Chloe Jennings-White Has Said She Wants Her Spine Severed

“Something in my brain tells me my legs are not supposed to work. Having any sensation in them just feels wrong,” says Chloe Jennings-White. She has said she wants a surgeon to cut her spinal cord. She wants to live in a wheel chair for the rest of her life.  Is she crazy? Does she want disability payments? 

None of the above. The cause is either organic within the brain or a profound psychological disturbance.

The era in which we live has a name for her situation. She is transabled. She has felt this way since she was four years old.

She thought she was a freak until one day.  Read on.

Standing on The Corner with Omar and Satchmo

We are a puzzle, we humans. We find ourselves in the midst of life and don't know how we got here. Our parents tell us we were born but they don't really know. Our teachers say DNA or God or accident. None of them know and both upbringing and education are a form of propaganda which bends our minds to perpetuate the most acceptable myths. By mid life we have settled many of our questions into answers in order to concentrate on pay checks and careers and families. Still, in quiet moments we sense the old, gnawing uncertainties. We think we have settled the questions of where we came from, who we are, why we are here, and what we want, but there they are, still waiting for real answers, not doctrine, so we put them back in their place and go on with our lives until one day we die.

The Contradictory Sides of Jack London

Jack London had contradictory sides in that one did not "talk" to the other, but before that a brief sketch of his life is needed. He was a brilliant man, brilliant but uneducated. Forced to work grueling jobs to support his mother and family, he had no time for schooling, and when he did return to high school he had sailed the Pacific in a schooner, tramped across America with Kellys’ Army, masses of the unemployed converging on Washington, and been thrown in jail for being a bum.

Are You Made of Matter or Consciousness Itself?

To explore whether you are made of matter or consciousness raise the index finger on your right hand. There, that was easy, wasn't it? You just told the finger to lift and it did. Now I have something not so easy, a question. How did the finger get raised? So what is your answer? Read on for an explanation.

Zen Masters and Zen at War

(I will be forever grateful to Zen for what it has given me over the years but I learned to sift the wheat it offered from its chaff. The following article is part of the latter.)

Unable to Tell Real from Unreal: Charles Bonnet Syndrome

The last moments happened in slow motion as the car collided in a sickening crunch. His head smashed into the windshield, fracturing the frontal bones above his eyes and the orbital plates protecting his optic nerves. He was comatose for two weeks until he woke up. When he did, he could not walk or talk. For Larry MacDonald that was just the beginning. When he opened his eyes he could not "distinguish what was real from what was fake." He looked at the doctors and nurses standing by his bed. Behind and next them stood football players while Hawaiian girls danced the hula, hips swaying gently.

Determinism or Fate (Predeterminism) or Free Will?

The Terrorist, He's Watching

The bomb will go off in the bar at one twenty p.m.
Now it's only one sixteen p.m.
Some will still have time to get in,
some to get out.

The terrorist has already crossed to the other side of the street.
The distance protects him from any danger,
and what a sight for sore eyes:

A woman in a yellow jacket, she goes in.
A man in dark glasses, he comes out.

Guys in jeans, they are talking.
One seventeen and four seconds.
That shorter guy's really got it made; and gets on a scooter,
and that taller one, he goes in.

One seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl there, she's got a green ribbon in her hair.
Too bad that bus just cut her off.
One eighteen p.m.
The girl's not there any more.
Was she dumb enough to go in, or wasn't she?
That we'll see when they carry them out.

One nineteen p.m.
No one seems to be going in.
Instead, a fat baldy's coming out.
Like he's looking for something in his pockets and
at one nineteen and fifty seconds
he goes back for those lousy gloves of his.

It's one twenty p.m.
The time, how it drags.
Should be any moment now.
Not yet.
Yes, this is it.
The bomb, it goes off.

by Wislawa Szymborska
(Nobel Prize in Literature)

Poppa Neutrino: The Happiest Man In The World

Poppa Neutrino was the free spirit (or lunatic according to some) who sailed across the Atlantic with his family on a raft made of trash scraps.

In his book The Happiest Man in the World, Alec Wilkinson chronicles the life of Poppa Neutrino. Poppa was then preparing for a solo journey across the Pacific. You can listen on NPR.

You can check out the DVD featured on the picture above at this site. Here are earlier links in Mind Shadows: Poppa Neutrino: "The road to the mystical is triadic. To get through the doorway is nomadic." and 72 Year Old To Cross The Pacific On A Raft of Scraps as well as another project by Poppa Neutrino

Below is a video of Poppa and other comments.



Poppa Neutrino, born William David Pearlman, was born in 1933 in Fresno, California and died in 2011 in New Orleans, of congestive heart failure.  Musician, raft builder and free spirit, he looked around, saw others slaving for dollars, chained to a mortgage, and eight work hours a day, and turned his back on all of it.  At his funeral a New Orleans Jazz band played.   Some seek a quantity of years, others the quality.  He had the quality.

If he was crazy then what about the social narrative on normalcy?  What about the rest of us who sacrifice the best years of our lives believing that narrative?

Steven Pinker on Free Will & The Fear of Determinism

There was a young man who said "Damn!"
It grieves me to think that I am
Predestined to move
In a circumscribed groove:
In fact, not a bus, but a tram.



"One fear of determinism is a gaping existential anxiety: that deep down we are not in control of our own choices. All our brooding and agonizing over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains. If you suffer from this anxiety, I suggest the following experiment.

For the next few days, don't bother deliberating over your actions. It's a waste of time, after all; they have already been determined. Shoot from the hip, live for the moment, and if it feels good, do it. No, I am not seriously suggesting that you try this! But a moment's reflection on what would happen if you did try to give up making decisions should serve as a Valium for the existential anxiety. The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you. If the most ironclad form of determinism is real, you could not do anything about it anyway, because your anxiety about determinism, and how you would deal with it, would also be determined. It is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time.

A more practical fear of determinism is captured in a saying by A.A. Milne: "No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature." The fear is that an understanding of human nature seems to eat away at the notion of personal responsibility. In the traditional view, the self or soul, having chosen what to do, takes responsibility when things turn out badly. As with the desk of Harry S. Truman, the buck stops here. But when we attribute an action to a person's brain, genes, or evolutionary history, it seems that we no longer hold the individual accountable. Biology becomes the perfect alibi, the get-out-of-jail-free card, the doctor's excuse note. As we have seen, this accusation has been made by the religious and cultural right, who want to preserve the soul, and the academic left, who want to preserve a "we" who can construct our futures though in circumstances of our own choosing.

"Why is the notion of free will so closely tied to the notion of responsibility, and why is biology thought to threaten both? Here is the logic. We blame people for an evil act or bad decision only when they intended the consequences and could have chosen otherwise. We don't convict a hunter who shoots a friend he has mistaken for a deer, or the chauffeur who drove John F. Kennedy into the line of fire, because they could not foresee and did not intend the outcome of their actions. We show mercy to the victim of torture who betrays a comrade, to a delirious patient who lashes out at a nurse, or to a madman who strikes someone he believes to be a ferocious animal. We don't put a small child on trial if he causes a death, nor do we try an animal or an inanimate object, because we believe them to be constitutionally incapable of making an informed choice.

"A biology of human nature would seem to admit more and more people into the ranks of the blameless. A murderer [might have] a shrunken amygdala or a hypo-metabolism in his frontal lobes. . . . Even worse, biology may show that we are all blameless. Evolutionary theory says that the ultimate rationale for our motives is that they perpetuated our ancestors' genes in the environment in which they evolved. Since none of us are aware of that rationale, none of us can be blamed for pursuing it, any more than we blame the mental patient who thinks he is subduing a mad dog but really is attacking a nurse. . . . Should we go even farther than the National Rifle Association bumper sticker--GUNS DON'T KILL; PEOPLE KILL--and say that not even people kill, because people are just as mechanical as guns? . . . .

"People who hope that a ban on biological explanations might restore personal responsibility are in for the biggest disappointment of all. The most risible pretexts for bad behavior in recent decades have come not from biological determinism, but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defense, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics. . . .

"Something has gone terribly wrong. It is a confusion of explanation with exculpation. Contrary to what is implied by critics of biological and environmental theories of the causes of behavior, to explain behavior is not to exonerate the behaver. . . . The difference between explaining behavior and excusing it is captured in the saying "To understand is not to forgive," and has been stressed in different ways by many philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and Sartre. Most philosophers believe that unless a person was literally coerced (that is, someone held a gun to his head), we should consider his actions to have been freely chosen, even if they were caused by events inside his skull. . . .

Few People today argue that criminal punishment is obsolete, even if they recognize that (other than incapacitating some habitual criminals) it is pointless in the short run. That is because if we ever did calculate the short-term effects in deciding whether to punish, potential wrongdoers could anticipate that calculation and factor it into their behavior. They could predict that we would not find it worthwhile to punish them once it was too late to prevent the crime, and could act with impunity, calling our bluff. The only solution is to adopt a resolute policy of punishing wrongdoers regardless of the immediate effects. If one is genuinely bluffing about the threat of of punishment, there is no bluff to call. As Oliver Wendell Holmes explained, "If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged (or electrocuted) I should say, ' I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. . . . the law must keep its promises'. "

(Steven Pinker,"The Fear of Determinism," in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Nature. NY: Vintage, 2002.)

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality is the term for a view of the world as not two, nor one but undivided  and without a second—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead a totality which is wholly subjective. Oneness, or unity, itself implies something outside, which is not the case and why those terms are not used instead. If there is one, there must be another. But with non-duality there is no second. The view derives from Eastern belief, principally Hindu advaita, which literally means without duality. It also finds support in Buddhism (Zen, for example, where form is emptiness and emptiness form as stated in the Heart Sutra).

A central tenet of non-duality is that self—that which we call our self—does not exist. The evidence is offered by a methodology.

The Duel Over von Trautmansdorf's Moustache

“In Hamburg in 1834, a handsome young army officer named Baron von Trautmansdorf challenged a fellow officer, Baron von Ropp, to a duel. The precipitating offense was a poem that von Ropp had written and circulated among his friends about von Trautmansdorf's moustache, stating that it was thin and floppy and hinting that it might no be the only part of his physique to which those adjectives could be applied.

Here Lies The Heart: Mercedes de Acosta and Ramana Maharshi

Descended from the legendary Dukes of Alba, daughter in a wealthy Cuban family, Mercedes de Acosta was born in 1893 in New York, raised near Fifth Avenue, and had a beautiful sister Rita de Acosta who was a model for artists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini. Married to painter Abram Poole, Mercedes was socialite, poet, playwright, Hollywood set and costume designer as well as script writer. She knew many of the greats of her day: Bessie Marbury, Rodin, Edith Wharton, Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Elenora Duse, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Elsa Maxwell, and Krishnamurti. Near the end of her life, she met and befriended Andy Warhol, and introduced him to many of the people who would count in his career.

Consuelo (Hatmaker) Sides, whose husband had been the World War I French flying ace Charles Nungesser, accompanied Mercedes on her passage to India. After arriving, de Acosta met former President Woodrow Wilson's daughter, Margaret, a devotee at Sri Aurobindo's ashram.

Robert Robinson: An African-American's 44 Years In The Soviet Union

Some years ago, I read Black On Red: My 44 Years Inside The Soviet Union, a book by Robert Robinson, An African-American who lived in Detroit during the Depression. I had to read it again, for it is about as gripping an autobiography as one can find. During 44 years in Soviet society, Robert Robinson found that the deepest discrimination was against blacks and orientals. In his book he notes that in the USA people may or may not condone institutional and racial discrimination but they do recognize that it exists. In the USSR, officially and socially, such discrimination did not occur. But it ran deep.