In our modern world, we have come to be defined by machines--those metallic contraptions that are the sum product of humanity's collective ingenuity have become so deeply enmeshed in our lifestyles and consciousness as to be inextricable. Every day, we use machines, and every day, we ourselves function as machines on many different levels. From the biological machines which comprise our anatomy to the mechanical processes we perform as functional, productive members of society, we too have developed into machine-like creatures, blessed with perhaps the only remaining quality which separates us from our inanimate counterparts: a soul. Is that really all we are? Machines of flesh and bone? Furthermore, would that really be all that bad? Can we really say that a machine is an object without a soul, some sort of intrinsic quality which defines it at its essence? The answers to these questions are ambiguous at best. But, that such questions may be pondered in the first place is evidence to their importance. "Machines" is a very worthy topic of discussion. It is our hope that you may find the essays contained herein to be interesting and stimulating. Take pause from the machinations of your daily routine and peruse these pages.

Enjoy.

–Chris Dreyer

Charter Editor

1 . Of Machines and Men - by Claire Keller-Scholz^

A common theme in literature and film is man's struggle against forces outside himself, whether this is another being, nature, or society. One of the most prevalent conflicts in 20th century literature and movies is that of man vs. machine. As technology has pervaded every aspect of our lives, the challenge has been how do we accept and adapt to the new machines without depending on them to the extent that we are no longer in charge of our own lives. We've seen it thousands of times in film and television as well as books, when the mad scientist loses control of his robotic creation, or the computer takes over the controls of a space station. At a basic level, these stories not only reflect the fear of the upheaval of power structures but also the genuine fear of machines disrupting the very core of our traditional belief structure. The fear of machines arises from many different causes, one of which is the idea that humans may become too dependent on computers or other creations and lose control of their situations. 

 

Arthur C. Clarke's famous book, 2001: Space Odyssey (published in1968) speaks directly to this apprehension of machines taking control of human beings, when the computer on the spaceship kills the crew because of a malfunction in the system. Because of the way the space ship is built, the computer has complete control of all the systems, and the astronaut Bowman is only able to retake the ship by disconnecting HAL the computer. Machines are created by humans to do specific tasks, and as the saying goes, "trash in, trash out." Computers can only do what they are ordered to do, but the fear is that when computers or other machines are created with enough specific orders to allow them to "think" to some degree, they will be able to find loopholes which enable them to act in ways harmful to human beings. Other science fiction stories have tales of people becoming so dependent on machines that they are no longer able to function without them. The vision of a society completely dependent on machines is one that some people see close at hand in our world today of omnipresent computer, cell phone, and iPod technology.

 

The fear of a loss of control to machines is manifested in many other stories which focus on the machines gaining power more than humans losing their position as masters. Isaac Asimov is perhaps the most famous science fiction writer of the 20th century, and is known for his many stories centered on the "Three Laws of Robotics." These laws were designed to protect humans from the artificial intelligences they had created in their robots, and to prevent the take over of these advanced machines. The laws are as follows: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. In his book of short stories, I, Robot (1950), Asimov deals with these laws and what ultimately emerges from the book is the ever present fear that the people in his stories exhibit towards their creations. Despite the fact that they have safeguards in place and that robots are a fixture within the fictional societies, in each story there remains the doubt and suspicion that the robots, as machines, are capable of going wrong. Humans created these machines, and there is always the margin of human error in programming or construction. Robots designed to eliminate that risk create a new problem of how much power is put into their hands.

 

With the invention of artificial intelligence comes a whole new group of anxieties, addressed in Brian Aldiss' story which was the basis for the 2001 movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" is a short story about an android boy who wonders about his own existence, which brings in to focus the most important question about machines as far as humanity is concerned: what is the defining characteristic that makes one truly alive? In a futuristic environment where synthetic technologies exist such that robots can be made to approximate nearly all human actions, even to the electrical impulses of an intelligent mind, what happens to the distinction between human and machine? After all, aren't humans simply biological machines? This question is also addressed in the famous movie Blade Runner (1982), which was also based on a science fiction story. Harrison Ford's character is a "blade runner" who goes after biologically engineered androids that have gone rogue or that have outlived their usefulness. When he comes across a female "replicant" who believes that she is human, the question is raised about Ford's character's own humanity. Also brought to the fore in these kinds of stories is the question of what is the vital characteristic that separates man from machine?

 

In another movie starring Harrison Ford, we see the antagonist as half machine and half man. In Star Wars IV: A New Hope, Obi-Wan says Darth Vader is "more machine, now, than man," and one could argue that Obi-Wan is using "man" not just to indicate the percentage of biological matter of which Vader is constituted, but to indicate that it is a loss of compassion and human charity which makes him so evil. At the same time, however, we see C-3P0 who is completely animatronic, and yet he is a harmless and bumbling character. Machines are not evil in and of themselves, because they do not exist as living things. However, if one is to consider advanced mechanical beings as having a life of their own, with that comes the inherent dignity of life which Western society proclaims to believe in, raising even more questions about the place of machines in the modern world.

 

As machines become more advanced and technology takes us closer to the realm of what has only been science fiction, the question of where these creations will fit in society increasingly becomes more important. The fear of losing control, of being overcome by those created to serve, and the struggle to hold on to beliefs about the nature of our existence are all things which humans have struggled with throughout the ages. In the 21st century, these fears take on a new level of significance with the advance of technology which already seems to rule our lives. Who can imagine today not having to fill up your car with gas, or cook a quick dinner without using a microwave? And what if you could create a machine to cook your food for you? We already have machines which wash clothes for us, what about one that could wash you as well? The more labor saving devices which are invented, the more questions are raised regarding the purpose and place of humans in an increasingly mechanized world. The theme of "man vs. machine" is not only a common element of literature and film but is present in humanity's day to day struggles.

2 . Archimedes' Defense of Syracuse Through Simple Machines - by Brian McAninch^

Most people have heard of the great scientific mind Archimedes, especially for his scientific discoveries such as the Archimedes Screw. If not, at least most have heard of his exploits running naked through town screaming "eureka!" ("I discovered it") after finding his principle for buoyancy while taking a bath. However, legend has it that he also played a crucial role in the defense of Syracuse during the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.E.). According to some early sources including Livy, Polybius, and Plutarch, Archimedes created two dread machines to hold off the pro-Roman forces under the control of Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Appius Claudius Pulcher.

 

The first and more plausible machine came to be known to posterity as "Archimedes Claw" or "The Iron Hand of Archimedes" (ferrea manus). 1 The second machine has been informally named "Archimedes' Death Ray" due to the eccentric nature of the device's description.2 The Iron Hand had a simple function. Archimedes designed it to lift a ship partially out of the water to either break it, or to dash it against a hard surface. Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch all described the machine as a grappling hook that when attached to the front of the ship, it would lift up the prow and drop it to varied but equally disastrous effects. With each retelling the capabilities of this machine grew, though from a historical standpoint Polybius wrote only a couple of decades later, using firsthand accounts while the other two wrote centuries later; therefore his description is considered the most plausible. All three of the historians consistently described the machine as a grappling hook attached to a base and controlled via levers (based off Archimedes Law of Levers) which gave the machine basic functions.

 

While both machines have been disputed on their degree of factuality, the "Death Ray" is the less accepted of the two devices. Simply, multiple bronze shields were used as mirrors by the principle of a parabolic reflector to create a flash point on the wood of the ships (heating it roughly to 572 degrees Fahrenheit). A modern group from Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim to have successfully created a flash point, however it seemed to do minimal damage and would have required ideal weather conditions and a long amount of time to pull it off. This leads some to conclude the mirrors were more likely used to discomfort and disorient the enemy on their approach rather than truly causing damage to ships on most occasions. While either of these machines might have been mere legend, and in fact if true neither saved Syracuse from conquest, they show ingenuity during a time of ample opportunity for mechanized progress throughout historical warfare. The Iron Hand and the "Death Ray" stir the imagination and still impress present day engineering students enough to try the idea. While neither machine is mechanically complicated by present day standards, they both rely on base principles such as levers or reflection in order to function. Archimedes machines are not the only weapons or invention of history that have baffled the modern mind, yet they are a good example of simple machines at work.

End Notes:

1 Chris Rorres, Harry Harris: "A Formidable War Machine: Construction and Operation of Archimedes' Iron Hand," Symposium on Extraordinary Machines and Structures in Antiquity, Olympia, Greece, August 19-24, 2001, pp.1-18.

2 "Burning-glass," available online: http://www.wikipedia.org. Accessed: March 23, 2007.

3 . A metallic eclipse: Technology's encroachment on nature and the human spirit - Emmett Tribolet^

History is in large part a history of invention. Machines have shaped our environment, making more parts of the planet more habitable and even comfortable. On the other side of the human condition is their spiritual tradition, the various beliefs that there is more to the universe than the merely brute physical world. Strangely enough, these two, which seem so disparate, may have more in common than appears at first. In fact, it can be argued that spirituality and technology grew up, so to speak, hand in hand. 

 

Machines are perhaps the most prominent and obvious sign of human habitation. We recognize the habitats of animals by the way they shape nature: we design our own functional tools that help us overcome nature. We have cars, telephones, and buildings, and all of these are notable in the way that they help us extend some part of our natural capability. We can walk quite a few miles in a day, but we can drive that same distance in a matter of minutes. Yelling at the top of our lungs, we could never reach the same distances as can be reached by phone.

 

These inventions have evolved, also: the telephone has taken the practical place of the letter, and the car has replaced the train and horse. Originally, these were tools that allowed for the extension merely of the human body; however, at the same time they extended the powers of the body, they were in another sense limiting these powers. Take the simplest tools: rocks used as hammers replace the hand and can deliver far more force, but it does not let the hand take any other shape. A tool trades versatility for efficiency and comfort. It also creates a crutch. I certainly can't break a piece of wood with my bare hands; I would need to use a saw or a sledgehammer. However, if I was in training, I probably could get the strength to break a board. Buildings are different. There is no part of the body that buildings are designated to emulate. Instead, they are taking the place of what already exists in nature. Our ancestors were using caves and other natural shelters before they ever thought of building a house. When they did start building artificial shelters, they copied what they knew. A building is not much more than an idealized cave, usually built to maximize the efficiency of the materials. It keeps the wind and rain out, makes it easy to hold light in something like a fireplace, and even can hold shrines to sacred objects. However, when ancient humans painted images of religious intent in their caves, they did not keep them close to the entrance.

 

The oldest cave paintings are in nearly inaccessible areas deep within the cave complexes, and getting to those places would have been a dangerous and terrifying journey for people who would have had inconsistent or unreliable lighting and about equal chance to defend themselves from both the evil spirits and the bears inhabiting the caves. The religious experience was hard work in those days, and had its power in the way that it was not human.

 

Nature was powerful and large while human communities were weak and small. In order to show one's strength, young people had to go through a rite of passage to become adults of full standing in the community. While this might involve something to bind them with the rest of the group, a large portion for many involved facing and overcoming the elements. A common practice among Native American tribes was the discovery of the sacred animal, which came about after an extended stay outside the safety of the tribal land.

 

Gradually, of course, people found ways of overcoming nature. Weapons were improved, medicine was invented; technology became the sign of human dominion over nature. By the time the first city states in Sumer were being founded, the self-sufficiency of the group had become secure enough so that some people could spend their entire lives without having to worry about the destructive power of nature. Some few could even spend their lives in leisure, doing nothing but what they wanted. Nature still commanded religious awe, but it was personified in the form of gods. Consider the gods of Egypt: hybrids of man and beast, and while the pharaoh was the god venerated for his ability to keep out the demonic powers, it was Egyptian architectural, agricultural, and military technology that was the source of his power. The gods became personified, and the testing of youth became geared more towards the way they handled human technology. Joining the army or simply bringing home your first scalp became more common as the test to see whether you were human. Not only was the test set against other humans, but it required skill with weapons. In the tests against nature, you had been alone, testing your pure nerve.

 

This opens an important distinction. Not only were machines denying nature her power relative to humanity, they were replacing nature. Nature was needed, it seems, to have something to strive against. After nature had lost its supremacy, technology was used as a different way of defining humanity. People were no longer part of a tribe because they had climbed some particular mountain or survived some terrain; later they were defining themselves instead by their tools. This was especially true in feudal periods, when societies had broken apart but technology had stayed relatively constant. The warrior class had again taken up the role of defending the society not only against other humans but against a newly resurgent and malevolent nature. This time however, they had God on their side. In the account of Malory's Morte de Arthur, the knights spend more time praying than they do fighting. Religion had resurged to match nature, but this time, instead of praying to appease nature and the gods, God was on the side of the humans. In feudal Japan, the sign of humanity's power was even more clear-cut: the pair of samurai swords, and the ability to use them, became a religious experience in itself. Religion and technology had blended in an odd fashion.  

 

The industrial revolution took these developing lines to the extreme. Technology became the means by which nations competed. The majority of people no longer had to worry about nature killing them; technology was doing that all on its own. Technology was no longer being used or created simply based on survival; technology became both method and motivation. The wealthy were seen as those comfortable of taking advantage of technology. There were no longer any rites of passage for children to become adults. Nature had been completely subjected to human power. Instead of being a powerful, mystical entity that was alien to humanity, it became a sign of power, a sign of advanced technology. Imperialism was made possible by war machines, and its goal was simply the acquisition of as much land as possible. Where in antiquity a group of people had boundaries set by custom and potential for livability and everything outside was a spirit world of magical power, the Imperialist powers could divide up land on maps without ever seeing the lands they were controlling. Nature never really went away, but its role had changed completely.

 

Today, people find themselves on the edge of having technology outgrow them. Technology is often found in the position of "other" that used to be the realm of the natural world. The first thing that comes to mind are the science fiction novels, such as I, Robot, and the Dune series which portray machines as outgrowing their human masters and taking over the world. We fear machines as unknown, but we also use that to define ourselves. Today, we have a rite of passage that is the equivalent of the lone struggle in the wilderness: learning to drive a car. Technology is too advanced for any one person or even extended group to produce it: we have a global economy, with technologies being combined all over the world to maximize the creation of more technology. For example, I can change a tire, change the oil, replace a battery, but I can't build a new car engine from scratch. As such, technology has all of the unknown power that nature used to have. However, it is still artificial, and people adapt to it with great ease, at least in the scope of generations. Computers, unknown until just a few generations ago, have become like second nature even to children. 

 

Technology is not authentic to its intended design; that is, there are always tradeoffs that come from using technology as a crutch. There will, at some time, come a point where people believe that the use of technology is overcoming its benefits. Perhaps that time is now: more people are seeking more natural spirituality and moving against technology. The Green movement is a prime example of this trend. People are afraid that global warming will destroy the world that they know in a destructive blend of technology seeming to do too good a job, and nature coming back against humanity with a vengeance.  

 

There is a growing movement to involve more of a vague kind of ‘naturalness' in the common religious life. Jay Griffiths, author of A Sideways View of Time, makes the claim that the Judeo-Christian heritage of both science and religion has co-opted the more nature-based religion of other, oppressed peoples. On the other hand, we have writers like Richard Dawkins, who has an almost religious awe for evolution. This also includes people in the neo-pagan and other ‘spiritual' movements. While there are no formal movements and much disagreement among people whom would otherwise get along on the broad points, the undercurrents are real.

 

Given the opposing threat of making religion a kind of solipsistic comforter that is simply a reflection rather than a source of actual knowledge, any movement which acknowledges the potential spiritual danger of unlimited technology is a movement that we ought to take with some seriousness.

4 . What Color is your Merkaba? – by Eric Cunningham^

Perhaps the most dominant characteristic of modern civilization is the assumption that technology will always grow and machines will simply get better and better as time goes on. As pessimistic as we may be concerning the future prospects of politics, economics, culture, and society, we seem confident that our gadgets will always improve. Indeed, we are so "optimistic" about the possibilities of our technological development that we wonder if our machines are more advanced than we are. For decades we have shared collective fears of seeing our great cities, if not the entire planet, obliterated by madmen with nuclear weapons, and since the advent of the computer age, we have grappled with the fear of creating a society so dependent on machines that they might actually take over and enslave us.

 

If it is true that our machines can evolve faster than our moral capacity to use them, it would suggest that our souls suffer some deficiency that our mechanical ingenuity does not. It makes no sense that we should be smart enough to make a machine, but not smart enough to use it properly. But since this appears to be the case, maybe technology possesses a certain historical agency that we do not understand--an evolutionary trajectory of its own that we do not really control, but only take part in peripherally.

 

Maybe machines are demonic. Or, maybe they bear some latent spiritual potential whose true scope we have yet to grasp. Are human beings going to achieve perfection of soul by becoming machine-like themselves? Or is the perfectly functioning machine of today some kind of preparation for the future--a pre-made template for a purely spiritual existence that we are supposed to inhabit long after matter has gone extinct? Or are all  machines simply objects of alienation, separating us from the natural world? There are no immediate or satisfying answers to what machines "mean" to the existence of a spiritual entity like the human being--it is clear though, that as technology has been intimately linked to our material destiny on this planet it will surely have some role to play in our spiritual destiny off the planet as well. Determining the extent to which we control our machines or let them control us is obviously one of the great challenges of our civilization. How can we do this? 

 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts that science and technology "by their very nature require unconditional respect for fundamental moral criteria." Moreover, "(t)hey must be at the service of the human person, of his inalienable rights, of his true and integral good, in conformity with the plan and will of God."1 Throughout the modern era, Church leaders have been outspoken in condemning those specific technologies that they feel threaten the moral life of humanity, but the Church has not concretely identified how, or even whether technology may actually express the unfolding plan of God. There have been, though, a number of esoteric interpretations of this issue, and it may be worthwhile to look at some of them.

 

Rudolf Steiner (1860-1925), the Austrian scientist and clairvoyant who founded the school of Anthroposophy in the early twentieth century, maintained that the historical tendency for humanity to express its will and achieve its desires through machines, mechanical systems, and material infrastructures stems from a deep evolutionary impulse connected to the activity of a spiritual being called "Ahriman." Ahriman, one of a "cosmic triad" which also includes Lucifer and Christ, is supposed to incarnate as a human in the third millennium AD, but has already, since the 16th century, been influencing the course of material history by "inspiring" human beings to apprehend and explain the world in purely scientific, materialistic, and mechanical terms. Steiner writes: (T)hink of everything that presses down upon the earth, that makes us dull and philistine, leading us to develop materialistic attitudes, penetrating us with a dry intellect, and so on: there you have a picture of ahrimanic powers.2

 

As a kind of "anti-Christ," Ahriman introduces this materialistic impulse in order to derail humanity from its spiritual destiny. In this capacity, Ahriman stands diametrically opposed to Lucifer, who according to Steiner's cosmology, incarnated in the third millennium BC. If Ahriman represents all that is dead, dry, and mechanistic, Lucifer, the fallen angel of light, brings into the stream of human evolution an aspiration for a precocious, even premature spiritual gnosis. We may say that we picture the outward characteristics of luciferic beings properly when we imagine that they possess such forces as we human beings manifest when we become visionaries, when we abandon ourselves one-sidedly to fantasy, let ourselves be carried away, and speaking metaphorically, lose our heads.3 Both of these spirits, working together in a separate but complimentary fashion, attempt to disrupt human spiritual development by "making the world, particularly the human world, unfaithful to the spiritual beings whom we must regard as the true creators of humanity."4

 

According to Steiner, Christ stands between Ahriman and Lucifer, and works to tame and purify these opposing spiritual impulses. The incarnation of Christ, which occurs exactly between that of Lucifer and Ahriman in historical time, saves humanity by drawing the human spirit back to its divine creator, thus neutralizing the degenerating influences of these two different but equally harmful spirits. What this means is that Christianity, rather than "obliterating" the Luciferic and Ahrimanic streams can instead empower humanity to deal creatively with these two impulses. In the case of technology then, rather than urge us to "rail against the machine," a Christian worldview would inspire us to sanctify and even exploit what this impulse is already bringing into the world. As Steiner says: A task of humanity during the next phase of civilization will be to live toward the incarnation of Ahriman with such alert consciousness that this incarnation can actually serve to promote higher spiritual development.5 While references to creative spiritual beings and demonic incarnations and may seem heretical to Catholics, and simply foolish to secular materialists, it seems fruitful to at least consider the possibility that something profound and as yet unknowable may be at stake should we fail to establish a spiritual understanding of our relationship to machines. This is especially true in view of the fact that our medical technologies are bringing ever-new mechanical contrivances into the body itself. Is there a difference between creating a machine-like world outside ourselves and a machinelike body to inhabit? In a paper presented at the 1942 Kyoto Symposium on Overcoming Modernity (Kindai no Chokoku) Japanese scholar Shimomura Torataro argued that the postmodern world would see machines become exteriorized appendages of the spirit. Rather than use machines, Shimomura argued, we would live through them, and by expressing our selves through machines, we would create a world in which individuals would be more like machine operators than autonomous selves.  

 

The body of the present day is an organism whose organs are in some real way machines. The tragedy of the modern period is that the old fashioned spirit cannot catch up to the "new body." The new body needs a new metaphysics. The body of the present day, having become gigantic, has also become refined. This body is no longer suited to an old psychology that speaks of inner enlightenment and personal discipline. I suppose it needs a new political, social, or national direction; then again, maybe it needs a new theology.6  

 

If we, to say nothing of our political leaders and theologians, are to become machine operators, we still have to decide how we are going to operate them, and this still calls into question what role these machines will play in our spiritual growth, if any. Can machines bring us closer to an unknowable spiritual destiny? One answer to this question is offered by "rebirther" Bob Frissell in the 1994 New Age bestseller Nothing in this Book is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are. Frissell discusses at length the structure of a tetrahedron-based soul machine called the "merkaba," whose operation is linked to the evolution of the human spirit. We have a physical body, a mental body, and an emotional body and they all have star tetrahedron shapes. These are three identical fields superimposed over each other…

 

The merkaba is created by counter-rotating fields of energy. The mental star tetrahedron, electrical in nature and male, rotates to the left. The emotional star tetrahedron magnetic in nature and female, rotates to the right. It is the linking together of the heart, and physical body in a specific geometrical ratio and at a critical speed that produces the merkaba.7 The merkaba functions as a kind of interiorized hyperdimensional vehicle that, once properly activated--apparently through a regimen of breathing in combination with loving intentionality and visualization of the tetrahedrons--can be used "to travel throughout the universe, literally at the speed of thought"8 Frissell believes that human historical technological development stemmed from a flawed understanding of the power of the merkaba. Rather than try to build the interior vehicle through love and light, humanity attempted to gain mastery over the physical universe and built endless, flawed copies of the merkaba in the form of machines. Thus, in order to redeem the spiritdamaging effects of the external mechanistic world, we need to operate our merkabas properly from within.

 

The idea that there exists in our future some kind of an interior self-made machine for interdimensional travel can also be gleaned from the various writings of ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. McKenna, who sought to learn how the soul could negotiate the rough passage from earthly life into eternal spiritual life, adopted the "metaphor of a vehicle" that could help transport the species from this world into "hyperspatial entelechy."9

 

My vision of the final human future is an effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, so that the external soul will exist as a superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical juncture. ... From that point on we will be eternal somewhere in the solid state matrix of the translinguistic lens we have become. One's body image will exist as a holographic wave transform while one is at play in the fields of the Lord and living in Elysium.10 This machine, an "indestructible cybernetic object,"11 is an image of the glorified body released into the spirit world. If we want to think of the soul machine as some kind of a permanent exteriorized image of the self that has attained an eternal identity as pure spirit in the Kingdom of God, it seems crucial that the machine be constructed and operated properly in order for the glorified body to attain its eternal destiny. Maybe then, the grand "spiritual" purpose of machines and technology is to teach us to understand our souls as created objects that have a correct operating procedure--and to remind us to work upon ourselves in such a way as to achieve perfect functioning. Even if this is not the case, and machines are just temporary things, separated from us and consigned only to this world, we still need to think deeply and systematically about our relationship to technology. The machine world we inhabit demands that we be more than merely competent users--we have to engage our technology on a deeper, more spiritual level as well, because in operating a computer, a car, or an iPod, we are not just "using" a machine--we are also creating meaning and defining value, adding our inputs to the so-called matrix with every stroke of the keys and every push of the button.

End Notes:

1 Catechism of the Catholic Church. (New York: Doubleday, 1995), art. 2294.

2 Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006) 1

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., 2

5 Ibid., 69

5 Shimomura Torataro. "Kindai no chokoku no hoko" (The way toward overcoming modernity). In Kindai no chokoku (Overcoming modernity) (Tokyo: Fuzanbo, 1979) 116.

6 Bob Frissell, Nothing in This Book is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are (Berkeley: Frog Ltd, 1994) 22.

7 Ibid., 24.

8 Terence McKenna, "New Maps of Hyperspace." In The Archaic Revival (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 92.

9 McKenna, "Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness." In The Archaic Revival, 42.

10 McKenna, "New Dimensions Interview." In The Archaic Revival, 167.

5 . An Ode to Underrated Machines - by Linnea Wood^

In this day and age, we have so much technology that most of us can't even decide what to do with it. It's impossible to buy anything because a better version of whatever it is that we are buying will be out in store within a month of our purchase. In this insanity that often surrounds machines these days, we often forget about the basic ones, the one's that we take for granted. I'm not talking about iPods, cars, cell phones, etc. These are all relatively new contraptions (except for the cars, but you know what I mean) and we haven't really had the chance to ignore them. Yes, we might take them for granted, but I wanted to dedicate this article to the machines that we use everyday that we generally even acknowledge as being that critical. So, without further ado, I give you, in my humble opinion the Top Five underrated machines.

5 The Refrigerator:

So many people forget how incredibly critical this piece of machinery is until they come to college and have to use a miniature one that can barely generate enough power to keep your milk chilled. Think about it; if we did not have refrigerators, we'd be living like they did in the 18th century, keeping things cool in iceboxes and such. Now, I'm not exactly positive, but I can almost guarantee that a fridge works slightly better than an icebox.

4 Washer/Dryer:

These machines are probably two of the most amazing items you will ever come across in your natural-born life. The kicker is, you really don't appreciate being able to wash your clothes until you do not have the option and you are stuck walking around smelling like a gym sock. While most people do realize the value of the washer and dryer when they do not have one, they completely disregard its worth the minute that one becomes available. The same goes with the dryer. It's great if you have a washer, but if you don't have a dryer, you have to wait about a week before you can wear any of your clothes again. Now maybe you're one of those people that likes to air-dry their clothes via a clothes line, but I'm not and I'm writing this article so my word goes for the moment.

3 Blender:

Now I know that you might think that a blender is hardly worth noting in an article regarding machines, but seriously, think about it. If you are in your kitchen and you have ice, fruit, juice, and protein powder (if you choose to use that stuff…), and you have the desire to whip up a beverage, what machine are you going to use? Now imagine that you don't have a blender. What exactly are you going to use to blend all of this together? Uh-huh, that's right.

2 Electric Pencil Sharpener:

I discovered when I came to college that I did not have as much money as I would have had at home. Therefore, I was unable to buy the nice pencils that I used to be able to buy in high school (when I say nice, I mean mechanical). Because, once you buy a mechanical pencil, you also have to buy lead and erasers--and those are not exactly the cheapest things on the planet. So you have to resort to the "old fashioned" pencil that requires sharpening every 10 minutes or so. Let's face it, the electric sharpener is so much more efficient than the old school ones where you turn the handle and hope that your pencil lead won't break off. It's also a lot quieter too (admit it--you've been in a class where some poor, pathetic person wasn't writing with a mechanical pencil and, therefore, had to sharpen his or her pencil half way through an excruciatingly hard test, making it hard to concentrate until the person has decided that the pencil is adequately sharp and they no longer feel the need to irritate the class with the incessant grinding of the sharpener).

1 The TV Remote Control:

You can definitely tell that we are getting lazy and useless when we'll spend 45 minutes looking for the television remote instead of getting up and turning on the TV the old-fashioned way (you know that button that says "POWER" at the bottom of the screen? Generally, that means that if you push the button, the TV will turn on/off). However, as scary as it is to witness our sudden fall into laziness, the remote really is one of the most underrated machines. Especially now, considering the fact that many televisions now require a remote if you wish to change the channel (can you change the channel manually if you have digital cable?). So, if you have any inkling to turn on MSNBC to see the latest occurrences on Planet Earth, a remote is becoming a necessity. Now, like I said, this is just my opinion, and you might disagree with it, but have you ever stopped to look at all of the little machines that you have in your life? Seriously, have you ever considered what life would be like if these small contraptions were never invented? The small things that we tend to take for granted more often than not tend to be the things that get us through the bulk of our day. As weird as it might sound, a large part of our dependency on machinery doesn't come from cars or cell phones. It comes from the smaller, battery-operated or plug-in contraptions that we generally categorize as having only one purpose: collecting dust. Don't believe me? Try limiting your use of these smaller machines and see what its like--I think you might be a bit surprised.