Brook Farm was a utopian experiment in communal living in the United States in the 1840s. It was founded by former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley at the Ellis Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841 and was inspired in part by the ideals of Transcendentalism, a religious and cultural philosophy based in New England.

The joint stock company promised its participants a portion of the profits from the farm in exchange for performing an equal share of the work. Brook Farmers believed that by sharing the workload, ample time would be available for leisure activities and intellectual pursuits.

Life on Brook Farm was based on balancing labor and leisure while working together for the benefit of the greater community. Each member could choose to do whatever work they found most appealing and all were paid equally, including women.

Revenue for the community came from farming and selling hand made products like clothing as well as through a fee paid by the many visitors to Brook Farm. Primarily, however, the main source of income was the school, which was overseen by Mrs. Ripley. A preschool, primary school, and a college preparatory school attracted children internationally and each child was charged for their education. Adult education was also offered.

The community was never financially stable and had difficulty profiting from their agricultural pursuits. By 1844, the Brook Farmers adopted a societal model based on the socialist concepts of Charles Fourier and began publishing The Harbinger as an unofficial journal promoting Fourierism. Following his vision, the community members began building an ambitious structure called the Phalanstery.

When the uninsured building was destroyed in a fire, the community was financially devastated and never recovered. It was fully closed by 1847. Despite the experimental commune’s failure, many Brook Farmers looked back on their experience positively. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member of Brook Farm, though he was not a strong adherent of the community’s ideals. He later fictionalized his experience in his novel The Blithedale Romance. After its failure, most of the buildings at Brook Farm eventually burned down and today much of the land is a cemetery.

Peace is a term that most commonly refers to an absence of hostility, but which also represents a larger concept of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, safety in matters of social or economic welfare, and the acknowledgment of equality and fairness in political relationships and world matters.

It is a state of balance and understanding in one’s self and between others where respect is gained by the acceptance of differences, conflicts are resolved through dialogue, other’s rights are respected, and everyone is at their highest point of serenity without social tension.

In the Great Lakes region of Africa, the word for peace is kindoki, which refers to a harmonious balance between human beings, the rest of the natural world, and the cosmos. This vision is a much broader view of peace than a mere absence of war.

Wolfgang Sutzl of the Innsbruck School of Peace Studies states that some peace thinkers have abandoned any single and all encompassing definition of peace. Rather, they promote the idea of many peaces. They argue that since no singular, correct definition of peace can exist, peace should be perceived as a plurality.

These thinkers also critique the idea of peace as a hopeful or eventual end. They recognize that peace does not necessarily have to be something humans might achieve some time in the future. They contend that peace exists in the present, we can create and expand it in small ways in our everyday lives, and peace changes constantly. This view makes peace permeable and imperfect rather than static and utopian.

Followers of some religions, such as Jainism, go to great lengths to avoid harming any living creatures, including insects. Pacifists, such as Christian anarchists, perceive any incarnation of violence as self perpetuating. Mahatma Gandhi’s conception of peace was not as an end, but as a means: “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” 

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded annually to notable peacemakers and visionaries who have overcome violence, conflict or oppression through their moral leadership. The prize has often met with controversy, as it is occasionally awarded to people who have formerly sponsored war and violence but who have, through exceptional concessions, helped achieve peace.

A psychomanteum is a mirrored room specially set up to communicate with the spiritual realm. Reflective objects or surfaces, such as blood or water, were considered a conduit to the spiritual world in ancient times.

Sometimes described as an apparition booth, the psychomanteum dates back to ancient Greece, where a person would gaze into a still pool of water. This silent and steady gazing into a reflective pool would produce apparitions or visions. In 1958, the Classical Greek archaeologist Sotiris Dakaris found accommodation near the Dodona oracle spoken of by Homer and Herodotus, where supplicants would wait their turn at the oracle in complete darkness. An extensive maze led to a long central apparition hallway where the experience took place. There Dakaris found the remnants of a bronze cauldron ringed with a banister which made it appear that the people who were seeing the apparitions would be gazing at the cauldron.

The room is set up to optimize psychological effects such as trance. Its key features are low light or near darkness, flickering light, and a mirror. The dimness represents a form of visual sensory deprivation, a condition helpful to trance induction, the undifferentiated color without horizon producing the Ganzfeld effect, a state of apparent blindness. The Ganzfeld experiment replicates the conditions of a psychomanteum where a state of trance may be induced by a uniform field of vision. In the way of strobe or flashing light, stimulus is provided by indirect, moving light in the psychomanteum. Flickering candles or a lamp are sometimes recommended to induce hallucination. It is supposed the indeterminate depth of the mirror’s darkness allows the eyes to relax and become unfocussed, a state that reduces alertness.

Dr Raymond Moody, author of the 1981 book about near death experiences Life After Life, included the psychomanteum in his research in trials of 300 subjects which he recorded in his 1993 book, Reunions. Moody viewed the room as a therapeutic tool to heal grief and bring insight.

The God’s Eye, or Ojo de Dios, is a ritual tool, magical object and cultural symbol evoking the weaving motif and its spiritual associations. For the Huichol peoples of northwestern Mexico, The God’s Eye is symbolic of the power of seeing and understanding that which is unknown and unknowable. The four points represent the elemental processes earth, fire, air, and water.

It is a simple or complex weaving made across two or more sticks. When a child is born, the central eye is woven by the father, then one eye is added for every year of the child’s life until the child reaches the age of five. Original Huichol God’s Eyes are extremely rare. There are many that are being made for the tourist market, but they do not carry the same traditional and spiritual significance.

Hung in a child’s hair or on the walls of homes, the main purpose is to ensure children a long and healthy life. The Huichol believe the design of the eye has the power to heal and to protect. It is often used in ceremonies and prayer. The colors used have different meanings. Red symbolizes life itself. Yellow represents the sun, moon and stars. Blue denotes sky and water. Brown stands for soil. Green describes vegetation, and black characterizes death.

The God’s Eye may also be understood as a shield which we interpret as a metaphorical protective device shielding against temptations or distractions along the spiritual path. It is also referred to as a mirror with two faces. Often both sides are covered with yarn designs and the hole in the middle of some is considered a mirror or often a small glass mirror is evident. The center is the magical portal through which humanity and deity perceive each other.

An example of Christian acculturation is evidenced on a craft website for Christians and envisions the God’s Eye as devotional process art. The binding of the God’s Eye is the physical process of a spiritual binding or covenant, expressing a prayer that the eye of God will watch the binder and grant health, fortune, and longevity. The God’s Eye becomes a physical representation of the process of prayer. The craft instructions on the website close with Psalm 119:18, “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.”

The Exciting Scout Craft Website is another example of how this spiritual ritual tool has been respectfully acculturated, given a life and attributed meaning as process art and a teaching tool for Scouts because they are easily and readily constructed.

Shamanism is a range of traditional beliefs and practices concerned with communication with the spirit world. A practitioner of shamanism is known as a shaman. There are many variations of shamanism throughout the world. One of the most significant and relevant qualities that separate a shaman from other spiritual leaders is their communications with the supernatural world.

Shaman perform a plethora of functions depending upon the society wherein they practice their art, such as healing, preserving tradition by storytelling and songs, fortune telling, acting as a guide of souls and leading a sacrifice. In some cultures, a shaman may fulfill several functions in one person.

The functions of a shaman may include either guiding to their proper place the souls of the dead, or curing of ailments. The ailments may be purely physical afflictions, such as disease, which may be cured by flattering, threatening, or wrestling the disease spirit, and which may be completed by displaying some extracted token of the disease spirit. Displaying this is supposed to impress the disease spirit that it has been, or is in the process of being, defeated, so that it will retreat and stay out of the patient’s body. Mental afflictions amy also be treated, such as persistent terror on account of some frightening experience, which may be likewise cured by similar methods.

In most languages a different term other than the one translated  as shaman is applied to a religious official or priest leading sacrificial rites, or to a reconteur or sage of traditional lore. There may be more of an overlap in functions with than of a shaman in the case of an interpreter of omens or of dreams.

Following are beliefs that are shared by all forms of shamanism:

• Spirits exist and they play important roles both in individual lives and in human society.
• The shaman can communicate with the spirit world.
• Spirits can be good or evil.
• The shaman can treat sickness caused by evil spirits.
• The shaman can employ trance inducing techniques to incite visionary ecstasy.
• The shaman’s spirit can leave the body to enter the supernatural world to search for answers.
• The shaman evokes animal images as spirit guides, omens, and message bearers. Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living. 

In contrast to organized religions like animism or animatism which are led by priests and which all members of a society practice, shamanism requires individualized knowledge and special abilities. Shaman operate outside established religions, and, traditionally, they operate alone. Shaman can gather into associations, as Indian tantric practitioners have done.

Shaman act as mediators in their culture. The shaman is seen as communicating with the spirits on behalf of the community, including the spirits of the dead. In some cultures, this mediator function of the shaman may be illustrated well by some of the shaman’s objects and symbols.

Among the Selkups, a report mentions a sea duck as a spirit animal. Ducks are capable of both flying and diving underwater, thus they are regarded as belonging to both the upper world and the world underneath. Similarly, the shaman and the jaguar are identified in some Amazonian cultures. The jaguar is capable of moving freely on the ground, in the water, and climbing trees (like the shaman’s soul). In some Siberian cultures, it is some water fowl species that are associated to the shaman in a similar way, and the shaman is believed to take on its form.

The Shaman’s Tree is an image found in several cultures as a symbol for mediation. The tree is seen as a being whose roots belong to the world underneath. Its trunk belongs to the middle, human inhabited world, and its top is related to the upper world.

In some cultures there may be additional types of shaman, who perform more specialized functions. For example, among the Nanai people, a distinct kind of shaman acts as a guide of souls. Other specialized shaman may be distinguished according to the type of spirits or realms of the spirit world, with which the shaman most commonly interacts.

There are also neoshamanistic movements which differ from many tradtitional shamanistic practice and beliefs in several points. Neoshamanism is not a single cohesive belief system but many philosophies lumped together. Most neoshamans believe in spirits and pursue self actualization through meditation and the use of entheogens.

Today, shamanism survives primarily among indigenous peoples. Shamanic practices continue today in the tundras, jungles, deserts, and other rural areas, and even in cities, towns, suburbs, and shantytowns all over the world. This is especially true for Africa and South America, where mestizo shamanism is widespread.

Voluntary Simplicity is a lifestyle individuals choose to minimize the more-is-better pursuit of wealth and consumption. Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in quality time for family and friends, stress reduction, personal taste or frugality. Others cite sociopolitical goals aligned with the anticonsumerist movement, including conservation, social justice and sustainable development.

According to Duane Elgin, “we can describe voluntary simplicity as a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich, a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with living.”

Some people practice voluntary simplicity to reduce need for purchased goods or services and, by extension, reduce their need to sell their time for money. Some will spend the extra free time helping family or others. Others may spend the extra free time to improve their quality of life, for example pursuing creative activities such as art. The philosophy behind these choices is examined at length in Ernest Callenbach’s 1972 nonfiction book Living Poor with Style, which also devotes hundreds of pages to practical tips and how to guides for both voluntary and involuntary practitioners of simple living.

Another approach is to look very fundamentally at the whole issue of why we need to buy and consume so many resources for a good quality of life. Though our society often seeks to buy happiness, materialism very frequently fails to satisfy, and may even increase the level of stress in life. It has been said that the making of money and the accumulation of things should not smother the purity of the soul, the life of the mind, the cohesion of the family, or the good of the society. Another key practice is the adoption of a simplified diet. Diets that may simplify domestic food production and consumption include raw veganism and the Gandhi diet.

Although simple living is often a secular pursuit, it may still involve reconsidering personal definitions of appropriate technology, as groups such as the Amish or Mennonites have done. People who eschew modern technology are often referred to as Neo Luddism adherents.

People who practice simple living have diverse views on the role of technology. Some simple living adherents, such as Kirkpatrick Sale, are strong critics of technology, while others see the Internet as a key component of simple living in the future, including the reduction of an individual’s carbon footprint through telecommuting and less reliance on paper. Voluntary simplicity may include high tech components such as computers, Internet, photovoltaic arrays, wind and water turbines, and a variety of other cutting edge technologies that can be used to make a simple lifestyle within mainstream culture easier and more sustainable.

The idea of food miles, the number of miles a given item of food or its ingredients has travelled between the farm and the table, is used by simple living advocates to argue for locally grown food. This is now gaining mainstream acceptance.

Advertising is criticised for encouraging a consumerist mentality. Many advocates of voluntary simplicity tend to agree that cutting out, or cutting down on, television viewing is a key ingredient in simple living.

A metabelief is a belief about beliefs themselves. It is above or on the next level to the belief under consideration. Thus, a metabelief operator is a concept or a function or an agent that operates on, transforms, or introduces changes into belief systems. The metabelief operator is outside the belief system that it operates upon. It thinks outside the box, or at least it perceives that there is a box. A metabelief operator transforms beliefs, and thereby transforms the perception of reality.

The concept of the metabelief operator is useful in understanding the problems posed by the process of our making facsimiles of the various facets of the realities external and internal. Here the term operator is used in the mathematical sense of something that operates on something else to change or transform it.

The metabelief operator can be weak, strong, or nonexistent. If we are quite content with our facsimiles of inner and outer realities, and content with our life as it occurs, there may be little need for a metabelief operator. We are content with our beliefs with regard to our family, business, religion and politics, and our beliefs work satisfactorily. Our intention is not devoted to questioning and transforming our beliefs.

In this case, the metabelief operator may be so weak as to be insignificant or function only to entertain the self. A crisis, whether physical, mental, or spiritual, can activate a metabelief operator in someone who previously did not have such an operator, or strengthen a weak one. A brush with death, a profound religious experience, a serious accident, a prolonged illness, a financial disaster, or a sudden unexpected confrontation with violence, can generate a need to change beliefs about Self, about external reality, and about internal reality. Here the metabelief operator may appear and function for a time. It may continue its operations or it may become dormant again.

Some people, geniuses of one sort or another, acquire metabelief operators quite early in life and continue to use them throughout their lives or they may let them die. Certain artists, scientists, businessmen, and politicians are creative through such metabelief operators. Once successful, the need for the metabelief operators may become weakened because the beliefs have become satisfied and the need for change has approached zero. Others maintain their metabelief operators throughout their lives. Curiosity and interest in challenging and transforming beliefs may be kept alive for decades and be unaffected by aging.

Consensus reality is that set of beliefs, which includes assumptions, postulates, interpretations, and simulations, that we have learned are real and true in our culture, society, family, school, and so on. Consensus reality is that which is agreed upon to be real and true by a family, a group, a nation, or a group of nations. Some examples are the various human legal structures, like city, county, state, and nation. These are pictures of realities created by media like newspapers and radio, financial realities such as those created by banks, taxes, salaries and wages, and the scientific community’s picture of reality.

It is fairly easy to see consensus reality at work in fanatical cults, yet generally difficult to see their operation in our world. Yet, in a sense, we all live in a cult whose members agree upon what is real and unreal, what is right and wrong, good and bad, possible and impossible.

In other words, consensus reality is a collection of simulations of internal reality and external reality, with which members of a particular group agree or disagree. Most of our sacred beliefs are actually agreed upon simulations of reality. Feedback, positive or negative, from lovers, family, as well as with religious, political, and business groups, generates beliefs and disbeliefs in each of us. Once programmed, beliefs are difficult to unearth because we are generally unaware of their powerful existence and influence on our thinking, doing, and feeling. The degree to which we function from this programming is, in a sense, the degree to which we are biorobots. Humans are distinctly different from robots, however. The human biocomputer can program its Self.

An important subset of the consensus realities is paper realities and their counterpart-film and tape realities. In our society we record on paper our contracts, our marriages, our wills, our financial transactions, our news, our history, our thoughts, our opinions. These records determine our actions, our thinking, and our doing to a large extent.

We live up to, or break, our contracts. We marry one person and live together according to our beliefs as to what is a marriage. We make a will in the expectation that its provisions will be carried out after our death. A checking account works because enough people believe in its paper reality. Otherwise a check for a thousand dollars is nothing more than a worthless piece of paper. We believe or disbelieve stories printed in newspapers and shown in TV newscasts. We tend to believe as true that which we read in books and magazines and what we see in motion pictures and on TV To a large extent, paper reality represents consensus reality. We are immersed in a representation of reality fed to us on paper, on film, on tape.

The metabelief operator can chance beliefs at various rates, from zero to the maximum speed available to the person. During a crisis, the speed of change can be such that the basic beliefs change in a few seconds, hours, or days. By contrast, during slow social change it may take years for beliefs to change.

Consensus reality itself is an aspect of a very large hyperstable multiple individual feedback system. It changes slowly in the absence of war, violence, or catastrophe. metabelief operators derived from consensus reality reflect this slow rate of change characteristic. In fact, fast belief changes are generally suspect by the group at large. The person is considered abnormal, far out, diseased, mentally ill, a fanatic, or unstable. They go from operating at the norm to being deviant, different from the group.

The consensus reality feedback loop keeps belief systems stable, static and unchanging. Getting out of the consensus reality feedback loop is necessary to speed up belief change. But how can we do so when we are quite literally immersed in it? There is only one way, go into the void, a place devoid of sensory stimulation and feedback from the consensus reality.

Crepuscular rays are sunbeams that are basically individual quantities of sunlight that poke through or around some object, usually a cloud. They’re made visible by dust or vapor that scatters light from them to our eyes, and by the contrast with the cloud’s shadow. Frequently, the rays project from a hole in cloud cover, appearing to spread out and widen.

They are also known as sun rays, cloud breaks, God’s rays, or the Fingers of God. They appear to radiate from a single point in the sky. They often occur when objects such as mountain peaks or clouds partially shadow the sun’s rays like a cloud cover. 

The name comes from their frequent occurrences during crepuscular hours, the times between dawn and dusk, when the contrasts between light and dark are the most obvious. Various airborne compounds scatter the sunlight and make the rays visible, due to diffraction, reflection, and scattering.

Crepuscular rays are nearly parallel, but appear to diverge because of linear perspective. Actually, the rays are straight and nearly parallel to each other. Because they come from the Sun, which is very far away and much larger than the Earth, they appear to be a lot longer and bigger than they look. The bottom of a ray can be miles closer to us than the top, where it comes out of the cloud. Some rays make it all the way across the sky.

If we were to see the rays exactly sideways at a 90-degree angle, they would be parallel with each other, and slanted at whatever angle corresponds to the height of the Sun in the sky. But if we see the rays from any other angle, especially head on, they appear to fan out, and the rays seem to get wider and farther apart from each other the closer they are to us. In exactly the same way, if we look down train tracks, they appear to converge and finally disappear in the distance.

This illusion, known as perspective, is based on the fact that light travels off objects in straight lines at definite angles. The farther away an object is the smaller the angle of vision and the smaller the image it projects on the retina. As we look into the distance, the angle of vision gets smaller and smaller until it effectively reaches zero, the vanishing point.

There are three primary forms of crepuscular rays. The first consists of rays of light penetrating holes in low clouds, and are also called Jacob’s Ladders. The second appears as beams of light diverging from behind a cloud. The third type contains pale, pinkish or reddish rays that radiate from below the horizon, which are often mistaken for light pillars.

The rays of the second and third types may extend across the sky and appear to converge at the antisolar point, which is the point on the sky sphere directly opposite the sun. They are called anticrepuscular rays. Like crepuscular rays, they are parallel shafts of sunlight from holes in the clouds, and their apparently odd directions are a perspective effect.

Crepuscular and anticrepuscular rays behave in the same manner. Crepuscular rays are usually red or yellow in appearance because the atmosphere acts as a giant lens, which refracts low sunset rays into long curved paths that pass through up to 40 times as much air as rays from a high midday sun. Particles in the air scatter short wavelength blue and green rays much more strongly than longer wavelength yellow and red.

Crepuscular rays can also occasionally be viewed underwater, particularly in arctic areas appearing from ice shelfs or cracks in the ice.