The Electronic Tattoo of Adam's Grandsons

Past

Cucuteni Culture
Washington, September 23 (ANI): An exhibition in the Vatican, which is displaying hundreds of artifacts, has suggested that the mysterious Neolithic people made optical art.
According to a report in Discovery News, the exhibition, which is being held at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the Vatican, introduces a mysterious Neolithic people who are now believed to have forged Europe’’s first civilization. Archaeologists have named these people “Cucuteni-Trypillians” after the villages of Cucuteni, near Lasi, Romania and Trypillia, near Kiev, Ukraine, where the first discoveries of this ancient civilization were made more than 100 years ago.
The excavated treasures - fired clay statuettes and op art-like pottery dating from 5000 to 3000 B.C. - immediately posed a riddle to archaeologists.
“We do not know the meaning of those painted symbols, and what is the significance of those zoomorphic and anthropomorphic statuettes. Everything seems to be wrapped in mystery."
The Neolithic buildings often featured walls and ceilings decorated with drawings painted in black and red. Inside, the houses were filled with pottery and statuettes whose quasi-modern design has become the Cucuteni-Trypillians’’s most identifiable trademark.
This unique artistic production, dominated by repeating lines, circles and spirals, amazingly echoes modern op art, also known as optical art, which is a genre of visual that makes use of geometric shapes and optical illusions.
The unusual art offers the best glimpse into this mysterious civilization. None of the enigmatic statuettes seem fearsome or fearful. The rare male statuettes have faces often covered by masks, while the abundant female statuettes are gracious and mask-free, with tattooed bodies and long feet. There are no chained slaves or sacrificial figures - a sign of a rather egalitarian culture, according to historians. The pottery’’s obsessive spiral and circle patterns could also help explain another strange feature of this culture.

Adam's Grandsons. An unique ancient form of art: painting pottery 6000 years ago still has misteries to uncover. An excelent documentary directed by my friend, Mihai Bauman.

Remembering the future - The Electronic Tattoo
Tattoos and physical mutilation are amongst the oldest forms of personal expression and identity. Subcultures have used tattoos as a form of self representation; a visual language communicating personality and status. Philips Design examined the growing trend of extreme body adornment like tattoos, piercing, implants and scarring .
The Electronics Tattoo film expresses the visual power of sensitive technology applied to the human body. The film subtly leads the viewer through the simultaneous emotional and aesthetic transformations between two lovers.

The secret of the Universe is the unimaginably larger number 10^122

"The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10122. Scott Funkhouser of the Military College of South Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston has shown how this number - which is bigger than the number of particles in the Universe - keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the Universe are combined1. This 'coincidence', he says, is surely significant, hinting at some common principle at work behind the scenes.

The number first turned up when, more than a decade ago, physicists discovered that the expanding Universe is accelerating. This implies that there is a force that opposes gravity on very large scales, which physicists call dark energy. It is quantified by a parameter called the cosmological constant.

One interpretation of dark energy is that it results from the energy of empty space, called vacuum energy. The laws of quantum physics imply that empty space is not empty at all, but filled with particles popping in and out of existence. This particle 'fizz' should push objects apart, just as dark energy seems to require. But the theoretical value of this energy is immense - so huge that it should blow atoms apart, rather than just causing the Universe to accelerate. Physicists think that some unknown force nearly perfectly cancels out the vacuum energy, leaving only the amount seen as dark energy to push things apart. This cancellation is imperfect to an absurdly fine margin: the unknwon 'energy' differs from the vacuum energy by just one part in 10122. It seems incredible that any physical mechanism could be so finely poised as to reduce the vacuum energy to within a whisker of zero, but it seems to be so"

Cosmic coincidence link

Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality

Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints.
Speaking for myself, the definition that seems least inadequate because most embracing is this: Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the "beginnings." In other words myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality — an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a "creation"; it relates how something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of that which really happened, which manifested itself completely. The actors in myths are Supernatural Beings. They are known primarily by what they did in the transcendent times of the "beginnings." hence myths disclose their creative activity and reveal the sacredness (or simply the "supernaturalness") of their works. In short, myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the "supernatural") into the World. It is this sudden breakthrough of the sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today. Furthermore, it is as a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings that man himself is what he is today, a mortal, sexed, and cultural being.

Mircea Eliade - Myth and Reality (1963)

The Unique Potentials of the Earth and the Ten Directions.

http://www.chanceandchoice.com/ChanceandChoice/chapter8.html

REMIXING ARCHETYPE

To historian of myth Mircea Eliade, architect Keith Critchlow and anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, our pan cultural architectures reflect the universal logic that is found in ancient archetypes. From the rippling architectures of human behavior to the shape of our built environment we carry forth these ancient symmetries, often without knowing it. We speak together in the language of archetype - reviving, rebuilding, recasting our rhythmic heritage, over and over again. Like Indra’s jeweled net, where everything is both self-similar and the mirror reflection of everything else, humans have always paid subliminal homage to the natural archetypes of ideal form.



Thinking about a scale independent view, can we look to the natural world for such an “ideal form” that could span the spectrum of scale in what Lewis Thomas described 35 years ago as “biomythology”? If we live in a universe of signs and natural symbols, is there a landmark image that recurs on every scale, from the nano to the astro? A ballast that can help us move seamlessly through the micro dimension to the macro dimension?

There is. Surprisingly, it is a form that is as simple as it is mysterious, as common as it is universal, a shape that is natural, ancient, symmetric – a form that is at once eloquent, iconic, and timeless. Just from our human scale, the scale of the naked eye, this form would have to be…



http://scaleindependentthought.typepad.com/scale_independent_thought/design/

The Theory of Ideas

According to Mircea Eliade (1975), "Plato 'rediscovers' and develops what may be called the archaic ontology: the theory of Ideas carries on the doctrine of exemplary models that is characteristic of traditional spirituality." This newer formulation by Plato spread Orphic and Pythagorean doctrine far and wide. It even became a source of inspiration in the Empire of Alexander and the Hellenistic culture. It has grown into the great academic tradition of philosophy and the humanities.

The Pythagorean-Platonic theory of Ideas has led to the concept of archetypes as models or paradigms of the phenomenal world. We comprehend and understand these Ideas, symbolized by the Platonic solids, through the faculty of the soul. For Plato, the soul was the source of knowledge.

The doctrine of transmigration implies that the soul can remember the archetypal world of Ideas and enjoy perfect knowledge and bliss communing with the original source. Death for the initiated soul is a return to this condition. Orphic philosophy taught the soul how to remain in the archetypal realm continually, becoming liberated from constant reincarnation.

http://zero-point.tripod.com/holistic/Netzach.html