We knew that search engine advertising and Social Software sales could make you rich. But until now, we did not know that those revenues could equal wisdom.

After all the name Google is pretty close to God in the English Lexicon and you can play the Zen Enlightenment game on Facebook  . . . but I thought that was a scam. Until I got an email from Mallika Chopra telling me about Wisdom 2.0 to be held in Mountain View California at the Computer History Museum April 30 to May 1st.

Who is Maillika Chopra? Deepak Chopra’s daughter it turns out. We know what an enlightened guy he is, after all he is on the Larry King Show at least once a month. She is also a friend of the late Michael Jackson, someone who was practically synonymous with wisdom.

Here is what she writes:

I'm happy to announce that registration is now open for the first annual Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from technology companies such as Google and Twitter, along with Zen teachers, neuroscientists, and others to explore how we can live with deeper mindfulness, meaning, and wisdom in our technology age. It also investigates how we can use the tools of our age, including social media, creatively and effectively.

The speakers are mostly people I never heard of. They include a mix of a new generation of New age "devotees", left-leaning bloggers and social software savants including:

• Mallika Chopra ... Founder, Intent
• Philippe Goldin ... Neuroscientist, Stanford University
• Susan Kaiser Greenland ... Author, The Mindful Child
• Roshi Joan Halifax ... Zen Abbot, Upaya Zen Center
• Bradley Horowitz ... Vice President Products, Google
• Gopi Kallayil ... Group Product Marketing Manager, Google
• Alana B. Elias Kornfield ... Living Editor, Huffington Post
• Loic Le Meur ... Founder Seesmic, Cofounder Le Web
• Ben Parr ... Co-Editor, Mashable
• Greg Pass ... Vice President Engineering, Twitter
• Kaitlin Quistgaard ... Editor-in-Chief, Yoga Journal
• Chris Sacca ... VC, Strategic Advisor Twitter
• Tami Simon ... Owner, Sounds True
• Meng Tan ... Head of School of Personal Growth, Google
• Bill Tolany ... Head of Integrated Media, Whole Foods
• Hosted by Soren Gordhamer

If anyone knows anything more about this event, please feel free to post about it here.

I am going to be 62 in February and so I have gone through a lot of my life, much of which seemed like endless mid-life crises and reached maturity. In terms of The 12 Stages of Life by Bruce Carnahan, I have arrived at Stage 9 called which he calls Reflection.

I was at a New Years party last night put by my DJ friend EROCx1. He’s 34 and most of his friends are in their mid-thirties. Shortly after the clock hit 12, I talked one one of those friend who I had met a another of Eric’s parties exactly a year before, “That year sure went by fast. “ He replied, “yeah they seem to go by faster and faster every year.”

This is the secret that all of those of us who have reached “maturity” share. We experience each day we live now as somehow feeling the equivalent of an hour when we were in our mid-twenties. The days fall off the calendar the way that they do in a film montage that shows the days and years passing by ever faster.

 One of the reason I left my Ph.D. psychology program after being “advanced to candidacy” is that I realized how little psychology really knows. It knows bits and pieces here and there but most of the big questions in psychology go largely unknown and sadly often not even recognized. One of those questions hovers around our perceptions of time. See The Naked Scientists on this question for most of what is known. 

According to Turn Back the Clock on the BBC News, William James, the “father of American psychology” was appropriately the first psychologist to speculate on this question. The fact that information and experience is more novel in our youth and gradually becomes less so as we age was his guess.

As we get older there are less “new things” to notice. Novelty gives way to routine and it all goes by so quickly. This theory is elaborated and taken to interesting new regions of exploration by Steve Taylor who teaches at the University of Manchester (see an interview with Taylor on YouTube).

Beginnings of a Book

A few weeks before my mother died, I told her I was working on a new book. Since it had been three decades since I published my first book, Ecstasy the MDMA Story, she felt that it was about time that I got to work on another one.

The short answer of course is writer’s block. Writer’s block was something I thought was impossible when first became writer. I remember meeting my late, long-time friend Peter Stafford who was my first writing mentor back in 1973 and him telling me about writer’s block. He had boughts of inability to produce words when under contract.  When I became Peter’s collaborator a few years later, I began to think I had caught it from him.

Writer’s blocks is the short answer. Another short answer that has a long story attached to is “The Lao Tsu Syndrome.” When people asked me why I did not write another book, I said that I suffered from the Lao Tsu Syndrome. That usually lead to me telling them a story which I suppose demonstrates that I do like telling stories.

I first heard the story of Lao Tsu while studying Chinese Philosophy in my third year of college at California University, North ridge (then called “San Fernando Valley State College.” I took the course in 1968, the year after I had started mutating from square Geek college student into an enthusiastic hippie wanderer.

Lao Tsu’s story was told to us in its original Chinese fable form from the class text book, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy Here is an audio version of the classic Chinese Myth narrated by Steven Mitchell (safe MP3 down load),

To be continued

As most of my readers know, Google plans to run the world by 2012. On their way to that goal, they have created Fast Flip, a visual front end  for news sources. As I write this, Fast Flip lives in Google Labs only

According to their Steve's Rubel's Lifestream in his post Google Fast Flip Nearing Launch , Fast Flip will be integrated with the popular  Google News feature. 

Heere is how my current Google Fast Flip page for my personal recommendations looks.

Links for this Post: Timothy Leary Video Archive and the video embedded above.

I discovered an collection of Timothy Leary themed videos available for online viewing or no cost download as part of the Internet Archive. I have seen a good chunk of them before but most are new. You have to dig a bit to get the entire list of videos which you can view here.

Embedded at the top of the post is the first one I watch, a BBC Documentary made about Leary in 2000. The video does not begin in a flattering fashion but is one of the best produced in the collection. If anyone sees another video that they think is worthy posting about, please add your comment on this post.

Link for this Post: Rebecca's World on vegas-times.com

A UNLV student in a Public Relations class was assigned to do a press release and media kit for a local non-profit. She picked Island Foundation and so we have been talking about blogs and social media and relaunching Island.

This is Rebbecca's blog, a post about the blight on Las Vegas Neighborhoods during this current recession. In my neighborhood as in the ones she describes, almost half the houses are vacant with foreclosure stickers.

Unlike the trens she observes in some neighborhoods, most people would consider me somewhat hip (in my nerdy square sort of way). And I am just about the last one standing in my neighborhood which has almost all my neighbors go the past 7 years I've live here.

I went to a memorial for my mother last night and wrote down some memories that I shared with her close friends and relatives. Here is what I wrote:

When I was four and a half, the summer before I started school and the summer before my sister was born, I got the then common childhood disease, the measles. I had a fever of a hundred and four for several days and I was sad that on the nicest days of the year, I had to stay inside sick.

My Uncle Murray Sloan, my mother's brother was a doctor and whenever I was sick, he would pay a house call on me with a black leather doctor's bag. I usually would get a shot of antibiotics and then he would entertain me with magic tricks while the pain from the injection faded.

One night while I was sweating through a high fever, I had one of those long vivid dreams that many people experience while sick. In the dream I traveled back in time to shortly after I was born. I was starting to develop my own identity.

Scenes of some of the more traumatic episodes of my early life are what I remembered. For example, at age one and a half, I remembered my mother putting on a snowsuit for me and going outside the brownstone building of my early years, only to be pushed down by a boy named Peter. I cried and knocked on the door. Safely inside, I reported, “Peter pushed me.”

In another episode, I remembered my concern when my mother got sick on the old fashioned propeller plane we took when we moved to Los Angeles when I was two.

Memories of Early Youth

From what I know of human psychology, most people few or no memories at all of their life before the age of four. Whether the experiences I had were actual events or complete fantasy is hard to know. Looking back, the many stories my mother and father told me about my childhood may have caused me to remember them differently, with the familiar stories imposed on fading memories of a dream in childhood.

Aside from the specifics, the dream was a tale of separation from mother and my fears and desires to stop the process. I was one of those kids who they say was tied to his mother’s apron strings.

Another early and somewhat traumatic moment came while living in Burbank at age four. My mother taught me to be politically progressive or liberal as we called it back then. I remember driving with her to the polls when she cast her first vote for Adele Stevenson in November of 1952.

And that we got in a minor accident on the way home, which resulted in my mother being taken by ambulance to a hospital with some cuts on my arm, I was worried and scared, perhaps as worried and scared as I was three weeks ago when my mother took what was probably the first ambulance ride to a hospital since that time. My mother did not like doctors, ambulances and hospitals and did her best to avoid them during her wonderful 82 years on the planet.

The dream at age four and a half became a context for how I think about my life. If like is like a movie, those were the early scenes in black and white and grainy film.

A later scene which is probably a more authentic memory is me at five nagging my mother for a toy I saw on TV called Robert the Robot (Here is a YouTube Video of the program I watched on TV that got me interested).. I was a geek from an early age and interested in things scientific and technical. I At the same time, my imagination inflated the powers of this toy robot until in my mind, I thought he would be like a home servant that would automate my existence, brining my cans of soda pop from the refrigerator and even cleaning my room.

My mother was less enthusiastic about Robert the Robert as this early wonder toy from Marvel cost almost $20 which back then was on the high-priced end of things. I would not stop asking my mother about getting me the toy. She tried her usual ploy which was to say that she would get it on Tuesday. I would wait until Tuesday and she would give me a new reason for not getting me Robert.

I was relentless and she finally broke down and bought me Robert the Robot. My initial encounter with the toy was disappointing to say the least. Here is short clip on YouTube showing exactly what the toy was really like . It didn’t even have a battery; you had to propel the thing but turning a crank inside a long metal flexible coil attached to the toy.

When you turned another crank, it had a small repertoire of phrases which started with “I’m Robert Robot mechanical man.” I played with the toy for 20 minutes at the most and abandoned it.

Mother kept asking me if why I wasn’t playing with it.  I told her, “I don’t like it.” She was right about Robert the Robot. It turned out that she was usually right about almost everything she told me to do or not to do.

When was eighteen, I became part of the rebellious hippie movement. One of the main credos of the hippies was to rebel against anything our parents stood for or wanted.

For many of my fellow members of the counterculture, rebelling against their parents may have worked out ok. As I have a bit of an independent streak, I prided myself on never following my mother’s advice on anything. This started a long losing streak which lasted for many years. If only she hadn’t been so right about everything, I would have had a life with perhaps a bit less adventures, many of which only sound good as stories but were not so much fun to live through.

Big Mother in the Sky

At age 27, I had moved away from Los Angeles where I grew up and moved to Santa Cruz where I was to spend most of my adult life in a home by the ocean. My mother always liked the idea that she live close to her children so in many ways, moving was a continuation of both rebellion and search for my own identity.

However, moving away from my mother in distance did not really separate me from her.  My mother loved Woody Allen moves and she especially liked the portion of the Woody Allen movie New York Stories called Oedipus Wrecks. Here is the film on YouTube.

The film is about a neurotic New York Lawyer named Sheldon who is micromanaged by his powerful Jewish mother. The name this segement of the film is a pun on the classic neurotic complex which early psychologist Sigmund Freud identified while studying middle class Jewish families in Austria at the turn of the 20th century.

He described the Oedipus complex as an affliction of male children who become have become overly fixed and identified with their mothers. Sounds a bit like me, no?

For those of you who have not seen the movie, neurotic Lawyer Sheldon tells his psychiatrist that his mother contently interferes with his relationships and everything else in his life and that he wishes she would disappear A few days later, Sheldon takes his fiancé to a magic show and his mother tags along. Sheldon'mother is invited by the magician to take part in the show. On stage, the magician makes his mother mysteriously disappear. But when the magician tries to make her reappear, he cannot.

However, she does reappear. Instead of a flesh and blood mother, she is now a giant god-like aspiration in the skies above Manhattan. From this vantage point on high, she is able to interject herself into every aspect of Sheldon’s life,

Like Sheldon, I ended up on more than one shrink’s couch telling stories about my mother. My mother could never understand why I would talk to a psychologist about her because she was always right. She figured that most of my problems came from not listening to her.

Saying Goodbye

Aldus Huxley once said that “life has to be lived going forward but is best undertood looking backward. About ten years ago, after a long mid-life crisis contemplating my life, I came to the realization that my mother usually had been right.

My mother had been asking me to move to Las Vegas so I could be close to her but I had resisted.  So when I realized that she was so often correct with her advice, I decided to move here. With that move, I finally had made a decision that began to lead to a better life.
When I moved to Las Vegas, I began to be mothered again. For those here that knew her, you know she had a remarkable attention to the details of life, something which for years I had ignored. With her coaching,

My mother called me at least once a day until about a year and a half ago. Often when she called, we talk about a range of things, romantic comedies on TV, the latest with Bush and later Obama. She would also have a long list things that I needed to attend to. She was my to-do list and checked up and me to make sure I had gotten my car registration done or my flight booked.

When my mother stopped calling, I started worrying about her the way that she probably worried about me the previous sixty years. Her health and ability to walk began to decline but never her mind or attention to details.

I also had to learn to start tracking my own to-dos. This is what Jewish mothers call becoming a mench (a man).

I started spending some weeks at her house as I was beginning to realize that soon I might not be able to ever go home anymore.

The last few months, she has had me come over periodically to help her go shopping.  About 10 days before she died, I went over to her house. I would usually go there when Angie and her cleaning crew were supposed to arrive.  When this cleaning crew gets to your house  they  go right to work with a purpose and make it obvious they do not want you in their way.

Just as we were leaving they showed up, we went over to Vons supermarket and spent some time shopping. After shopping, we usually had coffee at the Starbucks inside the market.

That day we sat and talked for over an hour. I had some deadlines on work I was doing home so I suggested we leave. She looked like did not want to leave. We got back to her house and I took the packages into the Kitchen.  A couple of people from Angies crew was still in the kitchen and got in the way of me putting away the groceries. The crew was also cooking their lunch in the microwave so I was sorry that I come back so early. I could have avoided the awkwardness of the scene in the kitchen. My mother had lingered behind and sat in the car. I realized that my mother had somehow known that they would still be here if he did not stay a bit longer in the cafe.

Images in this post: 1) Infant Bruce Eisner and Mother, 1948, Brooklyn, NY; 2) Bruce Eisner second birthday, 1950 Brooklyn, NY; 3) Robert The Robot Marvel Toy, 1952; 4) Woody Allen and Mother, New York Stories, 5) Bruce and Mother, Las Vegas Nevada, 2006

In an amazing endorsement of the innovative efforts of President Barrack Obama to bring a new vision of a world free of Nuclear Weapons to the Global Stage --  the Nobel Prize Committee awarded him their highest honer, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.

I think it also should be a signal for some of the rabidly negative Republicans who have given our young President such a hard time lately to take stock of themselves and begin to have some  realization and some pride in having this extraordinary and great man for the leader of their country.

Know Your Mushrooms DVD on Amazon

Know Your Mushrooms Showing October 4th on the Sundance Channel

Embedded YouTube Video Clips Below

I just finished watching a documentary called Know Your Mushrooms which I recorded from a showing yesterday on the Sundance Channel. The documentary was made by director Ron Mann who is best known for his film Comic Book Confidential.

Much of the film was shot at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival which is a Mecca for psychedelic fungiphiles. It explores many of the elaborate urban myths and theoretical speculations which have popped up like multiple fruiting bodies from the subcultural sod.

As someone who has in the past had a tale or two to tell about their experiences with various mind-changing catalysts including members of the Psilocybin mushroom family, I found the segment "Gary Lincoff's mushroom trip" which is the first video below amusing.

Also below is a longer segment -- an interview with director Ron Mann first shown on QTV

Link for this Post: Brainz: Greymatter at Its Best

It strains creadabity to read such a ... brain bulging title. The webmaster must have swelled head as well, you think to yourself.

"Well, I answer succinctly, "Its got top lists -- lots and lots of top lists."

I could continue in this direction but instead I'll stop here and suggest you read a few of these "top lists." Start anywhere. Its more addictive than popcorn at a good movie. Enjoy the swelling of your grey mater!

A quick blurb from the site before you haplessly and cluelessly leap in:

Brainz is a different kind of website. We go deeper. We are all about engaging your brain from multiple angles and stimulating your mind with fun, unique, interesting, challenging, thought-provoking, and funny content. Our goal is to provide you with all of the information you could possibly want, but to go as deep as possible, giving you lots of different ways to dig deeper and explore the topic. From games and quizzes to gadgets and software, Brainz has you covered.

Check Brainz out throught the link at the top of this post