abraxas23.net

Hollywood's War on God

2009-02-07T02:31:00.003Z

source: Google Video Hollywood's War on God

The Howard Beale Show (1976)

2009-01-24T13:14:00.002Z

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Life Story and Teachings

2009-01-18T15:25:00.008Z

source: YouTube user seastarwatcher

Playlist: J. KRISHNAMURTI : Life Story & Teachings

Krishnamurti Speaks with Dr. Anderson (1974)

2009-01-13T09:25:00.004Z

Playlist: Krishnamurti with Dr. Anderson

source: YouTube user Lerab

Jefferson's Koans

2009-01-11T05:31:00.004Z

source: YouTube user jerfow

Kevala Jnana

2009-01-10T12:18:00.003Z

Kevala Jñāna

There are two aspects to Kevala Jñāna : complete realisation of self and omniscience, complete knowledge of non-self.

A person who attains Kevala Jñāna realises the true nature of his soul. He remains engrossed in his true self. He is free from all desires and detached from all worldly activities, as he has achieved the highest objective that can be achieved by the soul.

Secondly, Kevala Jñāna also means complete knowledge of all the activities and objects in the universe. Jain texts describe the omniscience of Mahavira in this way:

When the Venerable Ascetic Mahavira had become a Jina and Arhat, he was a Kevali, omniscient and comprehending all objects; he knew and saw all conditions of the world, of gods, men, and demons: whence they come, whither they go, whether they are born as men or animals or become gods or hell-beings (upapada), the ideas, the thoughts of their minds, the food, doings, desires, the open and secret deeds of all the living beings in the whole world; he the Arhat, for whom there is no secret, knew and saw all conditions of all living beings in the world, what they thought, spoke, or did at any moment.

Kevala Jñāna and Moksa

Kevala Jñāna and Moksa are intricately related. Moksa, or liberation, can only be attained by the enlightened beings who have attained Kevala Jñāna. After the death or nirvana of a Kevalin, he becomes a Siddha, a liberated soul in a state of infinite bliss, knowledge, perception and power. It is a permanent and irreversible state, free from sufferings, births and death. It is a state of permanent untrammeled bliss.

Supreme Non-attachment or Vītarāga

There is a direct relationship between Supreme Non-attachment and Omniscience. In the higher stages of meditation or dhyāna, one first attains the state of Vītarāga wherein one is completely freed of all feelings of attachment to all else other than one's soul. Once a permanent state of Vītarāga is achieved, omniscience follows. This is because omniscience is the basic nature of the soul and it is merely clogged by the presence of the 8 types of karmas in the soul. The attainment of Vītarāga ensures that the 4 types of destructive karmas known as ghatiya karmas are dissociated from the soul permanently. Hence, since the destructive karmas are not present in the soul any more, the soul attains omniscience, its natural attribute.

Types of Karmas

There are eight types of karmas, categorized into four Ghatiya and four Aghatiya karmas.

Ghatiya karmas

These directly affect the attributes of the soul. These are:

1. Knowledge-obscuring karma (Jnanavarniya karma) – These karmas obscure the knowledge attribute of the soul.

2. Perception-obscuring karma (Darshanavarniya karma) – These karmas diminish the powers of Perception of a soul.

3. Deluding karma (Mohaniya karma) – These karmas are an instrumental cause of destruction the soul's right belief and right conduct. Of all karmas, deluding karma is the most difficult to overcome. Once this is eradicated, liberation is ensured.

4. Obstructing karma (Antaraya karma) – The fruition of these karmas creates obstructions to giving donations, obtaining gains, and enjoying things.

When Ghatiya karmas are totally destroyed, the soul attains kevaljnana or omniscience. Liberation is guaranteed for such souls in the same lifetime as soon it burns off the Aghatiya karmas also.

Aghatiya karmas

These do not affect the soul directly; rather, they have an effect on the body that houses the soul. These are:

1. Lifespan-determining karma (Ayu karma) – These karmas determine the subsequent states of existence and lifespan therein after death. The soul gets locked either into subhuman (Tiryanch), infernal (Naraki), human (Manushya), or celestial (Dev) bodies for its next birth.

2. Body-determining karma (Nama karma) – These karmas determine the type of body occupied by the soul.

3. Status-determining karma (Gotra karma) – The fruition of these karmas gives one high status or low status in society.

4. Feeling-producing karma (Vedaniya karma) – These karmas become an instrumental cause of the interruption of the soul's uninterrupted happiness (Avyabadh sukha). As a result of this, the soul remains agitated.

source: Wikipedia

Egomaniacs and the Opposite

2009-01-07T13:43:00.006Z

Whenever you hear something about spirituality, they talk about your ego and how bad it is. It seems to be an obsession, this hostility towards their ego. How many of these ego-haters have seen heaven? Well, I haven't seen heaven either, but I'm working on it.

What is so detrimental with this ego? How do you know, you have an ego in the first place? When I talk about knowing something, about knowledge I refer to what I'm actually aware of. There may be something like knowledge stored as information-patterns in your subconscious mind, but in this we aren't interested here, because we want to work with knowledge here, and you cannot work with what you aren't aware of. Easy, isn't it?

Whatever you do, whether it's in your thoughts, whether it's in your dreams, or whether it's in so called material reality, we always have a fundamental underlying principle: There is something you interact with, the known, the object, the perceived, what you are aware of. If the only thing you are aware of is you, the self, then obviously interaction is not possible. You can only interact with something or someone, and if neither exists, then how do you want to interact?

The meaning itself of the principle of interaction states, that there have to be at least two in order to interact. Interaction means an act in between, and between implies, that there are at least two. In physics interaction refers to two objects or two fields.

Considering, that all is one, it is quite strange, that interaction is possible at all. All is one, but in illusion there are many, and where there are many, interaction is possible, but in illusion only. When we perceive illusion as real, it becomes real, for it is always as real, as you perceive it to be. This real versus illusion discussion is purely intellectual and leads to nowhere. The illusion is real, the real is illusion an that's that.

Now, let us go back to this ego. When we have an apple and two people, and both of them want to have the whole apple, then conflict is inevitable. Your will to have the apple is your desire. You desire the apple. And obviously since the other one has the same desire, friction between the two is inevitable. This battle for the apple can be considered an archetype for all battles that exist on this planet and elsewhere. If we understand this fundamental conflict, and if we are able to resolve it, then we should also be able to resolve or at least understand all conflicts in his world.

Now what is ego? Can you show me a piece of ego? We stated, that we do not consider subconscious information as knowledge, only conscious knowledge, and conscious is what you are aware of. If the word ego has any meaning for us, the it must be something we can be aware of.

Now we aren't interested in words here. If only the word 'ego' is real and nothing else, then the word describes something that isn't there, and thus we don't have to discuss it at all. But then if ego didn't exist in the first place, why should there be a word describing it? We thus assume there truly is something like ego. We aren't word-fetishists and we do not believe, that problems can be solved by messing around with words. We want to deal with the real thing, with what we are aware of.

When you use a word to describe a feeling of pain, then the pain itself is what matters and not the word 'pain'. Thus we aren't interested in words, we focus on the real thing, the state of consciousness. Words are merely being used in order to describe such a state of consciousness. This state of consciousness also exists if we don't name it. We look at what is there even when not using any words. Words can be used in order to induce a specific state of consciousness, but that's another story.

We have said, that there must be something like ego even beyond words and thus it must be a state of consciousness. But what state of consciousness? If you close your eyes and clear your awareness of any contents, obviously no state of consciousness remains, for it has been cleared. Nothingness isn't called a state of consciousness here. Now, there is nothing you're aware of and obviously the ego is no longer here, provided it is or was a state of consciousness. You may call pure awareness the ego, but to call the allseeing eye of God the ego would miss the point, for that's not the kind of ego we are dealing with here. Unless you are Shiva, you don't want to get rid of that kind of supreme ego.

So ego must be a state of consciousness. But what state of consciousness? Is it a picture, is it a sound, is it a feeling, is it a color? Even a blind man must have an ego. What we have learned so far is that ego must be something very unstable, because you can get rid of it by simply being aware of nothingness. Apparently no fight is needed in order to get rid of it, if we can get rid of it so easily.

Why should we get rid of the ego in the first place? Any important spiritual people talk about it, so there must be something about it. So let us play sheeple.

In nothingness there is no ego, granted, but we cannot keep up that state of nothingness in everyday life, so there must be a way to get rid of ego without having to resort to nothingness. Solving a problem by deleting everything with nothingness is our ultima ratio, our last resort. Let us assume, that there is a virus on your computer, you may now simply delete everything in order to get rid of this virus, you may also use a bullet from a pistol in order to get rid of your ego. Let us now be a bit more gentle, let us be gentlemen or ladies. To have a gentle world, we have to become gentle ourselves. Shiva will solve all problems by deleting everything, but before this happens, we will have to be a bit more specific.

If there is nothingness in your awareness, there is no ego. Ego happens to you, as soon there is interaction. No interaction, no ego. Your ego manifests itself by the mere fact that you perceive something, something you do not consider to belong to yourself. This definition of the perceived as not belonging to yourself, to your Self, this is ego. As soon as the perceived is integrated, is felt as belonging to your Self, ego dissolves. Easy isn't it?

Do we have to fight? No, just look at it. Pure awareness, pure observation is extremely powerful. Pure observation is the supreme form of doing. And that's that.

Ego simply means to have priorities, to do what feels good. Your desire is desire for what makes you feel good, and your desire is to get rid of what makes you feel bad. Obviously the feelings in your soul are more important, than those in another soul. Your soul is your priority. Paradoxically, if all humans had less ego, less duality between the perceiver and the perceived, there would be more heaven on earth and this would be better for all souls.

To do what is good for your soul can't be bad, for it is good for your soul. Are good feelings bad for your soul? What you feel, God also feels, and can it be bad to create good feelings for God? The question is this: How can we improve our states of consciousness, the feelings in our soul, without falling back into duality, into ego? Can we do what is good for our soul, without creating duality? Remember, duality means conflict, and conflict means suffering

I suggest, you look at your soul-mind as a laboratory: You transcend duality, and then you just watch if your life improves. That's the scientific approach: Let us make experiments, and see what results we get.

god bless

Energy and Illusion as Quantum Reality as the Future

2008-12-26T14:23:00.003Z

Part 1: The perceptual energy being attributed to the illusion of separate perception is not really separate. But since it appears as separate one behaves as if it was separate. This identification with one's separate perception, with one's individual perceptions creates conflicts, and conflicts create suffering.

This video describes us being separated from the source as a result of different veils, which create the illusion of separate existence. Opinions are mental constructs, reflecting illusionary separate consciousness. Everything is mental, is opinion and thus even what you believe to be you is an opinion only, an attribution of energy to the illusion of separate existence.

However, behind these concepts, there is the point of origin and this is the knower of illusion behind it, the knower knowing the known, the knower making all these illusions possible. The identity of this ultimate knower is being evaluated based on the concepts being known by this knower and this results in a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the true nature of this supreme knower.

Part 2: You have opinions, and opinions are merely reflections of your limited personality, of your limited point of view. You have opinions about the observed, about something or someone, about what you perceive in your mind, about what has a meaning for you. What you perceive and what has a meaning for you is a symbol, a concept, a meaningful picture.

Your illusionary personality manifests itself not merely as your opinion about what you observe, but also as the symbolic meaning itself being attributed to the observed. And thus, your personality manifests itself as the meaning being attributed to the thought-patterns you're aware of. One could say, that thought interacts with thought, an opinion interacts with an opinion. What you believe to be is a thought, what you observe is a thought too. The observer is a thought and the observed is a thought too. Thought interacts with thought, like two material objects interacting with each other.

There is no real conflict, only the illusion of conflict exists. Laws and rules are the collective ossifications of the sum of individual perceptions, the sum of individual illusions, that manifest as so called material reality. The Supreme Self is not the physical itself, however, it makes the physical possible. The source is not the physical, but the physical is on a higher level than the picture of the physical in our perception. The physical itself consists of symbols, and what we are aware of are symbols being attributed to symbols. Even the primary symbols are an illusion. What we are aware of, is an illusion of an illusion, so to speak.

No, we are not helpless, we are as powerful, as the illusions we have created. Letting go means the dissolution of the density of meaning being attributed to the perceived.

These videos are truly exceptional.

How to Stand Absolute

2008-12-16T03:31:00.010Z

Instruction manual on how to stand absolute

The girl you see in the videos is not the being actually speaking. She seems to be a channeling medium, an interdimensional portal. Anyway this is supreme wisdom - a rare event nowadays, in these unwise ages. I have seen and read a lot, and hardly have I come along so much wisdom in one place. Although I have to say, the desteni website seems quite strange, so much disinformation and so much wisdom all in the same place. I suggest you simply watch these videos and ignore the rest.

Disinformation is about mixing up truths with untruths and half-truths. You mix the poison with honey, so people are willing to swallow it. What is being said on the desteni website about Jesus is inconsistent with what has been said by Meher Baba. What they say about many other subjects contradicts much of what I've read.

Anyway, I suggest you simply don't believe anything and just be here and now. Instead of believing new things, I suggest, you just stop believing in what you have believed in so far: Simply assume, that everything you have known and learned so far is wrong. Start from zero so to say. To gradually unlearn everything you have learned till now, would take you ages. I suggest you simply drop all of that.

Believe in what you are aware of, the moment you are aware of it, as a mind consciousness construct. See whatever you see as a thought only. Jiddu Krishnamurty, the super intellectual put it beautifully: You cannot get beyond the mind by judging with your mind, what your mind makes you be conscious of. Just look at everything you are aware of as what it appears to be, make the subjective stand absolute, see all of your perceptions as mind constructs, that are true as long as you believe them to be true.

Nothing is what it appears to be in this world, and yet in your mind everything is exactly what it appears to be. Here and now it is what it is. You make it what it is, by seeing it the way you make it being seen by you. If you change the way it appears onto you, you change it, you create it, you destroy it. Don't rely on anybody. Make no gods, be your own god. You make it real and unreal.

These videos are true mind control. Following these will completely wipe out your personality. So be warned, they are dangerous, dangerous to what you believe to be. Transcendence comes at a price: Sacrifice everything and become everything.

And remember not to remember anything. Do not trust me at any cost for I am a thief and a liar. Be just Be.

The Age of Information Has Ended

2007-09-25T11:50:00.000Z

"All paths lead to unreality. Paths are creations within the scope of knowledge. Therefore, paths and movements cannot transport you in Reality, because their function is to enmesh you within the dimension of knowledge, while the Reality prevails prior to it."

SRI NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

The age of information has ended? You don't believe this, I guess. You know, I'm my own country, I have my own religion, I'm my own corporate controlled media, I'm my own teacher, I'm my own greatest admirer and worst critic, and the most interesting dialogues I have with my own mind. Most people boldly state, that they represent this and that, I'm a simple fellow, I simply represent myself. I create my own beliefs and they are all futile, as futile as yours.

The age of information has ended? Yes, it has ended for me. Where has the age of information ever existed, if not in your own mind? Are you not the master of your own mind? Do you let others define, whether the age of information has ended or not? I don't. So, the age of information has ended, because I say so, and that's that.

Objectivity is subjective you say? Yes, that's true. And subjectivity is objective. And that's true too. What is the NOUMENON? Pure subjectivity.

You know, Jiddu Krishnamurti closed down the 'Order of the Star of the East' and his followers were shocked. Now, I understand, why he did this. He was not a fool. He said exactly what Nisargadatta said too.

But hey, do not believe something, because a wise man says so. What authority does the one have, who defines something, if you reject the authority of the one who defines? You are the ultimate definer. Without you, were is the one who defines? Think about it, you lovable fool.

The Second Coming of Christ

2005-12-03T14:57:00.000Z

The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You
by Paramahansa Yogananda

Book Description

In this unprecedented masterwork of inspiration, Paramahansa Yogananda takes the reader on a profoundly enriching journey through the four Gospels. Verse by verse, he illumines the universal path to oneness with God taught by Jesus to his immediate disciples but obscured through centuries of misinterpretation: "how to become like Christ, how to resurrect the Eternal Christ within one’s self."

Never before available in its entirety, this landmark work by one of the most revered spiritual teachers of our time transcends divisive sectarianism to reveal a unifying harmony underlying all true religions. A groundbreaking synthesis of East and West, it imparts the life-transforming realization that each of us can experience for ourselves the promised Second Coming -- awakening of the all-fulfilling Divine Consciousness latent within our souls.

Yogananda said, "In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth. He came two thousand years ago and, after imparting a universal path to God’s kingdom, was crucified and resurrected; his reappearance to the masses now is not necessary for the fulfillment of his teachings. What is necessary is for the cosmic wisdom and divine perception of Jesus to speak again through each one’s own experience and understanding of the infinite Christ Consciousness that was incarnate in Jesus. That will be his true Second Coming."

About the Author

Hailed as the "father of Yoga in the West," Paramahansa Yogananda is regarded as one of the great spiritual figures of our time. Born in northern India, he came to the United States in 1920, where for more than 30 years he taught the ancient science of meditation and the art of balanced spiritual living. That same year he founded Self-Realization Fellowship, to disseminate his writings and teachings worldwide. Through his best-selling classic, Autobiography of a Yogi, and his numerous other books, he has introduced millions throughout the world to the spiritual principles of yoga meditation and the universal truths underlying all world religions.

THE FIFTH ANGEL

2005-11-24T19:26:00.000Z

The Great Western Empire: The Fifth Angel

The walls of the Great Western Empire are tumbling because the fifth Angel of the Apocalypse has sounded his trumpet. The scorpion is placing his sting; every human being is being reduced, except for those, who are chosen. The Valley of the Folly of the World has to be travelled by those who are not chosen.

The wisdom of the world depicts Divine Wisdom as being foolish. Let no one who has gathered the wisdom of the world, cause those who are on the road to Divine Wisdom, to change their direction. The force employed by those, who have earthly wisdom, is evil dressed in good; presently, mind control by any available means is their greatest passion.

War between the Spirit and the Soul of Man is the ultimate goal of these warriors of earthly passions. If that can be achieved, then such a human being enters into a manipulated state, subject to the whims of every authoritarian earthly being. Most of mankind will eventually be in this manipulative state of existence; it is now happening and will continue for awhile. This can be compared to the locust of the apocalypse.

Even though this state can only be maintained for a short time by those who deem themselves to be in authority, if it could be continued according to their will, it would mean the total annihilation of the human race, including the instigators themselves.

Since God gave human beings free will, therefore, all of man's laws, thoughts, and ideas, as well as materialized thought, are only of a temporary nature, because, once the little truth these things possess is exhausted, they will enter into oblivion. Whereas God's Laws, Thoughts and Ideas, are here for eternity, and are immutable.

If man would succeed with his ideas, the result would be only leaders, and no people. These types of oppressive, materialized thoughts and laws will have the effect, if pursued by the authorities long enough, of gaining control over most human beings. These human beings no longer have human faculties and are, therefore, incapable of supporting themselves, thereby becoming totally dependent upon the system and upon those who are still capable of functioning as human beings. Even the people in authority, being subject to their own thoughts and laws, become just as impaired as those it was intended for.

Ultimately, they will have to rely on those human beings who are still in possession of their human faculties. The authorities will control these normal human beings through despotism, but only for a relatively short time, since one normal human being will have the strength of ten thousand, according to the Holy Scriptures. Those who survive this severe demonic attack on the human Spirit, will be those who believe in the Holy Trinity — God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

The villainous behaviour of human beings in this, the last decade of the 20th century, will be considered by the people who are under the influence of these authorities, as progressive, ingenious and benevolent. Whereas, in reality, it is demonic, insane, and the worst time the people of Planet Earth have ever experienced; in other words, the darkest of the dark ages, and the most unenlightened period the human race has ever witnessed.

The colour green is composed of blue and yellow. Whenever blue and yellow are mixed, green will sooner or later emerge. Most human beings do not make the effort to understand this simple composition. That is why, when it comes to these matters, they accept what they are being told: sometimes it turns green, and sometimes it does not. They accept such explanations without question. All this is due to the inactivity of their minds, which they themselves promoted - commonly called laziness. The belief that this is the right thing to do was fostered by those who have an interest in oppressing mankind, but the fault lies with human beings who accept this premise - not with those who are promoting it.

Life can only be understood when God enlightens the human Spirit. Drawing conclusions from man's logic leads to constant error. God is the Creator, not man. Only God has this knowledge, this wisdom - therefore, this information should only come from Him. Whenever it does not come from God, it is not reliable, nor is it true. Life is God's Creation. Therefore, when you accept incorrect information as being Truth, you then become subject to and dependent upon that particular source of information. This, then, is nothing else but mental slavery. Whereas, God, who is Truth, will set you free. All this information can come through another human being, as long as his source is God. Life is a gift from God, and we should, therefore, respect it by supporting it, and not abusing it or interfering with God's Will.

It is, however, the nature of human beings to attempt to side-step God's Laws, which always results in error. Since time immemorial, mankind's intellectual concepts have taken precedence over God's Commandments, and much to their surprise, the result was failure. The intellectual concepts human beings have, or those which they have come by, came into being either through acceptance due to blind faith in the promoters, or they were motivated by greed, or they believed that their intellect or that of those from whom they received their information was superior to the intellect of others or of God's. Therefore, the thoughts and the materialized thoughts of those they considered to be superior are considered to be the law, without any regard or question as to whether their logic was based on the truth, or not.

These intellectual concepts are the cause of all environmental problems Planet Earth is now experiencing, and are also the cause of many of the new ailments. The slaughter of our Natural World not only affects the physical world, but also the Soul, and the Spiritual World, because, a man-made building cannot replace a tree or a plant; it only destroys the vegetation, and the life it would support.

A picture of a tree does not replace a real tree; a silk flower does not replace a real flower, etc. Man-made substances do not replace themselves, nor do they multiply for the benefit of mankind, nor are they harmless to the living creations on Planet Earth, including human beings.

The infinity human beings have with Nature is based on a feeling of peace and contentment, whereas, when it comes to man-made things, the relationship changes. The feelings that come into being here, are based more on greed, wantonness and envy. As these negative qualities for man-made things develop in a human being, it will eventually lead to envy, jealousy, and greed for what others have and do.

However, the end-result of this progression of passions will astound most human beings. When they have everything they ever wanted and worked for most of their lives, in one moment "the things" become valueless and meaningless, at which point, materialism becomes such a burden that they cannot handle mentally or physically. There is, however, a solution: we should endeavour to work for the Eternal, and not for the temporary.

The sooner we all return to the Father, the sooner we will reach our real goal, the Kingdom of Heaven, which can only be achieved if we devote most of our time to the Eternal. Ask the Heavenly Father for this Enlightenment, because there is not one human being who can accomplish this without God's Help.

Through a Window Small
by Gerhard Hanswille
Mass Market Paperback, 194 pages
ISBN 0969382057

They Used Napalm

2005-11-08T22:24:00.000Z

The US Army used chemical weapons, that is WMD's in Falludscha also against woman and children. These weapons contain white phosphorus (Napalm), but US officials said they don't call it Napalm, so it must be harmless, as you can see in the picture.

But the US-Army does this to protect you, because they love you so much. They wouldn't hesitate to kill five billion people in order to protect you. That's how much they love you.

Chrstianity is a peaceful religion you know. And it's so nice to see politicians respecting the ten commandments. Love thy neighbour. Thou shalt not kill. What good Chrisitians they are.

ABRAXAS is waiting for you in hell, my dear Christians, because he loves you so much.

AMEN

1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.

2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.

Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons (Protocol III). Geneva, 10 October 1980.

Justice Is BLIND

2005-10-24T02:49:00.000Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil

DO NOT BELIEVE

2005-10-15T06:12:00.000Z

BELIEVE - NOT

Do not believe because you read it in a book,
Do not believe because you saw it on television,
Do not believe because science says so,
Do not believe because a famous person says so,
Do not believe because a wise person says so,
Do not believe because a wise person believes it,
Do not believe because your best friend believes it,
Do not believe because everyone else believes it,
Do not believe because others have believed it for a thousand years,
Do not believe because you've heard it many times before,
Do not believe because you are told you must,
Do not believe because others expect you to,
Do not believe because it gets you accepted
Do not believe because it will make your parents happy,
Do not believe because it will get you noticed,
Do not believe because you want to believe,
Do not believe because you can't afford not to,
Do not believe because it helps you cope,
Do not believe because you'd go mad if you didn't,
Do not believe because you must believe something
Do not believe because there's nothing else to believe,
Do not believe because it feels good to believe,
Do not believe because it makes sense,
Do not believe because your eyes tell you it is so,
Do not believe because it is your own experience,
Do not believe because it feels true,
Do not believe because you know it is true,

Do NOT believe any of this

Believe only that you ARE

And do not even believe that

For THAT IS beyond belief

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

2005-10-14T04:19:00.000Z

There is at the bottom of the picture one three-dimensional sphere containing one three-dimensional cube.

At the top of the picture there is the same three-dimensional sphere inside a larger three-dimensional cube.

From the two-dimensional point of view there are now two two-dimensional circles on top of different sides of the two two-dimensional planes the three-dimensional cube is made of.

What was once connected in the past is still connected in the timeless now. There is no such thing as different energy-states. The term energy is a metaphor for higher dimensional levels of phenomenal expression in the timeless now.

THINK PINK !

ANGEL OF ANARCHY

2005-10-13T00:33:00.000Z

Are you a radical? Have you heard that question before? Or is it rather a suggestion by the corporate-controlled media? Simply because you don't believe in capitalism doesn't make you a radical. But that's exactly what they want you to believe.

If someone doesn't like Marxism, does this mean he is a right-wing radical? Of course not. Now if someone doesn't like capitalism, does this mean he is a left-wing radical? Of course not. But that's exactly what the media make you believe. They want you to alienate you from yourself and the rest of society. They want to alienate the average guy from you.

Radicals were people like Hitler and Stalin, and they killed millions. So, who wants to be a radical after all? Who is killing people nowadays in the name of freedom and democracy? Those are the real radicals. So, don't be a radical, simply refuse to support a system, that is unethical and unfair and is killing people in the name of this or that.

PSYOPS MOOD-FACTORY

2005-10-11T21:26:00.000Z

PSYOPS - kiaz6453PFSK
OPERATION START: OKTOBER 10 - 2005
OPERATION END: OKTOBER 17 - 2005

Operation: Negative Mood-Induction
Operation: Anti-Hippie-Resentments
Operation: Establishment-Stabilization
Location: Area Europe
Time-Date: From October 10 to October 17 - 2005
Keywords:

DEATH - THREAT - PANDEMIC - 68 (HIPPIES) BOWING OUT

Operation: Positive Mood-Induction
Operation: Mood-Stabilization
Operation: Katrina-Posttrauma-Conciliation
Location: Area North America
Time-Date: From October 10 to October 17 - 2005
Keywords:

LIVING - BETTER - LONGER - SOUND - SLEEP - FEEL - YOUNGER - SEX - HEALTHIER - WELLNESS

HAVE A NICE DAY

ROOSTER-ALARM

2005-10-11T14:52:00.000Z

Avian Flu

The cock crows on the dung heap and nobody cares two hoots about it.

The 7 Plagues:

16:1 Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, "Go, pour out the seven bowls of God's wrath on the earth."

The 7 Plagues are also called the 7 Bowls, the 7 Cups, the 7 Vials, the 7 Angels... and hey come from Heaven, from the Tabernacle of the Testimony itself, in answer to the prayers and blood of the martyrs, as we saw in Rev.15.

They are the last call for repentance, the seven last plagues--last, because with them God's wrath is completed (Rev.15:1)... they are the last opportunities for the Church, for you an for me... they are catastrophes in our lives calling for repentance, because God wants all persons in the world to go to eternal Heaven (1Tim.2:5).

The seven plagues can be compared to the warning given in Lev.26:21,24,28.: If you remain hostile toward me and refuse to listen to me, I will multiply your afflictions seven times over, as your sins deserve... people ignored the repentance call of the 7 Seals and the 7 Trumpets, so here come the 7 Bowls...

The 7 Bowls are directed at:
1- The people who had the mark of the beast and worshipped his image, both Christians and non-Christians (16:2).
2- Those who had shed the blood of the saints and prophets, the martyrs (16:6,7).
3- To the throne of the beast and his kingdom on earth (16:10);
4- To the air where Satan has his dwelling (16:17).

hey follow similar pattern as the 7 Trumpets, and some them remind us the plagues of Egypt: The first four affecting creation: earth, sea, water, cosmos... then two affecting the beast... the final one in which the cities of the nations collapsed.

A difference:
- The 7 Seals affect a quarter of the land.
- The 7 Trumpets affect a third of mankind... and much of mankind refuse to repent.
- The 7 Bowls or Cups with the 7 Plagues affect all mankind who once again refuse to repent.

Bowl 1 is poured out on the land and it effects the people who had the mark of the beast and worshipped his image.
Bowl 2 is poured out on the sea.
Bowl 3 is poured out on the rivers
Bowl 4 is poured out on the sun
Bowl 5 is poured out over the throne of the beast
Bowl 6 is poured out over the Euphrates, the kingdom of the beast on earth
Bowl 7 is poured out into the air, where Satan has his dwelling... the cities of the nations collapsed

Speak of the Future

2005-10-10T11:10:00.000Z

"Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe... Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst."

- Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (1924)

Speak of the Future (AAC 64 kbps)

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

2005-10-09T13:50:00.000Z

"President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.''

“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lords work.” - Adolf Hitler, in a speech delivered at Reichstag, Berlin, 1936

Religious Delusions in Patients Admitted to Hospital with Schizophrenia

Siddle R, Haddock G, Tarrier N, Faragher EB.
Department of Clinical Psychology, North Manchester General Hospital, Crumpsall, UK.

BACKGROUND: Religious delusions are clinically important because they may be associated with selfharm and poorer outcomes from treatment. They have not been extensively researched. This study sought to investigate the prevalence of religious delusions in a sample of patients admitted to hospital with schizophrenia, to describe these delusions and to compare the characteristics of the patients with religious delusions with schizophrenia patients with all other types of delusion.

METHOD: A cross-sectional investigation was carried out. The prevalence of religious delusions was assessed and comparisons were made between religiously deluded patients and a control group on demographic, symptom, functioning and religious variables. One hundred and ninety-three subjects were examined of whom 24% had religious delusions.

RESULTS: Patients with religious delusions had higher symptom scores (as measured by the PANSS), they were functioning less well (as measured by the GAF) and they were prescribed more medication than those patients with schizophrenia who had other types of delusion.

CONCLUSION: It is concluded that religious delusions are commonly found in schizophrenia and that by comparison with other patients who have schizophrenia, those patients with religious delusions appear to be more severely ill. This warrants further investigation.

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

"Moses was taught that men were living in such unruly ways, lacking self-discipline, and all men were to be told that to kill was against God, for do not forget, God is The Creator and The Judge. Men do not have the right to kill another human being, whether it be to take his life, his will, his dignity, his skill, his mind, his hope, his trust, his integrity. Men can be depleted of physical energy, emotional control and spiritual strength by another man's lack of self-discipline, emotional instability, greed, hate, lust, anger, lack of charity.

To kill is to rob man of the great privilege reserved for God alone. Only God has the right to judge when the physical must end."

Principle of Locality

2005-10-07T20:08:00.000Z

Principle of Locality

In physics, the principle of locality is that distant objects cannot have direct influence on one another: an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings. This was stated as follows by Albert Einstein in his article "Quantum Mechanics and Reality" ("Quanten-Mechanik und Wirklichkeit", Dialectica 2:320-324, 1948):

The following idea characterises the relative independence of objects far apart in space (A and B): external influence on A has no direct influence on B; this is known as the Principle of Local Action, which is used consistently only in field theory. If this axiom were to be completely abolished, the idea of the existence of quasienclosed systems, and thereby the postulation of laws which can be checked empirically in the accepted sense, would become impossible.

Local realism is the combination of the principle of locality with the assumption that all objects must objectively have their properties already before these properties are observed. Einstein liked to say that the Moon is "out there" even when no one is observing it.

Local realism is a significant feature of classical general relativity and classical Maxwell's theory, but quantum mechanics rejects this principle. Every theory that, like quantum mechanics, is compatible with violations of Bell's inequalities must abandon local realism. (Most physicists believe that experiments have demonstrated such violations, but some local realists dispute the claim, in view of the recognised loopholes in the tests.) Different interpretations of quantum mechanics reject different parts of local realism.

In most of the conventional interpretations, such as the version of the Copenhagen interpretation in which the wavefunction is not real, the many-worlds interpretation, and the interpretation based on Consistent Histories, it is realism that is rejected. The actual definite properties of a physical system "do not exist" prior to the measurement and the wavefunction is only interpreted as a mathematical tool used to calculate the probabilities of the outcome of the experiments, which is, in agreement with positivism in philosophy, the only topic that science should discuss.

In the version of the Copenhagen interpretation where the wavefunction is real, it is the principle of locality that is violated. The wavefunction is a real object that exists prior to the measurement, but the measurement causes the wavefunction collapse which is a non-local process.

The Bohm interpretation always wants to preserve realism, and it needs to violate the principle of locality to achieve the required correlations. In fact, it needs to violate not only locality, but also causality which seems to imply a real conflict with the special theory of relativity because real, superluminal signals would have to be propagated.

Because the differences between the different interpretations are mostly philosophical ones (except for the Bohm interpretation), the physicists usually use the language in which the important statements are independent of the interpretation we choose. In this framework, only the measurable action at a distance - a superluminal propagation of real, physical information - would be usually considered to be a violation of locality by the physicists. Such phenomena have never been seen, and they are not predicted by the current theories (with the possible exception of the Bohm theory). This is why relativistic quantum field theory is usually considered to be a local theory.

The above is only about one sense of locality. In another use of the term, if we have two observables, each localized within two distinct spacetime regions which happen to be at a spacelike separation from each other, both observables would commute and we have locality. This interpretation of the word "locality" is closely related to the relativistic version of causality in physics.

Nonlocality

Nonlocality in quantum mechanics, refers to the property of entangled quantum states in which both the entangled states "collapse" simultaneously upon measurement of one of their entangled components, regardless of the spatial separation of the two states. This "spooky action at a distance" is the content of Bell's theorem and the EPR paradox.

Actions obtained from nonlocal Lagrangians are called nonlocal actions. The actions appearing in the fundamental theories of physics, such as the Standard Model, are local actions - nonlocal actions play a part in theories which attempt to go beyond the Standard Model, and also appear in some effective field theories. Nonlocalization of a local action is also an essential aspect of some regularization procedures.

Action at a Distance

In physics, action at a distance is the interaction of two objects which are separated in space with no known mediator of the interaction. This term was used most often with early theories of gravity and electromagnetism to describe how an object could "know" the mass (in the case of gravity) or charge (in electromagnetism) of another distant object.

According to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, instantaneous action-at-a-distance was seen to violate the relativistic upper limit on speed of propagation of information. If one of the interacting objects were suddenly displaced from its position, the other object would feel its influence instantaneously, meaning information had been transmitted faster than the speed of light.

Electricity

Coulomb's law in electrostatics appears to be a theory with action-at-a-distance - Coulomb's law deals with charges which have always been static. Efforts to develop a theory of interaction between moving charges, electrodynamics, led to the necessity to introduce the concept of a field with physical properties. In the theory of electrodynamics as formulated in Maxwell's equations, interactions between moving charges are mediated by propagating deformations of an electromagnetic field. These deformations propagate with the speed of light and therefore do not violate special relativity. The deformations of the field can carry momentum independently, thus facilitating conservation of angular momentum.

Gravity

Newton's theory of gravity offered no prospect of identifying any mediator of gravitational interaction. His theory assumed that gravitation acts instantaneously, regardless of distance. Newton had shown mathematically that if the gravitational interaction is not instantaneous, angular momentum is not conserved, and Kepler's observations gave strong evidence that in planetary motion angular momentum is conserved. (The mathematical proof is only valid in the case of a Euclidean geometry)

A related question, raised by Ernst Mach, was how rotating bodies know how much to bulge at the equator. How do they know their rate of rotation? This, it seems, requires an action-at-a-distance from distant matter, informing the rotating object about the state of the universe. Einstein coined the term Mach's principle for this question.

Einstein: One of the conditions that a relativistic theory of gravitation must meet is to be mediated with a speed that does not exceed lightspeed. It could be seen from the previous success of electrodynamics that the relativistic theory of gravitation would have to use the concept of a field or something similar.

This problem has been resolved by Einstein's theory of general relativity in which gravitational interaction is mediated by deformation of space-time geometry. Matter warps the geometry of space-time and these effects are, as with electric and magnetic fields, propagated at the speed of light. Thus, in the presence of matter, space-time becomes non-Euclidean, resolving the apparent conflict between Newton's proof of the conservation of angular momentum and Einstein's theory of special relativity. Mach's question is resolved because local space-time geometry is informing a rotating body about the rest of the universe. In Newton's theory of motion, space acts on objects, but is not acted upon. In Einstein's theory of motion, matter acts upon space-time geometry, deforming it, and space-time geometry acts upon matter.

Quantum Mechanics

Current physical theories incorporate the upper limit on propagation of interaction as one of their basic building blocks, hence ruling out instantaneous action-at-a-distance. At the same time however, instantaneous action at a distance appears to be an essential feature of some very fundamental quantum mechanical effects like entanglement and quantum nonlocality. For these implications of quantum mechanics, Einstein coined the term "spooky action at a distance".

The question of whether this 'spooky action' at a distance constitutes a violation of the relativistic upper limit on the propagation of interaction is not straightforward. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, entanglement cannot be employed for relaying information from one place to another.

Quantum Teleportation

Quantum teleportation is a technique discussed in quantum information science to transfer a quantum state to an arbitrarily distant location using an entangled state and the transmission of some classical information.

Indistinguishability

Let's say that Alice has a rubidium atom (the element physicists in this field like to use for their experiments), which is in its ground state, and Bob also has such an atom, as well in its ground state. It is important to see that these two atoms are indistinguishable; that means that there really is no difference between them.

If Alice and Bob had, say, two glass balls, which exactly look alike, and they exchanged them, then something would change. If you had a powerful microscope, you could certainly find some difference between the two balls. For atoms of the same kind and in the same quantum state, however, there really is no difference at all. The physical situation with Alice having the first atom and Bob the second is exactly the same as vice versa.1 In a certain sense, it is even wrong to say that the two atoms have any individuality or identity. It would be more appropriate to say that the two locations in space both have the property that the fundamental quantum fields have those values which define the ground state of the rubidium atom.

Quantum Teleportation: The Result

Now, imagine Alice's atom being in some complicated (excited) quantum state. Assume that we do not know this quantum state — and of course, we cannot find out by inspection (measurement). But what we can do is to teleport the quantum state to Bob's rubidium atom. After this operation, Bob's atom is exactly in the state that Alice's atom was before.

Now note that Bob's atom afterwards is indistinguishable from Alice's atom before. In a way, the two are the same — because it does not make sense to claim that two atoms are different only because they are at different locations. If Alice had gone to Bob and given him the atom we would have exactly the same physical situation.

But Alice and Bob were not required to meet. They only needed to share entanglement. The method: As a prerequisite, Bob has produced two particles (or atoms, to stay with the concrete example) called I and II, which are maximally entangled, e.g. in the Bell state.

This means that the particles I and II are neither in the state |0> nor in |1> but rather in both simultaneously, and if you measure one of them you will find it to be |0> or |1> each with probability 1/2. But the other is then always in the same state, and this connects them by some "spooky action at a distance", as Einstein has put it.

Bob passed particle I to Alice (by moving it there through a quantum channel) and kept particle II. From now on, Alice can send a quantum state to Bob, whenever she wants (or Bob to Alice).

If Alice now has a particle which she wants to teleport to Bob, she does a so-called Bell measurement on the particle to be sent and on particle I. The Bell measurement (for details see the article on it) projects Alice's two particle into one of the four Bell states. The two measured particles are afterwards in a known entangled state, specified by the measurement result, and the particle to be sent has lost its former state. That state, however, is not gone: it was teleported to Bob's particle II due to the previously existing entanglement.

One problem remains: The state of Bob's particle might be "rotated". This depends on the outcome of Alice's measurement, and Alice has to tell Bob this outcome by using some classical (i.e. ordinary) communication channel and Bob will then apply a unitary operation (a so-called Pauli operator) onto his particle.2 Afterwards, he really has the desired state.

Star Trek beaming: That the term teleportation reminds of the beaming process in the Star Trek TV series might have been intentional. After all, the physicists coining the term might have thought, it is as if the particle would be brought there. But this analogue is prone to miss the point: Only the information about the quantum state is brought there, the particle to take up the state must already be present.

Entanglement swapping: If a state being teleported is itself entangled with another state, the entanglement is teleported with it. To illustrate: If Alice has a particle which is entangled with a particle owned by Carol, and she teleports it to Bob, then afterwards, Bob's particle is entangled with Carol's.

A more symmetric way to describe the situation is the following: Alice has one particle, Bob two, and Carol one. Alice's particle and Bob's first particle are entangled, and so are Bob's second and Carol's particle:

Alice-:-:-:-:-Bob1 Bob2-:-:-:-:-Carol

Now, Bob performs a Bell measurement on his two particles, which projects them into a Bell state, i.e. they are now entangled. But, more spectacularly, Alice's and Carol's particles are now entangled as well, although the two never met:

Alice......Bob1-:-Bob2......Carol
|............................................|
\-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-/

This effect allows, at least in theory, to build a quantum repeater. Breaking news: [[1]] demonstrates one node of a quantum repeater.

It IS ALL in Your Head

2005-10-07T19:33:00.000Z

Icon of Coil

Icon of Coil is a Norwegian electronic body music group. The band was formed in 1997 by Andy LaPlegua; it was later joined by Sebastian Komor and (in 2000) by Christian Lund.

Discography

* Access and Amplify (MCD) (2002)
* Shallow Nation(MCD) (2002)
* The Soul Is In The Software (2002)
* Seren RP (2003)
* Serenity Is the Devil (2003)
* Machines Are Us (2004)
* Machines Are Us (2CD) Limited edition (2004)
* Uploaded & Remixed / Shelter (2CD) Limited edition (2004)

Side projects include: Panzer AG (frontman of Icon of Coil)

AIYH (AAC 64 kbps)

Warning: If you download or listen to this file, you have to buy it afterwards, or else you will be locked up for the rest of your life by your government. Remember: You live in a free country. Now please repeat: "I really do live in a free country." Please repeat this one hundred times or until you believe it. If you believe it, it must be true.

GOD IS DEAD

2005-10-03T01:09:00.000Z

GOD IS DEAD
- Nietzsche

Nietzsche IS DEAD
- GOD

Friedrich Nietzsche

String Theory

2005-10-01T06:20:00.000Z

String theory is a model of fundamental physics whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects (strings) rather than the zero-dimensional points (particles) that are the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics. For this reason, string theories are able to avoid problems associated with the presence of pointlike particles in a physical theory. Study of string theories has revealed that they require not just strings but other objects, variously including points, membranes, and higher-dimensional objects.

Interest in string theory is driven largely by the hope that it will prove to be a theory of everything. It is a possible solution of the quantum gravity problem, and in addition to gravity it can naturally describe interactions similar to electromagnetism and the other forces of nature. Superstring theories include fermions, the building blocks of matter. It is not yet known whether string theory is able to describe a universe with the precise collection of forces and matter that we observe, nor how much freedom to choose those details the theory will allow. No string theory has yet made falsifiable predictions that would allow it to be experimentally tested.

Work on string theory has led to advances in mathematics, mainly in algebraic geometry. String theory has also led to insight into supersymmetric gauge theories, which will be tested at the new Large Hadron Collider experiment.

History

String theory was originally invented to explain peculiarities of hadron behavior. In particle-accelerator experiments, physicists observed that the angular momentum of a hadron is exactly proportional to the square of its energy. No simple model of the hadron, such as picturing it as a set of smaller particles held together by spring-like forces, was able to explain these relationships. In order to account for these "Regge trajectories," physicists turned to a model where each hadron was in fact a rotating string, moving in accordance with Einstein's special theory of relativity. This led to the development of bosonic string theory, which is still the version first taught to many students. (The original need for a viable theory of hadrons has been fulfilled by quantum chromodynamics, the theory of quarks and their interactions. It is now hoped that string theory or some descendant of it will provide a fundamental understanding of the quarks themselves.)

Bosonic string theory is formulated in terms of the Nambu-Goto action, a mathematical quantity which can be used to predict how strings move through space and time. By applying the ideas of quantum mechanics to the Nambu-Goto action—a procedure known as quantization—one can deduce that each string can vibrate in many different ways, and that each vibrational state appears to be a different particle. The mass the particle has, and the fashion with which it can interact, are determined by the way the string vibrates—in essence, by the "note" which the string sounds. The scale of notes, each corresponding to a different kind of particle, is termed the "spectrum" of the theory.

These early models included both open strings, which have two distinct endpoints, and closed strings, where the endpoints are joined to make a complete loop. The two types of string behave in slightly different ways, yielding two spectra. Not all modern string theories use both types; some incorporate only the closed variety.

However, the bosonic theory has problems. Most importantly, as the name implies, the spectrum of particles contains only bosons, particles like the photon which obey particular rules of behavior. While bosons are a critical ingredient of the Universe, they are not its only constituents. Investigating how a string theory may include fermions in its spectrum led to supersymmetry, a mathematical relation between bosons and fermions which is now an independent area of study. String theories which include fermionic vibrations are now known as superstring theories; several different kinds have been described.

In the 1990s, Edward Witten and others found strong evidence that the different superstring theories were different limits of an unknown 11-dimensional theory called M-theory. These discoveries sparked the second superstring revolution. (Several meanings of the "M" have been proposed; physicists joke that the true meaning will only be chosen when the theory is finally understood.)

Many recent developments in the field relate to D-branes, objects which physicists discovered must also be included in any theory which includes open strings of the super string theory.

Basic properties

The term 'string theory' properly refers to both the 26-dimensional bosonic string theories and to the 10-dimensional superstring theories discovered by adding supersymmetry. Nowadays, 'string theory' usually refers to the supersymmetric variant while the earlier is given its full name, 'bosonic string theory'.

While understanding the details of string and superstring theories requires considerable mathematical sophistication, some qualitative properties of quantum strings can be understood in a fairly intuitive fashion. For example, quantum strings have tension, much like regular strings made of twine; this tension is considered a fundamental parameter of the theory. The tension of a quantum string is closely related to its size. Consider a closed loop of string, left to move through space without external forces. Its tension will tend to contract it into a smaller and smaller loop. Classical intuition suggests that it might shrink to a single point, but this would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The characteristic size of the string loop will be a balance between the tension force, acting to make it small, and the uncertainty effect, which keeps it "stretched". Consequently, the minimum size of a string must be related to the string tension.
Science
Unsolved problems in physics: Is string theory, superstring theory, or M-theory, or some other variant on this theme, a step on the road to a "theory of everything," or just a blind alley?

Extra dimensions

One intriguing feature of string theory is that it predicts the number of dimensions which the universe should possess. Nothing in Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism or Einstein's theory of relativity makes this kind of prediction; these theories require physicists to insert the number of dimensions "by hand". The first person to add a fifth dimension to Einstein's four was the German mathematician Theodor Kaluza in 1919. The reason for the unobservability of the fifth dimension (its compactness) was suggested by the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein in 1926.

Instead, string theory allows one to compute the number of spacetime dimensions from first principles. Technically, this happens because Lorentz invariance can only be satisfied in a certain number of dimensions. This is roughly like saying that if we measure the distance between two points, then rotate our observer by some angle and measure again, the observed distance only stays the same if the universe has a particular number of dimensions.

The only problem is that when the calculation is done, the universe's dimensionality is not four as one may expect (three axes of space and one of time), but twenty-six. More precisely, bosonic string theories are 26-dimensional, while superstring and M-theories turn out to involve 10 or 11 dimensions.

However, these models appear to contradict observed phenomena. Physicists usually solve this problem in one of two different ways. The first is to compactify the extra dimensions; i.e., the 6 or 7 extra dimensions are so small as to be undetectable in our phenomenal experience. We achieve the 6-dimensional model's resolution with Calabi-Yau spaces. In 7 dimensions, they are termed G2 manifolds. Essentially these extra dimensions are "compactified" by causing them to loop back upon themselves.

A standard analogy for this is to consider multidimensional space as a garden hose. If we view the hose from a sufficient distance, it appears to have only one dimension, its length. This is akin to the 4 macroscopic dimensions we are accustomed to dealing with every day. If, however, one approaches the hose, one discovers that it contains a second dimension, its circumference. This "extra dimension" is only visible within a relatively close range to the hose, just as the extra dimensions of the Calabi-Yau space are only visible at extremely small distances, and thus are not easily detected.

(Of course, everyday garden hoses exist in three spatial dimensions, but for the purpose of the analogy, we neglect its thickness and consider only motion on the surface of the hose. A point on the hose's surface can be specified by two numbers, a distance along the hose and a distance along the circumference, just as points on the Earth's surface can be uniquely specified by latitude and longitude. In either case, we say that the object has two spatial dimensions. Like the Earth, garden hoses have an interior, a region that requires an extra dimension; however, unlike the Earth, a Calabi-Yau space has no interior.)

Another possibility is that we are stuck in a 3+1 dimensional subspace of the full universe, where the "3+1" reminds us that time is a different kind of dimension than space. Because it involves mathematical objects called D-branes, this is known as a braneworld theory.

In either case, gravity acting in the hidden dimensions produces other non-gravitational forces such as electromagnetism. In principle, therefore, it is possible to deduce the nature of those extra dimensions by requiring consistency with the standard model, but this is not yet a practical possibility.

Problems

String theory remains unverified. No version of string theory has yet made a prediction which differs from those made by other theories—at least, not in a way that could be checked by a currently feasible experiment. In this sense, string theory is still in a "larval stage": it possesses many features of mathematical interest, and it may yet become supremely important in our understanding of the Universe, but it requires further developments before it is accepted or falsified. Since string theory may not be tested in the foreseeable future, some scientists have asked if it even deserves to be called a scientific theory: it is not yet a falsifiable theory in the sense of Popper.

It is by no means the only theory currently being developed which suffers from this difficulty; any new development can pass through a stage of uncertainty before it becomes conclusively accepted or rejected. As Richard Feynman noted in The Character of Physical Law, the key test of a scientific theory is whether its consequences agree with the measurements we take in experiments. It does not matter who invented the theory, "what his name is", or even how aesthetically appealing the theory may be—"if it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong." (Of course, there are subsidiary issues: something may have gone wrong with the experiment, or perhaps the person computing the consequences of the theory made a mistake. All these possibilities must be checked, which may take a considerable time.) These developments may be in the theory itself, such as new methods of performing calculations and deriving predictions, or they may be advances in experimental science, which make formerly ungraspable quantities measurable.

Human beings do not have the technology to observe strings (which are said to be roughly of Planck length, about 10-35 meters across). Eventually, we may be able to observe strings in a meaningful way, or at least to gain substantial insight by observing cosmological phenomena which may elucidate string physics.

In the early 2000s, string theorists revived interest in an older concept, the cosmic string. Originally discussed in the 1980s, cosmic strings are a different type of object than the entities of superstring theories. For several years, cosmic strings were a popular model for explaining various cosmological phenomena, such as the way galaxies formed in the early Universe. However, further experiments — and in particular the detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background — failed to support the cosmic-string model's predictions, and the cosmic string fell out of vogue. If such objects did exist, they must be few and far between. Several years later, it was pointed out that the expanding Universe could have stretched a "fundamental" string (the sort which superstring theory considers) until it was of intergalactic size. Such a stretched string would exhibit many of the properties of the old "cosmic" string variety, making the older calculations useful again. Furthermore, modern superstring theories offer other objects which could feasibly resemble cosmic strings, such as highly elongated one-dimensional D-branes (known as "D-strings"). As theorist Tom Kibble remarks, "string theory cosmologists have discovered cosmic strings lurking everywhere in the undergrowth". Older proposals for detecting cosmic strings could now be used to investigate superstring theory. For example, astronomers have also detected a few cases of what might be string-induced gravitational lensing.

Superstrings, D-strings or other stringy objects stretched to intergalactic scales would radiate gravitational waves, which could presumably be detected using experiments like LIGO. They might also cause slight irregularities in the cosmic microwave background, too subtle to have been detected yet but possibly within the realm of future observability.

While intriguing, these cosmological proposals fall short in one respect: testing a theory requires that the test be capable, at least in principle, of falsifying the theory. For example, if observing the Sun during a solar eclipse had not shown that the Sun's gravity deflected light, Einstein's general relativity theory would have been proven wrong. (Barring, of course, the chance of experimental error.) Not finding cosmic strings would not demonstrate that string theory is fundamentally wrong — merely that the particular idea of highly stretched strings acting "cosmic" is in error. While many measurements could in principle be made that would suggest that string theory is on the right track, scientists have not at present devised a stringent "test".

On a more mathematical level, another problem is that, like quantum field theory, much of string theory is still only formulated perturbatively (i.e., as a series of approximations rather than as an exact solution). Although nonperturbative techniques have progressed considerably — including conjectured complete definitions in space-times satisfying certain asymptotics — a full nonperturbative definition of the theory is still lacking.

Adoration of the Christ Child

2005-10-01T06:03:00.000Z

Adoration of the Christ Child
1548
Oil on canvas
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Pellegrino Tibaldi (also Pellegrino da Bologna) was influenced by Perin del Vaga during a stay in Rome in 1547 (as seen in the decoration of the Castel Sant' Angelo). Later he orientated towards Michelangelo.

In his Adoration of the Christ Child, 1548, Pellegrino Tibaldi surrounds the infant Jesus by a whirling crowd of worshipping figures reminiscent of the angels and the damned in the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.

2005-09-21T18:26:00.000Z

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.

2005-09-21T10:06:00.000Z

"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

2005-09-21T07:57:00.000Z

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

2005-09-20T15:37:00.000Z

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

2005-09-19T12:31:00.000Z

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

2005-09-19T11:42:00.000Z

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

2005-09-19T08:29:00.000Z

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.

2005-09-18T02:36:00.000Z

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.

2005-09-15T02:15:00.000Z

"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

2005-09-10T01:18:00.000Z

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.

2005-09-10T00:29:00.000Z

"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