Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world

http://www.ted.com Mycologist Paul Stamets studies the mycelium -- and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help save the world.

Hymn to Hathor

My latest video/music. Hymn to Hathor - excerpt from Awakening Osiris (The Egyptian Book of The Dead).

Graham Hancock

Researcher and author Graham Hancock presented his thesis that "supernatural" entities such as aliens and fairies are actually transdimensional beings that humans encounter during altered states of consciousness. The ability to shape-shift has been ascribed to both modern aliens as well as elves and other entities reported centuries ago, he detailed.

Around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago humans underwent a sudden change, and the emergence of cave and rock paintings are evidence of this, said Hancock, who noted that some of their depictions were of part human/part animal beings. He believes these represent the supernatural entities, and through altered states (probably due to ingesting psilocybin mushrooms) humans learned advanced skills from their encounters with these beings.

Nowadays, shamans commonly have such altered state communications. They feel humanity is at a crossroads-- the West has lost contact with the spirit world, and many of the world's woes are due to this, Hancock reported. As part of his experiential research, he traveled to South America and took the psychedelic plant mixture ayahuasca. During one such episode, he described a confrontation with an alien being, but rather than being an extraterrestrial, he suggested it inhabits another dimension that can only be accessed during an altered state.

A New Day on Earth

Kymatica

The sequel to ESOTERIC AGENDA

Holographic Universe

Our world may be a giant hologram

New Scientist, 15 January 2009 by Marcus Chown



DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely "black" but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.

Bekenstein's work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole's entropy - which is synonymous with its information content - is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and 't Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too - the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What's more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

According to Hogan, the holographic principle radically changes our picture of space-time. Theoretical physicists have long believed that quantum effects will cause space-time to convulse wildly on the tiniest scales. At this magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. This distance is known as the Planck length, a mere 10-35 metres. The Planck length is far beyond the reach of any conceivable experiment, so nobody dared dream that the graininess of space-time might be discernable.

That is, not until Hogan realised that the holographic principle changes everything. If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. "Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry," says Hogan.

This is good news for anyone trying to probe the smallest unit of space-time. "Contrary to all expectations, it brings its microscopic quantum structure within reach of current experiments," says Hogan. So while the Planck length is too small for experiments to detect, the holographic "projection" of that graininess could be much, much larger, at around 10-16 metres. "If you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring," he says.

When Hogan first realised this, he wondered if any experiment might be able to detect the holographic blurriness of space-time. That's where GEO600 comes in.

Gravitational wave detectors like GEO600 are essentially fantastically sensitive rulers. The idea is that if a gravitational wave passes through GEO600, it will alternately stretch space in one direction and squeeze it in another. To measure this, the GEO600 team fires a single laser through a half-silvered mirror called a beam splitter. This divides the light into two beams, which pass down the instrument's 600-metre perpendicular arms and bounce back again. The returning light beams merge together at the beam splitter and create an interference pattern of light and dark regions where the light waves either cancel out or reinforce each other. Any shift in the position of those regions tells you that the relative lengths of the arms has changed.

"The key thing is that such experiments are sensitive to changes in the length of the rulers that are far smaller than the diameter of a proton," says Hogan.

So would they be able to detect a holographic projection of grainy space-time? Of the five gravitational wave detectors around the world, Hogan realised that the Anglo-German GEO600 experiment ought to be the most sensitive to what he had in mind. He predicted that if the experiment's beam splitter is buffeted by the quantum convulsions of space-time, this will show up in its measurements (Physical Review D, vol 77, p 104031). "This random jitter would cause noise in the laser light signal," says Hogan.

In June he sent his prediction to the GEO600 team. "Incredibly, I discovered that the experiment was picking up unexpected noise," says Hogan. GEO600's principal investigator Karsten Danzmann of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, and also the University of Hanover, admits that the excess noise, with frequencies of between 300 and 1500 hertz, had been bothering the team for a long time. He replied to Hogan and sent him a plot of the noise. "It looked exactly the same as my prediction," says Hogan. "It was as if the beam splitter had an extra sideways jitter."

Incredibly, the experiment was picking up unexpected noise - as if quantum convulsions were causing an extra sideways jitter
No one - including Hogan - is yet claiming that GEO600 has found evidence that we live in a holographic universe. It is far too soon to say. "There could still be a mundane source of the noise," Hogan admits.

Gravitational-wave detectors are extremely sensitive, so those who operate them have to work harder than most to rule out noise. They have to take into account passing clouds, distant traffic, seismological rumbles and many, many other sources that could mask a real signal. "The daily business of improving the sensitivity of these experiments always throws up some excess noise," says Danzmann. "We work to identify its cause, get rid of it and tackle the next source of excess noise." At present there are no clear candidate sources for the noise GEO600 is experiencing. "In this respect I would consider the present situation unpleasant, but not really worrying."

For a while, the GEO600 team thought the noise Hogan was interested in was caused by fluctuations in temperature across the beam splitter. However, the team worked out that this could account for only one-third of the noise at most.

Danzmann says several planned upgrades should improve the sensitivity of GEO600 and eliminate some possible experimental sources of excess noise. "If the noise remains where it is now after these measures, then we have to think again," he says.

If GEO600 really has discovered holographic noise from quantum convulsions of space-time, then it presents a double-edged sword for gravitational wave researchers. One on hand, the noise will handicap their attempts to detect gravitational waves. On the other, it could represent an even more fundamental discovery.

Such a situation would not be unprecedented in physics. Giant detectors built to look for a hypothetical form of radioactivity in which protons decay never found such a thing. Instead, they discovered that neutrinos can change from one type into another - arguably more important because it could tell us how the universe came to be filled with matter and not antimatter (New Scientist, 12 April 2008, p 26).

It would be ironic if an instrument built to detect something as vast as astrophysical sources of gravitational waves inadvertently detected the minuscule graininess of space-time. "Speaking as a fundamental physicist, I see discovering holographic noise as far more interesting," says Hogan.

Small price to pay
Despite the fact that if Hogan is right, and holographic noise will spoil GEO600's ability to detect gravitational waves, Danzmann is upbeat. "Even if it limits GEO600's sensitivity in some frequency range, it would be a price we would be happy to pay in return for the first detection of the graininess of space-time." he says. "You bet we would be pleased. It would be one of the most remarkable discoveries in a long time."

However Danzmann is cautious about Hogan's proposal and believes more theoretical work needs to be done. "It's intriguing," he says. "But it's not really a theory yet, more just an idea." Like many others, Danzmann agrees it is too early to make any definitive claims. "Let's wait and see," he says. "We think it's at least a year too early to get excited."

The longer the puzzle remains, however, the stronger the motivation becomes to build a dedicated instrument to probe holographic noise. John Cramer of the University of Washington in Seattle agrees. It was a "lucky accident" that Hogan's predictions could be connected to the GEO600 experiment, he says. "It seems clear that much better experimental investigations could be mounted if they were focused specifically on the measurement and characterisation of holographic noise and related phenomena."

One possibility, according to Hogan, would be to use a device called an atom interferometer. These operate using the same principle as laser-based detectors but use beams made of ultracold atoms rather than laser light. Because atoms can behave as waves with a much smaller wavelength than light, atom interferometers are significantly smaller and therefore cheaper to build than their gravitational-wave-detector counterparts.

So what would it mean it if holographic noise has been found? Cramer likens it to the discovery of unexpected noise by an antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964. That noise turned out to be the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang fireball. "Not only did it earn Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson a Nobel prize, but it confirmed the big bang and opened up a whole field of cosmology," says Cramer.

Hogan is more specific. "Forget Quantum of Solace, we would have directly observed the quantum of time," says Hogan. "It's the smallest possible interval of time - the Planck length divided by the speed of light."

More importantly, confirming the holographic principle would be a big help to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity. Today the most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory, which researchers hope could describe happenings in the universe at the most fundamental level. But it is not the only show in town. "Holographic space-time is used in certain approaches to quantising gravity that have a strong connection to string theory," says Cramer. "Consequently, some quantum gravity theories might be falsified and others reinforced."

Hogan agrees that if the holographic principle is confirmed, it rules out all approaches to quantum gravity that do not incorporate the holographic principle. Conversely, it would be a boost for those that do - including some derived from string theory and something called matrix theory. "Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory." As serendipitous discoveries go, it's hard to get more ground-breaking than that.



Marcus Chown is the author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You (Faber, 2008)

The Police - your friendly guides

Film-maker Darren Pollard was clearing up flood rubbish from his front garden when he noticed the police and a teenager opposite his house. Darren retrieved his camera and this is what he filmed!

Psychedelic Healing?

This article originally appeared in the December/January 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind magazine


Mind-altering psychedelics, or hallucinogens, are back in the research labs, where their therapeutic applications -- rather than the illegal use -- are being explored. Studies are looking at psychedelics to treat a number of otherwise intractable psychiatric disorders, including chronic depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and drug or alcohol dependency.

The past 15 years have seen a quiet resurgence of psychedelic drug research as scientists have come to recognize the long-underappreciated potential of these drugs. In the past few years, a growing number of studies using human volunteers have begun to explore the possible therapeutic benefits of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, ibogaine and ketamine.

Much remains unclear about the precise neural mechanisms governing how these drugs produce their mind-bending results, but they often produce somewhat similar psychoactive effects that make them potential therapeutic tools. Though still in their preliminary stages, studies in humans suggest that the day when people can schedule a psychedelic session with their therapist to overcome a serious psychiatric problem may not be that far off.



The Trip Begins

Psychedelic drug research began in 1897, when the German chemist Arthur Heffter first isolated mescaline, the primary psychoactive compound in the peyote cactus. In 1943 Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic effects of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel while studying ergot, a fungus that grows on rye. Then, 15 years later, in 1958, he was the first to isolate psilocybin and psilocin-the psychoactive components of the Mexican "magic mushroom," Psilocybe mexicana.

Prior to 1972 close to 700 studies with psychedelic drugs took place. The research suggested that psychedelics offered significant benefits in easing the teetotaling of alcoholics, the anxieties of terminal cancer patients and the symptoms of many difficult-to-treat psychiatric illnesses, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For example, studies by Stanislav Grof and colleagues at the Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore with terminal cancer patients between 1967 and 1972 showed that LSD combined with psychotherapy could alleviate symptoms of depression, tension, anxiety, sleep disturbances, psychological withdrawal and even severe physical pain. Other investigators during this era found that LSD may have some interesting potential as a means to facilitate creative problem-solving (see sidebar: "A Spark for Creativity?" ).

Between 1972 and 1990 there were no human studies with psychedelic drugs. Their disappearance was the result of a political backlash that followed the promotion of these drugs by the 1960s counterculture. This reaction not only made these substances illegal for personal use but also made it extremely difficult for researchers to get government approval to study them.

Things began to change in 1990 when "open-minded regulators at the FDA decided to put science before politics when it came to psychedelic and medical marijuana research," says Rick Doblin, a public policy expert and head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). "FDA openness to research is really the key factor. Also, senior researchers who were influenced by psychedelics in the sixties now are speaking up before they retire and have earned credibility." Chemist and neuropharmacologist David E. Nichols of Purdue University adds, "Baby boomers who experienced the psychedelic sixties are now mature scientists and clinicians who have retained their curiosity but only recently had the opportunity to reexplore these substances."



Research Begins Anew

The efforts of two privately funded organizations have catalyzed much of the recent wave of research: a California-based group called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), founded in 1986 by Doblin, and The Heffter Research Institute, a New Mexico-based organization started in 1993. Outside the U.S. are groups such as the Beckley Foundation in England and the Russian Psychedelic Society. These groups seek out interested researchers, assist in developing the experimental design for the studies, and help to obtain funding and government approval to conduct clinical trials. They have initiated numerous FDA-approved clinical trials in the U.S., Switzerland, Israel and Spain. So far the agency has approved seven studies, with two under review and more on the way.

Current studies are focusing on psychedelic treatments for cluster headaches, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), severe anxiety in terminal cancer patients, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism and opiate addiction. New drugs must pass three clinical milestones before they can be marketed to the public, called Phase I (for safety, usually in 20 to 80 volunteers), Phase II (for efficacy, in several hundred subjects) and Phase III (more extensive data on safety and efficacy come from testing the drug in up to several thousand people). All the studies discussed in this article have received government approval, and their investigators are either in the process of recruiting human subjects or have begun or completed research on human subjects in the first or second stage of this trial process.

Psychedelic drugs affect all mental functions: perception, emotion, cognition, body awareness and one's sense of self. Unlike every other class of drugs, psychedelic drug effects depend heavily on the environment and expectations of the subject, which is why combining them with psychotherapy is so vital.

"Psychedelics may be therapeutic to the extent that they elicit processes that are known to be useful in a therapeutic context: transference reactions and working through them; enhanced symbolism and imagery; increased suggestibility; increased contact between emotions and ideations; controlled regression; etcetera," says psychiatrist Rick Strassman of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, who from 1990 to 1995 performed the first human study using psychedelic drugs in about 20 years, investigating the effects of DMT on 60 human subjects. "This all depends, though, on set and setting," he cautions. "These same properties could also be turned to very negative experiences, if the support and expectation for a beneficial experience aren't there."



Mechanisms and Targets

Scientists divide classical psychedelic drugs into two basic chemical groups: tryptamines (such as LSD, DMT and psilocybin) and phenethylamines (such as mescaline and MDMA). In addition, some people consider so-called dissociative anesthetics (such as ketamine and PCP) to be psychedelic drugs, although the way they affect the brain is quite different.

The exact mechanisms differ, but all of the tryptamine hallucinogens-which make up the majority of psychedelic drugs-selectively bind to specific serotonin receptors on neurons, mimicking the effect of serotonin on these receptors. Phenethylamines mimic the chemical structure of another neurotransmitter, dopamine. They actually bind to many of the same serotonin receptors activated by the tryptamines, however. Serotonin is responsible for many important functions, including mood, memory, appetite, sex and sleep. It is such an essential neurochemical that any substance-such as a hallucinogen-that interferes with its action might be expected to produce dramatic changes in brain function.

How do the drugs create their perceptual effects? Neuroscientists believe that activation of serotonin 2A receptors, which are highly expressed (or present) in the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, interferes with the processing of sensory information. Consciousness is thought to involve a complex interaction between the cortex, an area known as the thalamus and another region called the striatum. Disruption of this network by activation of serotonin 2A receptors is now the most popular theory for the mechanism of action for tryptamine and phenethylamine psychedelics.

"There are at least two possible mechanisms for beneficial actions," Nichols says. The first simply involves a change in the numbers of brain serotonin 2A receptors. Activation of serotonin 2A receptors by psychedelics causes the number of receptors expressed on the surface of neurons to decrease, a process called downregulation. For some disorders, such OCD, it may be this receptor downregulation that could be therapeutic. The other possible mechanism is a psychological effect that is harder to define, but in some way produces profound changes in the way the subject perceives pain and distress. Psychedelics seem able to produce a profound cognitive change that provides the patient with a new insight, able to see the world with a new perspective, somehow reducing anxiety, and raising the pain threshold."

MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) is also chemically classified as a phenethylamine, but its action in the brain is substantially different from that of other drugs discussed in this article. "In contrast to most psychedelics, MDMA does not directly stimulate serotonin 2A receptors but instead causes dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine [another neurotransmitter] to be released from their stores in neuron endings," Nichols says. There is some controversy about whether MDMA has neurotoxic effects. Most researchers believe, however, that the occasional moderate use of MDMA at therapeutic doses would not be damaging. There have been no recent studies using mescaline, although MAPS plans to initiate some in the future.

In contrast to the traditional psychedelics, the dissociative anesthetics selectively bind to N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors, blocking the neurotransmitter glutamate from activating these receptors. "Because glutamate is an essential neurotransmitter that activates neurons, this blocking effect seems to prevent the processing of sensory information by the brain,"

Ketamine appears to hold particular promise as a psychedelic therapy because it is already among the selections in Western medicine's pharmacopoeia. In addition to being part of a different chemical class of drugs than the other psychedelics, ketamine is in a separate legal class as an FDA-approved schedule III drug. This designation means that any physician can administer it for an off-label use if he or she believes it will help the patient.

Although some research indicates that psychedelic drugs may enhance suggestibility and certain aspects of psychotherapy, the benefits of dissociative anesthetics such as ketamine and ibogaine may simply be the result of enduring biochemical changes in the brain. For example, in 2006 Carlos Zarate of the National Institute of Mental Health published a study demonstrating ketamine's unusual antidepressant properties [see "Good News about Depression," by Walter Brown; Scientific American Mind, June/July 2007]. A single infusion of ketamine relieved symptoms of depression in some patients within a few hours, and that relief persisted for several days.

This was the third study that demonstrated ketamine's powerful and enduring antidepressant effects. In one intriguing finding from one of the previous studies, subjects received the ketamine as an anesthetic for orthopedic surgery -- so they were not even conscious during the mind-altering portion of the drug's action in the brain and the antidepressant effects occurred post-operatively.

In other work seeking to help cure addicts, a preliminary ketamine study, in which psychiatrist Evgeny Krupitsky of St. Petersburg, Russia, treated 59 patients with heroin dependency, produced encouraging results. And the Iboga Therapy House in Vancouver, Canada, has recently begun a study that has so far successfully treated three out of 20 opiate-addicted subjects with ibogaine. The experimental procedure substantially reduced the withdrawal symptoms associated with opiate addiction, helping the addicts to recover and break their dependency on the drug.



OCD, Cluster Headaches and Cancer

In addition to the promising work with ibogaine and the dissociative anesthetics, progress is also being made in the study of conventional psychedelics. In 2006 investigators at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine published the results of a six-year project on the effects of psilocybin, in which more than 60 percent of the participants reported positive changes in their attitude and behavior after taking the drug, a benefit that lasted for at least several months.

In another 2006 study, researchers at the University of Arizona, led by psychiatrist Francisco Moreno, found that psilocybin relieved the symptoms of nine patients with OCD. The patients suffered from a wide range of obsessions and compulsions. Some of them showered for hours; others put on their clothes over and over again until they felt right. All nine experienced improvements with at least some of the doses tested.

"What we saw was a drastic decrease in symptoms for a period of time," Moreno says. "People would report that it had been years since they had felt so good." Moreno cautions that the goal was simply to test the safety of administering psilocybin to OCD patients and that the true effectiveness of the drug is still in question until a larger controlled study can be conducted. Such a study is being planned, although there are currently no funds available for it. According to Moreno, however, no treatment in the medical literature eases OCD symptoms as fast as psilocybin does. Whereas other drugs take several weeks to show an effect, psilocybin worked almost immediately.

Preliminary results of a current study led by psychiatrist Charles Grob of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center suggest that psilocybin may reduce the psychological distress associated with terminal cancer. This research seeks to measure the effectiveness of psilocybin on the reduction of anxiety, depression and physical pain in advanced-stage cancer patients. Grob's study is almost complete; 11 out of 12 subjects have already been treated. Although the formal data analysis has not been completed, "my impression," Grob says, "from just staying in touch with these people and following them is that some do seem to befunctioning better psychologically. There seems to be less anxiety, improved mood and an overall improved quality of life. There also seems to be less fear of death."

The first studies of psychedelic drugs at Harvard since 1965 are also now under way. In one study, psychiatrist John Halpern and his colleagues are looking into using LSD and psilocybin to treat the debilitating symptoms of cluster headaches. The researchers, who are in the process of recruiting subjects, will probably begin trials in early 2008.



Acute Anxiety and PTSD

Another study at Harvard, also led by Halpern, will look into MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with advanced-stage cancer-similar to Grob's psilocybin study-using measures to evaluate anxiety, pain and overall quality of life. This study is also in the process of recruiting human subjects.

Psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer in Charleston, S.C., is running an MDMA study for treatment-resistant PTSD victims of crime, war or childhood sexual abuse. So far 17 out of 20 such subjects have already undergone the experimental therapy. "At this point the results are very promising," Mithoefer says. "I think we're seeing pretty strong, robust effects in some people. I hasten to add these are preliminary findings-we're not ready to draw conclusions yet. But assuming it keeps going this way for the rest of the study, it certainly seems that there's very good reason to go on to larger phase III trials."

Although we are still in the early days of psychedelic therapy research, the initial data show considerable promise. A growing number of scientists believe that psychedelic drugs may offer safe and effective help for people with certain treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders and possibly help some people who receive partial relief from current methods to obtain a more complete healing.



A Spark for Creativity?

Nobel Prize winners Francis Crick and Kary Mullis reportedly attributed part of their breakthrough scientific insights to psychedelic drugs. And architect Kyosho Izumi's LSD-inspired design of the ideal psychiatric hospital won a commendation for outstanding achievement from the American Psychiatric Association. Others scoff at the notion that the drugs deserve the credit. What do studies say?

In 1955 psychiatrist Louis Berlin investigated the effects of mescaline and LSD on the painting abilities of four nationally recognized artists. Although the study showed that the artists' technical abilities were hampered, a group of independent art critics judged the experimental paintings to have "greater aesthetic value" than the artists' usual work.

Two years later Los Angeles psychiatrist Oscar Janiger asked 60 prominent artists to paint a Native American doll before taking LSD and then again while under its influence. A panel of independent art critics and historians then evaluated the results. Members generally agreed that the craftsmanship of the second set of paintings suffered, but many of those pieces received higher marks for imagination.

In 1965 psychologist James Fadiman and social scientist Willis Harman of San Francisco State College administered mescaline to workers in various fields as they sought a creative solution for a professional problem. After some psychological preparation, subjects worked individually on their problem throughout their mescaline session. Psychological tests, subjective reports, and the eventual industrial or commercial validation and acceptance of the finished product or final solution measured the output of each volunteer. Virtually all individuals produced solutions judged highly creative and satisfactory by these standards.

Psychologist Stanley Krippner of the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, however, remains skeptical. "It is naive to claim that psychedelics produce creative experience," he argues. "At best, they may be one of many factors that result in something new that comes into being."



____

Further Reading

*Hallucinogens. D. E. Nichols in Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Vol. 101, No. 2, pages 131-181; February 2004.

*Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of Psilocybin in 9 Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. F. A. Moreno, C. B. Wiegand, E. K. Taitano and P. L. Delgado in Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Vol. 67, No. 11, pages 1735-1740; November 2006.

*The Use of Psilocybin in Patients with Advanced Cancer and Existential Anxiety. C. S. Grob in Psychedelic Medicine: New Evidence for Hallucinogenic Substances as Treatments, Vol. 1. Edited by Michael J. Winkelman and Thomas B. Roberts. Praeger/Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007.

*MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. M. Mithoefer. Ibid.

*The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) publishes a quarterly bulletin that reports on the status of current scientific research into psychedelic substances: www.maps.org

The Sound of Silence

Educate-Yourself
The Freedom of Knowledge, The Power of Thought ©

The Sound of Silence
The Antithesis of Freedom

[Editor's Note: This is an extremely timely and important essay. It overviews a secret Pentagon psychotronics technology known as Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS) that has been fully operational since the early 1990s. I first found out about the use of this technology from Al Bielek in a 1992 video he made with Vladimir Terziski. This technology was used against battle-hardened Iraqi troops fortified in deep underground bunkers in Kuwait and Iraq in the first Gulf War in January of 1991.

The physical, emotional, and psychological effects of this technology were so severe that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops surrended en masse without firing even a single shot against U.S. led coalition forces. The numbers reported in the news were staggering: 75,000 and then annother 125,000 (or more) Iraqi troops would come out of their deep desert bunkers waving white flags and falling to their knees before approaching U.S. troops and literally kiss their captor's boots or hands if given the opportunity. Why would eight year veterans of Middle Eastern warfare (with Iran 1980-1988) behave this way? Simple. They were subjected to a technology that was so extreme and incomprehensible that they were suddenly reduced to the level of compliant children and felt grateful to still be alive in the wake of their mind-wrenching experience.

This technology is about to be used, albeit in a more subtle fashion, against American citizens in a highly classified and covert operation to mind control and manipulate the entire population into 'compliance' with our New World order overlords. The technology will utilize a combination of HAARP transmitters, GWEN towers, microwave cell phone towers, and the soon-to-be-mandatory High Definition DIGITAL TV that will enter your home via A) Cable, B) Satellite, C) HD TVs, or D) those oh-so-easy -to-obtain "Digital Converter boxes" that the government is so anxious to help you obtain and underwrite most of the cost on your behalf.

But why is the government so anxious to help American citizens experience a clearer and more highly defined television picture? Does that make sense to you? Since when is the government so concerned about the visual quality of our televised entertainment that congress would pass an undebated statutory proclamation which mandated that the HD conversion take place on Feb. 17, 2009 and and then subsidze about 90% of the associated cost? I'm only guessing, but if there are 200 million "regular" televisions in America to be converted into HD, then that $40 in government subsidy per TV x 2,000,000 = 80 million dollars. Why is the government so anxious to spend $80 million dollars on her citizens to improve the clarity of a TV picture? Or is the recently touted "additional bandwidth" cover story that supposedly is to be gained with the HD technology the only and genuine reason for spending so much taxpayer dollars on HD conversion?

The second service that this author performs is to "out" two of our more deceptive CIA/Pentagon 'assets' masquerading under the rubric of natural health advocates. Their names are Rima Laibow and her husband, "former" Major General Albert Stubblebine. If your e-mail Inbox has been filling with warnings and articles in recent months about the coming Codex regulations and the "wonderful" job that Rima and her retired Army husband have been doing to try and stem the tide, then you know who I'm talking about.

Folks, is it time to wake up yet? Or should we just resume our slumber and wait for them to take us away in those spiffy Gunderson cattle cars that Phil Schneider warned us about in 1995 (you know, the ones with the built in shackles and manacles)? ...Ken Adachi]
__________________________________________________ _________

By A. True Ott, PhD, ND
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/sound...e11dec08.shtml


December 11, 2008

The Sound of Silence: The Antithesis of Freedom
by A. True Ott, PhD, ND (Dec 12, 2008)


The year was 1961, and John Kennedy was soon to become the 35th President. Shortly before Kennedy’s inauguration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower shocked the nation and the world with his televised farewell speech. The speech’s content was shocking because General Eisenhower was a very popular war hero, and American military might was second to none. Eisenhower, a highly decorated five-star general, was the Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces during World War II. It was Eisenhower’s leadership during the Normandy Invasion that ultimately freed Europe from the Nazi scourge. Incredibly, in his farewell address, this great American hero did not warn the nation of the budding communist threat or the horrors of nuclear proliferation. No, not at all! Instead, this career military genius poignantly and soberly declared to this great nation:

“... we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence --- economic, political, even spiritual --- is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to recognize its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or our democratic processes"

Here we have a career military officer, and sitting U.S. President warning the nation in his final farewell speech, that something called “unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex” poses an extremely dangerous threat to our Free Republic society. According to Eisenhower, this threat “exists and will persist”.

To President Eisenhower, in January of 1961, this evil was a much greater threat to America than Castro’s Cuba or Kruschev’s Soviet Union. What exactly could have happened in the “military-industrialist” establishment that would have caused Eisenhower to issue such a strongly worded warning? Improved machine gun production? Nope. Battleship production? Nope. Nuclear submarines? Nope. Proliferation of Nuclear warheads? A concern of course, but a concern that most Americans were fully aware of.

No, obviously what caused Eisenhower such deep concern had to be something much more pervasively shadowy, dark and secret. Some new, covert, technology had clearly emerged that had the very real potential to provide certain individuals with the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” that in turn would “endanger our liberties or our democratic processes” (i.e. our free and fair election process). In other words, it had the clear potential to circumvent the voice of the people and completely empower un-elected power mongers.

Eisenhower, I would submit, was warning America about something called the “Sound of Silence”. Eisenhower was an honest and patriotic American. Like Marine Corp General Smedley Butler, who decades earlier declared to Congress that “War is a Racket” --- Ike knew that such absolute power and total covert control over the minds and hearts of individual citizens would corrupt society absolutely. He also knew and understood, as did the German philosopher Goethe:

“No man is more hopelessly enslaved, than he who falsely believes that he is FREE.”

Therefore, he issued his strong, concluding warning to America. Today, this author must do no less.

The Sound of Silence is a military-intelligence code word for certain psychotronic weapons of mass mind-control tested in the mid 1950’s, perfected during the 70’s, and used extensively by the “modern” U.S. military in the early 90’s, despite the opposition and warnings issued by men such as Dwight David Eisenhower. This mind-altering covert weapon is based on something called subliminal carrier technology, or the Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS), (also nicknamed S-Quad or "Squad" in military jargon.) It was developed for military use by Dr. Oliver Lowery of Norcross, Georgia, and is described in US Patent #5,159,703

– “Silent Subliminal Presentation System” for commercial use in 1992. The patent abstract reads:

“A silent communications system in which nonaural carriers, in the very low (ELF) or very high audio-frequency (VHF) range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum are amplitude – or frequency-modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic, or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.”

In layman’s terms, this device, this “Sound of Silence” simply allows for the unwarranted implantation of specific thoughts, emotions, and even prescribed physical actions into unsuspecting human beings.

In short, it has the very real ability to turn human beings into mere puppets in the hands of certain “controllers” or puppet-masters. Eisenhower knew full well what such a “weapon” could do in the hands of greedy, conspiring men and women scheming to control the planet. It could easily result in the takeover of American society without a single bullet being fired.

This is what he was warning America about, this is the “combination” he feared above all others. Have the leaders of America ignored Ike’s warning? Have conspiring and evil men and women utilized this diabolical technology on unsuspecting Americans and others outside of our borders? If so, will they continue to utilize the technology through the medium of Television and Radio? This exposé will attempt to answer these questions, and give the reader a clear picture of exactly who made the decisions to use the “Sound of Silence” in both war and peace.

On March 23, 1991, a news brief was released in the form of an ITV News Bureau Ltd. (London) wire service bulletin entitled “High-Tech Psychological Warfare Arrives in the Middle East”. This was during the administration of George Bush Sr., during “Operation Desert Storm” and describes in remarkable detail a US Psychological Operations (PsyOps) covert operation successfully deployed against Iraqi troops in Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein’s vaunted “Republican Guard” crack troops were promising Bush “the Mother of all Battles” with many thousands of dead coalition troops. On paper, it looked convincing. Hussein’s Republican Guard troops were battle-hardened veterans of the 10 year war with Iran, while coalition troops were unblooded. The Iraqis had modern weaponry and were well trained in how to use it. Something very strange happened, however. The “mother of all battles” ended before it began, as literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered en masse without even firing a shot!

Here is what the British press reported on the incident – while the American press was censored:

“... an unbelievable and HIGHLY CLASSIFIED PsyOps program utilizing “Silent Sound” techniques was successfully deployed. The opportunity to use this method occurred when Saddam Hussein’s military command-and-control system was destroyed. The Iraqi troops were then forced to use commercial FM radio stations to carry encoded commands, which were broadcast on the 100 MHz frequency. The US Psy-Ops team set up its own portable FM transmitter, utilizing the same frequency, in the deserted city of Al Khafji. This US transmitter overpowered the local Iraqi station. Along with patriotic and religious music, PsyOps transmitted “vague, confusing and contradictory military orders and information”.

“Subliminally, a much more powerful technology was at work, however. A sophisticated electronic system designed to ‘speak’ directly to the mind of the listener; to alter and entrain his brainwaves, to manipulate his brain’s electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns and thus artificially implant negative emotional states ---- feelings of intense fear, anxiety, despair and hopelessness were created in the Iraqi troops. This incredibly effective subliminal system doesn’t just tell a person to feel an emotion, it makes them feel it; it implants that EMOTION in their minds.”

While utilizing such a “non-lethal” covert psy-ops weapon resulted in many lives being saved, both American, Coalition, as well as Iraqi, the question begs to be asked: How can Americans be assured that such a weapon is not being used on them by “Big Brother” on a daily basis?

Moreover, why was the REAL STORY behind the mass Iraqi surrenders censored so completely from the American people? Typically, secrecy of this nature is only employed when the subject is morally offensive, or when the powers that be wish to continue to deploy the subject without public scrutiny or oversight, or both. Clearly, if such a device employed covertly on Americans could result in “unwarranted influence” over a society, as Eisenhower warned, I submit the majority of Americans would be completely outraged and incensed, and rightfully so. Therefore, of course the technology would need to remain hidden away.

Officially, the Sound of Silence (S-quad) technology does not exist, just as the US Government officially denies the existence of UFOs and Area 51, (Groom Lake) in the Nevada desert. However, the physical realities cannot be ignored by the rational and logical mind. For instance, during the first Gulf war, the man who most likely ordered the deployment of the Sound of Silence was Major General Albert (Bert) Stubblebine, who was the Commanding General of the U.S. Army’s INTELLIGENCE SCHOOL AND CENTER, as well as the Army’s Electronic Research and Development Command (ERADCOM) as well as the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM).

In short, Albert Stubblebine was the Army’s liaison with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Naval Intelligence operatives (ONI) – and as head of ERADCOM, he would of necessity have had complete working knowledge of the Sound of Silence weaponry, if indeed it truly exists. He was the U.S. Army’s top spy-boss, and of course, was privy to all its secrets. Now retired from active duty following a 32-year career, General Stubblebine has combined with his wife, Rima Laibow to form something called the Natural Solutions Foundation, supposedly dedicated to fighting all HEALTH FREEDOM THREATS to individuals including Codex Alimentarias, Vaccinations, and of course the FDA Gestapo. On their website,
www.healthfreedomusa.org

one can read this about Albert N. Stubblebine:

“Many of the innovations he developed helped the U.S. to conduct the First Gulf W ar effectively and swiftly with a very low casualty rate.”

But of course, such “innovations” are never fully disclosed to Americans and are officially non-existent. With all due respect to General Stubblebine and shadowy power-brokers such as Frank Carlucci and Donald Rumsfeld, this author concurs whole-heartedly with General Eisenhower and I declare that such posturing and secrecy with weapons of mind-control constitutes indeed an “acquisition of unwarranted power and influence” and has absolutely no place in a free and open society- no matter how many soldier's lives it may save on the battlefield. The potential for massive misuse and abuse of such immense controlling power is simply too great.

Furthermore, with all due respect Mr. Stubblebine, is he and Rima Laibow using the cover of Natural Health activistism to hide their true agenda? Could this hidden agenda be the covert promotion and testing of Sound of Silence equipment and technology commercially throughout the world?

It would seem quite logical that since covert “Black Project” mindcontrol operations was indeed his highest area of expertise while in the military, would it not be logical to assume that he would continue to engage in such work in his “retirement” years? I would submit such activity would be immensely more potentially PROFITABLE than soliciting donations while hawking organic veggies and supplements over the internet.

Is it not highly unusual for a career military man with such deep ties to CIA Black Ops to suddenly become a highly vocal natural health guru, especially considering that he had zero prior experience or hands-on training in the field?

According to his Natural Solutions website,

“He [Stubblebine] has taken this set of experiences [psy-ops work] and become involved in leading-edge medical research and development in collaboration with his wife Rima E. Laibow, M.D.”

Yet, oddly, nowhere on the NSF website is any of this “leading-edge” R & D technology discussed, even in the most generic terms. Instead, it is primarily aimed at soliciting tax-deductible donations. This alone should raise immediate red flags.

Furthermore, according to public documents available in Virginia, General Albert Stubblebine separated from his former wife Geraldine on Independence Day, (July 4) 1991 while he was at the height of his power and successful Psy-Ops venture in Kuwait against the Iraqi Army. The Stubblebines were formally divorced on September 9, 1994, whereby the divorce court granted Geraldine a decree on the “grounds of adultery”with a “female psychiatrist friend”, in all likelihood, his current wife Rima Laibow. Court documents show that Geraldine was chronically ill at the time of her divorce, suffering from “cancer and other ailments”and needed financial support from General Stubblebine to continue with her ALLOPATHIC treatments.

Nowhere is it mentioned in the divorce proceedings that any NATURAL treatments were being employed or had even been considered. Immediately after “retiring" from the army, General Stubblebine took a position as the “VP for Intelligence Systems” with Braddock, Dunn, and McDonald (BDM), a major defense contractor owned by the shadowy Carlyle Group and ex-Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci of Iran-Contra infamy.

According to author Dan Briody in his book : "The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group",

“BDM’s major business was in an area called Black Projects which are kept secret because to publicize them would compromise national security. Lawmakers often complain about Black Projects, citing that many contracts are thusly classified, not because of national security concerns, but rather to avoid the required congressional review.” (Ibid, pg. 35)

It is clear that BDM was very deeply involved in highly questionable dealings during this time frame. According to Dan Briody:

“On Christmas Eve, 1994, the New York Times reported that Frank Carlucci had again been involved in a clandestine arms deal, this time with the Soviets. With Carlucci as chairman, BDM, now a Carlyle portfolio company, had brokered a deal between the Pentagon and the former Soviet Republic of Belarus to secretly purchase an S-300, the Soviet’s version of the Patriot missile defense system the United States had used so effectively during the Gulf War. ... For the deal, BDM used the infamous Canadian arms dealer Emmanuel Weigensberg, the same man that brokered the Iran-Contra arms shipments for the Reagan White House.” (Ibid, pg 38-39)

Since the Sound of Silence machine technology was patented for “privatization” commercial applications by Dr. Lowery on October 27, 1992 , it clearly opened the door to private defense contractors such as BDM to develop their own “Intelligence Systems”.

It would then make sense to employ General Stubblebine as a consultant. Of course, what would then stop BDM from quietly marketing and selling the Sound of Silence to large corporations tied to Wall Street? For example, imagine utilizing the Sound of Silence in a large Wal-Mart store, mixing the ELF waves with background music to subliminally brainwash dishonest shoppers NOT to engage in shoplifting? Such a device would save Sam Walton many millions of dollars in lost revenue every year.

Suppose also that a young, black man from Illinois was given access to, and was able to utilize the S-quad Sound of Silence technology in his public speeches, radio and 30-minute television“infomercials” -- all programmed and designed by “handlers” to illicit strong emotional responses from audience members who then are merely “hearing without listening”.

Moreover, what if televisions across the U.S. and Canada all went 100% DIGITAL [E.g. the mandatory HD conversion to take place in Feb. 2009] in their signals (which must happen in order to successfully link to pre-positioned, interconnected GWEN (Ground-Wave Emergency Network) Towers) which of course would allow the unrestricted use of the Sound of Silence frequencies in a complete and massive control of the nation’s mind and consciousness?

I am telling you that is EXACTLY what is happening. President Eisenhower was absolutely correct, and his worst fears were indeed well founded!

The military-industrialist complex has quietly completed the takeover of the nation’s consciousness, and thus its very soul. All without firing a shot! What about Stubblebine and his side-kick Laibow? What could they actually be doing in their world travels disguised as natural food activists?

Keep in mind that taking complete fascist control of America is just one step of the Zionist elites ultimate agenda, of which Stubblebine and Laibow have very likely pledged their true loyalty. The elitist Zionists overall objective is indeed absolute world control, something they refer to as a “New World Order”with them as dictators and overlords. Again, the absolute SECRECY surrounding the development and deployment of the electromagnetic mind-altering technology of the Sound of Silence in a very real way reflects the tremendous power that is inherent in it. This is why Eisenhower knew that he HAD to warn the nation about it back in 1961. To put it bluntly, whoever controls this technology literally has the power to control the minds of men – all men and women everywhere.

Of course, whoever controls the minds of all humans, controls the wealth and destiny of planet earth. Furthermore, Stubblebine, as commander of Army Intelligence would likely follow the prescribed manual of all covert ops --- such as is found in a de-classified U.S. manual for the planned subversion and coup of the government of Nicaragua. The manual instructs the CIA “guerilla forces” to engage in different “false front” organizations designed to win the respect, trust, and influence of the enemy. Once complete trust and confidence is achieved by means of the activities of the “false front”, then the destruction of the enemy by means of misdirection and dis-information tactics can more easily be executed.

I would submit there is no better “false front” to infiltrate in America than Natural Health proponents, for they are typically healthier, better informed, and more dedicated to preserving individual freedoms and fighting tyranny than other Americans. Thus, there could be no better “false front” to establish, and there is clearly no more potentially vicious wolf hiding in sheep’s clothing than the man who knows more about the Sound of Silence secret deployment than any other human –one General Albert (Bert) Stubblebine and his Jewish psychiatrist wife, Rima Laibow.

There is ample evidence that certain elitists in America and Israel plan to definitely extend the capacity of this technology to encompass all people on every continent. A key to this is the HAARP project where ELF and VHF frequencies can indeed be beamed off of the earth’s ionosphere to various GWEN towers world-wide. Of course, the U.S. Government officially denies all of this, telling the talking heads of the controlled news media that the GWEN towers are merely private cell-phone towers with no ulterior agenda, and therefore anybody who thinks otherwise is a lunatic-fringe conspiracy nut.

The evidence to the contrary, however is clear and unequivocal.

Dr. Michael Persinger is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada. Concerning this subject, Dr. Persinger writes:

“Temporal lobe stimulation can evoke the feeling of a presence, disorientation, and perceptual irregularities. It can activate images stored in the subject’s memory, including nightmares and monsters that are normally suppressed. Contemporary neuroscience suggests the existence of fundamental algorithms by which all sensory transduction is translated into an intrinsic, brain-specific code. Direct stimulation of these codes within the human temporal or limbic cortices by applied electromagnetic patterns may require energy levels which are within the range of both geomagnetic activity and contemporary communication networks. A process which is coupled to the narrow band of brain temperature could allow all normal human brains to be affected by a sub-harmonic whose frequency range at about 10 Hz would only vary by 0.1 Hz.”

Dr Persinger concludes the article by writing:

“Within the last two decades a potential has emerged which was improbable, but which is now feasible. This potential is the technical capability to influence directly the major portion of the approximately 6.5 billion brains of the human species, without mediation through classical sensory modalities, by generating neural information within a physical medium within which all members of the species are immersed.

“The historical emergence of such possibilities, which have ranged from gunpowder to atomic fission, have resulted in major changes in the social evolution that occurred inordinately quickly after the implementation. Reduction of the risk of the inappropriate application of these technologies requires the continued and open discussion of their realistic feasibility and implications within the scientific and public domain.”

How can one have an “open discussion” on the subject when government circles continually deny the existence of such technology?

All we see & seem

My latest video...
"All we see & seem is but a dream within a dream": the illusory nature of physical reality, creative consciousness & the universal mind. Featuring Fred Alan Wolf, Nassim Haramein, Amit Goswami, Jim Al Khalili, Greg Braden, Bill Hicks & David Icke.
(music: Rachid Taha "Barra Barra")

The void

The void is no mere emptiness, but is real, free and existing. It is the source from which all things arise and return. It cannot be seen, touched or known, yet it exists and is freely used. It has no shape, size, colour or form, and yet all that we see, hear, feel and touch is "it". It is beyond intellectual knowing and cannot be grasped by the ordinary mind. When we suddenly awake to the realization that there is no barrier, and has never been seen, one realizes that one is all things, mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, sun, moon, stars, universe are all oneself. There is no longer a division or barrier between myself and others, no longer any feeling of alienation or fear. Realizing this, results in true compassion. Other people and things are not seen as apart from oneself, on the contrary, as one's own body. - BRUCE LEE

Nassim Haramein - MUST WATCH!!!

If you are not yet familiar with Nassim Haramein's exciting work, prepare yourself for an exhilarating odyssey into hyperspace and beyond. Haramein, who has spent his lifetime researching fields of physics from quantum theory to relativistic equations and cosmology, will lead you along a fascinating discussion geared to a layman's understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe and creation that includes black holes, gravitational forces, dimensions, and the very structure of space itself - all of which are integral parts of his now-complete Unified Field Theory. Haramein's theory is currently in peer review process for publication in physics journals; however, the presentation does not end with the introduction of his theory alone, but includes the discussion of the path that he took to arrive at his views, which weaves between the texts and monuments of ancient civilizations, biology, chemistry and the primordial role of consciousness - all of which lend further credence to the science behind the theory...

The most mind-blowing thing I have ever watched!!
~Ali

Culture Is Not Your Friend

My latest video, a deconstruction of consumerist society featuring Bill Hicks, Terence Mckenna, Alex Jones & George Carlin.
~ali

Dark Flow

Something may be out there. Way out there.

On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The theory could rewrite the laws of physics. Current models say the known, or visible, universe—which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang—is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).

Picturing Dark Flow

Dark flow was named in a nod to dark energy and dark matter—two other unexplained astrophysical phenomena.

The newfound flow cannot be explained by, and is not directly related to, the expansion of the universe, though the researchers believe the two types of movement are happening at the same time.

In an attempt to simplify the mind-bending concept, Kashlinsky says to picture yourself floating in the middle of a vast ocean. As far as the eye can see, the ocean is smooth and the same in every direction, just as most astronomers believe the universe is. You would think that beyond the horizon, therefore, nothing is different.

"But then you discover a faint but coherent flow in your ocean," Kashlinsky said. "You would deduce that the entire cosmos is not exactly like what you can see within your own horizon."

There must be an out-of-sight mountain river or ravine pushing or pulling the water. Or in the cosmological case, Kashlinsky speculates that "this motion is caused by structures well beyond the current cosmological horizon, which is more than 14 billion light-years away."

"We Found a Great Surprise"

The study team didn't set out to explode physics as we know it.

They simply wanted to confirm the longstanding notion that the farther away galaxies are, the slower their motion should appear.

That movement is detectable in data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which NASA says "reveals conditions as they existed in the early universe by measuring the properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation over the full sky"—radiation thought to have been released about 380,000 years after the birth of the universe.

Hot gas in galaxy clusters warms the microwave background radiation, and "a very tiny component of this temperature fluctuation also contains in itself information about cluster velocity," Kashlinsky said.

If a cluster were moving faster or slower than the universe's background radiation, you'd expect to see the background heated slightly in that region of the universe—the result of a sort of electron-scattering "friction" between the cluster's hot gas and particles in the background radiation.

Because these fluctuations are so faint, the team studied more than 700 galaxy clusters.

The researchers had expected to find that, the farther away clusters are, the slower they appear to be moving.

Instead, Kashlinsky said, "We found a great surprise."

The clusters were all moving at the same speed—nearly 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour —and in a single direction.

Though this dark flow was detected only in galaxy clusters, it should apply to every structure in the known universe, Kashlinsky said.

Explaining the Unexplainable

To explain the unexplainable flow, the team turned to the longstanding theory that rapid inflation just after the big bang had pushed chunks of matter beyond the known universe.

The extra-universal matter's extreme mass means it "could still pull—tug on—the matter in our universe, causing this flow of galaxies across our observable horizon," said Kashlinsky, whose team's study appeared in the October 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Strong Doubts"

Not everyone is ready to rewrite physics just yet.

Astrophysicist Hume Feldman of the University of Kansas has detected a similar, but weaker, flow.

He said the Kashlinsky team's study is "very interesting, very intriguing, [but] a lot more work needs to be done.

"It's suggestive that something's going on, but what exactly is going on? It basically tells us to investigate," he said.

David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, echoed the sentiment.

"Until these results are reanalyzed by another group, I have strong doubts about the validity of the conclusions of this paper," he wrote in an email.

He added that, if the result does hold up, "it would have an important implication for our understanding of cosmology."

Study leader Kashlinsky agrees many questions remain unanswered. For starters: What exactly are these things that are apparently tugging our universe?

"They could be anything. As bizarre as you could imagine—some warped space-time," Kashlinsky said.

from National Geographic

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081105-dark-flow.html

Sit Down, Shut Up

Another video I made...

Tony Benn

"This is a clip from Michael Moore's film "Sicko", which is an excellent documentary about the US health care system, as well as the socialized health care systems of France, Britain and Canada. It is profound and brilliantly done, and is a must see.

In this clip, former British MP Tony Benn talks about power and democracy, and how empowering people is what is essential to bring a higher quality of life for most people. For, when people are empowered, they will demand more and shift the system in their own favour. The more empowered a society is, the less they will be exploited by their political and economic systems, and the better off the majority will be.

So, if you want to make a better world a reality (which you should), it is up to you to feel empowered. Feel hopeful. Feel worthy of more, and then demand it. Demand a higher quality of life for yourself and for all of those around you."

UK POLICE violate civil rights! Shocking videos

Police disrupt freedom of expression in Liverpool city centre.

Our World

Short video I made, music by MGMT
~ali

Thoughts From Within - Woody Harrelson

Wake Up Call - Remastered Edition (NEW) - New World Order Documentary

Some of the topics covered in the film: The New World Order, Federal Reserve, Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, North American Union, the Rockefeller/Rothschild families, Freemasonry, Bohemian Grove, the Illuminati, Illuminati symbolism, Problem-Reaction-Solution, 9-11, war profiteering, the phoney 'War on Terrorism', the impending 'Big Brother Surveillance Society', the war on civil liberties, microchipping, mind control, media control and 'education system' indoctrination... Featuring: Alex Jones, David Icke, Aaron Russo, Jordan Maxwell, G. Edward Griffin, Jim Marrs, Bill Hicks, Daniel Estulin, Jim Tucker, Ted Gunderson, Anthony Hilder, Professor Steven Jones, Webster Tarpley, George Carlin, John Taylor Gatto, Charlotte Iserbyt, Dave vonKleist, Stan Monteith and others...

1984

For those who have not read the book, this is a must see!

HAARP: holes in heaven

HAARP And Advances In Tesla Technology

Billions

"How many zeros in a billion?

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend,
but one advertising agency did a good job of
putting that figure into some perspective in
one of it's releases.
A.

A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

B.

A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

C.

A billion hours ago our ancestors were
living in the Stone Age.

D.

A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

....and the government is spending £500bn on a

Bail-out deal for banks. . .

And the goverment BORROWS this from the
Bank of England (PRIVATELY OWNED)

YOU PAY THE INTEREST on £500bn BY TAX!!! "

David Icke - Freedom Road - The Human Journey 7000 BC - 2012 AD Part 1

Since 1990, David Icke has been on an amazing journey of self- and collective discovery to establish the real power behind apparently "random" world events like 9/11 and the "war on terrorism."

Secret Space

"This new film continues Chris Everard's SECRET SPACE series of films by investigating if there is any evidence supporting the idea that highly intelligent "star gods" with reptilian features have visited planet Earth. Two hours of solid hardcore research, plus another two hours of interviews and amazing photos from the NASA archives showing vegetation on the surface of Mars presented by Jaime Maussan make this film simply the best UFO documentary ever made. A thoroughly professional film, British film director Chris Everard gives us a grandiose, mystical vision of the known and unknown cosmos. Superb in every respect."
-JANIS WRIGHT - The Voice

Blueberry

Ayahuasca scene from "Blueberry"...

Shift in Consciousness

Excerpt from Conscious Media Networks http://consciousmedianetwork.com David does a comparison with our addictions to "things." It's interesting to hear what the alternative is to the current direction modern humans are consuming the material world. It is time we start aligning our true selves and see the connection to true consciousness.

The Biggest Secret: Money out of nothing

Money out of nothing

"Today the initiates and frontmen for the Babylonian Brotherhood control world politics, banking, business, intelligence agencies, police, the military, education and the media. The most important of these, in terms of control, is banking. The creation and manipulation of money. The Brotherhood financial sting is very simple and spans the period we are documenting from the time of Sumer and Babylon to the present day. It is based on creating money that doesn’t exist and lending it to people and businesses in return for interest.

This creates enormous debt for governments, businesses and the general population, and you therefore control them. Vital to this has been to allow bankers to lend money they do not have. It works like this. If you or me have a million pounds, we can lend a million pounds. Very simple. But if a bank has a million pounds it can lend ten times that and more, and charge interest on it. If even a fraction of the people who theoretically have ‘money’ deposited in the banks went today to remove it, the banks would slam the doors in half an hour because they do not have it.

Money in the bank is a myth, another confidence trick. When you go into a bank and ask for a loan, the bank does not print a single new note nor mint a single new coin. It merely types the amount of the loan into your account. From that moment you are paying interest to the bank on what is no more than figures typed on a screen. However, if you fail to pay back that non-existent loan, the bank can come along and quite legally take your wealth that does exist, your home, land, car, and possessions, to the estimated value of whatever figure was typed onto that screen.

More than that, because money is not brought into circulation by governments, but by private banks making loans to customers, the banks control how much money is in circulation. The more loans they choose to make, the more money is in circulation. What is the difference between an economic boom (prosperity) and an economic depression (poverty)? One thing only: the amount of money in circulation. That’s all.

And, through this system, the private banks, controlled by the same people, decide how much money will be in circulation. They can create booms and busts at will. The same with the stock-markets where these guys are moving trillions of dollars a day around the financial and banking markets, so deciding if they go up or down, soar or crash. Stock-market crashes don’t just happen, they are made to happen.

Most of the ‘money’ in circulation is not physical money, cash and coins. It is represented as figures passing from one computer account to another electronically via money transfers, credit cards and cheque books. The more money, electronic or otherwise, that is in circulation, the more economic activity can take place and therefore the more products are bought and sold, the more income people have, and the more jobs are available. But a constant theme of the reptile-Aryan financial coup has been to create a boom by making lots of loans and then pull the plug.

Overpaid economists and economic correspondents, most of whom have no idea what is going on, will tell you that boom and bust is part of some natural ‘economic cycle’. What claptrap. It is systematic manipulation by the Brotherhood to steal the real wealth of the world. During a boom many people get themselves into even more debt.

The vibrant economic activity means that businesses borrow more for new technology to increase production to meet demand. People borrow more to buy a bigger house and a new, more expensive car, because they are so confident about their economic future. Then, at the most opportune moment, the major bankers, coordinated by the secret society networks, raise interest rates to suppress the demand for loans and they begin to call in loans already outstanding. They ensure they make far fewer loans than before. This has the affect of taking units of exchange (money in its various forms) out of circulation. This suppresses demand for products and leads to fewer jobs because there is not enough money in circulation to generate the necessary economic activity. So people and businesses can no longer earn enough to repay their loans and they go bankrupt. The banks then take over their real wealth, their business, home, land, car and possessions in return for non-repayment of a loan that was never more than figures typed on a screen.

This has been going on in cycles over thousands of years, especially the last few centuries, and the real wealth of the world has been sucked out of the population and into the hands of those who control the banking system...

The same applies to countries. Instead of creating their own interest free money, governments borrow it from the private banking cartel and pay back both the interest and the capital by taxation of the people. Fantastic amounts of the money you pay in taxes go straight to the private banks to pay back loans which the governments could create themselves interest-free!! Why don’t they do it? Because the Brotherhood controls the governments as much as they control the banks. What we call ‘privatisation’ is the selling off of state assets to stave off bankruptcy caused by the bank-created debt.
Third World countries are handing over control of their land and resources to the international bankers because they cannot pay back the vast loans made, on purpose, by the banks to ensnare them in this very situation. The world does not have to be in poverty and conflict, it is manipulated to be that way because it serves the Agenda.

The Knights Templar used the system I’ve just described when they created the foundations of the modern banking network back in the 12th and 13th centuries and this clearly connected with the Venetian network of the Black Nobility operating at the same time. The world financial manipulation is today coordinated by ‘central banks’ in each country which appear to be working independently, but are in fact working together to a common end. The Bank of England, chartered by the Black Nobility’s William of Orange, has been the spider at the centre of this web and so, too, since the 1930s, has the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland. Like the Bank of England, the central banks were chartered by the descendants of the banking families of Genoa and Venice. "
(The Biggest Secret, David Icke)

Labyrinth of the Psychonaut...

"We are on the verge of an important milestone in our world's political history. State-sponsored false flag operations, the central weapon of governments seeking a pretext for war and domestic repression can be eliminated forever. George Santayana wrote: "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." Today we have an opportunity to learn from our past and forge a new era in human sovereignty while righting the scales of justice. Horrible crimes against humanity were committed on 9/11 and the true criminals need to be identified and removed from positions of power in our world.

I think it's also very important to state that the Illuminati officials who orchestrated the 9/11 Mega Ritual were actually serving humanity a purpose, albeit a rather cruel one. Without "evil" or suffering there would be no cause for unification or evolution of consciousness. The Earth would become a stagnant pool in a Utopian society because there would be no lesson to be learned, no sickness to cure, and no hatred to absolve. They are apart of us as we are apart of them.. and as we approach the great change and 2012 please try and remember that the universe will unfold exactly as it should."




"The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet."

- Plato

Join me as I research the correlation between the water door Wormhole, The CERN facility: which may unlock the secrets of the universe for the second time in human history, and the Death/Rebirth themes of Ouroboros -- The Eternal Serpent."




"The silver cord has been described as being smooth, very long, very bright, like an elastic cable made of light, about an inch wide, sparkling like a tinsel on a Christmas tree, and attached to one of several possible locations on the physical body. During the dying process, as the spirit body leaves the physical body and moves farther away it, the silver cord becomes thinner as it is stretched to its limit and becomes severed. When this occurs, the spirit body is released from being attached to the physical body. At this point, it becomes impossible for the spirit body to ever return to the physical body. For this reason, we can define "irreversible death" as that point when the silver cord becomes stretched to its limit and severed. This is the so-called "point of no return." This boundary point may also be accompanied by the appearance of a particular landmark representing a boundary such as a river, a wall, a fence, or a canyon. Once this barrier is crossed, the near-death experience becomes an irreversible death experience.

Many experiencers have felt the pull of the silver cord when it is stretched near its limit. They often describe the experience as being instantly retracted to their physical body - like stretching a rubber band to near its limit and then releasing one end of it.

This silver cord is our spirit body's "lifeline" to our physical body in the same way that our umbilical cord is our "lifeline" to our mother's body during the birth process.

During the death process, should the physical body be subjected to a violent death, such as in a severe car accident, the silver cord is severed before the impact preventing the pain that is experienced by the physical body from being felt by the spirit body.

The Shuman resonance is described as the earths heartbeat.

Electromagnetic waves of earth energy occur at frequencies, These waves are called the Shuman resonance factor. They occur between 3 and 6 hertz. Oddly enough it happens to be in the range of the "delta" waves of the human brain.

One scientist Dr. Michael Persinger has demonstrated that artificial stimulation of the brain at these frequencies can cause hallucinations. Allowing humans to achieve an altered state of consciousness, enabling perception of realms usually invisible to humans, but altogether real.

One strange phenomenon is that the Shuman resonance is on the increase and has over the past year begun to increase rapidly. Its currently resonating at 13 hertz and rising.

This is a big change. The Shuman resonance obviously has a connection with human life. It is no coincidence that it resonates at the same frequency as the human brain, it proves that we are an intricate part of the earth. Like the Jungian concept of the "collective unconscious". We are not only connected to all humans at an unconscious level but to the earth as well.

Coupled with the ongoing environmental turmoil.. With corrupt political parties, humans inability to be truthful and resound, to rid themselves of their fevered egos and live in the love indoctrination that we once did ~ Earth's pulse is erratic and irritated."