I found this interview very interesting, though it won't convince me to take up meditation anytime soon. As a professional pianist, playing Bach every morning accomplishes this connection with a super-consciousness that Wilber appears to be talking about.

Still, I find it disturbing that so many here on the message board would trash the idea that there are interior states of being that can never be explained by science. I'm pleased though that there are fellow musicians here who have no problem with that assumption. You can scan my brain, but you won't find Beethoven's last piano sonata (Op. 111) there, though it certainly exists, and will, god willing, as long as this poor brain has some juice left.

Funny thing for us, this miracle of music. In 1822, a completely deaf Beethoven heard something rattling around in his brain. He struggled to give it form, to lay it down for an imperfect instrument, and to use an imperfect medium of black marks on paper to leave it for posterity. But the marks on paper do not equal op. 111. It exists, existed in the brain of a deaf man, exists in the brain of whomever struggles to learn it, and finally exists when people hear it in a concert or, to a lesser degree, on a recording.

As one of those who struggled for a year to drill it into my brain and fingers, I can attest that 111 is somehow a concrete object in my consciousness. Like any planet, it has certain immutable characteristics. The experience of performing it is more like channeling a spirit than regurgitating a series of notes and velocities learned by repetition, as many materialist-minded musicians liken classical music performance to. But the funny thing about this is that when I work on this sonata at home, it is just that: a certain series of technical challenges which must be always drilled if all is to go well on stage. Thus, when I practice it daily, its spirit is not there, only the material. But somehow, when this piece is performed, the work has a distinctive existence apparent to all who listen. Other musicians and connoiseurs already are familiar with its landscape, but its facts are apparent even to first-time listeners. The planet that Beethoven struck upon in his imagination is transferred to new listeners almost 200 years later. Subjective, yet it exists, and with a degree of specificity that materialists can never measure.

This is an interesting discussion, that ultimately reminds me of something I heard from Dan Rather once:

"My father used to tell me that you wouldn't worry so much about what other people think of you if you realized how little they actually did."

Writing painstaking, long lists of what you like on Facebook may at best start an interesting conversation with a friend or a stranger, or may get you a first date if you're lucky. But we're really kidding ourselves if we think that anyone who really matters defines us by what we like, "High Fidelity" aside. I figure that whomever reads my profile might appreciate a little entertainment, so I long ago deleted all of the blather and rotate in a quote or two. My friends can thus get a good indication of my mood, without me needing to post, "Mood, Quixotic."

If it's the constant and improbable predictions of doom for Obama's candidacy like this article, which cloak themselves in uncertainty and fuzzy math. (So what if seating of Michigan's and Florida's superdelegates raise the total votes required? That won't change the wide margin that Clinton needs to overcome.) Though I've never been a rabid enough Obama supporter to see Obama-bashing everywhere, a piece like this one can't pretend to be neutral. I'm not expecting an Obama coronation, but there's a certain gloom that Shapiro keeps projecting in his columns that is getting tiresome, and is frankly unrealistic. In the likely event that Obama is nominated as believed, some Clinton supporters will stay home in November, many will likely grudgingly vote for Obama. In the highly unlikely scenario of a Clinton nomination, the reverse will be tue also. Who really believes that a Republican will win the White House? Even if the Democratic race were contested until October, all it would take is a week of media coverage to rally the Bush-haters into voting Democrat.

But more disheartening might be the ugliness and short-sightedness on both sides of the debate in the letters. It just gets uglier and uglier. In February, Clinton supporters merely argued that Obama lacked experience. Now, he's an evil terrorist (to paraphrase a girl from my home state), a liar, a crook, who, gasp, has raised money! Foul play must be afoot. Clinton used to be an unpleasant holdover carrying too much of her husband's baggage. Now she's an evil, dishonest, cheating, shrill, calculating harpy who dares to stay in the race despite certain defeat by a whopping 5-10% margin. Has everyone forgotten that either Democrat would be better than John McCain, a candidate who is so tainted by merely accepting Bush's mantle as to be utterly useless in the White House?

Quote: <<If you want a simple and deeply disturbing example go to Google Earth and look up LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Look at runway 51. There you will see a plane either on takeoff or landing about 1/3 of the way along. On the end of the runway there is a plane waiting to take off. (It's sitting on the white strips so look closely.) And 400 yards behind it on approach is a third plane! Yes, that is error. But what are the odds that a snapshot from a satellite would capture this event? Astronomical if it is uncommon, not so large if it is more common than the republican FAA wants us to know!>>

Yeah, no one should pay attention to this armchair fear-mongering. Google Earth images are composites of many satellite photos, of course not all taken at the same moment. We might even be seeing the same plane photographed at three different moments.

If it weren't so brilliantly written, I'd probably be hanging myself now. Any single article that manages to trash both Barbara Walters and Michael Crichton in service of a grand theme, while leaving time for some good old-fashioned self-hatred, deserves a gold star in my book. I can almost forgive the author for misunderstanding Lost.

I anxiously await Crichton's next novel, to see what seedy backstory he'll have cooked up for Ms. Havrilesky. Perhaps she'll find herself even not human; my money's on a mutant dung beetle.

I wonder if the reviewers who have been ripping this film a new one have actually watched the other three movies recently. They were great fun, but not exactly classics. Extremely hokey, and with the same gag-inducing dialogue. I found this installment to be pretty much on par with the rest of the series.