Russian media billionaire Dmitry
Itskov has
invested some of his fortune in what he calls a
“science mega-project” to achieve cybernetic
immortality, somewhat along the lines of Ray
Kurzweil’s Singularity.
When I contemplate this sort of thing seriously, for
some reason it underscores how terribly transient and
illusory our human experience is. It also makes me
feel like we’re all willing participants in a strange
sort of game, life, wherein we all implicitly agree to
follow a bunch of rules to disburse resources, measure
the passage of time, and organize our physical
world…
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/billion_to_one/2013/11/dmitry_itskov_2045_initiative_eternal_living_through_science.html
In
2011, Itskov founded the 2045
Initiative,
which is named for the year when he intends to
complete the project’s ultimate goal: to outwit and
outrun mortality itself. His “avatar” project is a
four-stage process, beginning with the development
of androids directed by brain-computer
interfacing—mind-controlled robots, in other words.
It would culminate in a computer model of a person’s
brain and consciousness, which could be uploaded
into a machine for posterity. An eternal problem,
solved.
A quote from comedian and
musician Reggie Watts has gone
slightly viral this week, even amongst my non-nondual
Facebook friends. Clearly something about this
sentiment resonates with some of the mainstream.
One wonders what Watts means by the “you” he
references in his last sentence...
The
important thing to remember is that this simulation
is a good one. It’s believable, it’s tactile, you
can reach out, things are solid, you can move
objects from one place to another, you can feel your
body, you can say I’d like to go over to this
location, you can move this mass of molecules
through the air to another location. At will. That’s
something you live inside of every day.
From an issue of Jerry’s
earlier this week comes this bit from a 7-point
summation by David
Hodges on what is
nonduality:
...all
dualities are in reality aspects of the same stuff
but at different points on a spectrum.
Highlights reference:
http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/NDhighlights/conversations/messages/5083
Original source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/nonduality/comments/1qa5iu/a_reader_asks_what_do_nondualists_believe_my/
Reader and philosopher Wayne
Ferguson wrote
to us about the preceding David Hodges post on Reddit.
He said it reminded him of Aldous Huxley’s The
Perennial Philosophy, and wrote this thoughtful
comment on his own blog:
http://jwayneferguson.wordpress.com/the-perennial-philosophy/
While
it is very important not to underestimate the
differences between various religions (and religious
sects) as we interact with their adherents–
especially on a global or regional scale –it is also
important to see the
possibility of seeing beyond our differences–of
seeing that
which most of the world’s wisdom traditions seem
to share in common. And once
exposed to this possibility, it seems that our
hearts and minds actually become more open to a unitive
intuition of the
One in Whom we live and move and have our being–the
One that
is beyond name, form; beyond any and all traditions.
Ferguson is speaking of a
bold, noble truth by which to lead our lives. It may
be impossible to identify any conflict in the world
which could not be resolved by the manifest
actualization of that ideal.
Finally, a personal note.
I had two quite glorious epiphanies this week while
practicing two of my main passions: jazz tenor
saxophone and drawing. In each case, I experienced
several blissful moments of what behavioural
neuropsychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.
While playing a slow blues in B-flat with my Hammond
B3 organ quartet, I felt the music come through me
completely unhindered, without any of my own conscious
psychological involvement. For three or four minutes,
I became lost in physical time and space, just hearing
the notes of my saxophone being played to me as if in
a dream. Improvising jazz can be a terribly cerebral
exercise when playing a complicated tune. But in this
instance, I exercised no personal interference with
the notes that were played; they just
flowed naturally through me, without my control.
Later in the week, while
sketching somewhat aimlessly, I realized that if I
changed my hand position a certain way and then
removed my brain’s focus from the motor control of my
hand, I could just “see” the image I wanted to draw in
my mind’s eye, and watch my whole arm move in harmony
with what I was seeing. As long as I maintained my
focus of awareness on the
“seeing" instead of the
“drawing,” the image I saw in my mind was exactly
replicated in graphite on the page. But “I” didn’t
“do" a thing to draw it. It just happened.
The common aspect of both
of those experiences? I think I was just getting out
of my own way. For several glorious minutes this week,
I got completely out
of my own way, and let life be lived as it always is,
but without my own conditioning or desires or
influences laid on top of the experience.
So, that was pretty
awesome.
Dustin