Burning Man 2006 satellite view. (~ 40,000 participants)

Well, I'm off to Burning Man 2007 tomorrow (Saturday) and will be pretty much out of touch with SCIY (no phones or Internet access out there on the remote playa). Rumors are that this year's festival will be the biggest in its 18 years, even more than the record 40,000 last year. This is truly a remarkable experience when you realize that all the infrastructure for a self-contained international city is literally created by volunteers out of nothing in a few days on a barren, hot, lifeless desert site. It's fully populated for a week, and then completely dismantled, in accordance with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management regulations for use of the site, with no evidence of it having been there, not even a flake of glitter! ...   more »

His name means the Green One or Verdant One, he is the voice of inspiration to the aspirant and committed artist. He can come as a white light or the gleam on a blade of grass, but more often as an inner mood. The sign of his presence is the ability to work or experience with tireless enthusiasm beyond one's normal capacities ...

And I have felt....a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

~ William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey   more »

Every year, tens of thousands of participants gather to create Black Rock City in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, dedicated to self-expression, self-reliance, and art as the center of community. They leave one week later, having left no trace. Read Burning Man's mission statement, 10 Principles, and learn more about this incredible experience. ...   more »

CogWeb is a research tool for exploring the relevance of the study of human cognition to communication and the arts. It is edited by Francis Steen, assistant professor in Communication Studies at UCLA. CogWeb contains several hundred items and is continually under construction. Some new pages are posted below; see also the annotated bibliography and related sites of interest.. The historical content is largely restricted to the print culture of the Early Modern period (1500-1800). ...   more »

Terence McKenna is a psychedelic explorer, ethnopharmacologist and theorist of time. Rupert Sheldrake is a controversial biologist, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that there is an inherent memory in nature. Ralph Abraham is a chaos mathematician and pioneer in the field of computer graphics.

TERENCE: In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely overwhelm our metaphors.
RALPH: It's true. We have to misuse our language even to talk about these things.
RUPERT: If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost, with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers, such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own self-sufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods, demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric universe.
TERENCE: Humans are said to be the measure of all things.
RUPERT: This is humanism. To adopt the alternative tradition of animism and to recognize the living spirits and souls of all nature is profoundly repugnant to humanism, yet it is the common ground of all human civilization, thought, and tradition. As in Goethe's Faust, the paradigmatic scientist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power. The guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a satanic demon, a fallen angel called Mephistopheles. ...    more »

On May 29, 2004, the 13th edition of the Digital Be-In beamed in to San Francisco. The annual cyber culture happening featured Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy, luminaries digital and beyond, exhibits, live bands, DJs and an immersive visual environment. The theme of the event was “The Transparent Network. -- Be-In 13’s many co-creators addressed The Transparent Network theme through speeches, a curated art gallery, exhibits and installations, a video theater, more than 20 performances on three stages and immersive projections throughout the venue. Like past Be-In memes — “Freedom of Speech on the Internet,” “Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace,” and “Human Rights in the Digital Age” — The Transparent Network idea refers to current technical initiatives and social issues. But it is also an emerging archetype with broader meanings, and these more esoteric dimensions were explored as well. ...   more »

...Gathering at their church in Garnerville, and then again at performance sites around the country, the members of USCO ["US" company, an anonymous group of artists whose installations and events combined multiple audio and visual inputs] lived and worked together steadily for a period of years. Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics. ...   more »

As the impact of 'globalization' on the world’s cultures escalates, so does the need to honor and preserve the rich treasury of perennial wisdom that we share. Cross-cultural storytelling can be an opportunity to explore the genius of all the world’s indigenous and traditional communities. Within that vast and varied repository of human art and spirituality are the keys to hold and understand our collective nature, even as the accelerating pace of change transforms life on the planet. ...   more »

Veenapani Chawla is the Managing Trustee and Director of Adishakthi, a theatre group based in Pondicherry. The group is working towards enlivening dying theatre works while discovering new boulevards of ingenuity. Located near Auroville, the performance company is engaged in explorations of traditional forms of theatre, dance, music and movement. Presently, the troupe is here in city to take part in the National theatre festival, Bahuroopi. Here we publish an exclusive interview with Chawla by our special correspondent Geetha Shah. —Ed   more »

William Greaves, a resident of New York City and friend of Anie Nunnally amnd Connie Buckley of the Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles, is a reputed documentary movie maker and follower of the teachings of Sri Aurobindo. On June 18, 2005, Bill greaves visited the Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles and presented a screening of his documentary on the 1966 Festival of Negro Arts held in Senegal and answered questions about the movie as part of a workshop on Creativity and Yoga. On the first weekend of July, we screened another of his movies, an award-winning documentary on the black awardee of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Ralph Bunche, behind which movie Greaves claimed the central influence of Sri Aurobindo's Ideal of Human Unity. Here is a brief biography of William Greaves.   more »

Michael Moore's controversial documentary on George Bush Jr. was viewed in June 2004 at a Los Angeles theater by Sri Aurobindo Center members Dorian Schneidman, Keka Chakraborty and Debashish Banerji. Here are Debashish's notes on the movie. ...   more »