As I am pulling into the gas station a woman roars out from behind a pump and cuts right in front of me. I slam on the brakes, lay on the horn
and she stops just long enough to lean out her window and scream at me, You know what you are, buddy! Yeah, I do.
I am a sorry little loser who doesn’t know his ass from a gas pump; I am an arrogant educated screed who will show you everything I know for a dollar;
I am a scared tense lonely humbug willing to sell myself to the first woman who shows me a grain of kindness; I am a dazed and and hopeless idiot
wondering how I got here and what I am going to do next; I am a third-rate poet, a broken and ruined lover of God, a spiritual derelict hooked on Dharma,
a bum for truth, a pimp for the teachings of Masters, but what I want to know is, how could she tell?
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, is a computer scientist. He is author of Rationalist Spirituality, Why Materialism is Baloney, Dreamed Up Reality, Meaning in Absurdity, Brief Peeks Beyond, More Than Allegory, and The Idea of the World. He has published several papers in Scientific American arguing for metaphysical idealism. Bernardo is launching a new organization, #EssentiaFoundation, and has produced some wonderful short videos that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Nls4o_mR-sY and https://youtu.be/wJG6yL4ncK8. Here he describes a process of examining the mind deeply to discover the inner realities that exist at layers deeper than our cultural conditioning and personal psychology. He enumerates various approaches including meditation, biofeedback, breathing, and psychedelic drug use. Then he describes several experiences of his own after each of which he recorded detailed notes. Based on these experiences, he reflects on the nature of reality. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is past-vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of the Pathfinder Award from that association for his contributions to the study of consciousness. (Recorded on January 3, 2019) For a complete, updated list with links to all of our videos, see https://newthinkingallowed.com/Listin…. For opportunities to engage with and support the New Thinking Allowed video channel — please visit the New Thinking Allowed Foundation at http://www.newthinkingallowed.org. To join the NTA Psi Experience Community on Facebook, see https://www.facebook.com/groups/19530…. To download and listen to audio versions of the New Thinking Allowed videos, please visit our new podcast at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/n…. You can help support our ongoing video production while enjoying a book. To order Dreamed Up Reality: Diving Into Mind to Uncover the Astonishing Hidden Tale of Nature, by Bernardo Kastrup, please visit https://amzn.to/2T9Z38F.
Telos (/ˈtɛ.lɒs/; Greek: τέλος, translit.télos, lit. “end, ‘purpose’, or ‘goal'”)[1] is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the full potential or inherent purpose or objective of a person or thing,[2] similar to the notion of an ‘end goal’ or ‘raison d’être‘. Moreover, it can be understood as the “supreme end of man’s endeavour”.[3]“Pleasure and pain moreover supply the motives of desire and of avoidance, and the springs of conduct generally. This being so, it clearly follows that actions are right and praiseworthy only as being a means to the attainment of a life of pleasure. But that which is not itself a means to anything else, but to which all else is a means, is what the Greeks term the Telos, the highest, ultimate or final Good. It must therefore be admitted that the Chief Good is to live agreeably.” — Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, Book I[4]
Telos is the root of the modern term teleology, the study of purposiveness or of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. Teleology is central in Aristotle’s work on plant and animal biology, and human ethics, through his theory of the four causes. Aristotle’s notion that everything has a telos also gave rise to epistemology.[5] It is also central to some philosophical theories of history, such as those involving messianic redemption, such as Christian salvation history those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx.[2]
In general philosophy
Telos has been consistently used in the writings of Aristotle, in which the term, on several occasions, denotes ‘goal’.[6] It is considered synonymous to teleute (‘end’), particularly in Aristotle’s discourse about the plot-structure in Poetics.[6] The philosopher went as far as to say that telos can encompass all forms of human activity.[7] One can say, for instance, that the telos of warfare is victory, or the telos of business is the creation of wealth. Within this conceptualization, there are telos that are subordinate to other telos, as all activities have their own, respective goals.
For Aristotle, these subordinate telos can become the means to achieve more fundamental telos.[7] Through this concept, for instance, the philosopher underscored the importance of politics and that all other fields are subservient to it. He explained that the telos of the blacksmith is the production of a sword, while that of the swordsman’s, which uses the weapon as a tool, is to kill or incapacitate an enemy.[8] On the other hand, the telos of these occupations are merely part of the purpose of a ruler, who must oversee the direction and well-being of a state.[8]
Telos vs techne
Telos is associated with the concept called techne, which is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective. In the Theuth/Thamus myth, for instance, the section covering techne referred to telos and techne together.[9] The two methods are, however, not mutually exclusive in principle. These are demonstrated in the cases of writing and seeing, as explained by Martin Heidegger: the former is considered a form of techne, as the end product lies beyond (para) the activity of producing; whereas, in seeing, there is no remainder outside of or beyond the activity itself at the moment it is accomplished.[10] Aristotle, for his part, simply designated sophia (also referred to as the arete or excellence of philosophical reflection) as the consummation or the final cause (telos) of techne.[11] Heidegger attempted to explain the Aristotelian conceptualization outlined in the Nicomachean Ethics, where the eidos – the soul of the maker – was treated as the arche of the thing made (ergon).[12] In this analogy, the telos constitutes the arche but in a certain degree not at the disposition of techne.[12]
In philosophy of science
One running debate in modern philosophy of biology is to what extent does teleological language (i.e., the ‘purposes’ of various organs or life-processes) remain unavoidable, and when does it simply become a shorthand for ideas that can ultimately be spelled out non-teleologically.
According to Aristotle, the telos of a plant or animal is also “what it was made for”—which can be observed.[2] Trees, for example, seem to be made to grow, produce fruit/nuts/flowers, provide shade, and reproduce. Thus, these are all elements of trees’ telos. Moreover, trees only possess such elements if it is healthy and thriving—”only if it lives long enough and under the right conditions to fulfill its potential.”[2]
In social philosophy
Action theory also makes essential use of teleological vocabulary. From Donald Davidson‘s perspective, an action is just something an agent does with an intention—i.e., looking forward to some end to be achieved by the action.[13]Action is considered just a step that is necessary to fulfill human telos, as it leads to habits.[13]
According to the Marxist perspective, historical change is dictated by socio-economic structures, which means that laws largely determine the realization of the telos of the class struggle.[14] Thus, as per the work of Hegel and Marx, historical trends, too, have telos.[2]
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, is a computer scientist. He is author of Rationalist Spirituality, Why Materialism is Baloney, Dreamed Up Reality, Meaning in Absurdity, Brief Peeks Beyond, More Than Allegory, and The Idea of the World. He has published several papers in Scientific American arguing for metaphysical idealism. Bernardo is launching a new organization, #EssentiaFoundation, and has produced some wonderful short videos that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Nls4o_mR-sY and https://youtu.be/wJG6yL4ncK8. Here he describes a process of examining the mind deeply to discover the inner realities that exist at layers deeper than our cultural conditioning and personal psychology. He enumerates various approaches including meditation, biofeedback, breathing, and psychedelic drug use. Then he describes several experiences of his own after each of which he recorded detailed notes. Based on these experiences, he reflects on the nature of reality. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is past-vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of the Pathfinder Award from that association for his contributions to the study of consciousness. (Recorded on January 3, 2019) For a complete, updated list with links to all of our videos, see https://newthinkingallowed.com/Listin…. For opportunities to engage with and support the New Thinking Allowed video channel — please visit the New Thinking Allowed Foundation at http://www.newthinkingallowed.org. To join the NTA Psi Experience Community on Facebook, see https://www.facebook.com/groups/19530…. To download and listen to audio versions of the New Thinking Allowed videos, please visit our new podcast at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/n…. You can help support our ongoing video production while enjoying a book. To order Dreamed Up Reality: Diving Into Mind to Uncover the Astonishing Hidden Tale of Nature, by Bernardo Kastrup, please visit https://amzn.to/2T9Z38F.
1of2Beat poet Allen Ginsberg chats with hippies on a street corner in San Francisco in early summer 1967.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images 1967
The event that kicked off the hippie era, and whose cultural reverberations are still echoing today, took place in San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall on the evenings of Jan. 21-23, 1966. As recounted in the past Portals, in October that same unlikely venue had been the scene of the city’s first rock dance concert, called a Tribute to Doctor Strange. That show was groundbreaking, but the Trips Festival, as the three-night event was called, was epochal: It was the first time that the hitherto hidden-away psychedelic scene came fully into the open. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his account of the festival in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” “For the acidheads themselves, the Trips Festival was like the first national convention of an underground movement that had existed on a hush-hush cell-by-cell basis.”
The secret sauce of the nascent hippie scene was the psychedelic drug LSD, especially when combined with rock music — much of it played by musicians who were themselves high on acid. The novelist Ken Kesey’s “Acid Tests” had drawn attention to LSD; the Grateful Dead sound man and underground chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley had begun making large quantities of the drug; and by late 1965, a small but growing number of young Americans had begun taking it.
A not-yet-formed subculture was bubbling below society’s surface. The Trips Festival brought it to a boil.
The Trips Festival was inspired by acid and was all about acid. Although LSD was still legal at the time, the Festival’s creators disingenuously billed it as “an LSD experience without the LSD.” That was less than truthful: Many of the attendees were not just figuratively but actually tripping.
The Trips Festival was the collective product of an eclectic group that included Kesey; Stewart Brand, a Kesey associate who would become famous as publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog; Ramon Sender, an electronic music composer and co-founder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center; and Ben (later Roland) Jacopetti, an experimental artist and co-founder of Berkeley’s Open Theater.
The event was publicized by San Francisco’s radical ad man, Jerry Mander, and managed by a young promoter named Bill Graham, who had made his name holding two benefits for the San Francisco Mime Troupe and agreed to do the Trips Festival for free.
When thousands of people poured into Longshoremen’s Hall that weekend, they found themselves part of an unclassifiable, participatory, drug-fueled, ecstatic, out-of-control 50-ring circus, party, art installation, light show and rock concert. The handbill advertising the Friday night “program” read: “Slides, movies, sound tracks, flowers, food, rock n’ roll, eagle lone whistle, Indians and anthropologists, plus Revelations — nude projections, the God box. The endless explosion. The Congress of Wonders, the Jazz Mice, liquid projections, etc. & the unexpectable.”Past Portals
Friday night’s program featured a multimedia installation called “America Needs Indians,” as well as Jacopetti’s experimental theater-art pieces. But as Jacopetti says in Eric Christensen’s documentary “Trips Festival 1966: The Movie,” “We didn’t go over as well because these people were out for rock ’n’ roll.” For his part, Brand saw the Trips Festival as a passing of the torch from the older, high-art Beat aesthetic to the new, drugs-and-rock-driven one. “There was a kind of Beatnik era of art that got to participate in a big public way — and then pass,” Brand told Christensen. “The Grateful Dead, and Kesey, and basically the audience, the people who came in costume and stoned and basically as performers themselves, were the show. Those of us who could accommodate that were part of the next era. The kind of thing that Burning Man is now, the idea that there are no spectators, it’s all art, was born that night.”
Saturday night featured Kesey’s Acid Test, with music by Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead. As Wolfe wrote, “Well, the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that’s all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That’s nice. Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow…”
Mr. Acid Test himself, Ken Kesey, was up in the balcony, wearing a space suit as a disguise because he had recently been busted for possession of marijuana in North Beach. Kesey had a projection machine and was using it to write messages on the wall, so that suddenly the thousands of people in the hall beheld the enormous words ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HE IS GOD GO UP ON STAGE. A tub of ice cream dosed with acid fueled the proceedings.
The setting and atmosphere was Dionysian, unprecedented. But as Chronicle music critic Ralph J. Gleason noted, the heart and soul of the thing was the music. And it was when the Grateful Dead — who had had their minds blown at Kesey’s first Acid Test in November — took the stage that the Trips Festival really took off.
The Festival’s final night featured the same bands and some of the same attractions from the first two nights, as well as an Olympic-caliber trampolinist who dove from the balcony onto a trampoline under a strobe light as the Grateful Dead played. In “The Haight-Ashbury: A History,” Charles Perry writes, “The crowd was so psychedelicized nobody seemed to pay him any particular mind.”
The Trips Festival was a box-office and financial success. Reports differ, but over its three nights, anywhere from 6,000 to 15,000 people attended, and it netted between $4,000 and $12,500. For the young Bill Graham and others, the Trips Festival proved that the emerging youth counterculture was not only real but could be profitable.
The Trips Festival was a bugle call for the hippie movement, the start of the psychedelic revolution in American culture. For those who attended, the Trips Festival was a coming-out party, a gathering of the tribes. It announced that heads, freaks, hippies, whatever members of this countercultural vanguard called themselves, were not alone, that they could do their thing in public, with kindred spirits. As Jacopetti told Christensen, “I’m sure people went to the Trips Festival thinking, ‘Nobody’s gonna be as far out as I am,’ and they were very surprised to find that whoever you were, there was somebody farther out than you.” Wolfe wrote, “The heads were amazed at how big their own ranks had become — and euphoric over the fact that they could come out in the open, high as baboons, and the sky, and the law, wouldn’t fall down on them.” He concluded, “The Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend.”
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.” His most recent book is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle.
Chicago Humanities Festival Temple Grandin is one of the world’s most iconic scientists. A leading expert on animal behavior, she has even been the subject of a movie, in which Claire Danes played her in an award-winning performance. Her accomplishments are legion, including her creation of livestock-handling facilities based on animals’ natural behavior. But her greatest impact might be as one of the most prominent adults with autism. The condition has given Grandin unique insights, orienting her work on animals and allowing her to rethink human nature. The result is a series of best-selling books—”Animals Make Us Human,” “Animals in Translation,” and “Thinking in Pictures,” among many others—as well as the hug (or “squeeze”) machine, used for calming hypersensitive patients. More recently, autism itself has become the subject of her research. Her most recent book, “The Autistic Brain,” presents the latest physiological research and charts the shift from neurological to genetic approaches to the condition. Grandin shares this new work with her trademark intelligence and accessibility. This program is generously underwritten by Rose L. Shure.
• This cycle is based on empirical data meaning enough data was observed and recorded to make it possible to suggest attitudes and reactions. Keep in mind that we all have free will and thus results will vary from one individual to another.
• The graph shows the energy high at the beginning of the cycle (not unlike any other astrological aspect) followed by a slow down before it gets strong and again this reflects years of tracking and noting feedback from our many students.
• If you are making a decision during this time you might want to let it set for a day or two then check your decision again to see if it still makes sense. However, you can feel into the ebb and flow and find good times to work on self emotionally in both the low and high points. Impatience, emotion and acts without thinking are common.
• With practice you can feel when the energy is there to help bring completion to tasks, goals and projects you may be working on.
