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http://zenbox.stumbleupon.com/review/10409530/

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:21:18 -0700

Every massacre soon becomes the new normal. I'm briefly angry when I see a beautiful wild field turned into suburban houses, and then I get used to it. How much less will people feel, when they didn't even experience the world before?

Future generations will live on a Planet of Weeds, a world of abandoned buildings, junked cars, and cracked pavement, covered with english ivy or kudzu or himalayan blackberry or spotted knapweed or purple loosestrife. But they will look at the spectacular buildings and freeways and dead high-tech gadgets, and tell stories of the wonderful golden age when people lived like gods. They won't hate us -- they will envy us.

http://ranprieur.com/

http://zenbox.stumbleupon.com/review/10392893/

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:46:52 -0700

Ishmael notes

The story structured as a classic zen style dialog between master and pupil.

Ishmael notes the role of language as symbol and the immersion of himself as a separate ego upon taking a name (see Watts)

The book is the first source I have seen tie together eastern thought, nature, and primitivism in a meaningful way.

http://zenbox.stumbleupon.com/review/7512368/

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 07:11:12 -0800

Look to nature: sand dunes, for example, represent an even more abstract illustration of self-replication--they appear as shapes that can act like life forms. Some dunes will channel turbulent wind flows to continuously increase the size of the dune. Other dune shapes will create vortexes that propagate a chain of repetitive dunes extending off from the first. These spectacular dunes consist only superficially of particles of sand. Dig deeper and it becomes clear that their essential substance consists of a network of connections, a pattern of power-relationships. Sand and wind merely represent resources that this entity harnesses. The organizing pattern itself most essentially defines their identity.[5] The pattern-entity of a sand dune serves as an example of a "body without organs", the concept that the organizing process, the underlying pattern of power relationships represents the true essence and identity of anything.[6] There exist nearly endless examples of how the lens of pattern and power-relationship can provide new insight and understanding of the world. We will follow patterns of power down the rabbit hole to see if they change our understanding of ourselves, and of reality.
Jeff Vail - A Theory of Power

The interesting thing about such dunes is that they bear a resemblance to the force that created them, wind. It is as if each grain of sand were a bit inside the memory of a natural computer. The wind is the input that arranges the grains of sand so that they become a lower-dimensional template of a higher-dimensional phenomenon, in this case the wind. There is nothing magical about this, and it does not seem mysterious to us: wind, a pressure that is variable over time, creates a rippled dune, which is a structure regularly variable in space. In my thinking, the genes of organisms are grains of sand arranged by the ebb and flow of the winds of time. Naturally, then, organisms bear the imprint of the inherent variables in the temporal medium in which they arose. DNA is the blank slate upon which the changing temporal variables have had their sequence and relative differences recorded.
Terence McKenna - _True Hallucinations

http://zenbox.stumbleupon.com/review/1317310/

Wed, 25 May 2005 19:28:17 -0700

Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing. - Terence McKenna