NOOSPHE.RE

Cast your net wide. Speculate recklessly. Speak to the wide-eyed. Sink your ship. Build it anew. Burn your agreements. Watch the ashes rise.

The human species has changed its electromagnetic background more than any other aspect of the environment. For example, the density of radio waves around us is now 100 million or 200 million times the natural level reaching us from the sun. Nor is there any end in sight. When superconducting cables are introduced, they'll increase the field strength around power lines by a factor of ten or twenty. Electric cars, magnetically levitated transport vehicles, and microwave-beam satellites for transmitting solar power to earth would each add strong new sources of electromagnetic contamination. A proposed electromagnetic catapult that could shoot satellites into space from mile-long rails built up the side of a mountain would require the combined output of the country's thousand generating stations for the few seconds of each launch.

There is only one health, but diseases are many. Likewise, there appears to be one fundamental force that heals, although the myriad schools of medicine all have their favorite ways of cajoling it into action. Our prevailing mythology denies the existence of any such generalized force in favor of thousands of little ones sitting on pharmacists' shelves, each one potent against only a few ailments or even a part of one. This system often works fairly well, especially for treatment of bacterial diseases, but it's no different in kind from earlier systems in which a specific saint or deity, presiding over a specific healing herb, had charge of each malady and each part of the body. Modern medicine didn't spring full-blown from the heads of Pasteur and Lister a hundred years ago. If we go back further, we find that most medical systems have combined such specifics with a direct, unitary appeal to the same vital principle in all illnesses. The inner force can be tapped in many ways, but all are variations of four main, overlapping patterns: faith healing, magic healing, psychic healing, and spontaneous healing. Although science derides all four, they sometimes seem to work as well for degenerative disease and long-term healing as most of what Western medicine can offer.

power (n.)

A painting is a statement of the artist’s notions of reality in the terms of plastic speech. In that sense the painter must be likened to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. For science is a statement of the laws that govern a specific phenomenon or category of matter or energy within the specified limits and conditions of its operations; philosophy, however, must combine all these specialized truths within a single system. It is because of this broad scope that Aristotle gives preeminence to the philosopher in the introduction to his Metaphysica, for he tells us that every man except the philosopher is an authority within his specific field, whereas the philosopher must have the acute knowledge that each man has in his own field plus the ability to relate all these fields to the operations of universality and eternity.

integer (n.)

Running is an ontopsychophysical exercise.

pandiculation (n.)

Inhalation. Expansion. Circle. Life. Exhalation. Contraction. Point. Truth.

The body is both the map and the territory.

We have seen that men insist upon producing art as a fulfillment of the biological necessity for self-expression. Art is one of the avenues which has afforded satisfactory means, which we may here call a language, for the successful fulfillment of this drive. Art, then, is a definite kind of thing, a species of nature, and like any species in the physical world it proceeds according to definite laws of its own. It has definite properties which will here be described as the plastic elements. By the constant rearrangement of these properties, art, like every other species, proceeds according to logic through stages of change that we can call growth. It grows logically, definitely, step by step from the exhibition of one set of characteristics to another, always related to its past equipment, and bearing at the same time the promise of the future.

pulchritude (n.)