Centripetal Notion: category

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Neuroscientist Jill Taylor describes her experience with a stroke.

“I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations.”

“Reality Sandwich is a web magazine for this time of intense transformation. Our subjects run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies. We hope to spark debate and engagement by offering a forum for voices ranging from the ecologically pragmatic to the wildly visionary (which, to our delight, sometimes turn out to be the one and the same). Counteracting the doom-and-gloom of the daily news, Reality Sandwich is a platform for voices conveying a different vision of the transformations we face. Our goal is to inspire psychic evolution and a kind of earth alchemy.”

Wherein space exploration, by the year 2050, becomes entirely funded by a corporate merger between Google, Amazon and Second Life.

6,000 interviews and 4,500 hours (450 translated and subtitled) from people in 65 countries. Bertrand conceived of the idea while traveling and shooting for The Earth From Above. The full project is forthcoming in 2008, but there is sample footage available now on the website.

“At first glance, the manuscript appears to be a medieval Christian prayer book.

But on the same pages as the prayers, experts using a high-tech imaging system have discovered commentary likely written in the third century A.D. on a work written around 350 B.C. by the Greek philosopher Aristotle.”

“We travel through life as in a ‘time ship,’ which ‘has a prow and stern and room inside for us to move around.’ The problem is that the notion of the ‘extended present’ is fundamentally incoherent to the commonsense mind.”

National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis, here speaking at TED 2003, has some excellent insight to share from his travels. Here he discusses world cultures, dying languages and unique spiritual practices including tribal psychoactive rituals.

“That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself (…)”