The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space, by John C. Lilly

I wanted to read this book as I knew the author experimented with LSD and sensory deprivation tanks. He was the inspiration for the brilliant film Altered States, which I enjoyed immensely. The third book of John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone starts as an intense book, an exploration of the deep mind using arcane and sometimes forbidden techniques. A magnificent beginning... and a horrid ending.

Let me start from the beginning. Lilly is a psychoanalyst and a neuroscientist at the same time, perfect skills to explore and understand the limits of the human mind. He first starts his experiments with dolphins, trying to understand them and communicate with them. He starts an entire institute in order to research this field, but the book is not about that, but about the period starting with LSD experiments. At the time he begins taking the drug, it was legal. Parties were held where people would share the experience and entire schools of therapy were using LSD to facilitate access to the mind.

Having previously tried experiments of sensory deprivation, a sort of shutting down of all outside stimuli in order to explore inward, he attempts to mix the two techniques: LSD and sensory deprivation tanks. Something opens up and he gains access to repressed memories, deep understanding of self and incredibly fast and precise advances in pinpointing psychological hurdles, trauma points. Till this point, I have gobbled up the book, resonating profoundly with the scientific method of exploration aided by chemical substances that eliminate the barrier between consciousness and subconscious. But then it all changes.

If you intend to read the book and make up your own mind, I suggest you stop reading the review now and start with the book. I am going to express my own opinions on what I read there.

What I think happened is that Lilly had the spiritual openness that allowed him to connect empathically with himself and others, something I believe resides in the right hemisphere of the brain. This openness is facilitated by the catholic upbringing that he is subjected to as a child. He himself, under the influence of LSD, retrieves a repressed memory inside a church where he starts seeing angels flying around. He confesses this to a nun and she, bitchy as she was, gets terribly upset and tells him that only saints can have visions, not a seven years old boy. This makes him forcefully lock the door that he had opened in himself. But now, after he has dedicated himself to science and logic, he stumbles upon this drug which unlocks the memory and so the initial skill.

This should have been a momentous occasion, something to combine perfectly the scientific mind with a strong spiritual/emotional side. Unfortunately, he was truly unprepared for it all. From a scientific book, it quickly devolves into yogi and Eastern spiritual practices, combines knowledge gained from experiment with hearsay from ancient texts, mixes hallucination with perception. He acknowledges that he started writing the book, then, after experiencing all of this spiritual avalanche, he decided only the first three chapters were worth keeping. Unfortunately, those are the first three chapters that I loved and that made sense.

It is not just my own subjective disgust for his abandonment of reason that makes me think the book follows up with personal involution, but also the way the book is structured, the writing style, the use of information at the end which had not been introduced previously... it all gets worse.

Now, he is the second scientist I've read that reports some sort of mental or at least emotional connection at a distance, the first one being Kary Mullis, who also seemed rather wacky and experimented with drugs. I really wanted to believe that, as well as many of the extraordinary things reported in the book, and wanted to explore them for myself. But now... I am not so sure. Be it the LSD or some sort of giving up to the emotional side, I see this book as a diary of going bananas and not realising it.

That doesn't mean that the book doesn't contain valuable knowledge. The fact that, single or under guidance, the man could access hidden memories and background "programs" after the first LSD experience makes the entire business of psychotherapy laughable with their lengthy discussions and careful probing. Various methods to access the trance necessary to explore your inner spaces that don't even involve chemical aid (like the looping of a word and listening to it until entering the desired trance state) I bet are perfectly functional. Also, there was one collaborator of Lilly's, Ida Rolf, that used a technique combining deep tissue massage and trance to unlock the repressed memories that affected body stance.

Many more interesting and very useful facts are hidden in the book. Alas, it is difficult if not outright impossible to separate wishful thinking from actual fact, garbage from science. Or maybe, who knows, I am so biased that I can't understand some essential truths in the book. I guess it is up to you to read the book and decide for yourself. I loved the beginning and loathed the ending.

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Forge of Darkness, by Steven Erikson

I really wanted for Forge of Darkness to be great, something that would wash away the disappointment of the tenth and final book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. And, in a way, it is. However, with increases in the inner philosophical monologues and a downplay of magic, with a plethora of characters that, for anyone not reading (or remembering, like me) the entire Malazan series, don't yet make sense, it felt raw, pretentious, more in line with Steven Erikson's admission that after 20 years of writing, the voices have stopped nagging him (for a while at least, as evidenced by this book). If this was supposed to be a book to be read, understood and loved, then I cannot see it as a success. If it was only a way to unload the chaos of characters demanding voice in the author's head, then it is quite a realization.

I won't describe the plot in detail. Enough to say that it is all happening in the Tiste realm and it is the story of the beginning of the high magic used in the Malazan cycle. The Azathanai, magic creatures of unknown potential, start interacting with the world on a more personal level. Draconus marries a queen, while K'rull starts bleeding magic as a gift for anyone to use. Eleinth break open into the world and gates for the major flavours of magic are opening as a result of Draconus' love gift. Through all of that, the division of the Tiste and the break of civil war are preparing to shatter the realm of Kurald Galain.

I imagine the second book will be a lot more active, with magic breaking out wild in a world unprepared for it, however the first was more about presenting characters (a zillion of them) and setting the stage. My impression was that, even if Tiste people live for hundreds of years, not every soldier and common man can have pages of internal monologues about the philosophical aspects of living. That is the biggest failure of a book that is otherwise brilliant. I will continue reading the Kharkanas cycle (I doubt it will end as a trilogy), of course, but I am starting to ask myself when the next book of Ian Cameron Esslemont will come out.

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Video refresh for the Flash impaired (read Apple)

For a long time now, Flash was the de facto "cross browser video" technology. That is why many of the posts in this blog containing videos had embedded Flash videos in them. That until Apple came along and did not support the technology. As a result, more than half of my posts with embedded video were not available on an iPad, for example.

Today I've made sure the embedded videos were not deleted or otherwise unavailable and also replaced them with versions that also work on the iPad. If you browse the "video" tag in the blog and you see something that doesn't play on your device and it doesn't mention anything in the text about that, please let me know so I can update the post accordingly.

So, stop despairing, iPad people, now you can listen to the music and watch the movies Siderite style. ;)

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Phantom of the Opera - Lindsey Stirling

It has been a while since I've posted music here. The performer is Lindsey Stirling and today is the first time I've heard of her, but I like her stuff. She is a pop violinist akin to Emilie Autumn, but not as dark. Here is the clip for Phantom of the Opera, 7 minutes long and very nice.

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Vezi - Coma

I thought about translating the lyrics to English, but there would be no point. It is pure poetry and it is beyond me. For the non-Romanian visitors, I just hope you like the song.

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Writing a blog post from my iPad

I have to admit that after using the iPad a little, I got to enjoy it and find some uses for it. Most enlightening was using it with a cover. Without it, the iPad is just a thing to make your hands tire; with a cover one can place it somewhere, watch a movie, hold it in a myriad of ways and alternate the muscles needed to support it, if any. I still hate Apple and everything it stands for, but I'll admit that I stopped disliking my iPad.

I was thinking the other day what would my father do with a device such as that? His job at the moment is a translator, that even without it, he would like to comment on things and write content. So I have experimented by writing a blog post on the iPad (see previous post) to see how it holds for data entry.

My conclusion is mixed, but it borders on the positive. The first thing to notice is that, since I was writing English, the autocomplete was very helpful. I doubt that it would have been as easy to write in Romanian, for example. Then, the solution for writing on the iPad was not the split keyboard (keys too small and cumbersome use), but placing the device on my belly (in it's cover that allows for this) and typing with two fingers. The writing went pretty fast, but my hands soon got tired. I had to pause at regular intervals. That is not something bad when creating, though.

Of course, there have been problems with stuff like punctuation or writing non letter characters. Writing about code on the iPad would have been suicidal, I think. Also, I was a little put off by the fact that the blog post entry did not look too good on the iPad browser (the interface on the right, like labels, was inaccessible). I know this is a Google issue and they should fix their Blogger interface to fully support devices like the iPad, but also an Apple issue, since that interface works in every desktop browser and it should have worked in Safari as well (btw, have you seen how cool and cross browser is my blog even on the iPad? :) ).

Bottom line: I really would have wanted to say using a keyboard is so much better, but with my incredibly bad typing I have to always backspace and fix words, while in the iPad autocomplete enabled, one "key" at a time writing style, this was a non issue. My hands got tired though, even if I found a relatively comfortable position and in the end I had to Publish the post from the desktop just because I also needed to set the labels for the post. Overall, a usable experience.

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The need to do something

As an experiment in blogging from the iPad, I am also trying to say something about my thoughts lately. One of them is about the need to be active, to do something, no matter what.

There is obviously nothing wrong with the first part, more with the latter: we are content when we do all kind of stupid things. We might regret them later, but while we are engaged in them we are enjoying it. A brilliant example is my grandmother; when she retired from her job she had a crisis, she did not know what to do, so she came to our house and catalogued every book we had. And we had hundreds. In a recent film Maggie Smith's character said that her apartment is so small that she can make it spotless in 30 minutes; then what is she supposed to do? Why did she need to do anything?

I also remember the times when, no matter what idiot designed the feature and what moron asked for it, I was happy to feel useful coding it. I imagine that people with jobs that I consider inferior, like housecleaning for example, would also feel better doing that instead of nothing at all. We sometimes curse the people that use us for their own benefit: the faceless corporation, the greedy boss, the slave driver manager. But isn't that a bit two faced if we actually enjoy it and feel that it gives purpose to our lives anyway?

What is this obsession with doing something? I can imagine that during our evolution, individuals who needed to do something to keep occupied were more successful than the ones sitting around doing nothing. That we are obsessive by design is a bit unsettling.

I guess the true test of this hypothesis would be to get into a situation where I am neither constrained to do something nor having a particular craving at that moment. Alas, this is hard to achieve. Even during holidays, there is first a time of respite from the stress of work related thoughts, then a bit of relaxing, then some things that we had planned before and then... it's over: we need to get back to work.

There have been rare occasions when I would become bored with sleeping, watching movies, reading books and news, playing games or learning whatever held my fancy at the moment. It is a time of creativity, of sifting through previous ideas and dreams and deciding some are not worth the effort or the resources to complete (or are damn impossible) and, yes, of doing. And yet the doing is never as good as imagined before starting it and never as satisfying as expected after having been done it. Yet the sheer pressure of sitting still and doing nothing forces on.

Of course, being a rather ordinary human being, I can hardly consider myself free of constraints. The rare occasions mentioned are just that: extremely rare. Having a lot of money might enable this kinds of situations, but even then I suspect the real hurdle would be to actually get to be alone. Alone with one's thoughts, alone from incessant distractions, free to let the mind roam. Would I then do something great, as I often daydream? Would I find the situation satisfying enough to not do anything? Or would I bore myself and be forced to seek the very distractions I have been fleeing? And before feeling left out and ignored, dear wife, I have to mention that this is an exploration of myself, outside any context, and that includes you, not forgotten, just off topic.

The answer to the question above is that I don't know, really. I just feel that the true test of one's life is to have the opportunity to imagine its next steps free of constraints and the resources to follow that path. Until then, we are just absorbing stuff, like biological capacitors. And sometimes we die before we get to discharge. I refuse to even consider people that learn nothing from their experiences.

There was a TED talk about the evolution of computer intelligence. We are at the edge of a revolution when computers get as smart as us and then exceed that intelligence. It is inevitable. People will be replaced by machines in increasingly more fields of expertise until there is nothing left to do. Can you imagine how that would be? I can't at the moment. Like pets to exceedingly smarter computers, we would either explore new avenues of thought or just sit and eat and sleep and fornicate. The pessimist that I am, I predict the latter. We will drown in the thing that defines us next after intellect: socialization. You already see hints of this now (I am talking of you, Facebook!), but this will only get worse.

I am torn right at this very moment between exploring this scenario (and of course, finding a solution) and the very subject of this post: doing or not doing something because we need to. Of course, this post must win for now. I can save the world later (I am putting it in my todo list).

My life is really quite uneventful, but I wonder if it should ever be different. The Chinese do have that curse "Be that your life is an interesting one". Is that truly that awful? Why is it that whenever I feel content with my life I also feel the need to change it? And when I do not, I feel the need to be content. Must I journey to find myself, as in so many bullshit movies and books? And if so, what will I find? Will I even want it after finding it? Is my life like a boring movie that must pick up the pace and, if so, who is watching it besides myself and who gets to direct it?

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