"Apocalypto", "The Fountain" and increase in Mayan projection.

[nanouk]

Originally Posted by drew hempel

Anyway China had a foot fetish so why put all the buxom women in front doing the Baywatch trick? hilarious.

is mutilation of ANY kind hilarious? how many rings on yer neck would you like to feel the Full Lotus, drew? or how many inches off yer feet?

pick yer Fetish...

BBC 6 Music, featuring an hour of Bob Dylan, what a Soul Man!
can't stand his songs, bar "subterranean homesick blues", but what a voice!

Love and Respect,

~n~

[drew hempel]

No I meant the "baywatch trick" was hilarious in the movie. It was actually the main message of the movie in my opinion. Chinese women can also by baywatch babes too!

Anyway the full-lotus is not supposed to be some aerobics exercise, as yoga is now commonly assumed to be.

Once the 3rd eye is open then direct contact with the Eternal Feminine occurs -- this is not a fetish because its the consciousness of which everything is made.

In otherwords you practice full-lotus to completely relax, cure all diseases, and recharge yourself to heal others, as well as create new realities.

[Mars]

Saw this last night. A truly wonderful movie, far grimmer than I anticipated (my friend actually said it reminded him of the original Grimm's fairy tales, with their shadowy and sometimes grisly turns). I hesitate to write too much about it, as I wouldn't want to prejudice anyone prior to seeing it, knowing that it is in limited release at the moment. I will say that Del Toro synthesizes the rational and the irrational in a very novel, skillful way. I wasn't completly satisfied, but I did feel that this is another piece of art that is sympatico with the evolution of consciousness that feels nigh. And a damn well-made movie.

[Tree]

A Past That Makes Us Squirm


By CRAIG CHILDS
Published: January 2, 2007
Crawford, Colo.

A FEW years back, while traveling in the Sierra Madre Occidental of northern Mexico, I came upon a canyon packed with cliff dwellings no one had lived in since before the time of Christopher Columbus. On the ground were discarded artifacts, pieces of frayed baskets, broken pottery and hundreds of desiccated corn cobs — the ruins of an ancient civilization.

I reached down to pick up what I thought was a dry gourd, and instead found myself cradling the skull of a human child. As I turned it in my hands, I noticed a deliberate hole in the back of the skull, directly above the spine. The skull was not cracked around the hole, which means the child had most likely been alive when a spike or some other implement had been slammed into his or her head from behind.

This is not the only skull like this. Excavations from elsewhere in northern Mexico have turned up other children killed the same way, human sacrifices to an ancient water deity, their bodies buried under pre-Columbian ball courts or at the foot of pillars in important rooms.

With knowledge of such widespread ferocity, I recently saw Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocalypto,” which deals with the gore of the Mayan civilization. I had heard that the movie’s violence was wildly out of control. But even as I winced at many of the scenes, as a writer and researcher in ancient American archaeology, I found little technical fault with the film other than ridiculous Hollywood ploys and niggling archaeological details.

Indeed, parts of the archaeological record of the Americas read like a war-crimes indictment, with charred skeletons stacked like cordwood and innumerable human remains missing heads, legs and arms. In the American Southwest, which is my area of research, human tissue has been found cooked to the insides of kitchen jars and stained into a ceramic serving ladle. A grinding stone was found full of crushed human finger bones. A sample of human feces came up containing the remains of a cannibal’s meal.

It could be argued that “Apocalypto” dehumanizes Native Americans, turning their ancestors into savage monsters, but I think it does the opposite. Oppressed hunter-gatherers in the movie are presented as people with the same, universal emotions all humans share. And urban Mayans are portrayed as politically and religiously savvy, having made of themselves a monumental, Neolithic empire, something more akin to ancient Egypt than the trouble-free agrarians who come to most people’s minds when they think of native America.

To further shatter that popular notion of Native Americans, there’s the scene in which a turquoise-jeweled priest stands atop a staggering temple yanking out one beating human heart after the next. That’s an image that nearly every archaeologist working in Central America has played in his or her head many times, only now it’s on the big screen for everyone to see.

Being told by screenwriters and archaeologists that their ancestors engaged in death cults tends to make many Native Americans uneasy. In Arizona, Hopi elders turn their eyes to the ground when they hear about their own past stained with overt brutality. The name Hopi means people of peace, which is what they strive to be. Meanwhile, excavators keep digging up evidence of cannibalism and ritualized violence among their ancestors.

How do we rectify the age-old perception of noble and peaceful native America with the reality that at times violence was coordinated on a scale never before witnessed by humanity? The answer is simple. We don’t.

Prior to 1492 it was a complex cultural landscape with civilization ebbing and flowing, the spaces in between traversed by ancient lineages of hunters and gatherers. To the religious core of pre-Columbian Mayans, a beating heart ripped from someone’s chest was a thing of supreme sacredness and not prosaic violence.

If “Apocalypto” has a fault, it is not with its brutality, but with us in the audience who cringe, thinking the Mayans little more than a barbaric people. The fault lies in our misunderstanding of a complicated history, thinking we can lump a whole civilization into a single response and walk out of the movie saying, “That was disgusting.”

Craig Childs is the author of the forthcoming “House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest.”

[Mars]

I agree with Childs that we should not shy away from the truth about past civilizations even when it is ugly and reveals behavior and traditions that are violent, brutal or otherwise unsavory to our 21st Century Western culture. That whole "noble savage" thing seems like a legacy that many people have bought into, partly I think because it is a yearning for a nature-connected idyllic past that may or may not have existed as we imagine it and partly because of a cultural guilt over the atrocities that nevertheless built the world that we live in and enjoy today. Most history I've read - most recently "Guns, Germs and Steel" - reveals, shock of all shocks, that even native peoples had their flaws and made some pretty colossal mistakes along their historical path. For example, the original settlers of North America probably caused the extinction of almost every large mammal on the continent (Giant Sloth, Mammoth, others). Not exactly in "sync" with nature. Nothing is gained by denying the archaeological findings when they conflict with our own comfortable and comforting notions of history. We're humans. We've f**d up to some degree no matter where we've come from. Sidebar: one can wonder if such a catastrophe created a cultural awareness of the importance of being in balance with nature which comprised such an important role in their culture by at least the time the colonists arrived.

However, the problem with the Childs article is it's failure to point out how important it is to be specific. I don't excuse any storyteller who claims to be telling the story of a distinct group of people and then garbles and jumbles the known facts because it doesn't serve HIS interpretation. Which, by the accounts and criticisms I've read, is what Gibson does. Someone quoted him as saying something akin to "I just made up a lot of stuff" and I don't think he was just talking about the characters backstory. I wouldn't mind if he depicted the Mayans as brutal within the limits of the archaelogical record, but the criticisms have been that he goes far beyond it, into a fantasy that mixes in facts from a slew of traditions. If he wanted to make an allegory that hybridized and consolidated all ancient MesoAmerican cultures into a fictional peoples, situated them in a galaxy far far away calling the "Centauri Mestizos" or some such thing, I wouldn't complain. That to me, is creative license. Gibson didn't do that. He decided to tell a distinctly Mayan story. Childs suggests that only a few "niggling archaelogical details" bothered him. In keeping in the spirit of specifics, I wish he had mentioned what those were and responded to the following: the Mayan civilization collapsed long before the Spaniards arrived; we know of no mass graves; the common folk weren't torn from their homes and sacrificed; there were no slaves. If the above are correct, this is not indicative of an unwavering fidelity to correcting our soft-hearted but inaccurate view of a Native people that Childs seems to suggest Gibson exhibits.

Of course, one could argue that Gibson is being held to an unfair standard. Every historical movie is going to get some stuff wrong and make compromises in service to story. True. But striving for accuracy and falling short is far different than "making up a lot of stuff."

I had a college professor once say "History is not about then, but about right now," meaning that it is always seen through the lens of our morays, attitudes and cultural preconceptions, and of course is always changing as more evidence is revealed and as we re-examine our own interpretation of the data. Childs is right to point out that we need to stay open and alert to our sensitivities and subjectivity and how they may color our interpretation. I don't agree, however, that when a story distorts the facts the fault lies not in the storyteller, but solely in the audience for not knowing better.

[drew hempel]

Great response. I think Childs is being racist. Someone really good on this topic is Lyall Watson.

[Tree]

Who's racist here? Someone who is objective and knowledgable about history or someone who idealizes another race to the point of lying about things deemed unsavory in order to fit their own agenda and worldview? The Mayans sacrificed humans and they practiced slash and burn agriculture and there is increasing proof that they were involved in many wars.
They weren't perfect, no human is, and people need to stop pretending they were in order to fit their own personal mythologies.

[drew hempel]

I would say EVERYONE IS RACIST! What you have stated is Tree about the Mayans but what Mel Gibson put in his blockbuster has no evidence whatsoever. I guess we can repeat this ad naseum to no effect.

[craazyman]

this stuff is the history of all cultures. All anyone has to do is read Sir James Frazer's classic "The Golden Bough".

Speaking of movies, here's a bit of movie trivia. In Francis Ford Coppala's "Apolcalypse Now" (which was a contemporary interpretation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness") in Kurtz's (played by Marlin Brando) inner sanctum bedroom, he had three books on his nightstand.

1. The King James Bible
2. Conrad's Heart of Darkness
3. Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough"

The native American cultures in Mexico (especially the Aztecs and surounding tribes) took this stuff to a sublime extreme. But they were not alone, Rome's nemisis--the Cartheginians of Northern Africa--did too.

Where does the Passover feast come from--the slaughter of the sacrificial lamb--and where did that come from? Interesting that when folks take communion in church they are ritually re-enacting the eating of the flesh of the human sacrifical victim from thousands of years ago. But they have no idea.

Nobody knows this stuff because nobody reads anymore. They all just watch TV and go to the movies.

[sidecross]

I am finishing Richard Dawkins The God Delusion and have read Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation; both books I highly recommend.

Some of us still do read.

[drew hempel]

Dawkins is just the byproduct of crappy mass media. Read Professor Simon Conway Morris' book "Lifes' Solution" (Cambridge U Press, 2003) -- he's a Cambridge professor that has thoroughly debunked Dawkins -- the NeoDarwinians are raving idiots scared that someone might read real books, not mass-marketed propaganda promoted on "science" blogs that ban people, etc.

[Mars]

Originally Posted by Tree

They weren't perfect, no human is, and people need to stop pretending they were in order to fit their own personal mythologies.

Quite right, Tree. There's a quote from Mckenna to that effect in a weekend workshop that he gave - the transcript of which was posted recently:

Originally Posted by Caprinardo Delirio

"The conceits of Mayan religion and Mayan courtly life are all coming into focus and it's very exciting. All the people who have tried to make the Maya into some kind of Atlantean civilization should be running for cover at this point, because the picture that emerges is not as pretty as we might wish, but, hey, know the truth and the truth will set you free, I would choose truth over illusion anytime, no matter how damaging it might be to somebody's conceptions of these things."

I feel obliged to point out, however, that Childs does not indicate in his article that he is an expert of Mayan culture specifically: "as a writer and researcher in ancient American archaeology"; and doesn't address the inaccuracies that experts in Mayan archaeology have pointed out.

[sidecross]

“Dawkins is just the byproduct of crappy mass media..”

No author should be read out of context to other authors. For instance Richard Dawkins and Rupert Sheldrake are on opposite sides of many issues, but I have learned and appreciate much from each writer.

Drew you write from such an absolute position that really is not constructive even to your own point of view.

[Tree]

Originally Posted by Mars

Quite right, Tree. There's a quote from Mckenna to that effect in a weekend workshop that he gave - the transcript of which was posted recently:
I feel obliged to point out, however, that Childs does not indicate in his article that he is an expert of Mayan culture specifically: "as a writer and researcher in ancient American archaeology"; and doesn't address the inaccuracies that experts in Mayan archaeology have pointed out.

I noticed that too Mars, and a sentence like that invites questions into his credentials, I think. There's a lot of information on ancient Maya culture though and a lot of that points to a culture that was brutal, but people will believe what they want. I posted this article in hopes of challenging some people and getting a discussion started but I certainly don't think that makes me racist!
I just think it's interesting how people latch onto other cultures or ideas and insist on their perfection in order to make themselves feel better about the world. Not a judgement, just an observation. I suppose I feel that way about art. Art and Nature are parts of my belief system but they have their brutalities, too.

[Tree]

Originally Posted by craazyman

Where does the Passover feast come from--the slaughter of the sacrificial lamb--and where did that come from? Interesting that when folks take communion in church they are ritually re-enacting the eating of the flesh of the human sacrifical victim from thousands of years ago. But they have no idea.

Nobody knows this stuff because nobody reads anymore. They all just watch TV and go to the movies.

I've wondered about this. Is it willful ignorance on the part of Catholics that they are cannibals (wink, wink) or is there something more sinister going on?
Too many people asleep in the world. Apparently, sacrifice does nothing to change that.

[drew hempel]

Haha -- I just got back from hanging out at my anarchist cafe, the Hard Times, and while riding my bike was rebuking myself for not speaking out against the copy of the God Delusion on the table of a regular.

The God Delusion is a stupid book. No one has read "Life's Solutions" -- Have you read Dawkin's earlier books? Dawkins' is a Freemason, openly stating that Buckyfullerenes are the key to creating "synthetic ecology."

Now that IS interesting about Dawkins -- but how many have heard about "synthetic ecology"?

Or are you in favor of replacing Nature with silica-iron nanobiomotors? haha.

Once again a "mass media" product is promoted as "safe" for general consumption -- in fact "cool" is it to be now reactionary, blithe, cynical and yes....

CRAPPY! Check out PZ Myer's blog -- http://pharyngula.org -- I got banned from it because Myers, a professor of biology in Minnesota, is a rabid promoter of Dawkins and so Myers does not allow any open debate on his blog. The Myers fanatically gets people to vote him the top science blog -- meaning that he and one other blog got 80% of the vote! Some "prize." haha.

Myers is in fact afraid of Cambridge Professor Simon Morris Conway's masterpiece "Life's Solutions" which blows Dawkins to smitherenes. Myers dismissed Conway's book

WITHOUT READING IT!!

Yeah that's the trend of the internet -- self-censorship, "emoticons" Youtube -- general stupidity and increasing crackdowns.

I had my whole email account sabotaged by the same U administration that professor Myers kisses ass to. Western science is just an aristocratic Freemason project.

Extremist am I? Try MIT history professor David F. Noble's book "The Religion of Technology." 1996

I was just talking to an Ethiopian who is getting a PhD in materials science -- and he readily admits that industrialization has made life WORSE. He grew up drinking pristine water from a river and living in the mountains.

Now then -- Freemasonry is Science: ENGLAND: Thomas Telford, "father" of modern civil engineering, and President of Institution of Civil Engineers and his buddy William hazledine -- both top Freemasons (detailed in Noble's tour de force).

A generation later --- in France -- Ecole des Ports et Chaussees, founder Jean-Rodolph Perronety, and top member of the Uranie Lodge of Freemasons.

Same with Ecoles des Arts et Metiers and the Ecole du Corps Royal du Denie at Mezieres. 4 top Freemasons founded the Ecole Polytechnique.

On and ON.

So it's not just some "secret" cabal -- although that can be demonstrated amply enough.

The mathematics of Western science is based on "containing" infinity through logarithmics from harmonics which are founded on "deep disharmony" (math professor Luigi Borazacchini).

There is no pure science, as the hypotenuse of the Pythagorean Theorem was changed into physical "magnitude" by Eudoxus, Euclid, Archytas, Hippocrates, etc.

Descartes and Galileo just picked up from there. http://nonduality.com/hempel.htm

Is 25 years left of Freshwater too ABSOLUTE for you? haha. London will be underwater soon.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

richard dawkins is certainly either incredibly naive if he thinks he is dealing seriously with religion, or he's just getting rich by building the laziest academic scheme in the history of the world.

i watched this two hour special with him on 'the god delusion' that i downloaded, but i actually came to the conclusion that he wasn't as insane as i thought, because he was dealing solely with the problem of fundamentalist literlists and the god image he was denouncing was purely based on the image of yahweh.

the points and arguments he and his audience asked and stated didn't move one inch beyond the simplest kind of kindergarten rethorical ethical puns and the whole talk could resemble any talk at any high school where one would ask "what if god is a woman" there really wasn't much more to it than that.

if dawkins thinks he can dismiss religion like that, he certainly is the most naive and most career greedy/lazy academic around.

as for his point that we shouldn't base our morales on the stories in the old testament, well.. who the hell would disagree with that?

the god delusion is his own delusion!

[Caprinardo Delirio]

tree, that quote wasn't mine. the one with the mayans... whatnot!

[sidecross]

I just finished reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and found it be a well researched and very good book.

I think it only fair to any author to judge the book by reading it.


Edit: I too heard an interview of Richard Dawkins on C-SPAN an American non commercial channel, and was not impressed with him.

The book on the other hand as I have stated above was well worth my time.

[drew hempel]

Let's just say that Dawkins and Mel Gibson are both trying to start a new religion.

[Tree]

Originally Posted by Caprinardo Delirio

tree, that quote wasn't mine. the one with the mayans... whatnot!

what? I didn't know I'd quoted you.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

something something... look up..

[Caprinardo Delirio]

shit, it was mars.

[Giselle62]

Wow, Kronos quartet? I've seen them twice, both times mind-altering in themselves.
p.s. ii love you (this is a message from my niece, Angelique)
u make me happy(another, oh well, i better get off the computer)

[Mars]

Originally Posted by Caprinardo Delirio

shit, it was mars.

Yeah, I was quoting you quoting McKenna - or better put, quoting Mckenna's seminar that you posted. Sorry about the confusion.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

confusion causes clarity apparently.

[Zehn]

'The Fountain' rocked!

[jezebelle]

ahhh
men are men
(god bless)

[drew hempel]

Guess I missed the fountain..... hmmm. I'll see if somewhere is still showing it in Mpls. and make a fucking day of it! haha

[Thom]

I'm rethinking Dawkins personally...i think he's conciously sacrificed himself to kick the puritan creationists. Kudos to him for that. Kamikaze Dawkins, as he's known on campus. I guess.

Anyway, saw a movie! Pan's Labyrinth. I may have been bedazzled by the magic of cinema but i thought it was awesome - beautiful, brutal, ferocious, kitsch, profound, silly, forgettable. It's not all "fairy", it's actually really about civil war - well, i suppose that's what all fairy tales are about. But i was very impressed, and would recommend the film.

Also the Pan character really captures that camp vibe that struts forth from the andalusian machismo, kind of like one of Lorca's duende...

Worth seeing.