Posts Tagged ‘meditation’

A Police Chief with a Difference

Kiran Bedi has a surprising resume. Before becoming Director General of the Indian Police Service, she managed one of the country’s toughest prisons — and used a new focus on prevention and education to turn it into a center of learning and meditation. Before she retired in 2007, Kiran...

December 16th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Acoustic Archaeology Yielding Mind-Tripping Tricks

Recently uncovered sound effects include a clapping echo that sounds like a jungle bird. THE GIST Acoustic archaeology is an emerging field that melds acoustical analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. Ancient people created fun house-like temples that featured scary sound effects. Some of the sites...

December 14th, 2010 | Spirituality | Read More

Psychedelic Technologies

Imagine… you are strolling along the Esplanade at Burning Man, and something catches your eye. Bands of lights are rapidly moving up and down a 30 foot high pyramid, from Red at the bottom, through Orange, Green, Turquoise, Indigo, Violet, and finally White light at the top. Nothing too unusual,...

July 26th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

The Anti-Psychic’s Challenge

Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world’s psychics: Prove what you do is real, and I’ll give you a million dollars. (No takers yet.)

July 20th, 2010 | Extended Mind | Read More

Why can’t we stop Believing?

Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things — from alien abductions to dowsing rods — boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble. As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine,...

July 6th, 2010 | Science of the Mind | Read More

Mutation in key gene allows Tibetans to thrive

The gene mutation that enables people to thrive at high altitudes is much more common in Tibetans than Han Chinese and may represent the strongest instance of natural selection ever documented in a human population. From the Guardian, by Cian O’Luanaigh A gene that controls red blood cell production...

July 5th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

(A Brief History and) Motivation of an Entheogenic Chemist

Abstract: Casey Hardison was arrested spring 2004 for the production of psychedelic-type drugs, i.e., LSD, 2C- B and DMT. In the three years since, not one person from ‘authority’ had bothered to ask him what motivated him to synthesise psychedelic drugs. It was as if the a priori assumption that...

July 5th, 2010 | Drug Policy | Read More

In the Beginning: The Birth of a Psychedelic Culture

The following is adapted from the Foreword to Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties, by Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner with Gary Bravo, from Synergetic Press. LSD is a drug that produces fear in people who don’t take it. –Timothy...

May 17th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Indian man ‘survives without food or water for decades’

A team of doctors in western India is carrying out a study on a hermit who claims to have survived without food and water for 70 years. The holy man claims that he derives energy through meditation.

April 30th, 2010 | Spirituality | Read More