Truman Capote on Marlon Brando, written for the New Yorker magazine, November 1957
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| https://www.flickr.com/photos/qthomasbower/3470650293 |
Renee Yolanda Hauser, 1919-2008
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Saturday, January 28, 2023
The new scaffolding style in NYC, it’s called Urban Umbrella
When I came out of the pandemic lockdown and traveled around NYC again, I noticed an exceptionally beautiful, new style of scaffolding all over the city. It is painted white, unusually elegant and graceful. Such a remarkable difference from the old, depressing looking scaffolding. Nobody seemed to know when these new scaffoldings began or who created them.
So I looked it up and it seems a brilliant Korean deaigner by the name of Young-Hwan Choi won the design contest in 2010. Mayor Bloomberg initiated the contest to find a better way to create scaffoling in NYC. Then the engineering and finessing of the new deaign was done by a NYC architectural firm named Agencie.
Urban Umbrella: The Aesthetic Alternative to Scaffolding
Urban Umbrella: The Aesthetic Alternative to Scaffolding
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| Young-Hwan Choi |
Where Young-Hwan Choi works now, SCAAA
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| Sarrah Khan |
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| Andrés Ulises Cortés |
Sarrah Khan and Andrés Cortés both work at this architectural firm, Agencie
These scaffolding sheds are manufactured by a company called Urban Umbrella.
Friday, October 28, 2022
COMFORTING THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD - by Greta Christina
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COMFORTING THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD
I cite this piece a lot on my blog, so I decided I should post it here. It was originally published in the Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 29 #2 (March/April 2005).
So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.
But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.
Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.
And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.
And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.
And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.
Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.
Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?
It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.
And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.
But it's no less important, either.
I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
random images, September 2022
49th Street and Ninth Avenue, Hell's Kitchen, NYC street vending, circa 2017
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| Embroidered Medecine Buddha |
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| White Tara, a meditation image representation of enlightened activity |
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| Bhavacakra, Buddhist Wheel of Life, images of the 6 'realms'. blissed out 'god-like' realm, warring competitive 'demi-god' realm, human realm of desire, animal realm, craving realm of the 'hungry ghosts', hell realm of constant misery |
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| Green Tara, a meditation image, representing enlightened activity |
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| Shakyamuni Buddha with his hands in the teaching mudras |
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| Shakyamuni Buddha with his two main students, Sariputra and Maudgalyayana |
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by Patience Brewster     |
Thursday, September 15, 2022
THE CONTROLLED REMOTE VIEWING MANUAL USED AS A MANUAL FOR TRV TRAINING USED AS A REFERENCE MANUAL FOR CRV TRAINING AN HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
THE CONTROLLED REMOTE VIEWING MANUAL USED AS A MANUAL FOR TRV TRAINING USED AS A REFERENCE MANUAL FOR CRV TRAINING AN HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
CONTROLLED (“COORDINATE”) REMOTE VIEWING MANUAL: INTRODUCTION
https://rviewer.com/introduction-to-the-controlled-coordinate-remote-viewing-manual/
Remote Viewing Instructional Services
CONTROLLED (“COORDINATE”) REMOTE VIEWING MANUAL: INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
A. General
The following definitions and descriptions are provided to acquaint the reader with the remote viewing phenomenon and a typical remote viewing session.
- Definitions:
a. Remote Viewing (RV): The name of a method of psychoenergetic perception. A term coined by SRI-International and defined as “the acquisition and description, by mental means, of information blocked from ordinary perception by distance, shielding or time.”
b. Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV)*: The process of remote viewing using geographic coordinates for cueing or prompting.
c. Remote Viewer: Often referred to in the text simply as “viewer,” the remote viewer is a person who employs his mental faculties to perceive and obtain information to which he has no other access and of which he has no previous knowledge concerning persons, places, events, or objects separated from him by time, distance, or other intervening obstacles.
d. Monitor: The individual who assists the viewer in a remote viewing session. The monitor provides the coordinate, observes the viewer to help insure he stays in proper structure (discussed below), records relevant session information, provides appropriate feedback when required, and provides objective analytic support to the viewer as necessary. The monitor plays an especially important role in training beginning viewers.
2. Descriptions:
a. Remote Viewing Session: In a remote viewing session an individual or “viewer” attempts to acquire and describe by mental means alone information about a designated site. The viewer is not told what the site is that must be described but is provided a cue or prompt which designates the site.
b. Session Dynamics: In conducting a coordinate remote viewing session, a remote viewer and a monitor begin by seating themselves at the opposite ends of a table in a special remote viewing room equipped with paper and pens, a tape recorder, and a TV camera which allows either recording for documentation, or monitoring by individuals outside the room. The room is homogeneously-colored, acoustic-tiled, and featureless, with light controlled by a dimmer, so that environmental distractions can be minimized. The session begins when the monitor provides cueing or prompting information (geographic coordinates in this case) to the remote viewer. The remote viewer is given no additional identifying information, and at this point has no conscious knowledge of the actual site. For training purposes, the monitor is allowed to know enough about the site to enable him to determine when accurate versus inaccurate information is being provided. The session then proceeds with the monitor repeating the prompting information at appropriate intervals and providing necessary feedback. The remote viewer generates verbal responses and sketches, until a coherent response to the overall task requirement emerges.
c. Post Session Dynamics: After the session is over, the remote viewer and monitor obtain specific information about the site in picture/descriptive form. The remote viewer and monitor then discuss the session results.
B. Background:
In early 1980, an SRI – International (SRI-I) subcontractor developed a training procedure known as Coordinate Remote Viewing to satisfy R&D demands on SRI-I to enhance the reliability (scientific replicability) of remote viewing (RV). The subcontractor’s approach to improving the reliability of RV was to focus on the control of those factor that in his view tend to introduce “noise” into the RV product (imaginative, environmental, and interviewer overlays). The basic components of this training procedure consist of:
1. Repeated site-address (geographic coordinate) presentation, with quick-reaction response by the remote viewing; coupled with a restrictive format for reporting perceived information (to minimize imaginative overlays).
2. The use of a specially-designed, acoustic-tiled, relatively featureless, homogeneously-colored “viewing chamber” (to minimize environmental overlays).
3. The adoption of a strictly-prescribed, limited interviewer patter (to minimize interviewer overlays).
The training procedure requires that the trainee learn a progressive, multi-stage acquisition process postulated to correspond to increased contact with the site. At present there are six “stages” of training. In general, these stages progress as follows:
1. “Stage I” sites (islands, mountains, deserts, etc.).
2. “Stage II” sites (sites of quality sensory value–sites which are uniquely describable through touch, taste, sound, color, or odor–such as glaciers, volcanoes, industrial plants, etc.).
3. “Stage III” sites (sites possessing significant dimensional characteristics such as buildings, bridges, airfields, etc.).
4. “Stage IV” sites for which the trainee begins to form qualitative mental percepts (technical area, military feeling, research, etc.).
5. “Stage V” sites for which the trainee learns to “interrogate” qualitative mental percepts in an attempt to product analytical target descriptions (aircraft tracking radar, biomedical research facility, tank production plant, etc.).
6. “Stage VI” sites which involve the trainee in direct, three-dimensional assessment and modeling of the site and/or the relationship of site elements to one another (airplanes inside one of three camouflaged hangars or a military compound with a command building, barracks, motor pool, and underground weapons storage area).
The following document has been prepared to serve as a comprehensive explanation of the theory and mechanics of CRV as developed by SRI-I. It is intended for individuals who have no in-depth understanding of the technology and as a guide for future training programs. Particular attention should be paid to the glossary at the end of the document and to the terms as defined in the text, as they are the only acceptable definitions to be used when addressing the methodology presented.
* [Note] “Coordinate remote viewing” is now referred to as “controlled remote viewing”
Continue to “Controlled Remote Viewing Theory“
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