That's Some Kind of Neighbors

That's Some Kind of Neighbors

In our town neighbors post notice for discarded items to pick up. For free. On the porch, or at the curb. 

You never know what might show up. I'm still keeping a candle lit that I might score that last Fabergé Egg which will complete my collection. No, I'm not just waiting for a curb pick up. I have key people at key points around the globe on high alert should something come up. Cost? Hey, did I tell you we live in Montclair, New Jersey. Do I need to say more?

Moving along ... Recently I got wind of these two boxes of toy building blocks. Free. Come and get 'em. First come, first served.

I jumped on it. 

Got 'em!

Here's the interesting part. As you can see in the photo below, that's quite a lineup of so many random shapes. The thing is, though, look at how meticulously they are displayed. That's quite a thing for giving away a couple of boxes of toy building blocks. 

Think about it. Look. Look how carefully and thoughtfully they are presented. Art, really. Who does that? Good neighbors do. Still I'm really blown away at the presentation. Think of the time and care it took. Those pieces look like they could have been arranged with some sort of laser measuring device, so exactly are they placed next to one another. And, the choices that were made to put what where. Props upon props.

Again, just to give away some toy blocks!

Thank you good — and kind — neighbors!

I'm thinking that stilllife perhaps is a challenge. Those blocks are symbols of endless creative potential. "See what we can do? Now, you go!"

I'll try to do them justice. Consider this write up a first installment on that project.

Interdependent Origination ... Dig It!

Source: What is Interdependent Origination? 

Francesca Fremantle Lion's Roar June 1, 2003

Interdependent origination (Sanskrit, pratityasamutpada) is the law of causality, which the Buddha discovered at his awakening. It revealed to him the whole truth of existence, and in penetrating it he became the Awakened One. What he saw was a total vision of how and why all beings throughout space and time are entangled in samsara for countless lives, as well as his own past lives in his progress toward liberation. This was the extraordinary insight that distinguished his teaching from others, so it is said, “whoever sees interdependent origination sees the dharma, whoever sees the dharma sees the Buddha.” When Assaji, one of the Buddha’s first disciples, was asked by Shariputra about his master’s teaching, his reply was a summary of interdependent origination, which became famous as the fundamental doctrine of buddhadharma:

Whatever things are cause-produced, the Tathagata has told their cause; and what their cessation is, thus the great ascetic teaches.

According to this law, nothing has independent, permanent, or absolute existence. Everything is part of a limitless web of interconnections and undergoes a continual process of transformation. Every appearance arises from complex causes and conditions, and in turn combines with others to produce countless effects. By interrupting the causal chain at certain key points, the course of existence can be altered and effects prevented by eliminating their causes.

This law embraces all the basic principles of Buddhism. (The late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said that the whole range of teachings, from the shravakayana to dzogchen, has only the meaning of interdependent origination.) It demonstrates the doctrines of karma and rebirth. The three marks of existence are inherent within it: there is no unchanging self in this process, and it is characterized by impermanence and suffering, since whatever comes into being must change and pass away. The four noble truths flow from it: the first truth is the recognition of inherent suffering; the second truth, the cause of suffering, is shown by the law; understanding the cause of suffering leads to its cessation, the third truth; therefore, there is a path to liberation, the fourth truth.

Its best known formulation is the twelve causal links, which has been called the karmic chain reaction. In the traditional image of the Wheel of Life, it depicts the life, death and rebirth of sentient beings, but it can also be understood as the life cycle of appearances, actions, thoughts or any phenomenon whatever. Essentially it analyzes the process of an illusion crystallizing out of emptiness and being taken for reality.

The twelve links are:
(1) ignorance or unawareness, which imagines self and the world to have intrinsic existence;
(2) conditioning, the karmic forces that ripen in the ground of ignorance from seeds sown in previous lives and form the conditioning factors of the next life;
(3) consciousness, arising from conditioning, which carries the sense of self and operates through the mind and senses;
(4) name and form, the totality of an individual’s mental and physical constituents;
(5) the six senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mental faculty;
(6) contact, the meeting of the senses with their objects;
(7) feeling, the positive or negative sensations aroused by contact;
(8) thirst, the desire to possess or avoid these sensations;
(9) grasping, the physical, verbal or mental action that follows thirst;
(10) existence or becoming, the coming into existence that results from grasping;
(11) birth, manifesting in one of the six realms;
(12) decay and death, the process of aging and passing away that inevitably follows birth.

The circle of the twelvefold chain is continuous, a self-contained system without beginning or end. At death we fall back into ignorance and start all over again. The whole cycle can be contemplated in reverse order, starting with death and tracing its causes back to ignorance. Although the links appear sequentially, they may also be seen as interconnected, simultaneous, and mutually dependent. The wheel is a schematic picture, designed to demonstrate the conditioned and relative nature of apparent existence, while exposing sentient beings’ intense attachment and habituation to the causes of suffering.

But on what does the law of causality rest? Nagarjuna declares that interdependent origination itself is emptiness, and this identity is the Middle Way, while the Heart Sutra proclaims “in emptiness… there is no ignorance or extinction of ignorance, up to no decay and death and no extinction of decay and death.” Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche says of the Wheel of Life, “this wheel is the portrait of samsara and therefore also of nirvana, which is the undoing of the samsaric coil,” bringing to mind his wonderfully vivid image of self-liberation, “the snake-knot of conceptual mind uncoils in space.”

For significant as life and death may seem, genuine as suffering is, and seriously as we must regard the law of karma, as long as we remain within samsara, nothing produced by interdependent origination has ultimate reality. It is an illusion appearing from ignorance, whose nature is the error of belief in self. Since it has never existed it cannot be destroyed. It is dispelled only by the wisdom of nonself. Transcending both existence and nonexistence, it is self-liberated into emptiness, the vast openness of space beyond conceptual thought.

Jerrey Epstein ... Friend of Gravity?

Science Philanthropist, Jeffrey Epstein, Convenes a Conference of Nobel Laureates to Define Gravity

Twenty one of the world’s top physicists, including three Nobel Laureates, opened a symposium on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands to debate the essence of gravity and a unified gravity theory.

First ... my 2 cents: I would certainly seem that science is where we look for answers. You do know that science deals in the measurable. Names and divisions. That's fine. But ... if there is a "measurable" then there must be an "immeasurable". No? As a professional educator with Rolf Structural Integration a career long goal is to not only assist individuals to find a workable bodily balance in respect to the dictates of Gravity, but also to get across the simply observable fact — when you see it — that humans have some evolutionary steps to go to live into our full potential for having our bodies arranged according to Anatomical Design and the Laws of Physics; i.e., stacked up comfortably along the vertical, with everything level and even. It is noticeable to me that this point of view probably wasn't represented with the scientists, with all their theories and formulas. We didn't have a seat at that table. We're sitting at another table, inviting the scientists to step away from their microscopes and telescopes into the tangibly perceptible presence of the Force of Gravity.

New York, NY, March 29, 2012 —(PR.com)— Twenty one of the world’s top physicists, including three Nobel Laureates, opened a symposium on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands to debate the essence of gravity and a unified gravity theory. The private meetings were called, “Confronting Gravity: A workshop to explore fundamental questions in physics and cosmology.” The goal of the conference was to establish what the current consensus is, if any, for defining gravity.

The conference was financed by science philanthropist, Jeffrey Epstein and his foundation, J. Epstein Virgin Islands Inc. It was organized by physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, and Inaugural Director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. The Nobel laureates included, particle physicists, Gerardus‘t Hooft, David Gross and Frank Wilczek. Other scientists in attendance were theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, Jim Peebles from Princeton University, Alan Guth from MIT, Kip Thorne from Caltech, Lisa Randall from Harvard University, Barry Barish from LIGO, the gravitational wave observatory, a bevy of observational cosmologists and Maria Spiropulu from CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

Understanding gravity is critical right now Krauss argues because “many of the key ideas at the forefront of particle physics cosmology relate to our lack of understanding of how to accommodate gravity and quantum mechanics.” Indeed, conventional notions of gravity require little to no spatial energy for entities to be bound to the other, a sense of anti-gravity or vacuum. But on the quantum level, subatomic particles are bound by the exchange of increasingly intense energy parcels: electrons by the exchange of photons, neutrons and protons (made up of quarks) by the exchange of gluons, and the decay of quarks and leptons by the exchange of vector W and Z bosons.

To make it even harder, there is a lack of experimental evidence in the murky field of quantum gravity, and classical physics has really only observed the effects of gravity over larger ranges of 50 orders of magnitude of mass, i.e., for masses of objects from about 10−23 to 1030 kg.

The outcome of the conference however was quite astounding, Krauss asserts. There was a general consensus that gravity might exist in the form of gravitational waves and that these waves could be a part of “what we’ve been calling, empty space.”

The notion of gravitational waves is not new. They were predicted by Einstein to exist from the curvature of space time, and although they’ve never been directly detected, there is indirect evidence from the study of binary stars, neutron stars and black holes. What bothers Krauss though is that there’s still a lack of basic physics to explain them. “...We have these ideas and these parameters and every experiment is consistent with this picture, and yet nothing points to the fundamental physics beneath it.”

At the conference though, Krauss and others focused on finding such an explanation. Empty space, they suggested, is perhaps neither full, nor empty but is rather in a state of flux between intense energy spurts and their cancellation. “We know empty space isn't empty, because it's full of these virtual particles that pop in and out of existence,” Krauss points out, “If you try and calculate the energy level in a hydrogen atom, and you don't include those virtual particles, you get a wrong answer. Every now and then you have an electron positron pair that pops into existence,” he continues. “And [while] the electron wants to hang around near the proton because it's oppositely charged, the positron is pushed to the outskirts of the atom, and while there, they change the atom’s charged distribution in a very small, but calculable, way. Feynman and others calculated that effect, which allows us to get agreement between theory and observation at the level of nine decimal places. It's the best prediction in all of science. There's no other place in science where, from fundamental principles, you can calculate a number and compare it to an experiment at nine decimal places like that.”

But if empty space is full of intense virtual particles, not to mention other particles, it’s equally full of the cancellation of energy. Symmetry in nature occurs all the time, Krauss notes and can produce exact cancellations, for example the peak of a wave coinciding with the trough of another. Absolute cancellation is mathematically challenging though, Krauss points out. “You can't take two [energy] numbers that are very large and expect them to exactly cancel leaving something that's 120 orders of magnitude smaller left over. And that's what would be required to have an energy that was comparable with the observational upper limits on the energy of empty space.”

To deal with this difficulty, Krauss simply derives that the energy of empty space could never be exactly zero. And to distinguish it from pure empty space, one would have to measure it over time as it fluctuates. “The only observation that would give you positive information is if you could measure it changing over time. Then you'd know it wasn't vacuum energy.”

This view of not quite empty space, made up of intense energies that almost cancel each other out, might very well help to explain the physics of gravitational waves beyond the consequences of curved space time: not just in their architecture but their capacity to occur in both the high energy quantum realm as well as the apparent voids of gravitational space.

“Right now we're floundering,” Krauss admits. “We're floundering, in a lot of different areas.” But from a gravity point of view, that approach might well lead to a unified theory.

Free you are already. How could the free ever be bound? It is a lie. You were never bound. How could the unlimited ever be limited by anything? Infinite divided by infinite, added to infinite, multiplied by infinite remains infinite. You are infinite; God is infinite. You are all infinite. There cannot be two existences, only one. The Infinite can never be made finite. You are never bound. That is all. You are free already. You have reached the goal -- all there is to reach. Never allow the mind to think that you have not reached the goal.

~ Swami Vivekananda

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Do this: vote the party/candidates of your choice. For sure. And, also, vote for RENEWAL too. Regardless of party choice, RENEWAL is a vote also on the ballot. The human ballot. The ballot of the Heart.

Whos the candidate? You are. I am.

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New, New Times Square

New, New Times Square

Tokyo ... suck it!

After being away from the Big Apple for twelve years we moved to nearby New Jersey in 2006. On a visit to the City one evening we drove through the Times Square area. And then around some familiar neighborhoods. 

What a surprise. Shock really. Corporate commerce everywhere. So many people. So many. In Times Square, tourists spread liberally like jam on toast. Traffic moving across Broadway at 44th Street as slow as a chicken trying to lay an overlarge egg. [What? You think I should have just said "Molasses"?]

Also, the signage. Times Square has always been famous for it's bright lights, it's big billboard signs. I once worked in the area right across from the Bond Building when Camel cigarettes featured that famous guy blowing smoke rings into the air. The once remembered charm of the historic buildings is now papered over with billboards. Mostly, razed for sleek slab sided efficiencies. I once had my office at 1515 Broadway when it was the Grant Building. My view was from the 23 floor facing north. Directly across the street I enjoyed seeing what must have been a pre-WWI multi-story office building. Brownstone, if I recall right. You know the kind, bay windows, maybe a turret or two; narrow hallways with solid wood shiny varnished office doors with hand lettering in gold outlined in black on pebble textured wavy no-see-through privacy glass. Mail slots near the bottom. Transoms over every door. Lots of wood inside too. Paneling, door and window trim, furniture, file cabinets. Mickey Spillane kind of stuff. Tin Pan Alley songsters. Assorted small circulation magazine publishers. 

Only now, there aren't any more those paper billboards lit with regular incandescent bulbs on fixtures jutting outside. Or, neon. They're lit from inside! High tech. Video monitors writ large. BRIGHT! Motion. Changing in whichever way the guys with their hands on the levers decide. Them guys are not really some grungy nerds in some dank cellar, or even some well scrubbed, over-educated Young Turks. Really, just some algorithms cooked up by said fellows, and running on AI all by themselves. Big Brother knows best.

Algorithms. It's the thing. If you haven't noticed. Like this: I looked up "mousetraps" on a search and now all I'm seeing is ads for mousetraps. Nude midgets. Hey, don't judge. That's on account of algorithms. They know what you want. They give you what you want. They tell you what you want. Did you think Rise of the Machine was gonna look like some big contraption? It is a contraption, for sure. Just a conceptual one. In binary digits of 0's and 1's. A bit of this, a bit of that. You and me, we're baked into a pie. And, it's for sale. We're commodities now. 

So, just thinking about the next new, new thing over in Times Square; what will it be? If my rummaging around online is being sifted through an algorithm for the kindly, unselfish purpose of providing me with whatever the F I may be wanting, how about bringing that utility in real time right there while I'm strolling the dirty boulevard. BTW ... it's not nearly so dirty as when I first arrived in the Big Apple. Then it was: Grant's. Jean "Shep" Shephard up late nights on "Radio Free Broadway". Porno movie houses up and down 42nd Street. Peep shows you entered through narrow doorways tucked here and there. [Not me, but it was a thing.] Guys pushing little sheets of paper with ads for what seemed like a zillions of massage parlors. "Check it out!" Later, after prohibiting laws were passed, we had the sanitized "Rap Parlors". Yes, for a few bucks you could go and talk with a naked lady [I assume]. That's my kind of Times Square! Walkin' on the Wild Side. Love to hate it.

Anyway ... Real Time Interactive Signage. How's that gonna work? You know that chip they inserted into you? That chip. You don't have the chip? Wasamattawidya? Get the chip!

For more on the "chip" subject. Read here.

That cute little you-almost-don't-even-know-it's-there chip, it says everything about you. Vitals. GPS. History. Resume. The naughty, and the nice. But, the real beauty of it ... what you're thinking. And, based on what you've been thinking, what you're gonna be thinking. Brave New World. Aldous Huxley ... what he described is for pussies. We're in the 21st Century, boy! Belly up to the AI bar. Take your seat. And, we already know what your "usual" is so no need to deal with the barkeep. And, we know when you'll arrive at said barstool so that little drinkypoo will be there nice and freshly poured at the exact moment you platz. Prepaid, since your bankcard is on file too. 

So there you are, strolling Broadway. Holy Cow! As you look up at any perticular signage — in real time mind you — you'll see exactly what the all-knowing, all-seeing algorithm knows you should see. Coordinated ever so adroitly to coincide with the nearest place you can go to get said necessity. And, if it's a bit of a drive, you'll get a Uber in a jiffy to give you a Lift to said source of your next transitory happiness. And, so on. Down the road. A sort of bend over, we know this'll be good for ya kind of world.

Listen. This is not some idle speculation. The tech is in hand. Just now need the will to set it in motion. Of course, the basis for such a decision will be what's called monetization. In other words, what's in it for me.

I know. What a cynic I am. I was a Mad Ave Ad Biggie, so cynicism is part of the job requirement. 

There's hope. 

Just be here now. Where else can I be, you may say. Be here now ... as in, just that; nothing else. No algorithm can get you now. In the NOW. It's only designed to operate in the past, and in the future. Which, you may have noticed doesn't exist. 

The way out of dragging the past, and concerning about the future: WAKE THE F UP! 

THE Secret of the Pyramids

THE Secret of the Pyramids ... 

[Updated for Popular Consumption]

If you think this is about how they did it ... fuggedaboutit. Yet, maybe in what follows that will inspire some one smarty pants to figger that out too.

Those Egyptians went Green a long time ago. Like, now, we're going Green. "Sustainability" baby. You might at this point ask about if those fancy Egyptians had their shit so together over sustainability, show me then where the F are they? That's a question for the ages. Above my pay grade. Go figger.

We want to reduce our human emissions of gasses and all the other forms of shit what's been polluting the environment and contributing to global warming. Killing our planet, really. Fish? Do you know what's in your Fish? Do we even think there will be Fish? Don't look good, the way we're dumping into the water. 

What we got to show so far? Renewable energy. Electric cars. Photovoltaic. Wind power. It seems a good thing that we're looking to nature for guidance. Hurrah! Wind power. For sure. No polluting fossil fuels. Sun power. Yes!

I recently learned that the movement(s) of the Oceans themselves are being harnessed as motive power sources to convert into electricity. Waves, and currents. Wow! Yes! 

Maybe some smarty will come up with a way to generate electricity just out of the stomp, stomp, stomp of our shoes going where we are going and doin' whatever the F we want to do when we get there. That's a lot of steps. Somebody probably has already counted them. Look it up. Strength in numbers. 

Since we're looking now at the obvious — Nature — maybe some looking at some other obviousnesses. The Pyramids? The Pyramids!

That's right the Pyramids. Energy generators. This I don't think is a new idea. But, up until now mostly an esoteric, metaphysical speculation. But, what if there's something to it? 

My bright idea is based off this. On "mass pressure"; the pressure of mass. It could be that there's some kind of mass pressure focused in the design of those neatly stacked stones of the Pyramids. If we think of pressure as a movement, then maybe the Pyramids are in fact energy generators. If we entertain that possibility, let's see. What can we come up with? You can thank me later.

So the F what, you say? Here's the F what. How about we figger out how to use the mass pressure of those mountains as motive sources. They're just lying around anyway. Okay, so the snow melts and we get the water recycled. Fresh air up there. Nice challenge to climb. Thank you mountains! 

How about we convert the super tonnage to energy? I don't know how to do that. Hey, I'm an idea man. [See that pile of poop over there? I have an idea! Why don't you go and clean it up!] You do it!

That's it. Big whoop? Yes, big. Sustainability. "Mountainous"/"Mountaineous". What's the difference? If we can pull off what's my bright idea ... Big Diff! 

Other Search Engines

Other Search Engines ...

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worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

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repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.

Don't Mention the War!

 

What Is Your Orientation?

What is your orientation? 

As for me: Dahling ... "Pink" may be the "Navy Blue" of India, but "Verticality" is the "Navy Blue" of the Universe.

We certainly do live in interesting times! I'm not gonna go into that LGBTQQIP2SAA. Heck, I would have to go search just to tell you what all that stands for. Now that I'm on the scene, however, best add a "V" to that stringy acronym. "V" for "Verticality". You don't want to offend The Wronski!

It does give me pause that that's what the culture offers us in terms of choices of orientation. Gender identity, sexual preference. "Verticality"? WTF. [BTW, there is a trans procedure for that.]

Then there's that another way to look at orientation in the Land of Free: What you be wantin'? Baby I got it. Says the the marketers. There's just about a pill for everything. Ask your doctor. Does it occur that the frame we're enlisted in is easy to miss assumption that you can't live without a pharmaceutical drug? Probably not, we're so wrapped up in the choices. Starbucks. Just give me a Coffee! Large! Not "Vente". 

So, orientation, also can be applied to your lifestyle choices. What do you want to be when you grow up? Actually, truth told, I'm pretty well growed up and it's still an open question.

Don't get me wrong. Choose whatever your want. No problemo.

But ...

All the while, there's another question. The Perrenial Question. Just who it is that is having any preference at all ... who the frick is that? "ME! That who!" Of course. Simmer, dahling! But, now, who is this "ME"? 

"Huh?"

I'm for an orientation that goes: "Live in the world, but not of the World." There's a balance. "Keep one eye on the Lord." In basic terms ... don't forget to also live with the question of who — or, what — you are in fact? For Reals. After all the orientations and roles and accumulations are set aside. What's left? I AM.

Balance. That's were we leave the world of trying to decide if it's Pizza or Sushi tonight. Whether those brown shoes go with the blue suit; answer: NO! NEVER! Do I have to list the myriad of choices?

I choose the Vertical. It's not so much a thing. Well, it is. Has to do with bodily balance in line with the action of Gravity. More ... it has to do with "View". A balanced view. 

The Vertical we usually think about it in terms of it being a line. Looked at from the side, of course. But, where is it pointing? Interesting question. To the stars? To heaven? The limitation of seeing the Line of Gravity as a view is that one might take it that it's pointing aspect suggests some future outcome. 

Dahling, there's more!

If you cut through the Line of Gravity — like it was a strand of Spaghetti — and look into it, what do we see? 

You expect an answer? Don't you? 

Like I said, it's a view. Go there ... and, take a look for yourself!