Deepak Chopra: Consciousness is all

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This, via the Monroe Institute’s website, is Deepak Chopra explaining in four minutes the scientific reasons to believe that the primary basis of existence is neither matter nor energy (whatever “energy” might be, divorced from its context of matter!) but consciousness. I am no physicist, but this feels right. I suppose that, in context, “feels right” means “restates what I already believe.” Well, so be it. Four minutes, no more:

http://www.monroeinstitute.org/thehub/quantum-physics-and-consciousness/

Graham Hancock – It is written in stone

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

My friend Larry Giannou sent me this link to Graham Hancock’s presentation given to the 2012 Tipping Point Prophets Conference with the comment, “Thought you might enjoy this” — He was so right!

I had the pleasure of listening to Hancock, Robert Bauval, Colin Wilson, John Anthony West, Rand Flem-Ath and others in 1995, at a conference called Return to the Source. And I have for years been an interested and indeed impatient observer of the process of trying to get what has been called Forbidden Archaeology into the mainstream.

Watch this one and a half hour presentation and two things will likely happen. 1) You’ll be fascinated, and 2) you’ll start looking for more on the subject, which these days (courtesy of the Internet) is easier than ever to find.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4k8pdJ2so4&feature=player_embedded#at=199

Babies know the difference between good and evil at six months

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Another piece that I have been sitting on for some while, too good to throw away, too removed from topicality to make it to the top of the pile. From the Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1275574/Babies-know-difference-good-evil-months-study-reveals.html

Babies know the difference between good and evil at six months, study reveals

By DAVID DERBYSHIRE

At the age of six months babies can barely sit up – let along take their first tottering steps, crawl or talk.

But, according to psychologists, they have already developed a sense of moral code – and can tell the difference between good and evil.

Continue reading Babies know the difference between good and evil at six months

Plants ‘Can Think And Remember’

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I’ve been sitting on this for a while, mostly because it got lost in my files. It appeared in the SchwartzReport for July 17, 2010, but it is no less relevant today, and will be no less relevant next years. Things change slowly, in certain directions. Nonetheless, regardless who glacially slowly, they do change.

Editor Stephan Schwartz’ comment:

I remember back in the early 1970s, when my two friends, Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins were writing what became the best seller, The Secret Life of Plants, they introduced me to Cleve Backster whose research showed plants had a measure of consciousness. All three of them, Peter Chris, and Cleve were subjected to withering and largely ad hominem criticism, by paradigm constrained biologists and other deniers who simply could not accept that any species other than human beings could have conscious awareness.

Plants ‘Can Think And Remember’

VICTORIA GILL, Science Reporter – BBC News (U.K.)

Plants are able to “remember” and “react” to information contained in light, according to researchers.

Continue reading Plants ‘Can Think And Remember’

Ventura and the Highway of Life

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

So there’s this book of essays by Michael Ventura, with photos by Butch Hancock, called If I Was a Highway, published by Texas Tech University Press (ttup@ttu.edu, or www.ttupress.org). It’s a hardcover,  7.5 x 9.5 inches, 236 pages, $30 but you can get it at Amazon for $22.

* * *

Back in the 1980s, while reviewing books for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, I came across Shadow Dancing in the USA by this guy I’d never heard of. I read it enthralled, and gave it a good review which unfortunately didn’t see the light of day for nearly a year, thus doing the publisher no good at all) and from that moment added Michael Ventura to my look-for list. Of course, that was back before the days of internet searches, and Amazon and Alibris and Powell’s online and so forth.

Continue reading Ventura and the Highway of Life

Happy New (World)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Very interesting to see Michael Ventura quoting from his own predictions as set forth in his 1985 book Shadow Dancing in the USA. It was that book, which I came across as a book reviewer for the Norfolk (Va) Virginian-Pilot, that introduced me to Ventura. I recognized his importance then, an importance that has been confirmed by everything of his that I have seen since. From the Austin Chronicle. http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A1130109

Letters at 3AM: Improvising the Coming World

BY MICHAEL VENTURA

The recording is The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse. The year is 1971. Before the music begins, a voice speaks: “[T]he title was inspired by a statement made by Mr. Marshall McLuhan. … Mr. McLuhan says that the whole world is going Oriental and that no one will be able to retain his or her identity, not even the Orientals. … And, from that point of view, it’s most improbable that anyone will ever know exactly who is enjoying the shadow of whom.”

That’s Duke Ellington speaking. The phrase “New World Order” had not yet entered popular usage, but it might have amused Ellington. Jazz artists cultivate an acute sense of interplay between order and improvisation. They know how improvisation relies on an underlying sense of order, and they know how pliable order can become in the hands of a gifted improviser.

Continue reading Happy New (World)