Creative Connections

The Chinese invented paper money and the value was derived from a magical aura around writing. In early America church bells were inscribed with prayers and sometimes baptized. Morse code was invented by a painter. Before he was an artist Van Gogh was a preacher. "Emerald City" is a technical term used in Iranian Sufism to mean "the world of the Soul". Before the Nazi armies invaded Paris, the Louvre was emptied and its contents were secretly distributed among wealthy French citizens who hid them in their houses around the country. When The Mona Lisa was hidden from the Nazis, the curator of the Louvre kept it in his bedroom "so that there would always be someone with her."

Director Paul Verhoeven intended RoboCop to be a retelling of the Christ Story.

The tune for "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream. Lord Monboddo, a deist, first wrote about the idea of human evolution. Erasmus Darwin wrote poetry inspired by Monboddo, and then his grandson Charles copied the theory from his grandfather. Humans and worms share and underlying brain blueprint. If you have a deep voice you may have a low sperm count. Some Nazis believed that the secret origin of the entire Aryan race could be uncovered in Tibet. One of my good buddies who meditates a lot visited me in a dream and then told me about it the next day.  If rats learn to swim through a maze, their offspring will learn the maze more quickly. When the brain area necessary for muscle relaxation during REM sleep is surgically destroyed, cats fall asleep as usual, but during REM sleep they walk around and act out hunting dreams.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves had its premiere at New York City's Radio City Music Hall, and afterwards all the velvet seat upholstery had to be replaced because the young children were so frightened by the sequence of Snow White lost in the forest that they wet their pants.

Brain scientists now say consciousness does not occur in our brains, but is dynamically distributed, boundary crossing, offloaded, and environmentally situated within materiality. In 1980 there was a Sheffield University student who had a measured IQ of 126 and passed a Mathematics Degree but who had hardly any discernible brain matter at all. "You are not the one who experiences liberation; you are the clearing, the opening, the emptiness, in which any experience comes and goes, like reflections on the mirror. And you are the mirror, the mirror mind, and not any experienced reflection."

Six million pounds of space dust settles on earth every year.  There is real gold in the sun.  The first email was sent in 1971. "Columbia" is an old name for America. Queen Victoria commissioned a big fig leaf to be placed over The David's penis. Seven of the male members of the cult Heaven's Gate, including its founder, voluntarily underwent castration in Mexico as an extreme means of maintaining their ascetic lifestyle. Over 50 percent of American evangelical Christians say that non-christians can go to heaven.