• Capture the most captivating of materials, content, articles and more.
• Find the most fascinating facts, images, and information available.
• Integrate with self and website the most profound wisdom and stories I can.

Captivating materials and articles should read like poetry, delectable, fluent, smooth, accessible. Fascinating information should be transformative or enlightening. Images should be beautiful or awe-inspiring. Meta-integration-worthy wisdom must be capable or proven to have stood the passage of time and reach across cultures. All new content should be exemplary (from nature, humanity, science, art, literature) or illustrative (of important trends, patterns, cycles, etc.).

FYI, here are some of the places I generally like to look…

Quotes collections and websites – BrainyQuotes, Thinkexist, and Wisdom Quotes.

Social news aggregators and engines – Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Slashdot.

In books I read, the majority being sci-fi novels (and I’d argue that I generally pick very good ones). Sci-fi favorites from recent years: Foundation Trilogy/Series, Ender’s Game(Series), The Algebraist, Pushing Ice, House of Suns, Accelerando, and The Wind-Up Girl. Non-fiction favorites from recent years: What Technology Wants, The Next 100 Years, The Narcissism Epidemic, and The Evolving Self.

And of course I must mention TED.

I plan to pursue growth and thrival-fuel through these means. Please share your thoughts with me on other great sources of news and other fascinating or captivating information…

This is how I plan to…

differentiate & integrate,

explore & reflect,

discover & synthesize,

and widgetize & optimize ; )

A WARNING TO SELF AND READER ALIKE

Do not forget that all this hunting for paths through which to expand the mind, improve the intellect, evolve the self, (the same goes for entertaining yourself), that too much time spent on transistasis (change/evolution) equates to problems with homeostasis (the renewal, detox, and settling of physical and psychological selves).

As a rule, you must stand up and move your body around every hour if you are on the computer for more than two hours per day, and who isn’t these days, right? This is very important; you must train your body as you hone your mind — they go hand in hand. If you sit for too long reading or surfing the internet, your immune system and your cardiovascular system go into hibernation and blood vessels and muscles (as well as general well-being) atrophy. Watch out for the whole, holistic self. Meditation, whether sitting-emptying-the-mind style or walking-around-reflecting-on-things, is also to be considered essential, as is being with friends and family, which is very hard to do indeed when plugged in…

As Karl Jaspers wrote: “The human being is an open possibility, incomplete and incompletable. Hence it is always more and other than what he has brought to realisation in himself.” Nevertheless, it is our responsibility to try imagining what that human being could be at the next stage of its history.

p.234 – The Evolving Self, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Beyond Self-Actualization is of course Transcendence, which is easiest to conceptualize as the light outside of the self into which the self dissolves… Symbols are unsatisfactory at this point, suffice it to say that the non-dual awareness of the unity in the cosmos which one may or may not attempt to reach or enter into is ____________________. < Just indescribable > What we can say is that for those unique souls that can and often do make a habit of self-actualizing – it is to you that Transcendence is most accessible and Enlightenment most tantalizingly close! … And we do hope that you stick around and help brighten up the place here a bit before you depart. : )

“What a liberation to realize that the voice in my head is not who I am. Who am I then? — The one who sees that.”
– Eckhart Tolle

STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In Consciousness, the starting, waking state is that of the ordinary, Rational Mind. This state is defined by Ordinary Consciousness and Sense Awareness. It rests on the ever-growing-to-do-list, worry-bound, don’t-forget-to-take-out-the-trash-and-sometimes-go-smell-flowers kind of breathing-smelling-hearing-tasting-and-feeling-things level of reality.

Immediately below this state in the hierarchy we find Dreams and a bit further down is where the Subconscious and the Subliminal Self churn and stir themselves. Hypnosis impinges on these level and may occasionally allow for the liberation of bottled-up agony and fermented solitude. Dreaming, however, along with socializing, reading, and, of course, exercise and physical activity, work out the subliminal kinks in the mind and squeeze out the toxins quite satisfactorily most times, but the higher (and infinitely more enjoyable) stages require more focused and serious work, and greater commitment, to have any claim on the transcendental territory therein contained…

When we can set foot on higher ground, we are climbing (initially at least) a ladder that rests on the substrate of Ordinary Mind. Here we can see Higher Consciousness manifest a small fraction of its true potential in terms of Inspiration and in feelings of Peace and/or Revelation. But, at this level the Rational Mind is still in control and only allows limited bandwidth (probably 1 Kb/s combined throughput) on the ladder’s rungs and rails – and even climbing (transitively & figuratively) one thinking-man up the ladder per day is a neat trick in this epoch of history. Just consider. How much of the minority-portion in which we can breathe of our time are we NOT spending on matters of the Spirit, on feeling for the universally-accessible-but-rarely-accessed essence of things anyways? To make it worse, people nowadays don’t seem to care about ‘that kinda shit’ and those that do are (or intentionally make themselves) invisible and hence cannot be considered exemplary counter-examples to the spiritual malnutrition of the age.

But I digress (and thus continue onto what should be the highest level of consciousness).

The highest level of consciousness is, as you expected, the domain of the Sassy Spirit, the arena for Mossy Meditation, and the profoundly quiet, clean and wooden, Court of Contemplation. Really though… Transcendence is the approaching of both self and absolute in a kind of trance of dancing blue flames in which the body’s boundaries begin to dissolve and are dismissed as the evenly-spaced energy and information packets of which they consist. Merely ideas. Alone and afloat.

Unfortunately, even at the fire-dancing stage certain degrees of freedom can and often are distinguished – and the abstract, artificial division of self and other is again guarded, protected, i.e. allowed to stand.

This castle-moat effect around the self happens habitually and automatically, especially when we live in a world of words and constantly add “evidence” to our pools of doubt that we keep filling up in order to convince ourselves of our separate nature from that of our distantly-kept loved ones and fellow humans. In such swamps of ego-negativity the distance, indeed, only grows when we try to “transcend” all on our own. And yet why do we both know this and also so-obviously-fundamentally at the same time NOT know this (considering the evidence readily available in our behavior)?

It is here that we should take a critical look at the rolling, snowballing, ever-expanding ego momentarily and these things will perhaps be made more clear than they have been up to and including this point – in this essay, I mean…

The inertia of the Ego, as we know, is strong and heavy. We constrict ourselves by our constant and mostly-unaware way of working and stretching it out into the career-, life-, family-, status-, and goal-oriented pursuits of our lives. Now don’t get me wrong. This is the game of life. It should be, it must be played. These things are not undesirable or un-pursuit-worthy, but often they end up blocking the long-dormant channels running through our stomachs (those that start from the origin, from of the source, from the initial point of the big bang and run up vertically through space and time – to what? — To the 11-th dimensional tri-tonal non-dualistic non-material non-conceptual gods of orgy-pleasure and enlightenment that are waiting for their old playmates to come back home and build castles in the sand with them, that’s what!) and we are filling these holy channels up with status-oriented-classist-materialist, earth-destroying, mtv-youtube-infotainment-website-channel activity and all the other garbage of that ilk all the time. And take it from me, mon frere: Your channels do not need to be filled. (Dump that meme!) When they are empty they are at their absolute fullest.

So we see that the inertia of Ego is strong. The patterns of negativity, our inherited neuroses, and our bad habits are ESTABLISHED. With Pride. Since 1909. Deeply Rooted. Really. So? What to do? The answer is to find a way to break out of your cycle. Try to create something NEW and NOVEL. Creation is the highest-level cognitive (and I might argue Spiritual) task there is. Make some art then, or write in your journal, form a club, or plan a social event. Take your genes (an operating system), your psychology (out-of-date software), and your personality (80′s themed). They do have a bit of sway, sure. But — they are ultimately impermanent, non-dictatorial. You must then recognize and claim and reclaim your freedom to do things differently at every step of the way. You’ve got Genetics, Culture, Society, Psychology, and Mental Habits to reroute you, but however much you choose to abdicate your will to these things, you are still, at root, free to do otherwise. So show it to the world, and show it to yourself. You are free.

Remember: there’s no need to climb and creep up some rickety transcendence-ladder when already your own creative-flowing-liberated-and-also-liberating essence can just float in the direction you choose. Now go. Float.

“Once you come to know yourselves, you will become known.”
– Jesus

This just-found quote points at the reason why we must be careful, why even this blogger must be careful, to live the life and experience the world (wu-wei) and to just sample (and sometimes observe) the advance of technology (extropy) — for what technology (name one!) can more easily improve our lives than our own determination to, let’s say, just walk for an hour every day and breathe in the natural air? Henry David Thoreau said it best…

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things.
They are but improved means
to an unimproved end.

Space Tourism for Scientists

The New York Times ran an article yesterday on space tourism for scientists and scientific purposes:

“If all goes as planned, within a couple of years, tourists will be rocketing into space aboard a Virgin Galactic space plane — paying $200,000 for about four minutes of weightlessness — before coming back down for a landing on a New Mexico runway.

Sitting in the next seat could be a scientist working on a research experiment.

Science, perhaps even more than tourism, could turn out to be big business for Virgin and other companies that are aiming to provide short rides above the 62-mile altitude that marks the official entry into outer space, eventually on a daily basis.”

Why (and Can’t I Get a Better Price)?

Xcor Aerospace has offered the lowest ticket prices at $95,000 a person, which makes it reasonable (or at least a bit more reasonable) for scientific research budgets. I personally like pondering the outcomes of regular short-interval experiments being done in low-earth orbit, in addition to the falling prices after the practice has been established well enough.

So, what is the draw for the scientific community over such short trips? One slashdot user (Nyeerrmm) had the following to say and mentioned metallurgy and composite materials experiments, and equipment testing for later installation into the International Space Station:

“…There are some metallurgy applications. You can make some alloys out of otherwise immiscible metals. Melt them on the ground, stir quickly at the start of the free fall period and quench the mix.

There’s also some composite materials that consist of a metal and gaseous component. For example, you might have some sort of hollow beads with a metal binder. The radical density differences make this a hard material to build in normal Earth environment. Or you might be trying to make a solid metallic foam.

Another zero gee favorite is large protein crystals (for crystallography). The five minute period might be enough to create fairly large and relatively flawless crystals in some cases.

There’s one final reason even when zero gee processes take much longer than five minutes. It’s a cheap way to test the equipment before you put it in a really expensive environment.

For example, if you have a kit for making proteins in a week, it would suck to put that on the ISS and find out that you have a horde of technical problems that need to worked out by very expensive astronauts. Even five minutes is enough to get the gear running and find problems that manifest quickly.”

Any Takers?

The biggest researcher so far looks to be Southwest Research Institute, who specialize in chemistry, space science, mechanical engineering, and a number of other fields. Southwest plans to study how soil and rocks settle on the surface of asteroids, in addition to testing a refurbished ultraviolet telescope from 1997 and trying out a biomedical harness that monitors scientists’ vitals during space flight. Let’s wish them luck so that other potential early adopters may also be encouraged to join in on these new space research endeavors.

According to the Times, “even if only some of these companies succeed, the prospect is that in a few years, hundreds of suborbital flights could be taking off every year”. Wouldn’t that be cool…

Links

NY Times article: Space Tourism May Mean One Giant Leap for Researchers
Slashdot discussion: Scientists, Not Just Tourists Are Getting Tickets to Ride Into Space

Working prototype developed for DARPA (by AeroVironment Inc.) of a nano-hummingbird or ornithopter, useful for low-risk, long distance surveillance.

Source: Physorg.com – Ornithopter

SEE ALSO:

Ornithopter, the Magic: The Gathering Card…