Via an excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff’s latest column: Guruphiliac, a site dedicated to “exposing the profoundly manipulative legions of grifters preying on the spiritually hopeful, as well as those teachers who simply go around letting people think they’re God, one guru at a time.”
Reminds me of this site Brennio sent along: Stripping the Gurus . I’ve been meaning to read the chapter on Ken Wilber.
I haven’t listened to it yet, but here’s a full Hunter S. Thompson speech from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
New information on how the mind works:
The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study. Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.
Cornell Chronicle: Study suggests that mental processing is continuous, not like a computer
(via Post Human Blues)
Above is a hacked EKG unit that pulses the fire ring with the users heart beat. I want one.
Monkeyview: Biomorphic Input Machines
(via LVX23)
An interesting article about MIT’s new Buddhist chaplain:
Tenzin Priyadarshi’s path to becoming a Buddhist monk began when he was just 10 and he ran away from home in pursuit of the recurring “vision” he saw in his dreams of a monastery and an old man.
Tenzin, who grew up in an upper-class Hindu family of intellectuals and bureaucrats, slipped away from his boarding school one morning with the equivalent of $5 in his pocket. He left a note for his parents that he was embarking on a “spiritual quest.”
After a 24-hour train ride, he found himself at the foot of a mountain in Rajgir, India. It was at the top of that mountain where he found the very same monastery he had seen in his dreams, he said. He recognized the face of one of the monks who greeted him as the same man he had seen in his vision.
I posted a link to a New Scientist article about the study in question years ago… looks like the study was very likely fraudulent.
As the controversy rages, the Bay Area researcher is en route to a California prison camp on an unrelated fraud conviction. The second scientist recently took his name off the study. The third quietly left Columbia. The government conducted its own investigation and determined the study violated federal research guidelines.
Full Story: Sign on San Diego: Many have lost faith in ‘Miracle Study’
Here’s another study, done by Duke University, which failed to find that praying benefitted other people.
Old covers from the magazine that brought you H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
(via Boing Boing)
Expose on Madonna and Britney Spears’s school of Kabbalah:
The Bergs? luxurious lifestyle, in stark contrast to the bleak four-to-a-bedroom conditions and $35-a-month stipend they offer the full-time volunteers who cook and clean for them.
The bizarre scientific claims made by the Centre?s leaders on behalf of Kabbalah Water, ranging from its ability to cleanse the lakes of Chernobyl of radiation to its power to cure cancer, AIDS, and SARS.
The Bergs have come a long way since 1971, when Philip, then known as Shraga Feivel Gruberger, began preaching his version of Jewish mystical enlightenment to a small group of students in Israel. A onetime insurance salesman who left his wife and seven kids to marry Karen, his former secretary, Berg has become a man so revered that some of his followers believe he has the power to resurrect the dead. In the process he has created a multimillion-dollar brand out of a bastardization of an arcane branch of Judaism, larding it with pricey accessories and bold-faced names. His followers have been promised that Kabbalah can find their lost children, cure their illnesses, replenish their pocketbooks, and bring them true love. Berg himself is so above it all that even his wife refers to him, at least to the press, only by an honorific. He is ?the Rav.?
Full Story: Radar Magazine: Inside Hollywood’s Hottest Cult
(via Boing Boing).
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