After focusing on abstract ideas so long, this site is simply dedicated to subjects that interest me as well as video clips, games, and songs I like. In summary it is where I put personal items.
Col. Larry Wilkerson, Andrei Martanov, Stanislav Krapivnik, Sebastian Sas, Rachel Blevins, Lena Petrova, Max Blumenthal, Scott Ritter, Glenn Diesen, Jeffrey Sachs, Richard Wolff, Patrick Henningsen, Caleb Maupin, Carl Zha, Ben Norton, Sean Foo, Mohammad Marandi, Alastair Crooke, Laith Marouf, Michael Hudson, Warwick Powell, KJ Noh, Victor Gao, Li Jingjing, Sabby Sabs, Jamarl Thomas, Alex Krainer, Nima R. Alkhorshid, Danny Haiphong, Dr. Pascal Lottaz, Garland Nixon, Larry Johnson, Alex Christoforou, Alexander Mercouris, Judge Napolitano, Ray McGovern, Pepe Escobar, Col. Douglas Macgregor
La Vergine Degli Angeli is an aria from the 1862 Italian opera La forza del destino by Giuseppe Verdi. It is sung here by 16 year old Dutch-South-African soprano Amira Willighagen as part of her 2020 streaming concert "African Christmas with Amira and Friends." The full concert is available both on CD and DVD as "Streaming Shows of 2020" exclusively at Amira's website https://www.gelukskinders.org/en/store/. The concert was recorded in Pretoria, South Africa in late November 2020 and premiered December 23, 2020. Amira is accompanied by a men's choir compiled for the occasion by Christo Burger and a string orchestra. Piano and musical arrangement by Professor Charl du Plessis.
Amira Willighagen was catapulted to stardom at age 9 after auditioning for Holland's Got Talent in 2013. In this Dutch documentary made when she was 12, Amira reflects on her unexpected meteoric rise.
In 2023, I had the privilege of meeting Amira at a fan event in Madison, GA (U.S.A.) and took these adorable photos of her. She was 19.
Stranger Than Paradise opening scene, 1984. The song is I Put a Spell on You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Below, Norwegian singer Angelia Jordan records her own cover of the same song at 9 years old, in 2015.
After being temporarily kicked out of Zoetrope Studios while making the film Hammett, German director Wim Wenders filmed The State of Things, a self-reflexive film written extemporaneously while filming, in which Wenders reflects on the state of things in cinema. In this scene the fictitious producer Gordon waxes on to the director Friedrich about the reaction of some loan sharks he borrowed from to complete Friedrich's most recent black and white film. The scene was shot in a moving van while driving up and down Hollywood Blvd and ends with Friedrich and Gordon both being killed by the mob. The State of Things was filmed in Portugal and Hollywood, California.
The song What did you do out in Hollywood? was written by actor Allen Garfield, who played Gordon, especially for the scene.
Filmed noncontinuously from 1964 - 2012, the self-reflexive film Nema Aviona Za Zagred ends with the filmmaker Louis Van Gasteren reflecting back on his life at the age of 90. Van Gasteren died two years after completing the film at the age of 92. See the full film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7BhnI81P8w
In Westward the Women (1951), women hold a wagon upright to keep it from capsizing as a woman gives birth inside. The women strain as they wait to hear the baby's cry. Based on a story by Frank Capra.
In Man in the Wilderness (1971), a man left to die after being mauled by a bear reconciles with God and men as he survives and returns homeward to raise his son. Based on a true story.
In the Sony recoding studio in Salisbury, England, February 15, 2014. Her mother wrapping her in a coat to keep her warm while she records.
Amira Willighagen was by far the greatest classical singing prodigy since recording was invented. She is now 21 and still studying music at the University of Prague in South Africa, where she emigrated in 2018.
Achatnis Dichongta is a fourth-year student at the Margaret Shishak School of Music, Patkai Christian College in India. At the inaugural programme of the 4th Patkai Badminton Open Tournament, she performed “With All My Heart,” an Amira Willighagen cover from Amira's 2018 album by the same name. It is reported that her perfomance captivated the audience. Yet there is almost no publicity about Dichongta that I can find. So I am creating this post partly in hopes of search engines capturing the information. The language is Liangmai.
The Liangmai people are a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group and one of the Naga tribes primarily inhabiting the Tamenglong, Senapati, and Kangpokpi districts of Manipur, and the Peren district of Nagaland in Northeast India. They share a similar culture and language (Lianglad/Liangmai) with the Zeme and Rongmei tribes. The tribe, numbering around 50,000 to 80,000, has a rich, traditionally oral culture and is largely Christian.
Prymbra (often referred to as Jenni) is a German content creator, YouTuber, and Steam partner known for her gaming and "Let's Play" videos. She creates immersive content and often shares her emotional, often highly invested, experiences with video game characters. She has over 30K subscribers on YouTube and is active on Instagram. She describes herself as getting easily attached to game characters and often refers to her community as her "blazers".
Amira Willighagen appeared as a guest performer at the annual MAX Proms concert held in Utrecht, Netherlands on December 2, 2017. The program was later broadcast on Max TV on Christmas day. Amira was 13 years old. It was her last European stage performance before moving to South Africa. "Your Love" is the theme song from the 1968 spaghetti western "Once Upon a Time in the West," and was composed for the film by Italian composer Ennio Morricone.
I have written three books, 100 essays, and recorded over 100 videos describing my concept of an evolution of perception. Many subjects interest me that I would love to discuss. However, I don't because I don't want to distract from this one original idea, that I remain confident will be important to people one day. In short, I spent two decades writing about and communicating in any way I could think of this one theme, an evolution of perception.
The Evolution of Perception & The Cosmology of Substance: A Simpler Theory of Everything – June 24, 2004
Evolution of Perception Re-Explained: A radical new view of reality – February 25, 2021
Further Reflections: A discussion of the concept of the evolution of perception with a deep dive into the subject of causation – November 21, 2024
And three anthologies.
Two Philosophical Works: A Republication of The Evolution of Perception and Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, with a new introduction – April 13, 2024
EOP Trilogy: The three original books on the evolution of perception concept – January 26, 2025
Selected Essays: 46 essays on causation, the Soul, God, philosophy of mind, science, perception, and the teachings of Meher Baba – March 12, 2026
The song Unshaken (the second half of this video) is from the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption 2. Written by singer-songwriter D'Angelo and produced by Daniel Lanois, the words are based on the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda who often stated, "You must stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds," emphasizing remaining fearless and centered in God’s peace despite external chaos.
Featuring Daniel Lanois and Rhiannon Giddens.
In this cover of Unshaken below you can hear the lyrics better.
If we follow Meher Baba, ordinarily we think of ourselves as a person first, who has acquired specific karma in previous lives that we must play out. But really, if we think about it, we don't just have karma, but are our karma.
Let me give an analogy to clarify what I mean. We’ll use the analogy of a first person computer game.
Consider the popular computer game Red Dead Redemption 2. The game takes about 70 hours to complete its main missions and most people become extremely immersed in its story. In such a game a player not only becomes immersed in the story but even identifies with the character they are playing. If you watch reaction videos of the game you will see players refer to the main character Arthur in first person. Of course we all know that Arthur is really just the visual representation of scripted computer code.
Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2
Arthur is not a character who simply has a code added to him that determines his physique and actions. He is none-other than that code. Arthur is that code.
This gives us a good analogy by which to explain our relationship with our karma, as well as the sanskaras we have gathered that determines that karma.
Let me give an example of how events in the game are predetermined by the script embedded in its code. A main turn in the story is when Arthur visits a man named Thomas Downes and contracts Tuberculosis from him. People have asked if they can avoid this occurring. This is what ChatGPT had to say:
You can't put off visiting Thomas Downes indefinitely in Red Dead Redemption 2; the game forces the mission after a certain amount of time, usually when you try to rest or trigger another event, making it mandatory to progress and ultimately leading to Arthur contracting tuberculosis. Trying to avoid it too long results in Strauss intervening, locking you into the mission, and skipping it leads directly to the inevitable cough.
Now of course, the player playing the game is not controlled by such code. The player, like the soul of a man, is not really in the illusion of the game. He or she are simply observing it and identifying with Arthur.
Using this as an analogy, we can compare the scripted story to Arthur's karma. And the code in which that story is embedded can be compared to Arthur's sanskaras or impressions.
So the analogy goes like this:
The player is the soul, the conscious witness. He or she is not in the game, but immersed in it, and identifies his or her self as Arthur and feels the full emotional impact of the story.
The story is Arthur's karma.
The code that determines the events in the story can be compared to sanskaras.
Playable characters like Arthur don't have code. They are code. They don't exist and then someone adds code to them. They are that code. A person is his karma.
Everything about our lives, including the shape and look of our body and even the moment we will die is determined by our karma. Our body does not have consciousness. You who identify with your body and its actions have consciousness. And you are really a transcendent soul.
Clearly, Meher Baba says that we are not really our bodies or our actions, but are really the Oversoul, the witness. But those qualities we take ourselves to be before God-Realization, along with our life and all that occurs in it, is simply code. Sanskaric code.
So, though one’s real self is God, all that one currently takes himself to be, i.e. his body, his thoughts, the story of his life, are an illusion determined by his sanskaras.
A cinema operator who is cranking the projector with his own hand and is at the same time deeply absorbed in watching the images on the screen. He becomes so deeply absorbed that he forgets that it is his own hand which is cranking the machine, out of which is being projected all of this which he sees on the screen. He laughs and weeps according to the scenes presented on the screen. In the process he forgets the unreality and non existing state of the scenes on the screen. (Meher Baba, Intelligence Notebooks, Second Notebook, p. 32)
First of all, the United States Baba world, as it is currently put together, has no future at all. Throughout history, numerous minor religions and cults have vanished due to cultural shifts or outright self-destruction. Examples from the ancient past include Neoplatonism, Manichaeism, Donatism and the Adamites. More modern examples include the Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians, Aum Shinrikyo, and Heaven's Gate. An example of a dying religion is the Shakers, who have dwindled from thousands in the 1800s to only two remaining members as of recent records.
The Baba followers will not commit suicide, nor will they be exterminated or banned by any authorities. The reason for their disappearance will be loss of interest. The Baba followers are 70-90 years old. Their children drifted away long ago and there are no new converts.
Why the loss of interest?
The current surviving followers of Baba came from the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. They were adverse to authority, certainty, any fixed orthodox interpretations of Baba's writings, and anything they perceive as organized. This is a recipe for extinction as no one agrees on anything except that the community never organize into a religion. There is no positive conception of what they are. They also happened to be hostile to young people and fresh ideas due to a kind of generational narcissism common to their generation. They were also adverse to relinquishing positions. So instead of retiring, they just lost their vitality. Essentially they were afraid of the future and wishing things to remain stagnant. They became a very uninteresting gerontocracy with no clear ideas.
So, why is this paper titled The Future of the Baba World? For while I think the Baba community in its current state is doomed to die out, I see Baba himself leaving behind a legacy that will endure. It simply needs to be rediscovered by a generation in the future. When they do die off this will liberate enormous potential to be put together in numerous vigorous and interesting ways.
Why would anyone bother? What would be the allure? Why would it spread? And what would the consequences of such a vibrant movement, based on Baba's actual teachings, be? A lot of good questions. I'm going to try to answer each one.
It sounds terrible, but philosophy would not exist if there weren't people with ideas that need straightening out. A philosopher doesn't think in a vacuum, but most of his deeper thoughts are inspired from hearing other people say the most absurd things, and his desire to help them with those thoughts. There is no better example of this than Socrates, who walked with his followers in the streets of Athens helping people with their thinking -- and in doing so leaving the first great written legacy of wisdom on nearly every subject. Philosophy can actually be described as hearing thinking and seeking to improve upon it. So a philosopher should never condemn ignorance, but be grateful for it. As it is his life's blood.
This of course will never thrill the people around a philosopher. Socrates was, after all, sentenced to death for his efforts. And rather than discouraging future thinkers his sacrifice only inspired more to want to be like him. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest.
Most people don't like to hear they might be wrong, though real contemplatives enjoy learning they are wrong, for it opens up new vistas.
