/tag/biology

8 quotes tagged 'biology'

Publisher: psychedelicsalon.com (2013)

https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-365-effects-of-psychedelics-on-society/

Maybe there's a planetary regulating system and people are simply cells in a larger organism and when it comes time for something to happen which maybe means all life leaves the planet or something, then the equivalent of hormones are produced in the environment to initiate this morphogenetic rescripting of what is going on and suddenly animals which were perfectly happy hunting on the velts of Africa begin making art, watching the stars and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet. I really like to think that we are biologically regulated and that history is a biological phenomenon under the control of the environment. It isn't something that is going against the environment. \n\nNow the objection to that is that it looks so bad - it looks cancerous - but the obvious counter to that is birth! I mean, birth is - there's a lot of bloodshed, people make sounds as though they were in great pain - they are in great pain - it has all the attributes that we associate with the violent termination of the organism and yet it is the precise opposite: it is the birthing of the new generation. It is unavoidable and it is perfectly natural. \n\nAs a woman grows pregnant and she loses her sylph-like form and becomes heavier and clumsy and all these changes which go on in pregnancy - maybe something like what has happened to the Earth over the last 20,000 years. The Earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps much else. Obviously you just look at the Earth and humanity and you say, 'These two can't stay together much longer. They're becoming a problem.' The mother can't function, the child is in danger, and like the birth situation where if the child is not eventually birthed, toxemia will set in. Then everything goes haywire, then both parties are in danger and their has to be emergency intervention. I don't really think we've reached that point, but I think we have come to term. As you know, concerning birth, transition is the psychedelic compression of it all, where it all comes together, and it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming and is going on forever, and then it ends, and the baby is born and everything is seen to be alright. \n\nI think the 20th century is not a metaphor that we are birthing the new soul of humanity - it's actually happening and it's ripping our society and planet to pieces, but what will come out of it is the meaning of our destiny, perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny and I hope that we are going to be privileged to be midwives of this process. To be there on that great day when it all makes sense and then you can turn and look back at the process - the wars and revolutions and pogroms and migrations and the whole thing and say, 'Now I understand what all that was about.'\n\nThat's I think the real promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics: being in on that process, because if you're in on that process, anxiety will leave you. You will not define yourself as a victim, you will define yourself as a privileged spectator.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

The image of God as a personal Being, somehow 'outside' or other than the world, had the merit of letting us feel that life is based on intelligence, that the laws of nature are everywhere consistent in that they proceed from one ruler, and that we could let our imaginations go to the limit in conceiving the sublime qualities of this supreme and perfect Being. The image also gave everyone a sense of importance and meaning. For this God is directly aware of every tiniest fragment of dust and vibration of energy, since it is just his awareness of it that enables it to be. This awareness is also love and, for angels and men at least, he has planned an everlasting life of the purest bliss which is to begin at the end of mortal time. But of course there are strings attached to this reward, and those who purposely and relentlessly deny or disobey the divine will must spend eternity in agonies as intense as the bliss of good and faithful subjects. The problem of this image of God was that it became too much of a good thing. Children working at their desks in school are almost always put off when even a kindly and respected teacher watches over their shoulders. How much more disconcerting to realize that each single deed, thought, and feeling is watched by the Teacher of teachers, that nowhere on earth or in heaven is there any hiding-place from that Eye which sees all and judges all. To many people it was therefore an immense relief when Western thinkers began to question this image and to assert that the hypothesis of God was of no help in describing or predicting the course of nature. If everything, they said, was the creation and the operation of God, the statement had no more logic than 'Everything is up.' But, as, so often happens, when one tyrant is dethroned, a worse takes his place. The Crackpot Myth was retained without the Potter. The world was still understood as an artifact, but on the model of an automatic machine. The laws of nature were still there, but no lawmaker. According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going, but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists, naturalists, and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. It had constructed itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist of atoms like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time in virtually infinite time they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the world. The old story of the monkeys and typewriters. In this fully Automatic Model of the universe shape and stuff survived as energy and matter. Human beings, mind and body included, were parts of the system, and thus they were possessed of intelligence and feeling as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms. But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last they get around to typing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they may at any moment relapse into gibberish. Therefore, if human beings want to maintain their fluky status and order, they must work with full fury to defeat the merely random processes of nature. It is most strongly emphasized in this myth that matter is brute and energy blind, that all nature outside human, and some animal, skins is a profoundly stupid and insensitive mechanism. Those who continued to believe in Someone-Up-There-Who-Cares were ridiculed as woolly-minded wishful thinkers, poor weaklings unable to face man's grim predicament in a heartless universe where survival is the sole privilege of the tough guys. If the all-too-intelligent God was disconcerting, relief in getting rid of him was short-lived. He was replaced by the Cosmic Idiot, and people began to feel more estranged from the universe than ever. This situation merely reinforced the illusion of the loneliness and separateness of the ego (now a 'mental mechanism') and people calling themselves naturalists began the biggest war on nature ever waged. In one form or another, the myth of the Fully Automatic Model has become extremely plausible, and in some scientific and academic disciplines it is as much a sacrosanct dogma as any theological doctrine of the past—despite contrary trends in physics and biology. For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik— victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the Fully Automatic Model of the universe as bleak as possible. Nevertheless it remains a myth, with all the positive and negative features of myth as an image used for making sense of the world. It is doubtful whether Western science and technology would have been possible unless we had tried to understand nature in terms of mechanical models.

Occult Medicine and Practical Magic

Author: Samael Aun Weor

Publisher: Glorian Publishing (2008)

The Mind's I

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: Bantam Books (1982)

160

It is no good taking the right number of atoms and shaking them together with some external energy till they happen to fall into the right pattern, and out drops Adam! You may make a molecule consisting of a few dozen atoms like that, but a man consists of over a thousand million million million million atoms. To try to make a man, you would have to work at your biochemical cocktail-shaker for a period so long that the entire age of the universe would seem like an eye-blink, and even then you would not succeed. This is where Darwin's theory, in its most general form, comes to the rescue. Darwin's theory takes over from where the story of the slow building up of molecules leaves off.

We are now in a position to integrate the perspectives of three large fields: psychology, biology and physics. By combining the positions of Sagan, Crick, and Wigner as spokesmen for the various outlooks, we get a picture of the whole that is quite unexpected. First, the human mind, including consciousness and reflective thought, can be explained by activities of the central nervous system, which, in turn, can be reduced to the biological structure and function of that physiological system. Second, biological phenomena at all levels, can be totally understood in terms of atomic physics, that is, through the action and interaction of the component atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so forth. Third, and last, atomic physics, which is now understood most fully by means of quantum mechanics, must be formulated with the mind as a primitive component of the system. We have thus, in separate Rediscovering the Mind 40 Circle – from the mind, back to the mind. The results of this chain of reasoning will probably lead more aid and comfort to Eastern mystics than to neurophysiologists and molecular biologists; nevertheless, the closed loop follows from a straightforward combination of the explanatory processes of recognized experts in the three separate sciences. Since individuals seldom work with more than one of these paradigms, the general problem has received little attention. If we reject this epistemological circularity, we are left with two opposing camps: a physics with a claim to completeness because it describes all of nature, and a psychology that is all-embracing because it deals with the mind, our only source of knowledge of the world. Given the problems in both of these views, it is perhaps well to return to the circle and give it more sympathetic consideration. If it deprives us of firm absolutes, at least it encompasses the mind-body problem and provides a framework within which individual disciplines can communicate. The closing of the circle provides the best possible approach for psychological