Social Media: The First 2,000 Years (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Tom Standage, Mitch Jeserich (KPFA), Frank Rose (NY Times, 11-1-13)

Through the ages: A Roman wax tablet and its 21st-century electronic descendant, the iPad.

The Romans had social media and tablets. The Victorians had an Internet. We are taught to believe it's novel, but it's the way things were before media got centralized. Technology has just returned us to where we were with everything potentially faster and cheaper.

For nearly 20 years, we’ve thought of “new media” as the brash young upstart and “old media” as the stalwart if increasingly embattled establishment. 

But what if new media aren’t as new as we assume -- and old media not really old at all?

 

Social media history (popscreen.com)

So argues Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall, a provocative book that asks us to look at media less in terms of technology -- digital or analog -- than in terms of the role they invite us to play. Are we passive receptors for whatever facts, opinions, and ad messages come our way? 

Or are we participants, sharing what we like with others, amending or commenting in the process? The second is characteristic of the Internet in general and social media in particular. But there’s nothing revolutionary about this, Standage says. 

Instead, it’s the role of consumer, so typical of 20th-­century mass media, that’s unnatural -- and to Standage, a historical blip. This observation has been made before, but never with such a wealth of information to back it up. Standage -- the digital editor at The Economist and the author of such unorthodox chronicles as... More

Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage. Illustrated. 278 pp. Bloomsbury.

• Letters and Politics, Dec. 26, 2013, 10:00 am
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The Real and Fairytale "Jesus" (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Mitch Jeserich ("Letters & Politics," Dec. 24, 2013, KPFA.org, Berkeley), Dr. Reza Aslan (rezaaslan.com, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth)
Fox News' Lauren Green attacks historian Prof. Reza Aslan, Ph.D., why a former Christian and current Muslim would write about Jesus. It's reactionary, Islamophobic FOX "News" at its best.

BESTSELLER: Zealot (amazon.com)

Religious scholar Dr. Reza Aslan has discusses his fascinating, provocative, and meticulously researched biography about the historical Jesus [Yah'shua].

It calls into question everything Westerners in Judeo-Christian societies thought we knew about Jesus of Nazareth.

 

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher (rabbi) and miracle worker [siddha] walked across the Galilee, gathering followers [as an anti-imperial rebel like many modern Palestinians] to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” 

Good St. Issa as a bodhisattva

The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

 

Two decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God. 

 

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Dr. Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. 

• Letters and Politics, Dec. 24, 2013, 10:00 am
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• Whistleblower journalist Glenn Greenwald excerpt at Minute 48:00

Jesus became a Pagan Roman god

Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs [which always simply meant someone aiming to save Jews from Roman rule] traipsed through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. 

 

This is the age of zealotry -- a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

 

Fairytale: white savior like Thor

Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Dr. Aslan explores this diverse and turbulent age and, in doing so, challenges the conventional portraits of Jesus of Nazareth. He describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction:

• a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords;
• an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret;
• and ultimately, the seditious “King of the Jews” whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime.

Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary.

• [Biblical scholar Allegro points out that the Jesus cover-story came from an entheogen-using Jewish cult, possibly the Essenes, whose sacrament and "cross" was the magic mushroom. It provided them direct mystical experiences. The BBC documents that Jesus was a Buddhist monk. He returned from 18 lost years in India with long hair to continue his rebel and messianic activities to free the Jews.]

Vishnu, I'm going back to Palestine. - Good luck.

And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself (as a Jew, a "messiah," a "god," and a man), the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

Zealot questions what we thought we knew about Jesus of Nazareth -- even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of his life and mission. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion.

 

“Riveting...Aslan synthesizes Scripture and scholarship to create an original account.”

—The  New Yorker

“A lucid, intelligent page-turner.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Fascinatingly and convincingly drawn.”

—The Seattle Times

“[Aslan’s] literary talent is as essential to the effect of Zealot as are his scholarly and journalistic chops. . . . A vivid, persuasive portrait.”

—Salon
“This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

What can we expect when we die? (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Lilou Mace (juicylivingtour.com), Dr. Moody (lifeafterlife.com)

What can we expect after we die?

Adios, mijita.

Host Lilou Mace talks to Dr. Raymond A. Moody, M.D., P.hD. about the phrase he coined, "near death experience," and discusses his astonishing bestseller Life After Life, a book that offers real experiences of people who were declared clinically dead and returned.

The descriptions they give are similar, vivid, and usually so overwhelmingly positive that hearing about them changes our view of life, dying, and spiritual survival beyond death. The Buddha frequently speaks of karma carrying experience beyond "death after the dissolution of the body." One can mystically see beings re-arising ("again-becoming") according to their deeds, the fruition of a karmic act that serves as the "rebirth-linking consciousness."

It's okay. I'm not staying dead (zenmotion.com)

Is it the same being surviving death or wholly another? Both views are mistaken and rooted in ignorance of the impersonal process. Conventionally speaking, it is the same person. But ultimately speaking, there is no identity from one moment to the next even while alive. (Materiality, sensation, perception, mental formations, and awareness are not identical from one submoment to the next but rather are constantly in flux, giving rise to different subsequent replacements).  Therefore, Buddhism uniquely teaches the doctrine of not-self or not-soul (anatta). This does not mean that there is nothing that lives, dies, and is reborn.

Instead, the "ghost," "spirit," or subtle body involved is called the gandhabba.* The Buddha meticulously described and explained the process-of-consciousness (viññāṇa). These phenomena exist, and their nature is radically impermanent, impersonal, and unsatisfactory, and therefore they cannot ultimately be called an immortal or permanent self or soul. A superficial grasp of Buddhism leads to the wrong view that Buddhism is materialistic like science, contradictory, or that it denies or is ignorant of subtle-forms commonly reported in mystical experiences. The Buddha was perfectly aware of the dying process, the rebirth-linking process, and life continuum in any state of existence.
 
*Gandhabba (Sanskrit, gandharva) refers to a being (or, strictly speaking, part of the causal continuum of consciousness) in a liminal state between death and rebirth.

Death can prompt us to live well

We almost never want to think or speak of our own death, but it can be more difficult to deal with the death of a loved one. This is a source of great grief the Buddha called "suffering" (dukkha, unsatisfactoriness). In this long course of rebirths, we have lost uncountable loved ones -- children, parents, spouses, relatives, and friends. Loss and separation are inevitable in wandering life after life. Even heavenly rebirths, which are often incredibly long, eventually come to an end.

When Loved Ones Die

HOW TO CONTACT THE DEPARTED: Anyone can use the Psychomanteum, a chamber developed by Dr. Moody. He was inspired by ancient Greek techniques used for 2,500 years at the Oracle of the Dead in Ephyra, Greece. A visitor to a psychomantium (mirrored room) often experiences contact with departed loved ones. How? The process takes several hours of sincerely and emotionally speaking of the departed while gazing into a specially lit mirror tilted so as not to reflect oneself. This is explained in the doctor's DVDs Through the Tunnel & Beyond and Reunions.

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