Ubik is good, along with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from Philip willy.

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.

Don't really care for his other stuff, but Sati by Christopher Pike is wonderful. If you can get past their dollar bookstore thriller title, his The Last Vampire series is great- full of Hindu stories and allegories, and some stuff inspired by the 60's new age movement.

The Glass Bead Game, Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, and of course Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, although you might find the first overly pedantic.

Hope that was helpful!

"King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters"

Haha, I thought that this might be a Kungfu-type movie.... Donkey Kong- hilarious

And I watched "Easy Rider" online- absolutely solid. They don't make movies about reality anymore.

Yeah. But those vampires were gorgeous, that more than compensates the cliche ending  

Yeah, Tom Cruise's character was pretty good looking, and an incredible character beside- I like the complexity with which he is treated, since villians tend to be so cut and dried, and his motives and expressions are far from 2-dimensional.

Some others:

Mullholland Drive
Battleship Potyemkin
Grave of the Fireflies
Dark City
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Stookie:

I've been reading a lot of anthroposphy lately and it goes into the different epochs that the earth and humanity goes through over periods of time, how during lemurian and atlantean times that humans were much more connected to spirit and still had clairvoyance, and over time humanity has gradually become centered completely on earth, separating our perception of wider realities and making us materialistic. This is a part of human evolution.

Anyways, the idea I'm bringing up is that 2012 is maybe the approximate peak of this epoch into materialism and it's time to slowly move back into a natural perception of wider realities. The feelings that people have associated with this can cause all kinds of theories to manifest, which I suppose is completely normal.

One of my favorite contemporary philosophers is David Chalmers. He is someone who started his career focused on neuroscience, but started to back away when he realized that the work of the present all carries with it this latent assumption of matierialism; materialism is a pretty attractive doctrine, when one considers how well it meshes with most of our understanding of reality, but, as Chalmers realized, materialism has an extremely difficult time adopting itself to the realm of purely mental phenomena.

Most materialists will argue that consciousness can be reduced to an emergent property that arises from networks of neurons, but they generally ignore their responsibility to state exactly how this can happen- afterall, first-person experiences of qualia in no way resemble physical entities or processes, so it is difficult to see how the latter could cause the former. Chalmers was one of the first in contemporary times to make the charge that materialists are merely solving the functional problems of brain-based consciousness, and are utterly ignoring what he deems to be the "Hard Problem"- namely how a mental ontology arises from a purely physical ontology at all, when there doesn't seem to be any necessity, nor even reason for this effect to occur (Socrates makes the same charge in the Phaedo, and it was made many times since, by Decartes and others, and potentially before).

One interesting thing which Chalmers also says from time to time in his interviews, which I agree with, is that we should look to the example of classical age eastern cultures. Granted, they had a much different view of the world than we today, but one thing which they had which we currently lack is a tradition of introspection, whereby meditation and other mental disciplines are employed to study the mind and the self. I have no doubt that the understanding which a 6th century guru had of his subconscious is of no less value to undertstanding our minds than matieral neuroscience, if not significantly more. Afterall, we are apparently both physical and mental creatures (though arguments are made that we are purely mental or physical), and if we are going to try to understand what it means to be human from a purely physical standpoint, we are ignoring a large and essential part of our reality.

While I don't think that this shift in scientific paradigm would necesserily happen in fulfillment of Mayan prophecies, I do think it is direly needed for advancement of human understanding of the universe, and humanity's place in it.

Interview with the Vampire is pretty good, but the ending is a little cliche.

Bladerunner, Hero, Clockwork Orange, Fullmetal Jacket, Apocalypse now, Artificial Intelligence, Alice in Wonderland, Let the Right One In, Moon, The Star Wars series for sure, What Dreams may come, Hook, Highlander

I don't understand what their interest is here.....

Most viral campaigns are to spread awareness of a product, whereas what may be being sold here is not immediately clear, outside of the little ads on the bottom of the screen.

For one thing, the face is just creepy, and for another, I can't see what their intentions might be, if not to attract interest for those little ads...





Oh wait, now I'm doin' it too- they must have really hit upon some sort of psychological princinple here....

Oh well.

That is not difficult to beleive. I am not at all preaching for communism here, but incidents like this highlight what is pretty much bound to happen when the public interest is dependent on groups (large companies, in this case) which function and continue to exist by pursuing profit as their primary end.

Many times, the public interest is served by this pursuit, as in the case of more stringent safety standards, but conversely, these businesses will utterly ignore aspects of their products which are not in the immediate public eye, but which nonetheless have dire health consequences. I think a capitalist system can work in principle, but that serious constraints must be placed on products, and public advocacy groups, to which new advances can be reported, should exist to ensure that profit-driven businesses don't make the final say in cases of human interest.

The liberal manifesto, in other words...

He said they are tiny ions and filters wont remove them. I think you'd need a reverse osmosis filter

I think that you are exactly right; and aqueous flouride is definitely a little ion, and as such, is not going to be filtered by a mesh designed for particulate matter.


Flouridated water is one of those few things conspiracy theory people are always hyping, that turns out to be unequivocally true. We are still flouridating our water supply in the U.S. and across Western Europe, despite the major health problems it is known to invoke, not the least of which is flourosis, which effects teeth and bones. It may also have effects on metabolism, such as hypothyroidism. Other effects, such as early calcification of the pineal have unknown, but potentially deterimental effects. And yet our governments, knowing these things, and also that the benefits that were purported are entirely erroneous, continue to actively flouridate our water, for no rational reason. This fact is indeed disturbing.

Again with the raging, always with the raging.... with all the bippin' an' the boppin', the hippin' an' the hoppin', they forget- what the JAZZ MUSIC ..... is all ABOUT!

(Bill Cosby)

Okay, time to stop. I really will try 

haha.... yeah, a direct quote, if I have ever seen one

Not to take sides   

Unforunately, the wisdom that once permeated these forums has dwindled.

You know, it sounds odd, Stookie, but I think I can guess why.

When this forum was founded, it was a joint effort between Robert Bruce and Adrian. Attached to the site was a library of articles on various aspects of OBE, and Bruce's famous treatise. Now anyone who searched for OBE or astral projection online would immediately run into the treatise, and likely find their way here, or, if they came here first, they would soon find the treatise and other articles.

Now I will not claim the Bruce's original ideas were flawless (far from it), but their prevalence here insured that everyone had a start at the basics, and they implicitly focused the topics of discussion. This focus encouraged people who had come to the forum with no previous ideas to formulate and theorize new concepts, and attracted people who had previous life experience with the subject to join in from elsewhere.

It sounds odd, but I think that if we want the forums to return to what they once were, we would need to gather a library of resources conspicuously linked to the forum as the old one was, and one that draws attention from a google-type search, as predatory as that sounds.

Just a thought

 Dusty2010:

Okay, I'm not trying to be offensive hear but seriously, you have absolutely no concrete evidence of what you're saying.  I'm not saying I'm any better, but coming out and telling someone their opinion is wrong because your opinion is right is kind of an immature thing to do. You've still also not said what exactly is going to happen on 2012.  So my next question is obvious, but in your opinion what's going to happen?

Another thing is, how exactly are you preparing for this catastrophic event?

Zareste:

That's hilarious.

Hey, I live to entertain the stupid, apparently

       ?

lol, I clearly missed something in this line of reasoning.... you might call other people thick after you eloquently elucidate your reasoning, and they fail to see what is self-evident....not when you never respond at all, lol....

Can't help but admit that I would be interested in an explanation of your assertion as well, but perhaps I will regret this  ....

This month I celebrate the 11th anniversary of my 11th birthday!!!!!

Wrap your minds around that synapse-melting tautology.

I don't think that you can..... it has some terrible implications for the stability of space-time, and perhaps some 4th dimensional, nay, 11th dimensional consequences to be sure.

Yeah, this place is pretty dead now. I was here from around 2001, before a couple major data losses, when Robert Bruce was still co-proprieter. It is hard to say objectively, but I feel as though there was significantly more regular activity, and plenty of people who posted multiple times per day, both of which have severely declined. It is true that Robert Bruce (and Adrian?) now have their own independent forums, which must have divided the interest pool between them, but I still can't help but feel there is either less interest today, or less expectations of new developments.

I wonder if this lulling is the result of changes in society's general interests on a demographic level, or just purely attributable to other factors.

Stillwater

Haven't read it, but I have read some of Tart's material, and it mainly seems to check out. He has a pretty no-nonsense, scientifically sound approach to parapyschology, which is rare among such researchers. Can't vouch for everything he has written of course, but from what I did, it seemed refreshing. He is definitely one of the more respected names in that otherwise honorless field.

I like how everyone of the people who reviewed it on Amazon stated their PhD and which university they profess at, lol - and there is that one guy who gave it one star, and wrote a diametrically opposed book about skepticism: Priceless. I will have to check out his new book 

Stillwater

Yeah you better not mention the jews, it leads to cencorships on this forum and elsewhere

As does mention of their past oppressors, in any context, lol.

In another forum, my post was censored because it contained the word "homogenous", and I shan't say why 

Respect for various groups is essential, but so is un-inhibited speech.