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[jimtzu]

well since the thread has drifted in the AC/KW direction i thought it would be interesting to check out this latest posting from RAM for those who havn't seen it.  talking about intentional communities and the cultish shadow side.

http://www.robertmasters.com/newsletter/October2007.pdf

[henry]

interesting that robert masters doesn't mention his 1990 xanthyros community .....andrew cohen puts out a very good magazine and i take it on mike murphy's authority that SES is a wonderful important book. but i want to see some fireworks; astonishing siddhis, charisms as described in "the future of the body", miracles, even a knock-off sai baba manifestation  . frank jones is the planetary avatar and i'm not sure bubba has got raymond burr's island sewn up yet....a focus of esalen's center for theory and research is evolutionary panentheism  ...henry

[marianthi]

Henry,

What did you have for lunch?!

 

Marianthi.

[Jana]

Thanks Henry, I missed that one. RAM is more optimistic than me that community is possible...I tend to see all human activity as tribal and cultic...however we don't get anywhere by throwing in the towel and succombing to the notion that we are eternal f*ups. If anyone can crack open cultism its RAM
AC's speel is so good, I don't particularly care if he has a dysfunctional community—since we live in a dysfunctional world I wonder if functional relationship is even possible. The one red flag for me was when AC said that the new "chosen people" is those that are hip and active in evolutionary spirituality. The tendency in times of stress is to create special preferential bonds, however Spirit in order to survive, needs to be wild, it needs to roam the entire globe, not hang out with like-minded chosen people that will have everlasting life because of their joint belief system. It is this kind of thing that needs to be consciously routed out of all these Fab teachers programs who at this point in the game should know better. It is up to us audience to call a fish when we see it. I request that AC stop creating exclusion-preferential bonds with his flock...any such egostroking defense and security measures will be the downfall of the very thing he is so eloquently striving for.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxROglke1xE 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yir45VqDzg&NR=1

[Jana]

There is the no-self, and there is the Self.
Self-dissolution is only “half” of the equation.

AC is on the right track both with group evolving and the urgent need to put spirit into action. Spirituality has been used as a tranquilizer and antidepressant for too long...medicating ourselves into stupification however is not a truly human life—and will only speed the apocaplyse.

I don't even acknowledge the nondual in Zeropoint Unified Field, because polar particles spin out of it in their opposite charges, and my sense is that spin exists within ZPE itself...the entire universe is asymmetric.

Even if one holds nondual concepts in the mind, the mind IS a digital dualistic computer, it identifies opposites, that is its job.

Nondual realization only occurs during samadhi when the mind, all motor control, the world, everything has dissapeared...as soon as the Being returns to this world you are back in dualism again, with the very first thought.

So the whole concept of nondual spirituality is a prescienfific, sloppy interpretation of the samadhi state.

In fact they should really call it nondualling, because nondualists always go on about Nothing and fight as though they have a "position", well if they have a position, they are not nondual...to be nondual you have to be a perfectly symmetrical amorphous jellyfish in a perfectly symmetrical universe prior to spin, prior to consciousness, prior to matter!

The over-riding sense from satsang with Ady or Gangaji is the pleasure of hte blasting of the tower of Babel, but they offer no skill, sense of direction or any ideas on how to live a life beyond the tower of Babel. In this sense AC and KW represent some of the few Sp.teachers that are pointing a way into the future. That is if you need Sp.teachers.

Evolution is already what is. Nondualism without evolutionary-action, is simply hearing the message Herald forth from the Abyss and then sitting around endlessly grooving on the sound of the message itself...rather than enacting its instructions.

I think it is kinda funny now the drama that unfolded back in India around AC and Gangaji...when  Sri HWL Poonjaji blessed Gangaji with the job of taking Vedanta to the West, while he chastized AC for deviating from the original teaching. AC was not granted teacher statis within that tradition, but he has gone on to be far more effective in THIS world than Gangaji who can only recite the original self-dissolving message.
Simply self-dissolving in a time of crisis will lead to complete collapse of civilization, because self-dissolving is addictive and you can do it for lifetimes. However in order to be fully human, and resoponding to the true call of evolution, you need to do the building and action...that is the CREATIVE side of the equation as well. The dissolving is only there to provide space for  the NEW to manifest.

[Michael]

The damnedable thing is, the seemingly inevitable way that the "Voice of Spirit" morphs, develops, devolves into ideology to kill and die for, and/or into media products for consumption.

To me at this point, it comes down to: which will be more important?  Ideology with all its deadly baggage or the recognition and reduction of suffering?  Do we really need Spirituality to deal with our problems?  I wonder...


I wonder if anyone actually heard this girl:

[Jana]

Yes, in light of the current world crisis we have to question the very nature of our spirituality altogether...because we won't get a second chance...our time is running out. We have to ask ourselves "For whom does the Grail serve?" For whom does our Spirit serve?
Is our enlightenment merely for our own betterment, or are we really awake and making a difference. We have to change the way we think, feel, relate, do business...we have to change our reason for "existing." If our spiritual path distracts us from our eco-logical dharma, then we better get onto another spiritual path quick smart.

The cure for cancer is prevention. The cure for global suicide is prevention. We must give up our “disease producing”-”fix it” ways and learn to live in harmony with Nature from the ground up—or we will be undone BY Nature.

 Permaculture Global Report site http://www.permacultureglobalreport.com

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdnV1umiJpo&NR=1  —Open Sourcing Free Energy Systems, Sterling Allan, pureenergysystems.com  newenergynews.com

[Nickeson]

Hey,
In re: Andrew Cohen, y'all might find this at Open Integral of interest.
S.

[marianthi]

Amigos,

I listened closely to articulate 12 year old  Severn in her speech on behalf of the ECO that Michael posted recently in this thread.

I must answer because I live next door to ranchos, the Venezuelan equivalent to the favelas of Brazil: impromptu housing concocted by the very low income groups.  And I live in daily contact with their inhabitants.  Poverty is there and lack of much of what we´d consider basic living needs is there.  But I want to tell you in no uncertain terms: this is NOT SIMPLY because they don’t have income or education or do-gooders who would cover their ´needs´.  Their needs are just not inspired by the same stars as little Severn assumes. The boy who told her that if he were rich he´d give food and clothes and medicine and affection to the needy people in his world might be one of the occasional, rare and tangible exceptions.  ´Oh, com´n Marianthi´, you might say.  But I´ve  walked these fields,  since the age of 8 and  I had a 10 year sojourn in Canada , so I know the contrasting minds and lands of the ´developed´world vs. the ´third´ world.

I´ll speak by example.  In a ranchos town a few hours from where I live there was a drums festival by the locals.  After driving there and enjoying their percussions and  skill for a few hours I asked for the use of a toilet.  No house had one - but all houses had television.  A local lady brought out a plastic basin for my needs and encouraged me to empty it in the bush.   When I brought up the subject of  T.V. vs. toilets with her she just said that T:V. ´nos hace falta´ (we need it) but with toilets, ´nos las arreglamos´(we manage), obiously by means of basins and bushes.

When the read-write campaign started recently round here aimed at recruiting adult population of the ranchos who did not know how to read or write and could thus learn the skills, the majority did not attend (I practically tried to force the man working on my garden to go, but he said ´I´m not good for that stuff, it gives me a headache´.  To those that money scholarships were given to encourage them, quite a few used it to buy washing machines or fridges or replace old ones and they never attended classes.  I know only ONE woman, of the hundreds near here, who actually took up the challenge, at least for a while.

And to repeat a story (posted at IN long ago) of the woman who used to help me clean my house, who came from those same strata, who at age 34 had child no. 7 by man number 6 ,around Christmas time 2 years ago, she´d cry out to me: ´no money for baby milk!´.  I gave her a triple Christmas bonus equivalent to 3 salaries.  She spent ALL of it getting grey contact lenses (imported and expensive in these latitudes) for herself so she´d look good  and be talked about at the barrios Christmas parties – and no money for a drop of baby milk.

Immediate gratification mind-dimension rules. 

So,  who are we to judge by OUR yardsticks  what makes the únderpriviled´ life and what makes the ´privileged´one?  We simply assume that our level of comfort and security marks  a universal notch of  ´basic human needs´ , giving rise to a ´decent life´.  What IS a DECENT life?  What umbrella assumptions cover that one?

Enough for now.  

 

Marianthi

[jimtzu]

I think you're right about the masses on the "lower end" of things getting caught up in the un-self-serving gratifying of their immediate needs in an purely ego-centric way. that is the nature of the human animal response, unenlightened, for sure, but even the "enlightened ones" as we've seen, are not all that enlightened and the base reactions have their way of popping out of the shadows.  i think the girls impassioned pleas were a good thing for the leaders to hear, to remind them to walk the talk of the basic teachings we give to kids to function in society. all too often those lessons are forgotten with age and the distractions of running the world.

[Jana]

I can’t find out if Mark DeMucha’s movie The Tesla Conspiracy is out yet. In 1931 Tesla produced an electric motor for a Pierce-Arrow car made with vacuum tubes which must have run off zero point…hear Pt.5 of Coast to Coast with Nooney. Also in The Excalibur Briefing by Tom Bearden he says that Dr T. Henry Moray (UT) also produced a zeropoint electric device with valves that cost $500 each to make around the early 1900s.
What we have in America now (and worldwide) is the oilmen selling the country out. Politics must be for show only, there doesn’t seem to be any foresight or planning. Michigan is collapsing as the car industry folds, I hear even the drug companies are going under. Had the alternative technologies been allowed to grow this recession might have been avoided…if the car industry had adopted Tesla’s electric motor, the world would be a lot quieter, less polluted, less people dead from war, the drug industry that feeds the CIA that looks after the oil barons interests would be reduced, the US wouldn’t have to bully other countries into coughing up their resources…we would be far better off spiritually and intellectually, further along in the sciences, the land would be less depleted of minerals as there would be less acid rain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzxvhA72vGI&mode=related&search=Tesla%20free%20energy%20conspiracy%20Mark%20DeMucha
1-11 Parts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJBzwN_WKRg&mode=related&search=  —The Tesla Conspiracy: Mark DeMucha Pt.5

[Nickeson]

I can’t find out if Mark DeMucha’s movie The Tesla Conspiracy is out yet. In 1931 Tesla produced an electric motor for a Pierce-Arrow car made with vacuum tubes which must have run off zero point…hear Pt.5 of Coast to Coast with Nooney.

I just posted a little flight of fantasy about all this on my blog. Please feel free to peruse.

Thanks, SN

[Is the 'Net Generation "amusing ourselves to death"?]

Source

Is the 'Net Generation "amusing ourselves to death"?

I just finished reading through Neil Postman's ground-breaking screed against the dangers posed by television on our culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1984. Much of it still rings true today, perhaps even more true, as the dangers he foretells 23 years ago seem self-evident and pervasive today.

In light of Postman's book, I've been thinking about the advances in internet development over the past few years, particularly the growth of social networking technologies. Are we still amusing ourselves to death?

For those who have not read it, Neil Postman argues that the switch from print to television as the primary form of public discourse is having a profound impact on society, largely to its detriment. He characterizes it as a shift toward a medium whose primary value is to entertain, not enlighten. The dominance of television has particularly negative impacts on news and journalism, politics, and education. He posits that TV is making us less informed, less educated, more passive and less politically engaged. Postman closes this slim volume with the challenge "Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?"

Neil Postman passed away in 2003. So we don't know what he would make of this much "richer," denser and twitterific multi-media environment. His son Andrew wrote last year about the enduring legacy of his father's work, noting that:

...my father asked such good questions that they can be asked of non-television things, of all sorts of transforming developments and events that have happened since 1985, and since his death, and of things still unformed, for generations to come... His questions can be asked about all technologies and media.

So how does Postman's dire warning map onto the current state of information and networking technology?

To consider this, I want to examine what Postman saw as the losses to our culture from the incursion of television in our lives, and see if new media mitigate or share those same deficiencies.

"Now... This" : News as Drama

Postman takes strong exception to how television news truncates how we receive news and information into very small portions of video, resulting in the rapid "consumption" of news without any of the analysis, reflection, argumentation or debate.

The primary source of news for most Americans is still television. Newsprint has been in steady decline for the past 20 years. Radio has branched out into Satellite, HD and webcast models.

And then came the web. Social networking technology has exponententially expanded the population of the news "providers" and changed the audience from passive recipients to active responders and critics. From online versions of print and television news media, to internet-only news sites, to the blogosphere, people are no longer content to just watch an attractive cast of newscasters tell them what the news is, they want to create it and critique it themselves.

I think Postman would take heart in this development and see it as a win for rationality and public discourse.

Politics as Image over Substance
Postman argues that television has made politics into a game in which the winner is not the one with the superior policies but the most telegenic presence. He wrote in the era of Reagan, who is still the acknowledged master of style over substance. The defining feature of modern politics he posits is the television commercial: a pre-packaged set of appealing images and slogans that don't argue or inform as much as entertain with good feelings and emotive hooks.

Not much has changed since Postman wrote about Reagan. Actors and entertainers have become almost commonplace in politics, from Sonny Bono to Arnold Schwartzenegger.

But this election we may be witnessing some misfires in the political machinery as social networking threatens to open up the political process to millions more active voters who want to make their voices heard. Across the political spectrum, activists are using YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, MeetUp, Second Life, and Twitter to engage with other voters and try and influence their votes. Political campaigners will continue to try and maintain their command-and-control, top-down structures, spinmeisters will try and control the message. But with a million folks armed with cameraphones, podcasts, and Garage Band, you can't control the signal.

Again, I think Postman would welcome the inevitable chaos.

Education as Entertainment
His most damning section is how television has altered how people learn. Postman defines what he sees as the central educational motifs taught by television: it requires no slow accumulation of knowledge over time, it does not tax the viewer, and it requires no exposition. In his nightmare vision, "Sesame Street" has taken over the academy.

Well, twenty years later, kids are still learning the way they have always learned: a teacher lectures, textbook readings are assigned, written work is submitted. Students might try and Google answers, and assignments might include websites for further reference, but the basic structure of education has not been dramatically altered to accommodate television.

Meanwhile, digital technologies are changing the nature of what the "classroom" is. The US Department of Defense is launching a new initiative to create a virtual game development lab to test how computer games can be used to teach military skills. Harvard Law School is conducting virtual courses in Second Life. The non-profit Global Kids is helping teenagers create machinima public service announcements about different public policy issues. Far from passively receiving amusing video content, students are being challenged to learn in new ways, through interacting with digital media and engaging with each other in online spaces.

All-in-all, Neil Postman tells a cautionary tale of what will happen if the populace becomes captive to a unidimensional, hyper-consolidated, broadcast model of information delivery. It is still a vital message that deserves to be retold to succeeding generations. But I find more cause for optimism now than I think I would if I were reading this book 20 years ago.

We certainly are not out of the woods yet. But I think more than ever people are active creators of art, journalism, scholarly inquiry, and political speech. We won't be destroying our televisions anytime soon. But we are absorbing them into a wider web of connections and media that we create.

[Michael]

In 1931 Tesla produced an electric motor for a Pierce-Arrow car made with vacuum tubes which must have run off zero point…

Source

Electric Car Maker Aims
For the Top With Sports Car

Tesla Readies $98,000 Roadster
And Looks to Expand Downward
October 15, 2007; Page D2

Tesla Motors is a car company that's both decades ahead of its time, and a year behind schedule. Soon, it will become clear which is more important to Tesla's long-term future, and the future of the disruptive ideas the company represents.

For those who somehow missed the blizzard of publicity that has swirled around this company for the past 18 months or so, Tesla (www.teslamotors.com) is a Silicon Valley start-up, bankrolled by some of the same people who brought you the Internet boom of the late 1990s. The company's stated ambition is to develop over the next several years a full array of electric cars. Tesla's fans -- many of them influential leaders of Silicon Valley's "clean tech" green-technology movement -- see Tesla as an icon of the broader effort to make big money by unshackling the U.S. economy from petroleum.

Tesla Motors

Tesla's first model will be a $98,000 Roadster

Tesla's first model will be a $98,000 electric roadster, developed around the architecture of a Lotus Elise, that uses 6,831 lithium-ion batteries similar to those used in laptop computers, a patented electric-motor system, and a highly sophisticated package of controllers and software to deliver an exotically attractive car that zaps from standstill to 60 miles per hour in under four seconds and can travel up to 245 miles on a single charge.

Tesla isn't planning any traditional advertising, but if it did, one slogan could be: "You can't kill an electric car you can't catch."

Tesla and its approach to electrifying the automobile may well redefine the car industry. But first, Tesla needs to actually deliver the car. That was once supposed to have happened by early this year. Now, company co-founder Martin Eberhard says, the first Roadsters should come off the Lotus assembly line in Britain sometime during the first quarter of 2008.

"Our plan is to ramp up very gently," he says. The run of cars produced during the first quarter of 2008 could be only about 50 vehicles, with a goal of building a total of about 600 cars in the 2008 model year. Tesla recently told potential customers that it can no longer guarantee delivery of 2008 models. Newcomers to the waiting list might well get 2009s.

During an interview last week in his modest office in one of the nondescript warehouses Tesla occupies in the San Francisco suburb of San Carlos, Mr. Eberhard says he has gained respect for the challenges that conventional auto makers face.

Among the problems Tesla has encountered: The car's body had to be redesigned because the door sills were so high that getting in and out of the vehicle required excessive acrobatics, especially for women in skirts.

A supplier for the car's original transmission failed, and a subsequent decision to move from a one-speed transmission to a two-speed proved more difficult to execute than expected. In August, the car flunked a 30 mile per hour side-impact crash test, necessitating more last-minute design changes.

The logistics of getting components produced in Thailand, Taiwan, and the U.S. to arrive at the right time at the assembly plant in England have proven challenging. To manage this effort, Tesla in September hired Michael Marks, former chief executive officer of contract manufacturing giant Flextronics International Ltd. to become its CEO, replacing Mr. Eberhard, who remained as president of technology.

"Silicon Valley engineers find it easy to think they know everything and Rust Belt companies don't know anything," Mr. Eberhard says. "More often than not the knee jerk reaction, that these guys (in Detroit) don't know what they are doing, is wrong."

That said, Mr. Eberhard says conventional car makers did get it wrong on electric vehicle technology in the 1990s and early years of this decade.

Big car makers, led by General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp., responded to a California mandate in the late '90s by producing vehicles that were supposed to prove that electric vehicles could be affordable and oh-so-politically correct. Unfortunately, the GM EV1 and the electric Toyota RAV4 struck mainstream customers as geeky, slow and impractical.

"Electric cars had a terrible black eye," Mr. Eberhard says. As far as the general public was concerned, "they sucked and they were dead."

WSJ's Joe White interviews Tesla Motors co-founder Martin Eberhard about his agenda for producing and marketing the electrical roadster his company plans to launch.

Tesla's Big Idea was to start with an electric car that appeals to the id, not the superego. From the start, Mr. Eberhard says he wanted a car that could outrun a Porsche in a 0-60 trial, and would go 250 miles on a charge. He says the production Roadster will hit the under four-second target for the 0-60 dash, and will get very close to the original goal on range.

More fundamentally, the Tesla Roadster is designed to ride the technology curve from the high end of the price ladder down -- the direction that has worked for most other forms of technological innovation from the VCR to the laptop.

But after the Roadster is launched, and the high-tech elite have shown off their status-defining 2008 models at Silicon Valley's finest restaurants and clubs, what can Tesla become?

Tesla so far has raised $105 million from venture-capital firms and Chairman Elon Musk, the PayPal founder who was a ground floor investor. That's a lot for a tech startup, but it's chump change in the auto industry, where car programs with century-old, conventional technology can easily cost $500 million to $1 billion.

"Our ambition is, one step at a time, to become a real car company," Mr. Eberhard says. Tesla plans to develop more practical and more affordable electric vehicles, expanding its potential revenue. But the time frame for that is now 2010, not 2009 as once proposed.

Last May, Mr. Eberhard told a Senate committee that the company's second model would be a $50,000 sedan built in New Mexico, followed by an even more affordable car. Now, Mr. Eberhard is cagier about exactly what Tesla's "White Star" model line will be, and exactly when it will appear. "We are deep, deep into that," he says. "We are planning on building (cars) in Albuquerque. It's possible we might want to do something different."

Tesla is named for Nikola Tesla, the godfather of alternating current and radio who nonetheless died poor, in part because his weirdness wound up obscuring his genius. In recent years, Tesla has become a patron saint of Silicon Valley.

But there's another ghost hovering over Tesla Motors -- one whose name Mr. Eberhard brings up before a visitor can get around to it: John DeLorean.

Mr. DeLorean, who died in 2005, was the charismatic General Motors executive who left GM after clashing with its stolid hierarchy, and who later founded a company to build what he called the "ethical sports car." The DMC-12, with its stainless steel body panels and gull-wing doors, was designed to appeal to wealthy enthusiasts with a taste for the exotic. But Mr. DeLorean's company collapsed in 1982, and he spent several years fighting and beating charges of drug dealing and fraud. The DeLorean company's failure is one of several examples of how hard it has been for upstarts to challenge the automotive oligarchy since World War II.

"What problem was DeLorean solving?" Mr. Eberhard asks in response to the inevitable question about how Tesla avoids DeLorean's fate. The DeLorean car, when it appeared, was not any better, in some ways not as good, as a Chevrolet Corvette that GM was offering for less money, he says. By contrast, Tesla is offering a product unlike any other. "Nobody produces a real electric car," he says.

What will define success for Tesla? Big car makers have tools, capital and experience in dealing with the harsh environment of the global auto market that Silicon Valley doesn't possess, even with its abundance of rich, smart technology visionaries and venture-capital firms. Mr. Eberhard says selling out isn't the plan, even though "we've been approached by many, many car companies."

"We are rolling everything we can back into growing the company," he says. "If we wanted to be a fancy sports car company, we could do that next year."

[Jana]

Yea the Tesla is the sexiest car out there.

Hey,
Two fuel sources that seem promising to pick up where oil leaves off.

HHO GAS
Fuel from Water, Denny Klein
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F719KNddFN8&mode=related&search=
www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6YYUOx6fBU
Oxyhydrogen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HHO gas or Klein gas is an oxyhydrogen mixture made by water electrolysis ... The claimed difference between HHO and Brown's gas is unverified, untested, ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyhydrogen_flame

MAGNEGAS
From sewage to fuel tank, new type of matter produced magnetically from an electric arc, with carbon electrodes. Similar uses to natural gas.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy0WXkj1Drw 
www.magnegas.com/
Ruggero M. Santilli: Magnegas / Aquafuel ~ US Patents & articles
"Recycling Liquid Wastes and Crude Oil into MagneGas and MagneHydrogen": http://magnegas.com/technology/part1.htm Santilli's Scientific Papers:
www.rexresearch.com/santilli/santilli.htm