Seldom

progress shot of the middle stick in post 8, unfortunately the hollowing in the other two was too extensive, but this one should be the magnum opus

recently finished didj made from agave Americana

p.p.s - the reason people here may seem reluctant to help is we get this all the time here, people making a few posts, asking for tree id's, then disapearing. no one here knows who you are, or what your motivations are. that there's no monopoly on wattle identification, you're as free as anyone else to research it for yourself. i got the above info from http://www.worldwidewattle.com/speciesgallery/concurrens.php good luck ;)

well, there's always lumpers and splitters in the contentious and sometimes pretentious world of taxonomy, but most agree concurrens constitutes a 'complex' or clade, rather than a species .. it could be A. crassa, A. leoicalyx, A. longispicata (which would be my suspicion), A. cretata, etc .. without pods it's impossible to tell .. p.s - please be kind to the trees

not obtusifolia. would need pods and flowers to properly ID. bark looks like Hakea sp. ?

interesting discussion, good to hear different people's experience and perspectives . in the way it appears to me, they undoubtedly do, yet in a pre-reflective, primitive or primordial kind of way. I've never heard explicit, linguistically transmitted teachings. rather i've experienced plants setting up the pre-linguistic conditions which structure how the pre-conscious mind delivers meaning in such a way as to lead it toward particular realisations. in a sense they're teachers of the Socratic kind, wherein they lead or coax the pure stream of bare consciousness in a particular direction, colour it with a certain shade, imbue it with a certain quality (really trying to explain this runs up against the limits of language) which helps generate specific realisations. i believe it's always unique with each individual, and i think no one's experience should be discounted because it may differ from anyone else's, but the teachings appear to me in the form of emotional, somatic, visual or audiological alterations, and not linguistic transmissions. I have of coarse experienced intensification of linguistic meaning, be it in the form of an inner or outer monologue that arrives like an unstoppable avalanche, but the plants have never spoken to me in the queen's English, they just set up conditions. Honestly, I find English is not all that helpful for integrating psychedelic experiences into everyday life, and is just inadequate for communicating them to others. to use an analogy when i learn different techniques on the didjeridoo, language is of no use, i've just learned something new that doesn't require words, that enables me to play a different way . likewise with plants i've just received something from them that enables me to see and inhabit my world in a different way. Cheers for the thread

if you head toward the north of the state you're in you may be able to harvest your own. Nilotica has long been naturalized in most states of Australia, and is actually is listed as a noxious weed

^ ^ ^ ^ neuroscience is a young discipline .. 70-100 billion neurons, each connected to an average of 10 000 other neurons .. FMRI has only been used as a tool for looking at brains since 1993, with 21 years of deveolpment their resolution is about as good as photography was in the 1820's .. it's only the beginning .. also of coarse it doesn't solve 'the hard problem' of the neural correlates of consciousness .. but this is really interesting, cheers for posting . another really interesting field in brain science came across in one of the latest national geographics is the idea of connectomes . but i wouldn't expect answers to questions like this in our lifetime

actually if you look he is trained to endlessly trace the imperfect contours of infinity

well. that's kind of racist. i don't want to alarm anyone but recently my dreams have been infiltrated by a colony of time travelling abstractions whose society exists at the end of time, they are trying to use my brain as a doorway into earth so that they can escape before the universe ends so they can keep on living, but they don't realise that their time travel is actually overstuffing the past with too much matter and creating an asymmetrical vortex causing time in their reality to turn backwards and thus, ironically causing their own demise.

i don't really care ^ ^ ^ F***CCKING MYSTICAL OYSTER!! it cannot be solved .. unless you're got an unstated clause like Kripke's quus function, it can't make sense. can it?!? tell me! i'm gonna pm you every day until you tell me. 1+1 is 2 (0) (*2) and (*1) to get to 2+1 is 13 (+10) ( (*4) - 1 on the left and (*6) to get to 7+6 is 113 (+100) (*2) - 1 and (*2) - 1 to get to 13+11 is 224 (+200) (still no discernable pattern) (*2) - 1 and (?? to get to 17?) 24+17 is 741 (+700) 41+38 is 379 (+300) (!) <- if it's real it;s a non-linear function! 79+78 is 1157 (+1000) no. NO! it can't make sense. please tell me if it makes sense. if you're secretly a genius, i actually knew all along. why would you do that to someone.

ABC National's 'all in the mind' had a program on synesthesia recently, i'd highly recommend it http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/david-eagleman-the-afterlife-synesthesia-and-other/3141400

to me it just feels strange saying appy birfday to someone i've never met, but, in my time here i reckone you're one of the coolest people about, so Appy Birfday man!

when you log in expecting to find wholesome content, and you find a person in their mid to late 30s who has some kind of affinity with john wayne gacey, and a creepy stalker character from a movie in the 80s, who used to be called lordbaddigestionbloodpoo, this person, is having trouble with his bowels. i.don.t.need.to.know.buddy.

I've been signing my name as Bobsled on most things ever since some lady had a go at me for signing the back of my card with an X (she got a pen and made me do it properly). Not one person has noticed. Sad and true - Bobsled.

“Nothing screams poor craftsmanship like wrinkles in your duct tape.”

^ yet in fact they have, in their own way. the significance is their orientation toward what they take to be knowledge .. take fish for example: I find no obstacle to entertaining the idea that fish may be gods, stardust, or food, that they may make me sick and play different roles in ecosystems and origin myths .. Those who wish to separate any symbolic essence of fish from its “real” counterpart and extol the finality of their understanding should maybe themselves be separated and confined .. it's deeply naive to dismiss the tribal elder who affirms the fish’s divinity because no one has a monopoly on completely understanding what fish are: they may well be biological, ideational, astrological, nutritional, transdimensional, emetic, mythological beings. i think it's wrong to myopically fixate on science to the exclusion of all other insight ..

p.s - i think most of the negative things he has to say in relation to drug use relates to their potential to establish habits that diminish a person's receptivities, capacities to affect and be affected .. it's possible to find in his work his own efforts to dissuade . for eg. Are we to speak about Fitzgerald's and Lowry's alcoholism, Nietzsche's and Artaud's madness while remaining on the shore? Are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and create special journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerilla--just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably? LOS (157)

i can, but it's not really related to the idea of possession *edit - and re-reading your request the passage doesn't describe a 'negation or redundency of the self' .. - the section i referred to describes that where for eg. for Kant the basic categories that explain the being of the subject are conjunction of transcendental faculties of understanding [classifying generalities] and intuition [perception of particulars], for Hume the subject [read 'self'] is a kind of crystallization or 'congealing' that happens in a field of raw intensities [impressions, which are primary] and low intensity replicas of these [ideas] which is given structure by the force of habit or routine .. the basic point is that the self from this perspective depends on the flux of sensation to exist, rather than, as with Kant, a self is required for sensations to occur .. it's if anything an inversion, not a a negation, negation is a technical termo f modal logic that means 'not', as in the negation of P is simply ~P, as a logical operator it's not synonymous with words like 'destruction' .. and it doesn't imply a redundancy either - a proposition or redundant if it's made of information that can be inferred from the body of whatever it comes from .. it doesn't simply mean unimportant .. .. but it comes from his doctoral thesis titled Empiricism and Subjectivity . as far as I know there's no .pdf available online, but if you have access to Jstor i remember there being a number of solid articles/reviews

"Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. one conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. ... "It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same." - William James

daamn, that sounds really heavy .. there's no better lover than a lunatic, and you can learn a lot by being with a fierce woman, but when it turns, . well.

No! this is simply not the case! dating back to his book on Hume he cites the fact that rather than a self being a necessary precondition of experience, drugs show that experience does not depend on the possession of a self, meaning a self is anterior or even periphery to the raw datum of experience (as is the case of Hume's theory of human nature) in his 'letter to a harsh critic' he states "So I’ll move onto your other more cruel and hurtful criticism, when you say I'm someone who's always just tagged along behind, taking it easy, capitalizing upon other people's experiments, on gays, drug-users, alcoholics, masochists, lunatics, and so on, vaguely savouring their transports and poisons without ever taking any risks. You turn against me a piece I wrote where I ask how we can avoid becoming professional lecturers on Artaud or fashionable admirers of Fitzgerald. But what do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy, that is, in the power of falsity, rather than in representing things in a way that manifests a lamentable faith in accuracy and truth? If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. And what do my relations with gays, alcoholics, and drug-users matter, if I can obtain similar effects by different means?" (the last bit, you may notice about similar effects being achieved by different means comes from Burroughs, a figure Deleuze exhibited deep admiration for, not least for his drug exploits .. see for eg. his paper 'on the superiority of Anglo-American Literature') The 22nd Series - Porcelain and Volcano from The Logic of Sense is a philosophical encounter with the alcoholic temperament, and ends with the words "oh psychedelia" ! (p.183) .. The last chapter of What is Philosophy? called From Chaos to the Brain states that biochemically based technologies developing new forms of pharmaceutical intervention are preferable over psychoanalytic treatments for mental pathology . I don't know where you've picked up the sense of him being 'vehemently critical' . I remember Graham Harman of OOO fame calling his work a 'materialist mysticism' and 'lava-lampy-monism' . One of the most famous still living exponents of his work Manuel Delanda has a well known disdain for mysticism (but who, interestingly, still trips), but i think his vision of Deleuze has to be seen within the context DeLanda's primary goal, i.e making D and D+G intelligible to scientists and analytic philosophers .. for a different approach I'd recommend Joshua Ramey's The Hermetic Deleuze, or for someone that really did get Deleuze in a frighteningly deep way, writings of the lunatic Nick Land .. (an article worth reading irrespective of individual predilection .) in addition to his NoS experiences James also wrote of his experiences with mescaline, which are included in his discussion of 'anesthetic revelation' in the chapter on mysticism in Varieties' Bahh! what i hate more than obfuscation is bad scholarship, and tired old criticisms of straw men made of "a self-certain, thinking subject with respect to the knowledge and control of objectified being" .. (no one thinks that! who is he criticising!) - .. also, come on, spirits cannot be virtual! virtuality is not a realm, nor can it itself be actualized in individuated forms Deleuze's ontology acknowledges only the virtual, the intensive and the extensive, so to say you had contact with a 'virtual' spirit (even saying that makes me cringe!) is analougus to saying to a Hegelian that you had contact with a negative spaghetti monster .. it's a pre-individuated multiplicity which specifies the structure of a space of possibilities .. it's a scientifically oriented designation, not some egregious anthropomorphism .. that paper is masters level as well .. if i was adjudicating the mark he got for that paper .. crikey ..

not all ethnobotany involves the 4th dimension ;)