Richard Feynman http://joshuastarlight.tumblr.com/post/68705172909/nobody-ever-figures-out-what-life-is-all-about
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Showing posts with label interesting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interesting. Show all posts
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Monday, November 25, 2013
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Ursula K. Le Guin, American Science Fiction & Fantasy Author (Born October 21, 1929)
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
- A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
- The Dispossessed (1974)
Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
- "The Magician" by Maya Jaggi in The Guardian (17 December 2005)
No truth can make another truth untrue.
All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
Once you have seen the larger pattern,
You cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole.
- Four Ways to Forgiveness (1996)
I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
- The Language of the Night (1979)
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
- The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
- The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
- The Dispossessed (1974)
True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
- "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction" (1976)
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Cosmic Strings Are Super-Massive, Ultra-Thin Cracks In The Universe - io9
Cosmic strings are theoretical fault lines in the universe, defective links between different regions of space created in the moments after the Big Bang. And they might be theoretical no longer - distant quasars show the fingerprints of these strings.
Compared to cosmic strings, black holes seem downright sensible. These strings - no relation to the subatomic strings of theoretical physics - are one-dimensional objects, meaning they have length, but no height or width. They are defects in the fabric of the universe, a byproduct of the universe cooling in the first instants after the Big Bang. The easiest way to think about these strings is to see them as the cosmic equivalent of the cracks that form in ice over a frozen lake.
Of course, that doesn't capture the full measure of their one-dimensional weirdness. Since they have no width or height, they are incomprehensibly narrow, with a diameter that would make even a tiny photon look fat. They're also dense, as a string that's even a mile long would weigh considerably more than Earth. These strings expanded right along with the universe, ultimately stretching across the entire known universe in a more or less straight line, or forming massive rings many thousands of times bigger than our galaxy.
via io9.com
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Aleister Crowley (Born October 12, 1875) "Every man and every woman is a star."
via en.wikiquote.org
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Love is the law, love under will.
via en.wikiquote.org
Every man and every woman is a star.
The Inmost is one with the Inmost; yet the form of the One is not the form of the other; intimacy exacts fitness. He therefore who liveth by air, let him not be bold to breathe water. But mastery cometh by measure: to him who with labour, courage, and caution giveth his life to understand all that doth encompass him, and to prevail against it, shall be increase. "The word of Sin is Restriction": seek therefore Righteousness, enquiring into Iniquity, and fortify thyself to overcome it.
I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA.
The Many is as adorable to the One as the One is to the Many.
This is the Love of These; creation-parturition is the Bliss of the One; coition-dissolution is the Bliss of the Many.
The All, thus interwoven of These, is Bliss.
Naught is beyond Bliss.
I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.
- Aleister Crowley
Crowley is, admittedly, a complicated case. One can hardly blame people for feeling hatred and fear toward Crowley when Crowley himself so often exulted in provoking just such emotions. Indeed he tended to view those emotions as inevitable, given what he regarded as the revolutionary nature and power of his teachings and the prevailing hypocrisy of society ... Revile Christianity (but not Christ, mind you) as he might, seek its downfall as he did, Crowley desired nothing less than a full-fledged successor religion — complete with a guiding Logos that would endure for millenia, as had the teachings of Jesus. "Thelema" was the Logos Crowley proclaimed, Greek for "Will." "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" was its central credo. Let us concede that this credo — so redolent, seemingly, of license and arnarchy, dark deeds and darker dreams — terrifies on first impact, as does Crowley the man. ... Say what you will of Crowley, judge his failings as you will, there remains a man as protean, brilliant, courageous, flabbergasting, as ever you could imagine. There endure achievements that no reasoned account of his life may ignore...
- Lawrence Sutin in Do What Thou Wilt : A Life of Aleister Crowley (2000) Introduction
Monday, October 11, 2010
Krishnamurti On Love - Global One TV
ON LOVE
THE DEMAND TO be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path? We are not loved because we don't know how to love.What is love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love - every magazine and newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my king, I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love my wife, I love God. Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, `I love God', is absolute nonsense. When you worship God you are worshipping yourself - and that is not love.
Because we cannot solve this human thing called love we run away into abstractions. Love may be the ultimate solution to all man's difficulties, problems and travails, so how are we going to find out what love is? By merely defining it? The church has defined it one way, society another, and there are all sorts of deviations and perversions. Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional exchange, the companionship - is that what we mean by love? That has been the norm, the pattern, and it has become so tremendously personal, sensuous, and limited that religions have declared that love is something much more than this. In what they call human love they see there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere with another's thinking, and knowing the complexity of all this they say there must be another kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted.
Throughout the world, so-called holy men have maintained that to look at a woman is something totally wrong: they say you cannot come near to God if you indulge in sex, therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it. But by denying sexuality they put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny the whole beauty of the earth. They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with woman.
Can love be divided into the sacred and the profane, the human and the divine, or is there only love? Is love of the one and not of the many? If I say,`I love you', does that exclude the love of the other? Is love personal or impersonal? Moral or immoral? Family or non-family? If you love mankind can you love the particular? Is love sentiment? Is love emotion? Is love pleasure and desire? All these questions indicate, don't they, that we have ideas about love, ideas about what it should or should not be, a pattern or a code developed by the culture in which we live.
So to go into the question of what love is we must first ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.
Now how am I going to find out what this flame is which we call love - not how to express it to another but what it means in itself? I will first reject what the church, what society, what my parents and friends, what every person and every book has said about it because I want to find out for myself what it is. Here is an enormous problem that involves the whole of mankind, there have been a thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in some pattern or other according to what I like or enjoy at the moment - so shouldn't I, in order to understand it, first free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices? I am confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to myself, `First clear up your own confusion. Perhaps you may be able to discover what love is through what it is not.'
The government says, `Go and kill for the love of your country'. Is that love? Religion says, `Give up sex for the love of God'. Is that love? Is love desire? Don't say no. For most of us it is - desire with pleasure, the pleasure that is derived through the senses, through sexual attachment and fulfilment. I am not against sex, but see what is involved in it. What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self. You say you love your wife. In that love is involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house to look after your children, to cook. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don't like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you are really saying is, `As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don't I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don't like you.' So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love. But if you can live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps - perhaps - you will know what love is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas if you depend on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from oneself.
This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another - in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt, and so long as there is fear there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is; sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire.
Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present. It is not `I will love' or `I have loved'. If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect.
Don't you know what it means really to love somebody - to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing - don't you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.
Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use those words? When you do something out of duty is there any love in it? In duty there is no love. The structure of duty in which the human being is caught is destroying him. So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty you don't love what you are doing. When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility.
Most parents unfortunately think they are responsible for their children and their sense of responsibility takes the form of telling them what they should do and what they should not do, what they should become and what they should not become. The parents want their children to have a secure position in society. What they call responsibility is part of that respectability they worship; and it seems to me that where there is respectability there is no order; they are concerned only with becoming a perfect bourgeois. When they prepare their children to fit into society they are perpetuating war, conflict and brutality. Do you call that care and love?
Really to care is to care as you would for a tree or a plant, watering it, studying its needs, the best soil for it, looking after it with gentleness and tenderness - but when you prepare your children to fit into society you are preparing them to be killed. If you loved your children you would have no war.
When you lose someone you love you shed tears - are your tears for yourself or for the one who is dead? Are you crying for yourself or for another? Have you ever cried for another? Have you ever cried for your son who is killed on the battlefield? You have cried, but do those tears come out of self-pity or have you cried because a human being has been killed? If you cry out of self-pity your tears have no meaning because you are concerned about yourself. If you are crying because you are bereft of one in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not really affection. When you cry for your brother who dies cry for him. It is very easy to cry for yourself because he is gone. Apparently you are crying because your heart is touched, but it is not touched for him, it is only touched by self-pity and self-pity makes you hard, encloses you, makes you dull and stupid.
When you cry for yourself, is it love - crying because you are lonely, because you have been left, because you are no longer powerful - complaining of your lot, your environment - always you in tears? If you understand this, which means to come in contact with it as directly as you would touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you will see that sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time. I had my brother three years ago, now he is dead, now I am lonely, aching, there is no one to whom I can look for comfort or companionship, and it brings tears to my eyes.
You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called `me', my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion - all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow. Sorrow and love cannot go together, but in the Christian world they have idealized suffering, put it on a cross and worshipped it, implying that you can never escape from suffering except through that one particular door, and this is the whole structure of an exploiting religious society.
So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children - do you? - you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple.
But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers after.
If you have not got love - not just in little drops but in abundance - if you are not filled with it - the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, `I will practise love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practise being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others?' Do you mean to say that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out of the window. By practising some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of non-violence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.
In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see - not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind. But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.
So we reach the point: can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader - come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset?
It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive - passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come into being only when there is total self-abandonment.
A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it - to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing with everybody.
Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict.
You may ask, `If I find such a love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.' When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time - which means going beyond sorrow - is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love.
But you don't know how to come to this extraordinary fount - so what do you do? If you don't know what to do, you do nothing, don't you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love.
via globalone.tv
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Nicholas Roerich (Born October 9, 1874)
via en.wikiquote.org
One must manifest discipline of spirit; without it one cannot become free. To the slave discipline of spirit will be a prison; to the liberated one it will be a wondrous healing garden. So long as the discipline of spirit is as fetters the doors are closed, for in fetters one cannot ascend the steps.
One may understand the discipline of spirit as wings.
One may understand the discipline of spirit as wings.
via en.wikiquote.org
Into the New World my first message.
You who gave the Ashram,
And you who gave two lives,
Proclaim.
Builders and warriors, strengthen the steps.
Reader, if you have not grasped — read again,
after a while.
The predestined is not accidental,
The leaves fall in their time.
And winter is but the harbinger of spring.
All is revealed; all is attainable.
I will cover you with My shield, if you but tend to your labors.
I have spoken.
via en.wikiquote.org
They will ask: "Who gave you the Teaching?"
Answer: "The Mahatma of the East."
They will ask: "Where does He live?"
Answer: "The abode of the Teacher not only cannot be made known but cannot even be uttered. Your question shows how far you are from the understanding of the Teaching. Even humanly you must realize how wrong your question is."
They will ask: "When can I be useful?"
Answer: "From this hour unto eternity."
"When should I prepare myself for labor?"
"Lose not an hour!"
"And when will the call come?"
"Even sleep vigilantly."
"How shall I work until this hour?"
"Enhancing the quality of labor."
By holiness in life, guard the precious Gem of Gems.
Aum Tat Sat Aum!
I am thou, thou art I — parts of the Divine Self.
My Warriors! Life thunders — be watchful.
Danger! The soul hearkens to its warning!
The world is in turmoil — strive for salvation.
I invoke blessings unto you.
Salvation will be yours!
Life nourishes the soul.
Strive for the life glorified,
and for the realization of purity.
Put aside all prejudices — think freely.
Be not downcast but full of hope.
Flee not from life, but walk the path of salvation.
via en.wikiquote.org
We are dissipating superstition, ignorance and fear. We are forging courage, will and knowledge.
Every striving toward enlightenment is welcome. Every prejudice, caused by ignorance, is exposed.
Thou who dost toil, are not alive in thy consciousness the roots of cooperation and community?
If this flame has already illumined thy brain, adopt the signs of the Teaching of Our mountains.
Thou who dost labor, do not become wearied puzzling over certain expressions. Every line is the highest measure of simplicity.
Greeting to workers and seekers!
The Great Helpers of humanity do not abandon the Earth so long as sufferings go unhealed. Wholehearted fellowship can easily heal the wounds of a friend — but it is necessary to develop the art of thinking in the name of Good. And this is not easy amid the day's hustle and bustle. But the examples of the Great Helpers of humanity can encourage and infuse new forces.
When calculations become complex and Infinity is obscured, then will be remembered anew the simplest principle: from heart to heart — such is the law of fraternity, community, fellowship.
Toiler, when the energy is transmuted into an ocean of light,
does thy consciousness quiver or expand?
Toiler, is thy heart fearful or exultant
when before thee looms Infinity?
- Nicholas Roerich, Born October 9, 1874
div class="posterous_quote_citation">via en.wikiquote.org
Friday, October 8, 2010
Frank Herbert (Born October 8, 1920) & His Dune Series - Electric Sheep Fractal Image
via en.wikiquote.org
Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.
- Conclusion of the Commentaries in "Appendix II: The Religion of Dune"
Prophecy and prescience — How can they be put to the test in the face of the unanswered questions? Consider: How much is actual prediction of the "wave form" (as Muad'Dib referred to his vision-image) and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What of the harmonics inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?
- Private Reflections on Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan
The sequential nature of actual events is not illuminated with lengthy precision by the powers of prescience except under the most extraordinary circumstances. The oracle grasps incidents cut out of the historic chain. Eternity moves. It inflicts itself upon the oracle and the supplicant alike. Let Muad'dib's subjects doubt his majesty and his oracular visions. Let them deny his powers. Let them never doubt Eternity.
Muad'Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door." And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation."
- from Arrakis Awakening by the Princess Irulan
Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
- from The Humanity of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
via en.wikiquote.org
Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.
No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.
But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.
The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions — all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after all, says this time after time throughout Dune.
Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.
In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.
Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation. Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to aim painful barbs.
But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do they learn this?
- "Dune Genesis", an essay in Omni, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 1980), p. 72
via en.wikiquote.org
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Review Of Caprica Episode #10: "Unvanquished" - "Caprica Shows Us What Religion Really Is" By Annalee Newitz - io9: We Come From The Future
Last night's episode in the new season of Caprica, "Unvanquished," was quite simply amazing. It brought together disparate threads from the previous season, and showed us how business, crime, and religion are pretty much the same thing.
While the first season of Caprica focused on two families, the wealthy Graystones and the immigrant mobster Adamas, this season has shifted emphasis. Now the Graystones are completely interconnected with the Adamas, and the two powerful forces at work are the Graystone Corporation (now run by Daniel Graystone's enemy Thomas Vergis) and the monotheist terrorist movement STO. Both groups are vying to use technologies developed by Daniel Graystone and his daughter Zoe to further their goals to dominate Caprica - whether that's financially or spiritually.
via io9.com
I watched the pilot & quite enjoyed it, but lost interest somewhere in the first or second episode of the first season. Yet, after watching the most recent episode, I have to say that I am much more interested in watching the rest of the series than I thought I would be going into the second half of the first season. Now I suppose I will have to go back and watch the first half of the first season, though I doubt it will be as good as this most recent episode. You can catch the timeshifted episode as well as the four previous episodes at http://www.hulu.com/caprica. It is probably a good thing for as many people as possible to watch the episodes online if not on television in order for the series to get better ratings, and hopefully be renewed for a second season.
Niels Bohr (Born October 7, 1885) - "We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."
via en.wikiquote.org
"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."
"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."
"We depend on our words ... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly."
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."
- Niels Bohr (Born October 7, 1885)
*****
"Not often in life has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did."
via en.wikiquote.org
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Guillermo Del Toro's Words To Live & Write By: "If You Get Bored With Nothing To Do, You Are Not A Writer": "We Are In The Business Of Reproducing Reality Fom Nothing. We Are The Biggest Lars In The World, Seeking Truth."
"I'm going to sit, because I'm fat. I hope you're drinking stuff," Guillermo del Toro said as he took the stage at Portland's Baghdad Theater & Pub. Ostensibly he was there to read from his new book... but he digressed.
What really happened was this: del Toro talked about his book for like 10 minutes, then opened it up to questions for the next hour or two, talking about everything from the book (conceived "before vampires were teenybopper dreams"), to how the Hellboy comics saved his life while he was shooting Mimic, to Hitchcock (did you know he wrote a book on Hitchcock? Me neither).
[....]
via io9.com
Genius. I especially liked the part about humans being spiritual animals in need of totems & the benefits of naming things & treating the world as if it was alive & magic.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Why I Left My Publisher in Order to Publish a Book by Douglas Rushkoff
"Command Performance":
The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin
October 1, 2010 Special Edition
Why I Left My Publisher in Order to Publish a Book
by Douglas Rushkoff
I'm getting more questions about my latest book than about any other I've written. And this is before the book is even out—before anyone has even read the galleys.
That's because the questions aren't about what I wrote, but about how I ended up publishing it: with an independent publisher, for very little money, and through a distribution model that makes it available on only one website. Could I be doing this of sound mind and my own volition? Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big publishing house?
Because it would make my book twice as expensive for you, half as profitable for me, less purposefully written, and unavailable until about two years from now. In short, the traditional publishing system is nearly dead. And publishing a book under its rules can mean the death of ideas within it, as well. Until it utterly reworks its method, gets rid of a majority of its corporate dead weight, releases its publishing houses from the conglomerates that own them, and embraces direct selling models, the publishing industry will remain rather useless to readers and writers alike.
Authors and readers no longer need Big Publishing to find and engage one another. The sooner we all realize this, the better off we'll all be.
Think of it from the author's perspective. In the traditional publishing model, I write a proposal over a period of months, submit it to publishers, and—if the ideas manage to match the agenda of an acquiring editor at a big house—I get a deal. That deal is nice a thing. It means the publishing house, acting like a bank, lends me the capital I need to research and write a book. This is no small gift.
Then again, it's not really a gift. A year later when I turn in the actual book, that editor may no longer be at the publishing house. His imprint may no longer be there, either. Or the publishing house itself may have been bought by another company. (All three have happened to me.) Whatever the case, the book is now submitted to the editor who acquired it, or his assistant, or some other editor who replaced him. Then the publisher has a month or so to decide if they like what I've written. If they do, cool. If they don't, they can give me notes about how to make it more publishable—or they can simply decide it's no good at all and that they don't want to do it, anymore.
If they don't like it, I'm supposed to give the money back. (Or, if I've got a great agent, he'll ask for a "first proceeds" clause which means I only have to pay them back out of the money I make on the book if I take it elsewhere.) In any case, the original advance turns out to have been more of a loan, and the publisher more like a bank making an investment. If the environment changes, well, they move on. That's how my first book on the Internet ended up being canceled in 1992, because the publisher was afraid the net would be "over" by 1993 when the book was to be released. (It came out in 1994, from a now-defunct boutique imprint of HarperCollins.)
But even assuming they like the book and want to publish it, this only means they will then begin the one-to-two-year process of bringing it to market. The original rationale was that the book's editor would spend at least a few months going back and forth with the writer about the content, the style, the arrangement of chapters, the tone, and so on. The editing process was a collaboration between the author an the editor who knew how to make good writing better.
Today, editing is seen as a market inefficiency, or wasted salary. Most editors spend the bulk of their time acquiring new titles instead of editing the ones they have. So once they've read the proposal they're pretty much done with the creative end. Instead, that year or two from manuscript to book launch is spent "gearing up" the marketing and publicity machines. All sorts of people are supposed to learn about the book, and then "sell" it to distribution partners, chain stores, and independent retailers. The longer this process takes, the more people are involved. And in a self-justifying feedback loop, the more people are involved, the longer the process becomes.
All this ends in a "sell-in" figure—the number of books that are ultimately shipped to the stores, where they can be marked up another fifty percent and then returned if they're not sold. Does the process increase that sell-in figure? Not from what I can tell. In fact, in a universal policy I still don't understand, marketers do not reveal their sell-in figures to their authors, or even their own editors.
In the end, the books we read and write must keep a few dozen people employed, and the shareholders of at least three major corporations satisfied—almost none of whom actually create value. A book that costs three dollars to print ends up costing the consumer 28 dollars from the retailer, plus tax, plus shipping. The author gets around 10% of cover price per book applied to his advance, returns, discounts, and other creatively accounted debits. Then there's publicity departments to work through before doing any interviews or asking for reviews—all who have multiple authors competing for the same media opportunities. Getting oneself a great "media hit" can actually get an author in trouble.
Meanwhile, the better editors and publicists—the ones who understand their jobs differently than the corporate publishing model now dictates—are the first to be let go when budgets are cut. Working with an author on a book takes valuable time away from the acquisition of more titles. Working a whole afternoon to get a young novelist on NPR for an hour means a lot less to the executives and their balance sheets than getting a defamed movie star two minutes with Katie Couric.
Luckily for writers, however, the editors, marketers, and publicists booted from the corporate publishing industry are starting up little companies of their own. The corporate book industry can't grow at the rate required by publicly held companies, anyway. This is why it is failing. Publishing is a sustainable business, not a growth industry. So it needs to be run by people looking for sustainable projects and careers—not runaway profits.
One of these companies, O/R books, is run by an old friend of mine, John Oakes. He's been asking me to work with him for 20 years. So I figured it might be a good idea to take the book I've been working in one way or another for the past 20 years and publish it with his fledgling company.
The model is simple: work the concept with John, write the book, print and digitize it, and then sell it. No distribution, no marketing. Just put the link online and let people pay by credit card, paypal, or whatever method they choose. No middlemen, no markups, no returns. The book comes out two months after I've finished it, instead of two years. The public gets the book or ebook for half of what a "regular" book would cost—and the writer and publisher actually earn more, not less, per actual book sold. (Yes, the credit card companies still get their cut, but so do the central bank and taxman get their cut of any financial transaction.)
Moreover, producing less than a dozen titles a year, the independent publisher can focus fully on each one. I get to work with a friend, and in a way that puts the ideas of the book before the fleeting priorities of the marketing department. The whole process scaled to the human beings actually producing and consuming the content, instead of the corporations extracting value from our interactions.
The downside, of course, is that there's no books in stores, no listings on Amazon or BN.com, and no reviews from those who view independently published books as unworthy of critical attention. (Don't blame them—they're having a hard enough time keeping a column or two of the newspaper devoted to books at this point, anyway.) Luckily, most real readers aren't fixated on which corporation has backed which book project.
Will people still be able to find a book that's not in stores, and will they want to? Well, most books sell more electronic versions than print ones anyway, and Amazon already sells more of most books than all real-world retailers combined. So the only real question is whether people will follow a link to a place other than Amazon to buy a book, and whether they will be as comfortable using Google to find it as they are the search box on Amazon.com.
I'm betting they will. Especially for a book about the promise of digital media and the ways in which most established institutions are still entirely missing the opportunity here. The idea of the book—and much of my career—is that computers and networks give us the ability to rewrite the rules through which everything operates. Some of the systems we're using may have been efficient back in the 13th century, but are truly and totally obsolete today. Systems like central monopoly currencies, corporate charters, and, yes, top-down publishing and distribution are all breaking down, for better and for worse.
Those of us depending on them will have to improvise for a while, and those of us capable of designing alternatives will get to have some fun. The good news and bad news here is that we must create new ways of doing things that meet our real needs. And the easiest way to begin that process is to learn to distinguish between the real world and the systems we have been using to operate it—learning to see the territory instead of just the map.
And sure, I wrote my latest book to help people start to do this in the digital realm—to learn how to see the programming behind the software, websites, and devices they are interacting with every day. Without some knowledge of what these things were designed to do, we have little hope of using them effectively. We are less likely to become real users than we to become the used. Most kids think Facebook is there to help them make friends.
Likewise, naif that I was, I thought the publishing industry's primary goal was to help me communicate my ideas to the world. Live and learn.
Douglas Rushkoff's latest book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is available only at http://orbooks.com.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Earth-Like Planet Can Sustain Life : Discovery News
THE GIST
- A new planet that's the right size and location for life has been discovered 20 light-years away.
- The newly discovered world exists in a solar system very similar to our own but much smaller.
- Current technologies won't allow scientists to study the planet's atmosphere for chemical signs of life.
This illustration offers a glimpse of the Gliese 581 system from the perspective of planet G.
Artwork by Lynette Cook
A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It's called Gliese 581g, and the 'g' may very well stand for Goldilocks.
Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that's the right size and location for life.
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.
The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.
Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface.
"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.
"Everything we know about life is that it absolutely requires liquid water," he added. "The planet has to be the right distance from the star so it's not too hot, not too cold... and then it has to have surface gravity so that it can hold on to a substantial atmosphere and allow the water to pool."
With a mass three times larger than Earth's, the newly discovered world has the muscle to hold atmosphere. Plus, it has the gift of time. Not only is its parent star especially long-lived, the planet is tidally locked to its sun -- similar to how the moon keeps the same side pointed at Earth -- so that half the world is in perpetual light and the other half in permanent darkness. As a result, temperatures are extremely stable and diverse.
"This planet doesn't have days and nights. Wherever you are on this planet, the sun is in the same position all the time. You have very stable zones where the ecosystem stays the same temperature... basically forever," Vogt said. "If life can evolve, it's going to have billions and billions of years to adapt to the surface."
"Given the ubiquity of water, it seems probable that this thing actually has liquid water. On the surface of the Earth, everywhere you have liquid water you have life," Vogt added.
The question wouldn't be to defend that there is life at Gliese 581g, says Butler. "The question," he said, "would be to demonstrate that there isn't."
Current technologies won't allow scientists to study the planet's atmosphere for chemical signs of life, but astronomers expect many more similar life-friendly planets to be discovered soon. If one or more of those cross the face of their parent star, relative to our line of sight, then it's possible to gather atmospheric data.
"This system is not in an orientation such that this planet would ever transit, so unfortunately this is not a case where nature has thrown us a bone," Vogt noted. "That being said, it is so close and we have found this thing so soon that it suggests we will start finding a lot of these things in the future and eventually we will find systems that do transit. This is a harbinger of things to come."
The research appears in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal.
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Saturday, September 11, 2010
The Magic Act - Alejandro Jodorowsky | Reality Sandwich
This article is excerpted from Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy, recently published by Inner Traditions. The book presents the shamanic and genealogical principles the author discovered to create a healing therapy that could use the power of dreams, art, and theater to empower individuals to heal wounds that in some cases had traveled through generations. The following is an interview conducted by Gilles Farcet.
If I understand you well, one must, in Psychomagic, learn to speak the language of the unconscious in order to consciously send it messages.
Exactly. And if one directly addresses the unconscious in its own language, in theory it is going to answer. But we will get to that. For now, I would like to explain how the magic act contributed to the advent of Psychomagic. While in Mexico, I found myself confronted with the power of harmful sorcery. I, very naturally, asked the same power of beneficial sorcery. If those forces could be put to the service of evil, couldn't they be used for the service of good? I also searched for a good wizard. Then a friend spoke to me of the famous Pachita, a small, good eighty-year-old woman. People came from far away to consult her in the hope of being healed. I was very moved by the prospect of meeting this famous sorceress, so I prepared myself for this.
What do you mean "moved"?
I had my guard up. After all, nothing guaranteed me that this woman wasn't also evil. In Mexico, there are very dangerous sorcerers who can covertly introduce a little soreness into the unconscious of a visitor and trigger a delayed reaction. You see, at first you don't feel a thing, but at the end of three or six months, you're in agony . . . I therefore protected myself when I visited Pachita. You understand, she wasn't just any sorceress: her consultations could easily attract three thousand visitors. I tell you, it was sometimes necessary to evacuate her by helicopter. So it suited me to take precautions.
How does one protect oneself from the influence of a sorcerer?
It was in a way my first psychomagic act. Above all, I felt that at all costs, I had to disguise myself. To go to her in the fullness of my old identity was to expose myself to the worst. So I began by dressing myself in brand new clothing from head to toe. It was important that my clothes not be chosen by me. I gave money and my measurements to three friends and asked them to go buy all the clothing they wanted to.
Why three friends?
For depersonalization and so that the outfit thus obtained did not reflect the taste of any particular individual. Socks, underwear, everything had to be absolutely new. It was not until I departed for the meeting with Pachita that I put on these new garments. In addition, I prepared a false identity card: another name, another birth date, another photo . . .
I bought a slab of pork, wrapped it in silver paper, and put it in my pocket as a reminder. So each time I put my hand in my pocket, the rather unusual contact with the meat would remind me that I was in a special situation and that I should avoid letting myself get caught up, no matter what happened. I arrived at the apartment where Pachita was operating that day, and I found myself in the presence of about thirty other people, some of whom occupied important social positions. I should point out that I met her under relatively privileged conditions, far from those crazies who press around her while she operates in a public place. I made myself part of the intelligentsia. Although she had never been to the cinema, Pachita knew that I was a filmmaker, director of the film El Topo, which had been talked about a lot. I approached and saw a tiny old woman, stocky and nearly blind. Her forehead was rounded and her nose fell downward giving her the appearance of a monster. I had just entered when she tossed me a piercing look and heckled me, "Boy, my boy!"-it was a little strange to hear myself called "boy" at more than forty years old-"What are you are afraid of? Get closer to this poor old lady."
Slowly, I got near her, stupefied. She had used the right expression to address me. At this age, indeed, I was not mature. While I was no child, my level of maturity was not really that of a forty-year-old man. At heart, I had remained an adolescent.
"What do you want from me? What do you want from this poor old lady?" she asked me.
"You are a healer, right?" I responded. "I would like to see your hands."
To general astonishment-everyone wondered why she suddenly granted me so much importance-she put her hand in mine. This old lady's hand had such softness, such purity . . . It could have belonged to a young girl of fifteen. I couldn't believe my senses.
"Oh!" I exclaimed. "You have the hand of a young girl, of a beautiful young girl!"
At that moment, instantly, I was invaded by a feeling, difficult to describe. Facing this deformed old woman, I felt myself in the presence of an ideal adolescent, the girl that the young man in me had always searched for. She had her hand raised, palm toward me, and it clearly appeared to receive something. I was completely lost, and I did not know what to do. From her assistants a murmur arose. "Accept the gift," they all told me, "accept it!" I thought quickly: the gift of Pachita is of an unspeakable nature; but I wanted to act like I accepted the invisible gift. So I made a gesture as if taking something in my hand. But as soon as I approached her, I saw something shining between her ring finger and middle finger. I seized the metallic object that was nothing other than an eye on the inside of a triangle. Now, it was precisely the symbol of El Topo . . . I began to draw some conclusions from this-at the very least-striking experience: "This woman is an exceptional magician. When she first put her hand in mine, I clearly felt that she was not hiding anything. She had prepared her blow, but how did she make this eye emerge from out of nowhere? How did she know this object was the symbol of my film? In any case, she had me." I then asked her if I could serve as her assistant, and she immediately accepted.
"Yes," she told me. "You will be the one to read the poem that will cause me to go into trance."
So I began to recite a consecrated poem to the divinized Mexican hero, Cuauhtémoc. Suddenly, this shriveled old lady let out an enormous cry, close to the roaring of a lion, and she began to speak in a man's voice, "My friends, I am happy to be among you. Bring me the first of the sick!"
The patients began to line up, each holding an egg in his hand. After rubbing their whole bodies with it, the sorceress broke it and examined the white and the yellow to detect the evil . . . If she found nothing grave, she prescribed infusions, or sometimes stranger things like café au lait enemas. It happened that she advised eating termite eggs and making a plaster with mashed potatoes and human excrement . . . When she judged the problem serious, she proposed a "surgical operation." Witnessing these interventions, I saw incredible things; compared to these operations, the work of Filipino healers would seem innocent.
Example?
Oh! I could tell you of hundreds of operations. Later, indeed, I continued to serve as her assistant. I wanted to be the first to scrutinize the phenomenon, and thus I was witness to the most unprecedented things. I'll first describe the ambiance. The majority of the time Pachita operated at her home at the rate of one or two sessions per week. This apartment was pervaded by a pestilential odor because she gathered up all the sick animals in the neighborhood to live there for a time and do their business . . . It was torture to wait in this place breathing in the dog, cat, parakeet droppings . . . Yet, as soon as Pachita entered the room to operate, the odor seemed to disappear just from her presence. Without a doubt, it was her incredible presence, the allure of a queen who made us forget these nauseating fragrances. This little old lady had the aura of a great reincarnated lama.
What do you believe made her so impressive?
I often asked myself . . . Because in the end Pachita impressed the disbelievers as well as the followers! What is certain is that she was disposed of an energy superior to the normal. One day, the wife of the president of the Republic of Mexico invited her to a reception given on the patio of the government palace where a number of cages held a great variety of birds. When Pachita arrived, these hundreds of sleeping birds at once woke up and began to chirp as if to greet the dawn. There were a number of witnesses there to confirm this incident. But she did not leave it to her charisma alone. She knew how to create an ambiance around her appropriate to captivating the guest and the patient alike. Her house was kept in semidarkness; thick curtains prevented any light from entering and were so effective that arriving from outside, one was plunged into a world of darkness. Some assistants-all of whom were convinced of the objective existence of the "hermanito" (little brother), as Pachita had named the spirit that she supposedly contacted and who, in her opinion, worked the healing-led the newcomer down the hall in his sudden blindness. These assistants played, it seems to me, a key role in the smoothness of the "operations."
You mean to say they helped the sorceress execute the conjuring?
It could be that Pachita was a genius conjurer . . . In fact, it will never be known. What's for sure is that all these assistants, in the role they played, were not accomplices to trickery; all of them had an immense faith in "the Little Brother." In the eyes of these brave people, the hermanito was the one that mattered. Pachita was but an excellent healer; a "channel," as one would say today, an instrument of God. They respected the old lady, but they did not venerate her until she was in trance. For them, the disembodied being was more real than the person in the flesh through which he manifested. This faith by which Pachita was surrounded generated a magic atmosphere, which contributed to persuading the patient of his chances for a cure.
How would an ordinary consultation with Pachita proceed?
Seated in an obscure hall, a group of clients waited their turn to enter the room where the sorceress operated. All the assistants spoke with low voices, like in a temple. At times, one left the "operating room" concealing a mysterious bundle in his hands. He went into the bathroom, and by the half-opened door, those in the waiting area could see the glow of a burning object. The assistant came out and murmured, "Do not go in there before the evil is burned. As long as it is active, it is dangerous to approach. You could catch it." What was this "evil"? The waiting clients didn't know anything, but knowing they had to hold their urine as long as the immolation lasted created a strange impression. Little by little, they were leaving consensus reality, to topple over into a completely irrational parallel world. Then suddenly, from the operating room, four assistants appeared carrying an inert body wrapped in a bloodstained cloth. They put the body down like a corpse. Indeed, once the operation was over and the bandages in place, Pachita required the patient's absolute immobility for a half hour-or sudden death. Fearing being crushed by magic forces, the recovering patients do not make even the slightest movement. Immobile as a rock, they definitely appear dead. It goes without saying that this clever staging puts the next candidate into a state. When Pachita calls in a deep voice, always using the same expression, "It is now your turn, darling child of my soul," that generally makes them shake and regress into childhood. In this sense, this sorceress does not treat adults but children, and all are treated as such, whatever their age. I once saw her give a bonbon to a minister and ask him in a serious and tender voice, "What hurts you, my little boy?" People give up body and soul to her, taking her as an antidote for their terror.
You have described the ambiance and the preliminaries, which is certainly very important; but I would like to know how the operation itself proceeds in general. As "assistant," you were a privileged witness.
Only up to a point, because I was, like the others, captivated by the magical ambiance! Pachita always had the patient lie on a cot, by the light of a candle, because the internal organs in her opinion faced damage from electric lights. She marked the place on the body where she was going to "operate" and surrounded it with alcohol-soaked cotton. The odor filled the room, enhancing the "operating room" atmosphere. The healer was always followed by two helpers-I was often one of these two assistants-as well as half a dozen followers who were forbidden to cross their legs, arms, or fingers, so that energy could circulate freely. At her side, I saw her finger sink almost entirely into the eye of a blind man . . . I watched her "change the heart" of a patient: with her hands, she seemed to open his chest; the blood ran . . .
She made me plunge my hand into the wound. I felt the flesh wriggle, and I withdrew my fingers, bloodied. From a jar to the side, I passed her a heart from who knows where-from the morgue or the hospital-that she "transplanted" to the patient in a magical way. Soon after being placed on the chest, the heart seemed to be absorbed and disappeared just like that, as if inhaled by the body of the patient. This phenomenon of "inhalation" was common with all of the "transplants": she would place a piece of intestine on the person being operated on and no sooner would it disappear into him. I saw her open a head and put her hands in it. There was an odor of burning bone, the sounds of liquid . . . The operations were not lacking in violence and constituted a rather shocking show, in Mexican fashion, but Pachita showed, at the same time, an extraordinary softness.
What was the role of the followers present?
The sorceress relied on their presence. Should an operation seem to be going badly, both Pachita and the patient would solicit the active help of all the people present.
Can you give me an example?
I remember an operation during which El Hermanito screamed sharply from Pachita's mouth, "The child is getting cold! Quick, heat the air or we are going to lose him." A second later, we were all running, on the verge of hysteria, in search of an electric heater. As soon as we plugged it in, we realized the electricity was out! "Do something or the child is going to be in agony!" growled the Little Brother, while the patient, on the verge of cardiac arrest from actually seeing his stomach opened and the guts in the air, whimpered, frozen in terror, "My brothers, I beseech you, help me!" And we all gathered around and put our mouths against his body, blowing on it with all our might, worried, forgetting about ourselves, trying frantically to warm him with our breath. "Very good, my children, my dears," the Little Brother cried suddenly. "The temperature is back up, and the danger is passed. I can continue."
Did you ever lose a patient?
No. To my knowledge, Pachita has never killed a person while trying to heal him, even if the operations often had critical moments. That seemed in a certain way to be part of the process.
Did the patients suffer?
In general, yes. The operations could be painful. When Pachita died, her gift was transferred to her son Enrique, who operates like his mother. When I assisted him, I noticed that the hermanito spoke more sweetly and that the knife no longer caused pain.
I remarked about this to one of the assistants who responded, "From incarnation to incarnation, El Hermanito makes progress. He has learned recently to not make his patients suffer."
You have said that Pachita showed a lot of tenderness, in spite of her big knife. You were treated by her yourself, weren't you?
Yes, I had a pain in my liver, and I was curious to try having an "operation" myself. Pachita told me that I had a tumor on my liver, and she agreed to treat me. I decided to make a game of it, telling myself that she couldn't possibly kill me. Because, of all the people she had operated on, there had not been a single mishap. The time had come to put myself on the hot seat.
And you weren't afraid, about the pain?
No, because for me it was all theater. I wanted to undergo an operation to see what would happen. But when I found myself on the bed in front of Pachita, with a huge knife in her hand and surrounded by her praying followers, I did begin to feel afraid. I would very much have liked to get up and leave, but it was too late. I realized that she was cutting me with her scissors . . .
I felt the pain of my flesh being cut with scissors. Blood ran, and I thought I was going to die. After she made the cut in my stomach, it felt like my belly had been ripped open. I had never felt that bad in my life. For about eight minutes, I suffered atrociously, and I went completely white. Pachita made me drink some herbal tea, and then I could feel blood rushing through my body again. Then she acted like she was pulling out my liver . . . Finally, she passed her hands over my stomach to close the wound. And the pain instantly disappeared! If it was sleight of hand, the illusion was perfect. Not only did those present see the blood running and my opened belly, but they also felt the same pain as the patient. Since then, my liver has never bothered me. Leaving aside the cure, that was one of the greatest experiences of my life. That woman was something spectacular, as impressive as a mystical Tibetan lama. Never had I felt so much pain, nor so much gratitude, as in that moment when she told me I was cured and that I could go. In that instant, I saw in her the Mother Goddess. What a psychological shock! Pachita was a great psychologist; she knew the human soul.
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FarmVille vs. Real Farms [INFOGRAPHIC]
With all those millions of Facebook and iPhone users tending to virtual crops and sharing them with friends, have you ever wondered how their toils stack up against actual real-life farmers?
How does our output of digital (and decidedly less tasty) tomatoes compare with our worldwide production of real tomatoes? And perhaps most importantly, who are these casual croppers, and are they anything like their plow-toting counterparts?
We broke it down by the numbers and put some of these FarmVille trends in perspective for you.
via mashable.com
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