"The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light." ~ Joseph Campbell
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” -- Edgar Allan Poe
Forget all the standard art forms—don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies, and above all don’t think you’ll get a happening by putting all these together.
Marshall McLuhan discusses Harold Innis's idea of time and space...
"Industrialism implies technology and the cutting of time into precise fragments suited to the needs of the engineer and the accountant." -- Harold Innis
"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it." -- Alan Watts
“Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion. And we have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible.
And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word “now”; we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline on the watch. And as a result of this fabulous idea, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because the present is instantly vanishing - it goes so quickly. It is always becoming past. And we have the sensation, therefore, of our lives as something that is constantly flowing away from us. We are constantly losing time. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to be wasted. Time is money. And so, because of the tyranny of this thing, we feel that we have a past, and we know who we are in terms of our past. Nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were.
And we think we also have a future. And that is terribly important, because we have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply what we are looking for. You see, if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.”
— Alan Watts, British philosopher, writer, and speaker (1915-1973)
"At instant speeds, everybody begins to live inside a 360-degree module in which every event echoes every other event back and forth at electric speeds, and all events bounce off each other creating patterns. There is one optimistic feature. The mind moves very much faster than light. Light travels to Mars in minutes. The mind can go and come back from Mars in an instant many times. The mind can actually recognize all these electric patterns as easily as it can alphabetic letters. It's very much faster than the computer."
-- Marshall McLuhan in McLuhan Dissects the Executive, Business Week Magazine, p.118, June 24, 1972.
Ron & John tell the story of a camping trip encounter with Bigfoot!
Bigfoot, also known as sasquatch, is an ape-likecryptid that purportedly inhabits forests, mainly in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. Bigfoot is usually described as a large, hairy, bipedalhumanoid. The term "sasquatch" is an anglicized derivative of the word "sésquac" which means "wild man" in a SalishNative American language.
"Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events." - Marshall McLuhan
Picnic In Space: "The artist [...] is always trying to pep up perception"
"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." - Marshall McLuhan
"The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action," - Marshall McLuhan
"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." - Marshall McLuhan
They still think in the old patterns, 19th-century patterns, but they live mythically. They live surrounded by mythic monsters like go-go girls. [At the bar] Aren’t they going to turn that down? “Waiting for go-go.” “The medium is the message.” “Growing – growing up absurd.” The go-go girls ordinarily have a cage… [winces] while appearing to manifest their energies untrammelled, unconstrained, sound in this kind of world is not used as something to be listened to. It is a kind of foam rubber which you press against/it presses back against you, makes you feel kind of wanted. Sound, in the new world, of dance and song is not for listening. It’s for making. And so the go-go girls, locked up each in her little world, represents a kind of theatre of the absurd, in which all communication has broken down. In fact, no attempt is really made to communicate. Each puts on his own show in his own little straitjacket. - Marshall McLuhan
