Aloha Friends,

We are starting a listening & dialog group to discuss, share our concerns, feelings, thoughts, sense testimony, conclusions and anything else you’d like to bring about the current world crisis.

We’ll do these every Friday at 5:30 PM Pacific / 6:30 Mountain / 7:30 Central / 8:30 Eastern indefinitely.

Join us in community and spirit for this open discussion.

Pam Rodolph and I will be your hosts.

All are welcome.

This will be a Zoom online meeting.  See below for details.

The Prosperos is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Prosperos Listening & Dialog Group

Friday at 5:30 PM Pacific / 6:30 Mountain / 7:30 Central / 8:30 Eastern

Join Zoom Meeting

https://zoom.us/j/579891643

–Rick Thomas, H.W., M.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Parmenides was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of reality.

Ontology is the philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.^[1] Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

Etymology

The compound word ontology (“study of being”) combines onto– (Gr. ὄν, on,^[2] gen. ὄντος, ontos, “being; that which is”) and -logia (Gr. -λογία, “logical discourse”). See classical compounds for this type of word formation.^[3][4]

While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself, the New Latin form ontologia, appeared in 1606 in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius).

The first occurrence in English of ontology as recorded by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, 2008) came in a work by Gideon Harvey (1636/7–1702): Archelogia philosophica nova; or, New principles of Philosophy. Containing Philosophy in general, Metaphysicks or Ontology, Dynamilogy or a Discourse of Power, Religio Philosophi or Natural Theology, Physicks or Natural philosophy, London, Thomson, 1663.^[5] The word was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which themselves are based on the Greek.

Leibniz is the only one of the great philosophers of the 17th century to have used the term ontology.^[6]

Overview

Some philosophers, notably in the traditions of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns (including abstract nouns) refer to existent entities.^{[citation needed]} Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name entities, but that some provide a kind of shorthand for reference to a collection either of objects or of events. In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of specific kinds of intellectual activities.^{[7][need quotation to verify]} Between these poles of realism and nominalism stand a variety of other positions.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

321 GO! r/toptalent-A community about the world’s most talented ? Italian family sings Hallelujah from their balcony while being quarantined due to the Coronavirus

(Contributed by Richard Burns, H.W., M.)

HughJohn’s Lucid Dreaming Webinar will be an exciting class! 

Photo Credit: LunarLanding | Gardens of Time | mcscrooge54

Register at https://tinyurl.com/vtf7k5j

We’re all swimming in our subconscious mind when we dream.With Lucid Dreaming, we bring the conscious mind to be awarethat we’re dreaming (while we’re in the subconscious mind) andamazing things can happen. Come to class and learn the processof becoming a Lucid Dreamer. 

Release the power of your Dreams!

• Accelerate your Personal Growth
• Understand the route to your conscious evolving
• Solve Problems
• Realize those “not so secret” messages in your unconscious.
• Gain ideas to help in waking life
• Turn up your creativity
• Learn to interpret your dreams
• Practice methods to remember dreams
• Review of the Latest scientific information on dreaming and health

What you’ll receive with the Class

• 4-hour class delivered via an online webinar.
• Class Notes
• Workshop 
• Invitation to weekly Dream Group
• Dream interpretation session with HughJohn

Class fee is $50 new or $25 for a review student.Once you register you will be sent 
a Zoom meeting link to join. Register at https://tinyurl.com/vtf7k5j

HughJohnM@gmail.com

310.899.9453

We Look forward to having you in class!  

Aloha, 
HughJohn 

Right click “Open Image in New Tab” for a larger view.

Tour world-class museums, read historic cookbooks, browse interactive maps and more

BY MEILAN SOLLY

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | March 23, 2020, 8 a.m.

As efforts to contain the effects of the COVID-19 crisis ramp up, millions of people around the globe are social distancing and self-quarantining themselves in their own homes. To support those in search of diversion from the relentless news cycle, Smithsonian magazine has compiled a collection of 68 online culture, history and science collections you can browse from the comfort of your living room. Whether you’re in the mood to virtually explore ancient Rome, read past presidents’ personal papers or download coloring pages from dozens of international cultural institutions, this roundup has you covered. Listings are bolded and organized by field. (See Smithsonian’s lists of museums you can virtually visit, ways to virtually experience the Smithsonian Institution and Smithsonian educational resources for additional inspiration.)

History

History lovers may not be able to tour the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the British Museum or the Hermitage in person, but digital history resources spanning time periods, continents and countless topics can provide some respite from these travel woes.

Step back in time via Ancient Athens 3-D or Rome Reborn, then cross the Mediterranean into Egypt for an in-depth look at the famed Nefertiti bust. Other immersive historical offerings include a virtual reality museum featuring five shipwrecked vessels; the Heritage on Edge portal, which tracks climate change’s impact on five Unesco World Heritage Sites; a 3-D digital rendering of Japan’s Shuri Castle, which was ravaged by fire in October 2019; a 3-D scan of the bullets that killed President John F. Kennedy; Below the Surface, a multimedia project that traces Amsterdam’s history through excavated artifacts; and a Sketchfab collection of around 1,700 open-access cultural heritage models, from the Abraham Lincoln Mills life mask to the entrance gates of Ireland’s Menlo Castle and a Scottish boat-building school.

Interactive maps are another option for individuals seeking higher-tech experiences. Google Earth’s Celebrating Indigenous Languages platform spotlights dialects at risk of disappearing, while Parisian Matrimony tracks women’s cultural contributions to the French capital. Mapping the Gay Guides, a newly launched public history initiative, draws on more than 30,000 listings compiled between 1965 and 1980 to visualize American queer spaces’ evolution over time.

Those with more macabre tastes may want to peruse the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, a tool that visualizes thousands of sites linked with Scotland’s 16th- and 17th-century witch hunts, or the London Medieval Murder Map, which catalogs 142 brutal 14th-century homicides. (In one particularly colorful incident, a man named John de Eddeworth avenged his murdered brother by stabbing the killer “five times with his sword, three times on the back of his head, once on the left side, and once under his left ear.”) Lower-tech maps, including the Library of Congress’ collection of 38,234 digitized travelogues and English king George III’s recently digitized private library of more than 55,000 maps, charts, prints and manuals, are also available.

In the realm of information-heavy databases, highlights range from an index of searchable records that sheds light on New York’s ties to slavery to the Digital Panopticon’s descriptions of 75,688 Victorian-era convicts’ tattoos and the Getty’s archive of 6,000 photos from the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Troves of digitized documents, meanwhile, run the gamut from historic Mexican cookbooks to a 15th-century British manners book that warns children against picking “thyne errys” and “thy nostrellys,” 155 Persian language texts spanning nearly 1,000 years, one million pages of 16th- through 20th-century content formerly deemed obscene, and the famed Dead Sea Scrolls.

Those hoping to read more personal narratives can check out photographs, prints and papers related to Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert; the only surviving Arabic slave narrative written in the U.S.; and papers penned by such prominent politicians as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Other public figures whose private lives endure in the digital sphere include civil rights activist Rosa Parks, baseball star Babe Ruth, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and explorer David Livingstone (as recorded in the diary of his chief attendant, Jacob Wainwright).

Arts and Culture

In recent years, museums have increasingly turned to digitization as a tool for widening access to their collections. Among the major cultural institutions with digitized—and often open access—offerings are the Smithsonian, which released 2.8 million images into the public domain earlier this year; Paris Musées, which oversees 14 major museums in France’s capital; nonprofit organization Art U.K.; the Art Institute of Chicago; Taiwan’s National Palace Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of the Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Getty; the Wellcome Library; the Museum of New Zealand; and the Uffizi Galleries. Examples of artworks, artifacts and texts available for download include British psychiatric institutions’ 18th- through 20th-century records, Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom and Han dynasty jades.

In addition to digitizing broader collections, many museums have curated archives dedicated to specific topics: The Kunsthaus Zürich has an extensive trove of Dada documents that defy the movement’s long-held association with ephemerality, while the Delaware Art Museum has a portal of papers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Illinois State University’s Milner Library offers a digital collection dedicated to the history of circus. The San Francisco-based Letterform Archive has a digital archive of typographical artifacts. And Chicago’s Newberry Library provides online access to more than 200,000 images documenting the history of early America and westward expansion, including watercolors and colored pencil drawings by 19th- and 20th-century Lakota children.

Two giants of the digital cultural sphere—Google Arts & Culture and the Library of Congress—are each home to a dizzying number of virtual resources. The former offers experiences covering 3,000 years of fashion, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s unseen masterpieces, Latino culture in the U.S., Banksy’s most famous murals, Vermeer’s surviving paintings, armor through the ages, Easter Island and many more topics. The latter has, among others, collections of rare children’s books, Taiwanese watercolors and Chinese texts, braille sheet music, travel posters, presidential portraits, baseball cards, and images of cats and dogs. See the library’s database of digital collections for a more exhaustive overview.

Other out-of-the-box ideas include using an app that guides readers through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; downloading free coloring pages compiled during the annual #ColorOurCollections campaign—offerings range from a zany 1920s advertisement for butter to medical drawings, book illustrations and a wartime nurse recruitment poster; or reading the New York Public Library’s interactive Insta Novel versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Another option for individuals with ample time on their hands is transcribing historical documents and data. The Smithsonian Transcription Center is always looking for volunteers to log field notes, diaries, ledgers, manuscripts and biodiversity specimen labels. Other offerings include the Library of Congress’ By the People project, which asks users to transcribe collections related to women’s suffrage, Rosa Parks, Abraham Lincoln and Spanish law; the Newberry Library’s Transcribing Faith portal, which seeks volunteers eager to analyze early modern manuscripts; and the Citizen Archivist, which asks participants to tag, transcribe and add comments to the National Archives’ records.

Science

Flowers, fungi and fauna abound in digitized renderings of the natural world. The open-access Biodiversity Heritage Library, for instance, highlights more than 150,000 illustrations ranging from animal sketches to historical diagrams and botanical studies; the Watercolor World, a portal created to serve as a “visual record of a pre-photography planet,” showcases more than 80,000 paintings of landscapes, seascapes, buildings, animals, plants, ordinary people and historical events.

Other digital science resources include an interactive map that lets users plug in their address to see how it’s changed over the past 750 million years, a collection of unsettling sounds from outer space, Cambridge University’s Isaac Newton papers, Charles Darwin’s manuscripts, hundreds of case files written by a pair of 17th-century astrologers and physicians, a map that visualizes all 21 successful moon landings, and a medical pop-up book dating to the 17th century.

About the Author: Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities. Website: meilansolly.com

Read more articles from Meilan Solly and Follow on Twitter @meilansolly

(Contributed by Bob of Occupy)

The Coronavirus Pandemic

March 24, 2020

Fear often overwhelms clear thinking. It did on 9/11. We were told that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he was involved in 9/11, he was bosom buddies with Osama bin Laden, and……he was developing a nuclear bomb that we couldn’t wait for it to appear in the form of a mushroom cloud. That all turned out to be a “pack of lies”.

The Coronovirus, Donald Trump tells us, it originated in Wuhan, China. The Chinese say we brought it there. Who’s right about that? How many of us even know there is this rather serious disagreement?

What is the proof of either side? Does anybody know?

Very few of us are even aware of this. Why? We’re too busy following our government’s directives to stay sheltered inside and not to talk to anyone outside, always maintaining six feet from our fellow citizens when we go to the grocery store. Mmm! Those who do talk to others, what are they talking about through their masks? COVID 19. Nothing more. What are our TV news talking heads talking about? COVID 19. Be afraid, be very afraid. Be terrified and lock step behind the directives of our government.

Is there any questioning going on beyond the exigencies of Fear? You answer that question.

Allow me to digress for a moment. In 2003, the world was terrorized by a virus called SARS. Do you know how many people died from SARS worldwide? A little more than 800. After being told by our Authoritarian Experts that there would be millions of cases, WORLDWIDE, it turned out there were only a little more than 800. How could that be?

And those Experts told us that the virus originated in China around cities like Foshan near Quandong in southern China. Did they tell us that those cities were the centers for the world where all the electronic trash was sent to be disassembled and recycled by poor Chinese workers who did so for $1.50 an hour? Did they tell us that these workers labored around huge vats of acid, breathing in a cacophany of chemicals daily in the pursuit of feeding and caring for their families? Did they tell us that the corporations who profited from this exploitation dumped what they couldn’t salvage into their waterways, so much so that they poisoned the drinking water for the people that lived there? Their local governments ended up having to ship in clean drinking water.

And what did the corporations tell us? These people were the carriers of SARS. That was their “Cover Story” to the world, their covering up of their corporate criminal behavior. And it took our eyes off the ball, didn’t it?

Those Chinese Workers didn’t have a viral infection that caused fear and terror in the world. Their respiratory health problems, etc. were the result of Corporate Crime and the corporations covered it up by directing our attentions away from the Truth.

So in confronting this pandemic, are we asking the right questions or are we, once again, being directed away from deeper questioning? FEAR is a tremendous manipulator and controller. It DIVERTED our eyes and minds after 9/11, didn’t it?

What is FEAR doing to us now?

–Bob of Occupy

“Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society.”

BY MARIA POPOVA (brainpickings.org)

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.

Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but that the choices we make can impact the outcomes.

How to harness that uniquely human paradox in living more empowered lives in even the most vulnerable-making circumstances is what the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in the 1968 gem The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (public library), written in an era when both hope and fear were at a global high, by a German Jew who had narrowly escaped a dismal fate by taking refuge first in Switzerland and then in America when the Nazis seized power.

In a sentiment he would later develop in contemplating the superior alternative to the parallel lazinesses of optimism and pessimism, Fromm writes:

Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason. But the nature of hope is often misunderstood and confused with attitudes that have nothing to do with hope and in fact are the very opposite.

Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene made his poetic case for our sense of mortality as the wellspring of meaning in our ephemeral lives, Fromm argues that our capacity for hope — which has furnished the greatest achievements of our species — is rooted in our vulnerable self-consciousness. Writing well before Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant unsexing of the universal pronoun, Fromm (and all of his contemporaries and predecessors, male and female, trapped in the linguistic convention of their time) may be forgiven for using man as shorthand for the generalized human being:

Man, lacking the instinctual equipment of the animal, is not as well equipped for flight or for attack as animals are. He does not “know” infallibly, as the salmon knows where to return to the river in order to spawn its young and as many birds know where to go south in the winter and where to return in the summer. His decisions are not made for him by instinct. He has to make them. He is faced with alternatives and there is a risk of failure in every decision he makes. The price that man pays for consciousness is insecurity. He can stand his insecurity by being aware and accepting the human condition, and by the hope that he will not fail even though he has no guarantee for success. He has no certainty; the only certain prediction he can make is: “I shall die.”

What makes us human is not the fact of that elemental vulnerability, which we share with all other living creatures, but the awareness of that fact — the way existential uncertainty worms the consciousness capable of grasping it. But in that singular fragility lies, also, our singular resilience as thinking, feeling animals capable of foresight and of intelligent, sensitive decision-making along the vectors of that foresight.

Fromm writes:

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision making which replace the principles of instinct. He has to have a frame of orientation that permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger that is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind. The human being, born under the conditions described here, would indeed go mad if he did not find a frame of reference which permitted him to feel at home in the world in some form and to escape the experience of utter helplessness, disorientation, and uprootedness. There are many ways in which man can find a solution to the task of staying alive and of remaining sane. Some are better than others and some are worse. By “better” is meant a way conducive to greater strength, clarity, joy, independence; and by “worse” the very opposite. But more important than finding the better solution is finding some solution that is viable.

As we navigate our own uncertain times together, may a thousand flowers of sanity bloom, each valid so long as it is viable in buoying the human spirit it animates. And may we remember the myriad terrors and uncertainties preceding our own, which have served as unexpected awakenings from some of our most perilous civilizational slumbers. Fromm — who devoted his life to illuminating the inner landscape of the individual human being as the tectonic foundation of the political topography of the world — composed this book during the 1968 American Presidential election. He was aglow with hope that the unlikely ascent of an obscure, idealistic, poetically inclined Senator from Minnesota by the name of Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with the infamous Joseph McCarthy, who stood for just about everything opposite) might steer the country toward precisely such pathways to “greater strength, clarity, joy, independence.”

McCarthy lost — to none other than Nixon — and the country plummeted into more war, more extractionism, more reactionary nationalism and bigotry. But the very rise of that unlikely candidate contoured hopes undared before — hopes some of which have since become reality and others have clarified our most urgent work as a society and a species. Fromm writes:

A man who was hardly known before, one who is the opposite of the typical politician, averse to appealing on the basis of sentimentality or demagoguery, truly opposed to the Vietnam War, succeeded in winning the approval and even the most enthusiastic acclaim of a large segment of the population, reaching from the radical youth, hippies, intellectuals, to liberals of the upper middle classes. This was a crusade without precedent in America, and it was something short of a miracle that this professor-Senator, a devotee of poetry and philosophy, could become a serious contender for the Presidency. It proved that a large segment of the American population is ready and eager for Humanization… indicating that hope and the will for change are alive.

Having given reign to his own hope and will for change in this book “appealing to the love for life (biophilia) that still exists in many of us,” Fromm reflects on a universal motive force of resilience and change:

Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society… One cannot think in terms of percentages or probabilities as long as there is a real possibility — even a slight one — that life will prevail.

Complement The Revolution of Hope — an indispensable treasure rediscovered half a century after its publication and republished in 2010 by the American Mental Health Foundation — with Fromm on spontaneity, the art of living, the art of loving, the art of listening, and why self-love is the key to a sane society, then revisit philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and Rebecca Solnit on the real meaning of hope in difficult times.

Another Roundup of Positive Updates on the COVID Outbreaks From Around the World