A few more...
Joan of Arc
Aubrey Beardsley (One of my favs)
Reminds me of Yume Nikki but more sensical and way less sinister.Hahaha... @Wyote @sprinkles
You’ll have to try this one out and let me know your gaming opinion, lol.
I'm totally checking it out.It's a game of lucid dreaming. Very dark and insane lucid dreaming.
Some very fascinating theories and thoughts from some very smart folks regarding “Free Will”.
What say you??
Awww! Do you have a cat? =^.^=
LMAO
Free will is a Utopian dream. Mine and my family's usual cost me a bloody fortune .....
Awww! Do you have a cat? =^.^=
This extract reminded me of some of your posts @Skarekrow. One of the reasons I like longer pieces of more complex music - classical, some jazz, Asian music - is because I can lose my-self in them in a way I can't with something that lasts only a few minutes.
In March 1932, halfway through a hectic visit to the United States to conduct various orchestras and to teach at Harvard, Gustav Holst succumbed to a bleeding stomach ulcer and nearly died. As he subsequently recounted it to Ralph Vaughan Williams: ‘I felt I was sinking so low that I couldn’t go much further. And, as I have always expected, it was a lovely feeling… As soon as I reached the bottom, I had one clear, intense and calm feeling – that of overwhelming gratitude. And the four chief reasons for gratitude were music, the Cotswolds, RVW, and having known the impersonality of orchestral playing.’
That Holst found the near-death experience something of a release is not so surprising after decades of chronic overwork. Nor were his first three reasons for gratitude unexpected. Music had possessed him so completely since childhood that it was all the same to him whether he was elaborating The Hymn of Jesus (1917) in his soundproof room at St Paul’s Girls’ School or listening to competitive brass bands rollicking through one of his suites; whether he was conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a Haydn symphony or coaxing thousands of war-weary troops in the Middle East to sing madrigals. What mattered was the involvement. In fact, he regarded the fame and attention that the impact of The Planets (1914-16) brought him in the 1920s as a downright nuisance.
Holst first met Vaughan Williams as a fellow student at London’s Royal College in 1895 and this was rapidly to develop into one of the most fruitful friendships in the history of British music. By the time they met, Holst was already a professional trombonist and Vaughan Williams was to rely on his technical advice in matters of orchestral scoring to the end. In the other direction, it was Vaughan Williams’s fieldwork and two-year stint editing the English Hymnal that awoke Holst’s interest in folkdance and folksong, in plainchant and hymnology. Both composers were enthused by the visionary verse of Walt Whitman and the socialist message of William Morris, while also being involved in the rediscovery of Tudor church music and Purcell.
True, there was a period in the 1920s when they seemed to be drifting artistically apart, but the personal friendship never failed. Stunned by Holst’s unexpected death from heart failure a couple of days after an apparently successful operation on that same gastric ulcer in May 1934, Vaughan Williams wrote that ‘my only thought is now which ever way I turn, what are we to do without him – everything seems to have turned back to him – what would Gustav think or advise or do…?’
But what of that fourth reason for Holst’s gratitude: ‘having known the impersonality of orchestral playing’? It raises the enigma of his personality. By all accounts – not least, the biographical writings of his daughter Imogen – he was a generous, approachable man, wholly innocent of intellectual or social snobbery. In his twenties, he was drawn to Hindu mythology, actually learning Sanskrit in order to make his own translations from the Rig Veda, while The Planets was inspired by a fascination for astrology. For Holst, the function of the composer was not so much to express his or her personality as to serve as a kind of supra-personal receptor to potentially musical impulses from all around, and, not least – though Holst himself seems to have remained essentially agnostic – from above.
Okay...so now a bit of the bizarre.
I can’t believe that she ran for Parliament on the platform that she did - do you really think people are going to vote for that on purpose?!
Hahaha!
Enjoy the madness - or genius??
Hmmmm?
An Interview with the Woman
Who Drilled a Hole in Her Head to Open Up Her Mind
Amanda Feilding claims trepanation might make us happier,
healthier, and maybe help people at risk for Alzheimer's.
She's not only an expert, she conducted the operation on herself to see what was what.
Amanda Feilding trepanning herself.
There are plenty of ways to achieve a higher state of consciousness.
Most of them involve ingesting some kind of psychoactive substance, or getting in a white tank filled with water, or sitting in front of a flashing light while listening to trance music.
But as far as I know, only one requires you to drill a hole into your forehead.
Trepanation, a procedure where a small hole is drilled into the skull and left to heal naturally, can reportedly produce a prolonged positive effect on the trepanned individual's mood and overall state of well-being.
There's little hard scientific evidence that doing this has any tangible benefits, but people have been doing it for tens of thousands of years, so there has to be a reason they keep coming back to the tried and true method of inserting pieces of metal into the front of their skulls.
Amanda Feilding is the director of the Beckley Foundation, an organization that for over a decade has been carrying out research into consciousness. Her work spans the entire mind-altering spectrum, from cannabis and LSD to Buddhist meditation, and she's been looking into the physiological effects of trepanation for a long time.
In the early 1970s, Amanda trepanned herself when she couldn't find a doctor to do it for her, and has since become somewhat of an authority on the practice.
I visited Amanda's home on the outskirts of Oxford, England, to talk about trepanation and how she carried out the operation on herself.
Amanda in 2012.
VICE: So Amanda, can you give me a short history of trepanation?
Amanda Feilding: Trepanation is the oldest surgical operation in the world, dating back to at least 10,000 BC, and has been carried out by independent civilizations in nearly every continent on the planet.
From South America to Neolithic Europe, the practice has a rich and diverse history.
Shiva, the Hindu god of altered consciousness, was trepanned; it was done by monks in Tibet and up to the modern day in Africa.
What do you mean by "modern day”?
The 20th century.
I knew someone from Nigeria in the 60s who said that, when he was 13, the "hip" boys of the village went out with the shaman and got trepanned.
Did it have a legitimate medicinal purpose?
Absolutely.
These civilizations couldn't hypothesize scientifically on the physiology behind trepanation, so they gave it their own esoteric explanation.
In other places it was described as "letting light in" or "letting devils out.”
It has been successfully used to treat chronic headaches, epilepsy, and migraines, and it was surprisingly common until the First World War, when doctors started doing lobotomies—that's when it was suddenly seen as a primitive practice.
My father's encyclopedia from 1912 says that trepanation was being increasingly used in the treatment of mental disorders.
In fact, it's still regularly used today to enter the brain for operations, but the hole is often filled.
Did it have a religious significance?
For some, trepanation was a ritualistic practice in which the shamans, the kings, and the priests were trepanned.
I'd suggest this was because, particularly in South American societies, these were the ones taking psychoactive drugs.
The lifting of the baseline brought about by trepanation gave them less of a distance to come down from after the drugs wore off.
You trepanned yourself.
What attracted you to it?
In the 60s I was doing a lot of work on comparative religions and mysticism, and I heard of a Dutch scientist who had trepanned himself and had a theory of the underlying physiological changes brought about by it.
I didn't know him before he was trepanned, which meant I didn't know what changes had come about.
Even though I was interested in trepanation, I wasn't particularly concerned with having it done myself.
But I had another friend who did it and I noticed a definite change in him that was very subtle—a mellowing, a lessening of the neurotic behavior that we all have.
I knew him exceptionally well and did notice a difference.
Later, another friend had it done who had chronic headaches that caused him to lose a day or two a week, but he hasn't had those headaches for the last 30 years [since he was trepanned].
I started to seek out a doctor who would trepan me, including a doctor to the royal family who was very interested.
In fact, he had a hole in his head from an accident as a child.
After four years of unsuccessful searching, I decided to do it myself.
A trepanned skull found in Peru.
What sort of preparations did you make?
I was obviously very cautious and prepared myself very carefully.
I used an electrical drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal, and tested the drill head on the membranes of my hand to see if it would damage the skin.
The whole thing was carefully prepared, but more than anything I prepared myself psychologically.
It's the last thing you want to do.
Yeah, drilling a hole in your head kind of goes against every instinct.
Then I thought I'd make a film about it, being an artist.
It was useful making the film, because it felt like I was separating myself from the situation and taking a step away.
So you've got the physical anesthetic, then the mental anesthetic of treating it as a piece of artwork.
Yeah, it was effective.
After I'd performed the procedure, I wrapped up my head with a scarf, had a steak to replace iron from the lost blood, and went to a party.
It doesn't set you back at all, it doesn't incapacitate you.
It's just a half-hour operation.
But in no way am I advocating the idea of self-trepanation; it should always be carried out by members of the medical profession.
How did you feel after the procedure?
I described it at the time as feeling like the tide coming in: there was a feeling of rising, slowly and gently, to levels that felt good, very subtle. One very clear thing I noticed was the change in the dream pattern: my dreams became much less anxious—that was quite noticeable.
Could all of that be described as a placebo?
There is, of course, that possibility, and I am very conscious of that.
I have to say I noticed enough of a change to keep me interested, and noticed it in the people who I knew well who also got trepanned.
I noticed a fundamental change in all of them.
So what's the main premise behind trepanation?
When a baby is born, the top of the skull is very soft and flexible.
First, the fontanelle [the soft area on the top of the skull] closes, then the skull bones close, which inhibits the full pulsation of the heartbeat, so it is denied its full expression in the brain, so to speak.
That loss of "pulse pressure" results in a change of ratio between the two fluids in the brain: blood and cerebral spinal fluid.
It is blood that feeds the brain cells with what they need, such as glucose and oxygen.
The cerebral spinal fluid removes some of the toxic molecules.
Trepanation works by restoring the full pulse pressure of the heartbeat.
Then the capillaries slightly blow up and squeeze out an equal amount of the cerebral spinal fluid.
When the circulation becomes sluggish [when not enough cerebral spinal fluid is being pumped into the brain], stagnant pools can build up and this can contribute to the onset of diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer's.
A 17th-century trepanation kit given to Amanda as a gift.
After setting up the Beckley Foundation, you started to work on research into the effects and possible benefits of trepanation.
What things did you investigate?
The research that I've been doing with the Russian scientist professor [Yuri] Moskalenko involved observing patients who were being trepanned for other operations and what happened when the bone was removed and not replaced.
It did provide more blood to the brain and, with those subjects who had their hole filled, [blood flow] then decreased.
It's clear that making the hole increases the cerebral circulation and that closing it diminishes it.
But research with a healthy population is needed.
The second piece of research we did was with people with varying stages of Alzheimer's.
It showed that these people's cerebral spinal fluid had much lower mobility than someone who had a "healthy" cerebral circulation.
It wasn't a lack of blood in the brain of these patients that was the problem, it was a lack of washing out of the toxic molecules by cerebral spinal fluid.
This research contributed to the development of a device that can measure these things, possibly acting as an early warning signal for brain diseases.
Whether trepanation can act as a preventive measure to combat these diseases, and whether it has other effects, is research that I would love to conduct in the future.
This is still a hypothesis, one which isn't provable at the moment because I don't think we have the instrumentation to fully investigate it yet. But it seems that this is what trepanation has historically been used for, even if the people doing it at the time didn't understand the reasoning behind it.
The research we did on trepanation, which was only done on about 15 people, is not nearly enough to make any concrete scientific claims.
We need more research with more people.
Would you be doing the research even if you weren't trepanned?
Yes, I think so.
But I suppose that my personal experience of getting trepanned—which I, of course, would not put total faith in—gave me the feeling that it is worthy of research.
How are you going about doing that research?
It's difficult: although it's not illegal to trepan, it's not exactly legal, either.
It's a catch-22.
You can't get the research authorized because there's not enough evidence to support it, but you can't get the evidence without research.
I think it's strange that people can get sex changes but not trepanation—a simple operation.
We should research this simple operation that could increase consciousness.
Amanda's campaign poster for her campaigns for Parliament in 1979 and 1983.
(Yeah fucking right lady!!)
Do you see it becoming legal in the future?
I definitely do. I see it particularly in countries that are more familiar with the idea of consciousness, like Brazil or India.
Didn't you try to make trepanation available on the UK's National Health Service?
I stood for Parliament in Chelsea on the platform "Trepanation for the National Health.”
I didn't intend to get voted in; it was more of an art project.
My intention was to try to get the medical profession to agree that this is an interesting subject and is worthy of research.
Over the past 40 years I've got used to fighting the prejudice around trepanation, and I've never really understood the taboo around it.
I feel society is not doing itself any favors by making this a taboo, and I think the best thing that we can do is gain as much knowledge as we can about altered states of consciousness and how we can apply them for the good of mankind.
In traditional societies, which are much closer to consciousness, they recognize the shamanic process, the process of changing consciousness, whether that's fasting or dancing or the ingestion of psychoactive substances.
They recognize that it's a very important part of society and deciding which way to go with decisions.
(Skarekrow - If we were supposed to have a hole in our skull, then nature would have created one...the fontanels close in a baby’s head for a reason.
Just saying...lol)
This is absolutely insane! I’m all open for possible theories and hypothesis, but this is one I am completely against. With such a lack of research (15 people only!), there is absolutely no concrete legitimacy that this method is completely safe nor will it allow you to “expand your consciousness”.
Y’know, there is shrooms and weed for that! A much more safer method than drilling a hole in your skull!
This is absolutely insane! I’m all open for possible theories and hypothesis, but this is one I am completely against. With such a lack of research (15 people only!), there is absolutely no concrete legitimacy that this method is completely safe nor will it allow you to “expand your consciousness”.
Y’know, there is shrooms and weed for that! A much more safer method than drilling a hole in your skull!
But have you tried it tho
LOL eh you got a point