Just a reminder, we’re down to only three weeks left to The End Of Days, per the Maya Calendar.
Just so this isn’t a complete waste, here’s an interesting video about some intricately carved caves in India. It is presented in the usual “space aliens did it” kind of way, but the carving is excellent.
What all these folks forget is that prior to the modern metal tool era, we had a few million years of experience in breaking, shaping, and carving stone. Talk about your ‘mature technology’… So my belief is a simpler one: Lower a carver on ropes from above, have them start a hole in the wall. Once it’s begun, lower the master carvers down to do the finish work on the statuary. Use rope ladders for entry / exit. Nice protection from marauding bandits…
I had no idea the place existed, prior to discovering this video. I could easily accept that there were some fairly bright and competent folks around in the past, and they were as able to think of cool things to build as we are today. Of course, it had to be discovered by a Smith…
So, with that, remember to make your End Of Days shopping list, stock up on ‘libation’, and don’t pay any bills that can be put off to Jan 1 of next year… just in case the world does end. Oh, and you might want to open some of your Christmas presents a bit early. (What? Hey, it’s an excuse. Doesn’t have to be a good one, just plausible enough ;-)
BTW, I’d put a good raincoat on that shopping list. The Dresden Codex says it’s really just the start of a new calendar cycle that is marked by LOTS of rain. Given what is happening in Northern California right now, I tend to think they got it right…
Musings from the Chiefio 
How very sad that the History Channel has become an outlet for “alien civilizations on Earth” nonsense. Their notion of factual reporting seems to be history.
The cave temples certainly are interesting, though!
Maya con Dios, señor.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
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They deliver world wide and I received my stuff within 24 hours after ordering.
I watched the Ancient Aliens series with fascination. With equal fascination, I watched this point by point rebuttal (3hours). It’s mostly very well argued.
Ancient Aliens Debunked – (full movie) HD
The world is going to end on my birthday?!? I don’t suppose I should expect a lot of presents… or many guests, for that matter Just my luck.
Maybe I can get in a slice of cake and a scoop of ice cream before it all goes to flinders.
Alien visitors? My guess is that about 40-50,000 years ago the Mother Bus, filled with with tourists, broke down somewhere in our solar system and they’ve been waiting for the intergalactic equivalent of AAA to show up to get them on their way. Meanwhile, the grownup aliens told the kids they could go out and explore a bit – not too far away, relatively speaking – and whatever they do, don’t mess with the local flora or fauna. Goodness knows what gosh-awful diseases those creatures running loose out there could be carrying!
I could be wrong but it’s a good of a guess as anyone else has.
Thank you, E.M.Smith, for being the eyes and ears of society in troubling times.
Many sense danger and uncertainty. None of us have it all figured out yet:
http://www.ronpaul.com/2012-11-30/ron-paul-why-i-didnt-run-as-an-independent/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html
Fascinating, though the time spent on speculative extraterrestrials does grate.
I am sure the ancients had no difficulty sorting out where the sun came from at solstice time, and these points in the year are significant.
Every summer, a crowd of hippies invades Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, in southern England. Trouble is, the June sun seems to have no significance to the layout. However once, through half-closed eyes, I watched a BBC programme which pointed put that at winter solstice, the low sun shines (if that is the word in midwinter Britain) through a particular point in the stones.
If my opinion is worth anything, which is often disputed on many subjects, in the cold north it is the winter solstice which is significant. When you know it has arrived, you can then take inventory of your food stocks and animals, compare them with your tribal population, and make an estimate of how well the food will last until late spring at least; and how much hunting you must do to stay alive until the land starts to feed you with less effort.
No doubt Stonehenge had other uses, but I propose that timing the precise winter solstice was one of them.
Oh, and before we are all parted, enjoy the Apocalypse…
What I find interesting in the narrative about “It JUST HAD to take aliens with advanced technology!!!” is just how stupid they think people are.
For example, in the video there’s a place where a light shines on a statue on a particular day of the year (solstice I think it was). “Had to take advanced technology to do that inside a cave!”…
Bull pucky. As it takes many years to carve a cave, one has lots of cycles to watch where the sun lands. Two sticks. One at the entrance aperture , the other placed where that shadow landed on the last Solstice. Now you have a nice reference line anytime you want it. Also you now get two shadows showing how far the sun goes each side each year. So on the appropriate days, you knock a chunk from the wall. Now you tell the carvers “Stay inside that line and dig”…(or ‘stay outside that line and carve’ if you want a positive statue instead of a negative hole…)
So I still watch it from time to time as I get shown things like that cave complex (that IS interesting) and I get a bit of mental exercise to figure out “how they really did it with sticks and rocks and a brain”… I’ve pretty much always found a fairly simple explanation. Then they have the “looks like an alien picture!!!” moments. Guess they never look at old historical art forms. Often they used stylized shapes (circles, ovals) for faces and oversized eyes. Even for know “Names” from history. It’s just a style device and sometimes a limit of the level of understanding of perspective and technique that they had then.
Oh Well….
So say you were a religious order that was prone to private quiet meditation, and their was the occasional batch of “Huns” would ride through and burn villages. Might be nice to have a prayer center / church built into the rock that could only be reached via retractable “rope stairway”… Once you have the idea to do that, the rest is just a few generations of patient “Monks” chipping away making it a very nice place to be…
My first thought – well, maybe one of the first two thoughts – is that these shrines are actually tourist attractions. Putting them inside caves, or otherwise hard-to-access areas serves two purposes: (1) it helps preserve them and (2) it lets those who control the territory profit from controlling access to them. Sure, it was a challenge to create them, but in a world where you don’t have the distractions of 24/7 shopping, 24/7 entertainment, 24/7 Twitter feeds, etc., and if you are a reasonably good artist, you could be relieved of the responsibility for hunting and gathering, and spend your days creating something that would last a long time. Lots of people would like to have their creations last for eons, right?
On the solstices, they probably collected the largest offerings of the year!
Tourist attractions have been created by the locals for thousands of years as a way to generate revenue, often overlaid with religious bs. Anyone ever been to Disneyland or Tiger Balm Gardens, How about Lourdes or Delphi. pg
I was at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay (now Mumbai) for part of 1982-83 and made an overnight bus trip to the Ajanta Caves. I was very impressed.
Current distress over false AGW claims seems to match the Biblical story of The End of Days in Luke 21:25 “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;”
Society has been severely distressed by deceit for the past sixty-seven years (2012 – 1945 = 67 yrs), since the United Nations was established on 24 Oct 1945. Society is now awakening to a new reality consistent with science and spirituality:
The force field from the Sun’s pulsar core acts as a giant internet web, controlling a volume of space that exceeds the volume of ten billion, billion (10^19) Earths !
All Earth’s inhabitants – from the UN Secretary General to the lowest paid UN Custodian; from kings to paupers; from fleas to elephants – are controlled by the force field of a pulsar. That empirical fact will vanquish the delusion of power of would-be world tyrants and help restore democracy.
The video says craved out of granite. I am not a geologists although a did a few geology subjects at Uni but the color of the rock did not look like granite and I saw layering. On the wiki site I saw “The flood basalt rock of the cliff, part of the Deccan Traps formed by successive volcanic eruptions at the end of the Cretaceous, is layered horizontally, and somewhat variable in quality,[52] so the excavators had to amend their plans in places, and in places there have been collapses in the intervening centuries,” Have a close look at the pictures and you can see the layering, It is possible that between layers there was some volcanic ash which may help the working. Basalt can easily breakdown with weathering. If there were many seasons between each layer than the surface might breakdown. I have visited an Indian temple craved out of solid rock which was compressed volcanic ash. The surfaces were hard but underneath the surface it is soft and easy to work. The temple I visited ( I think a little south of Chenai/Madras) was built in only about twenty years. According to the Wiki site ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajanta_Caves ) this complex was built over several hundred years. No aliens in this.
In the immortal words of G. K. Chesterson:
“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the United States Declaration of Independence; . . . it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.“
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/262437-america-is-the-only-nation-in-the-world-that-is
Today the joke is on Big Brother, who built the internet to facilitate totalitarian control of human civilization on planet Earth, only to realize that his Creator had built a much larger internet that controls a region of space extending ~120 AU out from the Sun’s pulsar core, engulfing a region of space larger than ten billion, billion Earths, >10,000,000,000,000,000,000 or (10^19) Earths.
Re my earlier comment, that I wouldn’t be surprised at something happening simply because so many people seem to believe in this incipient doom, it appears to be starting early in Russia. And one or two other places, according to the article. Better get out there and panic-buy a load of popcorn now!
@Steve C: The Solar system it is, as demonstrated by the Electric Universe theorists, an electrical machine, like an induction electric motor, where stator windings are located around the rotor: In our system those “stator windings” have been traditionally called “the zodiac”, and are twelve in number. As in an electrical motor, force is generated by the movement from one stator field to the next (say, as today, from the constellation of Pisces to the constellation of Aquarius), if observed in slow motion a electric motor, a “jerk” is seen. Well, if the rotor makes a whole round circumference in about 26,000 years, such a “jerk”, where force is generated by the interaction of the magnetic-electrical fields, always trying to recover its 90º relation (Oersted´s law, or “right hand law”), then it would last about 150-200 years; and if that change began around 1987-1989 (the fall of the Berlin´s wall), it will take until the year 2,137 or 2,187.
Then changes will be “dosed” along that period of time. A lot of “fun”, indeed!
cementafriend says:
The same with the statues on Easter Island. All the “experts” were doubtful about the ability and the timing of the carving of them, even to the point of wondering how they could possibly carve through that hard rock at all, with only stone tools.
Thor Heyerdahl organised carvers and found that once through the hard weathered face that the volcanic rock was soft and easily carved with a stone axe. Estimated carving times dropped from years to 2-3 weeks.
Re carving into vertical rock; there is a road in the South Island of NZ carved down a cliff face by miners lowered in large ‘baskets’ on ropes. Haven’t seen it myself, but think it is inland from Greymouth, and was access to the gold mining town of Blackrock (now gone).
Discussion over at the Cosmic Tusk about the Mayan calendar. Baillie is wondering if the long intervals in the Mayan calendar were originally based on a pair of impact events 1577 years apart. They have found some ammonium and nitrate spikes in ice cores at 2719 BC and 1427 BC. Similar spike showed up in ice cores dated at Tunguska impact. Nothing definitive, but tantalizing. Paper is at the link. Cheers –
http://cosmictusk.com/perfect-match-scientist-baillie-discovers-perfect-correlation-between-ice-chemistry-spikes-and-mayan-long-count-calendar/
I am personally confident we will all be here in 2013, but Big Brother may not fare so well.
@Adolfo – The Electric Universe is an interpretation which immediately rang a bell for me the first time I heard the phrase – I’ve worked and played with electronics all my life and learned the basics by “playing” with valves (UK) / tubes (US) as a kid, so I’m quite at home with the idea of swirling plasma carrying energy around. Learning more about that theory, plus gradually working my way through OKM’s fascinating links, is helping keep my aging grey cells functioning and questioning great swathes of “received wisdom”.
But this social phenomenon is definitely going to be fun to watch. Agreed that any real effects will be spread out in time, but just look how many people believe it’s all due to happen in one major singularity on the 21st! It delights me particularly that the calendar concerned is the Mayan one, being also aware of the Hindu concept of maya, generally translated as “illusion”; If the everyday world is maya already, this business looks set to make (as the Mahavishnu Orchestra put it) the “Dance of Maya” into a frenzied Whirling Dervish display. Thank God I have my philosophy degree keeping a cool, rational hand on my mental tiller … just hope it doesn’t impede my evolution into the Fourth Dimension! ;-)
A peaceful (and not too apocalyptic) Christmas to all.
Thank you, Steve C., for your intriguing post. I never had a course in philosophy or religion, but
Society appears to be caught in a classical battle today between maya and reality, between the idealism of the United Nations and the practical realism of the US Declaration of Independence:
1. Maya (illusion) is advanced by activities that separate us from RTG (Reality, Truth God): Consensus models of reality, post-modern science, video games, reality TV shows, gladiator sports, pornography, social networking, sensual distractions, the internet, etc.
2. Reality (truth) is advanced by activities that enhance contact with RTG (Reality, Truth God): Observation, experimentation, contemplation, meditation, prayer, contact with Nature, etc
@E.M.: My my aging grey cells are older than yours….worst of all WE only have 640K Ram, that´s why we have to manage ourselves with much simpler programs, and self-made. My hard disk it´s almost full, it is beginning to not saving archives properly. :-)
As for the fourth dimension issue: Think of the oxidation-reduction of our blood: hemoglobin really does not need but an electron to change from Fe+2 to Fe+3; thus, it is not that we need oxygen but only electrons. We are evolving in such a direction: Teresa Neuman in Germany just lived from breathing in. What explains EVERYTHING is y=sin x, going up and down, following the development of the octave, to higher pitches and lower pitches.
Your quote about the Dervish´s dance it is quite appropriate, just watch them dancing THE LAW OF THE OCTAVE (min:2.48), among others, in the movie made by Peter Brook “Meetings with Remarkable Men”, and , of course, with american “dervishs” dancing:
@Omanuel: As Thomas Merton said: “distraction is the contrary of attraction”; if we are dis-attracted to ourselves, our attention/living energy goes out and nothing is left but a zombie.
@Dr. Manuel – it is I who should be thanking you. Working through a few of your papers and other links lately has reassured me that there are still physicists, with a track record like yours, talking theory which makes sense in terms of the physics I loved as a keen teen back in the ’60s. I never got on with singularities like the Big Bang, and downright weirdnesses like “dark matter” and “dark energy” just look like waving flags saying “we’ve got no ‘firkin’ idea what’s going on”. You, sir, are restoring my “wow factor”, hence the thanks.
In philosophy, most of the ‘legwork’ is getting to recognise the well-known range of logical solecisms in their different hats, plus a bit of wrangling in your chosen field(s) – philosophy of language, science, religion, whatever. You probably (OK, undoubtedly) have better logical abilities in matters scientific than I have, particularly when heavy-duty maths is needed; my own philosophical interest was always primarily epistemological – what, and how, we can know. The religious aspect seems to creep up on most of us with advancing years, of course: though I recognise with approval your quotes from the ‘Kuru Field of Justice’ on your site, I incline more towards a Taoist view myself, balancing on the tightropes between all the ‘opposites’ and trying not to fall off too often.
Cordial regards, SC.