As an introduction to Martin Witz’s outstanding documentary on Albert Hoffman, The Substance, I thought I’d share my experience of ingesting 20,000 mics or so of White Lightening acid when I was 16 years old – my first religious experience and one that reverberates through my being still to this day. It was a typically hot and humid Washington D.C. afternoon in 1967 and John and I were packing what was reputed to be Owsley’s latest batch of White Lightening acid into gelatin caps. The source was close to Owsley and the quality was certainly of Owsley’s caliber. We had no reason to believe it was anything less. John was my high school English teacher and he had good connections in San Francisco. He’d fly there regularly to purchase the latest batch of acid from Owsley’s people: Licorice-flavored Batman acid, purple tabs, orange tabs, white tabs, window pane, blotter, white powder…Was it all certified Owsley. We liked to think so.
Filling double 0 caps with fine LSD-laced powder was tricky business. We wore surgical gloves and masks so the acid wouldn’t get into our mouths or the pores of our skin. White Lightening was extremely pure and powerful LSD and the pile we were working with contained several thousand doses (at approx. 500 mics per dose). It wasn’t a precise system but we were careful. Packing the caps just so, not too tight, not too loose.
At one point, we stopped to take a break. There was a fan in the room that kept the humid air circulating and relatively dry. It was cautiously pointed away from the table. I had taken off my mask to get some air and was feeling slightly high from being exposed to some of the powder. John was feeling higher and did something stupid or, depending on how look at it, divine. He got up and absent-mindedly turned the fan in the direction of the table and the pile of acid. The White Lightening immediately became a psychedelic dust storm spinning toward my face and into my mouth and eyes. I ran to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked Marcel Marceau. But this wasn’t clown makeup. This was several thousand micrograms of high grade LSD. I blurted out “oh shit” and it was punctuated by a puff of white dust.
I started splashing my face with water, irrigating my eyes and washing out my mouth. But, it didn’t help. The acid was kicking in and I began the ultimate ego death trip.
Timothy Leary said if you didn’t go through a death trip experience on LSD you hadn’t taken enough. Well, I had. I sat on John’s living room floor and for what seemed like an eternity (and it was, relatively speaking) I died, was reborn, died again, born again, flipping the metaphysical television dial from cosmic station to cosmic station, whipping through the Bardo planes while hungry ghosts growled and laughed and mocked and danced and poked at me with their long ancient galactic fingers, chakras opening/closing, kundalini doing the serpent power mambo up my spinal cord, heart unfolding like a giant pulsing red lotus. I was passing through dimensions not even Rod Serling could imagine. Walls shimmered and breathed, rainbows everywhere, mandalas spinning like heavenly roulette wheels…I was so fucking high! And as far OUT and IN as I went, I remained calm. I was so overwhelmed that my ego made no attempt to resist. I was without fear. I felt at one with everything: huge, expansive, complete and unbounded, totally absorbed by the entirety of the Universe. GOD, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t somewhere out there, it was suffusing me, penetrating me and I was dissolving into its essence. I was in that moment of complete union with all things. I was no longer functioning as a separate entity; there was no fear because the one who did the fearing no longer existed. I was complete in my absolute non-existence. This was the white light experience where the ego is absorbed into the infinite molecular dance of absolute reality.
Enlightenment doesn’t happen to you because there’s no “you” for it to happen to. Enlightenment is there always. It’s that door of perception you walk through and suddenly disappear into. One moment you’re on the diving board. The next, you’re in the ocean.
12 hours later as I started to “come down”, I felt exhausted but refreshed, renewed and reborn. Within a matter of days, I returned to being my usual egocentric little self. But, I had had a genuine religious experience, one that has lingered throughout the years and one I often return to in small ways to put things into their proper perspective. LSD was wonderful. I tremble still in awe of its magic and often dream of finding some really pure acid out there…if it still exists. The Church of My Brain could use a nice house-cleaning.
I tried the old acid back in the eighties. Never had a bad trip, it was all good, actually very good. Music for one was 20 times better. When high on the psychedelic I appreciated the essence of everything, nothing was unimportant. Everything, from flowers to a brick wall, had a deep intrinsic value. And all problems and stress disappeared, it is like they say, you were only in the immediate moment, the past or the future didn’t matter. We would pop a few hits and go to punk gigs, the ensuing experience was exhilarating. The roaring dynamic punk rock would go right through you.
But it wasn’t for everyone. Some people would rekindle old negative baggage and get depressed. Being depressed on acid is a potentially harmful state to be in. When taking acid a person has to be in a positive mood and in a friendly and safe setting. I had very interesting experiences on the stuff.
Never under-estimate the creativity of human beings. Especially when it comes to the meaning of life. Many groups are in the seeker category. They are seeking the ultimate truth, the meaning of existence. One such group that seeks the truth in a very secretive way are the Rosicrucians.
Rosicrucianism is a generic term referring to studies or membership within a philosophical secret society said to have been founded in late medieval Germany by Christian Rosenkreuz. It holds a doctrine or theology “built on esoteric truths of the ancient past”, which, “concealed from the average man, provide insight into nature, the physical universe and the spiritual realm.” Rosicrucianism is symbolized by the Rosy Cross.
The Fama Fraternitatis presented the legend of a German doctor and mystic philosopher referred to as “Frater C.R.C.” (later identified in a third manifesto as Christian Rosenkreuz, or “Rose-cross”). The year 1378 is presented as being the birth year of “our Christian Father,” and it is stated that he lived 106 years. After studying in the Middle East under various masters, possibly adhering to Sufism, he was unable to spread the knowledge he had acquired to any prominent European figures. Instead, he gathered a small circle of friends/disciples and founded the Rosicrucian Order (this can be deduced to have occurred around 1407).
During Rosenkreuz’s lifetime, the Order was said to consist of no more than eight members, each a doctor and a sworn bachelor. Each member undertook an oath to heal the sick without payment, to maintain a secret fellowship, and to find a replacement for himself before he died. Three such generations had supposedly passed between c.1500 and c.1600, a time when scientific, philosophical and religious freedom had grown so that the public might benefit from the Rosicrucians’ knowledge, so that they were now seeking good men.
Another philosophical position is that there is no ultimate meaning to life. There is only the here and now (Zen position). The question is: Where were you before you were born? Nowhere. So when we pass on we go back to Nowhere.
WELL WE KNOW WHERE WE’RE GOIN’
BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHERE WE’VE BEEN
AND WE KNOW WHAT WE’RE KNOWIN’
BUT WE CAN’T SAY WHAT WE’VE SEEN
AND WE’RE NOT LITTLE CHILDREN
AND WE KNOW WHAT WE WANT
AND THE FUTURE IS CERTAIN
GIVE US TIME TO WORK IT OUT
We’re on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin’ that ride to nowhere
We’ll take that ride
I’m feelin’ okay this mornin’
And you know,
We’re on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go
CHORUS
Maybe you wonder where you are
I don’t care
Here is where time is on our side
Take you there…take you there
We’re on a road to nowhere
We’re on a road to nowhere
We’re on a road to nowhere
There’s a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it’s all right, baby, it’s all right
And it’s very far away
But it’s growing day by day
And it’s all right, baby, it’s all right
They can tell you what to do
But they’ll make a fool of you
And it’s all right, baby, it’s all right
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher’s stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base metals into the noble metals gold or silver, as well as an elixir of life conferring youth and longevity. Western alchemy is recognized as a protoscience that contributed to the development of modern chemistry and medicine. Alchemists developed a framework of theory, terminology, experimental process and basic laboratory techniques that are still recognizable today. But alchemy differs from modern science in the inclusion of Hermetic principles and practices related to mythology, religion, and spirituality.
The defining goals of alchemy are often given as the transmutation of common metals into gold (known as chrysopoeia), the creation of a panacea, and the discovery of a universal solvent. However, this only highlights certain aspects of alchemy. Alchemists have historically rewritten and evolved the explanation of their art, making a singular definition difficult. H.J. Sheppard gives the following as a comprehensive summary:
Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher’s Stone for metals; Elixir of Life for humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices).
In the eyes of a variety of esoteric and Hermetic practitioners, the heart of alchemy is spiritual. Transmutation of lead into gold is presented as an analogy for personal transmutation, purification, and perfection. This approach is often termed ‘spiritual’, ‘esoteric’, or ‘internal’ alchemy.
Early alchemists, such as Zosimos of Panopolis (c. AD 300), highlight the spiritual nature of the alchemical quest, symbolic of a religious regeneration of the human soul. This approach continued in the Middle Ages, as metaphysical aspects, substances, physical states, and material processes were used as metaphors for spiritual entities, spiritual states, and, ultimately, transformation. In this sense, the literal meanings of ‘Alchemical Formulas’ were a blind, hiding their true spiritual philosophy.
The origin of Western alchemy may generally be traced to Hellenistic Egypt. The Hellenistic city of Alexandria was a center of Greek alchemical knowledge, and retained its preeminence through most of the Greek and Roman periods. Here, elements of technology, religion, mythology, and Greek philosophy, each with their own much longer histories, combined to form the earliest known records of alchemy in the West. Zosimos of Panopolis wrote the oldest known books on alchemy while Mary the Jewess is credited as being the first non-fictitious Western alchemist. They wrote in Greek and lived in Egypt under Roman rule.
Technology – The dawn of Western alchemy is sometimes associated with that of metallurgy, extending back to 3500 BCE. Many writings were lost when the emperor Diocletian ordered the burning of alchemical books after suppressing a revolt in Alexandria (292 CE). Few original Egyptian documents on alchemy have survived, most notable among them the Stockholm papyrus and the Leyden papyrus X. Dating from 300 to 500 CE, they contained recipes for dyeing and making artificial gemstones, cleaning and fabricating pearls, and the manufacture of imitation gold and silver. These writings lack the mystical, philosophical elements of alchemy, but do contain the works of Bolus of Mendes (or Pseudo-Democritus) which aligned these recipes with theoretical knowledge of astrology and the Classical elements. Between the time of Bolus and Zosimos, the change took place that transformed this metallurgy into a Hermetic art.
The demise of Western alchemy was brought about by the rise of modern science with its emphasis on rigorous quantitative experimentation and its disdain for “ancient wisdom”. Although the seeds of these events were planted as early as the 17th century, alchemy still flourished for some two hundred years, and in fact may have reached its apogee in the 18th century. As late as 1781 James Price claimed to have produced a powder that could transmute mercury into silver or gold.
This Higgs boson particle (sometimes referred to as the God particle) has been all over the news for the last few days. I have heard, watched and read at least a dozen scientists and astronomers try to explain it in layman’s terms. I still don’t have a clue.
One fellow said it was like building a house out of bricks, then trying to understand what the bricks are made of, mortar you idiot!
This is something very few can grasp. But at least somebody is grasping it, it sure as heck isn’t me.
Does anybody get any of this?
A typical “candidate event” in the Higgs-hunting CMS experiment. Red lines represent high-energy proton beams while yellow lines show the tracks of particles produced in the collision.
In the years since the Higgs field and boson were proposed, several alternative models have been proposed by which the Higgs mechanism might be realized. The Higgs boson exists in some, but not all, theories. For example, it exists in the Standard Model and extensions such as the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model yet is not expected to exist in alternative models such as Technicolor. Models which do not include a Higgs field or a Higgs boson are known as Higgsless models. In these models, strongly interacting dynamics rather than an additional (Higgs) field produce the non-zero vacuum expectation value that breaks electroweak symmetry.
The Higgs boson is often referred to as the “God particle” by the media, after the title of Leon Lederman’s popular science book on particle physics, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest, many scientists dislike it, since it overstates the particle’s importance, not least since its discovery would still leave unanswered questions about the unification of quantum chromodynamics, the electroweak interaction, and gravity, as well as the ultimate origin of the universe. Higgs is an atheist, and is displeased that the Higgs particle is nicknamed the “God particle”, because the term “might offend people who are religious”.
As one comedian said the other night, there are 2 or 3 people in the world that truly understand quantum physics, one is Stephen Hawking, the other one or two are likely in insane asylums somewhere.
Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief
A series of new experiments shows that analytic thinking can override intuitive assumptions, including those that underlie religious belief
By Marina Krakovsky
People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science.
The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the origins of belief and disbelief. “To understand religion in humans,” Gervais says, “you need to accommodate for the fact that there are many millions of believers and nonbelievers.”
One of their studies correlated measures of religious belief with people’s scores on a popular test of analytic thinking. The test poses three deceptively simple math problems. One asks: “If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The first answer that comes to mind—100 minutes—turns out to be wrong. People who take the time to reason out the correct answer (five minutes) are, by definition, more analytical—and these analytical types tend to score lower on the researchers’ tests of religious belief.
But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either Rodin’s The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (The Thinker was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.) After seeing the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above the scale’s midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to think.
Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface. Gervais and Norenzayan did this by giving two groups a test of participants’ belief in supernatural agents like God and angels, varying only the font in which the test was printed. People who took the belief test in the unclear font (a typewriterlike font set in italics) expressed less belief than those who took it in a more common, easy-to-read typeface. “It’s such a subtle manipulation,” Norenzayan says. “Yet something that seemingly trivial can lead to a change that people consider important in their religious belief system.” On a belief scale of 3 to 21, participants in the analytic condition scored an average of almost two points lower than those in the control group.
Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don’t simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. “Analytic processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages religious belief,” Norenzayan explains.
Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene, who last year published a paper on the same subject with colleagues Amitai Shenhav and David Rand, praises this work for its rigorous methodology. “Any one of their experiments can be reinterpreted, but when you’ve got [multiple] different kinds of evidence pointing in the same direction, it’s very impressive.”
The study also gets high marks from University of California, Irvine, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, the only former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to have once been ordained as a Catholic priest, and who continues to assert that science and religion are compatible. Ayala calls the studies ingenious, and is surprised only that the effects are not even stronger. “You would expect that the people who challenge the general assumptions of their culture—in this case, their culture’s religious beliefs—are obviously the people who are more analytical,” he says.
The researchers, for their part, point out that both reason and intuition have their place. “Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful,” Gervais says, “and analytic thinking isn’t some oracle of the truth.”
Greene concurs, while also raising a provocative question implicit in the findings: “Obviously, there are millions of very smart and generally rational people who believe in God,” he says. “Obviously, this study doesn’t prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational, then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in God?”
The Mandelbrot set is a mathematical set of points whose boundary is a distinctive and easily recognizable two-dimensional fractal shape. The set is closely related to Julia sets (which include similarly complex shapes), and is named after the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, who studied and popularized it.
More precisely, the Mandelbrot set is the set of values of c in the complex plane for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial zn+1 = zn2 + c remains bounded. That is, a complex number c is part of the Mandelbrot set if, when starting with z0 = 0 and applying the iteration repeatedly, the absolute value of zn remains bounded however large n gets.
The Mandelbrot set is defined by a family of complex quadratic polynomials
given by
where is a complex parameter. For each , one considers the behavior of the sequence
obtained by iterating starting at critical point , which either escapes to infinity or stays within a disk of some finite radius. The Mandelbrot set is defined as the set of all points such that the above sequence does not escape to infinity.
More formally, if denotes the nth iterate of (i.e. composed with itself n times), the Mandelbrot set is the subset of the complex plane given by
As explained below, it is in fact possible to simplify this definition by taking .
Mathematically, the Mandelbrot set is just a set of complex numbers. A given complex number c either belongs to M or it does not. A picture of the Mandelbrot set can be made by colouring all the points which belong to M black, and all other points white. The more colourful pictures usually seen are generated by colouring points not in the set according to how quickly or slowly the sequence diverges to infinity. See the section on computer drawings below for more details.
The Mandelbrot set can also be defined as the connectedness locus of the family of polynomials . That is, it is the subset of the complex plane consisting of those parameters for which the Julia set of is connected.
The Mandelbrot set is a compact set, contained in the closed disk of radius 2 around the origin. In fact, a point belongs to the Mandelbrot set if and only if
for all .
In other words, if the absolute value of ever becomes larger than 2, the sequence will escape to infinity.
The intersection of with the real axis is precisely the interval [-2, 0.25]. The parameters along this interval can be put in one-to-one correspondence with those of the real logistic family,
The correspondence is given by
In fact, this gives a correspondence between the entire parameter space of the logistic family and that of the Mandelbrot set.
The area of the Mandelbrot set is estimated to be 1.50659177 ± 0.00000008.
By curling, crossing, stretching and touching the fingers and hands, we can talk to the body and mind as each area of the hand reflexes to a certain part of the mind or body.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has become a phenomenon across the globe. It is an anti-corporate movement protesting corporate love of money. When people think of corporations they think of a few top executives that make all the decisions related to the company. But most corporations are publicly traded and have shareholders as the main policy directors. The shareholders vote on company policy and strategy and ultimately direct the company.
On 60 Minutes last week there was a story on Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the U.S.-based conglomerate General Electric. GE has been moving many jobs to foreign countries to take advantage of lower wages. The 60 Minutes journalist asked Immelt if he felt an obligation to try to keep jobs in the United States. Immelt responded that he did, he would like to keep jobs in the U.S., as an American he felt a responsibility to help his people. But Immelt went on to say that ultimately he had to answer to the shareholders, and the shareholders only care about the bottom line, they are in it only to make a profit. Shareholders are greedy individuals that are basically gambling that their company will make profitable dividends for them. Then the shareholders can retire comfortably and move to Florida.
The avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert which sucks in all the rain and dew with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others —Zeno
One has to look out for him or herself. But the greed tendency is way to powerful in most people. Desire for things is powerful. Excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than what is necessary is what Wall Street capitalists and greedy shareholders represent. There is more to life than material gluttony.
is defined by a family of complex quadratic polynomials
is a complex parameter. For each 
starting at critical point 
, which either escapes to infinity or stays within a disk of some finite radius. The Mandelbrot set is defined as the set of all points 
denotes the nth iterate of 
.
diverges to infinity. See the section on computer drawings below for more details.
is connected.
for all 
.
ever becomes larger than 2, the sequence will escape to infinity.![z\mapsto \lambda z(1-z),\quad \lambda\in[1,4].\,](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/math/1/4/e/14ea2bcd4986ea856f321c077a157def.png)
