#but a purely disembodied intellectual force

[king0fcrows]

.

[artsandsciencesprojects]

Note posted April 10, 2020: the Arts & Sciences Projects website will be transitioning entirely to Tumblr as of May 1, 2020 due to our web host shutting down. We are posting images and texts from previous exhibition, events, and publications. 

Publish or Perish

Transmitter Gallery - Curated with Arts & Sciences Projects

April 1 - May 8, 2016

Benoît Broisat

Sessa Englund

David Horvitz

Farah Khelil + Antoine Lefebvre Editions

Nicole Reber

Paul Soulellis

“The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution.”—Marcel Broodthaers

Publish or Perish focuses on artists who align their practice with varied modes of content distribution and circulation, often experimenting with new forms that promote accessibility, collaboration, and engagement with others. Publishing, broadly  defined  to include  books, zines, PDFs, and other digital  content, is a central component of  their  artistic  repertoire. These works often defy conventional aesthetic hierarchies in counterpoint to prevailing market conditions. In an over-saturated and over-built culture, notions of ascribed value continue to expand, as some published works take on increasing value as they move through different channels of distribution and are absorbed into institutional and private collections. However, as economic challenges relate directly to issues of cultural over-abundance, our perspective regarding the value placed on art is also challenged, thus recontextualizing production into what Edgardo Antonio Vigo calls the "unmaking" of art objects. Ultimately, as self-publishing becomes more prominent as a tool in the pursuit of autonomy, so too does its intrinsic ideology of the self-organized.

“Publishing has never been a fixed notion. ‘What is publishing today?’ remains a relevant inquiry, but with an expanding field of response, as platforms, channels and modes of production mutate and multiply.”—Paul Soulellis

“La Bibliothèque Fantastique is an artist’s books virtual publisher. Our books are free and downloadable from the internet so that you can print them at home."—Antoine Lefebvre

"The power of books is to exist in several copies, and you can always destroy one, either by water, or fire, or stupidity; other copies will remain."—Farah Khelil + Antoine Lefebvre

“Za Nami is a 32 page full color photo book taken in Poland. Bound by elastic so you can put your favorite pictures on your wall.”—Nicole Reber

“The exhibition is a tool of the market, but at the same time oddly resistant to being sold. The curator is a force within that market, but has the alternative to maneuver against the current rather than with it.”—Sessa Englund

"All these projects are caused by my experience as a reader and by my dissatisfaction with this position. They deal with what we could call the ‘mediate knowledge’ issue. In the past, people used to be preoccupied by the events that concern them directly. They were in the dark about the global situation of the world but they were in close touch with their limited reality. On the opposite, we know a lot about the world but almost everything we know about it we learnt second-hand. Consequently, the reality we deal with is purely intellectual, like disembodied."—Benoît Broisat

“For $1 USD I will think about you for one minute. I will email you the time I start thinking, and the time I stop.”—David Horvitz

Transmitter Gallery, 1329 Willoughby Avenue, 2A, Brooklyn, NY 11237

[dharmaocean]

Dharma Ocean Discusses the Gateway to Direct Experience

Originally published on consciouslifenews.com This article is adapted from the Dharma Ocean Podcast Episode 214 – Direct Experience, by Dr. Reggie Ray, Dharma Ocean Spiritual Director. This excerpt is taken from the online course, The Somatic Practice of Pure Awareness: The Tantric Style of Embodied Meditation.  One keynote of the esoteric and tantric traditions of meditation is that they give rise to a grounded and all-inclusive field of awareness; rather than moving away from our fully embodied, experiential human existence, they are moving toward it. The emphasis is on the human experience as the ultimate and final reference point for everything that we know and think. This goes back to the time of the Buddha. He was engaged by one of his students, who wanted him to give him intellectual and tradition-based answers to questions. The Buddha's response was, “You can live that way if you want to. But at that point, there's no journey, and there's no awakening. In fact, there's no anything.” That approach, and ultimately, trusting anybody or anything outside of your own direct experience, he said, leads to suffering, confusion, pain, and harming others.The Buddha spoke for the primacy of experience — that which we know in the depth of our own being, unfiltered through the thinking mind. His response to this student was, “The only way that you should ever trust anything and know anything is to see for yourself if it's the case.”  That is the role of direct intuition, known only in and through our body.  He said, “Everything else is a hypothesis and not to be believed blindly.” This theme of the sacredness of direct experience as our only resource, our only guide, our only protector, has been central to the early meditation traditions — Ch’an and Zen, and Vajrayana, or Tantric Buddhism in Tibet — the esoteric traditions.Through meditation practice that is fully grounded in our body, what we call “somatic meditation,” we arrive at the knowledge that is not mediated by the thinking mind. It is not abstract; it is not conceptual, it is not hypothetical. At this point, through our body’s direct intuition, what we know is not what the mind thinks or assumes. What we know in our bodies is direct naked experience. And that experience is, as William Blake said, limitless. We're touching eternity when we step out of the thinking mind. When we talk about the human experience as being the touchstone of the whole tradition, this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about what we “think” we experience. We're talking about what we, in fact, truly experience, and it happens without thought. It's self-evident. It's the knowledge of our deeper being, what we're calling our Soma.In the conventional culture, we always look to the experts for everything. Even in the field of meditation, people look to the experts. In these days of profound spiritual consumerism, spiritual shopping, and spiritual materialism, people go to the internet to see which teacher gets the most “hits.” And then that teacher becomes the expert for them. They may even say, “that’s my spiritual teacher,” although never having met that person.When we are operating in modern culture, there are many powerful and seductive forces that lead us in different directions. The internet is amongst the most powerful of addictions and also the most pernicious, and least understood. It has captured and changed all of us in various ways. From my scholarly studies and direct contact with indigenous traditions and traditional religions throughout the world, I know that it hasn't always been like this. And because our disembodiment in this culture is so extreme, we have to find a way back to our basic being; our somatic being; our intuitive way of knowing; our physical body, and the arena where we experience things nakedly.This capacity to know in a different way has been not only part of us since the beginning but is actually a key to our survival. In the book Black Elk Speaks, he shows us how much he relied on what his body knew, how much his bodily intuition showed him while hunting buffalo in winter, blinded by blizzards. He said, “I sensed that over the third hill, there were buffalo.” And there were.We talk about the five senses; sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. And then we talk about the sixth sense as if it were a weird sort of outlying thing that maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't. When we are in our body, the knowledge of the sixth sense becomes our way of knowing. It's immediate direct knowledge. It is our direct intuition.  It doesn't have to be filtered by anything. And the clarity of that knowledge is much higher than any other way of knowing. This veracity, the self-existing truthfulness of that somatic knowledge, is infinitely beyond what we know in any other way.We have to develop that capacity. To be more specific, we are developing the capacity to be identified with our largest and most profound being, and to view and see the world from that standpoint and live from there.We're developing, we could say, a different kind of human being than the one we have been trained to be within this culture. We could also say that we are recovering a way of being human that's much more ancient and closer to our human genetic system. In fact, it is our human genetic inheritance from the very beginning. So we have a challenge in our culture to come back to ourselves. I think that the tendencies that separate us and deny us our own humanity and reinforce our disconnection, are very strong and real, but they don't hold a candle to the noon day sun of the awareness of our own body. About Dharma Ocean Dharma Ocean is a non-profit global educational foundation that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado.Their Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone is a sacred and protected space that hosts a wide range of retreats and meditation groups.  Students can immerse themselves in the richness and depth of their most fundamental being through connection with spiritual tradition, community, and nature.  Dharma Ocean also offers online programs and specialized training for students who wish to become Vajrayana practitioners.

[toomanysinks]

How to read fiction to build a startup

“The book itself is a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were 15, it will tell it to you again when you’re 50, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

Every year, Bill Gates goes off-grid, leaves friends and family behind, and spends two weeks holed up in a cabin reading books. His annual reading list rivals Oprah’s Book Club as a publishing kingmaker. Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg shared a reading recommendation every two weeks for a year, dubbing 2015 his “Year of Books.” Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, joined the board of Room to Read when she realized how books like The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate were inspiring girls to pursue careers in science and technology. Many a biotech entrepreneur treasures a dog-eared copy of Daniel Suarez’s Change Agent, which extrapolates the future of CRISPR. Noah Yuval Harari’s sweeping account of world history, Sapiens, is de rigueur for Silicon Valley nightstands.

This obsession with literature isn’t limited to founders. Investors are just as avid bookworms. “Reading was my first love,” says AngelList’s Naval Ravikant. “There is always a book to capture the imagination.” Ravikant reads dozens of books at a time, dipping in and out of each one nonlinearly. When asked about his preternatural instincts, Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe advised investors to “read voraciously and connect dots.” Foundry Group’s Brad Feld has reviewed 1,197 books on Goodreads and especially loves science fiction novels that “make the step function leaps in imagination that represent the coming dislocation from our current reality.”

This begs a fascinating question: Why do the people building the future spend so much of their scarcest resource — time — reading books?

Image by NiseriN via Getty Images. Reading time approximately 14 minutes.

Don’t Predict, Reframe

Do innovators read in order to mine literature for ideas? The Kindle was built to the specs of a science fictional children’s storybook featured in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, in fact, the Kindle project team was originally codenamed “Fiona” after the novel’s protagonist. Jeff Bezos later hired Stephenson as the first employee at his space startup Blue Origin. But this literary prototyping is the exception that proves the rule. To understand the extent of the feedback loop between books and technology, it’s necessary to attack the subject from a less direct angle.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is full of indirect angles that all manage to reveal deeper truths. It’s a mind-bending novel that follows six different characters through an intricate web of interconnected stories spanning three centuries. The book is a feat of pure M.C. Escher-esque imagination, featuring a structure as creative and compelling as its content. Mitchell takes the reader on a journey ranging from the 19th century South Pacific to a far-future Korean corpocracy and challenges the reader to rethink the very idea of civilization along the way. “Power, time, gravity, love,” writes Mitchell. “The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”

The technological incarnations of these invisible forces are precisely what Kevin Kelly seeks to catalog in The Inevitable. Kelly is an enthusiastic observer of the impact of technology on the human condition. He was a co-founder of Wired, and the insights explored in his book are deep, provocative, and wide-ranging. In his own words, “When answers become cheap, good questions become more difficult and therefore more valuable.” The Inevitable raises many important questions that will shape the next few decades, not least of which concern the impacts of AI:

“Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.”

It is precisely this kind of an AI-influenced world that Richard Powers describes so powerfully in his extraordinary novel The Overstory:

“Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.”

Taking this a step further, Virginia Heffernan points out in Magic and Loss that living in a digitally mediated reality impacts our inner lives at least as much as the world we inhabit:

“The Internet suggests immortality—comes just shy of promising it—with its magic. With its readability and persistence of data. With its suggestion of universal connectedness. With its disembodied imagines and sounds. And then, just as suddenly, it stirs grief: the deep feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound. That connectedness is illusory; that we’re all more alone than ever.”

And it is the questionable assumptions underlying such a future that Nick Harkaway enumerates in his existential speculative thriller Gnomon:

“Imagine how safe it would feel to know that no one could ever commit a crime of violence and go unnoticed, ever again. Imagine what it would mean to us to know—know for certain—that the plane or the bus we’re travelling on is properly maintained, that the teacher who looks after our children doesn’t have ugly secrets. All it would cost is our privacy, and to be honest who really cares about that? What secrets would you need to keep from a mathematical construct without a heart? From a card index? Why would it matter? And there couldn’t be any abuse of the system, because the system would be built not to allow it. It’s the pathway we’re taking now, that we’ve been on for a while.” 

Machine learning pioneer, former President of Google China, and leading Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee loves reading science fiction in this vein — books that extrapolate AI futures — like Hao Jingfang’s Hugo Award-winning Folding Beijing. Lee’s own book, AI Superpowers, provides a thought-provoking overview of the burgeoning feedback loop between machine learning and geopolitics. As AI becomes more and more powerful, it becomes an instrument of power, and this book outlines what that means for the 21st century world stage:

“Many techno-optimists and historians would argue that productivity gains from new technology almost always produce benefits throughout the economy, creating more jobs and prosperity than before. But not all inventions are created equal. Some changes replace one kind of labor (the calculator), and some disrupt a whole industry (the cotton gin). Then there are technological changes on a grander scale. These don’t merely affect one task or one industry but drive changes across hundreds of them. In the past three centuries, we’ve only really seen three such inventions: the steam engine, electrification, and information technology.”

So what’s different this time? Lee points out that “AI is inherently monopolistic: A company with more data and better algorithms will gain ever more users and data. This self-reinforcing cycle will lead to winner-take-all markets, with one company making massive profits while its rivals languish.” This tendency toward centralization has profound implications for the restructuring of world order:

“The AI revolution will be of the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution—but probably larger and definitely faster. Where the steam engine only took over physical labor, AI can perform both intellectual and physical labor. And where the Industrial Revolution took centuries to spread beyond Europe and the U.S., AI applications are already being adopted simultaneously all across the world.”

Cloud Atlas, The Inevitable, The Overstory, Gnomon, Folding Beijing, and AI Superpowers might appear to predict the future, but in fact they do something far more interesting and useful: reframe the present. They invite us to look at the world from new angles and through fresh eyes. And cultivating “beginner’s mind” is the problem for anyone hoping to build or bet on the future.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/16/the-best-fiction-for-building-a-startup/

[fmservers]

How to read fiction to build a startup

“The book itself is a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were 15, it will tell it to you again when you’re 50, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

Every year, Bill Gates goes off-grid, leaves friends and family behind, and spends two weeks holed up in a cabin reading books. His annual reading list rivals Oprah’s Book Club as a publishing kingmaker. Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg shared a reading recommendation every two weeks for a year, dubbing 2015 his “Year of Books.” Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, joined the board of Room to Read when she realized how books like The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate were inspiring girls to pursue careers in science and technology. Many a biotech entrepreneur treasures a dog-eared copy of Daniel Suarez’s Change Agent, which extrapolates the future of CRISPR. Noah Yuval Harari’s sweeping account of world history, Sapiens, is de rigueur for Silicon Valley nightstands.

This obsession with literature isn’t limited to founders. Investors are just as avid bookworms. “Reading was my first love,” says AngelList’s Naval Ravikant. “There is always a book to capture the imagination.” Ravikant reads dozens of books at a time, dipping in and out of each one nonlinearly. When asked about his preternatural instincts, Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe advised investors to “read voraciously and connect dots.” Foundry Group’s Brad Feld has reviewed 1,197 books on Goodreads and especially loves science fiction novels that “make the step function leaps in imagination that represent the coming dislocation from our current reality.”

This begs a fascinating question: Why do the people building the future spend so much of their scarcest resource — time — reading books?

Image by NiseriN via Getty Images. Reading time approximately 14 minutes.

Don’t Predict, Reframe

Do innovators read in order to mine literature for ideas? The Kindle was built to the specs of a science fictional children’s storybook featured in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, in fact, the Kindle project team was originally codenamed “Fiona” after the novel’s protagonist. Jeff Bezos later hired Stephenson as the first employee at his space startup Blue Origin. But this literary prototyping is the exception that proves the rule. To understand the extent of the feedback loop between books and technology, it’s necessary to attack the subject from a less direct angle.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is full of indirect angles that all manage to reveal deeper truths. It’s a mind-bending novel that follows six different characters through an intricate web of interconnected stories spanning three centuries. The book is a feat of pure M.C. Escher-esque imagination, featuring a structure as creative and compelling as its content. Mitchell takes the reader on a journey ranging from the 19th century South Pacific to a far-future Korean corpocracy and challenges the reader to rethink the very idea of civilization along the way. “Power, time, gravity, love,” writes Mitchell. “The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”

The technological incarnations of these invisible forces are precisely what Kevin Kelly seeks to catalog in The Inevitable. Kelly is an enthusiastic observer of the impact of technology on the human condition. He was a co-founder of Wired, and the insights explored in his book are deep, provocative, and wide-ranging. In his own words, “When answers become cheap, good questions become more difficult and therefore more valuable.” The Inevitable raises many important questions that will shape the next few decades, not least of which concern the impacts of AI:

“Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.”

It is precisely this kind of an AI-influenced world that Richard Powers describes so powerfully in his extraordinary novel The Overstory:

“Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.”

Taking this a step further, Virginia Heffernan points out in Magic and Loss that living in a digitally mediated reality impacts our inner lives at least as much as the world we inhabit:

“The Internet suggests immortality—comes just shy of promising it—with its magic. With its readability and persistence of data. With its suggestion of universal connectedness. With its disembodied imagines and sounds. And then, just as suddenly, it stirs grief: the deep feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound. That connectedness is illusory; that we’re all more alone than ever.”

And it is the questionable assumptions underlying such a future that Nick Harkaway enumerates in his existential speculative thriller Gnomon:

“Imagine how safe it would feel to know that no one could ever commit a crime of violence and go unnoticed, ever again. Imagine what it would mean to us to know—know for certain—that the plane or the bus we’re travelling on is properly maintained, that the teacher who looks after our children doesn’t have ugly secrets. All it would cost is our privacy, and to be honest who really cares about that? What secrets would you need to keep from a mathematical construct without a heart? From a card index? Why would it matter? And there couldn’t be any abuse of the system, because the system would be built not to allow it. It’s the pathway we’re taking now, that we’ve been on for a while.” 

Machine learning pioneer, former President of Google China, and leading Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee loves reading science fiction in this vein — books that extrapolate AI futures — like Hao Jingfang’s Hugo Award-winning Folding Beijing. Lee’s own book, AI Superpowers, provides a thought-provoking overview of the burgeoning feedback loop between machine learning and geopolitics. As AI becomes more and more powerful, it becomes an instrument of power, and this book outlines what that means for the 21st century world stage:

“Many techno-optimists and historians would argue that productivity gains from new technology almost always produce benefits throughout the economy, creating more jobs and prosperity than before. But not all inventions are created equal. Some changes replace one kind of labor (the calculator), and some disrupt a whole industry (the cotton gin). Then there are technological changes on a grander scale. These don’t merely affect one task or one industry but drive changes across hundreds of them. In the past three centuries, we’ve only really seen three such inventions: the steam engine, electrification, and information technology.”

So what’s different this time? Lee points out that “AI is inherently monopolistic: A company with more data and better algorithms will gain ever more users and data. This self-reinforcing cycle will lead to winner-take-all markets, with one company making massive profits while its rivals languish.” This tendency toward centralization has profound implications for the restructuring of world order:

“The AI revolution will be of the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution—but probably larger and definitely faster. Where the steam engine only took over physical labor, AI can perform both intellectual and physical labor. And where the Industrial Revolution took centuries to spread beyond Europe and the U.S., AI applications are already being adopted simultaneously all across the world.”

Cloud Atlas, The Inevitable, The Overstory, Gnomon, Folding Beijing, and AI Superpowers might appear to predict the future, but in fact they do something far more interesting and useful: reframe the present. They invite us to look at the world from new angles and through fresh eyes. And cultivating “beginner’s mind” is the problem for anyone hoping to build or bet on the future.

Via Danny Crichton https://techcrunch.com

[s33]

Qualia, Information, and Brain

Is it possible that qualia are properties of experience that don't affect information processing in the brain? Yes.  Sort of. Information processing does get affected, but only because it consists of qualia processing qualia. Let me explain.

The idea that the brain is ‘processing information’ is only true metaphorically. The brain is composed of concrete physical structures, not abstract logical functions. To say that there is information processing in the brain is like saying that there is profit in a dry cleaning business. It’s true in an informal, naive sense, but there’s no ontological difference between ‘profit’ and the excess of dollar bills in the cash register or the electronic states in a computer when the owner checks their bank account. The profit is an idea that we have about how the business is running, but the business itself doesn’t know that it’s profiting.

The same confusion exists when we talk about ‘information’ being processed ‘in’ a brain or computer. We are dazzled by both the depth of knowledge required to understand neurology or computer engineering, and by the feeling we get when we use sophisticated, trendy terms like ‘information processing’, so we don’t generally question the nature of information itself. If we did question it, we would find that there is no good reason to consider information anything more or less than the property of a mental experience in which our thinking is informed - that is, when our thinking seems like it has acquired new and potentially useful thoughts. The physical world of brains and computer hardware, if it were strictly physical and unconscious, would have no use for any such mental property as information, since every aspect of the world would be governed by deterministic forces and blindly probabilistic causality branches. If you have charge and momentum, mass and energy, etc, then there is no need for any kind of signals or accounting. The gears would simply turn because they have to, not because there is some process of accounting and comparison telling the charge to change polarity or strength.

To sum up - there is no need to invoke any informative entity to explain any physical process in a physical universe. Physical processes, especially on the quantum level, certainly remind us of how think and are informed, but if such a process were informing itself nonlocally or faster than light, retrocausally etc, there is no compelling reason to label it ‘physical’. In fact, when we cross the classical limit into quantum theory, we have left all pretense of materiality behind and have moved into a realm of pure abstraction…interpretations of interpretations. It is just as useful to think of the quantum world as microphenomenal (based on low level experiential interactions, aka sensory-motive qualia) is it is to think of quantum as microphysical (form/field-force) or information-theoretic. If we are going to insist on quantum mechanics existing in the absence of all awareness, then we would have to understand exactly why and how it could ever appear that it does not.

Physical mechanisms should reduce to chain reactions of forms or forces. The should not need to know or detect anything. There should not be any role for a conscious perceiver or participant in shaping their behaviors. Church-Turing Thesis, which is considered to be one of the foundational pillars of computer science and of all computing that really exists today, shows that any problem which is computable can be executed by blind mechanical functions. Just as we can solve any simple arithmetic problem by counting on our fingers, all problems that can be solved by computation will be equally valid when we use properly configured physical switches,  gears or electronic substances that can be set in a way that causes other settings to change or prevent change. As long as *we* (conscious seers, counters, and thinkers) can see and count and logically think about the significance of the result of such switches switching, the result will be reliable and potentially useful to us (informative).

In other words, computer science proves that computation need not involve any information processing at all, but rather only a chain reaction of changing formations. A physical machine has no ‘in’ or ‘out’, no ‘ones and zeros’, only charged field surfaces and volumes in motion or stasis. A ‘program’ is literally nothing but the sequence of moving parts of a machine.

Anyhow, now that we have made clear why it is not logical or parsimonious to conflate any physical phenomenon in a physical world with the presence of disembodied ‘information’, we can do the same thing with qualia. This has been done several times in the history of philosophy - Searle’s Chinese Room, Leibniz Mill, Plato’s Cave, etc. Alfred Korzybski’s phrase ‘the map is not the territory’ is a bit more general, so it applies to both the relation of information to physics, information to qualia, and physics to qualia. Information is an intellectual map* of a territory that is composed of either physical or mental qualia. Physics is a perceptual map of hypothetical qualia.

I know that it will sound outrageous to many readers to assert that physics is the map and qualia is the territory, but that is only because our physical theory includes the fallacious premise that it is not a theory. The only thing that we know for sure about physical phenomena is that they are reliable features of most of our waking experience - they are a category of qualia which subjectively seems to transcend our subjectivity, but so do other non-physical things like math and logic. In my understanding, it makes more sense that all phenomena are more like qualia or ‘dream-stuff’, then they are like ‘star-stuff’ or ‘number-stuff’**.

The irony is that it is pragmatic logic that tells us this. We don’t have to believe in anything supernatural or mystical to understand it. All that we have to ask is how the physical brain’s activity would change if there were no such thing as sight or sound or feeling. Would the rhodopsin molecules in the retina not become isomerized by a certain range of electromagnetic stimulation? Would the same neurons not release glutamate that cascades into other molecular releases along the optic nerve and visual cortex? No, logically, nothing would change if there were no such things as colors, shapes, and images. As long as there are atoms, molecules, cells, and bodies (setting aside for the moment the fact that they too are only known to be tangible-touchable qualia), nothing about the behavior of those bodies would change. Nothing about the way that chemical reactions in the brain ‘process information’ would change. If we believe that qualia does not have to exist, then we cannot logically justify that qualia could possibly exist. Neither information processing or formation collisions could logically lead to any ‘emergent properties’ without qualia/consciousness, but both physics and information could be derived by splitting and masking properties of qualia.

*an informational map is itself made of the intellectual qualia of thinking. I use the pretentious term ‘cognitive-cogitative’ qualia to reveal the parallels that I suggest between thinking and other qualia modalities, such as ‘visible-optical’, ‘aural-sonic’, and ‘personal-social’. More on that here.

**regardless of how many dreamers we believe the universal dream belongs to. If Monotheism were true, the physical universe would be part of the dream of a single God. If theism were false, the belonging relation may not need to exist at the absolute level. Experiences of God, or of being God could still exist, but they would just be features of an even larger dream in which are also dreams in which those experiences of divinity cannot be accessed. My absolute truth here is that what can always be accessed is qualia. Whether we believe in God or gods or computation, its all forms of qualia.

[dirtyprojectors]

“that’s a lifestyle” video

the animated video for “that’s a lifestyle” is out today. the director, kitty faingold, and i discussed bringing the song to life as a series of ethereal animated sketches, cronus the greek god, the visual metaphor of broken statues as a vanishing empire and much more . - dave 

i feel like i haven’t seen animation like this … maybe ever, definitely since i saw bill plympton’s cartoons when i was a kid!   what is your process — how do you make it look like that?

Basically, this animation was hand drawn with an HB pencil onto white paper and then photographed and put onto a timeline on a computer. I drew between six and eight drawings a second, which is not a lot and is why it looks jumpy and choppy - if you want a sleek look you need to draw more per second. But I’ve always liked lo brow & lo fi stuff, where you can see the artist’s hand at work and feel the human presence behind the piece. I like it when things look like they were made with the intense passion of a very dedicated amateur, it denotes enthusiasm, effort, aspiration, dreams. It’s flawed and personable and relatable. Maybe my taste is influenced by having lived in Latin America with it’s magical realism and it’s poetry of the mundane.

what’s the story you’re trying to tell in the video — and how does it relate to the story it seems like i’m trying to tell ?  

The story is that we, the audience, are a spectral being hovering above a lake in front of a strange house that has infinite rooms. We float in through a window and decide to take a quick disembodied tour of the house that’s inhabited by a group of enchanted statues which some strange electric life force has animated for all eternity. They are the eerie marble remnants of an extinct civilisation, long annihilated, the silent survivors of a by-gone atomic end time. Like dancing shadows burnt into a wall by a nuclear blast. It’s tragic but also strangely optimistic - something survived, perhaps at the end of the world, human consciousness liberated of its material constraints, spread at light speed throughout the universe, and fuzzy bundles of memory, thought and emotion seeped into inert matter in distant galaxies and parallel universes, creating the world portrayed in this animation.

The video is an imagined outcome of the story that’s sung in the song, which as I interpret it, is about a society at the cusp of destruction, looking out from itself into its past and its future and wondering will we survive? or will the monster eat its young til they’re gone.

do you hate it when people ask you questions like that, because you have this feeling of like, ‘uhhhh, hopefully the work articulates the thing in a way that words cannot — that’s why it’s an animation and not a piece of prose; why are you asking me to bastardize & diminish what i’m doing??’ or do you feel like words / discourse provide a different and useful lens?

Haha! both I guess, most things that I make feel like they come from a place in my mind that doesn’t understand or speak a verbal language, and others are created in harmony with a more intellectually stimulated region of the mind, something with a narrative, a reference to some historical thing, for example. Words themselves can have power that goes beyond the literal meaning and melts into something more emotional. But I do often feel that contemporary art can be overly wordy and rationalised; when you explain or justify what you’ve created with a lengthy text, the piece looses elasticity and ossifies into a concrete message, or as Susan Sontag says “a sensibility is ineffable… a sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system.. has hardened into an idea.” I like this way of thinking about art as sensibility.

Also, when a piece of art or music has a precise explanation, it sort of becomes redundant, it’s just an illustration to accompany that other thing you’re saying. In art, I think, if words are used at all it should be to infuse the work with another layer of poetry, mystery and psychic life.

in this video, did you think much abt correlating image & sound — ie having the visual gestures harmonize with the movements of the music? (i think they go together super well…)

Yes, I wanted the images to resonate with and respond to the sound. On a macro scale, I wanted them to inhabit the same world, to belong together, so the look and feel of the images is enhanced by the sound of the song and vice versa. On a micro scale, the cuts are based on the rhythm of the song, and there are different moments in the story and particular characters and happenings that also relate to the specific moments or moods in the song.

when you’re working in this way, you’re the writer, director, artist and editor.  does it feel natural and seamless to be in all these different roles, or do the imperatives of one role sometimes come into conflict with another ?  like, does the draftsperson in you occasionally want to take things in a direction that the director simply can’t allow?  if so, how do you resolve these conflicts?

That’s an interesting way of looking at it and very true; yes, I definitely had multiple voices in my mind whispering different things throughout the whole process - as an artist you are constantly engaged in an internal dialogue with many different elements of yourself and even with a fictional “other” that pretends to be an outside audience, so it’s challenging work. But this way of working does feel natural to me, I like being in control of as many aspects of my work as possible, so it doesn’t feel like a conflict that needs to be resolved, rather a conversation that’s had.

do you think there’s something special abt using old-school labor/time-intensive practices, even when there are readily available software/digital shortcuts ?  like, maybe you value the specific unique feel to the finished work, or maybe you just get something you get from the process itself (eg meditative zen state that comes out of doing the rote repetition by hand?)  

Yes, there is definitely something special about labour intensive work and, in this case, using analog rather than digital methods. On one hand, repetition as you say, let’s the mind wander into a meditative state which in a hyper stimulated world feels healthy and grounding. On the other, when you’re working purely in a digital realm you feel a sort of underlying existentialist horror as you are essentially one dimension removed from your work, or else you get a sense of plastic claustrophobia and you just need to run outside and roll around in some prickly grass or something! after a while of being on the computer you desperately need to feel the real material world around you, to feel phenomenologically “in” your body - to embody your reality. I think there is such a thing as a digital malaise akin to cabin fever. So I really enjoyed getting back to paper and pencil.

why roman / greek statuary?  in general, where does your imagery come from?  has it changed much over time, or from project to project, or do you find that there are leitmotifs and vibes that you return to consistently?  

That was mainly based on the imagery that came to mind from the lyrics; words about an empire, a senator, a decaying civilization, violence, power, greed etc. Also when the song talks about a monster eating its children, I thought of Cronus the Greek God. I associate these things with the ancient classical world, and the marble skeleton of it that we have inherited. Also, surrealist works of art, for example by De Chirico, often feature statues and in particular greek/roman ones; there is evidently something about them that resonates with the subconscious mind, they are a meaningful symbol to us, they have a dreamlike and strange quality to them. This video was conjured up mainly by a stream of consciousness, which is a surrealist method for creating images. To the second question I would say both, each project is different as I am a pretty eclectic person and the world is full of new inspirations, but there is a river bed under the passing currents that doesn’t change much, a soil made up of a certain composition of minerals which, in my particular case, has surrealist foundations and an interest in myth, symbolism and the occult, and drawing eyes, people in trances, odd faces and strange places.

w the greek/roman statuary, do you feel like there’s some parallel you’re drawing to an idea of the vast, broken, vanishing empire — and the West today ?   or maybe in general do u feel like that’s part of the operative fascination that vaporwave has with that imagery?  

I definitely think that a broken statue is a clear visual metaphor for a vanishing empire, which might be why it populates the allegorical world of surrealism and vapourware as its digital extension- maybe for the last hundred years we’ve all felt on some subconscious plane a pending apocalypse, the world that we’ve created on the brink of an extinction level event. It makes sense, after the world wars, the cold war, the atomic/nuclear threats, climate threats, financial threats, etc. everything has seemed to be in a constant state of mortal danger for the past century! even our food is supposedly poisoning us, our clothes, bodies, water, air itself, everything is menacing and threatening and hostile, so it’s little wonder our art would express this sense of doom.  

one of the things im kinda thinking out loud abt in the song is this question of, ‘in our insanely interconnected world, is it actually possible to draw our actions into congruence with our beliefs?  what would that mean?  and what does it mean if/when we can’t?’   sometimes it feels like the chains of production, ownership, causality etc are so deeply enmeshed that it’s impossible to chase down the global implications of our choices as consumers & citizens with any kind of confidence or accuracy … and that makes us feel powerless in the face of hideous injustices … like we’re all frogs in a pot of water slowly rising to a boil.  so in the song, even though i don’t have a resolution or conveniently optimistic way of thinking about it, i hope there’s a value in articulating the feeling anyway.  my question is, do you feel like art has a responsibility to be political?  or do you feel like art is inherently political — and there might be something more human / empathetic / mysterious when art is fluid enough to evade the reduction into easy sloganeering ?  for me it’s a question right now, because i’ve often landed in the latter camp, but this song woke up like this .. .

Yeah, it’s a tricky subject, politics and art. I guess that, in my opinion, your only responsibility as an artist is to give your audience your best and most genuine work, whatever that may be. The content of the work will vary hugely from artist to artist. There are many important things in the world, important parts of the experience of being, that don’t include politics at all, and perhaps are even antagonistic to it, so I don’t think that art has to be political. Sometimes it feels gratuitous and disingenuous when an artist injects some politics into their work or their discourse just because it’s in vogue. Lots of artists don’t have a clue about politics, they inhabit a parallel world of emotions, fairytales and daydreams! They might be an outsider, a rebel, or a romantic for example. Others are very passionate about being the voice of their own society, and are deeply entrenched in their cultural surroundings and make of their political ideas their body of work, in the hopes that their message might challenge certain prejudices or else that the audience will identify with the ideas and find expression for their own political thoughts. I don’t think one approach is more valid or moral than the other, as long as it’s genuine. However, on the other hand, anybody that has a visible social platform and access to a certain level of impact could be a useful tool to raise awareness for a number of social causes, but that’s something different.    

how long did this video take you ?

Nearly a month! In fact I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Max Mannone who helped me sooooo much to make it in such a short time! he took all the photographs and digitised most of it, as well as giving me creative input. It’s super important to bounce off of someone you respect when you are working alone, because it’s such a self centred process that you can lose all perspective and start to drown in yourself!

do you like to revise a lot, or is it a first-thought-best-thought headspace ?

With a stream of consciousness type method definitely first-thought-best-thought although as I said above, bouncing off somebody else throughout the process is also good.

what kind of music do u like to listen to when you draw?

Well, for this video I listened to a lot of Dirty Projectors :-) I love this song, and instead of growing tired of it which can happen with repetition I grew to like it more and more! it’s definitely alive. I also have lots of synth stuff on my playlist like New Wave songs and Italo disco music. Probably because I came into the world during the eighties so it kind of feels like home. I actually listen to a lot of podcasts when I draw & animate, I like finding undiscovered youtube channels about weird topics particularly about magic, myths and the fascinating shadowy world of the occult which are all sources of inspiration.  

thanks so much for this, kitty!!  i love the animation a lot, and best of luck with future projects!

Thank you Dave! It was a real pleasure to work on this project, I love the song and hope the video did it justice :-) I'll look forward to hearing the new album!

[younghunger]

THE SPIRITUAL TRIAD

#7. ATMA – The Divine Part

Atma (also written “Atman”) is the highermost and supreme part of man’s spiritual being. It is pure eternal Spirit. It is the Higher Self, the Divine Self, the Real Self of the human being and it is literally one and the same in essence and identity as the Infinite Supreme Self. This is in accordance with the fundamental teaching of Hinduism; that our Self (the Atman) IS the Supreme Self (Brahman). Atman literally means Self. It is the only one of our Principles to which the unqualified term “the Self” may be applied.

It is not an individual thing. There is no such thing as “my Atman” or “your Atman.” The Eternal Spirit is neither yours nor mine and is not the separate individual possession of anyone. There is neither “my Atman” nor “your Atman” but only THE Atman, the ONE Universal Self of all. It is here that all is truly one. The golden key to understanding universal oneness, divine allness, and non-duality (and thus the key to world peace!) is contained in this teaching about the Atman. I am the Atman. You are the Atman. Atman is Who and What we really are. It is our essential nature, it is our true self, it is the All IN All. In fact, It is the one and only Reality. As the Upanishads say, “This Atman IS Brahman.”

Since the Atman is literally Divinity Itself, we should always remember that it never incarnates or reincarnates, nor is it ever affected by our Karma or even by anything whatsoever. It just simply IS.

#6. BUDDHI – The Spiritual Part

Buddhi is the second highest Principle of man’s constitution and is referred to as the Spiritual Soul, the vehicle through which Atma (the highest Principle) radiates its light. There is nothing individual about the Buddhi principle. As with Atma, we cannot talk in terms of “my Buddhi” or “your Buddhi.” Contrary to popular opinion, Buddhi is not the faculty or quality of intuition and has nothing to do with this. It has nothing to do with anything except serving as the vehicle for Atma, the Self.

“The Monad” (meaning “ultimate unit” or “primary unit”) is a term used to describe the conjunction of the two highest Principles of the human constitution – Atma and Buddhi. There is nothing higher than Atma; Atma is the highermost and supreme part of man’s spiritual being. Because Atma is literally Divinity Itself, it has to have a vehicle through which to radiate its light to the individual soul. Buddhi is this vehicle and so the two in conjunction with each other are called the Monad.

#5. MANAS – The Intellectual Part

Manas is the mind principle in man, the consciousness aspect, the thinker, the permanent individuality which incarnates and reincarnates. It is in fact the human soul. Manas is the mind and the mind and the soul are one and the same thing. It is a mistake to confuse the mind and the brain, as if they are the same thing. The brain is only a physical organ and serves but as a physical vehicle for the mind/soul – who is the true thinker – to manifest through while in physical incarnation.

In the teachings of Theosophy, the Manas principle is often called the Ego. This is using the term “Ego” in its true and literal sense, of meaning the true “I” of our being.

It is the Manasic entity, the individual human soul, which sets the causes in motion in each lifetime – through every thought, word, and action – which have to have their corresponding Karmic effects in this and subsequent lifetimes. It is the maker and the experiencer of Karma.

It has a dual nature, that of Higher Manas and Lower Manas. When the mind and consciousness are lifted, raised, and elevated towards higher things, spiritual things, abstract things, intellectual things, things of goodness, truth, purity, love, compassion, and beauty, it is then functioning as the Higher Manas and rising ever closer towards the divine shining light of Buddhi, the Spiritual Soul. When the mind and consciousness are instead allowed to sink downwards towards the lower, separative, selfish, and sensual things of life, it is Lower Manas, attaching itself to the principle of Kama, the Animal Soul.

Manas cannot go in both directions at once. It can only either go up or down…up towards spirituality or down towards sensuality. Spirituality and sensuality can never and will never mix. Manas, the human soul, stands right in the middle between the two and must make a choice between them. Our primary battleground in life is that of the mind.

– – –

THE LOWER QUATERNARY

#4. KAMA – The Passional Part

Kama, which literally means “Desire” in Sanskrit, is the desire principle of the human being when in physical incarnation. It is the source and centre of his desires, passions, lusts, and sensual nature. It is sometimes referred to as the “animal soul” because it is the more animalistic and beastly part of us.

During human life this Principle is called Kama. After the lifetime has come to an end, the Kama principle forms itself into Kama Rupa, which literally means “desire form.”

One of the stages after death is that the desire nature objectifies itself into a sort of senseless, disembodied form which remains in Kama Loka (the atmosphere and attraction of our Earth) until it finally gradually fades out and disintegrates of its own accord. It will survive and remain until the force of those desires and passions has drained away and how long this takes will naturally be determined by how sensually oriented the individual was during the lifetime just ended.

#3. PRANA – The Vital Part

This is the Life Force, Vitality, or Energy which keeps the physical body alive. It is the Life Principle, the “breath of life” in the individual. A person remains in physical incarnation for as long as Prana remains active within them. As soon as Prana departs and ceases to flow, the physical body has no other option than to die, since it is the force of Prana which keeps it going.

#2. LINGA SHARIRA – The Astral Part

Linga Sharira – called the astral body – is the subtle, unseen “double” of the dense physical body. It is the form, mould, and blueprint upon and around which the dense physical body is built. It comes into existence before the physical body and it only fully fades out and dies when the very last remaining particle of the deceased physical body disappears and disintegrates, excepting the skeleton.

The astral body can also be thought of as the “vital body” or “energy body” of the human being because it is the vehicle through which Prana (the 3rd Principle) flows to the physical body. It is this part of our constitution which is utilised in the activities which have become known as astral travel, astral projection, and so forth. The term “astral” is used in Theosophy simply as a synonym for “subjective,” “subtle” or “inner.”

Its main connection point with the physical body is in the area of the spleen and these two bodies that we have are connected with one another throughout each lifetime by a sort of unseen umbilical cord which some have called the “silver thread” or “silver cord.”

#1. STHULA SHARIRA – The Physical Part

Sthula Sharira is the Sanskrit name for the dense physical body. It is not in strict truth a Principle in itself but is simply the vehicle of all the other Principles during physical incarnation. Sthula Sharira is described as being the child of Linga Sharira (its mother) by conception of Prana (its father). It is our outer shell and really nothing more. We often place far more importance and emphasis on our outer shell than is really necessary or worthwhile.

We are not doing ourselves any favours if we identify ourselves with our body or with any other aspects of our lower nature. These simply comprise our present personality, in distinction to the permanent individuality of the soul, the Reincarnating Ego. And higher still than the soul is our Real Self, pure eternal Spirit. Souls are many but Spirit is ONE. The whole aim of life is to realise Who and What you really are and to rebecome it in consciousness. Only the inner is the real.

~The Sevenfold Nature of Man

[imenome-blog]

SURAS ASURAS KAMA YAMA

Let’s try to throw a little light on just what these beings are, these Suras, Asuras,  Maruts, Kumaras and Agnishwattas? In the Rig-Veda, the "Asuras" are shown as spiritual divine beings; their etymology is derived from asu (breath), the "Breath of God," and they mean the same as the Supreme Spirit.

When a monad is at the very beginning of its evolutionary course in the cosmic manvantara, the technical name given to it is Kumara, which is a Sanskrit term meaning virgin. It is virginal in the new manvantara. It has therein incurred no sin; it is unadulterated, pure monadic essence. When such a Kumara at the end of a cosmic manvantara, or two or three, according to its ability to evolve, has emanated forth from itself what is in it, has reached the bottom of the great sweep of evolving life and has risen on the ascending arc to the top of it, the same Kumara then is an Agnishwatta because it then has evolved fully forth from itself, mind, intellect, and has gained experience. Yet they are both monads, or rather it is the same thing: a monad beginning as a Kumara, or as I have often put it, an unself-conscious god-spark, ending as an Agnishwatta, "purified by fire," which is what Agnishwatta means, the fire of the spirit and of experience.

Sura is a Kumara — a god. Because of their great purity, virginality in every sense of the word, Hindu mythology called them gods. Actually they are monads in a pure yet unevolved state, so undeveloped a state that they are swept along, as it were, in the evolutionary Rivers of Life. When this Sura or Kumara has become an Agnishwatta, it is then an Asura. From an unself-conscious god-spark, a Kumara — the Sura, the monad, the same thing — through suffering and experience in the lower realms of matter, in the different planes, has become an Agnishwatta. It has tasted of the fire and has become a self-conscious god, an Asura.

Asura really comes from Asu, the essential meaning of which in Sanskrit is 'to, breathe.' The Asuras are those who have gained self-consciousness. Asuras are described in Indian texts as powerful superhuman demigods with good or bad qualities, the good ones are called Adityas and led by Varuna, while the bad malevolent ones are called Danavas and led by Vrtra.

In the earliest layer of Vedic texts, Agni, Indra and other gods are also called Asura, in the sense of they being "lords" of their domain, knowledge and abilities.

The Maruts are a class of the Agnishwattas, (Asuras). Thus in The Secret Doctrine, which often quotes from Brahmanical theology, when you read that often the Suras and the Asuras were battling together, you have a very interesting fact not only of human evolutionary history here, but of cosmological history. It is the same thought that runs back of the early Christian legends concerning the battle fought in Heaven between the spirits of Light and the spirits of Darkness. And of course in mediaeval theology anything that thinks for itself, an Asura, is a spirit of Darkness. Do you catch it? That is why they are called the demons or the spirits of Darkness. Here is the gist of the Christian legends of the so-called 'Fallen Angels'; a descent of all the monads which have won self-conscious freedom in intellectual and spiritual growth and have become like unto us, Elohim.

You know in the Hebrew Bible — "Thou shall not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for if thou eatest of it thou shalt become like us." But that indeed is the whole purpose of evolution! That the monads may pass from the state of unself-conscious god-sparks to that of self-conscious fully evolved gods knowing their divinity and taking a self-conscious part in the cosmic work. These are the Asuras, the Maruts and the Agnishwattas.

It has always pleased the dogmatic priests of theology — to keep the thinking faculty down; and yet it is man's saving. The thinking faculty, it is true, often leads man into error and into making grievous mistakes for which he has to pay with the very blood of his heart “As ye sow ye shall reap” but the end of it is illumination, experience, compassion... No man's heart has ever throbbed with understanding compassion over the sufferings of another which it itself has never suffered. It takes suffering to make us compassionate to others who suffer the cleansing fires of sorrow and pain; and these come through the advancing evolution of man's mind, part of which is his ethical, his moral instinct.

A Sura, Kumara, is a starry, glorious being, spotlessly pure, radiant with the light of eternity, colorless, utter beautiful — but look in its eyes, there lacks a soul! Here lies the gist; one must gain a soul before it can be saved. How true it is! The gaining of the soul is the story of the Kumara passing through the experience of the lives, building up the human soul to self-understanding of what life and nature mean, and emerging from it in soul a god.

And on the other hand you would see an Asura, Agnishwatta, just as beautiful, just as glorious, shining with the glory of eternity on it; but in its eyes the deep richness of garnered experience and infinite compassion, things which are only latent in the Kumara. The Kumara is the unself-conscious god-spark. The Agnishwatta is the same, become a self-conscious god.

Kama the colloquially used word for work or doing, Kamadev or the god of desire is intimately connected with the divine force that propels the universe into being. Kama is a cosmic energy, impersonal and without attributes the term Kama has a wide significance, pertaining not only to the "desire" element in man but, as a primordial impulse of action.

Indra the god of senses and the gods are suffering at the hands of the demon Tarakasur, who cannot be defeated except by Shiva's son. Brahma who advises that Parvati woo Shiva; their offspring will be able to defeat Taraka. Indra assigns Kamadeva to break Shiva's meditation. To create a congenial atmosphere, Kamadeva (Madana) creates an untimely spring (Vasanta). He evades Shiva's guard, Nandin, by taking the form of the fragrant southern breeze, and enters Shiva's abode. (Sensory inputs)

After he awakens Shiva with a flower arrow, Shiva, furious, opens his third eye, which incinerates Madana instantaneously and he is turned into ash. However Shiva observes Parvati and asks her how he can help her. She enjoins him to resuscitate Madana, and Shiva agrees to let Madana live but in a disembodied form, hence Kamadeva is also called 'Ananga' (an- = without; anga = body, "bodiless"), or 'Atanu' (a- = without; tan = body). The spirit of love embodied by Kama is now disseminated across the cosmos: it affects Shiva whose union with Parvati is consummated. Their son Kartikeya goes on to defeat Taraka. I think the union of Shiva Shakti linga is actually the symbol of Kamadeva since he is now Ananga. So when you are prostrating to Shiv linga you are actually prostrating to Kamadeva/Madana.

Yama controls the organ of action (Kama); the motor system which is the part of the central nervous system that is involved with movement. It consists of the pyramidal and extrapyramidal system. The extrapyramidal motor system consists of motor-modulation systems, particularly the basal ganglia and cerebellum. Prana-Yama control of breath.

Yama is a Lokapāla and a powerful deity (god). He is the son of Surya (Sun), (though some sources say that he is the son of Brahma the Creator), and twin brother of Yami, or Yamuna, traditionally the first human pair in the Vedas. Interestingly Surya's two sons Shani and Yama judge. Shani gives us the results of one's deeds through one's life through appropriate punishments and rewards; Yama grants the results of one's deeds after death.

He is one of the Guardians of the directions and represents the south. Yama is also the god of justice and is sometimes referred to as Dharma, in reference to his unswerving dedication to maintaining order and adherence to harmony. It is said that he is also one of the wisest of devas. In the Katha Upanishad, among the most famous Upanishads, Yama is portrayed as a teacher.

Yama is called Kāla ("Time"). Shiva is also called Kāla ("Time") as well as Mahākāla ("Great Time") in his form as the destroyer of the world.

The dynamics of Kama Yama is the somatic nervous system. The primary role of the somatic nervous system is to connect the central nervous system to the organs, muscles, and skin. This allows you to perform complex movements and behaviors. The neurons of the somatic nervous system do not make complex decisions about the information they carry. The appropriate decisions are made instead in the brain and spinal cord. However, without the peripheral nervous system's ability to bring in sensory information and send out motor information, it would be impossible for a person to walk, talk, ride a bike, or even watch television. Without the ability to take in information and send out responses, the brain would be useless.

The Puranic stories aren’t mere stories of mythical gods but are the semantic parables of the interconnected functioning of these governing principles, gods that dynamically operate through every individual and the collective. That is the very reason they are called gods.

Puranic stories tell about demons who became the king of gods (Indra), gods being cursed and goddesses leaving there godly realms and becoming human for love. It says a lot about the pragmatic nature in which the Puranas narrate the intertwined drama of dharma, karma and bhoga as it reigns supreme and governs ever thing that exists.

In my view the puranas along with the six systems (saddarsana) of samkhya, yoga, nyaya, vaisheshikha, mimamsa, and vedanta collectively become an integrated education system or the system of sanskara.

Sāmkhya philosophy regards the universe as consisting of two realities; Puruṣa (consciousness) and prakriti (matter).

Yoga school of philosophy holds that ignorance is the cause of suffering and saṁsāra. Liberation, like many other schools, is removal of ignorance, which is achieved through discriminative discernment, knowledge and self-awareness. The Yoga Sūtras is Yoga school's treatise on how to accomplish this. Samādhi is the state where ecstatic awareness develops, state Yoga scholars, and this is how one starts the process of becoming aware of Purusa and true Self. It further claims that this awareness is eternal, and once this awareness is achieved, a person cannot ever cease being aware; this is moksha, the soteriological goal in Hinduism.

Naiyayika scholars approached philosophy as a form of direct realism, stating that anything that really exists is in principle humanly knowable. To them, correct knowledge and understanding is different than simple, reflexive cognition; it requires Anuvyavasaya (cross-examination of cognition, reflective cognition of what one thinks one knows).

Vaisheshika school of approach is known for its insights in naturalism and it is a form of atomism in natural philosophy. It postulated that all objects in the physical universe are reducible to paramāṇu (atoms), and one's experiences are derived from the interplay of substance (a function of atoms, their number and their spatial arrangements), quality, activity, commonness, particularity and inherence. Knowledge and liberation was achievable by complete understanding of the world of experience, according to Vaiśeṣika school of Hinduism.

Mimamsa school of Hinduism is a form of realism, it consists of both atheistic and theistic doctrines and the school showed little interest in systematic examination of the existence of God. Rather, it held that the soul is eternal omnipresent, inherently active spiritual essence, and then focused on the epistemology and metaphysics of dharma. To them, dharma meant rituals and social duties, not devas (gods) because gods existed only in name.

Vedanta, the term veda means "knowledge" and anta means "end", it came to mean all philosophical traditions concerned with interpreting of the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita,

Tantra, the word Tantra is etymologically split up into tananat and trayate iti tantra. Tananat means to expand or expansion and trayate means to liberate or free. What the above root words mean is to free or liberate by expansion. Expansion of what? Expansion on the limited consciousness into the infinite Braman, Chit , Chidanana, Chit-shakti, Mahamaya, para samvit, paramshiva para bindu etc. In a very simplified form, the Jiva is limited by the various Kancukas called asta pasa. When the consciousness of the jiva breaks through these kancukas and pasas by expansion he becomes siva. Pasa Yukta bhavet Jiva and Pasa Mukta Sadashiva.

He who is bound by the pasa is Jiva, he who is free of the pasas is Sadashiva. So this is the definition of the word Tantra within the hindu network.

Buddhism draws a lot from tantra. I’d go as far to say that Buddhism is rebranded tantra, “how is that? one may ask”. Here’s a controversial perspective, Buddha is not Vishnu’s but Shivas avatar. Shiva although is the Mahadeva is never accepted in the white pantheon of gods as a god. He is the dark lord of death and liberation. Buddha is the maha yogi Shiva in meditation, he has more in common with Shiva than Vishnu. Vishnu has always to do with sustenance or restoration not with liberation, that’s always Shiva.

If Buddha is Shivas avatar then there is a missing avatar of Vishnu, that missing avatar would be the Hayagriva avatar.