De-Evolution

Gravity Replaced with "Intelligent Falling" -parody from The Onion

I have problems with both "Evolution" and "Intelligent Design."
My main problem with organized religion is that it encourages unquestioning obedience.
My main problem with organized science is that it unwisely uses phrases like "evolution."

...You may be suprised, though, to learn that I actually don't agree with the idea of "evolution!"

Here's my take:
"Natural Selection" is an observable, factual process.
Living things mutate over time, and given enough time, can morph into completely different forms.
This is directly seen in a lab with fruit flies & microorganisms, and in nature through the fossil record.

On the other hand:
"Evolution" is a subjective, and therefore unprovable word & theory.
When you say "evolution" it implies that life now is better than anything that has come before.
It also suggests that all the mutations and adaptations throughout time are on a steadily improving slope.
That is a judgement call based on what you think "better" means, and makes for a shaky scientific term.

Proveable genetic mutation and physical adaptation over time should always be called "Natural Selection".

As for "Intelligent Design," there is obviously underlying order and observable patterns in our universe. That is one of the subtle lessons of Da Vinci's Challenge and the idea of Sacred Geometry. The more you study the Golden Mean, Fractals, Quantum Physics, and Sacred Geometry, the deeper your awareness of the amazing complexity and connectivity of the world becomes.

The problem for me is crediting a personal deity or supernatural "intelligence" for it. I prefer to think of "God" as the infinite order and creative energy of the universe. This is the unknowable ALL in ONE which has no name, gender, or personality. It has no reasons, no meanings, and no "designs" that human beings can begin to comprehend. It will always amuse me how mere mortals claim that God is The Great Unknowable Mystery, yet they also claim to know so much about "Him" and what "He" wants.

The important thing to remember is that when scientists, priests, or even know-it-all graphic designers talk,
all they are really saying is this.

"What Intelligent Entity would knowingly design a George W. Bush?" --Grant Gerver

600 Million Years of Evolution, Animated

It's the beginning of a New Year, and I'm going to continue the theme of time.

I've explained previously why I think "evolution" is a loaded term that makes people believe the metamorphosis of living forms over time follows an orderly, linear progression.

Despite my unease with the term "evolution", it is an undeniable fact that Life is not a static phenomenon and that living systems change. As the Greek thinker Heraclitus stated, "Nothing is permanent, except change."

Changes are always happening on an individual level, down to the cellular & molecular scales. Noticeable species-wide changes may happen at different rates, though, depending on the situation.

One of the intellectual benefits of digital media is the ability to visualize processes that were previously unimaginable. On Reddit, I came across this animated GIF of biological metamorphosis over the past 600 million years, which starts at cellular life and continues through up to modern humans.

It is available as a flip book, called EVO, from Evoboek.nl

Originally, the order was reversed for some reason, but after some searching I found a version going forward through time.

Here it is on Gfycat, allowing you to go frame-by-frame or reverse the order.

Finally, here is a Youtube video of the animation:

While I was searching Google images for this evolution GIF, I saw this cool animation that I posted before:

The Evolution of Robo-Ape 

"Evolution of Man" by Octavio Ocampo

This is a cool painting by Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo.

It contains hidden imagery & optical effects to illustrate man's progress from bipedal monkey... to machine-using inventor... to our future incarnation, which may transcend Einstein's conception of spacetime to become a non-localized quantum being.

"Evolution of Man"

click to enlarge

Update 2/20/2017

I was contacted by a student asking where to find in-depth analysis of this painting. I couldn't find any, so I wrote one myself:

'Evolution of Man' represents a 4-dimensional understanding of the human being and species. It is like stepping ‘outside’ of time, to see humanity as a continuous timeline of morphing forms.

It shows the progression as a classic triptych.

• The 1st part is our primitive hominid past, where we literally outrun our monkey body. Long-distance running is one of the unique evolutionary traits of humans. The large, superimposed face is that of an ape ancestor.

• The 2nd part is the material age of industrialization and the physical sciences. This is the stage when people are occupied with mechanical technology. The large superimposed image is the face of a modern person.

• The 3rd part is the cosmic/energetic future of humankind. After transitioning from physical technologies, the forms are breaking down into elementary particles and energies. Consciousness transcends the physical body & the light of the mind explodes into & throughout the Universe. The face superimposed over this area is that Albert Einstein, representing the inclusion of mind into science- through relativity theory and the emphasis on the experience of the observer. Also, his introduction of mass/energy equivalence through E=Mc^2 opened new horizons for the future of science, and therefore the human species.

Overall, this is a type of multi-dimensional roadmap for the progression of humanity as a collective phenomenon. It shows our past, present, and future, with an optical superimposition of a face for each stage of the “”Evolution of Man”.

Human Evolution According to A.I.

"Evolution" by Stable Diffusion software

One emerging technology that I've been watching very closely is the use of artificial intelligence (A.I) software to create artistic imagery.

As a graphic designer, the idea of computers creating art & design comparable to humans makes me uneasy- in the same way a horse-drawn carriage maker must have felt watching automobile factories coming online. I think that the human mind will continue to have a unique place in the creative process, at least for the foreseeable future. However, I look at some of the results coming from A.I. image processing programs & I'm like fuuuuuuuuck... this is amazing. 

From what I've seen, a lot of emphasis has been on the generation of fine art and illustration, creating images using descriptive keywords and style references. What worries me is the use of A.I. for design-related projects like logos, where many options can be generated in a speed & variety that no human designer can match.

Business Insider:
Artists say AI image generators are copying their style
to make thousands of new images — and it's completely out of their control

I wanted to talk about this topic after seeing a post in r/damnthatsinteresting in which human evolution is "imagined" by the A.I. Stable Diffusion software.

Human evolution generated by AI Stable Diffusion

 

I just stopped typing so I could mess with the program a little bit, and now I'm even more amazed & perturbed. 

This image was generated when typing in the name of my blog, The Monkey Buddha:

This is so crazy to me... I mean, what the hell??? This just shows that even human creativity is just an emergent phenomenon, that can be simulated and improved upon. These technologies and A.I. applications are going to be just as revolutionary & disruptive to culture as the Internet itself was. 

I'm pretty good at spotting Photoshop work, but it's going to be impossible to distinguish the source of photos & images in the near future. It will be interesting & disturbing to see this all unfold, but there's really no way to put this technology back in the box. So, we humans have to do what we do best, adapt & improvise - something it looks like computer networks are beginning to emulate.

Prompt: "computers taking my graphic design job"

In addition to the monkey at the beginning of this post, here are some more screenshots I pulled from the video above:

 

Finally metamorphosing into complete abstraction...

 

Spiritual Evolution of Man

 click to enlarge

I like this version of the traditional depiction of man's evolution. It shows our ascension from monkey to a spiritual being of conscious energy.

Perhaps the next stage of our evolution is becoming entities of pure light, either through technological or currently unimaginable means...

On a related note- I depicted the metaphorical ascent through the chakra energy centers, shown in the final image above of the spiritually evolved man, through this series I posted recently:

The Monkey Buddha Archives:

"Chakra Ascension Series" 

by Paul Micarelli

Photorealistic Evolution GIF

Recently I posted an animated GIF that illustrated the process of morphological transformation over time:

600 Million Years of Evolution, Animated

I came across another image-in-motion that shows the same process in a more photorealistic way, from the point of view of the animals changing over the eons.

Evolution of Company Logo Designs

Continuing on the logo theme, I saw this interesting article about the development process that went into different logos for the world's largest tech companies. I eat this stuff up. Thank you Neatorama.

The Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos

Human Evolution Explained

I think the term "Evolution" is misleading when talking about the process of natural selection.

It implies that Life is "improving", when it is really just a process of continual genetic change & adaptation. Whether the process leads to something "better" or "more advanced" is a matter of opinion.

Anyway, some people don't even believe that natural selection is a real phenomenon & refuse to believe that we could have "evolved from monkeys". These people choose to remain ignorant of the nature of life- despite evidence from things like the fossil record, or mutations observed in short-lived animals like fruit flies.

This is an excellent infographic, explaining the reality behind our lineage from an ancestor common with other primates:

click to enlarge

"Civilization: Beyond Earth" Trailer

 I used to play the original "Civilization" game when I was a kid. You used strategy & resource allocation to build up cities and control areas of a map. It was very addicting & was a fun way to simulate the evolution of nation states.

A few years ago I bought my brother Civ IV for his birthday, since he also used to love the game when we were younger. Even though the core gameplay was similar, the graphics were light years better & the game was much more sophisticated, overall. He says he's spent many hours building nations & empires, so apparently it's just as engrossing as the original.

I recently saw a trailer for the latest installment of the series created by Sid Meier. This game moves off our home planet, among the stars.

Civilization: Beyond Earth

The trailer for the new Civilization is cinematic & doesn't show any of the gameplay. However, it is a thought-provoking look at man's destiny to leave the planetary womb of Earth, to find other inhabitable worlds throughout the infinite expanse of interstellar space.

I've posted here many times about the importance on space travel for the survival of the human species.

The Monkey Buddha Archives:

Space Travel

Besides the technological hurdles that must be overcome, we tend to forget the emotional dimension that will inevitably accompany humanity's migration off-planet. The trailer very effectively conveyed the deep emotional experience that will be felt by our descendants when this journey begins. It also shows the influence of ancient institutions, such as religion & politics, will have on the endeavor.

Ultimately, human beings must break out of this tiny speck in the Universe if we are to continue our genetic & memetic evolution. If we have a destiny, it is among the stars. The time to start reaching for them is now...

The Monkey Buddha:

Travel Among the Stars

Reverse Evolution

I saw this funny image on the Tumblr blog Inner Cosmos, showing an alternate reality in which apes have evolved from humans.

This bizarre fact is being taught to a class of intelligent monkeys, using a chart showing the reversed evolution of hominids.

The writing on the board also shows that math is universal, since arithmetic was apparently independently derived by these smart apes.

'Evolution' Shadow Sculpture

On io9, I saw this video of a 3D sculpture that can be rotated to form different shadows.

The artist is J. V. Muntean & this particular shadow sculpture, Evolution 1, can be rotated three ways to show the development of man from an ape-like creature.

These ingenious constructions can be seen as a metaphor- for the idea that the changing forms we see in the world around us are only slices of higher-dimensional space. 

Like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", our senses can't directly perceive these higher forms. We only experience the "shadows" they project into our awareness in 3D space.

Becoming Human

Nova: "Evolution"

I was just watching a Nova episode on PBS about our current knowledge of human pre-history.

Becoming Human:
Last Human Standing

It's difficult to get a perspective on the countless tribes, clans, & societies throughout history, all around the globe who have contributed to the human story. I imagine overall human evolution as an amoeba-like phenomenon, feeling into the earth's environments to create paths of survival.

The fate of the Neanderthals seems to still be uncertain, but it seems likely that humans simply engulfed & destroyed the less intelligent species. Humans probably encountered the Neanderthals, thought they were inferior beasts and destroyed them. People think of Neaderthals as savage brutes, but humans have proven to be the most successful killing machines ever. Fortunately, our genetic disposition for interconnectedness is greater than our animal instincts of aggression.

Anyway, after mentally drifting through the vast epochs of humanity's unfathomable intricacy for a few minutes... I came to my senses and realized what's really important- Obama bowed to the Emperor of Japan! Why does he hate America so much!?!?!?!?!?

We have evolved... right?

Milestones in Human & Cosmic Evolution

I saw the above graph on r/coolguides, by Visual Capitalist. Although it is not a totally accurate representation of the morphological progress that led to human beings, it still gives a sense of the vast evolutionary history that has spanned the eons - resulting in our present state.

Here's another chart showing more specifically the hominid evolutionary tree:

Smithsonian Institution:
Human Family Tree

The sense of the long, continuous chain of life that has come before us is humbling and profound. The fact that we are here at all is the deepest of mysteries. It can be explained away with extensive screeds about God, evolution, or the Big Bang, but these are all just monkey grunts that only hint at the true nature of the infinite reality we inhabit.

For a real mind trip, there's this cosmic evolutionary spiral I also saw on the Visual Capitalist site, but was originally from Pablo Carlos Buddassi:

Evolve TV

Evolve TV is a new site that (so far) has two great interviews by the web's most influential progressive bloggers. The interviews are broken up into segments you can view at your leisure.

Duncan Black, aka Atrios, of the widely-read blog Eschaton.com talks with Dr. Paul Myers regarding Evolution and Intelligent Design. Duncan was kind enough to post about Da Vinci's Challenge in exchange for designing a new Eschaton logo for his site. This is an insightful interview with excellent discussion covering many aspects and viewpoints of this topic.

I personally wish the very un-scientific term 'evolution' would be discarded in favor of 'natural selection', which is observable fact. Here are my views on this ridiculous 'controversy.' The fact that this issue is even getting a hearing in a Pennsylvania court is a goddamn national disgrace. We look like a nation of ignorant fools when it comes to matters of science vs. religion.

Also, Markos of DailyKos.com discusses topics regarding the Iraq Occupation and the Middle East in general with Dr. Juan Cole, a history professor and expert on Middle Eastern language, culture, and current events. Watching this interview is more informative than a year's worth of Fox News reports.

Many years ago, I had found a web page with quotes & insights from an esoteric Buddhist text, along with those by some of the greatest scientific minds of modern times.  It was an astounding collection of ideas.

I have studied most of the world's religions in depth, have read countless works of philosophy, & studied the many mysteries of the Universe that science has discovered so far. However, this single page contained the most profound, penetrating wisdom I had ever seen.

One day, when trying to re-visit the page, I found that the site had been taken down!!! I was alarmed that this amazing wisdom had vanished from the Web. Some time later, after searching the Internet for some keywords that I had remembered from the text, I finally found another site that had posted the content in its entirety.

Determined not to lose this information again, I bookmarked it, downloaded all of the page's contents on my own computer, & I'm now also going to mirror it here on my blog. This way, there's a better chance that people will see it & it will be available in the future. So, here it is... read these mind-shattering insights carefully & perhaps bookmark it for later contemplation, or share it, to open the eyes of others.

The Secret Doctrine

The primary source for this document is The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden. Alan Watts calls this work "a wonderfully lucid account of the Madhyamika (or 'middle-way') School of Buddhism, a method of meditation and enlightenment which was worked out sometime between 150 and 250 AD by the great Indian sage and pundit, Nagarjuna." 

Holomovement

The world is movement.

"The tangible world is movement, say the Masters, not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are no objects 'in movements', it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us: they are nothing but movement."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Wholeness is flowing movement. With the hologram, the movement of interference patterns of coherent light enfolds a subtle range of structures and orders. In a similar, but unthinkably vaster, way, the whole movement or "holomovement" of the universe carries the implicate order and allows us to see and experience our four-dimensional space-time world."
- Briggs and Peat, Looking Glass Universe


Movement arises from flashes of energy.

"This movement is a continued and infinitely rapid succession of flashes of energy (in Tibetan tsal or shoug). All objects perceptible to our senses, all phenomena of whatever kind and whatever aspect they assume, are constituted by a rapid succession of instantaneous events."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Mind, I believe, exists as fleeting energy in parallel universes. The universe we perceive consists of the overlap of these fleeting flashes of energy. The patterns create mind as surely as they create matter. Both the existence of matter and the perception of it are the same thing."
- Fred Allen Wolf, Parallel Universes


A single result arises from many causes.

"Nothing is produced by one single cause; the combination of several causes is always necessary to bring about a result. The seed without the co-operation of earth, dampness, light, etc. will never become a tree."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Though the universe is in some sense determined, it is in another more important sense multidimensional, creative, and indeterminate, constantly unfolding new 'forms' or subtotalities which are expressions of the whole. The galaxy, the city, the corporation, even the very cells of a human's body are in a ceaseless energy exchange like water flowing through a vortex."
- Briggs and Peat, Looking Glass Universe


The microcosm and macrocosm are intimately connected.

"The cycle of Interdependent Origins thus takes place in everything, everywhere, in the infinitely small as in the infinitely great. Its development does not take place progressively in time; the twelve causes...are always present, co-existent and interdependent, their activity is interconnected, and they only exist on with the other."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"The development of structures in what is called microevolution mirrors the development of structures in macroevolution and vice versa. Microstructures and macrostructures evolve together as a whole."
- Erich Jantsch, Creative Evolution


The World as Mental Projection

"Mind" is a description not a thing.

"During his meditations, while watching his mind with close attention, he [the student studying the Secret Teachings] has attained Lhag Thong and 'seeing more' than most men, he has contemplated the continual arising and disappearance of ideas, of volitions, of memories, and so on, which pass like a procession of short-lived bubbles floating down a river. He has realized for himself that 'mind' is only a word indicating a series of mental phenomena."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"For the operation of the nervous system, there is no inside or outside, but only maintenance of correlations that continuously change (like the indicator instruments in a submarine)."
"Self-consciousness, awareness, mind - these are phenomena that take place in language.."
"'Mind' is not an entity but can be ascribed to a system exhibiting regular behavior."
- Humberto Maturana, The Tree of Knowledge


The apparent world is a creation of the observer.

"It is this world which we watch like a play which unfolds outside of ourselves while, in fact, there is nothing there but a canvas bearing many colored patterns, which we have woven and printed in ourselves according to the indications of our erroneous knowledge."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"The apparent world, the one which is perceived, with its figures, its brightness, its colors, is a psychical product, a creation of the observer. The figures seen on the vault of heaven are neither the celestial bodies, nor the true clouds or the falling stars, but are only effigies which the observer's psyche has created and localized how and where it can."
- Vasco Ronchi, Optics, The Science of Vision


All that we perceive are our own projections.

"The greatest saint, even if he has sacrificed a thousand times all that he held most dear, even his life itself, for love of others, for that of a God or for a noble ideal, remains a prisoner of samsara if he has not understood that all that is a childish game, empty of reality, a useless phantasmagoria of shadows which his own mind projects on the infinite screen of the Void"
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"...All sensation will be the reconstruction of objects in space and time from apparent or virtual images of those objects recorded in the cortex. All that we sense as 'out there' is projected from our 'witness' of the recorded virtual images."
- Fred Alan Wolf, Parallel Universes


Memories are painted over our screen of perception.

"This root originally free from any admixture, origin of the illusory world in which we live is a fleeting contact with some unknowable instant of Reality, some indefinable force which the vasanas [memories] obscure at once, superimposing on it the screen on which the images which we see, are painted."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Consciousness unfolds like a computer displaying its contents on a screen. A considerable part of that display comes from the past and is confused with the self."
- Briggs and Peat, Looking Glass Universe


Our Illusory Self

Thought encloses itself in its own world.

"What then is this activity from which one ought to abstain? It is the disordered activity of the mind which, unceasingly, devotes itself to the work of a builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Thought forms a world of its own in which it is everything. It rectifies itself and imagines there's nothing else but what it...thinks about."
- David Bohm, in RE-VISION 1


We are the many fragments of others.

"The Secret Teachings lead the pupil further. They teach him to look, with the same serene indifference at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity displayed by the body. He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing of all that is from him, is him. He, physically and mentally, is the multitude of others.
"This 'multitude of others' includes the material elements - the ground, one might say - which he owes to his heredity, to his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.
"On the mental plane, this 'multitude of others' includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his 'I', form there a swarming throng."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"The origin of chaos is in our fragmented, atomistic thought. Only when thought is not there would it be possible to perceive what is beyond thought."
- David Bohm, in RE-VISION 1


We do not exist as a soul or individual self.

"The answer to those that imagine that Buddhist salvation consists in the annihilation of the 'ego', at the death of the 'person', is that, as Buddhism denies the existence of an 'ego' or a soul, whatever be the name given to it, there cannot be any question of the annihilation of that which is held to be non-existent.
"In reality there is annihilation but it is that of false views, of ignorance, and more exactly of the belief in the existence of an 'ego' which is independent, homogeneous and permanent, a belief which deforms our understanding of the world in deforming our mental vision."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects 

"Humans come to think of the individual self as a fundamentally separate 'thing' which persists despite an immensity of changes that take place in one's life."
- Briggs and Peat, Looking Glass Universe


Beyond Thought

The void is an absence of anything we can conceive of.

"Void is understood as a state in which the elements do not produce any combination, give rise to no phenomenon, a state in which only forces, latent and non-manifest, exist. Being the sphere of complete absence of manifestation, the Void is inconceivable."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Nothingness' is not the vacuum of physics, loaded with geometry and field fluctuations; it is a nothingness devoid of structure, law or plan..."
- John Wheeler, "Frontiers of Time"


Insight is a process that bypasses thought.

"To go beyond virtue and vice, opinions and beliefs is to go beyond the mental constructions which are built up by the mind, unceasingly, and to recognize, by transcendent insight, that they are void of reality. It is also to recognize, by transcendent insight, that which has been imagined as practicing virtue, surrendering to vice, as holding opinions and elaborating theories, as traveling towards a goal and reaching the goal, is nothing but an inconsistent phantom, devoid of reality."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Insight is an intelligence beyond any of the energies that could be defined in thought. Insight directly transforms matter; it sort of by-passes thought as of little consequence."
- David Bohm, in RE-VISION 1


Consciousness continually creates the universe.

"According to the Secret Teachings the origin of things is not situated in any place or moment of past time; it is produced now, at each instant, in our minds. At every moment the subjective image which is the world, arises in our mind only to sink back and dissolve in it the moment after, like the 'waves which arise from the sea and fall back into it'.
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"Not in the dim past but continuously by conscious mind is the miracle of creation wrought."
- Sir Arthur Eddington


The Great Liberation

"...The well-informed dreamer may cease taking pleasure in dreaming. He may stop imitating those dreamers who, enjoying the phantasmagoria which they watch and in which they play a part, persist in wishing to remain asleep. In truth, why do the dreamers fear awakening, why do they imagine in advance other dreams of hells and heavens which await them after death? It is because they fear that with the disappearance of the 'images seen in dreams', the illusory 'Ego' which is an integral part of them will disappear. They have not yet perceived that the real face of this chimerical 'Ego' is the face of Death. As long as the idea of this impermanent Ego lasts, this simple mass of elements which various causes have brought together and which other causes will separate, death also subsists. The Dhammapada alludes to the disappearance of this phantom from the field of our mental activity when it refers to whom 'death does not see', that is, he for whom death does not exist.
"To wake up...The Buddhas have done nothing else than this, and it is this awakening which has made them become Buddhas."
- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

"History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken."
- James Joyce, Ulysses

"There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being."
- Albert Einstein

"Subtle, sparkling, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations... That is the radiance of thine own true nature."
- Bardo Thodol

Alien Communication

Deep Sea Basket Star

People are so excited at the prospect of being able to communicate with 'alien' beings.

I think it's silly to assume that we will be able to exchange information with other-worldy or other-dimensional life any better than we already do with bizarre Earth creatures such as jellyfish or lizards.

There is a chance that the reports of humanoid lifeforms, like the virtually cliché Greys or Reptilians, exist. There is an even better chance that other dynamic forms that we may interpret as "life" will be strange to the point of near incomprehensibility.

I saw this video linked in Posthuman Blues and thought that this could represent some mode of unfamiliar communication or other function which our minds cannot even associate with.

There's another Related Video of abstract eye candy that is pure computer-generated craziness. I wonder, "what if these weird visual forms were actually some kind of completely alien, unimagined intelligence trying to engage me?" I'd like to know how SETI or NASA or any agency on Earth would propose to interact with such beings...

The Evolution of Form



Biogenesis

Messages From Our "Cosmic Friends"

I recently came across a true Internet gem, which features some of my favorite things:  conspiracy theories, aliens, & (most of all) crazy graphic design:

Cosmic-People.com

TALKS WITH TEACHINGS 
FROM MY COSMIC FRIENDS

I highly recommend bookmarking this page, and exploring the wealth of information & awesome imagery on the website.

Basically, it seems to be a channel for communication from benevolent alien beings. It is also meant to warn against humans being eventually "chipped," with a computer implant like the "Apple iThink" I came up with:

Monkey Buddha Archives:

Apple iThink & The Evolution of the Mind

Apparently, being "chipped" will allow evil aliens to exert complete control over humanity. These malevolent beings, called "Saurions" seem to be the same kind of entities David Icke calls "Reptilian Shape-shifters".

Of course, the way to defeat these negative forces is through the usual means- self-awareness, cosmic consciousness, love, intelligence, etc.

Regardless of the legitimacy of it all, I can appreciate the effort that it took to create all the absurdly intriguing graphics featured on the site.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

Simulating the Merging of Galaxies

 

On Reddit I saw this NASA simulation of galaxies being formed, as cosmic gases and material coalesce due to gravitational forces.

How Galaxies Form: A simulation from NASA shows how patches of stars and dust merge together into galaxies

The scales of distance and time are impossible for the human mind to fully comprehend. However, we can still understand, calculate, and simulate these vast celestial forces. By doing so, we learn more about our Universe and, therefore, ourselves as an integral part of it.

Speaking of self-reflection, while searching for similar animations, I also saw this NASA video of galactic evolution on an even larger scale. Here, the strands of stellar material that thread between & form galaxies, resemble neural cells connecting throughout the fractal universal mind field.

2001: A Space Odyssey- Noir Poster

This weekend, during a break from celebrating Independence Day, I got into reading some ideas about the meanings in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It is one of my favorite movies, because of its artistic vision concerning the evolution and future of humanity.

On this isn't happiness, I saw this cool poster by Marko Manev, from a series of "Noir" posters.

Noir Series Vol. 2

  

The artist also created this set of posters that I liked from the Star Wars trilogy.

History of Video Game Graphics

Since I've been posting about video games lately,  I wanted to share a cool series of videos that I saw on BoingBoing.

The Monkey Buddha Archives:

Video Games

These informative & nostalgic videos trace the history of one of my favorite aspects of video games- the graphics.

Here is a link to a video playlist of the whole series:

YouTube Playlist

A Brief History of Graphics

Although the game play & story are extremely important in making a quality video game, being a graphic artist makes me especially interested in the visual aspects of games.

I was born in 1978, and my first game console was Atari 2600. Through the years my brothers & I had the Atari, Commodore 64, Nintendo NES, Sega Genesis, and the Sony Playstations.

I've personally watched the evolution of gaming progress from using monochrome, blocky pixels to the photorealistic, immersive 3D graphics we see today. In fact, I feel like my life has progressed in parallel to the development of video game technology.

 Pitfall, 1982

Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception, 2007

As new systems (including virtual reality interfaces like Oculus Rift) are developed, we will be opening new possibilities of what the human mind can experience.

The distinction between the "real" world and digital worlds will continue to be merged. People will keep exploring new ways for our nervous system to interface with the infinite possibilities that arise from the realms of our imagination.