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So where Ken Wilber at? I haven´t read his most recent book "Finding Radical Wholeness", but the link below goes to a critical review by his constant shadow Frank Visser over at Integral World (yes, that site still exists).
Make of the critique what ye wish, but I get the impression that Wilber is pretty much at the same place as, say, 20 years ago. The Tantric aspect is supposedly new, but hasn´t Wilber always been inspired by Tibetan Buddhism somehow?
And yes, Visser himself seems to be mostly stuck in the same place as always, too!
So I just learned that seriemas aren´t really gruiforms, but belong to an order all their own closer on the evolutionary tree to falcons, parrots and passerines. Does that matter? Not really...except that the seriemas are the only surviving cariamiforms. The order was once more diverse and also included, ahem, terrorbirds...
I never really thought about it, but it *is* funny that terrorbirds are closer on the evolutionary tree to the songbirds in your backyard than they are to cassowaries (the modern birds they superficially resemble). It´s also really, really funny that they have been extinct for quite some time, LOL.
There is something strangely reassuring about our ultimate evolutionary ancestors being "Asgard Archaea" found inside "Loki´s Castle" in the Atlantic Ocean midway between Iceland and Svalbard.
The hypothesis is that an archaeum captured a bacterium...and this became the first eukaryotic cell. All (?) extant living creatures which aren´t Archaea or Bacteria are Eukaryota, including humans. The idea that our evolutionary ancestor was a hybrid between two different lineages (presumably combining the best traits of both) is obviously also appealing. Are you listening, Lynn Margulis?
Note also that we are no longer bacteria "cladistically speaking", but rather archaea. Thank you. Always considered archaea to be more cool somehow!
I couldn´t withhold this little gem from JMG´s Parsifal essay linked to in the previous blog post:
>>>It’s indicative of the difference we’re discussing that the salvation offered by Christ is confirmed to his believers by their faith that he returned from death, while the salvation offered by the Buddha is confirmed to his believers by their faith that everyone else returns from death but he did not and never will.
>>>It’s equally noteworthy that Christian teaching rests on the idea that each human being has an immortal soul that needs to be saved from damnation, while Buddhist teaching insists that the idea that any of us has an enduring self at all is the very source of our damnation.
>>>The two faiths are irreconcilable at levels deeper than most people, and even most theologians, are willing to go.
Noooo, I want harmonization so I can pretend that pluralism doesn´t really mean what it seems to mean...
Is this the last installment in John Michael Greer´s analysis of Wagner´s Ring Cycle and Parsifal?
Here is the last paragraph: "The load of that loveless pity has become an immense political fact in our day. Wagner’s operas offer no answers in response to it; brilliant as he was despite his flaws, he wrestled with the challenges of his own time, not those of ours. Can we expect some other wandering youth raised in the wilderness to arrive with a new answer that will meet the hard needs of our predicament, or are we just waiting for fire and flood to overwhelm the Valhallas of the modern industrial world? The curtain falls, the lights come up, and the opera is over; if there is an answer, we must find it somewhere else."
Damn. For a moment, I assumed JMG would give us the Holy Grail!
An entertaining YouTube clip on the "Cardiff Giant", a pseudo-archeological hoax from the mid-19th century. That´s Cardiff, New York State, btw.
The hoaxer was apparently an atheist who wanted to trick the gullible believers with a Nephilim-type sculpture. At one point, none other than P T Barnum exhibited a fake "Cardiff Giant", claiming it was the real one?! That is, Barnum was promoting a fake of a fake!
Interestingly, both the real fake and the fake fake are still on display somewhere in the US. How´s that for Americana?
Anders Lindberg har ju tidigare uttalat stöd för det svenska NATO-medlemskapet. Och Aftonbladet verkar även ha stött DCA-avtalet. Här verkar det som att han ändrar linje, men utan att säga det rent ut?! Hmmm...
The Metatron has watched the hours-long press conference featuring the three Italian researchers who claim to have found evidence of underground structures at the Giza plateau. While our man doesn´t rule anything out, he is *very* critical of the presentations at the presser and wonders aloud (very aloud) about the underlying methodology. It seems to be some kind of "Alternative Egypt" esoteric mumbo-jumbo, put forward with all the usual fanaticized conviction of true believers.
For instance, the claim that the Giza plataeu can be dated to 36,000 BC?! Or the claim that the researchers have located an underground "city" from Egyptian mythology. And when they used their radar technology to pick up vibrations from the ground, they "discovered" an ancient structure that looked like a tuning fork! It´s all "fated" and what not, even the fact that these three investigators met is "fated".
What really seems fated here is that this will turn out to be another episode in the neverending saga of pyramidiocy. And yes, a reptoid alien was included in one of the team´s powerpoints. Probably a joke, but you´ll never know. The Schwärmers are already using the multi-color scans (which are extremely difficult to interpret - one of the researchers even admit that he is color blind!) as evidence for nuclear power plants, UFOs and what not.
And then, maybe not. In case you assumed that Adventism was a straightforward thing...Ready to Harvest is here to set you straight, brother! Note that the Adventist movement was split on several different Churches from the get go. If this was the case with Adventism, why should we think early Christianity was any different?
