A Magnet for Possibilities (news)

APA Philosophy Referee Hand Sginals (above)
Rumors that first Dark Matter Particle has been discovered
US finally to settle Native American Trust Lawsuit
What Philosophers Believe
How the iPhone could Reboot Education (which I've already seen with my own eyes at Pitt)
Tom Waits may be up for a role in the Hobbit
David Bowie and the Occult
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
The Milky Way at different Wavelengths
Don't Believe in God? Can't Hold Office in NC
MIT's Mind Machine Project takes AI research to 2.0
Dave Eggers publishes a newspaper
Casual Sex found to not be psychologically dangerous for young people
Henry Miller's Watercolors
Should Earth Scientists take a Hippocratic Oath? (I say yes)
The Mystery of the Magically Braided Horse Manes
Music for Water Bears
100 Best last lines of novels, the first of which and my favorite is from Beckett's The Unnameable:

".... ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on."

Updates from the World

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future

Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical

Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys

David Foster Wallace's Toy Cement Mixer

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty. Wherein, therefor, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief?"
-David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

On Ultimate Realism

I haven't written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: "Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist... does exist."

This view first occurred to me one day last year during a week of spiritual-existential difficulty. I had gone to a local bar and ran into an acquaintance, who said, having not seen me in ages due to my focus on school and writing, "welcome back to the real world," to which I could only reply, but isn't everywhere also just as real? and then wandered down the street struck by the total implications of everything around me being that real. There is some sense in which we tend to believe that only those habits and experiences that we usually have are really real, or at least of the most real importance to us, forgetting that other experiences we don't have are just as real. And beyond existing situations, every content of our imaginations and the stories we tell is real, in that these have real effects in the real world. And ultimately, any perspective that will allow us to articulate our lives in the whole of such a multifaceted reality, and perhaps allow us to formulate a perspective of global significance and understanding, will have to put us in relation to that whole, not just as it is scientifically and historically understood, but in relation to all that humans have said, imagined, believed, and dreamed.

This view has come out of years of questioning spiritual beliefs and the nature of the stories we tell. How do we, as human beings in a world with other human beings, deal with the fact that people have divergent and often contradictory views on what the world is and our place in it? Historically, belief systems have clashed, and continue to clash because each side takes their perspective as most true and right, whereas if one view was somehow objectively true and right there should be no cause for conflict; and yet there is. In my own life I have struggled with such limited perspectives, not knowing in what to believe, as the beliefs always seemed too small, and yet needing to believe in something, to tell some kind of story, and finally recognizing that any belief I would want to hold would have to be large enough to contain all possibilities of believing.

Similarly I fear global destruction due to the clash of these limited perspectives, and that we as a species do not have the stories to set us in relation to where we are now that might allow us to continue into the future in a meaningful, healthy, and positive way. The stories we are prone to tell today are often too small, quotidian, dealing with failure, comeuppance, and the meaningless joy ride of post-modernity, whereas we need a perspective that can address the Universe as a whole, for future generations of humanity in this Universe. These stories must be ultimate in order to place us and our actions in the widest set of meaning or significance necessary for survival.

My old professor, Dr. Fred Clothey (a student of famed mythographer Mircea Eliade), suggested that the stories we tell can tell us about ourselves, in effect modeling our understanding of reality in order to authenticate current actions and allow future actions. Our stories/ myths/ beliefs/ perspectives, etc. can do this precisely when they are cast in an "aura of ultimate significance," that is, by referring us to the widest possible scope of experience and understanding, to our cosmic and social beginnings, to our longed for and feared endings, to our ideals taking on human form. We find our place and being in between the limits of the real as we know it.

One such ultimate signifier, that has had a direct effect on real occurrences, is the concept of God(s). While belief in supernatural beings has allowed articulation of our relation to society and mortality, is has, perhaps most clearly and distressingly, served as a justification for centuries worth of horror and cruelty: crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, or just plain ignorance. But we are prone to forget in our polarized times that this personification of ultimate ideals was also a necessary and integral perspective for the development of scientific reasoning, framing an objective and total perspective that we humans could then hope to achieve ourselves, a belief that has existed coterminous to science up through the 20th century. Contemporary atheists might be glad that God is no longer a reference for rational understanding, but "His" death has negative impacts as well: God has traditionally not only been a signifier for ultimate perspective and knowing, but also for perfection and goodness, in short, ethical understanding of behavior, without which we do things like build the atomic bomb. Technology runs rampant when not placed in the widest relation to how it might rightly be used, or the lack of an ethical signifier allows the cultural insecurities that haunt us to become manifest, and such horrors not only be imagined but made real. One imagines a similar lack of ultimate significance in the perspectives that have allowed western culture's unparalleled material consumption, environmental destruction, and continued ideological warfare on the rest of humanity.

I am not arguing here for a return to a belief in the traditional monotheistic God or earlier gods. These stories, as we have seen, are just too small and conflict-provoking compared to those perspectives that now need to be adopted. I am arguing though for a greater belief in the reality and efficacy of the contents of our stories and imaginations, and an awareness of how these otherwise subconscious narratives influence the real world.

One of the problems to this approach is the primacy we give to literal truth, vs. the obvious falsity of our "true" representations of reality. I am a huge fan of stories of the fantastic, of the magical, supernatural, weird, heroic, or sci-fi, which, looking at the predominance of these themes in the current cultural media and imagination, I believe I am not alone in. But why do we love supermen, zombies, and the end of the world? There has been a trend in storytelling, dating from the late 18th century, of attempting to represent reality as it "really is," social or quotidian realism, and not as an allegorical reference for otherwise real things. Fiction, when it first was read as not literally true, was cast as "petite histories," in order to accept stories they had to mimic reality while being divorced from talking about reality. My immediate response to all this is, there's already too much of the world we experience on a daily basis, why create more of it, when stories beyond the everyday may raise possibilities of experience and understanding more than that which we are already familiar with. That familiarity constrains us, by being real, to the obviously inadequate belief systems we now live under. We hold up what we believe is a mirror and say, this is real, and because we say it, that marks the bounds up what we will allow to be really real.

My second issue with realism is that it is not reality despite how it primps and masquerades itself as such. It may represent aspects of reality, but does so by relying on and reaffirming our assumptions about how the world is and should be, which constrains us to accepting those views and realities as more true or valid, to the exclusion of wider views. And today it seems our view of the real is that it frankly sucks and nothing matters anymore. And any attempt to actually discuss real human issues in an emotionally valid way is negated by the irony and scorn with which we articulate the real world. The fantastic however, by being non-real and symbolic of the real (mythopoetic in Tolkien's terms), precisely allows us to highlight those human themes and conditions we want to examine in truthful ways. But in order to even accept the contents of fantastic stories we must (as Coleridge first suggested) suspend our disbelief of those things that couldn't be literally true in our everyday experience. We no longer have a problem leaping into wizard fights or across star systems, we can suspend disbelief but we are never asked to truly believe, and thus are not as prone to take such fantasies as being symbolic or ultimately significant for how we really are or could be in the world. We are content to let them be mere entertainments and diversions rather than suggestions of possibility.

Yet, are ghosts and gods really real, or is this even the right way of framing the question? There is a sense that certain things are existentially real, they commit us to accepting their physical reality, being right in front of us. The invisible and imaginative do not so commit us; one can not empirically and scientifically prove a god's actual existence. To argue one way or the other for this is to miss the entire point about gods. But one can clearly see the effects that belief in such unprovables has on our world, both on our perspectives and psychologies and in actual historical occurrences. Ignoring and belittling the immaterial causes of such beliefs and effects does little to add to our understanding of ourselves in the world, allows the results of inappropriate or too-small beliefs to continue unchecked, and limits the human imagination to articulate new possibilities of being and understanding being, which are necessary for our current and continued survival, let alone enjoyment and well being. On the other hand, if we do not remember that the stories we tell are only stories, that have been made up despite their real effects, we run the risk of mistaking the stories as literally true, thus causing us to act in dangerous and inappropriate ways, when imagining better stories to live by and through is always an option (and it is this lack of awareness of the power of our symbols that I mean by the absent narrative).

I do not know where we will go from here, but I am wary and sick of the post-modern skepticism that rejects any ultimate significance in favor of what we can directly lay our hands on (and in so doing, strangle it to death). I would prefer to see interconnections of the layers of reality rather than the whole's deconstruction and rebuttal. Acting as if we know everything and nothing really matters is perhaps the smallest and most dangerous perspective one could hold. Ultimately, we exist in a Universe which we barely understand, and in which we are a bare speck, and perhaps in that widest view humanity is indeed meaningless and fated to extinction for lack of any better options. And yet it is also possible to believe, and live by the belief, that life and our consciousness of life may be more than a random fluke or evolutionary mistake; not that we serve some clear teleological purpose or extant will of God, but that for all these unknowns we are still real, and still here, and confronted with the implications of that for all reality.

Though reality may be inherently meaningless we have the choice to take on meanings and act on those meanings, to continue to be and gather greater understanding and significance, both on this planet and in the Universe as a whole, should we choose to accept this mission. Anything less than such an Ultimately Realist perspective sells ourselves short, and will only propel us down the road of meaninglessness and destruction. But if we can perhaps articulate a perspective wide enough, not just for all humans, but all life in general and beyond life, then perhaps we can continue on until that perspective, and all else we can imagine, becomes real.

News Updates

The End of Philosophy. From Adbusters, interesting but the writer went to Pitt, and had one of the same philosophy classes I'm taking there this semester, and I agree its mostly irrelevant, except I'd have to say: don't expect other people to apply ideas for you, you have to think for yourself.

the Age of Universal Authorship. The one thing the author hasn't considered is that only will we have universal authorship when everyone has access to the technologies of communication and authorship.

Luther Blisset is now Wu Ming. Luther is one of the shared or multiple-use names phenomenon, which I first heard about in connection with Monty Cantsin and Neoism. Good to know these names are still out there.

Giant Orb Weaver Spider Discovered[image via riot rite right clit clip click]

Essential Plot Twists for Writers. Now in handy cartoon format.

Why Our Brains Will Never Live in a Matrix. Because they already live in bodies. Though the Internet is Altering our Brains.

The New End of the World Date is now 2068. Get Your calendars ready for the meteor crash.

In the mean time, don't forget to Live Life to the Full. A free guide to cognitive behavior therapy. Or, maybe depressed people are suffering from a lack of fun.

And finally, though science wants to stop aging, we still don't know exactly what is time?"

Dreams on the Cave Walls

There's a great essay over on the Dream Studies Portal about the prehistory of lucid dreaming. It seems that many of the kinds of designs found on the walls of paleolithic caves, from spirals and grids to monsters and sex organs, are the kinds of images that are said (by Eliade) to occur in connection with shamanic trance states, but they also occur to the modern, and perhaps prehistoric, dreaming mind, suggesting that our earliest ancestors may have been practitioners of dream-work. Having fallen to sleep to hypnogogic visions of radiant grids dancing in my head, I can identify with the suggestion that this kind of imagery is perhaps somehow hard-wired into our nervous systems. However, I am also sure that many of these kinds of images have appeared in my dreams, whether or not I have been lucid or in any shamanic trance kind of states, and perhaps there is something endemic about the geometrical and fantastic to our experience of reality itself.

The other alternative seems to suggest that we are really just disembodied brains floating in space. All things being equal, science suggests that reality is very, very unlikely to create a universe as complex, organized, and well, as pleasantly skinned as our own. Chances are that we exist in a much more chaotic manner, sans bodies, and more frequently than not, that monstrosity in your nightmares is more real than you are!

The biggest challenge is that is just as highly improbable that time only moves in one direction, and sooner or later someone will find out that it doesn't. Personally I already think that this is the case, for how else could we explain ancient artifacts that defy our concepts of history, such as ancient carvings of dinosaurs, prehistoric metal spheres, and batteries from the dawn of time? I suspect that time is just a subjective paradox, the deeper we look into the past (or the future for all you sci-fi fans), the more we are likely to find ourselves and our desires reflected in that distant eon. I'm almost surprised someone hasn't found a prehistoric car yet.

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

"freedom depends on the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

• Memory is accreted (like a seashell, armor, crystal) in our bodies and blood*, taking on a recognizable pattern, a body and meaning that can be called a life. when we are young and have no memory we have no such psychic detritus carried around us, but as we age we can't help picking up memories, symbols, songs, and attaching them to ourselves as sort of an addendum to that central self
• Thus we can say of an object, idea, person, moment, that it “gathers world” (ie: accrues meaning), which though often psychic or imaginative in nature can be displayed in a physical manner (wrinkles, collections of junk, crumbling, etc…)
• World itself could be considered an artifact of time, the shell or record (imprint) left behind by the movement of light/ life, in the way vinyl is a physical imprint of the sound waves of a song.
• Memory is not a recollection in the past, but a reconstruction in the present of what one images the past was like, and like dreams, may not bare any factual resemblance to what actually happened.+
• The longer ago something occurred, the less factual or clear the memory becomes. it is much easier to remember yesterday as it happened than last year, or childhood. as memory recedes it turns into myth (ie: its meaning takes on larger and metaphorical proportions turning the contents of our lives into a cohesive story instead of a disjointed series of circumstances).
• Memory is aided by symbolic, emotional, or physical cues (mnemonic triggers) in which the present reflects or replays some similar aspect of the past. music is an excellent example of this, hearing the first strains of a song related to your first relationship can years later still bring tears to your eyes.
• Object-bound (codified) memory is called history, imagination-based memory is called dream, or in the collective, myth. history is no more factual than myth, as both are perspectives relating event to meaning. and as myth is an amalgamation of countless archetypified memories, so is history a collective story we build around ourselves (in the world) in order to give ourselves a sense of time
• Media (writing, recordings, photographs, etc.) act as External Memory Devices, in that they take on the burden of memory into a physical object, thus removing any dreamlike/ mythic qualities of the memory. the current proliferation of EMDs marks a transition from myth to history, as well as the view of World from mind (“God”) to one large medium (artifact, the husk or corpse of “God”)
• While memory remains in imagination (subjective), it is fluid, malleable, and can take on whatever perspective or meaning the rememberer chooses. in a process similar to Dreaming Back, “bad” memories, moments of failure, anger, regret, can be re-remembered in a different light, one that allows the rememberer to get over or move past certain negatively ingrained perspectives or hang ups, thus altering where they stand in the present, as well as what they can make of their future.
• When a memory calcifies into history (becomes objective/ objectified), it is no longer fluid and can no longer be re-remembered in a different angle (unless of course the process of objectification is one of re-remembering), as it is no longer in the world itself. this also means that the memory is no longer personal, and belongs to the collective store of memory, the Record, and thus available to anyone as a memory of their own life. this is particularly true in ages of hyper-information, like this one, where the contents of individuals’ daily lives are offered up and become more readily available to strangers than ones own childhood. an example is a song coming on he jukebox and everyone singing along, even if they do not know the words or hadn’t heard the song before. what this means in terms of collective myth remains to be seen.
• With this vast store of memories to draw on, it would seem the artist should have no end of themes and experiences to draw on, effectively being bale to take on any life that is presented to them. However, art that is drawn from one’s own emotions and experiences rings the most true, as it has been lived, and the artist must be wary of assuming experiences that have no relation to their own. yet there is a balance to be found in taking the historicized memories and already written works of art of the collective and running them through one’s own experiences to create art that is both true and able to touch upon those deepest and most common themes of being human: love, death, family, struggle, the search for place and meaning. this could now be said to be the task of the modern artist, to take these themes that are available in the collective memory and return them to the fluidity of the subjective, where they are once again able to be reshaped or re-dreamed into whatever form imaginable or desirable, and thus to recreate the lost sense of myth in our culture. as Joseph Campbell put it: “dreams are private myths, and myths are collective dreams.”


• * memory and the body– one talks about having intellectual memories, emotional memories, muscle memory (the learning of physical tasks to a subconscious level). really, this separation of memories is a misnomer, as mind and emotion exist nowhere but in the body. there is only physical memory, the storing of tensions in muscle, the decay of skin cells with age, the patterning of genes, which can be read on a variety of different levels. take for example accounts of a person doing yoga for the first time, or receiving a strenuous massage. memories stored in the muscle tension are released and they have a flashback to that memory, effectively reliving the primary experience. however, most of us are not nearly so attuned to our bodies as to have such visceral remembrances.

• + time and memory– the trichotomy of past/ present/ future is also a misnomer, and the perception of time as a linear flow is an illusion, although sometimes a convenient one. Really all we live in is the present, and any perceptions of past or future are but imaginative extrapolations of this one current moment. a kind of subjunctive pattern recognition in which we can assert a sense of causality and desire in order to effectively plan our next action, and feel not so lost in the chaos of sensory data. as World accrues meaning, like seashells or thorns buried in the skin, so does times (our sense of eventuality or continuation) leave shards or ripples of itself in the periphery of our experiencing. these objects of memory are interpreted as a “coming from” that “goes somewhere,” and give us a reason and context for our present. it is also possible to remember the future, interpreting the present pattern in a manner that points to what will happen (prophecy).

thinking problems

Thinking [via Bodarniset]

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then -- to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzy and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..." "I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!" "But Honey, surely it's not that serious." "It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!" "That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently.

She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors... They didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster. Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting.

At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed...easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today, I registered to vote as a Republican...

Source: /Kate/A/blog

you are what you see

...which perhaps gives rise to another suggestion of attention (suggestion, as there are no laws):

'the more you notice yourself the less you notice everything else.'



the first several suggestions are of course:

'if you notice something once you can notice it again. but you have to notice it the first time.'

and:

'once you notice something, try standing behind it and notice it from a different angle.'

and that old tricky favorite:

'once you notice something, you can use it.'

that last has lead to more ills and manipulations than I would like to think. thankfully it is balanced by this:

'if you can notice something, it can probably notice you.'

the discontents of the soul

"Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded resovoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, the shades, phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct from an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the white light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned), we cannot tell the red from the black. So we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once -somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death.

The pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus' fragments: "...whatever it [thymos] wishes it buys at the price of the soul." Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul, did not belong in the underworld. So, to consider the dream as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural loses psyche. we cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream images in terms of drives or desires. Whatever counsel an analyst gives about emotional life, supposing it drawn from dreams, refers to his own experience, which he reflects from the dreams. It is not in the dreams. He is "sup-posing" them, that is, he is "putting into" them what he knows about life.

What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it."

-James Hillman, from The Dream and the Underworld

free agents in fractal space

Free Agents in Fractal Space [via DRT]

"A fractal is generated by a recursive process. So are landscapes and trees. DNA replication, population flux, heart fibrillation, the stock market -- all are based on iteration (cyclicity) and feedback. So are you. And how about language? And, sorry to jump the gun here, but consciousness -- self-consciousness -- is now presumed to be a recursive process.

The butterfly effect is due to a small change in one cycle getting fed back into the process, amplifying itself each time until it is quite significant...

Power, like climate, is a dynamical system, and as such is subject to the forces of feedback and iteration. Male-dominance hierarchies tend to centralize power, to simplify the channels of feedback so that further iterations further centralize power. And they try to minimize the "noise" -- that pesky hiss of human freedom, like escaping steam...

The fractal is a symbol of freedom. It is inifinte within a finite space, sprouting Form as waves rise from the sea. It is the abstraction of Energy as it is enfolded by the material plane. It hints at realities previously reserved for mystical visions."

on being pulled

On Being Pulled (Gravity and Intention)
notes from the digger’s manual 2 –20 –05

All beings have weight. If you throw them in the water they will cause waves. All beings have gravity, but this doesn’t just mean they fall down a lot. They each exert a field of attraction on every being, a subtle pull that influences and is influenced by the pull of every other thing. The earth pulls us to it, the moon pulls the tides and our blood, the stars pull each other and hold it all together. We are stars too, centers of our own web of attractions, and what strange attractors indeed. We are attracted through us the influence of all that crosses our attention, consciously or not, and change our relationship to the entire world in every moment. Imagine a cluster of spheres attached to each other by strings; move one and it readjusts the tension between all the rest. Our muscular system works the same way, in tensile integrity that continually keeps the system in balance (tensegrity, made known by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes). The whole universe is balanced in this tension, a great nexus of affect and reciprocation. Nothing is not involved, nothing is not affected, even our atoms "know" when another moves on the other side of the world, because they all move. They are all one medium, waves in the sea of particles that make us up, and it is only our attention to the particular waves of influence that separates them into distinct beings. Attention is etymologically to be stretched away from something, to be made more tensed, to be apart from what we attract and are attracted to. Knowing is being affected, interpreting the tensions into separate things in whatever degree one can be aware of their distinct level of detail. In this sense a rock knows something about falling into Earth’s pull, if not much else. Earth itself knows what it’s like to attract countless beings to its surface and about circling the sun. We exist as nodes in this web of mutual attraction, interfaces in Indra’s network, not reflecting all the other reflections but influencing all the other influences, or interpreting all the other interpretations.

Though it is all one flow of pull, it appears to us local attractors as two separate movements. We receive the pull on us, interpreting the incoming tensions, and create a pull on the universe, extending our influence outwards. The yin and yang states of intention and extension, everything stretching into us and back out into the universe; like breathing, but on a cosmic level and with all your senses. In passing through us this flow of tensions changes us, and we change the flow, readjusting the tensegrity of all the other centers of attraction. And like breathing, we can exercise some amount of control over how we let that flow pass through us. Like Kybernos, we cybernetically steer ourselves on the waves of this chaotic sea of influence. Any object, event, or idea can be treated as an external center of attraction, a star around which we spin like planets or particles, and the tensions we channel are limited to their particular sphere of attraction, and influence. We are always doing this as particular things are always passing through our attention, and we are always reinterpreting ourselves in relation to each one, even if it’s so subtle we do not know it consciously. A loud aggressive man enters the room, your stance (and the stance of everyone else present) changes in relation to their particular gravity.

Once something has attracted our attention we react to it, either by being attracted closer, or being repelled away, which in itself is a kind of attraction. In being influenced we are moved in relation; this is intention, not some desire towards an abstract goal state, but the process which is the action itself. As Castaneda put it, "There is no technique for intending, one intends through usage." we let ourselves become involved and fall into the things which attract us. Heidegger uses the example of intending to open a door by using the doorknob. In order to break from the subject/ object dichotomy he states that our intention is not towards "using" the doorknob itself, but in being drawn through the door. The doorknob itself is only an extension, a part of the world taken as part of ourselves to stretch out our reach of what we can most directly influence.

Though we do effect everything, it has a more localized limit in which the effects are strongest, like Earth’s gravity well or a blackhole’s event horizon. It’s likely there is a massive blackhole in the center of each galaxy, keeping the stars in tight. This is the extent or domain to which we can reach, the bounds of our sphere of influence. If you stretch out your arms you can reach further, if you hold out a stick you can reach further still. If you whisper only those close by can hear you, if you use the internet people all over the world can. Technology has become a quest for more precise ways to extend our interactions with our environments. All mediums become an extension of our intent, moving us further towards our attractions, depending on what we use to move in what manner. Metachor and I were bowling, and I mused that if the bowling ball extends our intention to knock down the pins, then the pins themselves were part of that intent to bowl. They are not separate from us however, but become part of us as an extension of our intention towards playing, just as we become extensions of someone else’s intension to tell us something. Language is a tool after all. Intention stretches out of us as attraction on the universe, realigning tensions of everything in its reach. What happens then if we were to consider the wholes Universe as an extensions of ourselves, as we have attention and intention for? If we were to catch the right grooves, letting the influence of the stars move through us, could we not in turn influence their spin, or everything else for that matter? Are we not heavenly bodies too, with the whole weight of the cosmos coursing through our backs?

Magic works on the principle that we can cause change to happen in accordance with our will, that we have some element of skill over the attentions and extensions we work our intentions through. Magic is writing a letter, or casting a spell, whatever means work best to fill the specific intention, regardless of whether that means seems possible in terms of a normalized view of cause and affect. Sometimes, the more impossible, the better; the mage is also a juggler, and people go to the circus to be amazed. Magic often draws on influences so subtle and attractors so arcane as to be unbelievable, but it works because these things are all connected, intent flows through them all and moves them in accordance with each other. But whose intent? Certainly not that of a single person. Our movements are cast on the whole web of movements, and everything we do through the force of that power carries the whole weight of the universe around us. No intention is not part of the intention of all beings. We are an extension of the Universe just as much as it is an extension of us, in relation to where we set the limits of our intentions. Except that we are only distended from life when we are dead, its pull never really loses us. If we choose to be single beings acting with the intentions of single beings then our reach and power is only that which we can muster ourselves. But if we act within the intentions of others then the power has a much greater pull, and control is extended that much further. Unfortunately this force can be disastrous if not intended towards the greater good, as can be seen right now in humanity’s treatment of the planet and each other. In the spin of the universe, things sometimes die violently, and our case may not be such a tragic thing. But if we act with the intentions of the universe, with the intentions of all beings, then our reach and power and aim includes all of them. And we all get to dance together, and be content.

On Lucid Living

On Lucid Living
Notes from the Digger's Manual... 1-16-04

Reality is whatever we make of it, our perceptions are shaped by the ways we approach the world and the filters we use to see the world through. Quantum physics points to innumerable different views on what the underlying reality could be, whether as shaped by our perceptions, an infinity of possible worlds, as a hologram, or colliding waves of energy. Any or all of these views could (or not) be correct in describing reality as we can know it, and may all just be different methods of interpreting the patterns we discover in the world. In this sense, anything we can imagine can be possible, as long as we develop the filters to perceive the world in a certain way. This means reforging the connections between our senses in order to perceive the subtle aspects of reality. We are raised and trained to perceive the world from certain points of view that fit together in the consensual reality, that is, our senses remain isolated from each other and we remain oblivious to patterns of energy and events that point to some higher-level structures in the organization and movements of the world.

However, we humans have the ability to imagine different realities and do so each time we create subjunctive worlds in order to prophecy our futures. These alternate realities can be simple or wild as our imaginations, and as possible as the amount of energy required to bridge the state differences. This ability to create our worlds can be turned inward to posit realities in which we can gather quite different information with our senses, These worlds are quite possible, to the extent that we can put energy into forming and maintaining perspectives which surpass those we typically use to interpret and perceive reality.

For instance we see the claims of mystics who throughout time have been able to perceive the subtle forces of energy which flow through (are) everything. Or being able to understand the synchronistic and dreamlike nonlinear causality of events and actions. In order to perceive these interpretations of reality one must create visual and mental representations through which to perceive these worlds, and constantly practice to perceive and maintain these views of the world. One has to be mindful of reality-shifting for it to occur. Luckily the resonant nature of the Universe plays in to this, for the more you look through one filter, the more the world will appear that way. But one has to look in the first place, and complacency and normalcy are just as resonant patterns if that is how one chooses to perceive the world.

Of course, It is often not enough just to practice visually representing alternate views of reality, for the bonds of our senses and connections are strong and must be cut through to truly view the world in new ways. Often severing and reforging tools are needed to restructure our minds in a way which allows the mental abstractions of alternate realities to become true perceptions rooted in the paths of our brains. Such tools would need to place the agent in vastly different positions in regards to the world so we can learn to bridge the gaps between the two in our everyday living. Usual tools for doing this include meditation and entheogenic (literally 'the birth of the divine within') drug experiences that allow us to actually 'see the light' behind the pure being of reality.

Such experiences can only work to reshape our perceptions if practiced regularly and approached with pure intentions. Thus these practices can act as gates or paths to reshape our worlds, but only if well-oiled/kept and approached with clear goals of states to move towards. One must remember that there is no absolute true reality behind the veils of Maya, but an infinity of interpretations which extend beyond our everyday sensations, so one must establish how one wishes to perceive the world before it can be perceived in that way (or in any other way than the 'normal' way). Gradually the gap between how one perceives the world and how one wants of perceive the world is closed until there is no difference between the two, and connections are formed to hold these views together.

Certainly, the human ability to forget, and the need to remember to remember play a large role in reshaping our world views. It is easy for us to forget what we strive to learn, and without constant maintenance the paths can become overgrown or lost, whether through intentional acts of suppression or pure slippage between our thoughts. We must be vigilant, or whatever we have put towards a connection will fade back into our everyday realities and perceptions. This is why such practices as meditation are important in keeping us on the right track.

The entheogenic experience is great for fast shifts in our connections, allowing us more immediate understanding of other realities, but the intensity of these experiences is counterbalanced by the speed with which they fade from our thoughts if we do not constantly practice in maintaining the visions we are shown. In this sense, drugs can break down walls and burn bridges, but without the continual mindfulness of meditation to build new paths we will just reconstruct our old ways of being again, as best we can. We must remember to remember the differences between the states in order not to fall back into our old patterns of living.

Though the practice of meditation allows us to build up new connections to how we perceive the world, we are always forgetting and therefore must constantly remember to remember in every moment. mindfulness of our being and becoming must be held in our every act and breath in order to not backslide into the sleep of the mundane. We must take care to always be waking up throughout everything we do and experience. We must truly be in each moment as it is and could be all the time. This is lucid living, the constant realization that life is a dream from which we can always be waking up. This practice keeps us on our way and completely transforms reality through how we approach it.

Of course, remembering to remember is the easiest thing to forget, as it requires complete focus of will and intention in each moment. However, the energy required to do so is in all of us naturally, making this approach an extreme possibility if it is constantly kept in mind. This is hard to do though, and requires a lifetime(s) of practice, patience, and perseverance to maintain and uphold. Nothing less than complete mindfulness will allow us to be in the world in this way. This is where the continuation of such practices as meditation and entheogenics becomes important in strengthening our will towards lucidity, either in our everyday lives or/and in short circuiting us towards higher levels of awareness to work from. It is a learning process that requires positive feedback to deviate us from normal living towards lucid living.

Certainly what makes meditation and entheogenics valuable for remembering to be lucid is that they are experiences that differ greatly from normal experience and therefore can be learned from in reminding us to approach the world anew. These are not the only experiences that carry this interstitial lesson though. Really any experience that carries differences can be used to realize being in the moment if we pay attention to the distinctions. Thus, music, dance, travel, etc... are also good experiences for remembering to live lucidly.

And beyond that, one can see that each moment is different from all others, and all experience of life is perceiving change in the differences between one moment and the next. And though these distinctions are often negligible and almost imperceptible, they can be paid attention to and allow us to remember in each moment, all the time, if we are mindful of being here and now. All living can teach us to be awake if we let it touch us this way, and all experience has the potential to completely reshape us in every moment. And allow us to reshape ourselves. We are always transforming, and always exactly who we are now.

There is no 'right' way to become, but we are always becoming. With constant practice and remembering to remember, we can be anything/everything we can imagine.

flungness and the primacy of spiritual experience

In his now infamous(ly incomprehensible) philosophical text Being and Time, Heidegger talks about the concept of flungness, the primal feeling of finding ourselves seemingly flung into the world and having to continually reinterpret what it means to find ourselves there as beings who are and have to be. Now, if you were to only read a definition of this concept, it may not seem so readily understandable, even translated out of Heideggerian into common English. But, if you were to find yourself flung into the middle of a street with a car bearing down at you at remarkable speeds, it becomes more apparent that yes, you are there, and have to do something about it. And quickly if you don’t want to be run over. Granted, most of our experiences do not seem to require such immediate interpretation, but that does not diminish the feeling of flungness that accompanies every moment of directly experiencing the world and having to interpret ourselves in it, even if that flungness is mostly subliminal. I wake up, and for a brief moment do not know who or where I am. I wait for the bus in the snow, it shows up late and I don’t have enough change, but then some stranger offers me a ride from out of nowhere. These are moments in between knowing the world in which we feel ourselves flung to the wolves, moments that bring into question everything we thought we knew enough of to get by on.

When I was in school I didn’t think I knew everything, though there were some moments when I felt pretty sure of myself. But everyone else seemed a lot surer, not because they actually were, but because they had read enough to back up their assumptions about reality. The teachers were particularly guilty of this, and seemed to suggest that this kind of book learning was enough to get by in the world. At the time I was a young punk, not at all satisfied with sitting in class all day listening to some old white dudes lecture while there was a whole world out there to explore. Even if that meant finding a new place to go get high during lunch. It wasn’t enough and I knew it, so I dropped out and moved out, hoping to fling myself into situations and experiences that might teach me in a more direct manner. Though I didn’t learn advanced calculus or how to write a master thesis out in the world, I did find myself confronted almost every day with questions of love and communication, politics and survival that seemed to reflect a much more basic understanding of human experience in the world. Small basic truths surprisingly not taught in schools that helped define my own flung place in this world better than anything I read in a book. Not that I didn’t read, but now it was less to learn something new than to find terms and arguments in which to express my own experiences in, which often would not have made any sense without the experience to back them up. When I found myself in philosophical discussions I couldn’t quote passages to those who had studied them extensively, but I tried to enlighten the conversations with personal anecdotes that portrayed the abstract points. It took a while to get to that point, and I often found myself having to rely on abstracts in order to fill in the gaps between my experiences and knowledge; but the more I was in the world the less I had to rely on the ontological maps of others. The understanding was fostered from my own interpretations.

But then I began to experience things that were far outside any interpretation I had found read about so far, synchronicities and acts of magic that did not seem to stem from any logical cause and effect. I was now flung not in front of a speeding car but a charging seven-headed beast that forced me to not only interpret how I would get out of the way but where it came from in the first place. Despite my wonder at this new spiritual dimension the world was rapidly taking on I also felt a terror comparable to Sartre’s idea of Nausea, like when the character in his novel looks at a single stone and feels himself flung beyond any possible interpretations. The Romantic poet Blake expressed this when he said "To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." Except that such abstracts as infinity and eternity were utterly meaningless in face of this direct experience and only seemed to hide the experience itself. In the same way the texts I read on these type of magical world views only seemed to hide the experiences of it behind abstract mappings and symbols, and not say what it meant and felt like to perceive so intensely.

Poetry is one of the few literary forms enamored by direct experience and split second reinterpretations of being flung into the world. Images are called up to reflect the world in a single grain of sand and flung back into the face of the unknown. But even here there is the pull to use abstracts and well-worn expressions, even to describe the vastness of the spiritual experience. Blake and the other Romantic poets fell into this, relying on symbolic interpretations of old religious texts to augment feelings that seemed too ineffable to put into words. About a hundred years later Rilke tried his hand at spiritual poetry, but broke from the Romantic’s approach of grandiose iconography to show how the spiritual breaks through in the small details of our daily lived experience. This wasn’t a new approach, as Rilke was directly influenced by the 13th Century Sufi poet, Rumi, whose body of work is filled with the idea of finding god in wine, laughter and sorrow, in the face of a friend and the turning of stars. Here were images that spoke directly to my own experiences of the world’s mystery, and offered me a voice to describe what I also felt, a light sliding through the features of all things that was recognizable only in giving myself to it fully. The spiritual experience became a continual feeling of being flung beyond all interpretation, experience that never needs disclosing because we are always here in it.

Not that I still don’t try and ground myself in attempts at understanding, but the desire to pull myself out of the air no longer feels so necessary, or the precise words so important.

***

It is night and all around you
strange shadows dance beyond
the flickering streetlamps.
One approaches in the dark
and for a moment you think
it is your death, beautiful
and mysterious in the twilight.
As you watch, in fear
and more wonder than a single heart
can hold, it takes form;
a tree, a beggar, a lover,
any of the known things
that might stumble towards you
in the night.
Suddenly you laugh
for it is a face you recognize
from each night before;
your own, reflected in the dark
glass of an empty storefront.
Who says your death
will not look that way too,
flung so suddenly in your path;
and will not your relief
at finding yourself there
be like finding yourself
each time you look in a mirror?

Dying is only a metaphor
for each moment you realize
you are still alive.
But it only happens once.
Living is to die
over and over again,
the knife's edge
of finding yourself there
always pressed close
against your chest.
Will you flinch away
or fling yourself bodily
into its embrace?

Only the young and insane
want to die so readily,
the feeling of blood pushed
so close to the skin
draws them out of themselves
and into each other's arms.
They cut their hearts out
of the mirror's glass
and polish them in starlight
so they can find themselves
in the middle of the night
and quickly die again.

e-motives and thinking machines: thoughts on feeling thoughts

The other day, Bastart wrote a really concise essay on tantra over at Key23, in which it was mentioned that it is important to sit with your emotions, to feel them and find their source so that they do not build up and become overwhelming. I found this to be really good and timely advice, for over the past few months I had been neglecting my emotions in favor of more intellectual pursuits such as this blog and the novel I'm almost finished writing (Granted, a rather strange and shortlived relationship had a large part to play in shutting out my emotions, but that's another story alltogether). But the issue of feeling emotions has always been a difficult one for me.



I am generally an intellectual person, and there was a point in time not so long ago when I thought that I didn't feel anything at all. I did, but I was numb to my emotions for the most part and tried to to analyze them away until I realized that that was a rather unfulfilling way to live. So I made a consciouss effort to put myself out into the world and feel it deeply, all the joy and all the pain, no holds barred. It's been difficult, and still is, but utterly worth it. The biggest problem I've found though is that I go through periods where I am so enrapt in the net of words and information that I forget to feel and be in the world and become in a sense a thinking machine. But these are balanced by periods when I shut off my brain almost completely and feel alive on a very visceral level, letting the world wash over me without any attempt at analyzing it.



Maybe its peculiar to my own situation, but this seems a very dichotomous way to live. Emotions and Intellect are two sides of the same coin (as represented in the juxtaposition of the left and right columns in the tree of life, or sides of the brain), but seem antithetical to each other. I can either rationalize something, or feel it, but not both at the same time. I can either break the world apart in my mind, or let it move through my body (which is what e-motion means). But not both. And that seems a bit ridiculous to me. As a magician and a yogi, I am concerned with integrating the dualities I find in my life, and this has been one of the longest standing and unquestioned dualities I've come across.



Is it possible to feel and think at the same time? Or is that state even desirable? For the most part, when I feel I experience the world as it is, but when I think I experience the world through the filter of my beliefs and preconceptions, which leads me to step away from and disregard the experience in itself. Thinking becomes a detachment form the world, and feeling, even the pains and angers, strikes so close to my heart that it is undeniably real, but does not allow for the reflections that enable us to act on the world in a critical and directed manner. Otherwise I would just give up on thinking all together, but I want to exert my will and intentions and not just react to external stimuli.



The question then is how to integrate these two poles of being, where is the middle path that feels full-heartedly, thinks criticaly, and acts from both these sources of input as one? There is a belief that there are three forces which make up our experiences of the world: thought, emotion, and action, situated in the mind, heart, and body respectively. And it is through the interplay of these forces that we live. The problem as I see it is one of definition. The heart and mind are not seperate from the body, nor are their functions. Emotions arise as physiological reactions, the tensions of stress and release in our muscular system and thus not seperate from the body. Thoughts likewise are physiological, being only electro-chemical interactions in the body, much like emotions, but on a different interpretive level. But on the grossest level it is all just body, acting and reacting as it sees fit.



So then, how to learn to interpret on both (and all) levels at the same time, or at least how to switch between them effectively? It seems endemic of the magical world view that world views (perspectives/ filters) can be juggled at will and as needed, and doing so is a necessary part of being able to act in the world in a willful and intentional manner. But what are the practical steps towards doing this, beyond taking each experience as it happens and filtering it through the different layers to gain clearer insight? If anyone has some opinions/ experiences of this, I'd love to hear them.

matrix as story-complex

I posted this article a couple weeks ago on my livejournal, Through the Spaces Between, but thought it was pretty applicable to the topics I want to discuss in True Names, so I'm reposting it here.



While catching up on the Net, ever a source for unexpected connections, I stumbled upon an article posted on Posthuman Blues a most amusing article: "Why make a matrix? And why you might be in one". Like much talk of matrices following those unfortunate movies, this article only talks about matrices in the movies' technological terms of simulated realities, and neglects to mention the roots and use of the word and how that has played out in many cultures. Now, I don't claim to understand the finer points of the term matrix, especially as they are used in mathematics, but most obviously missing from all this buzz is the roots of the word matrix in the Latin mater, meaning mother. Merriam-Webster defines a matrix as essentially being something from which form emerges, the substrate or medium for information. In many cultures, the Earth is considered the Mother, in that we all are born from her and return to her and are essentially just rearrangements of her parts. We are embedded in the matrix of our planet. Another name for this mother figure is also Maya, illusion, the veil that creates our sense of reality. In my last entry I talked about 'the lines of the world,' how people and events cross over each other to bring meaning to our experience of reality and in a sense create the worlds we see. This is very akin to the idea of Indra's Net, that each thing is a jewel reflecting each other and all the other reflections. This net is woven of all the disparate elements and connects them together to become reality, in much the way that meaning is derived from a mathematical matrix by placing disparate numbers in line with each other. It is from their arrangement that sense is made, and it is from the net of the matrix placed over them, the network of connections between them, that they are arranged.



The author of the article states that we are most likely living in a matrix, in his terms, a simulated reality, but then goes on to say that we haven't yet created one due to a lack of the necessary technologies. I am inclined to agree that we are living in matrices, but that we have been ever since the earliest humans began trying to understand the world by looking at their experiences in relation to each other. I am of the opinion that every attempt at understanding and communicating our experiences is the telling of a story, the interpretation of events to fit a framework in which they make sense and that others might be able to understand. These stories are only maps and metaphors, they are descriptions created to help us fit reality into a comprehendable form and are created by tying together the disparate and sometimes seemingly unconnected events of our lives, the chaos (also a mother figure e.g:Tiamat) of impressions and feelings, into a personal(or localized) network of relations, a matrix. If the Earth (mother) is the medium of our world, and (as McLuhan propheticaly stated) the medium is the message, then the matrices we use to interpret our expereinces are in a sense giving birth to new realities: The medium is your mother (medium- something in between, means of conveying info, someone that channels information between worlds). And like mathematical matrices, these realities can be read in a multiple of ways depending on what lines you choose to interpret it; which is why we each seem to have our own set of understandings that oftentimes do not seem to correlate with each other. It all depends on which fliter you have placed over your perceptions.



Now, I would argue that in this sense we are indeed living in a collective matrix as well, in that there are a large set of beliefs societaly ingrained in our cultures that over time have come to form the framework through which as memebers of the society we are expected to see the world. Such as views on education, other countries, the necessity of money and war, etc... But as this matrix is collectively created individuals will often times find themselves at odd with it like round pegs in square holes, their own experiences of the world being rather different than what they have been told it should be. This creates conflict, either doubt on the individual of their expereinces or doubt of the societal framework as being a bit too unflexible in its perspectives, and can also result in the individual (and even the society) reevaluating their matrices in relation to conflicting information, broadening their view of the world. And when our experiences of the world do not fit our own matrices we can change either as well, looking at conflicting info only in light of our assumed views or allowing it to change those assumptions and show the world from a new angle. This strikes to the heart of Magick, that our worlds change by changing the ways we look at them; that if we try and understand things systematicaly the rules have to be flexible enough, anarchic enough, for our systems to actually work in a univese that is just too big and unknown to fit into any one particular theory or description or order (including this one).





No to go outside and do something visceral. I've been working on this blog all day, and the peculiar 60 degree weather we've been having is supposed to turn into snow at midnight.