Ummagumma

In Harmogenics:A Practical Guide To Constant Becoming , I state: "We are living through what is perhaps the most exciting period in human history. We are literally witnessing the transformation of human consciousness." This is something I truly perceive. Despite all the challenges we face, we have never had so much transformational potential within our grasp as a species. When I recently watched Peter Leyden's Big Think presentation “ The Great Inflection 2025 ,” I felt an immediate affinity with his vision. Here was someone describing, from a completely different angle, exactly what I'd been writing about. His argument is simple, sweeping, and surprisingly hopeful: that 2025 marks the beginning of a new 25-year period of reinvention—a period as transformative as the American founding, the post-Civil War industrial explosion, or the post-World War II boom. He calls it a world-historic inflection, driven by three simultaneous “tipping points”: artificial intelligenc...

Gaza today. Longtime readers know I admire Sam Harris.  His discourse tour with Jordan Peterson is legendary. Waking Up is one of the best books of its kind in this century. The word "spirituality" definitely needs rehabilitating. Harris makes a valid attempt. I subscribe to several sources of Harris's content on YouTube. A recent interview video troubled me deeply as I listened to this guy speak. Without intending it, Harris shines a light on the world beyond his sacred " consciousness and its contents " I blogged about in 2023. This "beyond world" is where monsters await. It is a brutal world, it always has been and it is nowhere near as civilized as fools would allow. Harris unwittingly issues a damning admission about the state of humanity in this interview.  The man thinks he's discussing geopolitics and the paradox of tolerance. He's not. He's describing a species that remains fundamentally primitive, dressed up in suits and carry...

Note: This post emerged out of work I was doing for   my next post .  First things first. You may have seen drone footage of the seemingly endless rubble of what used to be cities in Gaza. I watched it off and on for days. It was hypnotic and horrifying at the same time. What year is this? This is the result of the bombing campaign conducted by Israel upon Gaza in the most recent, regrettable episode in the long-running show “Let’s See How Unholy The Holy Land Can Be.” Holiness is not an idea or a feeling, people. It is how you behave. The situation is almost incomprehensible to me. For months I tried to figure out how I was supposed to feel about this whole situation, just as I struggled with Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine . Or the violence in Ethiopia or Sudan or any of a number of other places on this brutal Earth. You can’t relate to it ethically. Everybody’s wrong. Long-time readers know I have an interest in military history. So I will attempt to...

  Omar Khayyam. I stumbled onto Omar Khayyam recently. I subscribe of YouTube channel that produces summaries of major philosophers and thinkers that last 3 or 4 hours. I listen to them at night sometimes and it helps make me drowsy. Their summary of Nietzsche’s philosophy, for example, is not completely objective but it is very well made and a splendid intermediate level introduction. I had listened to many of the channel's videos more contemporary philosophers Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Marx, Hegel, and Kant when the YouTube algorithm threw me “The Complete Philosophy of Al-Ghazali” and I thought I would give it a try, Muslim philosophy being a weakness of mine. I made it through about one-third of it before I grew bored with him and, searching the channel page, I found Omar Khayyam. The video on him was released about three months ago as of my viewing. Now, I cannot get this guy out of my head. I cannot shake him. I had never heard of him before, which seems ridiculous ...