The Helping Friendly Foundation Proudly Presents
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The Helping Friendly Book Stand Project: Part I
Changing how you feel about book depositories.
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Helping Friendly Book Club 28 Meets This Tuesday
"The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge"
by Jeremy Narby
June 5, 2018
8:15 PM at The Wild Detectives
Add To Your Calendar
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Hello Old Friend,
Come shed your cosmic skin with the Helping Friendly Book Club at The Wild Detectives this Tuesday evening at 8:15pm. We’re going to tell a story about a magical place called The Helping Friendly Forest and how we can all help each other get there. We’re also going to be voting for our next 3 books to read, and taking our consciousness down the the molecular level so we can converse with the vital essences of plants and bring back knowledge - maybe.
We are happy to be back outside on the patio this time and we’re going to mix up the format just a little bit with the debut an experimental ‘panel discussion’ of sorts, so don’t miss this Helping Friendly History in the making.
The Discussion Prompt will be sent out before Tuesday, so keep an eye out.
It's all coming to a head.
Yours in the Foam,
Cole
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PS. Check out the Updated Photo Archives on the website. Maybe you can spot yourself. There's also a list of the date, location, and Cosmic Door Prize Question for all 27 Helping Friendly Book Clubs ever, although we didn't invent the Cosmic Door Prize until after we read 'The Giver', so they start there. Phyllotaxis.
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If you don't have time to read the book you can watch this 12 minute video and be totally set for our conversation. I recommend everyone watch this video before the meeting on Tuesday actually, it's a great primer.
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Helping Friendly Book Ballot - June 2018
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Where should we search for the Secrets to Eternal Joy and Never Ending Splendor next?
We will vote for our next 3 books at our meeting on Tuesday.
“All About Love” by Bell Hooks
“Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard
“Women Who Run With Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels” by Loretta Graziano Breuning
“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
“On Glory Roads: A Pilgrims Book about Pilgrimage” by Eleanor Munro
“Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind” by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer
“A History of God” by Karen Armstrong
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The Helping Friendly Forest
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Conceptual models are great, so think of it like this: ‘Helping Friendly Book Stands’ are like trees. Even though we can’t observe a tree transmuting poisonous carbon-dioxide into life-supporting oxygen with our senses, we know it’s happening. ‘Helping Friendly Book Stands’ do something very similar. Like the air we breathe, libraries and books support everything in the most fundamental way.
When you plant a tree by itself it has a certain degree of influence, but when you plant enough trees, at a certain point they become a forest, and a forest has a much greater degree of influence, it transcends and includes. A forest truly is something greater than the sum of all its parts. A forest has its own ecosystem.
Phase I of The Helping Friendly Plan to elevate the public conversation is to reach that transformational tipping point by funding and installing one ‘Helping Friendly Book Stand’ for every book we’ve read on the Quest so far, which is currently 28, about to be 29 on June 5th.
Phase II of The Plan is to create a “Helping Friendly Book Stand Kit” that we can ship that will allow us to keep growing into other cities like Austin, Houston, and beyond.
Phase III of The Plan, which is our true aim, is to reach the point where we have the resources, the connections, and the public and private support to commission artists to create one-of-a-kind, large scale, outdoor urban art sculptures that also function as free public book exchanges. We want to use art to reframe the way people think about reading. To plant this Vision squarely in your mind, the aspirational goal for Phase III is to create something in Dallas at least as iconic as the famous Cloud Gate “Bean” Sculpture in Chicago, but that also functions as a mysterious, free public book exchange.
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The Helping Friendly Compass Rose
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“The Intellectual Sphere has a relationship to the Intellectual Compass, the latter being the means by which the Intellectual Sphere might be navigated [Ship of SEJNES], and the former being an image of the world created in the human mind, which Bacon believes could be accomplished by means of his Great Instauration. These two Spheres or Worlds are shown in the 1640 Advancement of Learning title-page, wherein the Visible World or World of Nature (i.e. what we perceive of the nature of nature, nature of man and nature of God) is on the right-hand Wisdom (or Sun) pillar and the intellectual sphere is on the left-hand Understanding (or Moon) pillar of the Tree of Life picture. Bacon’s idea is that, by exploring and getting to know the Visible World, the human mind would acquire a perfect image of the Visible World created by God (i.e. Creation, the Universe, Nature), which image is the Intellectual Sphere, and thus know the wisdom and power—the laws or forms—that created the Visible Sphere." - Peter Dawkins
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What did you learn about DNA that amazed you the most?
How did life on earth originate?
Where does knowledge exist?
Where does Knowledge exist before it has been discovered by humans?
By what means can knowledge be discovered by humans?
Is knowledge equivalent to intelligence?
Where in nature does intelligence exist?
Is consciousness equivalent to intelligence?
Where is consciousness located?
Is consciousness located in the brain?
Or is the brain more like a TV antenna?
What are the implications?
What presuppositions about the Truth do we make without realizing it?
What are the limits of the ‘Rational Gaze’?
How do the different layers of the Cosmos connect with each other?
How does heaven connect with earth?
How does your unconsciousness connect with your consciousness?
If Shamans have gained access to powerful knowledge via hallucinogenic plants, what’s the likelihood Western Culture also learned from hallucinogenic plants at some point?
Where in nature can you point out “randomness”?
What strikes you as a mystery worth contemplating?
Have you ever had any experiences with a Shaman?
What do you think about the “Panspermia” theory?
What is ‘cowboy science’?
How many “overview effect” type experiences does the author go through?
Does this book touch on any of the broader themes in our Quest for SEJNES?
What other Helping Friendly Books have snakes in them?
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P.S. - This is part of the Cosmic Door Prize for Tuesday. Somebody's going home with an AncestryDNA Kit and is going to learn a whole lot about themselves. #youridentityisamosaic
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INTERVIEWER: Could you sum up your book "The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the Origins of Knowledge"?
JEREMY NARBY: Research indicates that shamans access an intelligence, which they say is nature's, and which gives them information that has stunning correspondences with molecular biology.
I: Your hypothesis of a hidden intelligence contained within the DNA of all living things is interesting. What is this intelligence?
JN: Intelligence comes from the Latin inter-legere, to choose between. There seems to be a capacity to make choices operating inside each cell in our body, down to the level of individual proteins and enzymes. DNA itself is a kind of "text" that functions through a coding system called "genetic code," which is strikingly similar to codes used by human beings.
Some enzymes edit the RNA transcript of the DNA text and add new letters to it; any error made during this editing can be fatal to the entire organism; so these enzymes are consistently making the right choices; if they don't, something often goes wrong leading to cancer and other diseases.
Cells send one another signals, in the form of proteins and molecules. These signals mean: divide, or don't divide, move, or don't move, kill yourself, or stay alive. Any one cell is listening to hundreds of signals at the same time, and has to integrate them and decide what to do.
How this intelligence operates is the question...
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'There are those things that are known and those that are unknown, and in between them are the Doors." - Jim Morrison
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One of the first big decisions you face when you embark on the Quest to discover the lost Secrets to Eternal Joy and Never Ending Splendor (#SEJNES) is what to take with you, and what to leave behind. When you go on a ‘Hero’s Journey’, there are only so many presuppositions about the truth you can start with, and only so many you can hold onto at any one time. You have to assume you’re going to be discovering new ideas along the way, and in order to make room for those ideas, you’re going to have to let some of your old ideas go. I imagine this process being something similar to the way a lobster molts, or a snake sheds its skin…
The absolute sovereignty of the “rational gaze” is one presupposition the Western Mind finds especially difficult to loosen its grip on because it's so fundamental to the materialistic worldview of the last 200 years or so. Fortunately for us, we’ve already learned that the ‘map is not the territory’ and we’ve been developing our capacity to use language ‘like a thorn to remove a thorn’ for sometime now. We already know that our ‘Identity is like a Mosaic’, and in order to remain supple and travel well we have to keep our Identity lubricated. ‘Wet things don’t pop bubbles.’
Jeremy Narby is a master at this and he takes us with him on his own first person adventure of discovery in “The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” He offers us a window into his own rational thinking process as he grapples with trying to reconcile the inexplicable (from a western perspective) reality of South American shamanistic knowledge with the inherent limitations of the fractured rational gaze. A vital sense of WONDER is profoundly important on the Quest for SEJNES, and this book gives us great deal to wonder about. This book offers the serious seeker a paradigm shift, a “paradoxical passage to the Otherworld”, and a paradigm shift is something akin to shedding your philosophical skin.
Join us June 5th when we collectively “defocalize” the programming of our rational gaze and re-examine our presuppositions about the inherent Intelligence of Nature.
Yes there will be a #CosmicDoorPrize, and yes first timers are welcome, so come for the #mentalpollination and stay for the #brainhoney. Let's shed our skin for the summer.
As ever,
Cole
@hfbclub
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“The great testing ground or field of education is set up because of two basically conflicting principles within us. You can call them by different names: Good and Evil gives you one fundamental pair of names, or Love and Hate, or Strife and Fellowship, and so on. All the principles that exist in this evolving and transmuting universe derive from this fundamental Law of Opposites, - two conflicting principles that are striving against each other and which eventually create a union or fellowship. This was one of the basic principles taught in all the schools of initiation, the schools of the mysteries of old, and it is one of the fundamental teachings that runs through all of Francis Bacon’s work, whether sign with his Baconian name or signed under another name. He loved to put together ideas which have opposites in them, or put together words which are opposite in meaning. The great poets knew this secret. They used poetry in an initiatory way by putting two words which really have different meanings side by side, and the result gives this strange power, this certain something, which enters the psyche of the reader and stimulates something exciting or profound within them. If you read the Shakespeare works, especially the Sonnets, you will come across such words and ideas which are normally in conflict with each other, and yet the poet has brought about an exciting marriage, a union of opposites. This is known as the initiatory language, this placing together of opposites - the language of love.” - Peter Dawkins, The Path of Initiation
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The Secret between Shakespeare and Gemini is in the AAs.
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