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24. He who is ever happy within, who rejoices within, who is illumined within, such a yogi attains absolute freedom or Moksha, himself becoming Brahman.
25. The sages obtain absolute freedom or Moksha—they whose sins have been destroyed, whose dualities (perception of dualities or experience of the pairs of opposites) are torn asunder, who are self-controlled, and intent on the welfare of all beings.
26. Absolute freedom (or Brahmic bliss) exists on all sides for those self-controlled ascetics who are free from desire and anger, who have controlled their thoughts and who have realised the Self.
27. Shutting out (all) external contacts and fixing the gaze between the eyebrows, equalising the outgoing and incoming breaths moving within the nostrils,
28. With the senses, the mind and the intellect always controlled, having liberation as his supreme goal, free from desire, fear and anger—the sage is verily liberated for ever.
No, winter has not really arrived yet, with just a polite dusting of snowhere in Late January.
Still January
mood: Get Jackson on the 'lectric guitar and pronto
action: plugged in
The Roulette wheel is of course a mandala for a universe of chance and contigency, a dervish devoted to uncertainty. Yet one thing is fo sho: Casinos have long been sites of innovation in biometrics. Maybe it is because I grew up in South Jersey in the 1970's as the casinos began to manifest in Atlantic City, but for moi these gaming joints are anything but either game or a joint. They are part of a society desperate for attention sinks and "economic growth." (Atlantic City LOST population after the casinos arrived while surrounding areas such as Galloway Township grew and grew.) Casino tech and design can guide us to the ideals of the society of control and its desire to know every nook and cranny and convert it to cash. Casinos are some of the highest surveillence spots on the planet and always browsing at the frontier of total control in space and time. Ironic, no, that this is where our temples to the unknown and unknowable futures emerge? Such were the paradoxes that haunted and enlivened my first 19 years. One good thing about the casino sprout: It was always easy to return home, since free buses await to chug you toward the slots, cheap breakfast and pigeons of Atlantic City from most any spot east of Columbus. Yes, free. You arrive with voucher, walk through the casino, trade in voucher for a bunch of quarters, and leave. It was like my personal transit system from DC when I was in college, and something about the look on my fellow passengers' faces kept the slots and tables from ever really tempting me.
January Whatever, 2007
Mood: Fortress of Solitude
Method: I am a Transparent Eye-Con Cursor Thing
So. blog sloggers, you might say that wiki is like an ongoing and enormous Quaker Wedding, an infinite dimension of silence that calls forth the eloquence of its participants. In a quaker wedding (such as the gorgeous, crystalline one of my memory Somewhere Near Santa Cruz during which I had a psychedelic experience and found myself possessed by some words about birdsong and machines), the bride/groom assemble ensemble with a Hyperbolically Large Text, scratch upon it loudly with a writing device, then face and speak unto each other when called upon to speak by the silence. The wedding guests ( assembled in a state park Somewhere Near Santa Cruz, for example)then similarly wait in silence until they feel themselves called upon to speak out. Mobius notes that to "speak out" is the very etymology of the word "eloquence." At the meeting, Mobius notes from his fieldwork that one waits until it is simply unavoidable, mixes, remixes, creates admixtures of "I am about to speak" or " I have something to say" or "There was the time when" or "I remember!". In Santa Cruz I think I said that the scratching of the pen against the quaking text - for the participants had to maneuver the slate slab word-plane into position with some effort - was a birdsong from Thoth about this collective now being created, in song. It sounded like one of the participant's songs available on CD. This was music hosted and brought into existence by Stefan, he of the assembled wedding ensemble, the groom who not coincidentally made truly cystalline music out of the sounds of xerox machines.
Ok, so I was just visited by some chirpers outside my window. In January, yo. At first I thought it was the delay pedal connected to my amp connected to my computer connected to the wiki, which is itself nothing but connection. I thought maybe some kind of moire effect/rhythmic entrainment had gone down wherein some of my sonic and information appliances start chirping and echoing. Music.
No,and it wasn't a grasshopper either, though that was my second quest after checking cables and shutting windows and removing books from their depression of the phantom synthesizer keyboards of my imagination. I darted about on a grasshopper hunt to no avail cuz when I looked at the window toward the eponymous blue sky of this blog, there he was. A gorgeously slate black beaked chirper chirper. No, I don't yet know the species, cuz I am a shaman not an ornithologist. Or an apprentice shaman/ornithologist culturologist Wetware Expert with special reference to Schrodinger. And I slowly came to realize that a bird collective had formed, of at least three species, four if you include one of the characters who came to inhabit the book I just finished who said, despite himself and against his will: "I am the trace of the feather in language."
January 17, 2007
From: RICHARD DOYLE
Subject: Temporarily Autonomous Syllabus
To: The CLASS of ALl Metaprogrammers
Metaprogrammers: Do find our evolving syllabus here:
As you will see, I have mapped out much of the semester but there is also room for diversification and transformation. If there is interest we can also screen some films. Suggestion #1: A Scanner Darkly. Scanner is a film in love with the control society. Perhaps Scanner's highest aesthetic value is the revelation of self entrapment. The characters of the film (particularly Barris, played with no small measure of brilliance by famous junky Robert Downey Jr) committ the entirety of their creativity to the continual revelation of their mutual entrapment. It's beautiful, and I want to destroy it with you, or at least make you collectively aware that Scanner only pretends to be an anti-drug war film, that it is in fact a film very much captured by the mindset of the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs presents us with important lessons for our other wars: even when we collectively recognize the futility and error of any particular war, it is not so easy to extricate ourselves from the forms of thought and living that gave rise to the war and sustain it.
By tomorrow, please browse the links for January 16 and January 18. If you can muster it, drop your Anonymous Wiki Name here:
> The lecture will be in the Cybertorium on the second floor of the IST building at 9 a.m. on January 17th
>
> More information is attached. Please share this liberally with faculty and graduate students in your colleges and departments.
Is hacking, then, sorcery? Pace the below by Hakim Bey, wherein sorcery and poetics commingle in creative commons piracy, it certainly can be. The magus, the shaman, the doctor of the word, the script kiddie: all seek to locate those places where symbols and reality are indistinguishable. At these points of indisernibility between map and territory, they find the flashpoints between matter and word, where wyrd can most directly and unmistakably occasion the emergence of other orders of reality: "I love you, wiki-erasers, for helping to empty my mind." The description of the world as a \"hologram\" provides us with an excellent rhetorical tool for thinking through the implications of a cosmos composed of information as well as matter. Thus I have heard.
January 16, 2007
"THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity--those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity--those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes. Rhetoric: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results."Hakim Bey, \"Sorcery\", Mobius Remix
Tomorrow, I head to California with family and toward more family. Meanwhile, I may have figured out a way to integrate all of my favorite wikis into a single site! Stay tuned. - Flobius
Tensegrity Again:Why Open Source Theology Pulls Mobius
Inside/Out Once Upon a Time Called Right Now
So I immediately love the idea of an Open Source Theology and an emerging, even emergent church. The later phrasing suggests that the very purpose, nature and quality of the practices of the sacred associated with this obvious aspect of Homo Sapiens is itself grown out of nothing, its creativity a fractal or hologram of the big bang, Shiva becoming multiple in the absolute polarity gradient of being/non being, yin/yang, male/female... Yes, we take in and process "meaning" or "telos" as much as we process oxygen; grokin' and rockin' to our purpose is an aspect of our wetware and hence highly tuneable but hardly immuneable. Divinity drops a double bind in/on our gourds: can't deal with or without 'er... Stir in Matthew Fox's notion of creativity and divinity in with open source tools and commons, &, to quote Jackie Gleason completely out of context, "away we go." Beyond, Beyond, On Beyond Beyond, bodhi Svaha!
It does seem though that when I first looked at Open Source Theology on the web it often equated to "Christian" theology, and, Praise Jah, this is not the name we all use in the Perennial Philosophy. Don't gety me wrong. I like equations. Atman=Brahman, for starters. But rather than bathing me in a clear light as I discover my Buddha nature, again, the equation of "theology" with "Christian theology" honestly and suddenly gives me a sick feeling in my stomach ... Yes, Jesus is a potent avatar, and one I have recently come to revere and give thanks and praise to, but monocultures of all kinds are deadly to ecosystems. So we gotta remix this one, too, peeps, and sustainably, yo! Be fruitful and wikify... As we do, let us collectively remember that purpose does not equal belief, religion does not equal faith, the sacred can be a practice of introducing the eternal aspect of time into our daily life without "believing" in anything but the integrity and necessity of our ecosystemic interconnections. Indeed, in the buddhist traditions I find contagious, belief is to be avoided, itself emptied so that All That Is might be grokked through the lens of its own empty-assed interconnected self.
A job for a grad:
"I have been assigned the job of recruiting for new teachers (I'm an
English teacher) and was hoping to attract some PSU grads graduating
in December. The job is for a secondary track teacher in an
alternative high school for inner-city youth. Many of our kids are
behind in math and reading, so we do as much intense one-on-one work
as we can to bring them up to speed. The teacher is also responsible
for daily lesson planning, keeping track of grades, etc. The nice
thing about the job is that you DO NOT need your teaching
certification, just a bachelors in a subject area. You can get your
certification while working here, but do not have to go through
student teaching. Hours are 8:30-3:30 M-F, full medical/dental
benefits, and of course, holidays off. The school is located in
Baltimore, and the position begins ASAP. They can check out the
website at www.ccyd.org. Students should forward resumes to
Thus, since all of the possibilities of a terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or seem improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin has not been able to be ruled out, I must conclude that an ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) might have sent the signal that we received as the Wow! source. Of course, being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals like the Wow! source that are able to be received and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me. There is simply too little data to draw many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I choose not to "draw vast conclusions from 'half-vast' data"."
XMilitary's Novella in Progress, here. Please read it for Tuesday discussion, post about it, and please share your own projects in process. - flobius
Somebody please hack together this logo described in the novella:
The green tree with branches spreading outward to interconnect with and spread a leaf umbrella over stylized symbols of the sun, the wind, the ocean waves, grass-covered earth, an ear of corn, and a recycling symbol were comfortingly familiar.
Mindfullness and Ego Death Appear in XMilitary's fiction:
It was amazing what could be accomplished to reduce discord when the only criteria were that anybody who let their own agenda get in the way of helping people got booted from the councils, and received no more funding from GreeneCorp.
Here's a hack on what multimedia (de)composition might have to do with sustainability, sampled straight out of the novella in progress of XMilitary, my new favorite writer:
My favorite segment so far, with a tiny wikified revision:
Mary brushed errant blond hairs from her eyes with the inside of an elbow, her hands slimed by the calf’s still uncertain birth. She gritted her teeth and braced herself in a crouch, plunging both hands back into the cow to finish turning the breech calf.
More amazin and blazin, this time from XMilitary. This is the opening to her novella about sustainability. It sizzles, fashizzle!
Trapped in a post-apocalyptic world torn asunder in the battles for control of the last drops of fossil fuel, all you can do is watch as a few greedy bastards ruin it for the rest of us. Everything’s just the way it’s always been; but you won’t accept that. This is your world, and you’ll fight for it as long as there’s breath in your body. Maybe not for the world’s sake—are you that selfless?—you don’t know. There isn’t much you do know, except that things shouldn’t end like this. But it doesn’t matter; you live here. Whatever the reason, you won’t let this grisly image of lifeless rock and huddling refugees become reality, your home another casualty to the predations of the most powerful, corrupt few. You raise an arm with a defiant shout, and light spreads out from your fist, bathing the desolate wasteland of the earth in a consuming light.
December 4, 2006
The Heart of Thich Quang Duc
His death was dramatic but not all that different in nature and spirit from the deaths of many other Buddhist leaders and saints. One remarkable difference, however, was that his death was shown on many different televisions all around the world.Thich Quang Duc Website
Thich Quang Duc's self immolation in 1963 has understandably received a great deal of attention: The 67 year old buddhist monk's body was burned into a mandala, an attention focusing rhetorical device, as his incinerating flesh became image and then broadcast and then word. Thich Quang Duc was the Flesh made Image, a transmission that went directly to the desk of John F. Kennedy after his fellow monks doused him with gasoline and ignited Thich Quang Duc in a busy intersection in (then) Saigon, South Vietnam: \"This famous picture was on President Kennedy's desk that day.\" And this transmission was made only through stillness:
As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.
This lotus in flames is the very image of a body transmorgified into media through the transduction of fire and mindfullness, a demonstrative proof of emptiness and its paradoxical capacities. So potent was this stillness of Thich Quang Duc's body in flames that his sacrifice of himself and transduction into information was arguably a kind of rhetorical butterfly effect, a difference that made a difference for the Vietnam war. Some of its purported effects on the non linear system that was that particular war are reported with great compression in suitably telegraphic style on a website devoted to this act :
Accelerated the spread of "engaged Buddhism" that had begun in Vietnam in the 1930's. Led to the overthrow of the Diem regime in South Vietnam in November of 1963. Helped change public opinion against the American backed South Vietnamese government and its war against the communist supported Viet Cong.
Yet further compressed into this image is a map of the thermodynamics of information. The jerry can to the left of Thich Quang Duc's burning. motionless frame provides a narrative frame for the horror of an Actually Burning Man, as if the visibly half full container provided an icon of What Just Happened. So too does the visibly open trunk of his car seem to narrate the image for us: \"The light blue Austin in which he drove to Saigon to perform the act can still be seen there (along with a picture showing his self-immolation, with his car in the background). So too does the attention attractor focus our mind on the nature of information and how it is replicated and dissipated, the very real way in which living breathing suffering and ecstatic human bodies are involved in the apparently ethereal transmissions of information. And consider Thich Quang Duc's act though the lens of a carbon budget: Has more information and transformation ever been rendered through such an amount of spectacularly sacrificial fossil fuel? Finally, perhaps Thich Quang Duc's image can remind us that the burning of fossil fuels is precisely always a collective sacrifice of a biodiverse planet.
How to maintain mindfulness and stillness before such a sacrifice? Our language choice is "mindfulness", but the buddhist traditions remind us that we can empty our minds by opening to compassion. And Thich Quang Duc's transformation into light, heat, smoke and information was apparently not complete. His heart, shrunken but present despite his cremation, is currently located in the Reserve Bank of Vietnam.
A Sustainability Axiom:
Mindfulness is both necessary and sufficient to sustainability.
Corollary: Given any thermodynamic status of a system, its sustainability can quickly be scanned in binary fashion through inspection of its Mindfulness/Embodied Amnesia quotient.
Discussion: Pace Margulis, Sagan, Swenson, Salthe, Schneider, Kay et. al, the telelogical aspect of living systems can be characterized as the increased dissipation of information over evolutionary time. Tuning toward this constraint of living systems allows human organisms to capture greater and greater exergy from living systems: e.g., the sacrifice of abundance ( Rg Veda) dissipates excess energy ( a horse is sacrificed rather than eaten or trained) yields yet further abundance ( emergence of priestly class, hierarchy, culture of skaldic versification and agon). Mindfullness names an awareness of thermodynamic differentials through an apprehension of difference in any given system. Perceiving a larger scale dissipative structure is a common evolutionary solution to double binds. On the mindfullness/embodied amnesia continuum, the awareness of double binds and a stillness before them characterizes the left hand of our continuum and the experience of unexamined unity devoid of reflection characterizes the right hand path. All living systems must navigate this gradient between total awareness and its asignifying sacrifice which yields yet further elaborations of total awareness to emerge through rhythmic entrainment, whose order is itself sacrificed and increased in acts of symmetry breaking.
____
I'm heading out today to scrounge an extremely long USB cable so that the Center can manifest wireless. This DIY Wireless site shall be our guide! From my accumulated groking and clicking over the past several months, I now realize that we need the long cord plus a repeater.
TreeHugger is doing some demographic hacking, combining the "look of a modernist with the heart of a hippy". They also list green jobs, graduates... Treehugger functions as kind of link vortex for design firms and vendors working in this demographic space. Indeed, many of the visitors to the site are probably dsigners and vendors! Clicking around, I may have found the solution to the Center's restroom needs. How fortunate that it feeds off my growing fascination with cargotecture - the re-use of shipping containers toward sustainable ends, as in the example above.
Currently browsing an amazing how to, here. I'm going to build this one over the break. Anybody want to join in?
Sure! It's about time the assemblages for Sun-tapping emerge outside the Center's "walls". - UrthBound
I would be interested in helping, too. Also, if I read that document correctly, you can use a dead car battery. I just so happen to have one sitting in my living room, if that is in fact the case. - EschaTon
Yes, as long as it holds a charge it should be fine. I'll read over the how to again as well. - Flobius
Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome is a kind of 3D and inhabitable archetype of interconnectivity. The strength of the dome emerges from its connection to itself, its tensegrity. Cue Bucky on his neologism, and note the systems thinking necessary to groking tensegrity:
What is tensegrity?..."The word 'tensegrity' is an invention: a contraction of 'tensional integrity.' Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guarenteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder"
Hence the dome demonstrates the physical aspects of systemic interconnectivity in a palpable, grokable, way: It is the tensional behaviors of the system that provides the strength, the strength is found at a higher level dissipative structure than the local links.
Domes never really caught on the way it seemed they would or should, and it is hard to get a good read on their usefulness for sustainability beyond their work as avatars for creative DIY tuning to the environment that finds exergy through systems level thinking. My sense is that whatever their drawbacks, domes and other easily built, scalable, and highly mobile housing offers the crucial seduction of autonomy in sustainability: your own space, easily configured, that paradoxically gets stronger the bigger you make them. This capacity of the buckydome to find strength "for free" through good design (the application of mindful consciousness as evolution's local area problem solver) exemplifies the way sustainability and such exergy - increased quality and quantity of energy dissipation, getting the most strength out of the given materials and information - are linked to abundance.
Some of my work has been recently been dubbed "ecclectic and playful". Did you know that I also play the eccletic guitar, with an echo park delay pedal for full procrastination and sustainability through the hyperbolic sustainable infinite? I will will attach a track somewhere in This Endless Screed when I find a place to stow it. I seem to be continually thwarted from hosting a torrent, but once I have hacked it I will share everything creative commons style, likeee or notteee.
Today we meet at the center, prepare for Final Push Toward Sustainability, and prepare a framework for discussing __Forest of Visions__. In the meantime, prepare to discuss the imminent nature of your own projects and read this as framework for beginning __Forest of Visions__. We will discuss the first 50 pages or so Thursday, with short wiki posting for Friday. Next weekend you will post a finalized proposal for your final projects, it being December and all.
I have basically been non-lethally ill since August, and am now taking new counter-measures, with fingers crossed.
November 24, 2006
Here's a link that will show you how to transfer audio tape to audacity - useful for brewing up podcasts with nothing but a cassette recorder and somebody else's computer.
November 20, 2006
Current Mood: Meta
Mantra: pop a dissipative structure!
So it should be clear from current discussions in thermodynamics that both practices of rhythmic entrainment ( forced and unforced) and symmetry breaking (as in sudden bifurcations characteristic of complex systems exquisitely tuned to initial rhetorical conditions) are characteristic of this long phylogenetic asymptotic dance toward infinity.
Blog prompt for Econauts: In the Roadmap for Natural Capitalism, the authors argue that by tuning our sensibilities to "whole systems theory", we can locate previously unacknowledged sources of value in the economy. The Interface Corporation is their prime case study for the claim that using a template of sustainability allows one to locate "free energy" in any given system or corporation. As you walk/bike/bus/drive/levitate around Penn State and Central PA, locate at least one such place where further value ( or "exergy") could be captured and briefly propose a project to capture this untapped energy. All of our readings so far have been in preparation for this blog prompt!
Zum Beispiel: A blog which is an example of itself
Give us this day
our daily blog
and forgive us our trespasses
and our lack of whack postings...
online multimedia composition is as much about \"vaculoules of non communication\" than anything else. With the plethora of attention nabbing practices electronica
it is often difficult to maintain anything like a daily rhythm for any One compositional practice. So I stopped trying!
Instead I find myself in longer cycles involving meditating, swimming, biking, linux hacking, book manuscript psychedelic dreaming, animated gif whacking and playin' music in some sustainable shacking. This allows the arrival of massively impricated epic games and narratives into which one is thrown, all-immersive-like, and through which one can thrive and retrospectively narrate. Cue Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Volume 1, please. And the amazing thing is, this machine allows for continual bliss while every now and then, a \"product\" pops out for sharing. Zum Beispeil.
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