Steiner's THEOSOPHY

What has just been said already suggests one of the first qualities that must be cultivated by people who want to achieve independent perception of higher realities. It is unreserved and unbiased devotion to what human life or the world outside has to reveal. If we approach any phenomenon with a preconceived notion derived from our life as it has been until now, we shut ourselves off from the quiet yet pervasive influence this phenomenon can have on us. While learning, we must be able at any moment to make ourselves into a totally empty vessel into which the world we do not know can flow.
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Complete inner selflessness is part of this devotion to what the unknown world can reveal, and we will probably make some astonishing discoveries about ourselves when we test the extent of our own devotion. If we want to set out on the path to higher knowledge, we must practice until we are able to obliterate ourselves and all our prejudices at any moment so that something else can flow into us.
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We must eliminate any standards of attractiveness and unattractiveness, stupidity and cleverness, that we apply as a matter of habit. We must try to understand people purely out of themselves.
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The pleasure we experience because of a particular thing immediately makes us dependent on that thing; we lose ourselves in it.
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Seekers of knowledge must have the same goals for their actions as they have for their thinking—that is, their actions must not be disrupted by their personality, but must be able to obey the laws of eternal beauty and truth, accepting the direction these laws provide.
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Seekers of knowledge cannot consider only what will yield fruit or lead to success for themselves; they must also consider what they have recognized as good.
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We cannot question whether it does any good to resolve to obey only the laws of truth when in fact we may be mistaken about what is true.
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As long as our relationship to the world is a personal one, things show us only what connects them to our own personality. This, however, is merely their transient aspect. If we pull back from what is transient in ourselves and dwell with our “I” and our feeling of identity in what is lasting in us, our transient features are transformed and begin to convey the eternal aspects of things to us.
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We must not imagine that if we turn our mind to the eternal like this, it will estrange us from immediate reality and destroy our ordinary capacity for observation and our feeling for everyday affairs.
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This is the will to freedom, because freedom means acting from within, and only those who draw their motivation from the eternal can work from within.


Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner.

shiny happy hillside.

February 15, 2007
World Briefing Asia
China: Mountain Greenery, From a Paint Can
By REUTERS
The forestry bureau in Fumin County, in southwestern Yunnan Province, paid more than $60,000 for a team of painters to spend 45 days painting a barren hillside green, news reports said. “The painters were saying it was to adjust the hill’s feng shui,” The Beijing News quoted a villager as saying. Residents said the hillside, a disused quarry, was opposite the new office of the forestry bureau. The bureau confirmed ordering the paint job but did not explain why.

some people are heros. others aren't.

turning to around

Gods grew stationary
turned to stone
in a matter of decades
Pebble words fall through their mouths
each time
I pay homage with prayers.
This beach of mirrors reflects
pours blooming in twenty shades of red.
A ten-year window in the valley of the dead.
Forsaken decomposition rewound and left for the East
so as to greet ghost recordings
unleashing one syllable for each millennia.
I sit an wait until the word is said
while the languages reincarnate.

look

Morse code eyes
a decade between blinks
separating light from information
inside the lag after a not before a fire
turns it engulfed
for the licking giving
life to another dead observation.

nyctinasty

Trumped explanation
a crack at the knuckle
but a stain on the skin
a brown of ancestral brown
recalled
to the bed of yesterday
growing in patches
now a desert
maddened by a moon
striking down with repetitive rivers until sand
becomes a liquid sky aching to ascend,
cursed to an endless anchor.
Undertow attempts to jump
to grow feet on land
defy cliffs
sprung from the belly of a once dead thing
with wings
strapped to its back
Irises gaze straight into an Icarus embezzled sun
while all these skins evaporate
in thunderless clashes
plummeting back into the mouth
impersonating sounds,
anthropomorphizing the terror to hold it,
make it small,
tangible
to relay it back as an apology
repeating till
nyctinasty ears sleep in green.

U.S. not being very U.S. like

February 8, 2007
U.S. May Be Mishandling Asylum Seekers, Panel Says
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — A bipartisan federal commission warned on Wednesday that the Bush administration, in its zeal to secure the nation’s borders and stem the tide of illegal immigrants, may be leaving asylum seekers vulnerable to deportation and harsh treatment.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, which Congress asked to assess asylum regulations, found two years ago that some immigration officials were improperly processing asylum seekers for deportation. The commission, which also found that asylum seekers were often strip-searched, shackled and held in jails, called for safeguards in the system of speedy deportations known as expedited removal, to protect those fleeing persecution.
But the commission, which will issue its new findings on Thursday, says officials have failed to put into effect most of its 2005 recommendations. It says the failures come even as the Bush administration has significantly expanded efforts to detain and swiftly deport illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico without letting them make their case before an immigration judge.
“We are clearly concerned as to whether, in addition to prioritizing secure borders, the government is ensuring fair and humane treatment of legitimate asylum seekers,” said Felice D. Gaer, who is head of the commission, which was created by Congress in 1998. “We are really quite disappointed and dismayed by the lack of a response.”
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, also expressed concern about the slow pace of change. Mr. Lieberman said he planned to introduce legislation by March to require the Department of Homeland Security to adopt several of the commission’s main recommendations.
Officials from the Homeland Security Department emphasized that they had put into effect some recommendations, including naming the first senior adviser for refugee and asylum policy and updating training for immigration officers, detention workers and other personnel.
But they said many other recommendations were impractical given the challenges in trying to stop illegal immigrants from pouring into the country.
“We have taken their report seriously,” said Stewart A. Baker, an assistant secretary of homeland security. “But some of their recommendations just weren’t practical given the enormous flood of illegal immigrants that we deal with every day.”
Mr. Baker said the department looked forward to working with Mr. Lieberman and would review his measure after it had been introduced.
In its report, the commission praised the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, for training immigration judges on asylum law, expanding the number of legal orientation programs for detained immigrants and trying to improve immigration court decisions.
But the commission was sharply critical of the Department of Homeland Security, whose border agents and immigration officers interview asylum seekers at airports or land crossings.
Domestic security regulations require that immigration officials refer an illegal immigrant for what is known as a credible-fear interview if the immigrant indicates “an intention to apply for asylum, a fear of torture or a fear of return to his or her country.” The asylum seeker is then removed from the expedited removal process so an immigration judge can review the claim.
But the commission found no evidence that domestic security officials had taken steps to ensure that agents advised immigrants to ask for such protection or to ensure that agents did not deport immigrants who express fear of deportation.
The commission also found no indication that the Department of Homeland Security had taken steps to ensure that asylum seekers were not treated like criminals while their claims were being evaluated. Mr. Stewart said that it would be too burdensome to create a separate detention program for asylum seekers and that such a system might create incentives for people to claim that they were fleeing persecution.
Eleanor Acer of Human Rights First said the failure to address such problems promptly had “real human consequences.”
“Asylum seekers continue to be jailed in these prisonlike facilities for months and, in some cases, for years,” Ms. Acer said.
The commission also expressed concern that officials chose to expand the expedited removal process before addressing the problems in the handling of asylum seekers.

Asemic Writing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic

"ambition makes you look pretty ugly"

--paranoid android. radiohead.

Insula Article--NYTIMES

"The insula emerged from darkness a decade ago when Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist now at the University of Southern California, developed the so-called somatic marker hypothesis, the idea that rational thinking cannot be separated from feelings and emotions. The insula, he said, plays a starring role. "






February 6, 2007
A Small Part of the Brain, and Its Profound Effects
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
The recent news about smoking was sensational: some people with damage to a prune-size slab of brain tissue called the insula were able to give up cigarettes instantly.
Suppose scientists could figure out how to tweak the insula without damaging it. They might be able to create that famed and elusive free lunch — an effortless way to kick the cigarette habit.
That dream, which may not be too far off, puts the insula in the spotlight. What is the insula and how could it possibly exert such profound effects on human behavior?
According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.
They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.
Its anatomy and evolution shed light on the profound differences between humans and other animals.
The insula also reads body states like hunger and craving and helps push people into reaching for the next sandwich, cigarette or line of cocaine. So insula research offers new ways to think about treating drug addiction, alcoholism, anxiety and eating disorders.
Of course, so much about the brain remains to be discovered that the insula’s role may be a minor character in the play of the human mind. It is just now coming on stage.
The activity of the insula in so many areas is something of a puzzle. “People have had a hard time conceptualizing what the insula does,” said Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego.
If it does everything, what exactly is it that it does?
For example, the insula “lights up” in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see disgust on someone’s face, are shunned in a social settings, listen to music, decide not to buy an item, see someone cheat and decide to punish them, and determine degrees of preference while eating chocolate.
Damage to the insula can lead to apathy, loss of libido and an inability to tell fresh food from rotten.
The bottom line, according to Dr. Paulus and others, is that mind and body are integrated in the insula. It provides unprecedented insight into the anatomy of human emotions.
Of course, like every important brain structure, the insula — there are actually two, one on each side of the brain — does not act alone. It is part of multiple circuits.
The insula itself is a sort of receiving zone that reads the physiological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about actions, like eating, that keep the body in a state of internal balance. Information from the insula is relayed to other brain structures that appear to be involved in decision making, especially the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices.
The insula was long ignored for two reasons, researchers said. First, because it is folded and tucked deep within the brain, scientists could not probe it with shallow electrodes. It took the invention of brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to watch it in action.
Second, the insula was “assigned to the brain’s netherworld,” said John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology. It was mistakenly defined as a primitive part of the brain involved only in functions like eating and sex. Ambitious scientists studied higher, more rational parts of the brain, he said.
The insula emerged from darkness a decade ago when Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist now at the University of Southern California, developed the so-called somatic marker hypothesis, the idea that rational thinking cannot be separated from feelings and emotions. The insula, he said, plays a starring role.
Another neuroscientist, Arthur D. Craig at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, went on to describe exactly the circuitry that connects the body to the insula.
According to Dr. Craig, the insula receives information from receptors in the skin and internal organs. Such receptors are nerve cells that specialize in different senses. Thus there are receptors that detect heat, cold, itch, pain, taste, hunger, thirst, muscle ache, visceral sensations and so-called air hunger, the need to breathe. The sense of touch and the sense of the body’s position in space are routed to different brain regions, he said.
All mammals have insulas that read their body condition, Dr. Craig said. Information about the status of the body’s tissues and organs is carried from the receptors along distinct spinal pathways, into the brain stem and up to the posterior insula in the higher brain or cortex.
As such, all mammals have emotions, defined as sensations that provoke motivations. If an animal is hot, it seeks shade. If hungry, it looks for food. If hurt, it licks the wound.
But animals are not thought to have subjective feelings in the way that humans do, Dr. Craig said. Humans, and to a lesser degree the great apes, have evolved two innovations to their insulas that take this system of reading body states to a new level.
One involves circuitry, the other a brand new type of brain cell.
In humans, information about the body’s state takes a slightly different route inside the brain, picking up even more signals from the gut, the heart, the lungs and other internal organs. Then the human brain takes an extra step, Dr. Craig said. The information on bodily sensations is further routed to the front part of the insula, especially on the right side, which has undergone a huge expansion in humans and apes.
It is in the frontal insula, Dr. Craig said, that simple body states or sensations are recast as social emotions. A bad taste or smell is sensed in the frontal insula as disgust. A sensual touch from a loved one is transformed into delight.
The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.
People who are better at reading these sensations — a quickened heart beat, a flushed face, slow breathing — score higher on psychological tests of empathy, researchers have found. The second major modification to the insula is a type of cell found in only humans, great apes, whales and possibly elephants, Dr. Allman said. Humans have by far the greatest number of these cells, which are called VENs, short for Von Economo neurons, named for the scientist who first described them in 1925. VENs are large cigar-shaped cells tapered at each end, and they are found exclusively in the frontal insula and anterior cingulate cortex.
Exactly what VENs are doing within this critical circuit is not yet known, Dr. Allman said. But they are in the catbird seat for turning feelings and emotions into actions and intentions.
The human insula, with its souped-up anatomy, is also important for processing events that have yet to happen, Dr. Paulus said. “When you decide to go outside on a cold day, your body gets ready before you hit the cold air,” he said. “It starts pumping blood to where you need it and adjusts your metabolism. Your insula tells you what it will feel like before you step outside.”
The same goes for drug addicts. When an addict is confronted with sights, sounds, smells, situations or other stimuli associated with drug use, the insula is activated before using the drug.
“If you give cocaine to an addict, you are affecting their brain’s reward system, but this is not what drives the person to keep using cocaine,” Dr. Paulus said. The craving is what gets people to use.
For example, smokers enjoy whole-body effects, said Nasir Naqvi, a student at the University of Iowa Medical Scientist Training Program, who was the lead author of the recent article on smoking. It is not just nicotine binding to parts of the brain, he said, but sensations — heart rate, blood pressure, a tickle in the lungs, a taste in the mouth, the position of the hands, all the rituals.
The insula’s importance makes it an ideal target for many kinds of treatment, Dr. Paulus said, including drugs and sophisticated biofeedback. But methods to quell insular activity must be approached carefully, he said. People might lose the craving to smoke, drink alcohol or take other drugs, but they could simultaneously lose interest in sex, food and work.
As clinicians explore the possibilities, Dr. Craig is thinking about the insula in grander terms.
For example, lesions in the frontal insula can wipe out the ability to appreciate the emotional content of music. It may also be involved in the human sense of the progress of time, since it can create an anticipatory signal of how people may feel as opposed to how they feel now. Intensely emotional moments can affect our sense of time. It may stand still, and that may be happening in the insula, a crossroads of time and desire.