I was just finishing up Tool’s Aenima, and came across some stuff in one of the inserts that I had never noticed before. It goes like this:

Timothy Leary identified a genetic type whose future circuits have begun to be activated and coined them FUTANTS. Futants are naturally selected to facilitate survival by being better adapted to explore the future and take risks through their genetic characteristics. Ritual Magik is a system of disciplines and exercises aimed at activating parts of the mind we might normally never use (about 85%). Through this system, a better understanding of ourselves is attained. No true Ritual Magician has ever taken part in any stupid urban legend ritual. This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on your TV everyday letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.

I was gonna type all that out, but fortunately somebody else did. It’s from an article I just came across on Georgetown’s site about Tool & Nietzsche.

See now, normally, I have more than stopped caring about a CD’s packaging, cause I’m more into this notion that media and content is this fluid thing that can be poured into whatever container you have on hand. But it’s cases like this album packaging for Aenima that proves me wrong, cause it contains stuff like that quote above, which isn’t expressly IN the music, but enhances & explains the music to some degree, and gives me other things to go and research to get more into this headspace. Plus you have all those cool moving picture inserts.

And there’s an homage to Bill Hicks also. I found this thing by Bill Hicks a really long time ago, but am going to take the liberty to just pop the whole thing in here, cause it’s really good.

The world is like a ride in an amusement park.
And when you choose to go on it,
you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are.
And the ride goes up and down and round and round.
It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud and it’s fun,
for a while.
Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question,
is this real, or is this just a ride?
And other people have remembered,
and they come back to us, they say,
“hey - don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever,
because, this is just a ride…”
And we… kill those people.
Ha ha! “Shut him up.”
“We have a lot invested in this ride.
Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry.
Look at my big bank account and my family.
This just has to be real.”
Just a ride.
But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that,
you ever notice that?
And let the demons run amok.
But it doesn’t matter because:
It’s just a ride, and we can change it anytime we want.
It’s only a choice.
No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money.
A choice, right now,
between fear and love.
The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors,
buy guns, close yourself off.
The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one.
Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now,
to a better ride.
Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defences each year
and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world,
which it would many times over,
not one human being excluded.
And we could explore space, together,
both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

Anyway, I nabbed that from some site that had a really irritating sound sample playing on it. I closed the window really quick, or else I would link back to them. Oh well, fuck them anyway.

Plus they had this Nietzsche quote that I like a whole hell of a lot:

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier, and simpler.

Anyway, great stuff. It’s been a hot night for expanding the ol’ mind.