Consciousness and the Paranormal

[nameless]

When I think of the creative mind and drinking I think, Pollocks.

 

[Burnt State]

How many previous lives have you had, exactly? ;-)

I am a firm believer in personal transformation and playing many roles on this great stage of fools. Now I'm just working on refining this current life until I start heading towards older ages. I figure I have at least two or three more incarnations to go, one of which will be dementia, but prior to that i'll want to just tend the garden like Hesse did and write poetry about plants.

Of course we are only looking here at a writer in terms of his quality of output, aren't we?and not thinking they might drink for the same good reasons anyone else does. And we also assume they would just go on and on better and better had they not ever, ignoring any relationships more complicated than "if . . . Then" when it's the totality of all influences from which we can't extract any one thing. After all How much better do you think Hemingway Faulkner or Thomas could have been? The answer to that might have been what set them to drinking in the first and last places.

Once upon a long night a friend took me through each and every one of the AA 12 steps program, encouraging me that I could be a much better, and even more productive person sans addiction - confession: he was right. The thing is the reasons for addiction are eventually lost in the addiction itself and so all three of those writers were just busy living their lives as addicts, some more functional than others, the reasons were irrelevant long ago. Both Faulkner and Hemingway managed to hit sustained high points in writing before the end. They could not have been any better.

However, I think Thomas cut himself short, as did Plath, addicted to despair. I feel like we as audience lost a lot in their self-destruction, even moreso their families. Their specific potential was just starting to climax in their final works. For both, the story was quiet lives of desperation, totally outside the writing, yet totally interwoven with who they were.

 

[smcder]

I am a firm believer in personal transformation and playing many roles on this great stage of fools. Now I'm just working on refining this current life until I start heading towards older ages. I figure I have at least two or three more incarnations to go, one of which will be dementia, but prior to that i'll want to just tend the garden like Hesse did and write poetry about plants.



Once upon a long night a friend took me through each and every one of the AA 12 steps program, encouraging me that I could be a much better, and even more productive person sans addiction - confession: he was right. The thing is the reasons for addiction are eventually lost in the addiction itself and so all three of those writers were just busy living their lives as addicts, some more functional than others, the reasons were irrelevant long ago. Both Faulkner and Hemingway managed to hit sustained high points in writing before the end. They could not have been any better.

However, I think Thomas cut himself short, as did Plath, addicted to despair. I feel like we as audience lost a lot in their self-destruction, even moreso their families. Their specific potential was just starting to climax in their final works. For both, the story was quiet lives of desperation, totally outside the writing, yet totally interwoven with who they were.

yep

could also be parenthood - giving birth to Iago, Ahab or Judge Glanton might set one to drinking

 

[smcder]

When I think of the creative mind and drinking I think, Pollocks.

Pollocks!

 

[nameless]

gyeasss

 

[smcder]

I am a firm believer in personal transformation and playing many roles on this great stage of fools. Now I'm just working on refining this current life until I start heading towards older ages. I figure I have at least two or three more incarnations to go, one of which will be dementia, but prior to that i'll want to just tend the garden like Hesse did and write poetry about plants.



Once upon a long night a friend took me through each and every one of the AA 12 steps program, encouraging me that I could be a much better, and even more productive person sans addiction - confession: he was right. The thing is the reasons for addiction are eventually lost in the addiction itself and so all three of those writers were just busy living their lives as addicts, some more functional than others, the reasons were irrelevant long ago. Both Faulkner and Hemingway managed to hit sustained high points in writing before the end. They could not have been any better.

However, I think Thomas cut himself short, as did Plath, addicted to despair. I feel like we as audience lost a lot in their self-destruction, even moreso their families. Their specific potential was just starting to climax in their final works. For both, the story was quiet lives of desperation, totally outside the writing, yet totally interwoven with who they were.

Living their lives with addiction, I think - a more expansive view . . . Interesting the idea of addicted to despair . . . What exotic creatures we are for what we can get addicted to - it may be a graduate seminar in Xenopsychology on some other planet or maybe they do it so much better than we do!

 

[Burnt State]

Living their lives with addiction, I think - a more expansive view . . . Interesting the idea of addicted to despair . . . What exotic creatures we are for what we can get addicted to - it may be a graduate seminar in Xenopsychology on some other planet or maybe they do it so much better than we do!

Which then leads back to all those alien abduction reports where the so called greys are fascinated with these things called human emotions. We may indeed be quite exotic that way, an internal confusion of combustible feelings from agony to ecstasy. Obviously they never had a chance to abduct any characters from Camus' novels. Maybe then they would see we have the capacity to be indifferent just like them.

 

[smcder]

Which then leads back to all those alien abduction reports where the so called greys are fascinated with these things called human emotions. We may indeed be quite exotic that way, an internal confusion of combustible feelings from agony to ecstasy. Obviously they never had a chance to abduct any characters from Camus' novels. Maybe then they would see we have the capacity to be indifferent just like them.

There's a chapter on Camus in Shattucks "Forbidden Knowledge" I highly recommend the book to you.

 

[Burnt State]

There's a chapter on Camus in Shattucks "Forbidden Knowledge" I highly recommend the book to you.

In another life you are the librarian of the planet. I just read through the chapter titles - this text looks amazing. Perhaps instead of writing curriculm for cash this summer I'll take up reading again. You've offered up so many exceptional texts to go over in the last couple of months I don't know where to start. I do like the promethean angle - my favourite myth of all. Nothing like the furtive seeker stealing secrets from the gods to advance our own plight no matter the cost to self or the masses...oh Dr. Frankenstein, you should have just left well enough alone and never invented that CPU.

 

[manxman]

humans have always used drugs of choice, to numb the pain of existence, or in their view, enhance their existence.

personally i only use as much as i can afford.

 

[smcder]

In another life you are the librarian of the planet. I just read through the chapter titles - this text looks amazing. Perhaps instead of writing curriculm for cash this summer I'll take up reading again. You've offered up so many exceptional texts to go over in the last couple of months I don't know where to start. I do like the promethean angle - my favourite myth of all. Nothing like the furtive seeker stealing secrets from the gods to advance our own plight no matter the cost to self or the masses...oh Dr. Frankenstein, you should have just left well enough alone and never invented that CPU.

I've applied to fill a position in Borges Library of Babel - another recommended reading as it ties in to many of your thoughts above and this thread in general.

Francis Bacons essay ends Shattucks book "The Sphinx" - I'll see if I can find a link

 

[smcder]

The Library of Babel

 

[smcder]

humans have always used drugs of choice, to numb the pain of existence, or in their view, enhance their existence.

personally i only use as much as i can afford.

As much as you can afford now ... Or later?

 

[smcder]

XXVIII. Sphinx; Or Science. Bacon, Francis. Of the Wisdom of the Ancients. 1857

 

[Burnt State]

I've applied to fill a position in Borges Library of Babel - another recommended reading as it ties in to many of your thoughts above and this thread in general.

I was going to post this in the shapeshifters thread as it seemed appropriate but as you brought up yet another of my literary heroes perhaps it can go here as it is a story that investigates issues of identity/consciousness as well as god hood.

Everything and Nothing (edit) :: J. L. Borges | The Floating Library

 

[mike]

I'm not as think as you drunk i am ossifer

 

[smcder]

I'm not as think as you drunk i am ossifer

better the bottle in front of me than the frontal lobotomy . . . (variously attributed)

 

[smcder]

I was going to post this in the shapeshifters thread as it seemed appropriate but as you brought up yet another of my literary heroes perhaps it can go here as it is a story that investigates issues of identity/consciousness as well as god hood.

Everything and Nothing (edit) :: J. L. Borges | The Floating Library

Post it there too, I think? And The Library of Babel - an interesting thing to put side by side with the discussion of oral tradition.

The Library of Babel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[boomerang]

Much of Hemingway's character and that of numerous other creative people throughout history is best viewed within the context of Bipolar Disorder. Note that Manic Depression is the most heritable of all psychiatric disorders and that suicide is a sadly recurrent theme in the Hemingway family.
In Ernest Hemingway's family, there have been 5 suicides over 4 generations! - OMG Facts Sex
And--writers mostly live in the left hemisphere of their brains. Not the happiest region of the neuro-psyche.

Stanford Physicist: Vast, Powerful Realm Between Particles Influenced by Human Consciousness » The Epoch Times

Mike, thanks for the link. If that interface between matter/energy and consciousness is ever truly located, what might we find there? Is knowledge of access to that interface already possessed by more advanced species, or possibly buried in a very deep space in human culture? This should be where normal meets paranormal, a place to search for the origins of the UFO and other strange things.

 

[Randall]

Mike, thanks for the link. If that interface between matter/energy and consciousness is ever truly located, what might we find there? Is knowledge of access to that interface already possessed by more advanced species, or possibly buried in a very deep space in human culture? This should be where normal meets paranormal, a place to search for the origins of the UFO and other strange things.

Sorry but it's laced with quantum-woo. The article talks about the EM waves created by the brain that are believed to be associated with consciousness. That part is fine, and we've known about it for a long time. But saying, "The consciousness can, in a way, affect or interact with a power greater than anything conventional instruments have been able to measure thus far." is at best an unsubstantiated opinion. Human instruments and engineering are capable of dealing with EM fields millions of times more powerful than what a brain puts out ( e.g. radio transmitters ), and there are tools that are sensitive to EM fields beyond the ability of our biological systems to detect on any level ( e.g. superconducting sensors ). That's not the whole of it of course, but I don't have the time to deconstruct it all in written detail right now. Just trust me, it's fine up to a point and then falls off the ledge like most other quantum-woo.