Focus Features Everyone knew, but no one said anything. FINAL ACCOUNT is an urgent portrait of the last living generation of everyday people to participate in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Over a decade in the making, the film raises vital, timely questions about authority, conformity, complicity and perpetration, national identity, and responsibility, as men and women ranging from former SS members to civilians in never-before-seen interviews reckon with – in very different ways – their memories, perceptions and personal appraisals of their own roles in the greatest human crimes in history. https://twitter.com/FinalAccounthttps://www.instagram.com/finalaccoun…https://www.facebook.com/FinalAccount…https://www.focusfeatures.com/final-a…

May 12, 2021 Heard on All Things Considered (npr.org)

JON HAMILTON

A man who is paralyzed was able to type with 95% accuracy by imagining that he was handwriting letters on a sheet of paper, a team reported in the journal Nature.Science Photo Library/Pasieka/Getty Images

An experimental device that turns thoughts into text has allowed a man who was left paralyzed by an accident to construct sentences swiftly on a computer screen.

The man was able to type with 95% accuracy just by imagining he was handwriting letters on a sheet of paper, a team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“What we found, surprisingly, is that [he] can type at about 90 characters per minute,” says Krishna Shenoy of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The device would be most useful to someone who could neither move nor speak, says Dr. Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgeon at Stanford and co-director, with Shenoy, of the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory.

“We can also envision it being used by someone who might have had a spinal cord injury who wants to use email,” Henderson says, “or, say, a computer programmer who wants to go back to work.”

Both Henderson and Shenoy have a proprietary interest in commercializing the experimental approach used to decode brain signals.

The idea of decoding the brain activity involved in handwriting is “just brilliant,” says John Ngai, who directs the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative, which helped fund the research.Article continues after sponsor message

“But it was only on one subject in a laboratory setting,” Ngai says. “So at the moment it’s a great demonstration of proof of principle.”

The man who agreed to test the device is unable to move his arms and legs as the result of a freak accident.

“He was taking out the garbage, slipped, fell and instantly became quadriplegic,” Henderson says. “So he’s essentially completely paralyzed.”

A few years ago, the man agreed to take part in a study of an experimental system called BrainGate2. It allows people who are paralyzed to control computers and other devices using only their thoughts.

The system relies on electrodes surgically implanted near the part of the brain that controls movement. In previous studies, participants had learned to control a computer cursor or robotic arm by imagining they were moving their hands.

This time, Henderson, Shenoy and a team of scientists had the man imagine he was writing individual letters by hand while a computer monitored the electrical activity in his brain.

Eventually, the computer learned to decode the distinct pattern of activity associated with every letter of the alphabet as well as several symbols.

Once that process is complete, Shenoy says, “We can determine if the letter you wrote is an A or a B or a C and then plop that up on the screen and you’re able to spell out words and sentences and so forth one letter at a time.”

In previous experiments, participants had been able to use their thoughts to “point and click” at letters on a screen. But that approach was much slower than imagined handwriting.

Also, because the new system relies on familiar thoughts, the participant was able to use it almost immediately.

“He was very happy when he was able to write out messages in response to the questions we asked him.” Henderson says. “He was pretty excited about this.”

The team’s success decoding imagined handwriting is just the latest advance in efforts to link computers to the human brain, Ngai says.

“I was introduced to this concept over 10 years ago, and I thought it was quite a bit of science fiction,” he says. “Then roughly about five years later it was shown to be not to be such science fiction after all. So I think we’re seeing a progression. It’s really quite exciting.”

An editorial accompanying the study shares that view.

The handwriting approach “has brought neural interfaces that allow rapid communication much closer to a practical reality,” wrote Pavithra Rajeswaran and Amy L. Orsborn of the University of Washington.

(Suggested by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

Anu Puusa|TED@BCG (ted.com)

Think capitalism is broken? Try cooperativism, says co-op enthusiast and researcher Anu Puusa. She lays out how cooperatives — businesses owned, operated and controlled by their members — can both make money and have a positive impact on the environment and local communities. With co-ops, Puusa says, doing good business and doing good at the same time becomes possible.

This talk was presented at a TED Institute event given in partnership with BCG. TED editors featured it among our selections on the home page. Read more about the TED Institute.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anu Puusa · Co-ops enthusiastCooperative enthusiast Anu Puusa wants to spread the word about co-ops — and their potential as a sustainable business model that achieves long-term social, economic and environmental goals.

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

Aldous Huxley (July, 26 1894–November 22, 1963) endures as one of the most visionary and unusual minds of the twentieth century — a man of strong convictions about drugs, democracy, and religion and immensely prescient ideas about the role of technology in human life; a prominent fixture of Carl Sagan’s reading list; and the author of a little-known allegorical children’s book.

In one of his twenty-six altogether excellent essays in The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment (public library), Huxley sets out to answer the question of who we are — an enormous question that, he points out, entails a number of complex relationships: between and among humans, between humanity and nature, between the cultural traditions of different societies, between the values and belief systems of the present and the past.

Aldous Huxley

Writing in 1955, more than two decades after the publication of Brave New World, Huxley considers the stakes in this ultimate act of bravery:

What are we in relation to our own minds and bodies — or, seeing that there is not a single word, let us use it in a hyphenated form — our own mind-bodies? What are we in relation to this total organism in which we live?

[…]

The moment we begin thinking about it in any detail, we find ourselves confronted by all kinds of extremely difficult, unanswered, and maybe unanswerable questions.

These unanswerable questions, the value of which the great Hannah Arendt would extol as the basis of our civilization two decades later, challenge the very “who” of who we are. Huxley illustrates this with a most basic example:

I wish to raise my hand. Well, I raise it. But who raises it? Who is the “I” who raises my hand? Certainly it is not exclusively the “I” who is standing here talking, the “I” who signs the checks and has a history behind him, because I do not have the faintest idea how my hand was raised. All I know is that I expressed a wish for my hand to be raised, whereupon something within myself set to work, pulled the switches of a most elaborate nervous system, and made thirty or forty muscles — some of which contract and some of which relax at the same instant — function in perfect harmony so as to produce this extremely simple gesture. And of course, when we ask ourselves, how does my heart beat? how do we breathe? how do I digest my food? — we do not have the faintest idea.

[…]

We as personalities — as what we like to think of ourselves as being — are in fact only a very small part of an immense manifestation of activity, physical and mental, of which we are simply not aware. We have some control over this inasmuch as some actions being voluntary we can say, I want this to happen, and somebody else does the work for us. But meanwhile, many actions go on without our having the slightest consciousness of them, and … these vegetative actions can be grossly interfered with by our undesirable thoughts, our fears, our greeds, our angers, and so on…

The question then arises, How are we related to this? Why is it that we think of ourselves as only this minute part of a totality far larger than we are — a totality which according to many philosophers may actually be coextensive with the total activity of the universe?

Illustration from You Are Stardust

At a time when Alan Watts was beginning to popularize Eastern teachings in the West and prominent public figures like Jack Kerouac were turning to Buddhism, Huxley advances this cross-pollination of East and West. With an eye to pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James, who was among his greatest influences, he considers the notion that our consciousness is the filtering down of a larger universal consciousness, distilled in a way that benefits our survival:

Obviously, if we have to get out of the way of the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, it is no good being aware of everything that is going on in the universe; we have to be aware of the approaching bus. And this is what the brain does for us: It narrows the field down so that we can go through life without getting into serious trouble.

But … we can and ought to open ourselves up and become what in fact we have always been from the beginning, that is to say … much more widely knowing than we normally think we are. We should realize our identity with what James called the cosmic consciousness and what in the East is called the Atman-Brahman. The end of life in all great religious traditions is the realization that the finite manifests the Infinite in its totality. This is, of course, a complete paradox when it is stated in words; nevertheless, it is one of the facts of experience.

But this deeper and more expansive sense of self, Huxley argues, is habitually obscured by the superficial shells we mistake for our selves:

The superficial self — the self which we call ourselves, which answers to our names and which goes about its business — has a terrible habit of imagining itself to be absolute in some sense… We know in an obscure and profound way that in the depths of our being … we are identical with the divine Ground. And we wish to realize this identity. But unfortunately, owing to the ignorance in which we live — partly a cultural product, partly a biological and voluntary product — we tend to look at ourselves, at this wretched little self, as being absolute. We either worship ourselves as such, or we project some magnified image of the self in an ideal or goal which falls short of the highest ideal or goal, and proceed to worship that.

Huxley admonishes against “the appalling dangers of idolatry” — a misguided attempt at communion with a greater truth that, in fact, renders us all the more separate:

Idolatry is … the worship of a part — especially the self or projection of the self — as though it were the absolute totality. And as soon as this happens, general disaster occurs.

Illustration by Giselle Potter from To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays — Gertrude Stein’s little-known alphabet book.

Nearly half a century before Adrienne Rich lamented “the corruptions of language employed to manage our perceptions” in her spectacular critique of capitalism, Huxley argues that the uses and misuses of language mediate our relationship with the self and are responsible for our tendency to confuse the deeper self with the superficial self:

This is the greatest gift which man has ever received or given himself, the gift of language. But we have to remember that although language is absolutely essential to us, it can also be absolutely fatal because we use it wrongly. If we analyze our processes of living, we find that, I imagine, at least 50 percent of our life is spent in the universe of language. We are like icebergs, floating in a sea of immediate experience but projecting into the air of language. Icebergs are about four-fifths under water and one-fifth above. But, I would say, we are considerably more than that above. I should say, we are the best part of 50 percent — and, I suspect, some people are about 80 percent above in the world of language. They virtually never have a direct experience; they live entirely in terms of concepts.

It’s a sentiment triply poignant today, in an era when the so-called social media rely on language — both textual and the even more commodified visual language of photography — to convey and to manicure our conceptual perception of each other, often at the expense of the deeper truth of who we are. To be sure, Huxley recognizes that this reliance on concepts is evolutionarily necessary — another sensemaking mechanism for narrowing and organizing the uncontainable chaos of reality into comprehensible bits:

When we see a rose, we immediately say, rose. We do not say, I see a roundish mass of delicately shaded reds and pinks. We immediately pass from the actual experience to the concept.

[…]

We cannot help living to a very large extent in terms of concepts. We have to do so, because immediate experience is so chaotic and so immensely rich that in mere self-preservation we have to use the machinery of language to sort out what is of utility for us, what in any given context is of importance, and at the same time to try to understand—because it is only in terms of language that we can understand what is happening. We make generalizations and we go into higher and higher degrees of abstraction, which permit us to comprehend what we are up to, which we certainly would not if we did not have language. And in this way language is an immense boon, which we could not possibly do without.

But language has its limitations and its traps.

Much like Simone Weil argued that the language of algebra hijacked the scientific understanding of reality in the early twentieth century, Huxley asserts that verbal language is leading us to mistake the names we give to various aspects of reality for reality itself:

In general, we think that the pointing finger — the word — is the thing we point at… In reality, words are simply the signs of things. But many people treat things as though they were the signs and illustrations of words. When they see a thing, they immediately think of it as just being an illustration of a verbal category, which is absolutely fatal because this is not the case. And yet we cannot do without words. The whole of life is, after all, a process of walking on a tightrope. If you do not fall one way you fall the other, and each is equally bad. We cannot do without language, and yet if we take language too seriously we are in an extremely bad way. We somehow have to keep going on this knife-edge (every action of life is a knife-edge), being aware of the dangers and doing our best to keep out of them.

This, perhaps, is why David Whyte — as both a poet and a philosopher — is so well poised to unravel the deeper, truer meanings of common words.

Illustration by Giselle Potter from To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays by Gertrude Stein

The root of our over-reliance on language, Huxley argues, lies in our flawed education system, which is predominantly verbal at the expense of experiential learning. (A similar lament led young Susan Sontag to radically remix the timeline of education.) In a prescient case for today’s rise of tinkering schools and mind-body training for kids, Huxley writes:

The liberal arts … are little better than they were in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages the liberal arts were entirely verbal. The only two which were not verbal were astronomy and music… Although for hundreds of years we have been talking about mens sana in corpore sano, we really have not paid any serious attention to the problem of training the mind-body, the instrument which has to do with the learning, which has to do with the living. We give children compulsory games, a little drill, and so on, but this really does not amount in any sense to a training of the mind-body. We pour this verbal stuff into them without in any way preparing the organism for life or for understanding its position in the world — who it is, where it stands, how it is related to the universe. This is one of the oddest things.

Moreover, we do not even prepare the child to have any proper relation with its own mind-body.

Long before Buckminster Fuller admonished against the evils of excessive specialization and Leo Buscaglia penned his magnificent critique of the education system’s industrialized conformity, Huxley writes:

One of the reasons for the lack of attention to the training of the mind-body is that this particular kind of teaching does not fall into any academic pigeonhole. This is one of the great problems in education: Everything takes place in a pigeonhole… The pigeonholes must be there because we cannot avoid specialization; but what we do need in academic institutions now is a few people who run about on the woodwork between the pigeonholes, and peep into all of them and see what can be done, and who are not closed to disciplines which do not happen to fit into any of the categories considered as valid by the present educational system!

The solution to this paralyzing rigidity, Huxley argues, lies in combining “relaxation and activity.” In a sentiment that calls to mind the Chinese concept of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — he writes:

Take the piano teacher, for example. He always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity…

The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness — what has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what is what, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should. In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing.

Two decades before Julia Cameron penned her enduring psychoemotional toolkit for getting out of your own way, Huxley makes a beautiful case for the same idea:

We have to learn, so to speak, to get out of our own light, because with our personal self — this idolatrously worshiped self — we are continually standing in the light of this wider self — this not-self, if you like — which is associated with us and which this standing in the light prevents. We eclipse the illumination from within. And in all the activities of life, from the simplest physical activities to the highest intellectual and spiritual activities, our whole effort must be to get out of our own light.

Illustration by Lizi Boyd from Flashlight

The seed for this lifelong effort, Huxley concludes, must be planted in early education:

These [are] extremely important facets of education, which have been wholly neglected. I do not think that in ordinary schools you could teach what are called spiritual exercises, but you could certainly teach children how to use themselves in this relaxedly active way, how to perform these psychophysical skills without the frightful burden of overcoming the law of reversed effort.

The Divine Within is an illuminating read in its totality, exploring such subjects as time, religion, distraction, death, and the nature of reality. Complement it with Alan Watts on learning to live with presence in the age of anxiety and the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love.

The Intercept Did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback? Former Israeli official Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat. Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009 that Hamas is “Israel’s creation.” Hamas was the result of this, as Mehdi Hasan explains. First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence. Hosted by Mehdi Hasan (https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan), “How Israel Helped Create Hamas” is the fifth episode of a six-part Blowback series for The Intercept. Throughout this series, Mehdi Hasan examines key examples of blowback in greater detail and explores how foreign policy decisions by the U.S. and its allies often produce blowback and so-called unintended consequences. The Intercept is an investigative nonprofit news organization dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism. We believe journalism should bring transparency and accountability to powerful governmental and corporate institutions.

VOA News The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival

(Suggested by Suzanne Deakins, H.W., M.)

Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path, until one person in one generation, has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to his ancestors and spares the children that follow.

This work is not just for you. It’s for the generations yet unborn.

–Terry Real

Thomas Hübl Thomas Hübl and Terry Real look at: – Understanding trauma triggering – when the past overtakes the present – Getting to know your adaptive child part – your automatic responses – Undoing The Big Lie – that a person can be either inferior or superior to another – Demystifying “normal” aspects of life that are actually trauma symptoms – How long term ancestral trauma lives in our relationship #love#trauma#healing To learn more, visit https://lovetraumahealing.com —– More about Thomas Hübl: http://www.thomashuebl.com

An old man meets a young man who asks: “Do you remember me?” And the old man says no. Then the young man tells him he was his student, And the teacher asks: “What do you do, what do you do in life? ”The young man answers: “Well, I became a teacher.” “ah, how good, like me?” Asks the old man. “Well, yes. In fact, I became a teacher because you inspired me to be like you. ”The old man, curious, asks the young man at what time he decided to become a teacher. And the young man tells him the following story: “One day, a friend of mine, also a student, came in with a nice new watch, and I decided I wanted it. I stole it, I took it out of his pocket. Shortly after, my friend noticed his watch was missing and immediately complained to our teacher, who was you. Then you addressed the class saying, ‘This student’s watch was stolen during classes today. Whoever stole it, please return it.’ I didn’t give it back because I didn’t want to. You closed the door and told us all to stand up and form a circle. You were going to search our pockets one by one until the watch was found. However, you told us to close our eyes, because you would only look for his watch if we all had our eyes closed. We did as instructed. You went from pocket to pocket, and when you went through my pocket, you found the watch and took it. You kept searching everyone’s pockets, and when you were done you said ‘open your eyes. We have the watch. ’You didn’t tell on me and you never mentioned the episode. You never said who stole the watch either. That day you saved my dignity forever. It was the most shameful day of my life. But this is also the day I decided not to become a thief, a bad person, etc. You never said anything, nor did you even scold me or take me aside to give me a moral lesson. I received your message clearly. Thanks to you, I understood what a real educator needs to do. Do you remember this episode, professor? The old professor answered, ‘Yes, I remember the situation with the stolen watch, which I was looking for in everyone’s pocket. I didn’t remember you, because I also closed my eyes while looking. ‘This is the essence of teaching: If to correct you must humiliate; you don’t know how to teach.”

COSMIC INTENTION THERAPYFriday – Sunday, May 14 & 15/16 Cosmic Intention provides the context for your life and for all life on Earth or elsewhere. It is the greater canvas on which the story of our lives unfolds. This class explores the thesis of Cosmic Intention and presents a thorough explanation, with examples, of the evolution of Consciousness which underlies the evolution of life and of our lived experience. Only in such a context can we understand the true challenges of our time and the emergence on this planet of new generations whose advent presages the opportunity for a “Transcendent Society.” This will be a monitor class employing Thane’s audio lessons and augmented by live instruction.More Info or Register HereClass DetailsHours for this class will differ from our usual presentation plan. May 14-15 – Day 1 – Friday afternoon U.S, Saturday morning Brisbane Class begins at 14:00 PT, 17:00 ET, 07:00 Brisbane and runs until about 19:30 PT, 22:30 ET, 12:30 Brisbane May 15-16 – Day 2 – Saturday afternoon U.S., Sunday morning Brisbane Class begins one hour later 15h00 PT, 18h00 ET, 08h00 Brisbane and runs until about 18:30 PT, 21:30 ET, 11:00 BrisbaneEstimated breaks of 15 minutes between lessons and a 30-minute meal break on Day 1