Klaus Schulze - My Ty She [Contemporapry Works I - Ballet III]

Manifesting the Mind (documentary)

P. D. Ouspensky - In Search of the Miraculous [English audio, Italian subs]

Klaus Schulze - Die Kunst Hundert Jahre Alt Zu Werden [1971]

Two documentaries about the Dogon people

The Science of Gayatri Mantra / Meaning and Benefits of Gayatri Mantra

Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ

tát savitúr váreṇ(i)yaṃ

bhárgo devásya dhīmahi

dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt

"May we attain that excellent glory of Savitar the god:
So may he stimulate our prayers."

—The Hymns of the Rigveda (1896), Ralph T. H. Griffith

THE SECRET OF NIKOLA TESLA [MOVIE]

Meetings With Remarkable Men [1979] - A Movie by Peter Brook

John C. Lilly: In The Province Of The Mind

IN THE PROVINCE OF THE MIND with JOHN C. LILLY, M.D.  

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Today we are going to explore the province of the mind. With me is Dr. John C. Lilly, a noted pioneer of mystical states, of states of consciousness, and also interspecies communication. Dr. Lilly is a former researcher with the National Institutes of Health and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. He is the author of some five books on human-dolphin communication, including Lilly on Dolphins, Man and Dolphin, The Mind of the Dolphin, Communication between Man and Dolphin. He has written many books on deep inner exploration, including The Deep Self, The Center of the Cyclone, The Dyadic Cyclone, and The Scientist,and he is particularly known for Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer. In fact he introduced that term, the biocomputer, into our language. Welcome, John.

JOHN C. LILLY, M.D.: Thank you.

MISHLOVE: It's a real pleasure to be with you. I think it would be good to start with your famous maxim about what is true in the province of the mind. Could you begin by repeating that?

LILLY: In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits. However, in the province of the body there are definite limits not to be transcended.

MISHLOVE: You've probably devoted your whole life, and certainly many decades recently, to pushing to see what really were the limits -- by going into new realities, taking on the belief systems of those realities, and then coming back to your basic working reality and challenging those beliefs, integrating those beliefs with your own. In your writings you've explored almost every state of consciousness I could imagine -- the various mystical levels of satori, communication with extraterrestrials, communication with other species. You've established probably a more significant mapping of inner space than almost any other modern person, and I think we all owe a great debt to you for that.

LILLY: But don't get stuck with those. I've abandoned all of them. It's impossible, because there are infinities within the mind.

MISHLOVE: I think that's the beauty of your work, is that you keep moving further and further out. In The Center of the Cyclone you described a state -- you had a whole system, virtually a quantitative system, for mapping states of consciousness, and you talked about one that I found most fascinating, which you call +3, Mega Samadhi. In that state you describe going so far out of your body, even out of the physical universe, to the point of being at the level of essence, in which the physical universe is created.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: That almost seemed to me, in reading that book, like an ultimate state of consciousness, but I know you wrote about it some fifteen years ago. How does it look to you now?

LILLY: Well, there's one state beyond +3. That's +1, but you're not allowed to remember that once you go into it. It's union with God. That's the true yoga, and so you're nonhuman, so there's no way you can recount what happened. You have no way of saying it, because it's beyond language. Well, all those states are beyond language. Language is a very poor instrument to express it.

MISHLOVE: In some of your other writings you've described language as being a thin film that separates us from reality. Much as we try to use language to describe what we mean, it really puts barriers up.

LILLY: Well, there's one use of language that's valid. That's the injunctive use -- telling you how to do things. The descriptive one's very poor, and William James said that the other realities are separated from this one by the filmiest of screens. I found that this screen is language, so you have to abandon it when you're going to these other realities.

MISHLOVE: In addition to +1 and +3, you've mapped out +6. That's a state of consciousness, as I recall, in which the mind can travel to any point in physical or nonphysical space.

LILLY: Right. But you maintain your individuality.

MISHLOVE: That must be a basic mode of the psychic explorer. I gather from reading much of your work that you spent a great deal of time in +6.

LILLY: Right, and in +12. Plus 12 is the blissful idiot. You're in your body; you're right here and now, but everything is happy. There's gold dust particles in the air, and everything is good.

MISHLOVE: You can feel energy moving in and out of the different psychic centers of the body.

LILLY: And if a bird calls, you hear it echoing through the galaxy. But that's not much use, unless you can find another bliss being in the same space.

MISHLOVE: Many of the mystical teachings warn against getting stuck in some of these realities.

LILLY: Right. I haven't been in any of them since that time.

MISHLOVE: You also refer, in your mapping of states, to +48, which is sort of a perfectly neutral state.

LILLY: Right. Plus 24 is the professional state of any discipline that you're involved in, where you're lost in the discipline. Forty-eight is where you're communicating with everybody else. Then there are the minus states, but I don't go into those.

MISHLOVE: No, but at one point you wrote about the importance of going into the minus states and remaining perfectly aware, being conscious in those negative states, not trying to block out the negativity. You described that, as I recall, as burning karma.

LILLY: Yes. In The Center of the Cyclone there's a chapter called "A Guided Tour of Hell," which is -6. That was awful. So I never had to go back to that. And I was never frightened again. I was totally terrified in that one.

MISHLOVE: I suppose it's what the Christian mystics sometimes refer to as the dark night of the soul.

LILLY: Well, it was the dark night of my soul.

MISHLOVE: Perhaps this is a necessary part of everybody's journey, is to go through the epitome of terror.

LILLY: Right. For instance, there's an Iranian psychiatrist, an American psychiatrist, that put a hundred patients in a mental hospital in Iran through what they feared most, on Ketamine, and they all left the hospital. Now, I tried the same thing, after I read that. That evening I took 150 milligrams of Ketamine, and suddenly the Earth Coincidence Control Office removed my penis and handed it to me. I screamed in terror. My wife Toni came running in from the bedroom, and she said, "It's still attached." So I shouted at the ceiling, "Who's in charge up there? A bunch of crazy kids?" The answer came back, "Well, you had an unconscious fear, so we put you through it, just the way the Iranian psychiatrist did."

MISHLOVE: In the realm of the mind, the province of the mind, we can face all our fears.

LILLY: Well, you may not be able to live with it, but you should try it.

MISHLOVE: I often find in dreams that the things that would destroy the body, in the realm of the mind, don't.

LILLY: That's right. The survival programs, as I found out earlier from doing neurophysiology, are built into the brain. The rewarding systems, euphoric systems, and the sexual systems, and the painful, punishing, anger systems are all built in. And then you realize that the cerebral cortex has many, many paths to these systems and from these systems, so you don't have to go through these states.

MISHLOVE: Let's focus a little bit on some of the terms you mentioned a moment ago. You mentioned Ketamine. What is Ketamine?

LILLY: Ketamine is the most commonly used anesthetic for very young children and old people. In the literature there are emergence symptoms that are described, emergence being coming out of the anesthetic. Some doctors don't like those emergence symptoms, so they won't use it. Others know what they are, so they just hold the hand of the patient and help him come out. It was the most commonly used anesthetic in Vietnam. Some places won't use it at all, but are frightened of it.

MISHLOVE: Basically, what a strong dose of Ketamine will do is make you unaware of your body.

LILLY: Yes, it can. I don't like it anymore.

MISHLOVE: But it creates a state where one can enter into inner realities free from the attachments of the body.

LILLY: ECCO told me to stop using it, and get back here and learn how to be human.

MISHLOVE: In your book The Scientist you describe going through a period of very intensive explorations with Vitamin K, as you described it at that point -- to the extent that people thought you were -- and it's not clear to me whether you were or not -- addicted to the substance.

LILLY: Well, when one is doing research on a substance, one takes it so frequently that outside observers can say you're addicted, but that's a very bad definition of addiction.

MISHLOVE: I think in many ways whether you were or weren't, one has to admire your willingness to always push the frontiers of our knowledge further, and it's clear that that was your motivation for the work that you did.

LILLY: Any good research is obsessive and compulsive.

MISHLOVE: You also mentioned the term ECCO. What is ECCO?

LILLY: E-C-C-O. In Italian it means, "This is it." But it means to me the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which is one of God's field offices. ECCO runs our lives, though we won't admit it. If you're an ECCO agent, you can be very, very careful to use your best intelligence in ECCO's service, and you realize there are no discoveries, there are only revelations. That was a come-down for me as a scientist.

MISHLOVE: Well, I've found in my own work in the media and parapsychology, that I'm very much guided by coincidences.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: And I guess it's looking to coincidences as signs along the way that defines this relationship with what you've defined as ECCO.

LILLY: Right, the Earth Coincidence Control. It's coincidence control that they do, and they say, "We control the long-term coincidences; you control the short-term ones. And when you find out how we do the long-term ones, you no longer have to remain on earth; you don't have to return there."

MISHLOVE: It seems to me as if your concept of ECCO is a way of modeling a mechanism behind what Jung has defined as synchronocity.

LILLY: That's right. Jung defined synchronicity only in a good fashion in his introduction to the I Ching, and he uses the term coincidences.

MISHLOVE: Meaningful coincidences.

LILLY: But of course the coincidences are in your own construction, your own language construction of the events. So that's all a fake too. As I say at the beginning of my workshops, "Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation."

MISHLOVE: And here we are misrepresenting to each other in order that we can learn from these lies.

LILLY: Right. Now if you use language injunctively, as a set of directions, then it's not as bad as it is otherwise.

MISHLOVE: So in other words, for example, when you talk about ECCO, when you talk about perhaps going into an inner reality using sensory isolation, which is one of the other technologies in which you pioneered --

LILLY: In 1954, I invented it.

MISHLOVE: Or using a number of different molecules which can be used for this purpose, or mystical disciplines -- when one enters into these realities, each set of instructions carries with it usually a belief system.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: And basically what you're saying is that all of these belief systems are wrong, but one needs to entertain or to hold the belief system in order to follow through the instructions.

LILLY: That's right. Our brains are so small we have to do this.

MISHLOVE: So the belief system itself becomes a tool that we work with, and then eventually we have to let go of.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: And using these belief systems, you've been able to in effect map out the inner terrain of inner space in a manner which has as rich and varied flora and fauna and geography as one would find on any continent, perhaps richer.

LILLY: But if you take the same kinds of trips, you'll find a different flora and fauna at different times.

MISHLOVE: Each time.

LILLY: So in the province of the mind there aren't any limits.

MISHLOVE: And yet if one pushes that very, very far, I guess no limits almost means nothing. There's nothing there. Limits is what defines things, it's what creates form.

LILLY: I hadn't thought of it that way. Well, there are no limits that you put on it previously, and new limits may appear, which define it in an entirely new way, which is much larger. That's all that means.

MISHLOVE: I almost have the sense, though, that if there are no limits in the province of the mind, that we humans and other beings create limits of our own to make it interesting, to make the game worth playing.

LILLY: Well, you can't live as a human without limits, and that's your body. They're built into your brain. The pattern recognition system is in your brain, for instance. If one hallucinates, say, on cocaine, one sees a bush over there as an old lady crying with a shawl over her head. You walk over and it's a bush. Now if somebody else is on cocaine and they look at that same bush, they'll see the old lady crying. So this apparently is pattern recognition systems that are built into our brains, and are given at birth probably.

MISHLOVE: In other words, in certain altered states of consciousness, there is an ability, I suppose, to be telepathic, to cognize the thoughts directly of another person.

LILLY: I think it's more than that. It's a particularly noisy pattern of the bush, in striking your brain, is reorganized, personified by the brain. All brains do the same thing, even if you're not in telepathic communication. So you have an alternate there. Do you know about alternity?

MISHLOVE: Alternity, that's a wonderful word. No.

LILLY: I experienced alternity very dramatically when I came back from Chile. I sat in Elizabeth Campbell's living room in Los Angeles, in what I call the prophet meditation

-- sitting on the floor, my spine ramrod straight. Suddenly a line of light comes down through my spine, and there are leaves of different realities all around me. I can look into the future, and the present is here in each of those as it goes on out to many years from now, and goes to infinity upwards. There's a tremendous amount of power going through this. Well, the next morning I was thrown out of bed by the Sylmar earthquake, and I thought, "Gee, did I cause that? Or was it caused by the same energy that went through me?" And then I realized that this was hubris -- he whom the gods would destroy, he has hubris.

MISHLOVE: Filled with pride.

LILLY: And so I lost my pride, and I realized that I couldn't explain either of them.

MISHLOVE: Alternity, as you've described it, then, would seem to be a space in which you're in touch with many alternate realities, all simultaneously.

LILLY: Yes, and then you get caught with one, as I did.

MISHLOVE: It seems very similar in a way to what physicists are describing when they talk about the multiple-universe interpretation of quantum physics.

LILLY: That's right. Francis Jeffreys is writing my biography, and he describes alternity from the wave function of quantum mechanics, and when you collapse it you've chosen one alternate in future.

MISHLOVE: You've referred several times now to the fact that in the province of the body there are limits, and you yourself have thrown yourself up against those limits on many occasions and have written about it. In your writing you seem to be warning people maybe not to do everything that you've done.

LILLY: That's right. They don't have to. See this hand? I have to keep it in ointment, because on 11-11-87 I drove my car up a slight bank, turned it over, and totaled it. The battery acid burned this hand, and these knuckles were broken, and that's all. If I'd had my seat belt on I would have been decapitated. But ECCO was showing me something, that I wasn't exploring alternates properly. I was caught with one.

MISHLOVE: There's a wonderful section in your book The Scientist, in which you describe a conversation amongst different beings in an altered state, who are describing how carefully they worked to create all the coincidences so that you could have an accident in which you nearly died, and were resuscitated by your wife Toni who had just learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation three days earlier.

LILLY: Right. Then the other accident, the one that closed off Vitamin K for me, where I was on a ten-speed bicycle going down Decker Canyon Road, and the chain caught, and I hit the road and nine bones were broken. But I didn't say in The Scientist that I was on PCP at the time, forty-two milligrams injected. So I was out in the hospital for five days and five nights, and was taken by ECCO to planets that were being destroyed by supernova waves, by atomic warfare, and so on. It was incredible. When I'd try to come back here, I'd come back and Toni would be there and I'd grab on for six or seven hours, then they'd take me back out. I hadn't finished the lessons.

MISHLOVE: What do you think the lesson is?

LILLY: Well, the lesson in that case was, "Look up the dose for PCP before you take any." It's two milligrams, not forty-two. And the other lessons, of course, were that I came back and wanted to put on radiation suits. This planet is not very stable. It can be destroyed at any time.

MISHLOVE: There's a sense in the way in which you live your life, right out on the very edge of what would be called not just normalcy, or the edge of what is conventionally safe to do, but the very edge of what is physically possible for a human being to do --

LILLY: Going to the limits of the body.

MISHLOVE: And in so doing -- well, of course you've discovered, like the Fool in the Tarot deck, you put yourself into this position of nascent wisdom, in which you're bound to make mistakes. One can't explore the way you have without making mistakes, and yet those very mistakes seem to propel you even deeper.

LILLY: I have a saying, "There are no mistakes, there are only correctable errors. There are no errors, there are only alternate programs." They just get the guilt.

MISHLOVE: There is a sense in which you have lived your life on the internal reality, that I almost feel like your being with me here in a TV studio is like you've come up for air a little bit to breathe together with us, and to share what it's like in these vast, vast realms, light years away from planetside reality.

LILLY: I call that in-sanity, and when we're talking together we're in out-sanity. And you should never try to express all of your in-sanity in the out-sanity, or they'll lock you up.

MISHLOVE: But in a way you've expressed more of your in-sanity than most people would ever dare to.

LILLY: Well, a lot of people take my books as permission to go further with that.

MISHLOVE: One would almost think an entire generation, perhaps several generations of people, now feel much freer to describe their own inner experiences because of people like you doing it at a time when it was much riskier.

LILLY: I'm always surprised at how many people have read my books and been influenced by them.

MISHLOVE: Well, I can certainly say that that's the case for me.

LILLY: I think you'll like the new edition of The Scientist. It has all the things I left out of the first one, seventy-five new pages in it, and fifty new photographs. And I admit that it was Ketamine, not Vitamin K.

MISHLOVE: But you're not using Ketamine currently.

LILLY: No. I don't like it anymore.

MISHLOVE: Are you still doing work in sensory isolation?

LILLY: Once in a while. But I never talk about what I'm doing currently. Remember Human Biocomputer? I was doing that work with LSD in the tank in St. Thomas, and the National Institute of Mental Health, from which I was on a fellowship, thought I was just working with dolphins. So when I sent them Human Biocomputer as the report for five years of the fellowship, they wrote back, "We didn't realize we were going to get a monograph from this work." I don't think they read it.

MISHLOVE: And they cut off your funding shortly thereafter, didn't they?

LILLY: Yes. Somebody told the people supporting the dolphin research that I had brain damage from LSD. Well, I got that rumor, so I took it to the head of the Mental Health Council that was supporting the work. He was the head of the Neurological Institute in New York, and he got angry when they said that, so he spent three days examining me. I never had such a thorough examination. He got angrier and angrier. He said, "Absolutely no evidence." He said, "Do you want any more research money?" I said, "No, I've quit that." So he said, "All right, I'm going to fire two people, one in the Institute and one on my committee." So he did.

MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose for our culture the really special thing about you is the fact that you really have a foot in both worlds, the scientific camp and the mystical camp. And in a way you seem dissatisfied with both of them. Neither camp seems to provide an adequate enough model of reality for you.

LILLY: That's right. My own beliefs are unbelievable.

MISHLOVE: And you seem to be saying that it's up to each person to in effect make the same bridge that you have, and to create their own belief system, so that in creating that belief they can move into the state that that belief leads them to, so that they can then discard it again.

LILLY: That's the gnostic point of view -- self transcendence, not transcendence through a church or a group.

MISHLOVE: Back fifteen years ago or so, you were exploring the mystical states, as described classically as the various levels of samadhi, in your work with Oscar Ichazo in Chile, in the Arica school.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: You had achieved, as we have described earlier, some of the very highest states of those mystical traditions, and you wrote about them from your own personal experience. People in the mystical traditions view these states as being ultimate states. I get the sense that you don't think of them that way. You think of them more the way a scientist would look at tools.

LILLY: Well, Patanjali, for instance, in 400 B.C. said, "When you reach the highest form of samadhi, you realize there are hundreds more beyond that." I agree; there's no limit.

MISHLOVE: Well, John Lilly, it's been a pleasure having you with me. Thank you very much.

LILLY: Thank you. It's a pleasure being here. You sure do know how to ask the right questions.

END 

Possible Worlds [2001] / Movie I Recommend

Possible Worlds (2001)

Reviewed by Jason Korsner  Updated 11 July 2001

The fourth film by the French Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage - his first in English - cements his reputation as a film maker with a unique vision.

"Possible Worlds" is a poetic study of the nature of human existence, wrapped up in a murder mystery.

George Barber (McCamus) is found dead with $1000 in his pocket but with his brain missing. Interspersed with the subsequent police investigation, we see moments of George's life as he struggles to make sense of the world - or worlds - he lived in. "Each one of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds," he muses, as he keeps meeting the same woman, Joyce (Swinton), although each Joyce he meets has a different past, a different present, and a different personality.

Lepage employs exquisite visuals as he explores George's imagination and the role it played in his life, asking fundamental questions like do our thoughts exist before we think them? Or is there another me?

Tom McCamus displays just the right amount of vacant confusion, while Tilda Swinton gives a remarkable performance - or four performances - reprising the same character in different but simultaneous worlds.

The pace is slow and deliberate, but any faster and the audience would get lost. "Possible Worlds" is not easy to watch, and poses more questions than it could ever hope to answer, but this intelligent film will certainly achieve the director's goal of inspiring discussion.

End Credits

Director: Robert Lepage Writer: John Mighton, Robert Lepage Stars: Tom McCamus, Tilda Swinton, Sean McCann, Rick Miller, Gabriel Gascon, Griffith Brewer

Genre: Drama Length: 92 minutes Cinema: 13 July 2001 Country: Canada

Blixa Bargeld - Mein Leben (Documentary), Einstürzende Neubauten - Palast der Republik (live concert)

BLIXA BARGELD, "MEIN LEBEN" (2008), ARTE TV DOCUMENTARY

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, "LIVE AT THE PALAST DER REPUBLIK", BERLIN, NOVEMBER 4, 2004

The Genius Of Pythagoras (documentary)

Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim

Werner Herzog - Wheel Of Time [2002]

Nassim Haramein: Science of Unified Fields

Salvador Dali Arena [1996] (Documentary)

Entheogen [2007]

Starsuckers (A Documentary)

About the film: Internet Movie Database. 

Sex: The Secret Gate To Eden (A Documetary)

Secrets Of The Occult - A Documentary In Two Parts

Secrets Of The Occult - Part I: The Magicians

Secrets Of The Occult - Part II: The Scientists

Road Rage (animated film)

Road Rage, Australian animated short. Directed by Nick Khoo, 2001.

Maybe Logic: The Lives And Ideas Of Robert Anton Wilson

Review by Daniel Wible, as posted on www.filmthreat.com

He’s been called the Carl Sagan of religion. The Jerry Falwell of quantum physics. The Arnold Schwarzenegger of feminism. The Helen Keller of art and music. The James Joyce of swing-set assembly manuals. I think you get the idea. He’s the inimitable Robert Anton Wilson, futurist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, poet, lecturer, and even pope of the Church of the Subgenius. But just don’t be fooled by that whole “pope” thing. You see, if I understand the rules correctly, I am a pope of the Church of the Subgenius just by having seen this film. In fact, you might even be ordained a pope after reading this review! Nevertheless, Robert Anton Wilson is a true renaissance man. “Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson” is an often fascinating, if somewhat monotonous, attempt to document the man’s myriad incarnations and philosophies. Or as Wilson would say, “maybe” it is.
One’s enjoyment of “Maybe Logic” hinges on one’s openness to Wilson’s ideas, since they are by far its main focus. Indeed, Wilson’s “relative meta-beliefs”, or catmas (as opposed to absolute beliefs, or dogmas, get it?), virtually are the film, which makes it impossible to review it without reviewing them as well. Unfortunately, Wilson himself gets all but lost in all this discourse, as the film offers precious little insight into his life. (With Wilson credited as an executive producer, perhaps the lack of personal revelation is by design.) Instead, writer/director Lance Bauscher nearly melts our brains with a non-stop barrage of trippy philosophies on the nature of reality.
About a third of Wilson’s “b.s.” (that’s Wilson-speak for “belief system” and yes, it informs his opinion of them) borders too much on the hokey for my tastes. These half-baked (half-serious maybe?) theorems would include: being “tuned-into” reality as opposed to simply “being”, that there are 24 conspiracies afoot at any one time, that we may be receiving messages from either extraterrestrials or a 6-foot tall white rabbit from the Emerald Isle, that the world may be a better place if we used the word “maybe” more often, and, of course, there’s that whole pope nonsense. (And who knows, maybe the very phrase, “pope nonsense”, is the whole point. I’ll leave that to one of the supposed “12 million” popes running around to explain it to me.) But as for the other two-thirds, many of them are almost so philosophically self-evident that they’re kind of brilliant in a way. I would include here his ideas on reality tunnels (that each of ours are unique and valid, a piece of the bigger puzzle), the inadequacy of any one model/map/metaphor to tell the whole story, that nothing is truly consistent, and that we must continually revise our “map of the world”. As someone who’s seriously courted nihilism and retained my humor with all things human, I must admit to a certain admiration for Wilson’s almost anti-spiritual world-view. When Wilson claims that “perceptions are gambles and that people act on a certain nieve realism”, it’s hard to argue with the simplicity and truth to his logic.
Beyond his many grand philosophic (maybe anti-philosophic) statements, both ironic and sincere, Robert Anton Wilson is also funny as hell. Somehow he’s able to communicate his ideas with a kind of stoner dopiness, while being devilishly clever about it at the same time. It’s nice to see too that he’s hardly lost this edge even as he struggles in his old age with post-polio syndrome. Wilson remains as passionate as ever about his ideas and especially in his fight to save medical marijuana, which has been his saving grace. Love him or just laugh at him, Wilson is an important 20th century thinker and “Maybe Logic” does a decent enough job of celebrating him. As a film, it has little in the way of frills, except for some psychedelic background animation, and can be a bit too repetitive at times, what with Wilson often in close-up babbling away like a broken record about infinite possibilities. I would’ve liked to have heard more from the few Wilson-devotees who appear here about how they were influenced by his life’s work. And what about his family or his impact on the world at large? As a reality tunnel of Wilson’s life, “Maybe Logic” is woefully lacking. (Again, maybe it was by design.) Regardless, the film is well worth a look, especially if you’ve never even heard of the guy. As the man himself would say, don’t be a “cosmic schmuck”, give “Maybe Logic” and Wilson’s world-view a chance. But to the devout believers in… well, anything really, beware: infinite doors will open before your eyes. Maybe. (That’s nine times, for those keeping track.)


Posted on December 23, 2003 in Reviews by Daniel Wible

Read more: http://www.filmthreat.com/reviews/5310/#ixzz1qov8RTxG

Paradise Or Oblivion - A Venus Project Documentary

Paradise or Oblivion is a documentary created by The Venus Project. This documentary details the root causes of the systemic value disorders and detrimental symptoms caused by our current established system.

This video presentation advocates a new socio-economic system, which is updated to present-day knowledge, featuring the life-long work of Social Engineer, Futurist, Inventor and Industrial Designer Jacque Fresco, which he calls a Resource-Based Economy.

The film details the need to outgrow the dated and inefficient methods of politics, law, business, or any other “establishment” notions of human affairs, and use the methods of science, combined with high technology, to provide for the needs of all the world’s people.

It is not based on the opinions of the political and financial elite or on illusionary so-called democracies, but on maintaining a dynamic equilibrium with the planet that could ultimately provide abundance for all people.

Paradise or Oblivion, by The Venus Project, introduces the viewer to a more appropriate value system that would be required to enable this caring and holistic approach to benefit human civilization.

This alternative surpasses the need for a monetary-based, controlled, and scarcity-oriented environment, which we find ourselves in today.

This is NOT the “major motion picture” that The Venus Project is working towards but rather is a documentary to introduce the aims and proposals to new people.

Metanoia: A New Vision Of Nature

Rupert Sheldrake: The Extended Mind

Interviews with Dr. Stanislav Grof

Interview on "Thinking Allowed", by Jeffrey Mishlove, from the series "Roots of Consciousness":

Interview on "Present!":

"2012: A Time For Change", Daniel Pinchback interviews Stanislav Grof:

Terence McKenna, interviewed in Hawaii, October 1998

Carl Gustav Jung - Wisdom Of The Dream documentary

Part 1: A Life Of Dreams

Part 2: Inheritance Of Dreams

Part 3: A World Of Dreams

Michael Talbot (1953-1992) - Holografski svemir

The Universe as a Hologram
by Michael Talbot

Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist  Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations. 

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. 
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. 
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. 
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. 
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. 
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case. 
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram. 
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web. 
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort ofsuperhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. 
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is." 
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development". 


Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. 
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage. 
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. 
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). 
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information. 
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system. 
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. 
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. 


An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists. 
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smellisin part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. 

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the-holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolvedpuzzles in psychology.
In particular,  Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange. 

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical. 
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. 
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality". 


Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".