This very interesting think-piece from the arch-druid came via a friend. If our age is characterized by any one trait, I’d say it’s mythic illiteracy.

Dreams of a better world

By John Michael Greer

Created Jul 17 2008 – 07:12

http://www.energybulletin.net/print/45939

As it launched the modern worldview on its trajectory, the intellectual revolution of the 18th century – the Enlightenment, as it’s usually called – passed on a legacy with profoundly mixed consequences for the future. Central to the Enlightenment ethos was the claim that myths were simply inaccurate claims about fact, and should be replaced by more accurate claims founded on reason and experiment. This seems like common sense to most people nowadays, but like most things labeled “common sense,” it begs more questions and conceals richer ironies than a casual glance is likely to reveal.

One of those ironies became central to a discussion sparked by last week’s Archdruid Report post, when a reader took issue with my characterization of progress as a myth. Like most people nowadays, he assumed that “myth” meant a story that isn’t true, and drew the usual distinction between myth and science – that is, between the cosmological narratives of other cultures, which don’t usually make experimentally testable claims about the natural world, and the cosmological narratives of ours, which does. It took, as it usually does, several exchanges before he realized that the popular definition of myth he was using is not the only game in town.

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This is from the U.S. News and World Report website (http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/2008/01/09/embracing-alternative-care.html)

There is hope! We’re gradually making our point about conventional medicine’s incomplete picture. 

Many years ago Bob Friedman, John Nelson and I put our heads together to try to solve a problem for the publishing industry, and for the metaphysical (New Age) community. We were unable to have the impact he hoped to have, but perhaps the cause is not quite lost.

The problem is this. Suppose you’re someone new to metaphysics and you come across, say, “The Celestine Prophecy,” or “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” You go to your local bookstore (assuming you still HAVE a local bookstore and probably you ask what else they have by the same authors. But after a while, when you’re read everything James Redfield or Richard Bach had published, you might want more of the same, by other authors. You know (or anyway you assume) it exists. But how do you find it?

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A very interesting article

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/8469.html

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking — connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.

The first complete high-resolution map of the human cerebral cortex identifies a single network core that could be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.

Print-Quality Photo

The work by the researchers from Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Harvard Medical School marks a major step in understanding the most complicated and mysterious organ in the human body. It not only provides a comprehensive map of brain connections (the brain “connectome”), but also describes a novel application of a non-invasive technique that can be used by other scientists to continue mapping the trillions of neural connections in the brain at even greater resolution, which is becoming a new field of science termed “connectomics.”

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