http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/apr/13/werner-herzog-cave-art-documentary-3d

Herzog has apparently been given permission to film inside the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave, a site in the Ardèche department of southern France that contains the earliest known cave paintings, dating back at least 30,000 years. Even more intriguingly, Herzog is planning to shoot much of the film in 3D.

The Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, cannot be accessed by tourists, as the French authorities have deemed the risk of degradation to be too high, so Herzog’s film might be the only opportunity for the rest of humanity to view the site. The paintings depict lions, panthers, bears, owls, rhinos and hyenas, suggesting a vastly different fauna at the time of the paintings to that of modern France.

One of the panels from Chauvet – photo from the wiki.

Chauvet is the great painted cave discovery of our time, and I am really looking forward to seeing it in video form.

The Hall of the Bulls from Lascaux – photo from the wiki

One of my dreams, something I hope very much happens before I die, is that the cave at Lascaux can be videoed in extreme hi-resolution and detail, and that we will be able to see the art of the most important painted cave once again. Yes, I understand the risks, and I too worry about the damage that we have done, but still, I hope…

http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/en/00.xml

Can you imagine looking at the wounded man? It sends a shiver up my spine.

That is, death is the origin of religions, and death is the origin of esoteric systems.

Death is the great question, and the great puzzle.

And the near death experience is arguably the origin of much of the content and world models of religion and esotericism.

So, it’s relevant to we explorers to consider how the near death experience works.

National geographic recently posted an article that basically restates and provides a bit of popular literature supporting an old theory, which is that the characteristic content of the NDE, visions of light, the sense of meetings with beings, tunnels, and the like may be caused or supported by a higher concentration of CO2 in the bloodstream, and presumably by a change in the oxygen/CO2 balance.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100408-near-death-experiences-blood-carbon-dioxide/

James Owen

for National Geographic News

Published April 8, 2010

A model like this, incidentally, may OR may not invalidate the content.

And one thing is certain – the NDE has a huge impact on those that experience it.

But, we explorers have to be open to new information and new models, so it’s important to keep in mind that the content of the NDE could easily have a physiological and chemical origin.

Consciousness is chemical, or at the very least, has a very large and significant chemical component – this is the great unacknowledged lesson of the human onsession with the large array of psychoactive drugs, including those produced by the huge anti-depression and anti-anxiety pharmaceutical industry, those produced by the legal inebriant industries (alcohol, tobacco, and other legal inebriants around the planet), the pleasure drugs of the illegal inebriant industry, and especially of the psychedelics.

http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/41262/aleister-crowley-wicked

From BOINGBOING, a post about one of the grand old pioneers of consciousness exploration, Aleister Crowley.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/08/aleister-crowley-in.html

“Today is a special Crowley anniversary too! On this day 106 years ago, Crowley was in Egypt taking dictation from either his subconscious, or a messenger of the god Horus named Aiwass. The resulting text was Crowley’s most famous work, The Book of The Law, containing his oft-repeated rule-of-thumb: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Love him or hate him, Crowley not only talked the talk, but he walked the walk. To celebrate the Aiwass anniversary, Life has published a gallery of images related to Crowley’s remarkable life.”.

It’s rather sad and disappointing that boingboing would call the Book of the Law Crowley’s most famous book – a sign I suppose of the inevitable corruption of religion into all aspects of self-development and the exploration of the brain, mind, and consciousness. The book of the Law is ultimately Crowley’s worst book, a piece of trite psuedo-religion, the sort of junk that is always or almost always produced by “automatic writing” and trance writing experiments.

Oh, it’s pretty enough, and fine poetry, and if you have to have religion it’s not the worst religious document on the planet. It’s just not that special, and it contributes very little.

And I say that as someone who thinks of himself as a thelemite (well, a HIGHLY modified and modernized thelemite), and who thinks Crowley was one of the great geniuses of consciousness study in the 20th century.

There are many other Crowley books that are so much better, so much more worth reading and study, that it’s one of the great tragedies of Crowley’s life (a life filled with tragedies) that for so many people the Book of the Law, and the failed religion that surrounds it, is likely to be the introduction (thru groups like the oto) to the study of Crowley.

Don’t let that be you. For better poetry, read The Book of Lies; for better theory, read Magick in theory and practice, for better training tips, read Magick Without Tears, and for an explanation of the hermetic world model that underlies much of Crowley’s work, read The Book of Thoth.

The executive summary is that lucky people have mental traits that leaves them open to NOTICING possible openings that they can take advantage of for their benefit. I’ve snippeted out the mental traits as presented in the article below.

You may be able to quickly see why I mention these ideas – they involve yje way the brain and mind work, AND CAN BE TRAINED. They point at the phenomenon of selective perception, which is an incredibly important subject for the esoteric explorer to study and keep in mind.

But there’s another less obvious (on the face of it) reason to mention luck. If you hope to have success in your pursuit of meaning and “enlightenment”, you have to be damn lucky. Most people are, frankly, not so lucky. They are so focused on trying to see what they have been told to look for, that they forget to look at what is actually there, they miss the crucial clues, they fail to think for themselves and free themselves from the fictional storylines passed along in books and in popular mythology and “enlightenment culture”.

They are unlucky.

Don’t be unlucky. Stay relaxed, and look with relaxed eyes at the world and at yourself.

From the article:

“And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky-its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html

These are the traits of lucky and unlucky people:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

That old article starts with an image that is often described as the oldest map in the world, the “catalhoyuk map” – altho I describe it differently, I call it one of the oldest known examples of a “landscape painting”. Here’s a bad example of the image:

All along there has been a lot of disagreement about this image. Mellart’s book ‘cleaned up’ a lot of the badly damaged murals and wall paintings uncovered during his rushed old-style excavations, and frankly, it’s very hard to tell exactly what the wall paintings actually show. The common interpretation, that the shape on the wall represents the volcano now called Hasan Dag in an eruption (thus making the painting a landscape, and implying that the squarish cells painted in black underneath are an image of the town), has been questioned before.

And now from a cartographer an article that makes a good simple presentation of the arguments for the idea that the catalhoyuk wall painting isn’t a map NOR a landscape.

Why the World’s Oldest Map Isn’t a Map

It’s short, has some good illustrations, worth your time if you have an interest in ancient cultures.

Scent is an interesting topic, and a fruitful field for further study for we students of the mind. We use scent cues like perfumes and incenses as a basic part of our ancient and modern technologies of consciousness as tools to shapes moods and experiences and expectations. I predict that a lot of significant discoveries about the role of scent and smell in the brain and consciousness will be made this century, maybe even some really revolutionary discoveries – such as, for example, scent being one of the triggers for ‘feelings of energy in the body’, a subjective phenomenon familar to most people who’ve tried meditation or other training.

I thought a boingboing’s poster’s take on this was clever – managing long term memory may be a “search problem”.

Since I’m interested in memory, and the memory and association training systems from the underground esoteric culture like qabalah, art of memory, and mantrayama, I found this new study interesting, especially the visual cueing.

In the past several decades, cognitive psychologists have determined that there are two primary memory systems in the human mind: a short-term, or “working,” memory that temporarily holds information about just a few things that we are currently thinking about; and a long-lasting memory that can hold massive amounts of information gained through a lifetime of thoughts and experiences. These two memory systems are also thought to differ in the level of detail they provide: working memory provides sharp detail about the few things we are presently thinking about, whereas long-term memory provides a much fuzzier picture about lots of different things we have seen or experienced. That is, although we can hold lots of things in long-term memory, the details of the memory aren’t always crystal-clear

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-forget-things

A recently published study by Timothy F. Brady, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues suggests that these long-term memories may not be nearly as fuzzy as once thought, however. In their work, the researchers asked subjects to try to remember 3,000 pictures of common objects—including items such as backpacks, remote controls and toasters—that were presented one at a time for just a few seconds each. At the end of this viewing phase, the researchers tested subjects’ memory for each object by showing them two objects and asking which one they had seen before. Not surprisingly, subjects were exceptionally good (more than 90 percent correct) even though there were thousands of objects to remember. This high success rate attests to the massive storage ability of long-term memory. What was most surprising, however, was the amazing level of detail that the subjects had for all of these memories. The subjects were just as good at telling the difference between two pictures of the same object even when the objects differed in an extremely subtle manner, such as a pair of toasters with slightly different slices of bread.

If It’s Not Fuzzy, Why Do We Still Forget Things?
This new work provides compelling evidence that the enormous amount of information we hold in long-term memory is not so uncertain after all. It seems that we actually hold representations of things we’ve seen in a fairly detailed and precise form.

Of course, this finding raises the obvious question: if our memories aren’t all that fuzzy, then why do we often forget the details of things we want to remember? One explanation is that, although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday, however, we need to be able to voluntarily search our memory for the right answer—without being prompted by a visual reminder. It seems that it is this voluntary searching mechanism that’s prone to interference and forgetfulness.

And it is this voluntary searching mechanism that is trained and developed with associative tools like qabalah.

http://www.metafilter.com/76360/AOS

The Flag of Earth is a public domain design that can be used freely by everyone. It shows the blue “sphere” of the earth against the larger yellow arc of the sun, orbited by a white moon, against the black field of space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CadleFlagEarth.svg

http://www.flagofearth.com/history.html

I find the emphasis on Bruno’s involvement with the renaissance re-creation of the Art of Memory particularly interesting – I’ve written a bit about how important I think the art of memory is within the traditions of western consciousness exploration.

Giordano Bruno has been called a martyr to science and an occultist, but a new book argues that the brilliant philosopher’s unconventional behavior did him in.

the hooded and manacled effigy of Bruno, with its haunted stare, immediately catches the eye, and the gruesome story attached to it — Bruno was burned at the stake in that very spot, for the crime of heresy — cements him in memory. Practically every tourist who comes to Rome tromps through the Campo and hears that story, even if they’ve never heard of Bruno before. The students who commissioned the statue in the 1880s, as an emblem for freedom of thought and the division of church from state, really got their money’s worth.

But who was Giordano Bruno, and why was he executed in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600? A common misperception mixes him up with Galileo, who ran into trouble with the church 16 years later for embracing the Copernican model of the solar system instead of endorsing the Aristotelian belief that the sun revolves around the Earth. (In fact, the two men shared an Inquisitor, the implacable Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, canonized by the Catholic Church in 1930.) Bruno, too, thought that the Earth circled the sun, and subscribed to many other than heterodox ideas as well: that the universe is infinite and that everything in it is made up of tiny particles (i.e., atoms), and that it is immeasurably old. But as Ingrid Rowland demonstrates in her new biography of the renegade thinker, “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic,” Bruno was no martyr for science. What got him killed was a murky mixture of spiritual transgression and personal foibles, combined with a large dose of bad luck.