Alva Noë: You Are Not Your Brain

Survey | A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials | Public Religion Research Institute

Survey | A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials | Public Religion Research Institute

Unplugged

Religious fundamentalism, and for that matter religion as it is usually understood today, is an inherently modern institution. It was almost entirely unprecedented in the Islamic world until the eighteenth century, and in Christendom, the nineteenth. The nation-state, and therefore government as we understand it today is an inherently modern institution, as well; they are but a byproduct of the same dogmatic conclusions. Central to the construction and development of each of these, the evolutionary and ever uncompromising doctrine of race is also itself an inherently modern and unprecedented construction. The modern, it seems, is becoming incessantly outdated. But the Empire will not Fall until we are prepared -- not merely to knock it down that it merely be replaced by its inwardly identical outward antithesis. No, we have instead the more difficult goal of learning not to miss it when it's gone. We start by turning away from the ephemeral. Away from the politician and his corporation, tuning out the blinding glow of his magical picture box, reawakening and rekindling the primordial intellect which once made us human. Things may then get better for a while.

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

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