Obama Likens ISIS to ‘J.V. Team’President Obama described the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as the Sunni militant group was widely known at the time, as a junior varsity basketball team

Source: Obama’s Evolution on ISIS – The New York Times

“despite concerted efforts to stem the flow, we have largely failed to stop Americans from traveling overseas to join jihadists.”

Source: Thousands Enter Syria to Join ISIS Despite Global Efforts – The New York Times

neither the pontiff, nor his church, cared whether “Obama says the pope is a very good man” or whether a “fallible” Supreme Court legalized gay marriage

Source: A Pastoral Pope, Slipping Conservatives’ Grasp – The New York Times

“If the pope speaks about social justice, everybody will embrace him, no?” the cardinal said. “It’s not so difficult. But to speak about moral values, and the field of sexuality and matrimony and abortion and these values, is more conflictive.”

Source: A Pastoral Pope, Slipping Conservatives’ Grasp – The New York Times

In Gary Marcus’ article he does a good job of descrbing a “modern” computer, and discrediting “scientist” for their inexcusable ignorance of this computer.  And of course, he wants to compare the human brain to a computer.

But an alternative view has existed for thousands of years: the computer is definitely a brain.

That is, ever since the Torah proclaimed that G-d created Man in His own image, we have found it an essential revelation that all human creations, including G_d, are revelations of the true inner human creation.  In other words, we unwittingly recreate ourselves, and, if we are smart, can decompose ourselves by decomposing our creations.

1. Rejoice always
2. pray continually
3. give thanks in all circumstances
4. Do not quench the Spirit
5. Do not treat prophecies with contempt…
6. …but test them all
7. hold on to what is good
8. reject every kind of evil.

for this is God’s will for you

All music is already made. Like Einstein’s matter, music is neither created nor destroyed.

So what do musicians do? Delude themselves, at worst. Act as resonating instruments at best.

My analogy is coffee. What does it mean to “make coffee ?” I mean, the coffee beans were already made, there on the tree. Of you pick them, are you making anything? Is roasting the beans the same a making coffee? And isn’t pouring hot water over the roasted and finely grind beans is still only boiling water and grinding beans.

But musicians think that coffee beans are not the same as coffee. Coffee is the beverage humans make, and that beverage is somehow part of a higher manifestation of the thing called coffee.

For years when I studied classical music, I was conscious of trying ever successfully to extract all the information from the composers notations. The written music can be compared to a literary author’a attempt to describe some reality using words. Of course we know that the reality did not happen using words. Words may not have even been a part of it, of the sunset, of the feeling of loneliness, etc. You could say that the written words of an author, even those great words of those great authors, are weak at best at being – not just representing – some moment.

So that’s the key – certain of “the arts” have been devoted to recording and representing. And those arts have gotten wound around themselves to the extent that the “material” – the spiritual substance from which we drink, to see, to play, to perform the story of our wonder – that material is longer recognized as the actual thing, but rather an inspiration for the real thing. Wow. Look at your navel.

When I improvise music , including when I make up vocal harmonies on the fly , in my minds eye, I see the harmonies, in mind’s ear, I hear them, and then I try to guide them into my body and then back out.

INTERVIEWER: …I don’t understand it: the grey room. “breaking through to the grey room”

BURROUGHS: I see that very much like the photographic darkroom where the reality photographs are actually produced. implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It’s a film, what I call a biologic film

-cf Interview with W.S. Burroughs, The Paris Review, 1965

For fifty years, I imagine most intellectuals have written this theory off as paranoiac delusions of a hunted heroin addict – the butt of a joke that contains “the thought police”.  Further, I doubt that many scientists have read Burroughs at all, even though Burroughs was far more a scientist than a writer, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, modern cognitive theory now completely accepts and promotes this theory: that the sensory organs merely collect sensory data and present these to “the brain”, which assembles and interprets the data into what you experience as reality. In other words, we now accept that there is a less direct connection between reality and what we experience of it, in our minds, that someone like Aristotle, and thousands of years of Western thought after him, thought.

I think that nowadays, with the advent of very advanced digital filming technology, made available to the Wal-mart shopper, it is just not so hard for the average Joe to believe that there as a very high-speed processing phase, in between the moment you perceive a moment  of reality, and the next moment when the “film” is ready to be played inside your head. It doesn’t seem so drug-induced a notion, because we have experienced machines that can do something similar.

We could have understood this long ago – it has been accepted for hundreds of years that they eye functions like a camera lens (okay, vice versa): the image is “captured” by the cones and rods in the retina, upside-down, and then righted, and projected onto the “mind’s eye.” People in the street with little education know this, and accept it. 

What interests Burroughs in all this is that stage in between, where the “processing” happens.  It’s a kind of limbo, if you consider the outside sensory world the “real world”, and the world inside, painted by the mind, with the help of the sensory data. This grey room – grey matter + notion of film development + notion of “grey area” – is a vulnerable place.  Presumably, we’d like the picture we end up receiving and viewing, to be accurate.  After all, our decisions are based on “reality.” We move right or left, to certain degrees, based on where we think the attacker is, based on what – this process of transferring, rendering, and interpreting?

But haven’t you found that indeed, the picture in your mind was often very “wrong”? Haven’t you watched “The Thin Blue Line”? Haven’t you sort of woken up, several times in your life, in a significant way, to “see” that who you though you were, and what you thought you were doing, were way off the mark?  So, there had to be a miscommunication somewhere, right? 

And I don’t think our short-circuits happen, in most cases, is in the sensory-intake-to-sensory-perception link up. I think the broken, or, imprecisely-machined portion of the outside-to-inside transfer mechanism is the interpretive phase. I think this is the part we are supposed to train, but don’t. And within this phase, the words are what get in the way.  True enough, and sad, I know, for all you who are wed to the word – it is a poor excuse for a symbology of experience, and you rely on it for everything, even your perception of pretty clear signals coming in from your ears and eyes.

If you could just eliminate the words (Burroughs gives exercises for this, as does Dogen and Patanjali), and get a purer dose of uninterpreted reality, you might not be so confused by a reality that doesn’t often make sense.  I

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

Emanuel H. Bronner (born  Emanuel Heilbronner (help·info),^[1] February 1, 1908 – March 7, 1997) was the maker of Dr. Bronner’s castile soap.^[2] Bronner, whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, promoted a belief in the goodness and unity of humanity.

He started his business making products by hand in his home. The product labels are crowded with statements of Bronner’s philosophy, which he called “All-One-God-Faith” and the “Moral ABC”. Many of Bronner’s references came from Jewish and Christian sources, such as the Shema and the Beatitudes; others from poets such as Rudyard Kipling. They became famous for their idiosyncratic style, including hyphens to join long strings of words and the liberal use of exclamation marks. In 1947, while promoting his “Moral ABC” at the University of Chicago, Bronner was arrested and committed to a mental hospital in Elgin, Illinois, from which he escaped after shock treatments.^[1]

Jesus turned things around. He was a mover. Not a radical Jew, but a Jew who loved his faith, and because of this love, wanted to help it to evolve. Maybe , revolve. In that sense, I am a revolutionary.

When Judas hands Jesus over to the soldiers, when he exposes the true sociopathy of betrayal of the one we love, he told the soldiers , “the one I will kiss is the one.” The signal of betrayal was a kiss. In the same way that most rapists are known to their victims , we know our betrayers most intimately. Possibly, they could not betray us otherwise.
But then, in the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “greet one another with a holy kiss.” If this had been spoken, instead of written, the emphasis would be on the “holy” to remind us of the unholy kiss that started this whole thing. And to remind us that things must change.
The rest of the passage says, “mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.”
This is the new testament. The new kiss.