Thursday, October 23, 2008

Cantaloupe Melon: Counterculture, Loving Bliss, Brains


Here's an interesting area of inquiry to come in the study of information technology and counterculture:

Find {serendipitously?}, meet {synchronistically?} and talk with countercultural folks~bodyminds~'brains'~{hippies} which took shape in the 1960s and 1970s {'culture' giving new form to brains?}, of all ethnicities, who have generated a remarkable degree of 'loving bliss' - in Northern California, on the West Coast of the American continent, India, and around the world, especially in terms of optimal experience and enjoyment.

Amma, from India, is one example.

Whose minds generate loving bliss and optimal enjoyment, in part due to a re-orientation in understanding emerging in the freedom-seeking movements and processes of the 1960s and 1970s?

How does culture (counterculture) inform biology (brains), possibly distinct from the loving bliss that these minds might have generated without the 1960s and 1970s? India is a particularly fertile land for this, to complement these questions and related travel and get togethers on the West Coast.




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At UC Berkeley today, I walked from Bancroft and Telegraph Aves. into the central area through Sather Gate and in front of Dwinelle Hall at lunch time to a place where there were a group of people sitting under what I think was a cedar tree. Folks were relaxing and lying on the grass, haphazardly. One person was playing a guitar. A 60-ish year old man with white dread locks, whom I've seen playing this guitar quite well usually, was playing chess on the grass with someone else, - he had lent his guitar to a student who was playing it. Another young guy was wearing a Cal / UC Berkeley t-shirt. There was one woman, also probably a student, who looked hippie-ish. Most of these people looked like they were students. Many of the men had slightly long-ish hair, but not as long as pony-tail length. I sat down with them and ate my lunch.

I think that groups like this one, and similar individuals, were the 'seeds' of the 1960s and the emergence of counterculture ~ {little groups, for example, just hanging out, talking, making music and being} ~ sitting on a little grassy corner in the middle of this large University, taking it easy. I see relatively few of these kinds of nascent, alternative, loose, free-minded groups around Cal or the city of Berkeley these days, but the city of Berkeley is still pretty thoughtful and alternative, as well as prosperous, as a whole.


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{

Here's some related research to the above counterculture > brain questions {from which the above photo comes - click on the title}:


The God Experiments
by John Horgan / Discover Magazine (Nov 2006)


http://richarddawkins.net/article,361,The-God-Experiments,John-Horgan--Discover-Magazine ...

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/god-experiments/

}


To the Harbin dance and pools soon ...





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