In the Beginning Was Consciousness (Lecture by Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr)

Delivered at the Harvard Divinity School last year. Dr. Nasr discusses the epistemological changes that have occurred in recent centuries beginning in Europe, the Scientific Revolution, and the descent of true science to Scientism and the corresponding symptoms of the empty and utterly hopeless understanding of reality so frequent in the time and place in which we live. He shares his belief that, in light of some signs of change in recent decades, we are finally on the cusp of our long trajectory into intellectual darkness and back. A global future of polished hearts and awakened souls may not so distantly await.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJbASTsjxE8
 

Waiting for Dawn

It is a very curious thing that in the most current chapters within the world narrative of modernity and modern times that among even the most ignorant of laypersons there is a fascination and admittedly quite superficial albeit nonetheless existent attraction to initiatic, or gnostic, traditions. It is particularly interesting, and particularly absurd, given that the initiatic realm and anything that may be considered close to a comprehension of it is and has always been unreachable by the majority since humanity's descent from its truer status, before which period, as metaphysician René Guénon had said, the very word 'initiation' could not have meant anything, all persons having naturally occupied the station which may be said to be the object of all authentic initiatic tradition today.

What is initiation? It may in a nutshell be thought of quite simply as the transmission of a spiritual influence upon a candidate, given the satisfaction of candidature and given the satisfaction of an authentic traditional body (to be explained). Early Christian Gnosticism as well as Sufism, Shi'i Irfan, and the Kabbalah, are among those initiatic or esoteric bodies or schools most obvious and most recognizable to the West. According to Guénon, there are three absolutely necessary "conditions" for initiation which act as qualifications for the passage into authentic esoteric knowledge and status, reworded a bit for mnemonic purposes:

1. An aptitude or "initiability" on the part of the candidate

2. An "attachment to a regular, traditional organization" (on the part of those conferring benefit on the candidate)

3. An actuality wherein the candidate is guided through a systematic realization of his initiatic ascent

(See Fohr's translation of Perspectives on Initiation, pp. 22 - 27.)

It is clear that many contemporary, widespread attractions to the mystical rest on a lack of understanding of these three principles insightful laid out by Guénon, a complete rejection of their necessity altogether, or the replacement of the quality of attachment with a pseudo-traditional authority.

By necessity, only a minority will have the aptitude to discern between the qualified and unqualified forms, or authentic religion or spirituality from inherently misguided pseudo-authority. The greater challenge will be to raise consciousness, or distribute aptitude, with the majority who despite all their good intention and grand intelligence have continued to be unable to launch themselves outside the prisons of the contemporary paradigm.

Three Dollars Per Month = Still Factors Freer than a "Free" Dropbox Account

Last week, Dropbox proved that it cares nothing for its users' privacy. For several hours, every Dropbox user's account was accessible through the member website without need of a password. The incident gave clear validity to the intuitive suspicion of thousands across the Internet who used Dropbox's service for the sake of convenience, complacent in the "possible" elimination of their freedom, privacy, and personal dignity.

In the hours that followed, the question was posted on slashdot as to what alternatives to the service might already be in development under a free and open license. An answer, which I decided to investigate further, was SparkleShare.

Not only is SparkleShare released under the GPL, but it also has one other very significant distinction from Dropbox. Rather than hosting your files on Dropbox's server, you decide what server your files are hosted on. This is both a radical advantage in terms of freedom, and a disadvantage (for some) in terms of feasibility.

I decided, a few days ago, to purchase a monthly subscription for a cheap, unmanaged VPS. The site sshVM.com currently offers simple virtual Linux machine, accessible by SSH, for only $3.00. All I had to do then was follow the instructions on SparkeShare's website to set up my own SparkleShare server on my VPS. It was surprisingly simple!

I did have some difficulty getting SparkleShare to build on my local machine. I settled for the PPA:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pdffs/sparkleshare/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/pdffs/sparkleshare/ubuntu lucid main

Installing and configuring SparkleShare on my machine went mostly smoothly, except I did notice that it crashed any time I tried to open a folder from the SparkleTray system tray icon. This may have been due to the fact that I am running Awesome Window Manager, rather than the GNOME environment it is designed for. If you encounter stability issues with SparkleShare like I have, simply wrap the execution binary in a container script like I have, so that it will be restarted upon crash.

I am sure there is a better way to do this, but here is the script I wrote to launch Sparkleshare, then sit in the background and relaunch it anytime it crashes:

while [ 1 = 1 ]; do if ps -A | grep sparkleshare > /dev/null; then echo "" > /dev/null ; else `echo "sparkleshare start"` ; fi & sleep 10s; done

Let me know if you have a better way of writing that script, and I'll let you know how my experience with Sparkleshare goes!

Pirate File-Sharing Group Claims Religious Status in Sweden

The Missionary Church of Kopimism, founded by 19-year-old Isaac Gerson, has filed for status as an official religion in Sweden. Among their principle beliefs:

• Reproduction of information is ethically right.
• The flow of information is ethically right.
• Remix Spirit is a sacred kind of copying.
• Copying or remixing information conveyed by another person is an act of respect.

The group has also stated that “to appropriate software (to keep source code hidden from others), is comparable to slavery, and should be banned.” It does not seem they share a philosophy with the Free Software Movement. Not only do they not agree with proprietary licensing, but they also do not appear to recognize its legal existence.

Visit the official website: http://kopimistsamfundet.se/english/

[Read more from the original article.]

Friday Prayers from Kazakhstan

Egypt

My heart and soul is with my Muslim and Christian and other brothers and sisters in Egypt, and with all who are rising up together in the spirit of brotherhood against the tyranny throughout the East brought upon you by corrupt powers. May God symbolically cast the pharaoh once again to the seas and let the believers have self rule and peace again. And may such a state of peace be brought about nonviolently, in the spirit of Agape, of Sadaqah, and brotherly love.

Too often Islamic governance, and the mix of religion and state in general, is understood in the West as necessarily and essentially violent. The Muslim Brotherhood of today has done an honorable job of acting to and proving the contrary despite their having been demonized by some corners of the western media, and altogether ignored by others. The Brotherhood must continue to show that the complete separation of Islam from a state ruling over Muslims is unjust, and that a legal and recognized Islamic party with a share in leadership is a part of the medicine to the ailment facing the East and West today alike. But may it only come to power when it is welcomed and may it not be misguided by evildoers that it too becomes oppressive; it can only justify itself in the voice of people.

May the voice of the men on the streets be heard, and may a new government be formed that reflects their aspirations, manifests that of what they know, and rises above what they know not. May this include all parties, sacred and secular. May the powers that have been realize there is neither ethical nor practical justification in stopping peaceful protests with arms and may they allow their dream to come about nonviolently for the better of Egypt, the Mother of the World.

مصر أم الدنيا

Take A Moment

Take a moment to put aside every thing you have been taught by this world to worship, to take an objective look at every aspect of our world that you were taught never to criticize. Mind not that you be looked upon thereafter by the masses as the blinded philosopher, unable to walk through the darkness as well as they do, for indeed you are blinded, but blinded by the light of the sun they have never seen.

"This [intellectual] regress has reached such a point that the Westerners of today no longer know what pure intellect is; in fact they do not even suspect that anything of the kind can exist..."



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aHPPSqhbF4

Creating a Custom Bash Prompt for each GNOME Terminal Profile

This website does a particularly good and simple job of explaining how to set up your own custom bash prompt style in Linux. One issue that I had been having, however, is that I could not find any way to have more than one co-existing prompt style. That is, to set up each terminal profile to have its own bash prompt design. I managed to find a number of people online looking to set up multiple bash prompt styles for each of their GNOME terminal profiles, but with no answers. Thankfully, I was ultimately able to figure it out by my own trial and error.


First of all, read the instructions on http://www.linuxhelp.net/guides/bashprompt/bashprompt-print.php to learn how to set up a "PS1=..." line for your ~/.bashrc file. As you may already know, if you wish to make changes for all bash sessions, you can add such a line to the bottom of that file, or you may simply type it into a bash prompt to enable the configuration temporarily.



I will use as an example the following format, generated with the help of the website provided above:

PS1="\[\033[0;31m\]Linux\[\033[1;37m\]Box \\w"

Rather than adding this to your ~/.bashrc file and therefore modifying the prompt style of all your terminals, you can simply make a copy of your .bashrc.bashrcalt) and make the changes to that file:   file, call it whatever you would like (I call mine

cd ~

cp .bashrc .bashrcalt

Then, in the GNOME Terminal profile settings for the specific profile you would like to work with, go to the "Title and Command" tab, check the box that says "Run a custom command instead of my shell," choose "Exit the terminal when command exits" and, for the command to run, set the following:

 bash --rcfile .bashrcalt

Now, load a GNOME Terminal session with your custom profile enabled. e.g.:

gnome-terminal --profile=the_name_of_your_profile_here

You should be viewing the bash prompt with the custom set up you configured.

How to Make Jimmy Go Away (A Personal Appeal)

Jimmy Wales wants you to donate to Wikipedia. While anyone who uses Wikipedia must surely appreciate the service, we certainly aren't all in a situation to give back, at least financially (Actually, the best way to show your appreciation for the service is to become an at least occasional editor and contribute to the content).

Calling it a "personal appeal" sounds very sentimental, but it doesn't make it any easier for you to donate if you don't have money. Some of us, respectfully, just want the ad to go away.

If you use the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox (and why wouldn't you), go to Tools -- Adblock Plus Preferences and add the following filter:

/w/index.php?title=*:bannercontroller

Apply the new setting, and refresh the page!

Before

After

Special thanks to Michael at Adblock Plus forums!

An Open Letter to Diaspora

Dear Diaspora founders, investors, and developers,

Allow me first of all to congratulate you on the levels you have already reached, and extend to you my best wishes for a hopeful future and a better, more morally just alternative to the Facebook social networking site. I have a couple of issues to address with you that I think you will find to be of very high importance.

First of all, please consider the benefits, for you and the community at large, of introducing your product as the open-source alternative to Facebook under a free software license. Not only would such a gesture prove your service to be the moral alternative to Facebook, but it would ensure for you a vast and committed community of individuals regularly working to make your service more appealing and best of all, make it run better. I think the benefits of open source licensing apply especially to social networking and there is a very high demand for it today. Moreover, it is an ethical necessity.

Understand, as well, that by competing with Facebook you will be taking on all her moral and philosophical challenges. Facebook's privacy problem is only one issue. The way it decides what material can be posted and what cannot, is another one all together. The appropriate balance between freedom of speech and censorship is a moderately difficult subject for the intelligent, free-thinking people; Facebook has proven that it is, however, next to impossible for corporations. If your social network is to prove a morally just alternative to Facebook, and not merely a competitive clone, you must allow it to become neither a breeding ground for misinformation or the false representation of or discrimination against persons or peoples, nor an environment where intellectual challenges and critiques of modernity as well as religious beliefs and the full spectrum of political opinions are suppressed. Facebook has been guilty of some large degree of both of these extremes; and being guilty of some degree of two extremes does not make one moderate, nor does it make one just. If you decide your ethical issues by bribes and interest groups, as is the business of Facebook, than you will prove no better to the rest of the world, you will fail to bring the needed change to the digital world that we are calling for, and you will fail to gain the support of the masses who otherwise see no reason to step away from the services they are already using. Please consider these warnings, recognize the truthfulness of my intentions, and take them to heart.

I wish you peace and blessings in your endeavors, and I hope you make the right decisions, and I hope you make them for the right reasons.

Former Facebook User

Creating a fixed RAM disk in Ubuntu

Ciao lume.

A couple weeks ago I began tinkering with an operating system called Icaros, a desktop distribution of AROS, which is in turn a modern operating system designed to imitate and build upon the classic AmigaOS 3.1 environment. AROS comes with a "RAM Disk"--a fixed or dynamic partition of a computer's memory set asside to function as though it were a disk drive--loaded on the machine by default.

A RAM disk offers the benefit of storing and retrieving data more quickly than on an actual hard disk, as well as some security features thanks in part to the fact that any data stored on the disk will be removed on reboot. A RAM disk can be beneficial for numerous purposes, most commonly today to set as the location for browser cache to make visited webpages load faster (ideally on larger RAM disks with proper size limitations noted in one's browser cache settings). The use and benefit of RAM disks (which as far as I know have been around longer than permanent disk drives) will whither away with the replacement of spinning disk drives with static-state drives. For the moment, however, I found it an interesting enough concept that, despite the fact I have little to no apparent use for one, I decided to create a RAM disk that boots at each startup in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid).

There are a few easier ways to do this which you can easily google and bing yourself. I have found, however, that what most people consider today a RAM disk are actually disks that use both physical as well as virtual memory, the latter being stored on the hard drive and thus eliminating the purpose of having a RAM disk to begin with. I also made the decision that I wanted a RAM disk of fixed size, not a dynamic one (e.g. mounting /dev/shm) which can take over up to half the system memory--I only have two gigabytes of RAM on my machine).

To do this, run:

sudo mkfs -t ext3 -q /dev/ram1 65536
sudo mkdir -p /media/ramdisk
sudo mount /dev/ram1 /media/ramdisk -o defaults,rw

(Where 65536 is the size in kilobytes, translating to an example size of 64 megabytes.)

The RAM disk should then be mounted on the desktop. To make this happen at system startup (for all users), run:

gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local

(Replace gedit with your preferred editor, replacing gksudo with the ordinary sudo command for terminal-based, non-graphical editors.)

Making sure not to add anything after the line reading exit 0, add the following to the file:

mkfs -t ext3 -q /dev/ram1 65536
mount /dev/ram1 /media/ramdisk -o defaults,rw
chmod 777 -R /media/ramdisk

A few additional tweaks: Setting the RAM disk up as an ext3 partition, a folder lost+found is created every time the RAM disk is loaded at boot-up. I personally found this annoying. As you may know, to hide a file or folder (without having to rename it) in Gnome, you must create a file named .hidden whose contents list the names of the file(s) you wish to hide and which must be stored in the same directory. To make this happen each time you log in, you can create a text file containing nothing but lost+found, name it whatever you would like, and then store it somewhere obscure. Then create a basic script which copies that file to /media/ramdisk/.hidden - The contents of the script can be as simple as:

#!/bin/bash

cp /home/user/example/hide_thing /media/ramdisk/.hidden &

Set the script to load when you log in by (System - Preferences - Startup Applications) setting the command to: /the/location/of/your/script/./the_name_of_your_script.sh


The RAM disk I set up is viewable by all users of my system including my guest account. Any files that are stored to the RAM disk can be viewed by others users by logging out and switching sessions (as long as the machine is not rebooted). I decided to create a folder called private on the RAM disk (which is automatically created every time I log in, which is only viewable only by me. To do this, add the following line to the script just shown:

mkdir /media/ramdisk/private && sleep 1s && chown YOU_USER_NAME -R /media/ramdisk/private && sleep 1s && chmod 700 -R /media/ramdisk/private &

Now all I have to do is find a use for this thing. This article will be grossly obsolete in a few months if it isn't already.

For every man his due.

I have no sympathies for a country whose existence is structured upon the tearing down of places of prayer to build restaurants and night clubs. There is no love of God in this, and any one of faith should be ashamed that any of them claim to follow the same faith or any faith at all. Jews have a covenant with God that should be respected and protected by everyone, but those who have no morals have no covenant. Those who violate their duties lose their rewards. Responsibility precedes right. Those who turn against God must expect no gift from him and moreover no protection from him. In fact, they should expect only its antithesis.

Regarding:

Israel's new war on Islamic sites. Daud Abdullah, Aljazeera.

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/02/2010225111933403649.html

In a move that appears to be a celebration of the 16th anniversary of the massacre of 29 worshippers by the terrorist Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli government has proclaimed that the Ibrahimi Mosque in Khalil (Hebron) and Masjid Bilal ibn Rabah (mosque) in Bethlehem are "Jewish Heritage sites". [read more]