“The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of new monasticism which has in common with the old only the uncompromising attitude of a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount in the following of Christ. I believe it is now time to call people together to do this.”Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I have just finished reading “Punk Monk: The New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing” by Pete Greig and Andy Freeman, and I must say that I’m thoroughly impressed! I’ve long held the beliefs and ideals that they speak of and it sounds incredible that they’ve actually been guided far enough to be able to make a movement out of it!
Basically the book chronicles the development of Boiler Rooms and the 24-7 Prayer Movement. I won’t go too far into it, but if you find yourself reading this and following the links, I highly recommend finding a copy… parts of it do get a little tedious (probably just because I’m fairly well-read and parts of it was basic repetition to me) but all-in-all it was an incredibly inspiring and uplifting read, and I can’t wait to get to a Boiler Room at some point in the future!!!
In putting this little post together I also came across a blog the guys have running:
This site isn’t really about a book or a movement or a particular way of doing church. This site is about following Jesus and how it looks like to be true to Christ, kind to others and take the Gospel to the nations. Boiler Rooms are one way of doing that. We’ve filled this website with resources to equip you, questions to challenge you and stories to inspire you. We want to pray for and with you as you seek God and build communities around prayer justice and mission.
- Andy & Pete”
I suppose I should also add this:
What is a Boiler Room ?
What is a 24-7 Boiler Room Community?
The Purposes, Principles & Practices of a Boiler Room
A 24-7 Boiler Room is a simple Christian community that practices a daily rhythm of prayer, study and celebration whilst caring actively for the poor and the lost.
(i) The Two Purposes: a 24-7 Boiler Room exists to love God in prayer and to love its neighbours in practice. These purposes are contextualised in community and expressed in a defined location.
(ii) The Three Principles: at the heart of every Boiler Room is a living community committed to being 1. Authentic: True to Christ. 2. Relational: Kind to People. 3. Missional: Taking the Gospel to the World.
(iii) The Six Practices: Every Boiler Room Community applies the three principles practically through six core activities:
A Boiler Room is true to Christ by being:
+++ A prayerful community practicing all kinds of prayers on all occassions.
+++ A creative community where artistic expressions of prayer and worship may take the form of art, sculpture, new music, poetry, dance, fun and celebration.
A Boiler Room is kind to people by being:
+++ A just and merciful community where the practical needs of the local poor are met and where liberation is championed.
+++ A hospitable community where pilgrims are welcomed, meals are shared and where friendships can flourish across boundaries of race and culture.
A Boiler Room is committed to the sharing the gospel by being:
+++ A missional community existing for the incarnation of the gospel amongst the poor and the lost both locally and cross-culturally. To act as well as to pray.
+++ A learning community of training and discipleship, where people are growing in their faith, their life-skills and their ability to lead.
Here is a video of Amelia Hazelip (FR) who has adapted the Fukuoka technique (natural farming) along with other permaculturist skills (Bill Mollison), to temperate climates such as Europe. It lasts 30min and has been divided into 8 sequels.
Ian Hume, emeritus professor of biology at Sydney University, said he and his researchers also found that the amount of toxicity in the leaves of eucalyptus saplings rose when the level of carbon dioxide within a greenhouse was increased.
Hume presented his research on the effects of carbon dioxide on eucalyptus leaves to the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra on Wednesday.
The researchers found that carbon dioxide in eucalyptus leaves affects the balance of nutrients and “anti-nutrients” — substances that are either toxic or interfere with the digestion of nutrients.
An increase in carbon dioxide favors the trees’ production of carbon-based anti-nutrients over nutrients, so leaves can become toxic to koalas, Hume said.
Some eucalyptus species may have high protein content, but anti-nutrients such as tannins bind the protein so it cannot be digested by koalas.
Hume estimated that current levels of global carbon dioxide emissions would result in a noticeable reduction in Australia’s koala population in 50 years due to a lack of palatable leaves.
Out of more than 600 eucalyptus species in Australia, koalas will only eat the leaves of about 25, Hume said. Changing the toxicity levels in the trees could further reduce the varieties that koalas find palatable, he said.
“Koalas produce one young each year under optimal conditions, but if you drop the nutritional value of the leaves, it might become one young every three or four years,” Hume said.
Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, a marsupial physiologist, described Hume’s predictions of declining koala numbers as speculative but credible.
Eucalyptus leaves already have little nutritional value, he said, and koalas have adapted to their poor diet by sleeping to conserve energy.
“It’s a very precarious existence,” Tyndale-Biscoe said. “They basically sleep for 20 hours a day and then they’ve got four hours to do everything else — occasionally eat a leaf and maybe once a year go after another koala” to mate.
Tyndale-Biscoe said koalas had already disappeared from parts of Australia but remained plentiful in others and were unlikely to be wiped out by climate change. They already have been displaced from the most nutritious trees on the most fertile land by the spread of farms and suburbs, he said.
It’s the psychedelic drug that inspired Hendrix and The Beatles - and shaped the music, art and literature of a generation. As the world bids farewell to the bicycling Swiss chemist who created LSD, John Walsh explores his mind-altering legacy…
The letters LSD once denoted English money in pre-decimalisation days: librae, solidi, denarii, the Latin forms of pounds, shillings and pence. From the mid-1960s, however, the letters had only one meaning: they stood for the most powerful mood-altering drug in the world.
Those who experienced the 12-hour “trip” it engendered would report back with all the fervour and awe of travellers returned from mystic lands, desperate to relay the sights and sounds of their wild adventures, but frustrated by the impossibility of making their listeners see or understand their experiences. Sometimes, they’d been on a physical journey (usually no further than the garden or local shops); but mentally, the trip had taken them into a new realm of consciousness that was a) hard to evoke and b) very boring to listen to. They talked about the blinding sensory enhancement, and the synaesthesia of hearing colours and smelling the stars. They saw profound truths in cracks in the pavement and cosmic harmonies in a match flame. They tended to mention God, several times. The man who invented the stuff had a lot to answer for. He was a Swiss chemist called Albert Hoffman, and he died on Tuesday morning.
The fact that he reached the age of 102 seems a tribute to the efficacy of his invention. But its importance to the 20th century isn’t as a therapeutic medical treatment. It may have altered some lives for the better, but its real importance is cultural. For LSD gave the Sixties a brand-new concept to embrace and apply to every area of life, especially the arts: psychedelia. The word was spelt wrongly – it should, strictly, be psychodelia – but its meaning was clear. It meant the making-visible of the soul: opening up your inner, half-glimpsed metaphysical self for inspection while in a state of profound relaxation and pleasure.
The English writer Aldous Huxley had, of course, been there years before, when he experimented with mescaline in the early 1950s. His 1954 book, The Doors of Perception (the title is taken from William Blake – “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”) argued that altered-state-inducing drugs were good for you, if you were sufficiently clever.
“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual,” he said. But LSD was, by 1968, becoming available to all, and seemed, for a time, a thing that could change the world.
In theory, the entire young “counterculture” of the West, the same young people who listened to rock’n'roll, smoked dope, rejected the values of their straight, bourgeois parents and demonstrated against the Vietnam War, could all drop acid, discover their transcendent inner being, forsake their redundant ego and refuse to cooperate with the ordinary forms of society. They could, in the immortal phrase of Timothy Leary, LSD’s greatest fan and most articulate zealot, “Turn on, tune in and drop out.“
They could share with each other soul-perceptions that were denied to the straights, the military-industrial complex, the politicians and judges…. It didn’t happen. But, for a few years, it felt as if the doors of perception might budge an inch.
The first acid trip was on 16 April 1943. It was an accident. Dr Hoffman had been conducting experiments with LSD-25, which he had synthesised from lysergic acid in 1938 and was trying to make again, having a “presentiment” that it could possess “properties other than those established in the first investigations”. The doctor got some of the stuff on his fingers. In the afternoon he felt dizzy, couldn’t work, went home to bed and wrote later that he entered a dream-like state. Behind his closed eyes, he saw streams of “fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours” for a whole two hours.
Three days later, with a Dr Jekyll-like foreboding, he put himself through a guinea-pig experiment. He took 250mg (a colossal dose by blotting-paper standards) and went for a bicycle ride. Wherever he looked, the landscape became distorted as if seen through a funfair mirror. Though he was moving fast he felt completely stationary, as though the fields were whizzing by him.
Back home, he experienced the world’s first bad trip. He became convinced that he was possessed by a demon, that his neighbour was a witch and that his furniture was trying to kill him. The doctor was summoned, found nothing wrong beyond a dilation of the pupils, and packed him off to bed. Hoffman’s panic subsided and he started to enjoy the visions and exploding colours, the shifting kaleidoscope of shapes breaking up and folding into themselves. Every noise from the street became a visual event.
He woke next day full of beans, refreshed, reborn. His breakfast tasted delicious. In the garden, looking at birds and smelling the flowers, he described his senses as “vibrating in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day”.
“Bicycle Day”, 19 April, was later commemorated by acid enthusiasts because it was the first conscious “trip” and it had had – just about – a happy ending. But the doors to perception are, for some truth-seekers, booby-trapped and dangerous. When LSD was co-opted by medical staff for recreational use, two decades after Hoffman’s bike ride, users learnt the hard way how impossible it was to control the wild ride once it had started.
At Oxford in the early 1970s, we were frankly intimidated by the drug’s reputation. We all wanted to try it, but were too chicken. The word in the quad was: if you had any secret hang-ups, mental instabilities, phobias, sexual inadequacies or social insecurities (the kind that surface in dreams,) you were wise of steer clear of acid. We knew when one of us was going to try it. “Tonight,” I’d hear during dinner in hall, “Roger’s tripping for the first time. But he’ll have Will and Ollie with him, so he’ll be OK.”
I’ve always remembered Roger’s first trip (so, I’ll bet, has he). We all knew he’d be fine because he was so perfect: cool, handsome, easy-going, a hit with the girls, a dead ringer, with his corkscrewy curls, for Marc Bolan of T. Rex. And he was rich; he owned a Morgan, which he casually parked in the back quad. We knew Roger would survive the experience and bang on about it, like he banged on about his Bang and Olufsen state-of-the-art hi-fi. And anyway, Will and Olly would look after him.
The evening started well. The three students took a tab each, drank some wine and waited for results. An hour later, they were happily tripping on the college lawn, listening to the grass grow and hearing their voices transforming into harp notes. They went to Olly’s room, smoked, listened to Tubular Bells in a haze of bliss. Then Roger went the gents. This proved a mistake.
After using the facilities, he washed his hands, dried them and looked in the mirror. Something caught his eye. He looked closer. Just below his cherubic lower lip, there was a spot. It’s wasn’t huge or septic, but it was unquestionably a skin eruption, a blemish. As he watched, it grew bigger and bigger until it took on the size and texture of a Brussels sprout. Roger was transfixed. He looked on in horror, as the distended spot grew wobblingly larger, and began to pull his features into its green heart. His nose disappeared, his cheeks and eyes began to twist down, his Marc Bolan curls hung uselessly over his aghast, imploding face.
Roger, you see, was indeed a near-perfect human being but he was as vain as a canary. And discovering a spot on his immaculate physiognomy played straight into his worst insecurity: that he might secretly be unattractive. He ended up imagining his whole head was a great blob of pus; and sat screaming with paranoia for two hours as his friends dosed him with orange juice (vitamin C is the only known cure for bad trips). Other occupants of his staircase, alerted by the noise, called in to discover a scenario straight from the locked unit of Bedlam hospital, circa 1880.
During the Cold War, both the British and the US governments were keen to exploit LSD’s unique qualities, for “social engineering“. They were convinced it would be useful as a “truth drug” during interrogations – a rather prosaic understanding of the kind of visionary truth revealed by communing with one’s soul.
In 1953 and 1954, scientists working for MI6 drugged servicemen with LSD without telling them what to expect; the scientists told them they were looking for a cure for the common cold. One soldier, aged 19, reported that he saw “walls melting, cracks appearing in people’s faces… eyes would run down cheeks, Salvador Dali-type faces… a flower would turn into a slug.” Not surprisingly, the experiment failed; MI6 reported that LSD was of little practical use as a mind-control drug. It took 50 years for the human guinea-pigs to be compensated for what they’d been put through.
This is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now, but keep forgetting or getting distracted… today I received the following from Ross Bishop(I have put in the hyperlinks to words-check ‘em out!), so I guess I’ll pop it up, with a quick mention to check out “Slow Food“, “Free School” and “Dumpster Diving“… I’ll put a bit more info on the last 3 into Babylon Molatov…
Hello,
I’ve been thinking about something for while – with fuel costs going through the roof, carbon footprints, the awful nutritional content of supermarket produce, agricultural chemicals, skyrocketing grocery prices, grain shortages and price hikes due to ethanol production (one of the greatest con jobs ever foisted on the American public, by the way), global warming, droughts around the planet, etc., I think it’s time for all of us to rethink our choices.
I started making my own bread a while ago, and have thought about grinding my own flour because store bought flour in America simply has no life to it. When I lived in Santa Fe I raised chickens, and I cannot believe the difference in the energy of fresh eggs and what I get from the store – even the free range ones. The difference is incredible!
I was talking with a friend about this yesterday, thinking to myself, “I have this acre of land around my house on which I grow what? Grass! And it takes more water and fertilizer than vegetables would!” Then the light began to dawn. During WWII, people were encouraged to create Victory Gardens as a part of the war effort, largely to reduce fuel consumption. Prior to that, family gardens and fruit trees had been a standard part of our lifestyle. Family gardens had gone away as people moved into town and stores and mass produced fruits and vegetables provided a more upscale and frankly, easier alternative. Well guess what? It’s Victory Garden time again. Interestingly, that same day, someone sent me a link about urban gardening: http://www.chow.com/stories/10995?tag=nl.e357. (There is a lot of material on the Internet.) Then a friend,
Brian Sanderoff, a natural pharmacist who runs Your Prescription For Health (http://www.illnessisoptional.com/cms/) in Baltimore, sent me an article about eating locally that he had circulated to his email group last week. It is worth reading:
THE HEALTHIEST POSSIBLE DIET – For You and For the Rest of Us by
Brian Sanderoff, P.D.
The debate rages on… vegetarian, vegan, high protein-low carb (Atkins), South Beach, Fat-Flush, Macrobiotic… which diet is the healthiest for you?
In the past, my stock answer to this sticky question has been, “it depends”. There are many factors that would determine which is right for an individual… genetics, metabolism, blood type, ethnic background, health, personal preferences, etc. If I saw five patients in one day that all asked me that very same question, the conclusion drawn would have been that there is a different answer for each one of them.
Herbivore? Carnivore? Omnivore?
Nope… if we really want the healthiest way of eating… for you, and for the rest or us, how about LOCAVORE!!
A “locavore” is someone that eats food grown or produced locally or within a certain radius of where they live. The distance considered “local” may vary depending upon your sensibilities, but a generally accepted rule of thumb may be within 100 miles.
This would be taking the question to a whole different level – one that transcends whether you are eating meat or not. And one that eschews the organic vs. non-organic argument. Or, better said, decide to eat locally first – then you can argue about all the rest of it. Vegetarian or carnivore, organic or not – if you are getting your food locally, chances are it will be healthier for you than if it traveled in a truck, boat or plane to make it to your plate. And, just as importantly, it will be healthier for me if you did that too!
The average American meal has traveled at least 1,500 miles to make it to your plate (that is further than the average American family goes for vacation). So what is the true cost of a meal when you consider the fuel costs of transportation and refrigeration, packaging, labor, etc? The cost to the environment and the inflated cost of gasoline (because of supposed scarcity) makes that 99 cent hamburger one heck of a lot more expensive.
Get this – according to Barbara Kingsolver (author of many novels including Poisonwood Bible) and husband Steven Hopp in their book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – if every American citizen would eat just one local and organically grown meal a week, the savings in fuel would amount to 1.1 million barrels of oil every week! How many of us have considered trading in our SUVs for little Hondas? Want to make a real difference, and help yourself in the process… become a locavore… the impact can be tremendous, even if you only partially dedicate yourself to the idea.
Locally grown food makes up less than 1% of the $900-billion food industry. The reasons for this are numerous, including grocery chains & wholesalers and fast-food producers finding it easier and more profitable to buy from huge factory farms. Government subsidies also contribute to the appearance of economies with the large-scale food delivery system.
Imagine what would happen if there were no more local farms in our area. All it would take is one natural disaster between here and the Mid-West, or one ill-timed political decision, or one trucker’s strike to render us helpless.
Here are additional benefits (other than saving gas) that come from encouraging and supporting local farmers…
Eating foods harvested locally also means eating them almost immediately after harvest, which translates into better taste and increased nutritional value, because foods ripen on the vine, not through an artificial process while in a truck.
Keeping local farmers in business helps to control urban sprawl – a family farm going out of business is what leads to the land becoming available to developers.
Eating locally encourages multiple cropping; growing multiple species and a wide variety of crops at the same time and place… this is healthier for the land and also makes the farms less susceptible to the likelihood of an entire crop loss caused by one factor (meaning if all you grow is soy beans and a soy bean virus attacks your crops – you’re done).
Multiple cropping also allows for more efficient use of labor and materials because different plants come in at different times, as opposed to 80% of the work happening in a short period of time.
Local economies are strengthened by protecting local jobs and local suppliers.
I really encourage you to think this through very carefully. Think about how simple it would be to make a small change in your habits that could reap huge rewards down the road. One meal a week, that is less than 5% of your total eating activity, can make a huge difference in your health and mine. If you aren’t interested in helping yourself, you could at least do it for me! Brian
So, whether you decide to grow your own or simply buy more locally, DO SOMETHING! I will finish turning my garden soil tomorrow. Be the first in your neighborhood to grow corn or beans in your yard or squash amongst your petunias - (if you can find non-GMO seed). Create a plot with a neighbor, put a potted tomato on your balcony, shop a the farmer’s market - do something to create change, and then follow thorough on it. The politicians have had 50 years to do something, but they have been corrupted by the special interests. We must take responsibility for our lives - change begins with you.
Here’s some tunes I popped out around this time last year… I’ve really been intending to go back and remaster them but now I need the disc space for a new idea, so they must go, Go, GO!!!
I would’ve popped them up on Mr. (n)’s site, but alas, they’s far too big!!!
So, after a bit of internerd perusal and head-scratching, I decided on FileFreak (mainly ’cause the name sounds cool). I download a fair few DJ sets etc. which, due to sheer size, require the use of free filehosting, and I know how much of a bitch it can be to get to the goods on many servers so I’d appreciate feedback on ease of accessibility, even if you think the music sucks!!! (It doesn’t)
As an ex-laser printer technician and having an avid interest in futuristy-type stuff, I’m pretty annoyed with the whole overreactive hype surrounding the new laser menace! It seems every idiot and his (retarded) dog has something to say about the evils of lasers… and I do mean idiot… take the perfection on this one:
Carrying a high-powered laser without a permit could attract a 14-year jail term under tough new NSW laws designed to reduce the potential for “mass murder” resulting from laser attacks on planes.
The proposed legislation, which has been modelled on NSW knife laws, will also make it an offence to carry any kind of laser in public without a reasonable explanation.
Under the proposed legislation, high-powered lasers - category 3 and 4 devices - will be classed as prohibited weapons, and possessing one without a permit will be an offence punishable by up to 14 years in jail.
Police will also be able to frisk anyone suspected of carrying a laser (FB’s note-!!!), and anyone unable to provide a lawful excuse for possessing one could face two years’ jail and a $5,000 fine.
In the past, police had to catch people in the act of misusing lasers to prosecute them, he said.
The laws will be introduced into the NSW Parliament in May and Mr Iemma said he hoped they could be adopted nationally.
The legislation complements the recent Commonwealth ban on importing high-powered lasers, which can be purchased online for as little as $US50 ($A53.63).
“As long as that doesn’t end up impinging on the people that actually require them for work,” CFMEU spokesman Tim Vollmer said.
Western Sydney Amateur Astronomy Group president Gerry Aart accepted the proposed laws were sensible but said his organisation only used weak lasers as a “brilliant tool” for pointing out phenomena indistinct to the naked eye.
However, Australian Optical Society president Professor Hans Bachor said the blanket ban was an overreaction.
“You can’t point (low-powered lasers) at any aircraft over a distance - the effect wouldn’t be big enough,” he said.
Many people used such pointers and the proposed ban could create a headache for police and the community, he said.
Legal laser pointers, with light output of less than 5 mW (5/1000 of a watt), are relatively weak. They are so weak that, at close range, it is difficult or impossible to cause confirmed eye damage. For example, the Mayo Clinic study mentioned above showed no damage to the retina even after a 15 minute exposure to a legal (5 mW) laser pointer. This is echoed by Canadian laser regulators who state that laser pointers cause eye damage only “if you look directly into the beam from a laser pointer for more than a minute and a half in a very steady manner.”
In aircraft incidents, it is safe to say that absolutely no eye damage could occur from even the brightest legal laser pointer. The aircraft would be well beyond the 50 foot range of eye hazard, the aircraft is moving at high speeds, the pilot would naturally blink or avoid the light, and the beam’s light would spread out due to the large laser-to-aircraft distance.
Even illegal laser pointers are not a great concern. For example, if an illegal laser pointer is five times brighter, the eye hazard distance increases to 250 feet. This is still a relatively short distance. This short distance, coupled with the aircraft’s movement and the pilot’s normal blink/avoidance mechanism, would protect the pilot from permanent damage.
Finally, eye damage limits were set conservatively, with a “safety margin”. If you are exposed to laser light at the eye damage limit, it would be unlikely in most people to cause permanent damage.
What concerns experts is not eye damage, but the brightness of laser pointers. This can cause distraction or other visual effects.
Anyway, lasers get used in so many different ways these days, it’s gonna be interesting to see how the licensing system for “legitimate laser possession” will pan out…
So… ummm… if you use lasers for anything, or have anything to say regarding them, drop me a line.
Just thought I’d draw your attention to this. Many thanks to digitalseance- I’d never come across Etidorhpa before… I downloaded it the other day and have been sucked… right… in…
Take a Victorian scifi premise, say, a trip to the center of the earth, and by the way, it’s hollow. Add a tale of a soul condemned by the Illuminati to a perilous underground quest to find the Goddess of Love (spoiler alert: spell Aphrodite backwards). Top it off with a wild magic mushroom trip. That’s Etidorhpa!
This may be the very source of the ‘adepts living in hollow earth who abduct humans’ meme, later developed by Ray Palmer, and many others. The book is larded with long passages of speculative science. The structure of the hollow earth and the effects of gravitation at various places is much better worked out than some of the ‘nonfiction’ hollow earth books (e.g. Reed or Gardner).
The journey of ‘I-am-the-man’ is a not-so-subtle allegory of spiritual progression to being a disembodied adept. Along the way he loses his youth, loses sunlight, becomes weightless, stops breathing, can hear without ears, then his heart stops, … and still he lives. Each of this steps is symbolic of a progression to a more ethereal plane of existence.
At times, the narrative recursion is three levels deep. This is an acquired taste. L. Sprague de Camp called Etidorpha ‘unreadable.’ Modern readers accustomed to consuming multiple narrative streams at the same time (i.e. channel hopping), with long recursive breaks (i.e. commercials) might do better.
Except for the titular Etidorhpa, there are no female characters. And she only appears briefly in a hallucination. Why such a small part in the book? Other genre novels, such as Atlantida and The Lost Continent, are driven by strong female characters. And once the main character is inside the hollow earth, it just halts. He doesn’t even get to meet Etidorhpa again. Whether the author ran out of steam, or the ending was only supposed to be implied, is unknown.
feralbrown
