Grateful Dead

ha ha!! just being a little cheeky, that's all, Mr. P.!!we don't want any podiums here! true true! maybe we can have some pizza instead of piazza though...it's gotta have anchovies on it whatever the case! mozzarella olives tomato and anchovies...mmmmmmm.... yes, that community centre was great, wasn't it? reclaiming for future generations hopefully. a magnificent enterprise. interesting recent reports here on airlines and ferry companies being threatened by animal activists over the transportation of live animals for scientific research. many are now refusing to offer such a service. apparently there is serious concern over lack of test subjects for cancer drugs. to be honest, i'm not sure where i stand on the matter personally; could they be used to potentially cure someone who would go on to alleviate animal suffering in the long term? or make a huge advance in the study of all beings? i don't consider myself above any other species. wouldn't (or dare i say it, shouldn't?) a cancer sufferer offer themselves up for testing? i would. if it's to preserve the human strain, can't we be taking experiments upon ourselves? should an animal, without a voice, be plucked from it's habitat (bred for this very purpose, i feel, is no argument here; also morally wrong i believe). my heart and conscience is torn. yes, i've witnessed first hand the terrible suffering caused by cancer in my own family. horrific. but hand on heart...is it right to involve animals? it surely isn't right to have innocent lives threatened by activists though; i'll say that for sure. i just don't know really.

Um, it's Ours. Anyone who is kind enough to contribute, and all those just watching. It's a piazza, not a podium. Hopefully more will speak up if they feel they have something to add. Or interject. Finally had a chance to watch the Synthetic Biology vid, jonapi. To me the scariest thing about it was the title, with its embedded preconception of the existence of a god. The most encouraging aspect was the community center filled with all sorts of normal folks, adults and kids alike, experimenting with the technology. This stuff needs to be demystified and unfettered from the paranoiac caterwauling of those limited by the strictures of Organized Religion. It also needs to be readily available, and not the sole province of Monsanto et al. Very happy to see the Open Source model being utilized widely here. Anybody can have the parts for free. Create value by making something useful out of them. It does strike me as curiously ironic that the initial research in this field was done by an Augustinian monk who was neither jailed for heresy nor accused of "playing god." But he was just fidgeting with peas, and they aren't really life forms anyway, right? Well, at least not ones that actually matter. And what about that broccoli stuff? Dogs? Cats? Cows? Corn? We humans have been haphazardly mucking about in other gene pools for a long, long time. Personally, I think it's better that we go about it armed with fuller understanding and finer grained control over the process.

I have loved you always,since I can remember, xo! But alas...today... I love you, syawla. But why? Of the moment I find myself in: Always is but a menstrual pad, with wings. and Always is but Walmart's low prices. How could I defame them, by wrongly using Their word. So, syawla, uoy evol I xo Trademarks. Best wishes to Everyone- "Always". "Have a happy period." Awww shucks! Hopefully this month I will. "I Love You, All" -Too. @-sherbear-@

we don't need the answer to "what is love?".we only have to experience it; some questions should stand adrift from analysis. personally, i don't want love to be reduced to cold calculations, clinical forensic dissection. feeling can take the place of discussion and speculation sometimes. ruminations appearing cheap, almost debasing to it's purity. this could be seen as a contradiction when other ineffables are encouraged by myself. but true love is beyond strict notions of explainability; the moment you try it will vanish, and rightly so. one can analyse the psychedelic experience too but no amount of chatter will reproduce the same effects. sensation is paramount and of the Now. improvisation the key to enlightenment. swimming in bliss. don't capture, let it go. if only it were that simple....... something jonapi has only ever experienced, truly, a handful of times. but what times they were. living versus existing.

a film by Franco Piavoli. a vision of beauty and harmony in a universal language for all ages a poem, a voyage, a concert on nature, universe, life. a different image from the one we always see. - Andrei Tarkovsky.

!ox,lla, uoy evol I

"individuals exist for the benefit of culture, and not the other way around" is an interesting way of looking at it. What we are able to contribute to the growth and development of advanced notions like culture and society as individuals is our legacy. Hopefully many of us will be more generous and productive than Hunter's sad creature in China Doll who apparently contributes nothing. As for how long it's taking us to get further, it is worth noting that in geological terms humans per se have only been around for an eyeblink, and even less than that in cosmological terms. Hell, it's only been 520 years since somebody had to prove that the earth was round, not flat, and less than 400 years since someone was effectively jailed (by a religious order, thank you) for heretically suggesting that Earth was not the center of the universe and in fact orbited the sun. We have come a long way (baby) but there is so much more we don't know than we do. Love? Well, I can't prove it, but my belief is that Love is a fabric of shared energy, bigger than any one individual. We all contribute to it and draw from it using processes we don't quite understand but can recognize its presence and absence. I like to describe it as being like the smell of bacon. Once you know what it is, you never need to have it explained to you again. And you can recognize it instantly, even from a long way off.

> I guess it's my frustration that after all this time, a proper coherence and joining between the scientific and the "spiritual"...seems particularly unforthcoming. In his text, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Jacques Derrida writes that, "as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire." Back to that in a minute. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes that "Every child begins the world again, to some extent." In my opinion, that extent is near total and my evidence is the unanswered question, What is love? We have no answer to that question yet and I doubt that we ever will. The problem with getting science and spirituality to cohere is that science is an institution of culture, which accumulates itself and transmits its ideals into the future, and spirituality is a function of spirit, whose manifestation is Thoreau's child. Humans don't advance, while culture does; hence, McKenna's observation that "culture is not your friend." Unfortunately, it seems that individuals exist for the benefit of culture, and not the other way around. A culture's agenda is not necessarily akin to the goals of its constituents; hence the lack of coherence.

yes, you're quite right.i guess it's my frustration that after all this time, a proper coherence and joining between the scientific and the "spiritual"; a serious study on a widespread scale seems particularly unforthcoming. a more shamanistic view is still shunned as unworthy of serious "academic" investigation (except, of course, when Western medicine and pharmaceutical companies rape indigenous cultures of their knowledge, while steadfastly refusing to reinvest in or reimburse centuries old traditions and experience). Jeremy Narby's book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge brings up some highly pertinent points on this matter. but those kinds of study will not get you a grant or serious acceptance in the scientific field. and so it remains on the margins for a curious few to stumble across. unsurprising really, as free thought and inner-cosmonauting is not going to be readily encouraged in these here times!!!! i'm also highly curious as to "whether these factors will extend humanity's time here..."; let us wait and see, eh? we have it in us if we all but try. fascinating solar storm occurrences recently. what may it bring?

> since when did that [money, prestige, accomplishment, ego, acceptance and critical regard and high esteem] contribute to true evolution? My understanding is that evolutionary processes select against an organism, rather than for an organism; we do what we do, and natural selection then determines whether what we have done is effective in terms of survival. Here's another way to say it: nature hasn't selected for humans, it just hasn't selected against us yet. Hence, the conclusion that "money, prestige, accomplishment, ego, acceptance and critical regard and high esteem" may not "contribute to true evolution" is premature, I think. These factors are determining the condition of the world; what remains to be seen is whether these factors will extend humanity's time here, or bring it to an end. In a way, these factors can be seen as having extended our time here; they've been in place for some time now, (5000-10000 years at least), and we're still here.