This is really interesting...I would love to see more introverts running the show and fewer war-mongering, money worshiping, sacks of shit.
Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
That was a great post!
That was something that helped me a lot too- coming to terms with the fallibility of my perception. All perception.
I read a series of books that i loved called 'Requiem for Homosapiens', by Zindell. He made up a term called 'glavering', which is the sum of our beliefs, values, and knowledge. The glavering acts as a filter for all perception, and defines everything that we see and how we engage with it. We dont see things as they are, we see things as we are. Unless we recognise our glavering, we are more or less imprisoned by it. Any quest for knowledge must then begin with self awareness, self inquiry.
in many ways the concepts in this series of scifi books was the beginning of my spiritual journey, or journey though mind.
Looking for the objective in a living mirror, the only thing that remained constant was the observer. And what a mind fuck it was trying to get a handle on what the 'observer' was. A friend of mine introduced me to to the concept of 'tolerance for uncertainty'. It blew my mind and opened whole worlds.
Very cool...I’ll have to read up on ‘tolerance for uncertainty’ and check out that sci-fi novel as well....it could possibly be in my gigantic, ever-growing, collection of books I have yet to read and me not knowing it’s there...lol.
I read those books some time ago, I hope they still read well! Much of the story i dont remember now
Here is a link to some Zindell quotes if you're interested - http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/zindell.html
The concept that i fell most in love with was the 'asarya'
"[The] completely free individual is the Asarya. Only the Asarya may hold all possible realities at once....the Asarya...is one who would say yes to all things..."
David Zindell, War in Heaven
"The Asarya: [a] completely evolved man (or woman) who could look upon the universe just as it is and affirm every aspect of creation no matter how flawed or terrible..."I would say yes to everything, if only I could"...
David Zindell, The Wild
copied from http://asarya.com/
At the time it seemed completely out of reach, even 'wrong' - being able to say yes to all things. It contradicted so much conditioning. But there was something about the idea that i felt, knew, was true. i think that was the first leap of pure faith i made...very painful at the time to break open...but what a trip its been..
Shaqie
The Grandmaster in Disguise
This is really interesting...I would love to see more introverts running the show and fewer war-mongering, money worshiping, sacks of shit.
Interesting …
… so that you know there are two types of Alphas:
Agressive and Social. In the Animal Kingdom the aggressive ones tend to be the leaders. In our culture the Aggressive and the Social ones tend to be the leaders.
It sounds very good! I will bump it up to next on my list!
One could say they are still aggressive...only socially aggressive.
"Socially aggressive - A phrase used to describe someone who is determined to participate in or dominate a conversation or social situation. Socially aggressive people assume things are all about them and want to talk but never listen. They never feel uncomfortable because the never think about how others see them, and have no hesitation about crashing someone else's party/conversation/intimate moments."
It’s still aggressive behavior, but it’s more passive aggressive because society deems it wrong to walk around all the time fighting for dominance...if they could get away with sticking a knife in your ribs, they probably would. Since they can’t do that, they just make certain slights at people to make them look bad, or do things to make themselves look better. They are just a hair away from every asshole you have ever encountered in Jr. High school.
They world would be a better place without them.
[MENTION=10289]Rift Zone[/MENTION]
I'd say that self is an illusion, but matter is a hologram or a mirage. There's quite a difference.
I think in order to say that matter is an illusion, you have to be willing to die for it. Otherwise you kind of don't really believe that it is an illusion do you? Like positing that it's possible to shoot yourself in the head and in some universe the gun always misfires - that isn't really much to me if nobody is willing to try it.
I'd say that self is an illusion, but matter is a hologram or a mirage. There's quite a difference.
I think in order to say that matter is an illusion, you have to be willing to die for it. Otherwise you kind of don't really believe that it is an illusion do you? Like positing that it's possible to shoot yourself in the head and in some universe the gun always misfires - that isn't really much to me if nobody is willing to try it.
[video=youtube;ND7Qjj0eZ5o]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND7Qjj0eZ5o[/video]
[video=youtube;0bnUT9df4QU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnUT9df4QU[/video]
Some say that Zen means to lose fear of death - or to live such that whatever you're doing right now, you're willing to die doing this thing.
[video=youtube;0bnUT9df4QU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnUT9df4QU[/video]
Some say that Zen means to lose fear of death - or to live such that whatever you're doing right now, you're willing to die doing this thing.
In my younger days I used to ride sport bikes with my friends. We would wheelie and race on rural roads. Sometimes guys I would know would crash. We would help them get to the hospital if they needed it. Or helped them and their broken bike get home. But as soon as any of them could get their bike back together they would join us up front hauling ass on some back road risking life and limb for nothing more than the pure joy of going as fast as you can. I crashed once. Just a slow low side. I was able to keep riding my bike. It was just scratches on the fairings. I never felt like I would die on a motorcycle. And I was out a few days later going as fast as I could at night on twisty canyon roads. I knew quite a few fellas that died though. That was always sad. It weighed on your mind for a time. But once you twisted that throttle and felt the bike rush forward and the speed kick in you forgot all about that stuff and you focused your entire self to riding. I miss those days. I still have my bike. I won't be trying that stuff again. Age has taught me that some roads are a one way trip. It's not wise to push ones luck too many times. I feel like I have had a lot of passes over the years. Or a lot of angels watching over me. Either way I am done. I just enjoy that I still have my bike and can ride it now. Although I have risked my life to do the things I have done a lot really when I think about it. I can say that it does change you and it give you a focus. It's pretty fun until you crash or die though. I have been lucky. A little too lucky I think..
Is it possible for anyone to truly be alive if they are afraid to die? There is a big difference between existing and living. This is one reason i see many people as zombies. Because they are so afraid, and caught up in survival and self preservation, it is like they are dead anyway, they may as well be dead because they dont know what it means to be alive and live freely. In truth, when their body does 'die', they will once again experience what it is to be completely free and alive
[MENTION=95]efromm[/MENTION] [MENTION=4956]charlene[/MENTION]
Yes. And I don't think it's necessary to overtly risk your life all the time either. But there's a thing to living that is just visceral. Not living in your head all the time.
I owned several cars when I was younger and I liked to drive them crazy some times. I'd peg my Escort GT turbo at over 100mph. That isn't really fast at all but there's still no questioning illusion or matter when you're blitzing around on wet roads with that cute little sporty engine hooked up to a 5-speed manual.
Yes. And I don't think it's necessary to overtly risk your life all the time either. But there's a thing to living that is just visceral. Not living in your head all the time.
I owned several cars when I was younger and I liked to drive them crazy some times. I'd peg my Escort GT turbo at over 100mph. That isn't really fast at all but there's still no questioning illusion or matter when you're blitzing around on wet roads with that cute little sporty engine hooked up to a 5-speed manual.
22 Messages From Creationists To People Who Believe In Evolution
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/messages-from-creationists-to-people-who-believe-in-evolutio
I'm not trying to put evolution down, as I am a believer in it- but I thought these were kind of interesting to think about!
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/messages-from-creationists-to-people-who-believe-in-evolutio
I'm not trying to put evolution down, as I am a believer in it- but I thought these were kind of interesting to think about!
Check this out...even Pat Robertson implores Ken Ham to shut up....lol...funny stuff -
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/...to-shut-up-lets-not-make-a-joke-of-ourselves/
Found a new article about the third eye....I know [MENTION=10272]John Newton[/MENTION] is probably interested, but you should all check it out too!!
Located in nearly the direct center of the brain, the tiny pinecone-shaped pineal gland, which habitually secretes the wondrous neurohormone melatonin while we sleep at night, was once thought to be a vestigial leftover from a lower evolutionary state.
Indeed, according to recent research, we could be increasing our chances of contracting chronic illnesses like cancer by unnecessarily bathing its evenings in artificial light, working night shifts or staying up too late. By disrupting the pineal gland and melatonin's chronobiological connection to Earth's rotational 24-hour light and dark cycle, known as its circadian rhythm, we're possibly opening the doors not to perception, but to disease and disorder. A recently published study from Vanderbilt University has found associations between circadian disruption and heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
By hacking what pinealophiles call our mind's third eye with an always-on technoculture transmitting globally at light-speed, we may have disadvantaged our genetic ability to ward off all manner of complicated nightmares. No wonder the pineal gland is a pop-culture staple for sci-fi, fantasy and horror fandom, as well as a mass attractor of mystics and mentalists. Its powers to divide and merge our light and dark lives only seems to grow the more we take it seriously.
"We still lack a complete understanding of the pineal gland," University of Michigan professor of physiology and neurology Jimo Borjigin, a pioneer in medical visualization of the pineal gland's melatonin secretion, told me. "Numerous molecules are found in the pineal, many of which are uniquely found at night, and we do not have a good idea of what their functions are. The only function that is established beyond doubt is the melatonin synthesis and secretion at night, which is controlled by the central clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus and modulated by light. All else is speculative."
Discerning between the science and speculation of the pineal gland hasn't been easy since long before Rene Descartes called it the "principal seat of the soul" after studying it at length nearly four centuries ago. (Although "no evidence exists to support this," clarified Borjigin.) So here's a handy shortlist of things you should know about the pineal gland.
1. Third Eyes and Theosophistry
The current scientific understanding is that the pineal gland probably started out as an eye, and it receives signals from light and our retinas. Whether it was our only eye which shrunk into the brain once its perceptive tasks were taken care of by our two newer eyes, or whether it was a third eye with a spiritual and physical connection to previous spiritual and evolutionary states, or both, has galvanized science and speculation for centuries.
Earth's ancient cultural histories are filled with folklore featuring both one-eyed and three-eyed beings of great power, from Shiva and Cyclops to that amiable fellow in The Twilight Zone's classic episode, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" and beyond. (From Beyond even: See below.) Associations can be found in Hinduism, whose seventh primary chakra Sahasara is a multilayered lotus that looks like the pineal gland's pinecone, and whose primary function is to perceive universal oneness, scientifically and spiritually speaking. Theosophists, who have been studying what they perceive as hidden knowledge since the Greeks and Romans ruled philosophical and scientific inquiry, have more recently claimed that the pineal gland is the spiritual engine of our evolution into "embryo gods, beings of consciousness and matter."
That description seems apt, given the astronomical power we have achieved in a few million yeas of evolution. While Homo sapiens' third eyes likely transformed into pineal glands along the way, today we can still find animals with photoreceptive third eyes, now called parietal eyes, like New Zealand's endangered tuatara. Fossils from other ancient creatures feature similar sockets in their skulls, making our pineal gland a candidate for an ex-eye.
2. What Was Once Hidden Is Now Hi-Res
Michigan University professor Borjigin and his team are hard at work on how the pineal gland and melatonin regulate our lives.
"The central circadian clock controls timing of almost all aspects of our life, including physiology and behavior, and melatonin is the best marker to decode the fingerprints of circadian timing in both humans and animals," he told me. "In the past, it was very difficult to study circadian properties of melatonin in animals due to technical limitations. My lab invented long-term pineal microdialysis, which permits automated, computer-controlled and high-resolution analysis of melatonin secretion from rodent pineal gland from four to 10 weeks in the same animal."
These visualizations could go a long way toward understanding how to hack melatonin, which the pineal gland secretes when we sleep and helps the brain repair and sync our bodies to Earth's rotation. Melatonin is a stunning compound, found naturally in plants, animals and microbes. A powerful antioxidant, its list of its medicinal uses only seems to grow each year, as we learn more about its ability to help with immune disorders, chronic illnesses, and neurodegeneration.
"Pineal microdialysis allows us to monitor melatonin secretion closely under various conditions to simulate jet lag, shiftwork, light pollution, diet manipulation and more to define the fingerprints of circadian response to environment, he added. "It also allows us to discover animals with extreme chronotypes, like early-birds or night-owls, to understand how individuals with different chronotype respond to circadian challenges differently. These are still ongoing studies, but hopefully some of the works will be published this year."
3. Artificial Light = Dark Future
What has been recently published about melatonin is already pretty significant, especially for those looking to combat breast and prostate cancer. Harvard University School of Public Health researcher Itai Kloog and his group published a series of studies in the last few years explaining how our "modern urbanized sleeping habitat" (PDF) is a massive hormone-based cancer risk. "We have blotted out the night sky" with artificial light, wrote Earth Island Journal's Holly Hayworth," citing Kloog's research and noting that half that light is wasted anyway.
"We've proven beyond a doubt that it's a risk factor," Kloog told me. "Light at night has been proven on many levels, by our group and many others, to definitely contribute to higher risk of developing hormonal cancer."
Kloog's team published five studies altogether, including analyses at local and global levels, and all of them found firm correlations between circadian and melatonin disruption and higher risks of cancer. Analyzing NASA's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program archive (to illuminate Earth's light-at-night coverage) and data from the World Health Organization, Kloog's group "found clearly that as women were more exposed to light at nighttime, their rates of breast cancer went up. Our Israel study found that going from minimum exposure to average exposure to light at night resulted in a 36 percent higher standard rate of breast cancer, and going from average to maximum was another 26 percent increase."
Using kernel smoothing to create density maps showing light exposure and cancer rates, Kloog's team found that another of its studies, which sourced more than 20,000 light sources by height and intensity, showed a clear association. For their two worldwide studies, they developed an algorithm to assign population weight average light exposure for every person in every city across the world, using WHO data, and again they found a clear association between cancer and light at night.
"For average light exposure per person, if you take an underdeveloped country like Nepal, we're talking about 0.02 nanowatts per centimeter squared," Kloog explained. "Compare that to the United States, where the average light exposure of a person is 57.5. Up until around 120 years ago, humans were basically exposed to 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness on average, seasons and latitudes permitting of course. But since the invention of the lightbulb, we've artificially stretched the day. We go to sleep late at night, we have lights on while we sleep, we have a shorter sleep duration. We have a lot of factors stretching out our days, relative to the light period we experienced during millions of years of previous evolution."
"It's something that's easy to take out of the equation," Kloog told me. "Go to sleep in a dark room. Use less light. Close the shutters. Circadian disruption is carcinogenic to humans."
4. Occult Classic
This is not to say that late-night viewing itself isn't good for the mind, especially when it comes to pineal glands and third eyes. Because pineal glands and third eyes remain singular components of an otherwise binary brain with an extraordinary past, they have stimulated some stranger explorations of their spiritual and supernatural possibility. The pineal gland's circadian dualism has achieved particular resonance with influential occultists like horror influential H.P. Lovecraft. Who, in turn, have spawned new generations of speculative talents that have used it as a quite flexible receptacle for expansive meaning.
"My first exposure to the pineal gland came from Stuart Gordon's movie adaptation of Lovecraft's From Beyond," Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of the cult sci-fi television classic The Middleman, told AlterNet. "In truth, everything I know about that particular endocrine body probably derives from that seminal experience, which explains why I am a television writer and not a brain surgeon."
In From Beyond, a supernaturally activated pineal gland turns mad scientists into brain-eating zombies. The recently reissued 1957 exploitation film She Devil features a "female monster" whose hyperstimulated pineal gland turns her into "a demon, a devil, a creature with a warped soul!" In both films, and many other third-eye head-trips, functions as a sexualized organ, rather than a circadian regulator. Today, some use melatonin supplements, available since the '90s, to aid with sexual dysfunction. But the pineal gland's expansive mythic and scientific history has much broader applications when it comes to folklore and entertainment.
"In The Middleman, we quickly discovered that because this most mysterious of glands is so misunderstood, even though its very name connotes a certain frisson of scientific accuracy and technical understanding, it was a fantastic shorthand for whatever otherworldly qualities we needed to justify," Grillo-Marxuach added. "Over the course of 12 episodes, the pineal gland became the source of psychic ability, communication between parallel dimensions, the magical influence of succubi and incubi over the libidos of ordinary mortals and, finally, the power source for our main supervillain's armageddon device. Since Stuart Gordon and H.P. Lovecraft gave me such a gift in my teenage years by providing me with so fanciful an understanding of cerebral anatomy, I figured I'd pay the favor forward as many times as possible."
Located in nearly the direct center of the brain, the tiny pinecone-shaped pineal gland, which habitually secretes the wondrous neurohormone melatonin while we sleep at night, was once thought to be a vestigial leftover from a lower evolutionary state.
Indeed, according to recent research, we could be increasing our chances of contracting chronic illnesses like cancer by unnecessarily bathing its evenings in artificial light, working night shifts or staying up too late. By disrupting the pineal gland and melatonin's chronobiological connection to Earth's rotational 24-hour light and dark cycle, known as its circadian rhythm, we're possibly opening the doors not to perception, but to disease and disorder. A recently published study from Vanderbilt University has found associations between circadian disruption and heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
By hacking what pinealophiles call our mind's third eye with an always-on technoculture transmitting globally at light-speed, we may have disadvantaged our genetic ability to ward off all manner of complicated nightmares. No wonder the pineal gland is a pop-culture staple for sci-fi, fantasy and horror fandom, as well as a mass attractor of mystics and mentalists. Its powers to divide and merge our light and dark lives only seems to grow the more we take it seriously.
"We still lack a complete understanding of the pineal gland," University of Michigan professor of physiology and neurology Jimo Borjigin, a pioneer in medical visualization of the pineal gland's melatonin secretion, told me. "Numerous molecules are found in the pineal, many of which are uniquely found at night, and we do not have a good idea of what their functions are. The only function that is established beyond doubt is the melatonin synthesis and secretion at night, which is controlled by the central clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus and modulated by light. All else is speculative."
Discerning between the science and speculation of the pineal gland hasn't been easy since long before Rene Descartes called it the "principal seat of the soul" after studying it at length nearly four centuries ago. (Although "no evidence exists to support this," clarified Borjigin.) So here's a handy shortlist of things you should know about the pineal gland.
1. Third Eyes and Theosophistry
The current scientific understanding is that the pineal gland probably started out as an eye, and it receives signals from light and our retinas. Whether it was our only eye which shrunk into the brain once its perceptive tasks were taken care of by our two newer eyes, or whether it was a third eye with a spiritual and physical connection to previous spiritual and evolutionary states, or both, has galvanized science and speculation for centuries.
Earth's ancient cultural histories are filled with folklore featuring both one-eyed and three-eyed beings of great power, from Shiva and Cyclops to that amiable fellow in The Twilight Zone's classic episode, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" and beyond. (From Beyond even: See below.) Associations can be found in Hinduism, whose seventh primary chakra Sahasara is a multilayered lotus that looks like the pineal gland's pinecone, and whose primary function is to perceive universal oneness, scientifically and spiritually speaking. Theosophists, who have been studying what they perceive as hidden knowledge since the Greeks and Romans ruled philosophical and scientific inquiry, have more recently claimed that the pineal gland is the spiritual engine of our evolution into "embryo gods, beings of consciousness and matter."
That description seems apt, given the astronomical power we have achieved in a few million yeas of evolution. While Homo sapiens' third eyes likely transformed into pineal glands along the way, today we can still find animals with photoreceptive third eyes, now called parietal eyes, like New Zealand's endangered tuatara. Fossils from other ancient creatures feature similar sockets in their skulls, making our pineal gland a candidate for an ex-eye.
2. What Was Once Hidden Is Now Hi-Res
Michigan University professor Borjigin and his team are hard at work on how the pineal gland and melatonin regulate our lives.
"The central circadian clock controls timing of almost all aspects of our life, including physiology and behavior, and melatonin is the best marker to decode the fingerprints of circadian timing in both humans and animals," he told me. "In the past, it was very difficult to study circadian properties of melatonin in animals due to technical limitations. My lab invented long-term pineal microdialysis, which permits automated, computer-controlled and high-resolution analysis of melatonin secretion from rodent pineal gland from four to 10 weeks in the same animal."
These visualizations could go a long way toward understanding how to hack melatonin, which the pineal gland secretes when we sleep and helps the brain repair and sync our bodies to Earth's rotation. Melatonin is a stunning compound, found naturally in plants, animals and microbes. A powerful antioxidant, its list of its medicinal uses only seems to grow each year, as we learn more about its ability to help with immune disorders, chronic illnesses, and neurodegeneration.
"Pineal microdialysis allows us to monitor melatonin secretion closely under various conditions to simulate jet lag, shiftwork, light pollution, diet manipulation and more to define the fingerprints of circadian response to environment, he added. "It also allows us to discover animals with extreme chronotypes, like early-birds or night-owls, to understand how individuals with different chronotype respond to circadian challenges differently. These are still ongoing studies, but hopefully some of the works will be published this year."
3. Artificial Light = Dark Future
What has been recently published about melatonin is already pretty significant, especially for those looking to combat breast and prostate cancer. Harvard University School of Public Health researcher Itai Kloog and his group published a series of studies in the last few years explaining how our "modern urbanized sleeping habitat" (PDF) is a massive hormone-based cancer risk. "We have blotted out the night sky" with artificial light, wrote Earth Island Journal's Holly Hayworth," citing Kloog's research and noting that half that light is wasted anyway.
"We've proven beyond a doubt that it's a risk factor," Kloog told me. "Light at night has been proven on many levels, by our group and many others, to definitely contribute to higher risk of developing hormonal cancer."
Kloog's team published five studies altogether, including analyses at local and global levels, and all of them found firm correlations between circadian and melatonin disruption and higher risks of cancer. Analyzing NASA's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program archive (to illuminate Earth's light-at-night coverage) and data from the World Health Organization, Kloog's group "found clearly that as women were more exposed to light at nighttime, their rates of breast cancer went up. Our Israel study found that going from minimum exposure to average exposure to light at night resulted in a 36 percent higher standard rate of breast cancer, and going from average to maximum was another 26 percent increase."
Using kernel smoothing to create density maps showing light exposure and cancer rates, Kloog's team found that another of its studies, which sourced more than 20,000 light sources by height and intensity, showed a clear association. For their two worldwide studies, they developed an algorithm to assign population weight average light exposure for every person in every city across the world, using WHO data, and again they found a clear association between cancer and light at night.
"For average light exposure per person, if you take an underdeveloped country like Nepal, we're talking about 0.02 nanowatts per centimeter squared," Kloog explained. "Compare that to the United States, where the average light exposure of a person is 57.5. Up until around 120 years ago, humans were basically exposed to 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness on average, seasons and latitudes permitting of course. But since the invention of the lightbulb, we've artificially stretched the day. We go to sleep late at night, we have lights on while we sleep, we have a shorter sleep duration. We have a lot of factors stretching out our days, relative to the light period we experienced during millions of years of previous evolution."
"It's something that's easy to take out of the equation," Kloog told me. "Go to sleep in a dark room. Use less light. Close the shutters. Circadian disruption is carcinogenic to humans."
4. Occult Classic
This is not to say that late-night viewing itself isn't good for the mind, especially when it comes to pineal glands and third eyes. Because pineal glands and third eyes remain singular components of an otherwise binary brain with an extraordinary past, they have stimulated some stranger explorations of their spiritual and supernatural possibility. The pineal gland's circadian dualism has achieved particular resonance with influential occultists like horror influential H.P. Lovecraft. Who, in turn, have spawned new generations of speculative talents that have used it as a quite flexible receptacle for expansive meaning.
"My first exposure to the pineal gland came from Stuart Gordon's movie adaptation of Lovecraft's From Beyond," Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of the cult sci-fi television classic The Middleman, told AlterNet. "In truth, everything I know about that particular endocrine body probably derives from that seminal experience, which explains why I am a television writer and not a brain surgeon."
In From Beyond, a supernaturally activated pineal gland turns mad scientists into brain-eating zombies. The recently reissued 1957 exploitation film She Devil features a "female monster" whose hyperstimulated pineal gland turns her into "a demon, a devil, a creature with a warped soul!" In both films, and many other third-eye head-trips, functions as a sexualized organ, rather than a circadian regulator. Today, some use melatonin supplements, available since the '90s, to aid with sexual dysfunction. But the pineal gland's expansive mythic and scientific history has much broader applications when it comes to folklore and entertainment.
"In The Middleman, we quickly discovered that because this most mysterious of glands is so misunderstood, even though its very name connotes a certain frisson of scientific accuracy and technical understanding, it was a fantastic shorthand for whatever otherworldly qualities we needed to justify," Grillo-Marxuach added. "Over the course of 12 episodes, the pineal gland became the source of psychic ability, communication between parallel dimensions, the magical influence of succubi and incubi over the libidos of ordinary mortals and, finally, the power source for our main supervillain's armageddon device. Since Stuart Gordon and H.P. Lovecraft gave me such a gift in my teenage years by providing me with so fanciful an understanding of cerebral anatomy, I figured I'd pay the favor forward as many times as possible."
I kind of wish everybody would shut up, both sides. All of this has been covered before. When people go on about the same shit over and over defending it as completely 100% true no compromises, that makes me even more skeptical, and frankly, sick of it.
I can see where you're coming from, but discourse is one of the best ways to generate new thought and ideas. Additionally, there are people out there (like myself), who were only taught about the merits of evolution (or creationism!), and this was a very accessible platform for people who want to learn more to be involved. I actually think more things like this need to happen to educate more people who might otherwise overlook the information.
Found a new article about the third eye....I know [MENTION=10272]John Newton[/MENTION] is probably interested, but you should all check it out too!!
Located in nearly the direct center of the brain, the tiny pinecone-shaped pineal gland, which habitually secretes the wondrous neurohormone melatonin while we sleep at night, was once thought to be a vestigial leftover from a lower evolutionary state.
Indeed, according to recent research, we could be increasing our chances of contracting chronic illnesses like cancer by unnecessarily bathing its evenings in artificial light, working night shifts or staying up too late. By disrupting the pineal gland and melatonin's chronobiological connection to Earth's rotational 24-hour light and dark cycle, known as its circadian rhythm, we're possibly opening the doors not to perception, but to disease and disorder. A recently published study from Vanderbilt University has found associations between circadian disruption and heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
By hacking what pinealophiles call our mind's third eye with an always-on technoculture transmitting globally at light-speed, we may have disadvantaged our genetic ability to ward off all manner of complicated nightmares. No wonder the pineal gland is a pop-culture staple for sci-fi, fantasy and horror fandom, as well as a mass attractor of mystics and mentalists. Its powers to divide and merge our light and dark lives only seems to grow the more we take it seriously.
"We still lack a complete understanding of the pineal gland," University of Michigan professor of physiology and neurology Jimo Borjigin, a pioneer in medical visualization of the pineal gland's melatonin secretion, told me. "Numerous molecules are found in the pineal, many of which are uniquely found at night, and we do not have a good idea of what their functions are. The only function that is established beyond doubt is the melatonin synthesis and secretion at night, which is controlled by the central clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus and modulated by light. All else is speculative."
Discerning between the science and speculation of the pineal gland hasn't been easy since long before Rene Descartes called it the "principal seat of the soul" after studying it at length nearly four centuries ago. (Although "no evidence exists to support this," clarified Borjigin.) So here's a handy shortlist of things you should know about the pineal gland.
1. Third Eyes and Theosophistry
The current scientific understanding is that the pineal gland probably started out as an eye, and it receives signals from light and our retinas. Whether it was our only eye which shrunk into the brain once its perceptive tasks were taken care of by our two newer eyes, or whether it was a third eye with a spiritual and physical connection to previous spiritual and evolutionary states, or both, has galvanized science and speculation for centuries.
Earth's ancient cultural histories are filled with folklore featuring both one-eyed and three-eyed beings of great power, from Shiva and Cyclops to that amiable fellow in The Twilight Zone's classic episode, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" and beyond. (From Beyond even: See below.) Associations can be found in Hinduism, whose seventh primary chakra Sahasara is a multilayered lotus that looks like the pineal gland's pinecone, and whose primary function is to perceive universal oneness, scientifically and spiritually speaking. Theosophists, who have been studying what they perceive as hidden knowledge since the Greeks and Romans ruled philosophical and scientific inquiry, have more recently claimed that the pineal gland is the spiritual engine of our evolution into "embryo gods, beings of consciousness and matter."
That description seems apt, given the astronomical power we have achieved in a few million yeas of evolution. While Homo sapiens' third eyes likely transformed into pineal glands along the way, today we can still find animals with photoreceptive third eyes, now called parietal eyes, like New Zealand's endangered tuatara. Fossils from other ancient creatures feature similar sockets in their skulls, making our pineal gland a candidate for an ex-eye.
2. What Was Once Hidden Is Now Hi-Res
Michigan University professor Borjigin and his team are hard at work on how the pineal gland and melatonin regulate our lives.
"The central circadian clock controls timing of almost all aspects of our life, including physiology and behavior, and melatonin is the best marker to decode the fingerprints of circadian timing in both humans and animals," he told me. "In the past, it was very difficult to study circadian properties of melatonin in animals due to technical limitations. My lab invented long-term pineal microdialysis, which permits automated, computer-controlled and high-resolution analysis of melatonin secretion from rodent pineal gland from four to 10 weeks in the same animal."
These visualizations could go a long way toward understanding how to hack melatonin, which the pineal gland secretes when we sleep and helps the brain repair and sync our bodies to Earth's rotation. Melatonin is a stunning compound, found naturally in plants, animals and microbes. A powerful antioxidant, its list of its medicinal uses only seems to grow each year, as we learn more about its ability to help with immune disorders, chronic illnesses, and neurodegeneration.
"Pineal microdialysis allows us to monitor melatonin secretion closely under various conditions to simulate jet lag, shiftwork, light pollution, diet manipulation and more to define the fingerprints of circadian response to environment, he added. "It also allows us to discover animals with extreme chronotypes, like early-birds or night-owls, to understand how individuals with different chronotype respond to circadian challenges differently. These are still ongoing studies, but hopefully some of the works will be published this year."
3. Artificial Light = Dark Future
What has been recently published about melatonin is already pretty significant, especially for those looking to combat breast and prostate cancer. Harvard University School of Public Health researcher Itai Kloog and his group published a series of studies in the last few years explaining how our "modern urbanized sleeping habitat" (PDF) is a massive hormone-based cancer risk. "We have blotted out the night sky" with artificial light, wrote Earth Island Journal's Holly Hayworth," citing Kloog's research and noting that half that light is wasted anyway.
"We've proven beyond a doubt that it's a risk factor," Kloog told me. "Light at night has been proven on many levels, by our group and many others, to definitely contribute to higher risk of developing hormonal cancer."
Kloog's team published five studies altogether, including analyses at local and global levels, and all of them found firm correlations between circadian and melatonin disruption and higher risks of cancer. Analyzing NASA's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program archive (to illuminate Earth's light-at-night coverage) and data from the World Health Organization, Kloog's group "found clearly that as women were more exposed to light at nighttime, their rates of breast cancer went up. Our Israel study found that going from minimum exposure to average exposure to light at night resulted in a 36 percent higher standard rate of breast cancer, and going from average to maximum was another 26 percent increase."
Using kernel smoothing to create density maps showing light exposure and cancer rates, Kloog's team found that another of its studies, which sourced more than 20,000 light sources by height and intensity, showed a clear association. For their two worldwide studies, they developed an algorithm to assign population weight average light exposure for every person in every city across the world, using WHO data, and again they found a clear association between cancer and light at night.
"For average light exposure per person, if you take an underdeveloped country like Nepal, we're talking about 0.02 nanowatts per centimeter squared," Kloog explained. "Compare that to the United States, where the average light exposure of a person is 57.5. Up until around 120 years ago, humans were basically exposed to 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness on average, seasons and latitudes permitting of course. But since the invention of the lightbulb, we've artificially stretched the day. We go to sleep late at night, we have lights on while we sleep, we have a shorter sleep duration. We have a lot of factors stretching out our days, relative to the light period we experienced during millions of years of previous evolution."
"It's something that's easy to take out of the equation," Kloog told me. "Go to sleep in a dark room. Use less light. Close the shutters. Circadian disruption is carcinogenic to humans."
4. Occult Classic
This is not to say that late-night viewing itself isn't good for the mind, especially when it comes to pineal glands and third eyes. Because pineal glands and third eyes remain singular components of an otherwise binary brain with an extraordinary past, they have stimulated some stranger explorations of their spiritual and supernatural possibility. The pineal gland's circadian dualism has achieved particular resonance with influential occultists like horror influential H.P. Lovecraft. Who, in turn, have spawned new generations of speculative talents that have used it as a quite flexible receptacle for expansive meaning.
"My first exposure to the pineal gland came from Stuart Gordon's movie adaptation of Lovecraft's From Beyond," Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of the cult sci-fi television classic The Middleman, told AlterNet. "In truth, everything I know about that particular endocrine body probably derives from that seminal experience, which explains why I am a television writer and not a brain surgeon."
In From Beyond, a supernaturally activated pineal gland turns mad scientists into brain-eating zombies. The recently reissued 1957 exploitation film She Devil features a "female monster" whose hyperstimulated pineal gland turns her into "a demon, a devil, a creature with a warped soul!" In both films, and many other third-eye head-trips, functions as a sexualized organ, rather than a circadian regulator. Today, some use melatonin supplements, available since the '90s, to aid with sexual dysfunction. But the pineal gland's expansive mythic and scientific history has much broader applications when it comes to folklore and entertainment.
"In The Middleman, we quickly discovered that because this most mysterious of glands is so misunderstood, even though its very name connotes a certain frisson of scientific accuracy and technical understanding, it was a fantastic shorthand for whatever otherworldly qualities we needed to justify," Grillo-Marxuach added. "Over the course of 12 episodes, the pineal gland became the source of psychic ability, communication between parallel dimensions, the magical influence of succubi and incubi over the libidos of ordinary mortals and, finally, the power source for our main supervillain's armageddon device. Since Stuart Gordon and H.P. Lovecraft gave me such a gift in my teenage years by providing me with so fanciful an understanding of cerebral anatomy, I figured I'd pay the favor forward as many times as possible."
Very interesting! There's quite a bit of information out there on artificial light from screens, melatonin, and sleep patterns. Also, there's work on how factors of the built environment (e.g., less natural light, light pollution, noise, etc.) also impact us physically. I've mostly read about the amygdala, which controls the 'fight or flight' response (i.e., physiological stress).
It's also the centre for senses and emotions- without it, we would just be null of anything feelings. There are some beliefs that if we can actively trigger our frontal amygdala, we can reach levels of transcendence. For some, this is the goal of meditation!
I wonder if it's somehow associated with the third eye as well.
None of that is new and it generates nothing new. This was a stunt as always.
It's always science vs. 6000 year Christian creationism. That's not new. That's pigeonholing and it's some bullshit is what it is. Political stunting on both sides.
Where's Shinto? Where's Hinduism? What about the other creations? Why aren't they there? They aren't there because it's a set up because both sides are only interested in setting things up to knock them down.
They don't want you to look at new things. They want you to look at old things again so you don't forget!
It was put on by the Creationism museum, so that's likely why other beliefs weren't included. I mean you can't deny the outright benefit that the Christian creationists are getting from it! I agree that the scope was limited, but I also think it'll get people talking and interested in the topic. Getting someone interested in science and understanding where we come from is the most essential part in them understanding and gaining knowledge about it.
I see it's purpose as being what TEDTalks do- except more accessible and relatable to the public.
I do wonder if there will be a backlash in the education system. Some people have been saying that Bill Nye might have done a disservice to the K-12 system and having evolutionary being taught....I don't know about the American system - as in Canada where I'm from, creationism wasn't taught - but it would be a shame if they limited the teaching of evolution even more.