The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels

The frame is decorated with twenty-six painted medallions depicting Christ and four angels, as well prophets and saints. This is one of Cimabue's early works, painted in about 1280, well before the Maestà di Santa Trinità (Florency, Uffizi). A lack of consensus in attributing this painting to the Florentine master is due in large part to the later date of execution traditionally assigned to it, difficult to reconcile with the hieratic and dramatic style.

A new sensitivity

Cimabue's palette is delicate, with shaded tones, notably in the angels' wings. The figures take on real solidity and an unprecedented visual presence. The artist prepared the ground for 14th-century Florentine art. His works raise the issues that would preoccupy his successors, notably Giotto: the representation of space, the representation of the body, and light.

"You have met many anchorites and ascetics, but a fully realised man conscious of his divinity (swarupa) is hard to find. The saints and Yogis, by immense efforts and sacrifices, acquire many miraculous powers and can do much good in the way of helping people and inspiring faith, yet it does not make them perfect. It is not a way to reality, but merely an enrichment of the false. All effort leads to more effort; whatever was built up must be maintained, whatever was acquired must be protected against decay or loss. Whatever can be lost is not really one's own; and what is not your own of what use can it be to you? In my world nothing is pushed about, all happens by itself. All existence is in space and time, limited and temporary. He who experiences existence is also limited and temporary. I am not concerned either with 'what exists' or with 'who exists'. I take my stand beyond, where I am both and neither.

The persons who, after much effort and penance, have fulfilled their ambitions and secured higher levels of experience and action, are usually acutely conscious of their standing; they grade people into hierarchies, ranging from the lowest non-achiever to the highest achiever. To me all are equal. Differences in appearance and expression are there, but they do not matter. Just as the shape of a gold ornament does not affect the gold, so does man's essence remain unaffected. Where this sense of equality is lacking it means that reality had not been touched.

Mere knowledge is not enough; the knower must be known. The Pandits and the Yogis may know many things, but of what use is mere knowledge when the self is not known? It will be certainly misused. Without the knowledge of the knower there can be no peace."

I AM THAT Dialogues of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

As Hungary sinks deeper into the quagmire of neo-liberalist dogma, the outlook for the future has become increasingly bleak

Ever since the palace coup in Hungary which brought the Gyurcsany government to power, Hungary has been in a holding pattern politically pending the spring 2006 elections. As a result, a fine juggling act is being performed in order to keep interest rates, inflation, and the government deficit all in check. With the pressure of higher oil prices threatening to fumble this delicate balance, the next six months will be crucial for Hungary -- both politically and economically.

Country For Sale

It's ironic how much politicians and the mass media in the US and its client states resemble that of the former Soviet Union

The day after Hurricane Katrina passed reports noted that that the hurricane was downgraded before it hit land and at the last minute veered to the east, thus the city of New Orleans was spared the worst. This half-truth sought to cover a tragedy which many had predicted would one day happen.

Despite this, the true extent of the damage soon became apparent. Although the hurricane may have lessened in intensity and its eye brushed to the side of New Orleans, the city was not spared the worst. As with modern-day Russia, it appears the American establishment feels that misinformation and sometimes outright lies are enough to placate those over whom they hold sway.

The same can be said of US client states in Central and Eastern Europe. By mid-week after the hurricane hit, the mass media in countries like Hungary brushed off the tragedy as if it were a minor inconvenience. While elsewhere the full extent of the horror had already begun to make itself known, Hungarian media pundits reassured listeners that the US, being the "richest" country in the world, will have no problem in dealing with the situation. In a semi-mocking tone, news of three Hungarian baptists travelling to the US to assist in rescue operations was viewed as nothing more than an insignificant gesture.

Yet when the sheer magnitude of the crisis soon became obvious media outlets were at a loss of how to report the situation; some even chose not to report anything at all. For instance, in it's nightly news broadcast three days after Katrina struck, Hungary's Duna TV didn't mention anything about the devastated area, as if there was no hurricane and nothing had happened.

Blown Away

Front Line Assembly (FLA) is a Canadian industrial music band created in 1984 by Bill Leeb and Michael Balch after Leeb left Skinny Puppy. Following two demo tapes Nerve War and Total Terror, their first album The Initial Command was released in 1986. Soon Rhys Fulber joined the band. The album State of Mind (1988) was the first to be released worldwide.

In 1989 Michael Balch left Front Line Assembly, and joined Ministry. The album Gashed Senses and Crossfire was released in 1989, and the track "Digital Tension Dementia" caught the attention of many underground music fans and DJs. Caustic Grip was released in 1990, and became an instant classic with underground fans. In 1991, the stand-alone single Virus (and also music video) won extensive play in industrial and dance clubs world wide. The album Tactical Neural Implant in 1992 was next, and with it Front Line Assembly became one of industrial music's most popular bands. The next album Millennium (1994) featured a combination of metal guitars and electronic music which would become one of the characteristics of industrial rock during the 1990s. Hard Wired (1995) and the world tour following the release was Front Line Assembly's most successful period.

Rhys Fulber left the band to concentrate on producing Fear Factory and other bands. Replacing Fulber was Chris Peterson, who already supported the band on their live shows. Two years after Fulber quit, the album FLAvour of the Weak was released, making a complete turn in Front Line Assembly's musical style. The metal influences were subdued and instead drum and bass dominated the band's new sound. Front Line Assembly made somewhat of a return to their former sound with the album Implode (1999), followed by Epitaph (2001). Chris Petersen left Front Line Assembly in 2002, and through most of that year it was rumored that the band had essentially broken up. However, in 2003, Rhys Fullber rejoined the band. The single Maniacal was released in October 2003, launching a new phase in the band's career, and the album Civilization followed in early 2004.

Side projects include : Conjure One, Delerium, Pro-Tech, Synæsthesia, Will, Intermix, Noise Unit, Equinox, Cyberaktif and Mutual Mortuary

Everything Must Perish - Providence

Apoptygma Berzerk is a Norwegian synthpop / EBM / futurepop musical group. It has achieved moderate commercial success with a unique brand of gloomy, danceable gothic synthpop, winning awards and top-10 spots in Germany and Scandinavia. Apoptygma Berzerk (abbreviated to APB or Apop) has toured Europe, North America, and Israel with bands such as VNV Nation and Icon of Coil. All of the band's lyrics are in English.

The name "Apoptygma Berzerk", either has a secret meaning, or does not mean anything, depending on which interview you read. Groth claims that it was randomly picked out of a dictionary. Apoptygma is an old Greek word for the fold of a woman's garment. Technically the 'y' ought to be pronounced like a long 'u', but the band's name is universally pronounced a-pop-tig-ma.

The band was formed by Stephan Groth and Jon Erik Martinsen in 1986. They recorded a few demos, including Victims of Mutilation. Jon Erik left the band shortly afterwards feeling unconfortable with the direction of the band's music.

Until the End of the World

This fantastic metamap of human consciousness integrating the systems of quaballah, the hindu-chakras and Leary's eight-circuit-map comes from vortexegg.blogspot.com

In Hinduism and its spiritual systems of yoga and in some related eastern cultures, as well as in some segments of the New Age movement, a chakra is thought to be an energy node in the human body.

The word comes from the Sanskrit cakra चक्र meaning "wheel, circle", and sometimes also referring to the "wheel of life". The pronunciation of this word can be approximated in English by chuhkruh, with ch as in chart and both instances of a as in yoga (the commonly found pronunciation shockrah is incorrect).

The seven main chakras are described as being aligned in an ascending column from the base of the spine to the top of the head. Each chakra is associated with a certain color, multiple specific functions, an aspect of consciousness, a classical element, and other distinguishing characteristics.

The chakras are thought to vitalise the physical body and to be associated with interactions of both a physical and mental nature. They are considered loci of life energy, or prana, which is thought to flow among them along pathways called nadis.

Traditional Chinese medicine also relies on a similar model of the human body as an energy system. The New Age movement has led to an increased interest in the West regarding chakras. Many in this movement point to a correspondence between the position and role of the Chakras, and those of the glands in the endocrine system. Some people in New Age also claim that other chakras, besides the above, exist — for instance, ear chakras.

Shortly put, the seven chakras are said to reflect how the unified consciousness of man (the immortal human being or the soul), is divided to manage different aspects of earthly life (body, instinct, vital energy, deeper emotions, communication, having an overview of life, contact to God). The chakras are placed on an intermediate layer which lies between the spirit and the earthly body.

Black hole unitarity

An open question in fundamental physics is the so-called information loss paradox, or black hole unitarity paradox. Classically, the laws of physics are the same run forward or in reverse. That is, if the position and velocity of every particle in the universe were measured, we could (disregarding chaos) work backwards to discover the history of the universe arbitrarily far in the past. In quantum mechanics, this corresponds to a vital property called unitarity which has to do with the conservation of probability.

Black holes, however, violate this rule. Because of the no hair theorem, we can never determine what went into the black hole. Information is apparently destroyed, as there is no way to reconstruct what went into the black hole. This is an important unsolved conceptual problem in quantum gravity.

On 21 July 2004 Stephen Hawking presented a new argument that black holes do eventually emit information about what they swallow, reversing his previous position on information loss. He proposed that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could allow information to escape from a black hole, where it can influence subsequent Hawking radiation. The theory has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community, and if it is accepted it is likely to resolve the black hole information paradox. In the meantime, the announcement has attracted a lot of attention in the media.

Singularities

The fundamental concern is that since the physical behavior of singularities is unknown, if singularities can be seen from the rest of spacetime, causality may break down, and physics may lose its predictive power. The issue cannot be avoided, since according to the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, singularities are inevitable in physically reasonable situations. Still, in the absence of naked singularities, the universe is deterministic - it's possible to predict the entire evolution of universe, knowing only its condition at a certain moment of time (more precisely, everywhere on a spacelike 3-dimensional hypersurface, called the Cauchy surface). Failure of CCH leads to the failure of determinism, because it is impossible to predict the behavior of space-time in the causal future of a naked singularity.

The hypothesis was first formulated by Roger Penrose in 1969, and it is not stated in a completely formal way. In a sense it is more of a research program proposal: part of the research is to find a proper formal statement that is physically reasonable and that can be proved to be true or false (and that is sufficiently general to be interesting).

Planck Units

In physics, Planck units are physical units of measurement originally proposed by Max Planck. They form a system of natural units because they are defined exclusively in terms of the following fundamental physical constants — the units are natural because the numerical values of these five universal constants become 1 when expressed in units of this system.

The Planck units are often semi-humorously referred to by physicists as "God's units". They eliminate anthropocentric arbitrariness from the system of units: some physicists believe that an extra-terrestrial intelligence might be expected to use the same system.

Referring to Duff Comment on time-variation of fundamental constants and Duff, Okun, and Veneziano Trialogue on the number of fundamental constants (The operationally indistinguishable world of Mr. Tompkins), if all physical quantities (masses and other properties of particles) were expressed in terms of Planck units, those quantities would be dimensionless numbers (mass divided by the Planck mass, length divided by the Planck length, etc.) and the only quantities that we ultimately measure in physical experiments or in our perception of reality are dimensionless numbers. (When one commonly measures a length with a ruler or tape-measure, that person is actually counting tick marks on a given standard or is measuring the length relative to that given standard, which is a dimensionless value. It is no different for physical experiments, as all physical quantities are measured relative to some other like dimensioned values.)

...These necessarily retain their meaning for all times and for all civilizations, even extraterrestrial and non-human ones, and can therefore be designated as "natural units"...

Planck's time is how long it takes for light to travel Planck's length. The Planck length is the smallest amount of length with significance, as below this length quantum laws reign, meaning all measurements are nonsense. The speed of any object is limited by Einstein's laws of relativity, which state that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Consciousness causes collapse

Consciousness causes collapse is the speculative theory that observation by a conscious observer is responsible for the wavefunction collapse. It is an attempt to solve the Wigner's friend paradox by simply stating that collapse occurs at the first "conscious" observer. Supporters claim this is not a revival of substance dualism, since (in a ramification of this view) consciousness and objects are entangled and cannot be considered as distinct. The consciousness causes collapse theory can be considered as a speculative appendage to almost any interpretation of quantum mechanics and most physicists reject it as unverifiable and introducing unnecessary elements into physics.

The process of "measurement" in quantum mechanics is regarded as consciousness itself. However, it is not explained by this theory which animals, living creatures, or objects have consciousness, that is, the right to collapse the wavefunction. It is also not clear whether measuring devices might also be considered conscious, though generally measuring devices are considered simply a "chain of observations" that only ends at a conscious entity. Some even suggest that some beings have a "higher consciousness" and therefore more capability to collapse the wavefunction, whereas others believe all conscious entities have an equal capability.

It has been claimed that the theory that meshes well with ancient Eastern mysticism and philosophy, including Hinduism and Taoism, which stress "Oneness".

Amit Goswami, a retired theoretical physicist, supported this theory in some of his writings, including The Self-Aware Universe. The Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner also supported it.

"That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is but a dimensionless point of consciousness, a conscious nothing; all you can say about yourself is: 'I am.' You are pure being -- awareness -- bliss. To realise that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness of the transient as transient, imaginary as imaginary, unreal as unreal. It is not at all difficult, but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the true so difficult to see. Once you understand that the false needs time and what needs time is false, you are nearer the Reality, which is timeless, ever in the now. Eternity in time is mere repetitiveness, like the movement of a clock. It flows from the past into the future endlessly, an empty perpetuity. Reality is what makes the present so vital, so different from the past and future, which are merely mental. If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not allow your mind to go out of yourself in search. When you want something, ask yourself: do I really need it? and if the answer is no, then just drop it." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

God formed Adam out of earth "adama", and set him in the Garden of Eden, to watch over it. Adam is allowed to eat of all the fruit within it, except that of the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." God then brings all the animals to Adam, to serve as company for him. Adam gives names to all the animals, but finds no comfort in his loneliness. God then puts him into a deep sleep, takes a rib from his side, and from it forms a woman (called later "Eve"), to be a companion.

Eve is convinced by a talking serpent to eat of the forbidden fruit. Eve wisely questions the serpent and hesitates to take a bite. But after she finds it pleasant, Eve offers the fruit to Adam to eat it as well (the "original sin"). Adam asks no questions. He immediately takes a bite. As punishment the ground is cursed, the death sentence is imposed (although it takes some time to be fulfilled), and Adam and Eve are driven out of the garden. The entrance to the garden is then guarded by cherubim with a flaming sword.

"The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born first must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas" - Herman Hesse, Demian

"Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time. Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible." - Carl Jung: The Seven Sermons to the Dead

"Abrasax represented the 365 Aeons or emanations from the First Cause, and as a Pantheus, i.e. All-God, he appears on the amulets with the head of a cock (Phoebus) or of a lion (Ra or Mithras), the body of a man, and his legs are serpents which terminate in scorpions, types of the Agathodaimon. In his right hand he grasps a club, or a flail, and in his left is a round or oval shield" - E. A. Wallis Budge