I decided to take the leap of creating an entire book online about two years ago. I started it by blogging the book but quickly realized shortly into the first chapter that blogging and publishing a book length work are so different that it is better not to try and combine them in the same place.

A blog is an online journal composed of a series of online posts, each with a title and often organized by date. Beyond those specifics, blogs range a wide gamut of written content, ranging from a collection of essays or editorials on the long end and on the other end of the extreme, the blogging genre sometimes called micro-blogging,  posting in short bursts,, taking the form of sharing a link to some other content online, another post, some news, a video or picture, sometimes with bit of commentary and sometimes without.

Micro-blogging itself has spread to other online genres, starting with group micro-blogs like Digg and Delicious, and made popular by the social media giants, Facebook and Google+.

Writing a book is more than a share, more than a post, it is a putting forth a sequenced hierarchy of essays comprising a long narrative on a consistent theme. The process of writing a book off-off-line is more like a trial by fire than the civilized process I imagine most people think it is. A book sometimes starts with a proposal and sometimes without one. But it can involve the writing and rewriting, organizing and reorganizing or major sections as well as several levels of proofreading. That is before it finds its way to the printing press, if it manages to get that far.

The idea of publishing a book online has a lot going for it. Seth Goodin in a 2007 post, Advice for Authors points out book authoring and publishing are both really hobbies, not lucrative businesses. Only a few writers, mostly fiction writers, Stieg Larsson, Stephanie Meyer. Steven King, Anne Rice, J.K. Rawling and perhaps one or two others find book authoring financially gratifying.

Another problem with print book publishing, according to Goodin, is the long gap, that span of time between when an author gets a contract, or even when they submit their manuscript and when the book finally hits the bookstores, that can be a year or more. That was fine back before the advent of the Internet, which seen the information explosion go on steroids. By the time a book hits the stands, the idea often goes stale.

The process I am currently does not have the lengthy and often grueling experiences of print publishing, peddling a manuscript (even getting rejection letters) multiple edits, awkwardly reading printed gallay proofs. Instead it could best be described as combination of walking a high rope without a safety net and leaving on vacation but forgetting to have a destination.

Online publishing has always been a high wire act,  before the Internet I used at leas two revisions of anything I wrote before it was published. Being typo blind, since blogging came along, I publish my work quickly and then am embarrassed later to find out how much revision it needed.

The aspect of leaving on vacation without a destination refers to dirty little secret that a lot of writers share, that when they start out writing something, an essay, article or book, they are not sure where it is going to go or how it is going to end up.  While I write, I am constantly researching to enhance the output with supporting information.  The last couple of weeks have been an adventure that way, as the process of discovery has shaped and reshaped the final form the book will take.

New Home Page of Memes for the Creation of a New Culture

When I wrote the post Memes Book Moving Forward last November, I did so with the intention of getting the book online after I had taken it offline for over a year.

When I put the book up for viewing on the web, I announced that the first chapter had been completed. In my mind, it had been completed, but when I looked, I had left out a “last section” which I thought I would complete quickly after the book went up.

I spent the next two months, adding section after section at the end of the first chapter and it is still not done. In the process, I noticed that the book was not getting much Internet traffic. At first this was a relief but after a while it started worrying me. After all, I was writing the book so it would get read and assumed that since it was so publicly available, people would read it the way the have read everything I have written since I published my first essay when I was 16.  But from looking at the blog stats, the site was getting less traffic than Highway 1 in Big Sur California, after a winter rock slide.

I started investigating the situation. I noticed that when people arrived on home page of the book, it told people that a book was here, but gave them no clue of what the book was about, other than the title and referring them to an outline full of cleaver section titles. So I decided to write a proper introduction to the book, which was give people a fairly clear idea about the nature of the material to be covered including where it would start off and where it would end up.

Since the book is called Memes for the Creation of a New Culture, I started the introduction by talking a bit about memes. I wrote:

A meme is a theoretical notion, postulating the existence of core creative ideas or cultural knowledge, having a propensity for transmission between between people using words, gestures and other imitable behaviors. A meme can be thought of as the fundamental particle of human ideas or a virus of the mind, spreading between people, infecting human culture.

A meme is that song you hear on the radio that you can’t get out of your head or that new fashion that everyone starts wearing or an an old saying, such as “a penny saved is a penny earned” that gets passed from generation to generation intact. Those are just a few examples of many memes that fill our heads.

While talking to my sister on the phone, I read here these two paragraphs. She told me that the language was a bit dense. Not a really good way to start out.

I looked at these mimetic passages again and cut and pasted then into a new section below the beginning and decided to tell a story in order to introduce memes and how they might lead to a new culture. So I started by telling the often told story of the Hundredth Monkey. On researching the story, I found out that the story had been properly debunked by skeptics. In explaing to my readers how this story had been debunked, the process lead me to remember how I first heard the story and this opened a Padora’s box of additional memories and discoveries, each which both complicated and enriched to story.

In fact the story had become so interesting and involving that I had to take a break from writing it. So I decided to post about this process on Vision Thing, to explain a bit where the book that started here was going, and invite you again to take a look.

Link for this Post: Haight-Asbury Psychedelic Art and History Museum Project Page
I’m just about ready to be stuffed and put into psychedelic museum named for the historic location in San Fransisco, California, the Haight Asbury. The organizers sent me an email today with a link to this video and website.

Here is a snip from what the museum is about

The Haight-Ashbury movement left an undeniable impact upon the world and the reverberations of the psychedelic sixties are still being felt today. Strangely there is no museum dedicated to keeping the history alive and relevant for the millions of visitors who come to San Francisco searching for inspiration and authenticity. A non-profit community supported museum will permanently cement San Francisco as the home of psychedelia. Our intention is for the museum to become an attraction in and of itself that will educate and inspire visitors for generations to come to reinvent the world according to how they want to live.

With all of us members of the Hippie tribe fading into the dusty pages of history, its a good idea to get as much of its counter-cultural artifacts.

I have been researching the practice of imitation and found that certain kinds of morphic imitation extend beyond mammals into cold blooded sea creatures, like this mimic octopus above.

I found out about this trickster critter via the Life Imitates Life:The Mysterious Mimic Octopus by T Goodman on the Inventorspot

Along with the article is a link to a YouTube Video that tells more:

In doing research on my in-process book , Memes for the Creation of a New Culture,  by doing some Googling, I found longish but well worth it essay, The problems with beliefs by Jim Walker on his website, nobeliefs.com.

Walker explores the concept of beliefs all the way from their origins to their implications. The essence of his conclusions about beliefs is, don’t have them.

I am going to discuss this more in the section of my book,  Believing in Your Beliefs which I have enhanced and extended recently.

After putting the book online, I found that this section really had not been finished.  So decided to add material and found myself on a thought exploration similar to the one that Walker must have done.

Reading his essay is helping me toward getting Chapter 1 closer to a version that could be published in a book.

To update you on the book writing process, it took me a long time to get the book back online after I took it off. Once it went back online, I spent another about two months getting the worst of the bugs out of the new WordPress template I am using.

Since then, I am starting to enjoy some of the benefits I had hoped for when I decided to change the way the book lookis. I now have single html pages for many of the sections of the book. Those pages will never change their address and they have no date on them.

So I can work on each section without having to push a post button and notify everyone. Having this system in place makes writing this book somewhat more like the process of writing my last book offline so many years ago.

Link for this post Consciousness and the New Physics

Part of an archival collection called the William James bookstore. Named for the founder of American psychology and writer on the subject of consciousness, this essay I found there does not disappoint.

It provides a review of what used to be called the “New Physics” but which is probably best described as modern physics.

What I like about this essay is that it spotlights several of the most prominent of the physicists including Fred Alan Wolfe, Saul Paul Sirag, Evan Harris Walker, Arthur M. Young and my long time friend Nick Herbert.

With regard to the relationship between consciousness and physics, we really have not even begun to agree on what consciousness is yet, so how can physicists really talk about it except in a general sense in which each of them has their own ideas about what they are talking about.

For example, there is a UK blog called thinktech with the tagline The UK’s Leading Brain-Computer Interface, Mind Controlled & Neurotechnology Gadget Blog which I stumbled upon while Googling on the subject which first tipped me off about the rapid proliferation of BCI that has taken place. I would recommend taking a look at that blog to get a notion of the diversity of development taking place.

Just in the past couple of years, a number of devices which use EEG biofeedback have become available at prices which most would consider affordable. You can get a rundown of these devides on one of those thematic Wikipedia pages that have begun popping up a lot recently called Comparison of Computer brain-computer interfaces.

I recently purchased one of these gadgets called Neurosky Mindwave at a web store appropriately named ThinkGeek. Until recently, the cheapest mobile EEG biofeedback device cost over a thousand dollers but this one cost under a hundred bucks.

Neurosky developed a complete brain wave biofeedback device on a small circuit board that it uses in Mindwave as well as some some higher end devices targets at researchers and rich people. It also licenses the board for other companies to use. Toymaker Mattel uses the board popular toys Mindflex and Mindflex Duel Another company Uncle Milton Science Toys makes a toy called Star Wars Science – Force Trainer.

The Mindwave device is not aimed at kids but rather at adult geeks like myself. So I spent a few hours playing around with the device. Although Mindwave is packaged Apple style in a artfully decorated boy with just the headset, a USB dongle and a CD-ROM, using the device is anything but simple. I’ve used similar types of devices before in my role as head of the Mindware catalog and before that in a college class at UC Santa Cruz back in the late seventies with the guy who invented biofeedback. Dr. Joe Kamiya.

All of those credentials did not make using Mindwave any easier. I first hooked it to one of my Windows Workstations. I installed the software and it even updated itself from the Internet. Putting on the headset was fairly awkward and when i went to the Neorsky website, I found out that there were several more sophisticated headsets which did not use plastic and which apparently made it easier to clip one part of the headset to your ear and press the other to your forehead without inflicting quite as much pain as I did on my try.

Worst of all, once all properly set up, I could not get any of the applications what came with the device to register my brainwaves. I went to the Neurosky app store and found out that there were hundreds of apps for the device. Neurosky has made available a developers toolkit and created a software API for the device. Unfortunately the most promising ones I could find in their app catalog were fairly expensive.

I finally downloaded a  14 day demo of a Windows program called Mind Workstation by a developer I know called Transparent Corp. The program has built in drivers for the Mindwave as well as other devices by Neurosky, Emotive and several more.  However, again no luck. So I gave up for the day.

Thinking about the situation later, I had an aha moment remembering when I demoed a another device of its type and found that it worked better with my Macintosh than with Windows. So I gave it a shot and and after another hour or some of trial and error, I managed to get one of the supplied programs called Meditation Journal to display my brain waves.

That was about an hour ago. Later, I’m going to give a shot at using the same program on the Windows computer and now that I know what to look for, I can probably get it to work there as well.

Most of the biofeedback games on the market until this year like those from Journey to Wild Divine use GSR biofeedback. GSR is short for Galvanic Skin Response which means that the sensors measure the electrical conductivity of your skin.

This new generation of brain games use EEG which is short for Electroencephalogram. The devices measure brain waves that are found at the surface of your scalp. Although this is a bit more promising of direct brain computer connection, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before we all are writing blog posts by brain waves.

I attended the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Cartographie Psychedelica: Celebrating 25 Years of Research & Education. That bit of a tongue twister is short for the MAPS 25th Anniversary Conference. See the MAPS website for detailed information about the organization.

As I mentioned previously, when you get to be my age, time seems to fly by. It is hard to believe that it was 25 years ago that I first met Rick Doblin, when MAPS was still just a twinkle in his eye. He was returning from a workshop he had taken with Stan Grof at Esalen. I had taken a similar workshop the year before and as it were, he was glowing with the kind of psychedelic enthusiasm that I experienced upon my return from a similar month living in the Big House at Esalen poised on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in beautiful Big Sur, California the year before.

I had been part of a couple of groups in Santa Cruz which were also inspired by the psychedelic experience and so our paths crossed on a number of occasions including a conference we co-organized in April of 1993. As readers know, I attended MAPS last major US conference back in April 2010. I have a good time at these conferences, especially when I am a guest and not the organizer.

The purpose of MAPS a 501 c 3 Educational and Research Organization is to plan and fund research into the psychedelics and marijuana  with the goal of making some of these compounds into approved medicines.

Once a compounds has been approved, MAPS would also act as a pharmaceutical company and market these drugs with a variety of purposes. One such purpose would be to set up psychedelic exploration centers where people could come for approved purposes such as therapy for psychological disorders and guidance during life transitions including the dying process.

MAPS has grown through the years but progress in this area has been quite slow. This of course is due to tremendous resistance by the US Government and various world regulatory bodies inspired by US drug laws.  MAPS has pushed hard and tried a variety of tactics to speed up the process but with only limited success. These successes  include on US study in which subjects used MDMA under rigorous scrutiny.  This study looked at use of MDMA in the treatment of  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

However, there still to this very day has been no US Government sanctioned studies with LSD since the early 1970s.. Facing difficulties in getting a single pilot study at Harvard using LSD to treat cluster headaches,  MAPS has had more success funding researchers in Switzerland, the country in which LSD was first discovered.

MAPS facilitated the work of Dr. Peter Gasser who completed a pilot study looking at use of LSD in therapy to treat anxiety faced by individuals with life-threatening illnesses. Results from study have been presented and are being evaluated.

Before LSD or MDMA could be approved for medical use, they would have to undergo several stages of US based research which would take several years to complete once approved.  Currently, even the approval of pilot studies continue to encounter resistance. Phase three studies would require that thousands of subjects be given the drug to prove its efficacy for a particular use so the hopes of MAPS supplying LSD or MDMA seem almost as remote as the day when I first heard Rick Doblin describe his vision.

Progress in the two and a half decades has been surprisingly slow.  Doblin estimates that it may take several more decades to begin realizing the groups strategic goals.

The conference was held in downtown Oakland. It appears that the choice of the locations was due to the fact that Oakland, California is where a large portion of MAPS funding comes from. For many years, they have received support from individuals there looking to show the safety of using vaporized marijuana.

As many people who follow the medical marijuana story know, there has been a crackdown by the US Government on clinics dispensing marijuana for medical use.

The promotion of harm reduction policy with regard to drug use is another area that MAPS has pursued. Harm reduction is based on some common sense notions. It can safely be assumed that no matter how draconian the War on Drugs gets, people will continue to use illegal drugs. So instead of focusing on punishing drug users, harm reduction looks to eliminating some of the controllable risks involved with using using illicit drugs.

These risk include the lack of knowledge that people have of the effects of drugs.  There is lack of knowledge with regard to the proper way to use a drug. Most serious of all the problems around the drug itself. In some cases, another drug may be substituted for the drug that people think they are taking. They have a difficult time determining the purity of the drug they take or what dosage they are taking.

MAPS began looking at harm reduction in the context of the Burning Man Celebration in Nevada which takes place every Labor Day weekend.  MAPS has attempted to provide safety for users of illicit drugs who chose to take drugs at this desert event. They call the approach they are taking Psychedelic Harm Reduction

In refining and attempting to expand their investigation of harm reduction MAPS has again been met with the familiar stiff resistance they have encountered in other areas. Many state and federal authorities in the US equate harm reduction with encouraging the use of illegal substances.

In attempting to get more data on harm reduction, MAPS again has looked out of the US to pursue their research. Doblin announced at the close of the conference that MAPS is working with the organizers of the Boom Festival, an biannual youth-oriented event which takes place annually in Portugal.

Unlike the US, harm reduction is official government policy in Portugal.  MAPS plans to provide extensive Psychedelic Harm Reduction services at the next boom festival which will take place next year on July 28th to August 4th 2012 (as best I can determine) .The festival is called Boom 2012 The Gathering of the Psychedelic Tribe.

My site, bruceeisner.com has grown from one simple blog, Vision Thing to three blogs including Mind Flashes and more recently the Bruce Eisner Journal

Also on the same site is a growing collection of my writings and a new book. Memes for the Creation of a New Culture.

With a growing number of places to post to, I realize that updates have become on all of my publications have become infrequent.  So I have created a combined feed from the three blogs. Anyone who has subscribed to a feed from them is now getting the combined feed.

If you get this and do not already have a subscription, you can pick up the RSS feed through this link. You can also get the feed delivered via email here.

This weekend has been intense. I have been MAPS 25^th  Anniversary conference in Oakland. I will reflect on my experiences in a post tomorrow.

I finally put my work-in-progress, the book Memes for the Creation of a New Culture online. I had been nervous about putting it up for a long time, but finally took the leap. As expected, there has been a lot of bugs including most of the site being redirected in an endless loop for at least 20 hours.

I finally got these major technical problems worked out. I then read through what I had written and found more than the usual number of typos. As I explained in a previous post, I am virtually typo blind and usually have to look at something at a post three or four times before a host of spelling and grammar problems come out of hiding.

So I finally beat back the major problems with the text (at least much of the first chapter) so I am proud to announce that the book is now live and ready for your enjoyment and hopefully your participation.

I just posted a couple of flshes there including one yesterday called The End of the Cyberculture and one today called a A definition of consciousness

If you want regular notifications on updates to Mind Flashes you can get the feed here. You can also getu pdates via email or your preferred method here.

Consciousness is one of those words. You know what I mean, words like love and god. Words that have different meanings to different people and a wide variety of shared and public definitions as well.

Another of those kind of words is consciousness. I admit that its not used nearly as much as the words I gave as examples but it is one of those words that everyone who hears it have a different notion of what it means.

Indeed consciousness is so lacking in a definition that it has been the subject of a growing number of books, each of which tries to put an end to the confusion.

If found a definition that I like. Before telling it to you, I warn you that there are many people who would not agree.

I found it while working on my book, Memes for the Creation of a New Culture. I have to admit that what I like about it is that it is just about the same as what I mean when I think of consciousness. After all, great minds think alike.

Titled The Definition of Consciousness  it is found on Natural Science Forum under the topic “New Theories” it is signed EL Hemetis and dated November 24, 2004.

Dear colleagues,
perhaps one of the most elusive definitions is that of consciousness. Recently, while I was contemplating on the fact that consciousness need not be binary in states, I have arrived at a very simple definition that demanded an immediate peer review.

I have hope that the implications that could follow, if I had
succeeded in pinpointing a correct definition, would be enormous and consequently applicable within some disciplines and research related to AI and neural networks. If this definition could be put practice then conscious machines would not be far fetched.

I propose this definition.

Consciousness is the awareness of being aware.

I would like to hear your take on this.

Is the trip really over? on Cyborg Democracy

This is an old article from my files. I’m working on Memes for the Creation of a New Culture today and referred to it. The article which appeared in a publication called the Cyberdem is a clip from public manuscript by Arno Ruthofer dated 1997.

Its worth a look

Here is an exempt from the beginning of the piece:

The techno-euphoria that prevails in the cyberdelic counterculture seems to be slowly wearing off. More and more cyberians are realizing that the PC, the Internet, and other new technologies did not really bring the social, political, and personal changes they thought they would. Even R. U. Sirius, who used to be an euphoric spokesman of cyberculture, has finally realized that the visions of the cyber-society and the “liftoff from biology and gravity” have blinded us to the real problems on this planet.

This bit is worth reading but if you are interested in things cyberculture, the entire article by Ruthofer linked above via archive.org is worth reading.

Note. Art at the top via the Cyberculture Art Museum

Machines Like Us is an artificial intelligence blog that I read. I found this story there — mimicking the brain, in silicon by Anne Trafton.

Here is an excerpt:

With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other. The researchers anticipate this chip will help neuroscientists learn much more about how the brain works, and could also be used in neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas, says Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

This seems a promising direction for AI in that while these chips cannot yet duplicate the functioning of a human neuron, they point to a new opportunity in the development of computer intelligence, in so far as they are based on a different model than our current digital machines.

As I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago on the Bruce Eisner Journal I am getting ready put Memes for the Creation of a New Culture, a book I began writing online on this blog, in its new format, as a separate WordPress weblog on bruceeisner.com. at the directory http://bruceeisner.com/new_memes/.

Of course I have been talking about doing this for a long time. If you visited any of the sites the new bruceeisner.com you have looked at that black bar at the top of the page and have seen New Memes Book Coming Soon.

You have to realize that for someone who has been afflicted with writers block for a long time, procrastination is a habit that is hard to break. So I have spent a lot of time working on the framework for the book and not that much time writing it.

Before showing you what the book is going to look like when it goes live, I want to ask again for your help in writing this book.  I am most seriously in need of a good proofreader but welcome other roles in the book’s future development.

In fact, I am put Help Wanted on the Navigation Menu of each of the blogs on this domain. Please take a look.

In order to move the process forward. within a week, I am going to place the entire first chapter which has been written (minus your future additions and comments) plus the first few sections of Chapter 2 which are mostly complete.

I am going to remove fragments and notes that I have currently added to the rest of the chapters and chapter sections and leave them blank for now. They will be place holders with static web address urls for what is still to be completed.

Nobody has published a book online in the way I am trying to, so I am sure that there will be glitches in the framework but its time to kick its tires.

The image at the top of this post is the opening portion of chapter 1.  The book will be made up of pages like this instead of long posts like the way this same material was originally presented on Vision thing.

In fact, the book is made up of WordPress pages rather than WordPress posts. They may look the same but have many technical differences. These differences include not having dates on them and their ability to be nested in a hierarchy rather than in a linear sequence. There are some down sides of doing things this way including having to create custom RSS feeds for the book and that they are harder to get seen and spidered by search engines.

The last thing I want to show you is some of the navigation features which I also have described on some informational pages on the site.

This is from the last section of Chapter 1. At the bottom of each section, there are navigation cues. There are different cues on each section, some tell you what came before, others what is next.

In sections at the beginning and end of each chapter there are also links to what is above at the top level of the chapter. For example in Chapter 1, if you click on “Up on Level” you end up here.

I will post more about what I have been up to with regard to the book in an accompanying post on my Vision Thing blog. I will update this post with a link to it so you can find out more about when the update will be happening and why it is so late. The rest of this post is about the day itself.

Halloween and the days leading up to it has been a time of both extreme happiness and deep sadness in my life

One of the sad days was two years ago when my mother died unexpectedly on October 27th.  I had moved to Las Vegas in 2003 to spend time with her and she had become one of my closest friends. At my age, you lose a lot of friends but no loss is like losing your mother.

I also remember a happy day, Halloween 1988 in Santa Cruz. I spent Halloween evening with a new lover, haunting the streets of Santa Cruz.

Halloween in Santa Cruz is the biggest Holiday of the year. Bigger than Christmas or New Years by far. It seems like half the town turns up on Pacific Avenue, that long street with shops. Back then that section of town was called the Pacific Avenue Mall.

The next year a big earthquake centered close to Santa Cruz would wipe out the mall and then they rebuilt it they changed the name.

So it was the peak of things for me in life and a peak for Santa Cruz. Both of us would never be quite the same.

Another sad day for me was 49 years ago. I was 12 years old and quite close with my maternal grandfather. His name was Paul Solomon and he was a Renaissance man in many senses of the word.

He spoke 12 languages and loved to build things. In fact, his profession before he retired was Civil Engineer. He had been the lead engineer on both the Tribourgh Bridge and Holland Tunnel when he lived in New York City. he had gotten a medal from President Roosevelt, of which he was quite proud.

As a boy, he came over on a boat from Russia and sold newspapers on the streets of Brooklyn. Later he worked for his father as a barber before getting his engineering degrees.

He used to cut my hair and tell me stories about the old days. He died on Halloween and I remember how sad me and my mother were.  In all the years that have passed since then, I have never liked having anyone else cut my hair.

A psychedelic peak happened to me on another Halloween, the one that came in 1968. I was a student at California State University, Northridge (back then just a state college nicknamed “Valley State.”

In late 1967, I had been experimenting with LSD. By Halloween of the next year, I was member of a the counterculture community at the college which was quite large, one of the biggest by percentage of total student population of any college in the US. For days, many of the most involved of us had worked on a big Halloween party which we had gotten permission to hold on campus.

It was planned as a costume party. I had decided to go dressed as someone I had read about in my philosophy class, Diogenes of Sinope or Diagnoses the Cynic as he is sometimes called. I wore a white robe, had a grey wig and beard and carried a candle lantern to help me in my search for an “honest man.”

I was to be be picked up and driven to the party by a group of friends who I did my weekend LSD sessions. That evening, I swallowed a tablet of purple haze, the famous LSD of Owsley.,

I took the drug and while waiting for my ride, I transitioned into a trip. I felt like I had walked through a doorway into a magic theater where anything goes, aided by my thoughts.

We arrived at the school and I headed into the crowd of students there. At one end of the school, the band called the Fraternity of Man was playing the song with a refrain that went, ” Hello People smile on Your brother everybody get together and love one another right now

I was carrying my candle lantern and like on some earlier trips, I tried a self experiment. I gazed at the candle and chanted the Hindu mantra “Om.” I had learned it a few weeks before while listening to a record by Alan Watts.

As I gazed into the flame, I found it growing increasingly bright. I felt myself moving into the light of the candle. Becoming the light of the candle.

What seemed like quite a long time later, I emerged from this comfortable eternal place. I found myself surrounded by other costumed people, who were waiting turns to join me looking at the candle.  It was an experience i will never forget.

In my research and web browsing today I can upon this interesting new book and audio book called How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

The book has some interesting reviews and has a Blackstone audio version as well as print and Kindle. The book has good reviews so it might be good to take a look at later.

Here is a snip from the longer article by Dr. Blackmore in the UK Guardian

For me LSD is the ultimate psychedelic. It’s a tough one – one not to be taken lightly or often. A typical trip lasts eight to 10 hours and there’s no respite or way out once you’ve popped that tiny scrap of blotter in your mouth. I will even admit that on those rare occasions when I take it I feel some deep physiological reaction that makes me involuntarily shaky and afraid just before that fateful moment.

So why do it? Because the fear is worth – a million times over it’s worth – the experience.

Susan Blackmore is best known for her books The Meme Machine and Consciousness: An Introduction

Ecstasy does not wreck the mind, study claims

published in the Guardian UK cites a large scale study of MDMA users conducted by John Halpern of Harvard and published in the Journal of Addiction. Halpren is quoted in the article:

Essentially we compared one group of people who danced and raved and took ecstasy with a similar group of individuals who danced and raved but who did not take ecstasy. When we did that, we found that there was no difference in their cognitive abilities." In other words, previous studies highlighted problems triggered by other factors, such as use of other drugs or drink, or sleep deprivation.

It also has this from him:

But the drug still posed risks, he said. "Ecstasy consumption is dangerous because illegally made pills often contain contaminants that can have harmful side-effects."

For those of of you who are readers of my blogs which include Bruce Eisner’s Vision Thing and Mind Flashes as well as other writings online or off, welcome to my newly redesigned website!

There are actually five  separate WordPress websites on bruceeisner.com If all goes well (and be sure to tell me if it does not) you will be able to move seamlessly through these sites using the top navigation menu.

You are on the top site which provides the basic information you need as well as my personal journal  You are reading the first page of the journal.

Bruce Eisner’s Vision Thing which used to be at the top of the site but has been moved here.

The book that was being published on the Vision Thing Blog has been moved to a third site and its content has been placed on fixed pages arranged like in chapters and sections like a book rather than a blog

Bruce Eisner’s Writings an assortment of essays, articles, interviews and poems is the forth site and is found here.

My microblog Mind Flashes is the fifth site and is found here.

I have moved my entire website including my blogs Vision Thing, Mind Flashes and my Writings from my old blogging platform Typepad to WordPress in order to facilitate with open sourcing During the past six months, I have been studying the mechanics of WordPress in order to use it as a content management system for writing a book rather than a journal based weblog (blog).

WordPress comes with both pages and posts as part of it basic structure. Posts are dated journal entries and pages are dateless and static sections of content that can be arranged in a hierarchical order, lending themselves to the the way a book is structured. I am using both in the project.

Comments are part of a blogging and I have enjoyed the many comments you have made since I started Vision thing way back in 2003. I have added commenting to the pages so all of you can offer ideas and suggestions in each of the books sections. Additionally, I would like to havee some of the best of you work on the sections in the role of writers and editors. You can add additional words, images, videos and references that I would otherwise miss or leave out for lack of resources.

Many of you have noticed that I make a lot of typos in writing. i was born with typo-blindness, which renders all my mistakes in spelling, grammar and content invisible to me. Writing a book in real time is a bit like walking a type-rope without a safety net. I invite those of you who can help be my safety net and help spare some embarrassment.

You can email me directly at bruce@mindmedia.com if you want to volunteer first thing or you can also get active in commenting on the sections of the book and blog that are already online. I welcome your participation to move this project forward.