Nice Day… sitting outside, we witnessed a Crow Riot (lots of beatings handed out between different groups) A Blue Heron hanging out in our trees, then taking off… and a multitude of Bees all over the Blackberries and Rasberries.
Cat came in, a horrible mood afflicting him. Getting old does not agree with him, he gets a shorter temper daily. “I demand an immeadiate rub, with some attention to the belly (not too much as I will scratch) followed by feeding, with a back rub simultaneously.”
Headed over to Randies and DeDa’s for dinner, hanging out above OHSU… lovely evening indeed.
Came home in the gloaming, and have begun to upload a new show on the radio, of several hours length, stay tuned…
Our concentration for this entry is on the great Afghan Sufi Mystical Poet: Hakim Sana’i. Excellent, all of it.
On the menu:
The Links
The Article: A Dose Of Genius
Poetry: Hakim Sana’i (with Bio)
The Art: Illustrations from Ancient Islamic Afghanistan
Pax,
Gwyllm
_______
The Links:
Crows Have Human-Like Intelligence, Author Says
Hitler ‘Tested Small Atom Bomb’
Russian Official Jailed for Forcing Subordinates to Study Scientology
_______________
Smart Pills’ Are on The Rise. But Is Taking Them Wise?
By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 11, 2006; Page D01
Studying with diligent friends is fine, says Heidi Lessing, a University of Delaware sophomore.
But after a couple of hours, it’s time for a break, a little gossip: “I want to talk about somebody walking by in the library.”
One of those friends, however, is working too hard for dish — way too hard.
Instead of joining in the gossip, “She says, ‘Be quiet,’ ” Lessing says, astonishment still registering in her voice.
Her friend’s attention is laserlike, totally focused on her texts, even after an evening of study. “We were so bored,” Lessing says. But the friend was still “really into it. It’s annoying.”
The reason for the difference: Her pal is fueled with “smart pills” that increase her concentration, focus, wakefulness and short-term memory.
As university students all over the country emerge from final exam hell this month, the number of healthy people using bootleg pharmaceuticals of this sort seems to be soaring.
Such brand-name prescription drugs “were around in high school, but they really exploded in my third and fourth years” of college, says Katie Garrett, a 2005 University of Virginia graduate.
The bootleg use even in her high school years was erupting, according to a study published in February in an international biomedical and psychosocial journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Mining 2002 data, it noted that even then, more than 7 million Americans used bootleg prescription stimulants, and 1.6 million of those users were of student age. By the time students reach college nowadays, they’re already apt to know about these drugs, obtained with or without a prescription.
Comparable accounts are common on other campuses, according to dozens of interviews with university students in Virginia, the District, Maryland and Delaware, as well as reports in student newspapers serving campuses in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana and Missouri.
“I’m a varsity athlete in crew,” says Katharine Malone, a George Washington University junior. “So we’re pretty careful about what we put in our bodies. So among my personal friends, I’d say the use is only like 50 or 60 percent.”
Seen by some ambitious students as the winner’s edge — the difference between a 3.8 average and a 4.0, maybe their ticket to Harvard Law — these “brain steroids” can be purchased on many campuses for as little as $3 to $5 per pill, though they are often obtained free from friends with legitimate prescriptions, students report.
These drugs represent only the first primitive, halting generation of cognitive enhancers. Memory drugs will soon make it to market if human clinical trials continue successfully.
There are lots of the first-generation drugs around. Total sales have increased by more than 300 percent in only four years, topping $3.6 billion last year, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical information company. They include Adderall, which was originally aimed at people with attention-deficit disorder, and Provigil, which was aimed at narcoleptics, who fall asleep uncontrollably. In the healthy, this class of drugs variously aids concentration, alertness, focus, short-term memory and wakefulness — useful qualities in students working on complex term papers and pulling all-nighters before exams. Adderall sales are up 3,135.6 percent over the same period. Provigil is up 359.7 percent.
In May, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America issued its annual attitude-tracking study on drug use. It is a survey of more than 7,300 seventh- through 12th-graders, designed to be representative of the larger U.S. population and with an accuracy of plus or minus 1.5 percent, according to Thomas A. Hedrick Jr., a founding director of the organization. It reported that among kids of middle school and high school age, 2.25 million are using stimulants such as Ritalin without a prescription.
That’s about one in 10 of the 22 million students in those grades, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Education. Half the time, the study reported, the students were using these drugs not so much to get high as “to help me with my problems” or “to help me with specific tasks.” That motivation was growing rapidly, Hedrick says.
Why should we be surprised? This generation is the one we have pushed to get into the best high schools and colleges, to have the best grades and résumés. Computer nerds are culture heroes, SAT scores are measures of our worth and the Ivy League is Valhalla. Hermione Granger in “Harry Potter” is a heroine despite being such a goody two-shoes that she doubles up her course load with a spell that allows her to be in two places at once. This is the kind of focused overachievement that is addressed by smart pills.
A student Web site for a consortium of tony Philadelphia prep schools makes the point with one of those jokes that’s not really a joke: You know you are part of this elite educational set if:
· “You applied to Penn as a backup school.”
· “You tend to think anything below a 1400 is a mediocre SAT score.”
· “You could get adderall in less than 5 minutes at practically any time of the school day.”
Smart-pill use has not been the focus of much data collection. This comes as no surprise to researchers such as Richard Restak, a Washington neurologist and president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, who has written extensively about smart drugs in his 2003 book, “The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind,” as well as his forthcoming “The Naked Brain: How the Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, Work and Love.”
Contributing to this dearth, he points out, is that these drugs are not famous for being abused recreationally and they are not being used by people with a disease.
This is not “the type of data collected by the FDA,” he says. Law-enforcement activity has been sparse. “Who is the complainant?”
Compared with the kind of drug users who get police attention, “This is an entirely different population of people — from the unmotivated to the super-motivated,” Restak says. These “drug users may be at the top of the class, instead of the ones hanging around the corners.”
Smart-pill use generally doesn’t show up in campus health center reports, he says, because “This is not the kind of stuff that you would overdose on” easily. Amphetamines are associated with addiction and bodily damage, but in use by ambitious students, “if you go a little over you get wired up but it wears off in a couple of hours. And Provigil has a pretty good safety record.” Finally, smart-pill use is a relatively recent development that has not yet achieved widespread attention, much less study, although Restak expects that to change.
“We’re going to see it not only in schools, but in businesses, especially where mental endurance matters.” Restak can easily imagine a boss saying, ” ‘You’ve been here 14 hours; could you do another six?’ It’s a very competitive world out there, and this gives people an edge.”
That’s why even small surveys conducted by students themselves are suggestive. For a senior project this semester, Christopher Salantrie conducted a random survey of 150 University of Delaware students at the university’s Morris Library and Trabant Student Center.
“With rising competition for admissions and classes becoming harder and harder by the day, a hypothesis was made that at least half of students at the university have at one point used/experienced such ‘smart drugs,’ ” Salantrie writes in his report. He found his hunch easy to confirm.
“What was a surprise, though, was the alarming rate of senior business majors who have used” the drugs, he writes. Almost 90 percent reported at least occasional use of “smart pills” at crunch times such as final exams, including Adderall, Ritalin, Strattera and others. Of those, three-quarters did not have a legitimate prescription, obtaining the pills from friends. “We were shocked,” Salantrie writes. He says that in his report, he was “attempting to bring to light the secondary market for Adderall” specifically because “most of the university is not aware” of its extent, he says.
When you start asking questions about smart pills, the answers you get divide sharply into two groups.
When you ask the grown-ups — deans, crisis counselors, health counselors — they tell you they don’t know too much about the subject, but they don’t think it is much of a problem at their institutions.
“I’m not sure of the size and scope,” says Jonathan Kandell, a psychologist and assistant director at the University of Maryland Counseling Center. “I have heard about it. But I don’t get a sense it’s a major thing that they come to the center about.”
When you ask the students, they look at you like you’re from the planet Zircon. They ask why you weren’t on this story three years ago. Even if some of these drugs are amphetamines, it’s medicine parents give to 8-year-olds, they say. It’s brand-name stuff, in precise dosages. How bad can it be? Sure, there are problems with weight loss, sleep loss, jitters and throwing up, they say. But other unintended consequences are not what you might expect. Universities now sport some of the cleanest apartments in the history of undergraduate education. Says one student who asked for anonymity because she has been an off-prescription user of these drugs: “You’ve done all your work, but you’re still focused. So you start with the bathroom, and then move on to the kitchen . . . .”
Warning: Side Effects
In the name of altering mood, energy and thinking patterns, we have been marinating our brains in chemicals for a very long time.
Caffeine is as old as coffee in Arabia, tea in China, and chocolate in the New World. Alcohol, coca leaves, tobacco and peyote go way back.
Even psychopharmaceuticals have been around for generations. Amphetamines — which are the active ingredient in Adderall and Ritalin — were first synthesized in Germany in 1887. Students have been using them for generations, in the form of Benzedrine and Dexedrine.
Beta blockers have been the dirty little secret of classical musicians since the 1970s. Originally prescribed to treat high blood pressure, they became the “steroids of the symphony” when it became clear Inderal controlled stage fright. As long ago as 1987, a study of the 51 largest orchestras in the United States found one in four musicians using them to improve their live performances, with 70 percent of those getting their pills illicitly.
What’s new is the range, scope, quantity and quality of substances, old and new, aimed at boosting our brains — as well as the increase in what’s in the pipeline. Current psychopharmaceuticals represent only the beginning of cognitive enhancers aimed at improving attention, reasoning, planning and even social skills.
The memory compounds being raced to market by four U.S. companies are initially aimed at the severely impaired, such as early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. But researchers expect the market for memory drugs to rapidly extend into the aging population we think of as normal, such as the more than 70 million baby boomers who are tired of forgetting what they meant to buy at the shopping mall and then realizing they’ve forgotten where they parked their cars, too. Or students who think such drugs could gain them hundreds of points on their SATs.
In research now underway, one such substance, ampakines, boosts the activity of glutamate, a key neurotransmitter that makes it easier to learn and encode memory. How useful they might be in a French or law exam.
But there are side effects with every drug. Strattera — the ADHD medicine that is not a stimulant and may be taken for weeks before it shows an effect — comes with a warning that it can result in fatal liver failure. The FDA warns it also may increase thoughts of suicide in young people. For a while last year, Canada pulled a form of Adderall from its markets as a result of sudden unexplained deaths in children with cardiac abnormalities. Provigil can decrease the effectiveness of birth control. All of these drugs come with a raft of side-effect warnings.
Nonetheless, pharmaceutical companies are racing to bring to market new drugs aimed at fundamentally altering our attitudes toward having a healthy brain. The idea is less to treat a specific disease than it is to, in the words of the old Army recruiting commercial, “Be all that you can be.”
Of Mice and Men
Is this what smart has come to in the early 21st century? Is Ken Jennings, the “Jeopardy” phenom, our model of smart? Do SATs and grade-point averages measure all of what it means to be intelligent? If so, these drugs have a potent future. But definitions of intelligence may change — already, some colleges have stopped requiring SAT scores from applicants.
Howard Gardner of Harvard is the godfather of the idea that smart is more than what IQ tests test. In his seminal 1983 book, “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” and later works, he laid out a then-novel model of cognition that included many other kinds of sagacity.
“I feel that what we call ‘intelligence’ is almost always ‘scholastic skill’ — what it takes to do well on a certain kind of short-answer instrument in a certain kind of Western school,” he writes in an e-mail. “Other uses of intellect — musical competence, facility in the use of one’s hands, understanding of other people, sensitivity to distinctions in the natural world, alertness to one’s own and others’ emotional states etc. — are not included in our definitions of intelligence, though I think that they should be. Unless performances in these other domains were directly tapped, we’d have no idea of whether ‘performance enhancing pills’ affect these other forms of intelligence as well.”
Eric R. Kandel is shocked by the idea that powerful elixirs like the ones he is developing might rapidly trickle down to ambitious college kids. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He also founded Memory Pharmaceuticals.
“
That’s awful! Why should they be taking drugs? They should just study! I think this is absurd. What’s so terrible about having a 3.9? The idea that character and functioning and intelligence is to be judged by a small difference on an exam — that’s absurd. This is just like Barry Bonds and steroids. Exactly what you want to discourage. These kids are very sensitive. Their brains are still developing. Who knows what might happen. I went to Harvard. I like Harvard. It ain’t worth it.”
The mind amplifiers he’s working on, he insists, could have major effects on lots of needy people — those with mental retardation or Down syndrome, or those with memory loss from depression or Alzheimer’s or cancer chemotherapy or schizophrenia. “There are lots of populations out there that really, really need help,” he says.
Kandel is hugely enthusiastic about taking a memory that has slipped and bringing it back up to reasonable. His compounds are terrific in aging mice, he says.
But ambitious college kids?
Why take the risk?
In normal mice, he says, his stuff improves memory — only by 20 percent to 50 percent.
_________
Afghan Sufi Poetry – Hakim Sana’i
Saki,
bring wine
& don’t stop the flow!
Our old friend has broken his vows
of repentence. He’s lifted the siege of Self-denial
& Duty, & come to loiter round the
tavern with a notorious beauty!
He’s vacuumed his head of hypocrisy &
pious attitudinizing, & all at once he’s sprung him-
self from his monastery. He’s freed his ankle from
Religion’s chains-but cinched his waist with a
Fireworshipper’s sash. How he drinks! And urges me,
“Have one yourself! Stay drunk as long as you can!
Stick to this path toward nothingness
& light a fire beneath all
that survives!”
(Translated by Hakim Bey)
——–
The Good Darkness
There is great joy in darkness.
Deepen it.
Blushing embarrassments
in the half-light
confuse,
but a scorched, blackened, face
can laugh like an Ethiopian,
or a candled moth,
coming closer to God.
Brighter than any moon, Bilal,
Muhammed’s Black Friend,
shadowed him on the night journey.
Keep your deepest secret hidden
in the dark beneath daylight’s
uncovering and night’s spreading veil.
Whatever’s given you by those two
is for your desires. They poison,
eventually. Deeper down, where your face
gets erased, where life-water runs silently,
there’s a prison with no food and drink,
and no moral instruction, that opens on a garden
where there’s only God. No self,
only the creation-word, BE.
You, listening to me, roll up the carpet
of time and space, Step beyond,
into the one word.
In blindness, receive what I say.
Take “There is no good…”
for your wealth and your strength.
Let “There is nothing…” be
a love-wisdom in your wine.
—–
The Wild Rose of Praise
Those unable to grieve,
or to speak of their love,
or to be grateful, those
who can’t remember God
as the source of everything,
might be described as a vacant wind,
or a cold anvil, or a group
of frightened old people.
Say the Name. Moisten your tongue
with praise, and be the spring ground,
waking. Let your mouth be given
its gold-yellow stamen like the wild rose’s.
As you fill with wisdom,
and your heart with love,
there’s no more thirst.
There’s only unselfed patience
waiting on the doorsill, a silence
which doesn’t listen to advice
from people passing in the street.
—–
The Way of the Holy Ones
Don’t speak of your suffering — He is speaking.
Don’t look for Him everywhere — He’s looking for you.
An ant’s foot touches a leaf, He senses it;
A pebble shifts in a streambed, He knows it.
If there’s a worm hidden deep in a rock,
He’ll know its body, tinier than an atom,
The sound of its praise, its secret ecstasy –
All this He knows by divine knowing.
He has given the tiniest worm its food;
He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones.
—-
The Great Provider
Allah sets the table for all living things,
and lays out more edibles than eaters!
Everyone has its spirit, its days, its daily bread,
blessings and happiness from Allah.
Allah brings to light everyone’s daily bread,
then leaves the larder door wide open!
Unbeliever, believer, wretched and happy alike,
all creatures will find new sustenance and new life there.
A Bearded Man Leans on a Stick, Persian, 1630-40. Click for larger image.
While the N of need still sticks in their throats,
the M of His munificence has already provisioned them.
Nothing nurtures us other than bread,
and we eat it only because of our hunger for it.
Allah does not leap to the command of servants!
Having blessed us with our hunger for bread,
He will give us that bread as well.
Your bread and your soul are both in the divine treasury;
they are Allah’s buried treasure, if you only knew it!
If your meal waits for you in China,
the horse you will ride to it is already saddled and waiting.
Either you will be carried there quickly,
or your bread will be brought to your side while you sleep.
Did Allah not say,
“I am your Provider, the Knower of things secret, the Knower of things open.
I give you life, and I will give you bread.
Whatever you wish, I will give you in good time”?
Know that the work of daily bread is at your door like the dawn;
and that bread is a souvenir of the day.
The Mean One fears this truth,
and avoids the leftovers of the Wise.
The lion does not devour its prey alone
when it’s had its fill, it leaves the rest.
Allah’s kindness is with you,
so you trade the life your hold in your hand for a crumb.
Mind your soul, for, just like bread,
loaf follows loaf till the edge of the grave.
Allah grants no one life without granting bread,
because the soul is sustained by it.
Take this seriously eat now,
and soon you will eat the food of the soul…
Your daily bread is granted to you by the Knowing, Powerful One,
so don’t shake your fist at the King and the tax-collector!
When the soul flies from your body,
be certain that your daily bread has arrived at last.
It arrives through the gate of Allah,
not the gate of your teeth or throat.
You may sit at the head of the table, but only way of great suffering
especially if you weren’t wealthy or wise to begin with!
So forget that place!
To rise to such a rank would assure you nothing but heartache and scattered desires Let Allah be enough to fill you.
In any state, in any event, it is better that you seek support from Allah
than that you should seek it from an ass-powered mill or a sack.
In any state, in any event, it is better that you depend upon the benevolence of Allah
than that you should depend on an ass-powered mill and the sack.
______
Hakim Sanai
Timeline (1044? – 1150?)
Not much is known about Hakim Sanai, often just called Sanai or Sanai of Ghazna. Sanai is one of the earlier Sufi poets. He was born in the province of Ghazna in southern Afghanistan in the middle of the 11th century and probably died around 1150.
Rumi acknowledged Sanai and Attar as his two primary inspirations, saying, “Attar is the soul and Sanai its two eyes, I came after Sanai and Attar.”
Sanai was originally a court poet who was engaged in writing praises for the Sultan of Ghazna.
The story is told of how the Sultan decided to lead a military attack against neighboring India and Sanai, as a court poet, was summoned to join the expedition to record the Sultan’s exploits. As Sanai was making his way to the court, he passed an enclosed garden frequented by a notorious drunk named Lai Khur.
As Sanai was passing by, he heard Lai Khur loudly proclaim a toast to the blindness of the Sultan for greedily choosing to attack India, when there was so much beauty in Ghazna. Sanai was shocked and stopped. Lai Khur then proposed a toast to the blindness of the famous young poet Sanai who, with his gifts of insight and expression, couldn’t see the pointlessness of his existence as a poet praising such a foolish Sultan.
These words were like an earthquake to Hakim Sanai, because he knew they were true. He abandoned his life as a pampered court poet, even declining marriage to the Sultan’s own sister, and began to study with a Sufi master named Yusef Hamdani.
Sanai soon went on pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned, he composed his Hadiqatu’l Haqiqat or The Walled Garden of Truth. There was a double meaning in this title for, in Persian, the word for a walled garden is the same word for paradise, but it was also from within a walled garden that Lai Khur uttered the harsh truths that set Hakim Sanai on the path of wisdom.
