This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Viet Nam War .

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair style is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue. Back in the Vietnam war however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical hospital. He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Vietnam.

Sally said, “I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.

As I read the documents, I learned why. It seems that during the Vietnam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities. Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious causalities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ‘sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ‘sixth sense’, their ‘intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ‘read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas. Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests. They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut. Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.

Here is a Typical Test:

The recruit is sleeping out in the woods. An armed ‘enemy’ approaches the sleeping man. The long haired man is awakened out of his sleep by a strong sense of danger and gets away long before the enemy is close, long before any sounds from the approaching enemy are audible.

In another version of this test the long haired man senses an approach and somehow intuits that the enemy will perform a physical attack. He follows his ‘sixth sense’ and stays still, pretending to be sleeping, but quickly grabs the attacker and ‘kills’ him as the attacker reaches down to strangle him.

This same man, after having passed these and other tests, then received a military haircut and consistently failed these tests, and many other tests that he had previously passed.

So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long.”

Comment:

The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years. Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural. Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive. Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole.The body has a reason for every part of itself.

Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ‘feelers’ or ‘antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out .

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems. It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds. It contributes to sexual frustration.

Conclusion:

In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error. It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.

The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us. When Delilah cut Sampson’s hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.

Reported by C. Young

“My name’s Randal, and I am an artist.”
In 2004, around the time I turned 30, I started introducing myself with that. I’d met and been deeply inspired by the great visionary artist Alex Grey, quit the factory job, and began a nearly year-long road trip exploring life and the country where I was born in an old pick-up truck named Suzie-Q.
The exploration continues.

Life appears to be made up of a truly overwhelming grid of gifts, and each one increases in elegance and detail the closer we look. Upon reflection, the only appropriate repsonse to these gifts seems to be gratitude. I try to make art about that.”

>>> View More on Randal Roberts Personal Site 

Joel Allen is getting a lot of attention for his grown-up treehouse nestled in the branches atop Whistler Mountain in B.C.

Allen, a 31-year-old unemployed software developer, started building the egg-shaped structure, dubbed the HemLoft, in 2008. He wrote on his website:

The driving force behind the whole thing was a simple, yet inexorable desire to build something cool. There were no practical motives or profound meanings. The fact that it was hiding below some of the richest properties in Western Canada wasn’t a political statement, it just happened to be where I found the perfect tree. And building with free materials wasn’t out of some principled ideal, it was just the only avenue I could afford. In the end, I was mysteriously compelled to build something cool, something beautiful … and apparently, I was willing to go to maniacal lengths to make it happen.

The treehouse was completed in the summer of 2011 and has been featured in U.S. design and architecture magazine, Dwell.

Media from around the world have since picked up the story of the HemLoft and now Allen risks losing the structure, illegally built on Crown land near multi-million dollar homes. He says:

It took a lot of work to build it, and I’d rather not take it down, just yet. So I’ve been thinking of ways to expose the HemLoft, while somehow making it legal. To the best of my knowledge, Squatting on Whistler Mountain, beneath some of Western Canada’s most luxurious mega-homes would not be looked favourably upon.

People who have visited Allen’s website have voted in a poll for Allen to try to purchase the land. As of Friday, Allen said no decision has been made on the future of the HemLoft.

Here are some photos of the HemLoft:

“It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget what really matters to you. With help from old and new friends, Candy turned the side of an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans into a giant chalkboard where residents can write on the wall and remember what is important to them. Before I Die is a public art project that invites people to reflect on their lives and share their personal aspirations in public space. Painted with chalkboard paint and stenciled with the sentence “Before I die I want to _______”, the wall becomes an enlightening way to understand  your neighbors and discover what matters most to the people around you. It creates a public space for contemplation and reminds us why we want to be alive in the world today. It’s a question that changed Candy after she lost someone she loved very much, and she believes the design of our public spaces can better reflect what matters to us as a community and as individuals. This was the basis for her graduate thesis.”

Featuring Dr Bernard Rollin, Gary Yourofsky Dr Richard Ryder, Dr Steven Best. Narrated by Dr Nick Gylaw.

“The Superior human?” is dedicated to 2012 Earth April (EA) which includes Earth Day and World Lab Animal Day.
EA official website : http://EarthApril.GoodEasy.info

the unlikely duo : 1970′s surrealist film Fantastic Planet, and Jason Schwartzmen shopping for records.

Have you ever watched the video series “What’s in my Bag?”. It’s incredible. Watching creatives shop for records while maintaining a running dialogue is really quite entertaining. And who better to source music and film from than people who are extremely passionate about it? Enter Jason Schwartzman. Super entertaining as an actor, and luckily just as entertaining in real life.

One of his picks: Fantastic Planet.
 

Watch it – that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Now, I realize I’m devloping a habit of posting two loosely related articles. And that Fantastic Planet and What’s in my Bag really have very little to do with each other. But I think that the connections between anything and everything are important to recognize. And the connection between these two things says a lot about something I hold very near and dear: curiosity.
At first I wanted to post just Fantastic Planet. But I haven’t formulated complete thoughts about it yet; only that I like it. So it seemed to me that it would just hang there in the blogosphere, void of context. The most important context I can give it (currently) is that it’s awesome and I’m glad to have found it. So, I wanted to say thanks to Jason Schwartzman and Amoeba Records. Thanks guys!

Why do I feel the need to give them a shout out? For Curiosity’s sake. Record shops can seem pretentious and exclusive. And in my experience with music-fanatics, there is an underlying desire to know it all. But Amoeba has put together this video series which unveils some of the mystery. It outs the guest’s thought process about music. Why they choose what they choose. In quite a few of the episodes, the choices are made almost at random (see the Elijah Wood episode where he chooses “Soviet Funk”). What’s in my Bag shows that in music (like anything), it is necessary to be curious in order to become knowledgeable.

So, I say, swallow your pride! If a conversation takes a turn into a territory you know nothing about, proudly proclaim “I know nothing about this, but am curious!”. It seems to me that when it comes to knowledge, it is not the knowing that is the best part, it is the coming to know. And I, for one, spent too many years in my (younger) youth trying to play it knowledgeable, trying to play it cool.

I would post an article about Fantastic Planet. But to emphasize the need to let your curiosity guide you I won’t!

Co.Exist provides a glimpse at humankind’s impact on the earth in a powerful animated globe video and some scientific research to explain what you see:

This tour of our glowing transportation and communication networks shows the majesty–and horror–of how mankind has altered the planet.

According to scientists, we’re currently in the geological epoch known as theHolocene, which has lasted for the last 12,000 years. The Holocene encompasses the rise of humanity since the last ice age. But some scientists think we have actually entered a new era, called the Anthropocene–an era in which the world no longer shapes humanity, but in which humanity shapes the world to its own purpose and does so to such an extent that it will have permanent effects of the geological record of our planet.

As scientists debate the merits of declaring we are in a new epoch (these things take time and lots of arguing), humanity plods on, continuing to make a massive impact on the planet. Globaia, an organization devoted to promoting an understanding of “big history,” has been working on mapping these impacts. We’ve already featured some of their stunning maps, but now they’ve stitched those together into the beautiful video you see above.

>>> Read More

Adam Yauch, the Beastie Boys member who went by the stage name MCA, had long practiced Tibetan Buddhism before his death, which was announced Friday in several news reports.

The cause of his death is unclear, but Yauch, who died at age 47, had been battling a cancerous tumor in his salivary gland in since mid- 2009 and was vocal about the role spirituality had played in his recovery efforts. Yauch, who was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, had practiced Buddhism since 1994.

In an email to the Beastie Boys fan club in 2010, Yauch asked supporters to meditate with him in “smashing apart all the cancer cells of the world.”

A few friends and I are meditating at the same time twice a day. 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. eastern standard time, for about an hour and half. We are picturing smashing apart all of the cancer cells in the world. We are visualizing taking the energy away from the cancer, and then sending it back at the cancer as lightning bolts that will break apart the DNA and RNA of the cells. If you have the time, please join us in whipping up this lightening storm. Mind over matter.

Yoko Ono later told Paste magazine that she would join Yauch in meditating.

In a 1994 interview with Tricycle Magazine, Yauch spoke in detail about his Buddhist spirituality, saying that he had explored “a lot of different religions and spiritual paths and Native Americans for a while” before visiting Nepal and Kathmandu (his second trip to the region) in the early 1990s and being exposed to Buddhism. Upon his return to the United States, he started reading the Dalai Lama’s books.

In the interview, Yauch explained his attraction to Buddhism:

The feeling I get from the rinpoches and His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] and Tibetan people in general. The people that I’ve met are really centered in the heart; they’re coming from a real clear, compassionate place. And most of the teachings that I’ve read about almost seem set up to distract the other side of your brain in order to give your heart center a chance to open up. In terms of what I understand, Buddhism is like a manual to achieve enlightenment—there are these five things and these six things within the first thing, and all these little subdivisions. And despite all of that right-brain information, it’s very heart-centered. At least that’s the feeling I get from the Tibetans. Also the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism have been passed down for a long time now. They have that system pretty well figured out.

>>> Read More 

What’s happening in Winnipeg? First it is listed as one of the up and coming hot beds for art and now a LSD theatre production inspired by Albert Hoffman’s discovery of LSD has popped up there titled The Sandwich: Transforming Consciousness Bite by Bite. Sounds like an influx of psychedelics might be responsible for fuelling the arts in a once unknown Canadian prairie town. Learn more below and check it out from May 9  to 12 at the Out Of Line Theatre if you are from or passing through Winnpeg:

Imagine taking a bite of a sandwich and having everything change.

From the wonderfully warped minds of Out of Line Theatre co-artistic directors Mia van Leeuwen and Ian Mozdzen comes The Sandwich: Transforming Consciousness Bite By Bite, a neo-psychedelic performance work inspired by Albert Hoffman’s serendipitous discovery of LSD. Billed as “part Alice in Wonderland, part Requiem For a Dream, part Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the piece, as van Leeuwen explains, “explores altered states as mind-opening experiences in which we may find some truth.”

The Alice-on-acid concept was planted in van Leeuwen’s mind three years ago. “I was talking to someone about the discovery of LSD, and he told me a bit of a wrong story,” she explains. “He was like, ‘Hey, did you know there was this scientist and some LSD fell onto his sandwich and he ate it?’ That concept blew my mind. As I researched it, I learned he got it sort of right and sort of wrong.”

Here’s the real story: in 1943, Hoffman, a Swiss chemist, absorbed a small amount of an unknown substance through his fingertips while attempting to re-synthesize ergot, a fungus that grows on diseased rye (“hence the sandwich reference,” van Leeuwen says). Hoffman’s resulting hallucinatory experience went down in the books as the first-recorded LSD trip.

“What I was fascinated by was what happened after its discovery,” van Leeuwen says.

>>> Read more

View concept video here >>>

THE SANDWICH: TRANSFORMING CONSCIOUSNESS BITE BY BITE
Out of Line Theatre
May 9 – 12,
Atomic Centre (167 Logan Ave.)