LedgerGermane: links on futurity, cover ups, mind control and the weird

The Century of the Self - Watch at Your Own Risk

Adam Curtis (in an interview with The Register)

At a time when there isn’t anything to give you confidence beyond yourself - you live in the “empire of the self” - then it is inevitable that you will seek those like you, because it will give you a sense of collective purpose. It will give you a sense of collective security.

And that’s exactly what the internet is about - “If you like this book, others before you have bought these books…” And it works to create those little circles. All those little radio stations which tell you, “If you played this, other people have played this…”

On the internet, you’re constantly monitoring other people’s choices to see what those people who you think are like you do, and they say, “OK I’ll do that to be like that”. And what that leads to, again, is Balkanisation.

And it’s what advertisers rather like, because it gives them a definition.

The Century of the Self, parts 1 - 4

Technology transformed humanity into something different than it was before, into a new creation – flesh and technè,” he said.

“We are mutants now. What will come out of it nobody knows. It’s something unprecedented – and scary,” he said. Science fiction, in many cases, is simply “presenting the fears of the metamorphosis.”

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—	Unabomber’s writings raise uneasy ethical questions for Stanford scholar

Free will is an illusion, biologist says »

azspot:

As Cashmore explains, the human brain acts at both the conscious level as well as the unconscious. It’s our consciousness that makes us aware of our actions, giving us the sense that we control them, as well. But even without this awareness, our brains can still induce our bodies to act, and studies have indicated that consciousness is something that follows unconscious neural activity. Just because we are often aware of multiple paths to take, that doesn’t mean we actually get to choose one of them based on our own free will. As the ancient Greeks asked, by what mechanism would we be choosing? The physical world is made of causes and effects - “nothing comes from nothing” - but free will, by its very definition, has no physical cause. The Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius, in reference to this problem of free will, noted that the Greek philosophers concluded that atoms “randomly swerve” - the likely source of this movement being the numerous Greek gods.

“Conditional Free Will” is likely a better way to put it. We do have to power to choose, but usually the options that are socially condoned whether we want to believe it or not.

The FederalJack Free Ebooks Archive.

Declassified Federal Docs, FOIA Requests, Fiction and Non-Fiction Books, Survival Manuals and more.

Stock up, 2010 is going to be a bumpy ride.

Justinfinity: Daily eBook: Carl Jung - Liber Novus (The Red Book) »

Oh yes indeedy my friends. I bring to you this gem I recently found. I had actually come across another scan copy of this about a week ago, but it had separate versions for the German and English translation, and all color pictures were separate jpeg files… that was no fun. This is one PDF, with with the first half the full color scanned German original w/ pics, and the second half English translation text w/o pics.

This is a must for anyone interested in psychology and the occult. More info on it on Wikipedia.

Download | 146.73 MB

HUGE Thanks to Justin - who has been featuring some pretty nice book downloads. The sheer size of the file nearly killed my computer though, ha.

There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wine-shop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.

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—	M.A. Bakunin (via fuckyeahradicalquotes) (via ontologicalterrorist) (via americansatori) There should be multiple ways.

comicallyvintage:

If Only I Were Insane Enough To Remember It!

If I stay on tumblr long enough…maybe that’ll do it!

Mythical thinking … ha[s] helped people to face the prospect of extinction and nothingness, and to come through it with a degree of acceptance. Without this [mythical] discipline it has been difficult for many to avoid despair. The twentieth century presented us with one nihilistic icon after another, and many of the extravagant hopes of modernity and the Enlightenment were shown to be false… [Rationalism] has in many ways transformed our lives for the better, but this has not been an unmitigated triumph. Our demythologized world is very comfortable for many of us who are fortunate enough to live in first-world countries, but it is not the earthly paradise predicted by Bacon and Locke. When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgeny neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Other societies saw death as a transformation to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife [like having seventy-two virgins in heaven - ed] but devised rites and myths to help people face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down to a rite of passage or an initiation with the horror unresolved. But this is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology [emphasis added]… We must disabuse ourselves of the nineteenth-century fallacy that myth … represents an inferior mode of thought. We cannot … return to a pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology. We are myth-making creatures… we need myths that help us realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us … to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred … instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’. This is crucial because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

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—	Karen Armstrong (via azspot)

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage »

pieto:mkarmstr:

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (Track 1), Columbia Records (late 1960s)

uncertaintimes:

“John Bigg, the Dinton Hermit, baptized 22nd of April, 1629, buried 4th of April, 1696. He lived [..] in a cave, had been a man of tolerable wealth, was looked upon as a pretty good scholar, and of no contemptible parts. Upon the restoration he grew melancholy, betook himself to a recluse life, and lived by charity, but never asked for any thing but leather, which he would immediately nail to his clothes. He kept 3 bottles that hung to his girdle, viz. for strong and small beer, and milk; his shoes are still preserved; they are very large, and made up of about a thousand patches of leather.”

BibliOdyssey: Remarkable Persons

Asch Conformity Experiment

aka Group Think vs. YOU.

This 4min video shows how easy it is to conform, even against your own perceptions and experiences.

You experience this mental bug in: Politics, Society, Religion, Corporations, Peer Groups, etc…you know, the real Great Beast…

Think, Think, THINK.

borderlandsciences:kookscience:

Part One: On the Technology and the Ethics of Wishing
William S. Burroughs on the technology and the ethics of wishing. The discussion includes rules for wishing, the dogma of science, L. Ron Hubbard, The Big Lie, and sympathetic magic. The class also includes a question and answer session covering subjects such as memory, Henry Miller, dreams in writing, and defining the soul.
Part Two: On the Technology and the Ethics of Wishing
[Part Two] contains additional commentary by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. Included is a question and answer session that covers the space shuttle Challenger explosion, lucid dreaming, yoga, feminine energy, DNA, the Dalai Lama, and music. Waldman also discusses the ego, rituals, science and why questions, death, birth, mortality, and the bodhisattva.

Today’s lessons are courtesy of Aleph9 Waveform Research Journal and the Naropa Poetics Audio Archives.

Image: William S. Burroughs as illustrated by Shaky Kane

Japanese buddhist monk by Arashiyama