Back in 1966, Timothy Leary met Marshall McLuhan, guru of the global village, and seeded the idea in Leary’s mind that a conflict between the old industrial society and the new information society was to be played out in the new arena of power—the media. Those who understood this would create the future. Leary, and other members of the psychedelic movement, aimed to be among those who would create this future. Consequently, during the 70’s the new future’s epicenter consequently shifted from the Haight/Ashbury district in San Francisco to Silicon Valley, some fifty miles to the south, as the hippie creators of the future got in on the ground floor of the computer (information) revolution. The hippies weren’t the only group to realize the potential of new information technologies. Entrepreneurial yuppies smelled profits, and were in on the ground floor too. What appears to have emerged from the intersection of these two groups is a yippie mentality that combines the ideology of both; the notion of a digital utopia [where] everybody would be both hip and rich. —Andy Cox, What’s the Story Morning Glory?
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. —Alan Watts (via elige)
(Source: hybrid-machine, via tarotwoman)
The intravenous drips commonly attached to the hands or arms of birthing women make a powerful symbolic statement: they are umbilical cords to the hospital. The cord connecting her body to the fluid-filled bottle places the woman in the same relation to the hospital as the baby in her womb is to her. By making her dependent on the institution for her life, the IV conveys to her one of the most profound messages of her initiation experience: in American society, we are all dependent on institutions for our lives. The message is even more compelling in her case, for she is the real giver of life. Society and its institutions cannot exist unless women give birth, yet the birthing woman in the hospital is shown, not that she gives life, but rather that the institution does. —Robert Davis-Floyd
The metaphor of the body-as-machine and the related image of the female body as a defective machine eventually formed the philosophical foundations of modern obstetrics. Wide cultural acceptance of these metaphors accompanied the demise of the midwife and the rise of the male-attended, mechanically manipulated birth. Obstetrics was thus enjoined by its own conceptual origins to develop tools and technologies for the manipulation and improvement of the inherently defective, and therefore anomalous and dangerous, process of birth.
The rising science of obstetrics ultimately accomplished this goal by adopting the model of the assembly-line production of goods as its template for hospital birth. Accordingly, a woman’s reproductive tract came to be treated like a birthing machine by skilled technicians working under semiflexible timetables to meet production and quality control demands. —Robert Davis-Floyd, Rituals of American Hospital Birth (A wicked read)
The rising science of obstetrics ultimately accomplished this goal by adopting the model of the assembly-line production of goods as its template for hospital birth. Accordingly, a woman’s reproductive tract came to be treated like a birthing machine by skilled technicians working under semiflexible timetables to meet production and quality control demands. —Robert Davis-Floyd, Rituals of American Hospital Birth (A wicked read)
What is wrong with its seeking the pleasant and shirking the unpleasant? Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life I mean acceptance — letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression. —Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. —Gerardus van der Leeuw
