Archive for the ‘Mythology’ Category

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Saturday, January 24th, 2009

No prescription tramadol online legally, In his blog series "A programmer's view of the universe", Google engineer Steve Yegge is exploring the ontological insights gained in his years writing software.  His first post told the sad story of a pet fish who died after discovering the nature and limits of its own captivity, its tank, while looking out through the glass walls to a world it could never reach.  His latest post uses the video game Mario Kart to explore the concept of embedded system, where the player controls drivers who race around a track inside a universe completely contained within the computer, but with the illusion of a landscape that stretches off into the horizon.  Here he introduces the concept of the one-way wall, which the players butt up against, for example, when attempting to drive too far off the track.  The rules of the game keep the players safely within prescribed boundaries; the game software itself can monitor and control all activity within the simulated game world, but the game cannot "see into" the containing world outside its confines.

Yegge is probably fully aware of the well-worn philosophical implications of this line of inquiry; he is, after all, a self-proclaimed fan of Douglas Hofstadter, whose almost mystical ruminations on the nature of recursion and embeddedness in Gödel, Escher, Bach are a metaphysical classic in the computer-geek canon.  Seeing oneself as a creature in an embedded system attempting to perceive the workings of the "outer system" - to look through the one-way-wall the other way - has forever been a preoccupation of intelligent and spiritually-inclined seekers.

Flammarion woodcut


I would submit, contra Baudrillard, that while we denizens of the internet may today experience an unprecedented degree of abstraction, humanity has never inhabited a space other than one populated by self-created simulacra, and that indeed, the simulacrum has always been the very nature of the worldview of every individual who has ever lived.  For the human brain is itself an embedded system, fed information through a one-way wall (our sensory input) and developing a model of the world outside to the best of our abilities and according to our internal propensities.

Human communities are also an embedded system, one in which individuals reside, and they share a pool of common assumptions about the world (myths) and the "rules" by which we participate in it, refining and elaborating on the individual's innate sense of right and wrong.  Much like cells organizing themselves in a human body, or ants in a colony, all of human civilization and culture -- indeed all human achievement -- is built up of thousands of individual decisions within a socially prescribed rule system.  Such self-emergent organization -- whereby progressively more complex, richly varied systems construct themselves from a few basic rules -- is very appealing to computer geeks, who can create such embedded systems on their computers with just a few lines of recursive code, like this 1-dimensional cellular automaton:

1d cellular automata


This ties into a conversation I was having the other day with a colleague who had just finished reading another computer-geek classic, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near.  Kurzweil's work of Utopian fantasy is popular among geeks, since it promises a future world (not too distant, either: according to his projections, within the next 50 years) in which technology will become sufficiently advanced that computer intelligence will outpace human intelligence.

What happens beyond this point is impossible to say, but according to Kurzweil's theory, machine intelligence will recursively create new machines with rapidly accelerating intelligence, Very Cheap Tramadol, which may (among other things) provide capabilities for human immortality, interstellar space travel, or perhaps even, one day, create nanobots that will transform the nature of matter and reality so that all matter will reach a point of "supersaturation" in which the entire universe becomes a gigantic supercomputer.  This event is called the singularity, also known as "nerd rapture".

To which I replied: What if the singularity has already happened?  How would you know, no prescription tramadol online legally.

Singularity speculation (in its modern form) began in 1965 with J. L. Good, but was eagerly adopted in the post-psychedelic era by early transhumanist and Harvard psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary in his eccentric 1979 book The Game of Life, in which he uses the Tarot, the I Ching, Kundalini Yoga, and various other esoteric traditions as metaphors for a projected evolution of life (and accompanying stages in the development of individual consciousness), beginning with single-celled organisms and progressing through fish, lizards, mammals, apes, primitive humans, early civilizations, monarchies, and monotheism, then stepping into increasingly liberated states of self-awareness, reality fabrication, DNA manipulation, and atomic, gravitational, and quantum manipulation, into the final payoff, Tramadol Caps 50mg, fusion into a black hole, which in turn creates a new universe.  (Paul Davies also alludes to this possibility, that new universes could be spawned by sufficiently advanced technology.)

The key insight that Leary brings to this fantasy is one of cyclical motion: once a new universe is spawned, the cycle begins anew, for new worlds and new civilizations to repeat this journey.  Indeed, for Leary, each stage of evolution goes through a three-stage cycle of birth, maturation, and decay before leading into the next stage.  This reflects the notion of a cyclical universe in Hindu cosmology, which however sees the course of civilization as one destined toward decay and destruction rather than a state of perfection.  In the Hindu view, it is the individual life that re-enters again and again in new forms to attempt to climb the ladder to liberation. No prescription tramadol online legally, In any event, the key ingredient to this timely yet ancient cosmology -- recursion -- leads us to the insight that no matter the ultimate direction of history or the universe, we exist only in a single moment, a point in motion, brought here by events outside our control and to be swept away by forces outside our control, in death and decay.  We act out our parts as best we can, knowing that we are subsumed in the eternal flux of creation and destruction that define all existence.

This problem is present in all cosmologies (including the modern scientific one), and it's a crucial weakness for the monothestic/Judeo-Christian view, which sees an eternally static Creator God "zapping" the world and time into existence exactly as we see it today, then just as abruptly, destroying it all in a raging fire, whisking his faithful off to eternal, static bliss.  I find this view of the universe pitifully unimaginative and lacking a key ingredient: sacred union, from which we derive imbalance, from which comes change, repetition, recursion, and eternity.  The Judeo-Christian god is deeply flawed for lacking (or, more truthfully, denying) a creative feminine force, which drives this change and evolution.

In fact, to reconcile this problem, Kabbalistic thinkers have developed the idea of tzimtzum: that, in order to make room for creation, the omnipresent God had to withdraw from a part of himself, leaving himself imperfect.  Thus even Yahweh seeks a mystical union with his own creation.  In any event, Cheap Tramadol Fedex Overnight, we know from experience that the nature of reality is the paradox of eternal change, and yet in common Christian thought Yahweh immaturely seeks to deny this, asserting the immutability of his own personality and ego.  (Gary Snyder reports a Mahayana Buddhist commenting, "He needs to do more meditation.")

A frequent counter to the idea of an "unmoved mover" god is the question: well, where did God come from, then?  The answer, "I am that I am", is true yet unsatisfying; this is not the petty, adolescent, egotistical, tribal Yahweh-god but his Mother - the primordial Void, the backdrop in which the creator God appears - talking.  Here's Jesus, emerging from Mother-God's vagina, represented as a Mandorla:

Mandorla


That's more like it!  Every cause must have a cause, and this leads us into a state of "turtles-all-the-way-down", or infinite recursion, which may as well be an eternal cycle, represented as the self-devouring serpent ouroboros:

Ouroborous


The ultimate, all-encompassing religious expression of this concept is contained within this modern image of the Tibetan Buddhist Dharmapala (dharma-protector) Mahakala:

Mahakala


Here, the Great Time-Lord Mahakala advances through time in a blaze of activity, through all dimensions, in perpetual combat with himself as he generates adversaries (his own image) and slaughters and devours them, thereby regenerating himself.  His myriad arms, at once swords and wings, cradle in their clawed hands Bodhisattvas (saints and future Buddhas).  From this eternal recursive creation-destruction, all forms are generated (symbolized in the tiger skin, the leopard prints, the octopus tentacles, the various faces... well, What Is Tramadol Used For, keep looking, you'll see).  The two tracks of infinitely-receding adversary heads are joined in an earring which points to the empty heart of the beast, the Void.  Yet in his hands, amid the fires and the creation and the death and destruction, he protects in a delicate (vaginal/Mandorla-like) clamshell the central Mystery of the sacred union, Yabyum: the eternal, dark Buddha making love to his own ephemeral feminine nature, enraptured in the embrace of the beloved.

In the distance stand other Buddhas, Dharmapalas, and various demons: the Dharmapala replicated, again, across yet other dimensions (other universes, perhaps?).

The lesson that the Dharmapala brings to us is this: wherever you are, whatever you are doing, all things are in flux.  There is always change, there is no Utopian state of perfection, for creation and destruction are intertwined.  Fighting through the one-way wall, stepping out of the matrix, you find yourself in another matrix, and you cannot escape.  Concentrate therefore on the center, this fusion of opposites, from which all things flow, and you will inhabit at once all levels of existence; the nested shells of all matrices outward and inward come into focus, and you see them line up in eternal recursion in all dimensions for all time.  This is Moksha, liberation.

In the meantime, humanity will continue to attempt to construct a utopia out of machines.  It's what we do, worker bees that we are. Futile though it is, it's in our nature.  It is clear that while we may construct bigger and more fantastic fishtanks for ourselves, Ultram Overdose, we cannot escape fishtank existence.  But perhaps we don't really want to.

No matter.  Onward.  Upward.  Inward.  Outward.  Always.

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Monday, December 8th, 2008

The Hemispheres of the Brain

The two hemispheres of the human brain

Androgyne

The alchemical androgyne Overnight tramadol bars, , from the Rosarium Philosophorum (1550); note the sun and moon symbols.  The central task of alchemy is solve et coagula, "distill and combine", meaning that sulfur and quicksilver (solar/masculine and lunar/feminine) elements are to be distilled to purity, then recombined to create alchemical "gold".

Ardhanarishvara

Ardhanarishvara, or the viewing of the androgynous deity composed of Shiva and his consort Shakti/Parvati (commonly viewed as male and female halves of the same deity).  They are accompanied by a lion and a bull, which are symbols, respectively, of the solar and lunar; in contrast to the European conception, Is Ultram Addicting, however, Shiva is seen as a "moon-man", while Parvati is a "sun-woman", thus emphasizing the divisions within divisions.

Since the eighteenth century, science has debated about the many inherent dualisms woven throughout the human brain and nervous system ... These dualities are probably not a surprise to most people.  We need polarities in order to modulate our attention and behavior in response to environmental cues.  Sometimes we need excitation and sometimes rest, Ultram Tramadol, sometimes intellectual and sometimes emotional intelligence, sometimes solitude and sometimes community... The key to health seems to be fluidity...

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The problems inherent in a polarized dualism must have been evident [by the 6th century BCE], as we find Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca, overnight tramadol bars. 540-480) warning of the dangers. The opposites, Tramadol Cheap, he said, cannot be divided - rather the universe is made up of the opposites in interplay.  Without dark we don't understand light, without absence we cannot grasp presence, without evil we can't understand good.  Herclitus made it his life's message to show that "human desire inevitably is imprisoned within the structure of opposition."  Ignorant people strive only for what they see as "good" without recognizing that good and evil are inseparable.  Lao Tzu, a contemporary of Heraclitus, likewise taught that dark and light, yin and yang, What Does Tramadol Treat, are intertwined, and the ego's attempt to treat them separately, or favor one over the other, is the source of error and conflict.

-- Dr. What Is Ultram Used To Treat, Stephen Larsen: The Fundamentalist Mind, pp. 31 & 97 (Quest: 2007).

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Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Order tramadol overnight delivery, Finding many popular secular critiques of "religion" as lacking in thought, substance, and reflection as a dog barking at the ocean, lately I've been reading Burton Mack's The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy for a grasp on early Christian origins.  He evaluates the current terrain of New Testament studies, littered with apologists looking for the "real" Jesus, and concludes that a new approach is needed.  He then proceeds to lay out a 5-point theory of religion that goes quite far in describing the shape of the terrain of religious understanding that we are now exploring in the context of mythic thinking and social theory.  This extended quote is worth the read (pp. 67-70):

To account for the emergence of Christianity, including the formation of groups and congregations, the development of their various practices and rituals, the production of their mythologies, and the writing of their literature requires a radical shift in thinking and theory. That is because the theory of religion implicit in the field cannot even ask about, much less account for the motivations involved in the investments early Christians made in their new associations.  To account for the data that now confronts the New Testament scholar, a theory of religion is needed that can explain Christian origins as a thoughtful, collective human construction, instead of the result of human response to an overwhelming activity on the part of a god.  Only a theory that gives the people their due, a theory firmly anchored in a social and cultural anthropology, capable of sustaining a conversation with the humanities, can do that.

There are some common features to the many theories of religion now being formulated and tested in the humanities.  I would like to suggest five such features that, Experience Snort Tramadol, taken as a set, provide a perspective on religion that can be used as a kind of lens or working hypothesis for getting started on a collaborative redescription project.

(1) Religion is a social construct.  The notion of personal religious experience is inadequate as a point of departure for defining religion or developing a theory of religion.  That individuals have religious experiences is not in doubt.  But individuals in any culture experience religion in many different ways.  The more interesting phenomena are the myths, rituals, symbols, beliefs and patterns of thinking that are shared by a people.  These cultural constructs can be experienced and manipulated in a variety of ways by individuals, but it is their self-evident status as common cultural coin that marks them as the religion of a people.  ... We need to ask about the reasons for and the processes whereby their myths and rituals were first constructed and agreed upon, and how they came to be taken for granted.  It is the social factor, the possibilities and rewards for coming to these agreements as groups in the context of a social history rife with other peoples, groups, and religions, that we need to understand, order tramadol overnight delivery.

(2) Social formation defines the human enterprise.  Constructing societies large and small is what people do.  It is a fragile, collective craft requiring enormous amounts of negotiation, experimentation, living together, and talking.  And it invariably results in very complex arrangements of relationships, agreements reached on better and less better ways to do things, and practices established to pass on the knowledge and skills accumulated in the process.  Social formation is hard work, creates as many tensions as rewards, and is overkill if thought of simply as a strategy for survival.  But despite the risks and repeated disasters, online tramadol, watching each other and talking about each other is what we humans find most interesting.  If so, a social anthropology will be required to counter the endemic personalisms that pervade Christian mentality, and ask about the reasons for and the processes whereby early Christian myths and rituals were first conceived and agreed upon.  What if the Jesus schools and christos groups were attractive as intentional experiments in social formation and mythmaking.

(3) Myths are more than fascinating fantasies, fuzzy memories, misguided science, or collective debris.  Myths acknowledge the collective gifts and constraints of the past and create a space for thinking critically about the present state of a group's life together. Myths are good for creating marvelous narrative worlds in which to stretch the imagination and work out theoretical equations.  They are also good for defining a group's place and identity in relation to a larger world.  This view of myth means that early Christians may not have entertained fantastic mythologies because they were overwhelmed by encounters with a god or a son of God, but because they wanted to comprehend and justify the investments in social formations for which only a god could render an account.  That is what myths can do.  So the questions to ask of these early Christians have to do with what social intelectual benefits they got from the way they dared to imagine their pasts and their worlds the way they did.

(4) Rituals are more than divine placations or magical attempts to channel the powers of the gods.  Rituals are the way humans concentrate attention on some activity or event of some significance to a group, and observe its performance apart from normal practice.  Much can happen at a ritual, for rituals are social occasions, require roles, invite attendance, Description Pill Tramadol, display skills, confirm loyalties, trigger commitments, evoke thoughtfulness, and reconstitute the structure of a group.  In the case of Christian origins, then, it will be important to know what activities were chosen for ritual performance, why they were chosen, how they were performed, and what such observance may have achieved for the group.  I can't resist the temptation to remark that, as far as I can tell, the supper texts in the New Testament were not taken as scripts for "reenactment" until the third century.  If so, scholar of Christian origins have a wonderfully elongated process of ritualization to describe and an interesting quest for theory to explain it.

(5) Mythmaking and social formation go together.  In a stable situation, where pressure to chnge a way of life is not serious, a people's myths and social structure may not need constant tinkering.  But when circumstances change and the social fabric tears, Tramadol Side Effects, and especially in the case of a clash of cultures, the pace quickens, for the older plots will need revision and the social structure will need repair.  Experimentation and bricolage mark the ways in which myths get rearranged and groups reform. Except for the case of an obvious pathology, even the most daring social experiments and the most fantastic mythic constructs turn out to be thoughtful and constructive attempts to regain sanity in a social situation that threatens human well-being.  In the case of early Christians, this proposition means that the making of their myths and the processes of forming social groups should be looked at together as constructive and thoughtful human activities.  And whenever there is a chance to catch sight of both mythmaking and social formation happening at the same time in the same place, the relationship of one to the other should be explored.


It saddens me to see so many atheists bashing their heads against the wall, unaware that the processes of social formation and mythmaking outlined above likewise apply to them.  Religion - and Christianity - makes perfect sense when you realize that people believe in these systems in spite of, not because of, logic, reason, and facts; the social benefits of opting in to the mythic systems of a welcoming community overwhelm the benefits of cold, hard, solitary logic.  We are social creatures, Tramadol Hcl 50 Mg Tab, and any "ism" that fails to address the human desire for community will utterly fail, no matter how many facts it has on its side.

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Sunday, November 30th, 2008

Gustav Doré’s “Paradisio Canto 31″

[Dante's] Paradisio Canto 31 On sale tramadol without prescription, (a view of God, the source of Light) by Gustav Doré.

E8

A 2-dimensional projection of an 8-dimensional representation of E8, an 248-dimensional mathematical structure of "extreme symmetry" proposed by physicist Garrett Lisi's Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything as describing all fundamental interactions in physics.  See Lisi's TED talk.

A fascinating discussion is occurring in the theoretical physics realm in the pursuit of a "theory of everything".  The main rival of Lisi's theory, Getting High On Tramadol, string theory, is also very much in theoretical stages, International Online Tramadol, and is considerably more baroque in its explanations, theoretical implications, and mathematics.  Among the heated partisan debates within the physics community, I admire Lisi's stance: "I think scientists should be able to weigh the pros and cons of different theoretical models for themselves and follow what interests them, Medication Tramadol, without pressure in one direction or another... I welcome criticism and skepticism, Tramadol Stay In System, and I encourage people to look through the mathematics for themselves."  He seems to embrace the possibility that he may be proven wrong, which is the healthy way to practice science.  And even if he is wrong, we're still left with the beautiful E8 Lie group, which existed before Lisi's theory and exhibits some extraordinary properties in its own right, Avesto Online Tramadol.

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Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Bill Maher: Religulous

Order tramadol bars, For some interpreters, such as philosopher Daniel Dennett and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, science reveals religious beliefs to be malignant memes gnawing their way through believers' brains, diseases needing to be cured. Yet for many of the researchers closest to this work, the recognition that religion has biological roots only makes it harder to talk about severing it from ourselves.

This must have come as a disappointment to comedian and Real Time host Bill Maher, who traveled the world making fun of religious people for his documentary Religulous. Standing at the prophesied site of Armageddon — 

Meggido, Israel — 

Maher indicts religion as a "neurological disorder" that causes the afflicted to wish for apocalyptic death.

Maher interviewed Dean Hamer and Andrew Newberg, Can Ultram Give You Seizures, two scientists who study the biology of religion, to back up his anti-religious polemic; neither says much of substance in the film. Hamer, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, is the author of The God Gene, which posits that human beings are genetically predisposed for "self-transcendence," the feeling that there is something beyond ordinary experience, order tramadol bars. In other words, we're hard-wired to believe in a higher power. In his research, Hamer noticed a correlation between personality survey data and different alleles of the gene VMAT2, What Is Prescription Ultram, which codes for an emotion-regulating brain chemical. In the course of human evolution, he suspects, this gene helped foster "an innate sense of optimism" that had adaptive benefits.

Since the NIH doesn't sanction Hamer's religion research, Maher interviewed Hamer at a lab at American University. Order tramadol bars, During the interview, "[Maher] really kept on pushing me to say that science proves religion is wrong," Hamer recalls. "And I kept on trying to push back and say, 'Science proves that people have an innate desire for religion.'"


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My takeaway from seeing Religulous was that Maher was, on the whole, more even-handed than someone like Dawkins has been in his documentaries; he was able to treat people with whom he disagreed with a modicum of human respect, even as he made fun of their beliefs.  But the film was light on science and research from experts in fields like neuroscience and psychology, and heavy on unfounded opinion. Hcl Tab Tramadol, Likewise, Dawkins, in his recent crusade against Harry Potter, is cited saying: "I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."  But Dr, sample tramadol online cheap. Dawkins, there is already plenty of researchReams of it.  It just doesn't say what you wish it did.

There seems to be a pattern emerging: secular fundamentalists like Maher and Dawkins seek to use the cover of science to advance their foregone conclusions, rather than looking objectively at what the evidence presents; there's a deadly certainty here that is the actual culprit of radical fundamentalism.  In Dawkins' words: "Always look at the evidence.".

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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Just saw The Dark Knight On sale tramadol on sale, with some friends, and on the walk home, we saw a new billboard placed near I-5:

Imagine No Religion

The Dark Knight just topped opening weekend sales records, making it the most profitable superhero franchise in history.  Americans clearly have an appetite for superhero logic.

Two Face

An East African vision of [the] great lord of the world emerges from a folktale of a young man whose dead father appeared to him along a path going into the ground, as into a burrow.  ... In the morning the Great Chief Death appeared.  One side of him was beautiful, but the other rotten, with maggots dropping to the ground.  Attendants were gathering up the maggots.  They washed the sores and, when they had finished, Death said, "The one born today will be robbed if he goes trading.  The woman who conceives today will die with the child.  The man who works in his garden will lose the crop.  The one who goes into the jungle today will be eaten by the lion."  But the next morning Death again appeared, and his attendants washed and perfumed the beautiful side, massaging it with oil, and when they had finished, Snorting Ultram, Death pronounced a blessing. "The one born today: may he become rich!  May the woman who conceives today give birth to a child who will live to be old!  Let the one born today go into the market: may he strike good bargains; may he trade with the blind!  May the man who goes into the jungle slaughter game; may he discover even elephants!  For today I pronounse the benediction."

"If you had arrived today," said the father to his son, "many things would have come into your possession, but now poverty has been ordained for you; so much is clear."


-- Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology NY: Penguin Books, 1976, pp.118-119

The theme of duality pervades the Batman franchise more overtly than perhaps any other multi-million-dollar Hollywood comic book fad, and indeed, as some have pointed out, Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride, can be interpreted as right-wing propaganda.  Isn't that getting the cart before the horse?  How could Batman possibly be an imitation of Bush, when it's been so apparent this whole time that Bush is in fact the simulacrum.

Loki as the Joker

Loki, archetype of the Joker

While Two-Face embodies in the flip of a coin Batman's Jekell/Hyde duality (CEO of a multimillion-dollar corporation by day, high-tech strong-man by night), the Joker is Batman's mirror image, the trickster, the destroyer of order, with "nothing in his pockets but knives and lint".  Bruce Wayne hoardes money, in order to use it for "good" ends; the Joker burns piles of it in sweet torment of the pathetic ambitions of the mob.  Batman is the warrior king; Joker, the trickster who is the agent of the oblivion, Purchase Tramadol, the teacher of the most difficult lesson we all must one day face, but seek -- in fear -- to hold at bay.

Make no mistake: Batman is, like most conventional superhero tales, most immediately obsessed with national (and, indirectly, personal and ego) security.  The threats to society consist of mobsters, terrorists, bombs; Gotham City is in a sort of perpetual crisis mode, overrun with criminals and corrupt officials. Generic tramadol online legally, For the greater part of the 20th century, a large portion of the American people lived cowering in fear that any minute bombs may begin raining down.  This sublimated fear has oozed out of our pores and become pop culture -- comic books, movies, cartoons -- stories that, not coincidentally, bear strong resemblance to tales our ancestors wove about times and places quite different from our own.  We resonate with Batman: we worship in the temples of our movie theaters and shell out our wages to purchase his likenessExcessive violence in the Bible notwithstanding, our understanding of the world order is as much informed by watching the Joker as it is by reading Beatitudes.  Simply because the comic book industry, unlike the religio-tainment industry, does not yet come equipped with an army and a navy, it's easy to dismiss the religious significance of witnessing and vicariously living in the psyche of Batman, the vigilante of order and reason in a chaotic universe.  Singling out only one form (the Bible, a comic book, Ultram Cold Turkey Withdrawal, a political figure) is an exercise in vanity, unless we go further and address the underlying root cause of these forms and our affinity for them.  The stories we venerate -- whether blockbuster movies or Bible tales -- are as much a reflection of us as we are of them.  Until we begin to address the affinity between both kinds of "religious" experience and acknowledge that it is a fundamental feature of human psychology, generations will continue to be swayed by the crusading Batman rhetoric of the Bushes of the future.

Batman and Robin.

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Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Where to buy cheap tramadol, Do we ever understand what we think. We understand only such thinking as is a mere equation and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in.  That is the manner of working of the intellect.  But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images -- in symbols that are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, Cheap Tramadol Online, eternally living, Ultram Schedule, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche.  It is possible to live the fullest life only when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.  It is a question neither of belief nor knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious.  They are the source of all our conscious thoughts, What Is Ultram Prescribed For, and one of these primordial images is the idea of life after death.

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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Crucifixion


 Cheapest tramadol online, I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Odin, myself to myself,
On that tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.


Poetic Edda, "Hovamol" (translated by Henry Adams Bellows, via Joseph Campbell: Primitive Mythology

Odin (aka Wotan), the Zeus-like Ruler of the Gods in Norse mythology, in order to retrieve sacred wisdom from the Underworld, sacrifices himself on the World Tree, Yggdrasil,

whose shaft was the pivot of the revolving heavens, with the World Eagle perched on its summit, four stags running among its branches, browsing on its leaves, and the Cosmic Serpent gnawing at its root... It is the greatest of all trees and the best, Tramadol Cod, Order Overnight Tramadol, the ash where the gods give judgment every day. Its limbs spread over the world and stand above heaven, Tramadol And Alcohol. Order Synalar Tramadol, Its roots penetrate the abyss. And its name, Order Tramadol Cod, Yggdrasil, means "The horse of Ygg", whose other name is Odin.
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Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Two items from the last week:

Mars lander landing Cheap tramadol without prescription, This photo depicts the Mars Phoenix lander in descent, as shot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing says: "How badass awesome is it to be a human. Super badass awesome."

Amazon tribe fights off airplane

This is a view of a group of "uncontacted" indigenous people in the Amazon, who were photographed last week from a plane flown by Survival International, a group that advocates for indigenous rights.

While I sit and type on my Macbook Pro, others of my culture are busy sending machines to investigate another planet.  And here on our own planet, we investigate each other: Westerners, using advanced technology, to look at other human beings who have a radically different (but no less "human") experience of the universe.

Amazingly, this is also the dawn of the first time in Western history when we might be able to actually begin to treat these folks with some respect and dignity - by leaving them alone and preserving the ecosystem upon which their lifestyle depends.  Where previously Europeans might have invaded with hostility and taken their land by force, or, Description Tramadol, more recently, killed them with kindness in a misguided attempt to "rehabilitate" or "assimilate" the "natives" into a "modern" lifestyle, we are beginning to have enough understanding to be humble about our relationship toward others with an autonomous, self-sufficient way of living.

At Sentient Developments, George Dvorsky ponders the ethics of leaving them in the wild, untouched by the wonders of Western civilization.  He raises the following "ethical issues":


  • What if some of these people need medical help and medicine?

  • Is it ethical for us to not let them know about the greater world around them?

  • How could we ever have consent for contact and/or cultural uplift. Should it be assumed, cheap tramadol without prescription. Why. Why not?

  • Are we sufficiently justified in keeping this tribe in a zoo-like scenario?

  • If eventual contact is unavoidable, why wait until then. Would contact with the modern world ever be 'on their terms?'

  • How would we feel if we discovered that we were being observed and purposefully held-back by a more advanced civilization?

  • Is this the kind of cultural diversity that we want to preserve. If so, why, Tramadol Antidepressant. Cheap tramadol without prescription, To what end. Does cultural diversity benefit the lost tribe?

  • What does it mean to say that we risk their "extinction?" Is it accurate to equate the extinction of a culture with that of a species. What are the consequences of a lost cultural mode for a) those who used to participate in it and b) for those who will never be a part of it. What are the consequences relative to the benefits of adopting a new culture?


  • First of all, let's dispense with the notion that by leaving them alone, we're somehow confining them to a zoo.

    This is the wild world, you know, the world that predates our civilization and will outlive it.  It couldn't be more different from a zoo. Animals in zoos are transported from their natural environment into an extremely confined cage, where they are fed processed food and monitored round the clock, cheap tramadol without prescription. If anyone's in a zoo, it's us out here in the "modern" world.

    Secondly, Least Expensive Tramadol, it's telling that Dvorsky's first impulse is to assume there are people needing medical help and medicine among them.  Probably so, but tell that to the millions of impoverished third-world people deprived of access to traditional medicines AND modern medicine.  The warriors in the photographs look plenty strong and healthy.  Any group of people that can survive in the jungle - surrounded by insects, snakes, wild cats, poisons and dangers of all kinds - is going to have ways of coping with them.

    The rest of the questions are amazingly condescending in their premises, assuming that "we" in the civilized world have knowledge to share with them, and that this knowledge only goes one way: that their understanding of the world is necessarily incomplete or naive.  How would we know that?  Presumably, they've developed a mythological/religious framework that is well-suited to their environment.  We're not "holding them back."  They're doing what they want on their own terms.

    Consider for a moment the possibility that human knowledge exists outside the published canon, and that there are paths to spiritual fulfillment that are outside of the realms of typical Western experience. Cheap tramadol without prescription, We're looking at a tribe which doubtless has a complex system of myths and rituals, replete with oral history, magic, storytelling, probably music and dancing, and (since the evidently have paint) possibly also art. Self-fulfillment is not contingent on a Western lifestyle. In fact, Side Effects Tramadol, one could argue that the comforts of a Western lifestyle are an obstacle to be overcome.  An intimate familiarity with the bounties and dangers of one's own environment and an understanding of one's place within it is a treasure we often just don't have in cities.

    There's nothing that Westerners can do to "help" these people. They've been doing quite well for millennia, and their culture - which includes amazingly advanced technologies for survival wholly incompatible with a Western worldview - would be utterly shattered by any contact with Westerners.

    No, we have nothing to offer them, cheap tramadol without prescription. Nothing. Before extolling the benefits of Westernization, let's see if we can't clean up its record first by making life better for the millions of impoverished people already living under the grip of industrial society in slums around the world. Then - MAYBE - we can talk. Until then, Godspeed, indigenous people. 150 Tramadol, May this be the last anyone in the West ever sees of you.

    UPDATE:

    Check out Werner Herzog's heartbreaking documentary on a well-meaning first encounter gone horribly wrong:

    Part one

    Part two

    Part three.

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    Friday, May 16th, 2008

    Order tramadol online cheap, Quantum physics, on the other hand, seems more resonant with those residual dualist hankerings, perhaps by holding out the possibility that scientific realism and objectivity melt away in that domain, or even that thoughts and feelings are, in the end, the fundamental properties of the universe. Explanation of something as special as what makes me me, should really involve, the feeling is, something more "deep" and mysterious and "other worldly" than mere neurons. Perhaps what is comforting about quantum physics is that it can be invoked to 'explain' a mysterious phenomenon without removing much of the mystery, quantum physical explanations being highly mysterious themselves.

    Now we are not for a moment suggesting that anything like this is behind Penrose's work, and whether our diagnosis is right or wrong has no bearing whatever on the strengths and weaknesses of his arguments. It may, however, Sniffing Ultram, help explain why the very possibility of a quantum physical explanation is often warmly greeted, whereas an explanation in terms of neurons may be considered "scary", "degrading" and even "inconceivable". Why should it be less scary, reductionist or counter-intuitive that "me-ness" emerges from collapse of a wave function than from neuronal activity?

    Nothing we have said in this paper demonstrates the falsity of the quantum-consciousness connection. Our view is just that it is no better supported than any one of a gazillion caterpillar-with-hookah hypotheses.


    -- From Gaps in Penrose's Toilings [a play on Penrose tiling] by Rick Grush and Patricia Smith Churchland, Philosophy Department, UCSD, order tramadol online cheap.

    Yeah, that Caterpillar-with-Hookah didn't really have anything helpful to say:

    The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, Online tramadol online, sleepy voice.

    `Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.

    This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

    `What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!'

    `I can't explain MYSELF Order tramadol online cheap, , I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'

    `I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.

    `I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly, Ultram Euphoria,' Alice replied very politely, `for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'

    `It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.

    `Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; `but when you have to turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, 100 Tramadol Free Shipping, won't you?'

    `Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.

    `Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; `all I know is, it would feel very queer to ME.'

    `You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. `Who are YOU?'

    Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such VERY short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, 100mg Buy Tramadol, `I think, you out to tell me who YOU are, first.'


    -- From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

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