cant

I am poem hungry today. Must be starting off with the Black Narcissus, his initiation (oh: read) (and Oh! The roses! I have a rather bold comment hidden there as museredux...)

From my archives

Deborah:

Date: Tue Oct 17, 2000 3:06 pm Subject: Re: [Negative-Capability] in the beginning



Search my soul here: No beliefs to speak of. But thinking: I instinctively try to see the divinity in everything. Blooming simply to bloom.

This path is just an approach, an act. A way to move, because we are creatures of movement. We have different ways of seeing the same thing. Paths. I'm understanding that I really have no religion but that. Just my heart's direct experience and opening to it.

Just a pragmatic 'looking at the mask'. And Beauty -- that's just Eternity perceived in the old myth -- the memory of being beyond time and movement *where there isn't even silence and stillness.*

My kids ask if there's a god, and I say yes! It's what all this is, where it all came from and goes to. What is it-they-neuter no-English-word-to-even-ask-the-question? Well, that's just a way humans have... wanting to know why and where, etc. But this simply is. 'Being' really was a good way to put it.

Just a grasping of Being. Personifications are poetry and grasping. Truth and Beauty: always coming and slipping away. You can't possess anything in time/space. And matter doesn't exist anywhere else. So physics tells us.

e.g..: I see Pico della Mirandola's sigil reads Love is Passion aroused by Beauty. I am fascinated. I ask--stars fill me with the vision--How does Beauty arouse us? Move us, set us aflame? Make us live, animate? Each word is essential to grasp. Love is Eros. Whole books on that. Beauty as Keatsian truth and beauty, Beauty as form, Beauty as archetype, Beauty as Sephirah, and especially Beauty re Eros traced back before Plato--because Plato as the origin of all things is the great lie of the West--fascinates me. Fascination is a demon. Demons are teachers. I sit down and try to be full and empty enough to be filled. That's the upsurging draft, the arousal. Life.

I suppose that sort of exploration becomes my practice of religion. It's a thing hidden in my soul that urges me on, a process. Lucifer, bringing light, bringing darkness in the time between dawn and sunrise. Midnight and the new night's morning.

Oddly, irritability seems a natural and essential condition of creativity. Without it, we only have abiding, which doesn't belong in time/space. Stuck in Eros, we have nothing at all. Torque is the word I use for irritability. Says it for me. It means beingness: being in time. Moving toward Being. Ah: Love is Passion aroused by Beauty.

I do think -- and if I have a prejudice, this is it, because it's been the experinece I've lived and that defines me -- that all religions began this way. With this search in the heart. The search creates the truth is all I can really say about it honestly. That's descriptive, mind you. Not anything belived or writ in stone. More writ in water. Write it all in water.


~~~~

Beautiful Daimons, all.

From: Deb Date: Tue Nov 14, 2000 2:15 pm Subject: Myth again

Notes:

(Diotima, the Matte'i essay and the Symposium. etc.)

Symposium was the prime myth of the Renaissance (and Wilde, Pater, Rossetti, Keats) (Important also because: it shows Platonism of Jung. Truth in wine and children!)

Forms as archetype, collective unconscious as the Masks of God. Each affects/reflects/creates the other: It's a dance: A sacred marriage of Becoming.

Archetype: a priori intuition expressed as instinctual image.

Art of Becoming: Pairs of relationships: A dialectic.

Word and thing: The main business of magick is the search for the original language that perpetuated the cosmos is this relationship. The perfect word or symbol and their systems of relationships, e.g. Language, or form (Kabbalistic sefiroth, sacred geometry, Ars Memory...) .always about word and thing: that is, the creation or generation or relationship between word and thing. Apollonian and Dionysian; Whole and Part; Syncretism and Analytical. Anabolic and catabolic. Anode and cathode. Time and moment. Being and Becoming.

All carry the same language as the early Eros myth: Eros: son of chaos, the creator, the mover, the shaper; hangs out with Desire and Longing. Dance: Shape and shaper. Created /creator. Love and Beloved. Penetrator and penetrated. AhHa and before AhHa. Memory and Soul.

Eros and Beauty: mediated by memory.

Drama and theater as The Self:

The stage the center of the dance between the gods and man; archetype and the psyche. Both wear masks, make masks for each other, project & reflect masks, inotherowords: create the other. Also idea of sphere as theater: the stage as the Center which is everywhere, circumference Nowhere. As god/Self. Unconscious/conscious.

Greeks understood this. So did Oscar. And Nietzsche and Rossetti and Keats and Lawrence and Hardy et al. The prime Romantic myth.

Beauty as mediator between Time and Eternity.
Beauty as Mercurious, as Daimon.
Beauty as mediator between archetype/forms/eternity and becoming.
Beauty as Truth, Truth as Beauty
Never separate: always both at once. Self. The deity dressed in
time/space/matter.

(Seing this frees it. "For I am redeemed by Art" )
x's Deborah

From: mike
Date: Tue Nov 14, 2000 3:06 pm
Subject: Re: [Negative-Capability] Myth again

You might be interested in the following

http://socrates.philosophy.msstate.edu/pr/Faculty/papers/digges.html


and in the discussion on Dee and Digges and Copernicanism on the alchemy list

Otherwise, take a look at the archives which are at http://www.levity.com/alchemy/a-archive1.html

Love,

me

cant

I am poem hungry today. Must be starting off with the Black Narcissus, his initiation (oh: read) (and Oh! The roses! I have a rather bold comment hidden there as museredux...)

From my archives

Deborah:

Date: Tue Oct 17, 2000 3:06 pm Subject: Re: [Negative-Capability] in the beginning

Dark City

Some jungy notes on dark city...

Memory is the mother of the Muses (creativity, active imagination, Art = the perception of the divine within us, the province of the soul). The Strangers as a split-off collective consciousness: they are looking for their lost soul, their connection with Nature. (If not soul, then Bruno's 'spirit' fx, mayhaps?) Without it, they perceive that their race of telepathic materialists can no longer exist (i.e. continue in time & space? Or better, have a meaning?) They study a stolen cross-section of humans, in a place where they can stop time (‘shut it down’; they do this with their collective will, the ‘tuning’, just as they can direct material things) and control all the variables of human existence, hoping to isolate that essential human quality that they have lost: Soul.

Soul equated with individuality. Love lasting beyond the ‘personality’= Platonic soul mate. God, I love it when Murdoch shatters the glass with his will and kisses her (a kiss, after all, is to join their life’s breath at its font, and we all know breath = soul), and the trance he is in with this realization of his deepest identity: the way he looks at her as they drag him off her.

"They needed an artist," the doc says in reference to himself and the work he does for the Strangers, i.e. the personalities/life stories he concocts for the human experimental victims. Artist = Creator and, as the Kabbalah advises, "Imitate the Creator" = a link with the scintilla, the glimmer of the divine within each of us (again, the soul).

The Strangers as our collective shadow: a soulless, dissociated collective: ‘Mr Quick’ dies, the quality lost for the whole? ‘Mr Book’ reading the ‘lives’ they ‘create’; the purpose of switching the memories/personalities is to define the variables and separate them out to find the essence of the human. A circle without closure (the Strangers) vs the (human) Jungian Self as ‘an intelligent sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere’. No light, no sun, no sea, in the dark city. The renegades question the Doc in the boat: "Where did we come from?" and he answers that he has forgotten. No one remembers. Our story, too.

So it falls to the individual to save the whole - with some help from the Artist-Scientist wizard (the Doc). And the individual has enough of his center left to do it. The final dark city is a city of light. It looks like the Dantean Rose of Light in space (just like the first pic on Hereward Tilton’s web page). When this Murdoch-Dante emerges from the Dark hellish wood, he finds his Beatrice/soul mate looking out on a bright sea like a river of light. Like the Clapton song, she ‘knows him in heaven’ (and this is the ‘heaven’ from the Thomas Gospels: ‘the kingdom of god is spread upon the face of the earth and men do not see it’. Well, some DO see it - and if you don’t see it here, you’ll never see it) even though she thinks they have never met. As he tells his shadow before he leaves the dark city, the specifics of the personality in the human are not what matters in each of us. It is what is in the heart.

Summa felicitas,~Deborah



From Maureen:

Dark City: Reviewed by Maureen Roberts

I revelled in and am very impressed with this film, which deals in immense complexity - and with delightful artistic force - with science fiction’s two foremost issues: what is real, and what does it mean to be human? The film, which concerns a city’s induced amnesia by a parasitic bunch of dark aliens called ‘Strangers’, is undoubtedly destined to be slotted into the ‘film noir’ genre, along with Blade Runner and other ‘dark art as social comment’ movies. Dark City is a deft hybridization of a surrealist dreamscape and the kind of gloomy atmospheric consistency that made Blade Runner similarly impact and resonate on the mythic plane. Like Blade Runner, it’s also about human empathy and soul versus individual and collective soul loss.

In Dark City the central theme is (pre-Jungian i.e.) Platonic: the ‘loss of memory’ that we all suffer in having forgotten our original home and ground of being, in this case appropriately symbolized by the ocean. The challenge of the human characters is thus Platonic ‘anamnesis’ - the recovery of memory, or ‘re-collection’ as reconnection to lost soul. In this sense, one of the film’s opening, then recurring metaphors is perhaps the key: a goldfish bowl, belonging to the ‘hero’ figure, John, is accidentally shattered and we see the floundering fish gasping for air amid broken glass, then John carefully rescuing it and putting it in his abandoned bath of water.

The soul-robbing aliens, in a vain effort to discover what makes humans tick, are meanwhile busy erasing and replacing everyone’s memories, and dissolving and reforming the City at midnight to fit the swapped identities. John, an imaginative type, and his alter ego, another artistic guy who’s been driven mad by knowing what’s going on, are two of only three humans who know what the aliens are up to. Here, then, is a comment on firstly, the fine line between creativity and madness - its ablity to push the individual either way - secondly on the awesome burden placed on ‘those few who see what’s really going on’ (= ‘visionaries’, such as genuine artists)’: John survives and grows stronger, in other words, but his victimized alter commits suicide.

John keeps searching for his home, called (not surprisingly) ‘Shell Beach’. Again not surprisingly, no-one seems to remember where it is. John asks the advice of one ‘Uncle Carl’ (could this be an allusion to Jung?), a friendly old guy who lives in a fish-filled place called (wait for it!) Neptune’s Castle, but it proves to be a red herring (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). All John can find is advertising boards, facades, saying, ‘Welcome to Shell Beach’. (Interestingly, another written sign that keeps reappearing is ‘Book of Dreams’). A fascinating figure - and the other of three humans who know that something fishy is afoot (double pun!) - is a limping, half-blind psychiatrist, a Hephaestus figure who is at first aiding the aliens, but later goes over to the human camp (again, another comment on the needed fate of psychiatry?)

Uncle Carl’s nasty alter ego is the cold old chief alien, whom John ends up battling with telepathically. John wins and is able to imagine (‘tune’) back into reality his home, Shell Beach, the sunlight which has been absent throughout the entire film, and his lost wife. (Again, there’s a visual and mythic resonance here with Blade Runner, which is similarly set in a ‘dark city’ void of sunlight; only at the end of the film do Decard and Rachel escape the dark clutches into sun-filled Nature, hence in both films the male-female union is inextricably melded with a reunion with Nature and with an escape from urban soul loss and dehumanization).

The Strangers revamp the familiar science fiction theme of the ‘soulless and dying alien collective’, a motif which films such as ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, and ‘Village of the Damned’ deal with. A key statement at the end of Dark City is John’s comment to the last remaining alien on the Strangers’ failure to discover what makes us human: "You were searching on the wrong level" (here he points to his head). The Strangers have missed the human centrality of heart, soul and individuality, as is reflected in some of their names, ‘Hand’, ‘Brain’, ‘Book’.

In summary, owing to its rich tapestry of archetypal themes, Dark City is one film that would definitely reward repeated viewing by those who are intrigued by the role which science fiction plays as contemporary myth.


Blessings & Goldfish from the Event Horizon

Maureen

[...]

From Deborah

As for Dark City, there was a complete absence of female Strangers, and I think that was the point. Classically, the Anima - soul - was always feminine (Jung borrowed this existing terminology). Part of the concept, then. And no opposites = no energy potential: the Strangers are doomed. (Metaphor, here, boys and girls.) Clearly, they have no understanding about the need to get in touch with their female side! But ultimately it is love that saves the dark city, and the female counterpart of John Murdoch is conceptually essential. So no, it wasn’t just Jane folding Tarzan’s socks, though she didn’t go head to head with Mr Hand.

Dark City

Some jungy notes on dark city...

Memory is the mother of the Muses (creativity, active imagination, Art = the perception of the divine within us, the province of the soul). The Strangers as a split-off collective consciousness: they are looking for their lost soul, their connection with Nature. (If not soul, then Bruno's 'spirit' fx, mayhaps?) Without it, they perceive that their race of telepathic materialists can no longer exist (i.e. continue in time & space? Or better, have a meaning?) They study a stolen cross-section of humans, in a place where they can stop time (‘shut it down’; they do this with their collective will, the ‘tuning’, just as they can direct material things) and control all the variables of human existence, hoping to isolate that essential human quality that they have lost: Soul.

Soul equated with individuality. Love lasting beyond the ‘personality’= Platonic soul mate. God, I love it when Murdoch shatters the glass with his will and kisses her (a kiss, after all, is to join their life’s breath at its font, and we all know breath = soul), and the trance he is in with this realization of his deepest identity: the way he looks at her as they drag him off her.

"They needed an artist," the doc says in reference to himself and the work he does for the Strangers, i.e. the personalities/life stories he concocts for the human experimental victims. Artist = Creator and, as the Kabbalah advises, "Imitate the Creator" = a link with the scintilla, the glimmer of the divine within each of us (again, the soul).

The Strangers as our collective shadow: a soulless, dissociated collective: ‘Mr Quick’ dies, the quality lost for the whole? ‘Mr Book’ reading the ‘lives’ they ‘create’; the purpose of switching the memories/personalities is to define the variables and separate them out to find the essence of the human. A circle without closure (the Strangers) vs the (human) Jungian Self as ‘an intelligent sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere’. No light, no sun, no sea, in the dark city. The renegades question the Doc in the boat: "Where did we come from?" and he answers that he has forgotten. No one remembers. Our story, too.

So it falls to the individual to save the whole - with some help from the Artist-Scientist wizard (the Doc). And the individual has enough of his center left to do it. The final dark city is a city of light. It looks like the Dantean Rose of Light in space (just like the first pic on Hereward Tilton’s web page). When this Murdoch-Dante emerges from the Dark hellish wood, he finds his Beatrice/soul mate looking out on a bright sea like a river of light. Like the Clapton song, she ‘knows him in heaven’ (and this is the ‘heaven’ from the Thomas Gospels: ‘the kingdom of god is spread upon the face of the earth and men do not see it’. Well, some DO see it - and if you don’t see it here, you’ll never see it) even though she thinks they have never met. As he tells his shadow before he leaves the dark city, the specifics of the personality in the human are not what matters in each of us. It is what is in the heart.

Summa felicitas,~Deborah



From Maureen:

Dark City: Reviewed by Maureen Roberts

I revelled in and am very impressed with this film, which deals in immense complexity - and with delightful artistic force - with science fiction’s two foremost issues: what is real, and what does it mean to be human? The film, which concerns a city’s induced amnesia by a parasitic bunch of dark aliens called ‘Strangers’, is undoubtedly destined to be slotted into the ‘film noir’ genre, along with Blade Runner and other ‘dark art as social comment’ movies. Dark City is a deft hybridization of a surrealist dreamscape and the kind of gloomy atmospheric consistency that made Blade Runner similarly impact and resonate on the mythic plane. Like Blade Runner, it’s also about human empathy and soul versus individual and collective soul loss.

In Dark City the central theme is (pre-Jungian i.e.) Platonic: the ‘loss of memory’ that we all suffer in having forgotten our original home and ground of being, in this case appropriately symbolized by the ocean. The challenge of the human characters is thus Platonic ‘anamnesis’ - the recovery of memory, or ‘re-collection’ as reconnection to lost soul. In this sense, one of the film’s opening, then recurring metaphors is perhaps the key: a goldfish bowl, belonging to the ‘hero’ figure, John, is accidentally shattered and we see the floundering fish gasping for air amid broken glass, then John carefully rescuing it and putting it in his abandoned bath of water.

The soul-robbing aliens, in a vain effort to discover what makes humans tick, are meanwhile busy erasing and replacing everyone’s memories, and dissolving and reforming the City at midnight to fit the swapped identities. John, an imaginative type, and his alter ego, another artistic guy who’s been driven mad by knowing what’s going on, are two of only three humans who know what the aliens are up to. Here, then, is a comment on firstly, the fine line between creativity and madness - its ablity to push the individual either way - secondly on the awesome burden placed on ‘those few who see what’s really going on’ (= ‘visionaries’, such as genuine artists)’: John survives and grows stronger, in other words, but his victimized alter commits suicide.

John keeps searching for his home, called (not surprisingly) ‘Shell Beach’. Again not surprisingly, no-one seems to remember where it is. John asks the advice of one ‘Uncle Carl’ (could this be an allusion to Jung?), a friendly old guy who lives in a fish-filled place called (wait for it!) Neptune’s Castle, but it proves to be a red herring (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). All John can find is advertising boards, facades, saying, ‘Welcome to Shell Beach’. (Interestingly, another written sign that keeps reappearing is ‘Book of Dreams’). A fascinating figure - and the other of three humans who know that something fishy is afoot (double pun!) - is a limping, half-blind psychiatrist, a Hephaestus figure who is at first aiding the aliens, but later goes over to the human camp (again, another comment on the needed fate of psychiatry?)

Uncle Carl’s nasty alter ego is the cold old chief alien, whom John ends up battling with telepathically. John wins and is able to imagine (‘tune’) back into reality his home, Shell Beach, the sunlight which has been absent throughout the entire film, and his lost wife. (Again, there’s a visual and mythic resonance here with Blade Runner, which is similarly set in a ‘dark city’ void of sunlight; only at the end of the film do Decard and Rachel escape the dark clutches into sun-filled Nature, hence in both films the male-female union is inextricably melded with a reunion with Nature and with an escape from urban soul loss and dehumanization).

The Strangers revamp the familiar science fiction theme of the ‘soulless and dying alien collective’, a motif which films such as ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, and ‘Village of the Damned’ deal with. A key statement at the end of Dark City is John’s comment to the last remaining alien on the Strangers’ failure to discover what makes us human: "You were searching on the wrong level" (here he points to his head). The Strangers have missed the human centrality of heart, soul and individuality, as is reflected in some of their names, ‘Hand’, ‘Brain’, ‘Book’.

In summary, owing to its rich tapestry of archetypal themes, Dark City is one film that would definitely reward repeated viewing by those who are intrigued by the role which science fiction plays as contemporary myth.


Blessings & Goldfish from the Event Horizon

Maureen

[...]

From Deborah

As for Dark City, there was a complete absence of female Strangers, and I think that was the point. Classically, the Anima - soul - was always feminine (Jung borrowed this existing terminology). Part of the concept, then. And no opposites = no energy potential: the Strangers are doomed. (Metaphor, here, boys and girls.) Clearly, they have no understanding about the need to get in touch with their female side! But ultimately it is love that saves the dark city, and the female counterpart of John Murdoch is conceptually essential. So no, it wasn’t just Jane folding Tarzan’s socks, though she didn’t go head to head with Mr Hand.

Study: Adderall type drugs have no more than small effects on cognition in healthy young adults, although users may perceive the drug as enhancing their cognition.

We don't know the long-term effects of these things. Worth the risk? 

Objective and subjective cognitive enhancing effects of mixed amphetamine salts in healthy people

• Irena Ilieva^, , 
• Joseph Boland, 
• Martha J. Farah

• University of Pennsylvania, United States

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropharm.2012.07.021, How to Cite or Link Using DOI

• Permissions & Reprints

Highlights

► Mixed amphetamine salts (MAS) have no more than small effect on healthy cognition. ► Despite that, the drug is subjectively viewed as cognitively beneficial. ► Enhancement of a few functions is moderated by baseline ability and COMT genotype.

Abstract

Psychostimulants such as mixed amphetamine salts (MAS, brand name Adderall) are widely used for cognitive enhancement by healthy young people, yet laboratory research on effectiveness has yielded variable results. The present study assessed the effects of MAS in healthy young adults with an adequately powered double-blind cross-over placebo-controlled trial. We examined effects in 13 measures of cognitive ability including episodic memory, working memory, inhibitory control, convergent creativity, intelligence and scholastic achievement, with the goals of determining (1) whether the drug is at least moderately enhancing (Cohen's d >= .5) to some or all cognitive abilities tested, (2) whether its effects on cognition are moderated by baseline ability or COMT genotype, and (3) whether it induces an illusory perception of cognitive enhancement. The results did not reveal enhancement of any cognitive abilities by MAS for participants in general. There was a suggestion of moderation of enhancement by baseline ability and COMT genotype in a minority of tasks, with MAS enhancing lower ability participants on word recall, embedded figures and Raven's Progressive Matrices. Despite the lack of enhancement observed for most measures and most participants, participants nevertheless believed their performance was more enhanced by the active capsule than by placebo. We conclude that MAS has no more than small effects on cognition in healthy young adults, although users may perceive the drug as enhancing their cognition.

This article is part of a Special Issue entitled ‘Cognitive Enhancers’.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390812003577

*********
extra credit: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/health/attention-disorder-or-not-children-prescribed-pills-to-help-in-school.html?_r=0

be sure to read the comments

Study: Adderall type drugs have no more than small effects on cognition in healthy young adults, although users may perceive the drug as enhancing their cognition.

We don't know the long-term effects of these things. Worth the risk? 

Objective and subjective cognitive enhancing effects of mixed amphetamine salts in healthy people

• Irena Ilieva^, , 
• Joseph Boland, 
• Martha J. Farah

• University of Pennsylvania, United States

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropharm.2012.07.021, How to Cite or Link Using DOI

• Permissions & Reprints

Highlights

► Mixed amphetamine salts (MAS) have no more than small effect on healthy cognition. ► Despite that, the drug is subjectively viewed as cognitively beneficial. ► Enhancement of a few functions is moderated by baseline ability and COMT genotype.

Abstract

Psychostimulants such as mixed amphetamine salts (MAS, brand name Adderall) are widely used for cognitive enhancement by healthy young people, yet laboratory research on effectiveness has yielded variable results. The present study assessed the effects of MAS in healthy young adults with an adequately powered double-blind cross-over placebo-controlled trial. We examined effects in 13 measures of cognitive ability including episodic memory, working memory, inhibitory control, convergent creativity, intelligence and scholastic achievement, with the goals of determining (1) whether the drug is at least moderately enhancing (Cohen's d >= .5) to some or all cognitive abilities tested, (2) whether its effects on cognition are moderated by baseline ability or COMT genotype, and (3) whether it induces an illusory perception of cognitive enhancement. The results did not reveal enhancement of any cognitive abilities by MAS for participants in general. There was a suggestion of moderation of enhancement by baseline ability and COMT genotype in a minority of tasks, with MAS enhancing lower ability participants on word recall, embedded figures and Raven's Progressive Matrices. Despite the lack of enhancement observed for most measures and most participants, participants nevertheless believed their performance was more enhanced by the active capsule than by placebo. We conclude that MAS has no more than small effects on cognition in healthy young adults, although users may perceive the drug as enhancing their cognition.

This article is part of a Special Issue entitled ‘Cognitive Enhancers’.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390812003577

*********
extra credit: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/health/attention-disorder-or-not-children-prescribed-pills-to-help-in-school.html?_r=0

be sure to read the comments

donnie darko

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 3:15 PM, Ariel wrote:

the director's cut of donnie darko is pretty shit and ruined the entire tone and pace of the film. it's overproduced and narrows the interpretive aspects that made the film good, it just falls flat. i cant believe they changed the music!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ7Fz3m485s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cugqRpgNJjA&feature=related

the only thing i find interesting about it is that it introduces the idea that the alternate universe is endlessly repeating itself on a loop until donnie fixes it. the director's cut supposes that the events in the film have happened many times before, over and over again, with donnie failing to close the loop each time. this is just the time that he succeeds. when the film starts you hear the rolls of thunder from the storm that happens with the wormhole at the end of the film, so the opening shot is actually supposed to be where the alt universe begins, it doesnt start when the engine falls in donnie's room. donnie is on the mountain laughing because he remembers for a few seconds. thinking about it that way kind of gives more purpose to some things, in a way, it gives a lot of the actions of the characters a concise meaning, but i sort of dont like that as well. and the idea that dead frank bunny's presence must 'prove' that frank had to of been killed in a previous time cycle before he go could back and guide donnie to his purpose is a bit lame. i thought the whole point was that the alt universe was so unstable that things no longer had to be linear. frank dies in that universe at some point, therefore has the power to be present in another form throughout it's entirety.

i really liked before how it had this 'hamlet' quality to it where things just feel 'off' or wrong to everyone, everything feels weird and out of place and everyone knows it intuitively but cant openly understand it.

everyone's actions are being manipulated by some other force, which i guess is also how the director's cut explains the events, but the director i am pretty sure wanted it to be the force of GOD and not human intuition. which is stupid. his view seems to be more like 'this movie is about how you cant escape the path of god' or some shit. it is kind of like LOST in that sense, the creator's idea of what they were doing turns out to be much less sophisticated, interesting, and intelligent than what the viewers thought it was. how lucky he didnt have enough money to put his full creative vision into this.

anyway you might like to watch it, it gives different insight, but the original is obviously much better.

--------------
deb:
Oh wow. Thank you. I will.
Great commentary. I love the original. The negative capability of it, as you say. To lose that -- is a great loss.
Will watch it this week.
Loves, mum
---------------



my donnie darko review:

every psyche, a portal..., September 25, 2003

This review is from: Donnie Darko (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

...more haunting each time you watch it, Donnie Darko captures the fractal, paradoxical nature of human experience. It lives fully, with a growing awareness of an unconscious that pulls you in like an undertow, inverting reason into the greater consciousness of dream.

Think of Leibniz's Monads: every psyche, a portal--"an intelligent sphere whose center is everywhere, and circumference nowhere."

Think fractal:

Whether generated by computers or natural processes, all fractals are spun from what scientists call a "positive feedback loop." Something--data or matter--goes in one "end," undergoes a given, often very slight, modification and comes out the other. Fractals are produced when the output is fed back into the system as input again and again. (glyphs.com)

and:

FRACTALS depict calculations which exist on the borders of chaos, and INTERFEROGRAMS depict near-invisible disturbances of matter in time. The relationship is not accidental.

Do a search on INTERFEROMETRIC HOLOGRAMS and extrapolate. As Mad World says, ENLARGE YOUR WORLD.

Donnie's consciousness of the process, committing it to memory, binding it to Self (as CGJung used the term), seems most important.

It's a movie that acts as a symbol because its memory moves in your psyche constantly, a golden snitch that leads you on... like Frank...

donnie darko

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 3:15 PM, Ariel wrote:

the director's cut of donnie darko is pretty shit and ruined the entire tone and pace of the film. it's overproduced and narrows the interpretive aspects that made the film good, it just falls flat. i cant believe they changed the music!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ7Fz3m485s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cugqRpgNJjA&feature=related

the only thing i find interesting about it is that it introduces the idea that the alternate universe is endlessly repeating itself on a loop until donnie fixes it. the director's cut supposes that the events in the film have happened many times before, over and over again, with donnie failing to close the loop each time. this is just the time that he succeeds. when the film starts you hear the rolls of thunder from the storm that happens with the wormhole at the end of the film, so the opening shot is actually supposed to be where the alt universe begins, it doesnt start when the engine falls in donnie's room. donnie is on the mountain laughing because he remembers for a few seconds. thinking about it that way kind of gives more purpose to some things, in a way, it gives a lot of the actions of the characters a concise meaning, but i sort of dont like that as well. and the idea that dead frank bunny's presence must 'prove' that frank had to of been killed in a previous time cycle before he go could back and guide donnie to his purpose is a bit lame. i thought the whole point was that the alt universe was so unstable that things no longer had to be linear. frank dies in that universe at some point, therefore has the power to be present in another form throughout it's entirety.

i really liked before how it had this 'hamlet' quality to it where things just feel 'off' or wrong to everyone, everything feels weird and out of place and everyone knows it intuitively but cant openly understand it.

everyone's actions are being manipulated by some other force, which i guess is also how the director's cut explains the events, but the director i am pretty sure wanted it to be the force of GOD and not human intuition. which is stupid. his view seems to be more like 'this movie is about how you cant escape the path of god' or some shit. it is kind of like LOST in that sense, the creator's idea of what they were doing turns out to be much less sophisticated, interesting, and intelligent than what the viewers thought it was. how lucky he didnt have enough money to put his full creative vision into this.

anyway you might like to watch it, it gives different insight, but the original is obviously much better.

--------------
deb:
Oh wow. Thank you. I will.
Great commentary. I love the original. The negative capability of it, as you say. To lose that -- is a great loss.
Will watch it this week.
Loves, mum
---------------



my donnie darko review:

every psyche, a portal..., September 25, 2003

This review is from: Donnie Darko (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

...more haunting each time you watch it, Donnie Darko captures the fractal, paradoxical nature of human experience. It lives fully, with a growing awareness of an unconscious that pulls you in like an undertow, inverting reason into the greater consciousness of dream.

Think of Leibniz's Monads: every psyche, a portal--"an intelligent sphere whose center is everywhere, and circumference nowhere."

Think fractal:

Whether generated by computers or natural processes, all fractals are spun from what scientists call a "positive feedback loop." Something--data or matter--goes in one "end," undergoes a given, often very slight, modification and comes out the other. Fractals are produced when the output is fed back into the system as input again and again. (glyphs.com)

and:

FRACTALS depict calculations which exist on the borders of chaos, and INTERFEROGRAMS depict near-invisible disturbances of matter in time. The relationship is not accidental.

Do a search on INTERFEROMETRIC HOLOGRAMS and extrapolate. As Mad World says, ENLARGE YOUR WORLD.

Donnie's consciousness of the process, committing it to memory, binding it to Self (as CGJung used the term), seems most important.

It's a movie that acts as a symbol because its memory moves in your psyche constantly, a golden snitch that leads you on... like Frank...

more from archives: It thrives close to the dragon

more from archives: It thrives close to the dragon

Thursday, July 05, 2001 Re: [Negative-Capability]

Re: salt of soul, sulfur of spirit

Deb,

You might recall an animated discussion we had here on the distinction between soul and spirit a while back. I am still not sure if we need two different constructs (*spirit* and *soul*), as in the line, "When a spirit is imagined as above human life, as fundamentally masculine, as abstracting and distancing, and as pure and uncontaminated, the soul is particularly denigrated." In my experience thus far, spirituality = soul-making (I think). What say you?

The rest I agree with wholeheartedly, of course.

Soulfully yours,

Anand  

 from Deborah:

>>Your Birth of Kali picture/s is/are very funny, Deb.
>>Carroll

:)

"The idealizations which Eros tends always to constellate can be counterbalanced: creativity expresses itself also as destruction.  Love's torture may not always lead to the happy ending of our tale.  The idealizations may further be weighted by recalling the connections in Hesiod, the Orphics, and renaissance Neoplatonism between eros and chaos.

"Eros is born of Chaos, implying that out of every chaotic moment the creativity of which we have been speaking can be born.  Further more, Eros will always hearken back to its origins in chaos and will seek it for revivification.  ...  Eros will attempt again and again to create those dark nights and confusions which are its nests.  It renews itself in affective attacks, jealousies, fulminations, and turmoils.  It thrives close to the dragon." 

That quote is James Hillman (Love's Torturous Enchantment in A BLUE FIRE)  *This book -- by the way--  has been a real affirmation for me.  It's in keeping what interests me in Jung -- and also with my fascination with Platonic Eros.

What Diotima is telling Socrates in Plato's Symposium is this reading of the Eros and Psyche myth.

Neoplatonism--the post earlier today on Plotinus (think Ficino)--reread Plotinus and the birth of Venus in Beauty.  The pairs, above below. Read it as spirit--soul. ?  One is Two. Plotinus: the earthly Venus, the heavenly Venus.  And Eros, her son or brother,but always her companion.  Speaking of comPASSION and what moves it -- desire.  Erotic, all, this force that inspires -- that 'breathes life.' Anima / Animus in the flame of becoming, at once holding on and letting go.

Anand was telling me the Hindu story of the goddesses...  as 'the void' projected desire and created Space... then Time... then... The same story again and again. And in each of us.(And fascinating to see Saturn figure in the Hindu Parvati myth--just as Chronos does in Plotinus's birth of Venus.)

Catholic catechism:  We are born to know love and serve god.  The void looking in the mirror with the same impulse: creation and Self.

I keep drawing all that out -- seeing these myths as archetype, as they played on Richardson's imagination.

Have long been intrigued with the Eros-Psyche myth and its earlier alt.form Persephone-Hades and the ways it mutated as it passed itself down, both drawing from the same underground stream somewhere beneath Mt. Etna.  Hades and his brother Hephaestus: Peter Kingsley tells us in the early fragments of Empedocles they form a pair: fire as erotic creativity: destructive and creative at once.

I see so much of Hillman drawn from deep reading of Symposium -- which is an amalgam of earlier myths.  Eros reflects the earlier goddess myth and often is seen as hermaphrodite.  Anima Animus analogs.

I wrote Anand:

Before archetype theory was there to guide and pull things together, there was myth, story.  Novels came about in following down these fascinations, the demons who lead us on into the interior.  So -- maybe archetype theory came about for math and business majors who don't have time to read novels (oh, professor!) ;)  I'm kidding of course, but -- empiricism is based in experience.  Art and analytical psych orient and ground the journey, is all.   And art is too often neglected and so mass produced and mass fed that maybe a crutch is now needed that wasn't needed before.  The 'primitives' were not primitive.  They certainly knew the power of myth and story in living life. In a living cosmos.  A thing we -- especially in the west, as we become these machines we serve -- have undervalued, lost.

The Philosopher's stone.  The Foundation Stone. The orphan.

I love your dream of the two halves becoming one.  I think it is both sides of Venus, both sides of Eros, the one and the One.  Our face in the mirror, the longing that created us us, Longing longing back... Wonderful dream. Please, just enjoy the experience, the memory of it.  A gift.  Fascination is enough.

Anand said: >>So one path is seeking 'detachment' through renunciation: a merger with Shiva; the other, with the joyful energy of Shakti. Of course they converge. >>

It's the whole of Eros, the whole of Venus, both Janis face sides.  Earthy, heavenly, both at once.  Holding on and letting go all at once: *standing in the upsurging draft of love* and that IS the whole message of the Symposium.

Self.  The deity dressed in time and space. Our living.

So they put it to us superior westerners as we first come across words like heathen and pagan -- that we aremonotheistic, unlike those other primitives!  Those heathen lost souls and their polyglot polygods!  See the Greeks worship Zeus!  Them Hindoos, they worship all sorts of melon-breasted eroticons!  Them pagans and all their calling up them demons in the night, dancing naked beneath the moon!  And them Buddhists!  Why, they have no god at all!  And yet -- and yet -- the Void, the ground of Being, the Forms.  All are the same One, and the many gods and godlets the archetype, the matrix that we cast our images of godhead upon.

As I see it, Archetype is the psyche's analog to the knowledge / matrix intrinsic within matter: the 'memory' of hydrogen bonding in water that ' knows' to form ice, the crystal lattice that forms diamonds from carbon. Not the elements, not the image per se -- but the matrix behind, within.

(imho...)

Anand asked:

>...In  my experience thus far, spirituality = soul-making (I think). What >say you?

To answer -- I am seeing the distinction -- and understanding that for you -- and for one conscious of anima / animus and able to see the archetype revealing itself and speaking in its cryptic, wordless, imaginal way -- they can be the same.  But there is always a danger in transcendence.  Seeking only the high of peak consciousness, in churches, ritual, piety, magic, etc.  The peaks that skim the cream off the valleys. Soulmaking IS finding the sacred in the commonplace, the temple everywhere, the deity in your child's face, the godhood in your mortal lover.

Hillman writes:

"At first the entanglements which Eros constellates seem personal, as if all of love hung on the right word or move at the magical right time, as if it were a matter of effort and doing.  But then the entanglements become reflections of archetypal patterns that appear in everyone's life.  The images (eidola) are what everyone has experienced in his psyche through loving.  In this way Eros leads to the archetypes behind the patterns, and we are played into myth after myth: now a hero, now a virgin running, now a satyr who must clutch, now blind, now soaring.  Precisely this mythical awareness and enactment result from psychological creativity.
Thus we begin to recognize in ourselves that eros and psyche are not mere figures in a tale, not merely configurations of archetypal components, but are two ends of every psychic process*.  They always imply and require each other.  We cannot view anything psychologically without it entering our soul.  By experiencing an event psychologically, we tend to feel a connection with it; in feeling and desire we tend to realize the importance of something for the soul.  Desire is holy, as D.H. Lawrence, the romantics, the Neoplatonists insisted, because it touches and moves the soul.  Reflection is never enough." (*Ouroboros again.) 

"Desire is holy."

Summa Felicitas,

Deborah

"Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul making. Then you will find out the use of the world."

~John Keats 

Carroll wrote:

Spirit and Soul

How about spirit is the God that's seeking us and soul is the God

the spirit is seeking?  I don't know where that puts Us --

more than spectator certainly.  I think it's hide and seek

and spirit comes together with soul and then they go off

for a new place to hide.  Why all the hiding though?

Carroll

Anand wrote:

Carroll,

Are you thinking along the lines of individual soul (= 'soul') and Cosmic/Universal soul (= 'spirit')? A distinction, perhaps germane to the Moore quote, that has emerged in my thinking lately is between the path of eros and the path of detachment/renunciation, with my path currently squarely in the former. [Jung's Anima = Soul really gels with me now. Anima work = soul work.]

Another possibility:

Spirit= Pure Consciousness = Shiva (inert corpse)

Soul= Animating Energy / Will = Shakti (e.g. Kali dancing on Shiva to animate or give him life).

So one path is seeking 'detachment' through renunciation: a merger with Shiva; the other, with the joyful energy of Shakti. Of course they converge. And, of course, oversimplifying.

Mikey?

Tripping on soul,

- Anand

mike writes:

The Buddhist's have a threefold manifestation, a triplicity of dimensions of being, named dharmakaya ('absolute dimension of being'), sambhogakaya ('dimension of blissful enjoyment') and nirmanakaya ('emanational dimension') which correspond, more or less, to the alchemical sulphur=life- energy/spirit, mercury=becoming/soul, salt=formation/body. One of the images used is that of the sun, its rays, and its reflections in various bodies of water; another, that of space, the sun, and streaming rays of sunlight... There is no hierarchy; when the first is attained, the other two are inherent in that attainment. The first is jñana (primordial knowing, lamely translated as wisdom); the other two are upaya (skilful means/compassion).

m

from Carroll 7/5/01 11:33 AM:

 Well you guys of course have very different concepts  of and feelings  about Anima (Jung gave us women the Animus, what a gift! instead)  -- I can't  imagine the Anima though I sure know what an Anima  Woman is like and what they/ we have to disintangle from in terms  of male projections.   That's why I threw both Anima and Animus  away (I'm now throwing away that tiresome Baby in the Bathwater, too). and substituted ideas  that have meaning to me for instead: Soul and Beloved of the Soul.   You can dance with Shiva or Shakti or both, why not?   The Baby can dance with everyone.

Carroll

alice writes:

In a message dated 7/5/01 11:19:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time, anandk writes:

> How about spirit is the God that's seeking us and soul is the God

> the spirit is seeking?  I don't know where that puts Us --

HOW AB THE SPIRIT IS THE GOD THAT IS SEEKING US AND THE SOUL IS THE goddess the spirit is seeking i.e. Div Guest seeking Sophia to rebirth the ego?

ao

Alice O. Howell

Rosecroft

"Look for the sacred in the commonplace!" :)

Phoebe writes:

In a message dated 7/6/01 7:57:07 AM, Deborah writes:

<< ...And yet -- and yet -- the Void, the ground of Being, the Forms.  All are the same One, and the many gods and godlets the archetype, the matrix thatwe cast our images of godhead upon. >>

The Egyptian image is one of simultaneity... all things at all times alive and co-existing: the gods are in and with us always as they have always been; we are backwards and forwards always -- that Boat of Millions of Years I talk about... We are never not in the presence of deity. All things manifest as themselves and their opposite: the harvest is present in the planting.

Of all the profound lessons learned on my shamanic path, the one that continues to work both unseen and knowingly in my life is the simple, hard one: What is Is. After four years of breathing this lesson, I feel I'm finally getting a handle on it. Aha! Crooked things are made straight; rough places are made smooth...

Life living itself is an immense and wondrous thing.

xx

ph

from Anand:

Deb,

Great post. Not sure where I can begin to respond.

>Before the archetypes were there to guide and pull things

>together, there was myth, story.  Novels came about in following down these

>fascinations, the demons who lead us on into the interior.  So -- maybe

>archetypal theory came about for math and business majors who don't have time to read novels.

Frighteningly true. Not that the "math and business majors" (you forgot to mention my Bachelor's in Computer Science :-)have much patience with non-fiction. I think this whole attitude is also related to the Enlightenment, and the dissing of the non-rational images. Consider that 'Deity Yoga' (Active imagination with Deities, but also much more than that) has been around for eons. The rational mind scoffs at this: working with images is so infra-dig, unless you are a famous artist making oodles of moolah. But now, when I look at the older texts on Yoga/Tantra, I see variants of active imagination *everywhere*. How *could* I have been blind to this before? Call them "archetypes" to cloak these practices with some respectability: I know I often do this to 'communicate' to the Western educated (Indian or American) mind [protect myself, more likely. Why do I feel under siege?]. Old wine in a plastic cup.

>cosmos.  A thing we -- especially in the west, as we become

>these machines we serve -- have undervalued, lost.

Unfortunately, this disease is spreading everywhere, certainly in the cities of India. Like Jung's description of the tribe's Medicine Man who no longer gets Big Dreams because the English Commissioner knows all the answers. The Goddess weeps from loneliness-- as we value the distracting trinkets She strews in our path, more than Her Self and Her Love that She wants to give.

>;)  I'm kidding of course, but -- empiricism is based in experience.  Art and
 >analytical psych orient and ground the journey, is all.  And art is too often
>neglected and so mass produced and mass fed that maybe a crutch is now
>needed that wasn't needed before.

To address the latter point first: I think the problem is the overvaluing of rationality, stemming from the phenomenal material successes of the Industrial Revolution, and the appalling poverty in  those societies that missed that boat. Can we marry the two-- scientific rationality and the image-ination, or at least use them as appropriate? On the former, specifically:

> Art and analytical psych orient and ground the journey, is all. 

That is an *exact* and excellent summation of my own journey of late. A friend of mine who is very much into tantra and other Hindu paths wrote asking me what exactly I practiced. (He does not know Jung). I include my reply to him below, with some clarification of Sanskrit terms (You know all this already):

***(snip)***

Alok, 

In response to your question on Jungian Psychology and the live process:

When all is said and done, my process has converged (for now) into a form of free-flowing deity yoga. That is where Jung's Active Imagination process and worship of SriDevi have converged. I didn't plan on it. Read this fine article about Kabir (did I send you this earlier, along with the Ramana site? I don't remember). The process of active imagination is very similiar to Ramanand's manasika [Mental] puja of Rama mentioned here, except that it is much more free-flowing. . . . .

The 'simple fascination' should be enough, and would be for the 'simple' man. But She has to hammer the message into my addled head. One last aside on this, and then I will shut up. One of the fundamental tenets of analytical psychology is that the anima can 'lead' one to disaster (as seductress/ temptress/ Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel), to mawkishness, etc.: the Persona's enantiodromia into the Absolute Other. But this is at best true only when the anima is led awry by other active complexes that thwart the Self's teleology. Following the Self, on the other hand, is the path of individuation. . . . .

What do we have in our banal lives, other than the exhilaration of Insight into the Divine?

Lots of Love,

- Anand

                     Carroll wrote:

       

There is a lady sweet and kind

Was never face so pleased my mind,

I did but see her passing by

And yet I love her till I die.

Her gestures, motions and her smiles,

Her wit, her voice my heart beguiles,

Beguiles my heart, I know not why,

And yet I love her till I die.

Cupid is winged and doth range,

Doth range her country, so my love doth change,

But change the earth, or change the sky

Yet will I love her till I die.

(Words from Thomas Ford's MUSIC OF

 SUNDRY KINDS)

***

(thinking of carroll, with love. I miss you.)

Gut instincts: The secrets of your second brain

Gut instincts: The secrets of your second brain

My friend had gallbladder trouble. A share --




Deborah to cmuncy

(snippity snip) Jaysus!

Probably saying spenda decreases the activity of the celiac ganglion -- which has to do with the sympathetic nervous system. complicated system, the gut brain. Let me see if I can find an article I saved...






 

Gut instincts: The secrets of your second brain

• 17 December 2012 by Emma Young
• Magazine issue 2895. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the Food and Drink , Mental Health and The Human Brain Topic Guides

When it comes to your moods, decisions and behaviour, the brain in your head is not the only one doing the thinking

IT'S been a tough morning. You were late for work, missed a crucial meeting and now your boss is mad at you. Come lunchtime you walk straight past the salad bar and head for the stodge. You can't help yourself - at times of stress the brain encourages us to seek out comfort foods. That much is well known. What you probably don't know, though, is that the real culprit may not be thebrain in your skull but your other brain.

Yes, that's right, your other brain. Your body contains a separate nervous system that is so complex it has been dubbed the second brain. It comprises an estimated 500 million neurons - about five times as many as in the brain of a rat - and is around 9 metres long, stretching from your oesophagus to your anus. It is this brain that could be responsible for your craving under stress for crisps, chocolate and cookies.

Embedded in the wall of the gut, the enteric nervous system (ENS) has long been known to control digestion. Now it seems it also plays an important role in our physical and mental well-being. It can work both independently of and in conjunction with the brain in your head and, although you are not conscious of your gut "thinking", the ENS helps you sense environmental threats, and then influences your response. "A lot of the information that the gut sends to thebrain affects well-being, and doesn't even come to consciousness," says Michael Gershon at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York.

If you look inside the human body, you can't fail to notice the brain and its offshoots of nerve cells running along the spinal cord. The ENS, a widely distributed network of neurons spread throughout two layers of gut tissue, is far less obvious (see diagram), which is why it wasn't discovered until the mid-19th century. It is part of the autonomic nervous system, the network of peripheral nerves that control visceral functions. It is also the original nervous system, emerging in the first vertebrates over 500 million years ago and becoming more complex as vertebrates evolved - possibly even giving rise to the brainitself.

Digestion is a complicated business, so it makes sense to have a dedicated network of nerves to oversee it. As well as controlling the mechanical mixing of food in the stomach and coordinating muscle contractions to move it through the gut, the ENS also maintains the biochemical environment within different sections of the gut, keeping them at the correct pH and chemical composition needed for digestive enzymes to do their job.

But there is another reason the ENS needs so many neurons: eating is fraught with danger. Like the skin, the gut must stop potentially dangerous invaders, such as bacteria and viruses, from getting inside the body. If a pathogen should cross the gut lining, immune cells in the gut wall secrete inflammatory substances including histamine, which are detected by neurons in the ENS. The gut brain then either triggers diarrhoea or alerts the brain in the head, which may decide to initiate vomiting, or both.

You needn't be a gastroenterologist to be aware of these gut reactions - or indeed the more subtle feelings in your stomach that accompany emotions such as excitement, fear and stress. For hundreds of years, people have believed that the gut interacts with the brain to influence health and disease. Yet this connection has only been studied over the last century. Two pioneers in this field were American physician Byron Robinson, who in 1907 publishedThe Abdominal and Pelvic Brain, and his contemporary, British physiologist Johannis Langley, who coined the term "enteric nervous system". Around this time, it also became clear that the ENS can act autonomously, with the discovery that if the main connection with the brain - the vagus nerve - is severed the ENS remains capable of coordinating digestion. Despite these discoveries, interest in the gut brain fell until the 1990s when the field of neurogastroenterology was born.

We now know that the ENS is not just capable of autonomy but also influences the brain. In fact, about 90 per cent of the signals passing along the vagus nerve come not from above, but from the ENS (American Journal of Physiology - Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, vol 283, p G1217).

The feel-good factor

The second brain also shares many features with the first. It is made up of various types of neuron, with glial support cells. It has its own version of a blood-brain barrier to keep its physiological environment stable. And it produces a wide range of hormones and around 40 neurotransmitters of the same classes as those found in the brain. In fact, neurons in the gut are thought to generate as much dopamine as those in the head. Intriguingly, about 95 per cent of the serotonin present in the body at any time is in the ENS.

What are these neurotransmitters doing in the gut? In the brain, dopamine is a signalling molecule associated with pleasure and the reward system. It acts as a signalling molecule in the gut too, transmitting messages between neurons that coordinate the contraction of muscles in the colon, for example. Also transmitting signals in the ENS is serotonin - best known as the "feel-good" molecule involved in preventing depression and regulating sleep, appetite and body temperature. But its influence stretches far beyond that. Serotonin produced in the gut gets into the blood, where it is involved in repairing damaged cells in the liver and lungs. It is also important for normal development of the heart, as well as regulating bone density by inhibiting bone formation (Cell, vol 135, p 825).

But what about mood? Obviously the gut brain doesn't have emotions, but can it influence those that arise in your head? The general consensus is that neurotransmitters produced in the gut cannot get into the brain - although, theoretically, they could enter small regions that lack a blood-brain barrier, including the hypothalamus. Nevertheless, nerve signals sent from the gut to the brain do appear to affect mood. Indeed, research published in 2006 indicates that stimulation of the vagus nerve can be an effective treatment for chronic depression that has failed to respond to other treatments (The British Journal of Psychiatry, vol 189, p 282).

Such gut to brain signals may also explain why fatty foods make us feel good. When ingested, fatty acids are detected by cell receptors in the lining of thegut, which send nerve signals to the brain. This may not be simply to keep it informed of what you have eaten. Brain scans of volunteers given a dose of fatty acids directly into the gut show they had a lower response to pictures and music designed to make them feel sad than those given saline. They also reported feeling only about half as sad as the other group (The Journal of Clinical Investigation, vol 121, p 3094).

There is further evidence of links between the two brains in our response to stress. The feeling of "butterflies" in your stomach is the result of blood being diverted away from it to your muscles as part of the fight or flight response instigated by the brain. However, stress also leads the gut to increase its production of ghrelin, a hormone that, as well as making you feel more hungry, reduces anxiety and depression. Ghrelin stimulates the release of dopamine in the brain both directly, by triggering neurons involved in pleasure and reward pathways, and indirectly by signals transmitted via the vagus nerve.

In our evolutionary past, the stress-busting effect of ghrelin may have been useful, as we would have needed to be calm when we ventured out in search of food, says Jeffrey Zigman at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. In 2011, his team reported that mice exposed to chronic stress sought out fatty food, but those that were genetically engineered to be unable to respond to ghrelin did not (The Journal of Clinical Investigation, vol 121, p 2684). Zigman notes that in our modern world, with freely available high-fat food, the result of chronic stress or depression can be chronically elevated ghrelin - and obesity.

Gershon suggests that strong links between our gut and our mental state evolved because a lot of information about our environment comes from ourgut. "Remember the inside of your gut is really the outside of your body," he says. So we can see danger with our eyes, hear it with our ears and detect it in our gut. Pankaj Pasricha, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Neurogastroenterology in Baltimore, Maryland, points out that without the gutthere would be no energy to sustain life. "Its vitality and healthy functioning is so critical that the brain needs to have a direct and intimate connection with thegut," he says.

But how far can comparisons between the two brains be taken? Most researchers draw the line at memory - Gershon is not one of them. He tells the story of a US army hospital nurse who administered enemas to the paraplegic patients on his ward at 10 o'clock every morning. When he left, his replacement dropped the practice. Nevertheless, at 10 the next morning, everyone on the ward had a bowel movement. This anecdote dates from the 1960s and while Gershon admits that there have been no other reports of gutmemory since, he says he remains open to the idea.

Gut instincts

Then there's decision-making. The concept of a "gut instinct" or "gut reaction" is well established, but in fact those fluttery sensations start with signals coming from the brain - the fight or flight response again. The resulting feeling of anxiety or excitement may affect your decision about whether to do that bungee jump or arrange a second date, but the idea that your second brain has directed the choice is not warranted. The subconscious "gut instinct" does involve the ENS but it is the brain in your head that actually perceives the threat. And as for conscious, logical reasoning, even Gershon accepts that the second brain doesn't do that. "Religion, poetry, philosophy, politics - that's all the business of the brain in the head," he says.

Still, it is becoming apparent that without a healthy, well-developed ENS we face problems far wider than mere indigestion. Pasricha has found that newborn rats whose stomachs are exposed to a mild chemical irritant are more depressed and anxious than other rats, with the symptoms continuing long after the physical damage has healed. This doesn't happen after other sorts of damage, like skin irritation, he says.

It has also emerged that various constituents of breast milk, including oxytocin, support the development of neurons in the gut (Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, vol 55, p 1592). This might explain why premature babies who are not breastfed are at higher risk of developing diarrhoea and necrotising enterocolitis, in which portions of the bowel become inflamed and die.

Serotonin is also crucial for the proper development of the ENS where, among its many roles, it acts as a growth factor. Serotonin-producing cells develop early on in the ENS, and if this development is affected, the second braincannot form properly, as Gershon has shown in mutated mice. He believes that a gut infection or extreme stress in a child's earliest years may have the same effect, and that later in life this could lead to irritable bowel syndrome, a condition characterised by chronic abdominal pain with frequent diarrhoea or constipation that is often accompanied by depression. The idea that irritable bowel syndrome can be caused by the degeneration of neurons in the ENS is lent weight by recent research revealing that 87 out of 100 people with the condition had antibodies in their circulation that were attacking and killing neurons in the gut (Journal of Neurogastroenterology and Motility, vol 18, p 78).

If nothing else, the discovery that problems with the ENS are implicated in all sorts of conditions means the second brain deserves a lot more recognition than it has had in the past. "Its aberrations are responsible for a lot of suffering," says Pasricha. He believes that a better understanding of the second brain could pay huge dividends in our efforts to control all sorts of conditions, from obesity and diabetes to problems normally associated with thebrain such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (see "Mental illnesses of the gut"). Yet the number of researchers investigating the second brain remains small. "Given it's potential, it's astonishing how little attention has been paid to it," says Pasricha.

Mental illnesses of the gut

A growing realisation that the nervous system in our gut is not just responsible for digestion (see main story) is partly fuelled by discoveries that this "second brain" is implicated in a wide variety ofbrain disorders. In Parkinson's disease, for example, the problems with movement and muscle control are caused by a loss of dopamine-producing cells in the brain. However, Heiko Braak at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, has found that the protein clumps that do the damage, called Lewy bodies, also show up in dopamine-producing neurons in the gut. In fact, judging by the distribution of Lewy bodies in people who died of Parkinson's, Braak thinks it actually starts in thegut, as the result of an environmental trigger such as a virus, and then spreads to the brain via the vagus nerve.

Likewise, the characteristic plaques or tangles found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's are present in neurons in their guts too. And people with autism are prone to gastrointestinal problems, which are thought to be caused by the same genetic mutation that affects neurons in the brain.

Although we are only just beginning to understand the interactions between the two brains, already the gut offers a window into the pathology of the brain, says Pankaj Pasricha at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "We can theoretically use gutbiopsies to make early diagnoses, as well as to monitor response to treatments."

Cells in the second brain could even be used as a treatment themselves. One experimental intervention for neurodegenerative diseases involves transplanting neural stem cells into the brain to replenish lost neurons. Harvesting these cells from the brain or spinal cord is not easy, but now neural stem cells have been found in the gutof human adults (Cell Tissue Research, vol 344, p 217). These could, in theory, be harvested using a simple endoscopic gut biopsy, providing a ready source of neural stem cells. Indeed, Pasricha's team is now planning to use them to treat diseases including Parkinson's.

Emma Young is a writer based in Sheffield, UK

• From issue 2895 of New Scientist magazine, page 38-42.