On The Music Box: Axiom Of Choice – Beyond Denial
Rowan and I saw
‘The Faun’s Labyrinth’ on Sunday..or as it is titled here in the US:
‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. Excellent film, and Rowan and I both recommend it. The Spiritual/Shamanic Journey is well layed out, the harrowing of Hell, The Three Task, The Sacrifice…
This will be one of those films that we will purchase the DVD for the home library. The last few years has seen a reasonable amount of films with the ancient tales, myths and dreams deeply embedded in them… The Brothers Grimm (with that bit of joyousness that Terry Gilliam brings to the mix)… V For Vendetta, with its heroes journey and redemption of the world.
The great themes are there if we but look. Films are the modern dream time, with all of the tales laid out within. It could not be any other way, as we come again and again to the deep wells of remembrance and sleep.
Do your self a favour, see this one. The tale is dark, but the rewards are there if you seek them out…
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On The Menu:
Updates & Notes
The Obligatory Links…
Pan & Daphnis…
Those Amazing Quantum Honey Bees
At the Foot of Cold Mountain: The Poetry of Han Shan…
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Updates & Notes:
The second ‘The Invisible College’ PDF Magazine is taking shape. Lots of excitement around here with that project. We are looking for a way to have them physically published in the future…
If you haven’t read it, you can down load it to your left… Tell your friends, and spread the word if you would please!
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Spring is coming on in earnest here in Portland. It was up to 60f today here. Blue skies, beauty everywhere. We were out in the back yard today, getting it ready for spring (later spring planting) We get freezes up until April 15th, so you have to move with a bit of caution when it comes to the planting side of it all here….
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Finished ‘Poets on the Peaks’ last night.
A recommended read. It tells the story of Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac’s times as Fire Watchers in the Cascade Wilderness. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
It fills in all kinds of gaps for me regarding the paths the three of them chose with their writings and lives…
It is a must for anyone who finds an affinity with the Beats, and that time of great change and transition. I had a very hard time putting this one down. I read it every night given the chance.. Masterfully done.
You can pick it up through Powells… (Check out the link on our home page…)
Check it out!
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Have a lovely Monday!
Gwyllm
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The Links:
Towers point to ancient Sun cult
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Pan & Daphnis…
Daphnis was a hero from the island of Sicily. His father was Hermes, god of merchants and thieves, and his mother was a Sicilian nymph who was tricked by Hermes into making love to him. When her time came and Daphnis was born she abandoned him to die in a grove of laurels (whence his name) on the Mountain of Hera, to avenge herself on his father. But Hera saw her and took pity on the beautiful infant. She made sure that he was found by some shepherds, who brought him home and raised him as one of their own. From an early age he was renowned for his beauty, and for his delightful songs about the shepherd’s life. His great pride were his herd of cattle, which were of the same stock as those belonging to Helios, the sun god, and of which he took the greatest care.
Many were those who desired and courted this beautiful boy. He was a beloved of the god Apollo himself, and also of Pan, who taught him to play the panpipes. As he grew older it was his turn to fall in love. One day while tending his herd of magic cattle he caught a glimpse of a lovely nymph, Nomia by name, bathing in the river and fell in love with her. At first she ran off, angry to have been seen by human eyes. He did not give up and kept chasing her. In the end she relented, but warned him that if he ever was unfaithful to her she would strike him blind. He meant to respect her wish, but one day Nomia’s rival, another nymph by the name of Chimaera, plied him with wine and then seduced him. The furious Nomia took away his eyesight in revenge, and Daphnis spent the rest of his short life on earth playing the flute and singing his songs which were now sadder and even more beautiful than before.
Soon afterwards Hermes found out about his son’s misfortune, and came to take him up to Mount Olympos. As he flew off he struck the rock with his foot, causing clear water to gush forth. That spring, close by the town of Syracuse, is said to flow to this day and still carries the name of the blinded youth. There the Sicilian shepherds came ever after to offer sacrifices to their hero.
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Thanks To Dr. Con For This….
Those Amazing Quantum Honey Bees
Ken Korczak:
Warning! What I am writing about today may fry your brain. If you dont like the thought of your cerebral cortex sizzling like a corndog in a vat of boiling vegetable oil, dont read this column. In fact, if this column does not fry your brain, then your brain is just unfriable. Is unfriable a word? I dont know, but I digress. Now, on with the brain buzz, and you’ll soon understand what I mean by “buzz.”Imagine having the ability to see, with your naked eye, a quark particle spinning in the weird and shadowy quantum world. Imagine being able to perceive subatomic particles winking in and out of existence. What would it be like if you could easily see electrons shimmering in their orbits around atoms? Furthermore, think about what it would be like if you could exist naturally in a realm of six dimensions, rather than being cramped into the three-dimensional world you live in now. What if you could perform a sensational six-dimensional dance?
Well, that may be what the world of the common honey bee is like. If the theories of mathematician Barbara Shipman are correct, honey bees can not only perceive the energies of the subatomic, quantum world directly, but they also use six-dimensional space to communicate with each other. The fact that Shipman stumbled upon this theory is a classic example of what Louis Pasteur called: Chance favoring the prepared mind.Shipman is a mathematician at the University of Rochester, but her father was a bee researcher for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Shipman would often stop by her fathers office and he would show her the amazing world of honey bees. One aspect of bee behavior which has fascinated and baffled scientists for more than 70 years is the mysterious dance they perform in their hives. The dance — a kind of crazy wing-waggling jitterbug (no pun intended) — communicates to other bees where new sources of yummy flower food can be found. By watching the dance of a scout bee, other bees, called recruits get an exact idea of the direction and distance of where new food can be found.Even though bees were not her field of study, Shipman could never get the mystery of bee dances out of her mind. In the meantime, Shipmans work as a math theorist led her to an area only a select few other mathematicians were working on — something called manifolds. A manifold is a geometric shape described by certain complex math equations. There are an infinite variety of manifold configurations.
They can describe shapes of many dimensions. Shipman was working with a six-dimensional structure called a flag manifold, when suddenly, in one of those eerie moments of scientific coincidence, she realized that the flag manifold very closely resembled the pattern of the honey bee waggle dance.Now, because the flag manifold is a six-dimensional object, it cannot be perceived in our three dimensional world. We can visualize only an approximation of what it looks like by projecting its shadow into two dimensional space. The shadow of an ordinary sphere, for example, projects onto two dimensions as a flat circle. And when you project a sixth-dimensional flag manifold onto two dimensions, it matches exactly the patterns dancing bees make. But two-dimensional bee-dance patterns are not enough to explain how bees interpret these patterns to locate distant sources of food. A good explanation may be that the bees actually perceive all six dimensions. In order to do that, the eye or senses of the bee would need to be able to see subatomic activity directly! When a human scientist tries to detect a quark–by bombarding it with another particle in a high-energy accelerator–the flag manifold geometry is lost. If bees are using quarks as a script for their dance, they must be able to observe the quarks in their natural states.At first, scientists speculated that bees were perceiving their flight directions similar to the way birds follow migration routes. It is commonly accepted that birds sense the earths magnetic fields because they have a mineral called magnetite in their heads. Magnetite helps birds follow terrestrial magnetic fields like a directional beacon. Even though bees have been found to have tiny amounts of magnetite in their bodies, it does not explain the bee dance and communication process. Also, it is unlikely that the two-dimensional pattern of the bee dance is a perfect shadow for a six-dimensional flag manifold unless there is a connection.
What are the implications of bees being able to directly perceive the quantum, subatomic world? For one thing, it means that we have to reevaluate the fundamental nature of bees. One might speculate that bees have a kind of special cosmic ability to transcend three-dimensional space, operate in a multidimensional universe, and straddle multiple levels of time, space and existence. Bees may be living proof that higher dimensions of reality exist physically, and not just in theory. There also may be doorways for entering into those realities — if you have the right equipment. But the bee evidence has much wider implications for quantum mechanics as a whole, which I won’t get into here.I think this bee phenomenon borders on the miraculous. Imagine these amazing creatures — honey bees — plying the quantum oceans, transcending mundane three-dimensional space as they perform their common labors. A bee is like a tiny winged Prometheus, entering the realm of the gods to bring back a wonderful gift to mankind — the sweetness of honey. Furthermore, I cant help but speculate that there may be a way to harness the multidimensional ability of bees to expand our own perceptions and abilities. Can we tap into the bee nervous system to help ourselves more directly experience that which can currently only be described with numbers? Can bees in some way enhance the information we collect from gigantic atom smashers? Can bees become the instrumentality that opens a direct portal for us into higher dimensional realms? Can we create bee sensors to make a quantum beam that will shine into the eldritch spaces between atoms, electrons, protons and quarks? It stings the imagination! Or to paraphrase a great poet: “It sings the body electric!” At the very least, it gives my brain a buzz! Yours?
Ken Korczak: www.starcopywriter.com
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At the Foot of Cold Mountain: The Poetry of Han Shan…
Climbing up the Cold Mountain
Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?
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Born Thirty Years Ago
Thirty years ago I was born into the world.
A thousand, ten thousand miles I’ve roamed.
By rivers where the green grass grows thick,
Beyond the border where the red sands fly.
I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting,
I read books, I sang songs of history,
And today I’ve come home to Cold Mountain
To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.
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My Dwelling at TianTai
I divined and chose a distant place to dwell-
T’ien-t’ai: what more is there to say?
Monkeys cry where valley mists are cold;
My grass gate blends with the color of the crags.
I pick leaves to thatch a hut among the pines,
Scoop out a pond and lead a runnel from the spring.
By now I am used to doing without the world.
Picking ferns, I pass the years that are left.
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I recently hiked to a temple in the clouds
and met some Taoist priests.
Their star caps and moon caps askew
they explained they lived in the wild.
I asked them the art of transcendence;
they said it was beyond compare,
and called it the peerless power.
The elixir meanwhile was the secret of the gods
and that they were waiting for a crane at death,
or some said they’d ride off on a fish.
Afterwards I thought this through
and concluded they were all fools.
Look at an arrow shot into the sky-
how quickly it falls back to earth.
Even if they could become immortals,
they would be like cemetery ghosts.
Meanwhile the moon of our mind shines bright.
How can phenomena compare?
As for the key to immortality,
within ourselves is the chief of spirits.
Don’t follow Lords of the Yellow Turban
persisting in idiocy, holding onto doubts.
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The layered bloom of hills and streams
Kingfisher shades beneath rose-colored clouds
mountain mists soak my cotton bandanna,
dew penetrates my palm-bark coat.
On my feet are traveling shoes,
my hand holds an old vine staff.
Again I gaze beyond the dusty world-
what more could I want in that land of dreams?
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Since I came to Cold Mountain
how many thousand years have passed?
Accepting my fate I fled to the woods,
to dwell and gaze in freedom.
No one visits the cliffs
forever hidden by clouds.
Soft grass serves as a mattress,
my quilt is the dark blue sky.
A boulder makes a fine pillow;
Heaven and Earth can crumble and change.
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