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In a comment thread elsewhere, 'Sellitman' mentioned this article by Charles Cameron about Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game. Now, I had no idea what that was, as I hadn't even heard of his book "Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game". And, well, there's a lengthy academic treatise about how one might possibly construct a game that is described rather vaguely in the book. But it somehow stimulated my interest, and it seems to point to something important, albeit a bit beyond the horizon of comprehension.
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"I hear music and see men of the past and future. I see wise men and poets and scholars and artists harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind."That sounds great of course. Now hear what Timothy Leary had to say:
In the avant garde, cyber-hip frontiers of the computer culture, around Mass. Ave. in Cambridge, around Palo Alto, in the Carnegie Mellon AI labs, in the backrooms of the computer graphics labs in Southern California, even in the Austin labs of MCC, a Hesse comeback seems to be happening. However. This revival is not connected with Hermann's mystical, eastern writings. It's based on his last, and least understood, work, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game. This book, which earned Hesse the Expense-Paid Brain Ride to Stockholm, is positioned a few decades in the future when human intelligence is enhanced and human culture elevated by a device for thought-processing called The Glass Bead Game. Up here in the Electronic '80s we can appreciate what Hesse did, back down there (1931-1942).Hm, intriguing, but still didn't tell us what it is. Anyway, the author of the treatise inches closer with various examples and snippets of clues.
The figure of Pierre Sogol (ie *logos*) in Rene Daumal's novel *Mount Analog* is clearly a Game Player. Sogol lives in an attic studio in Paris, and a pebbled path leads through shrubs and bushes and cactus plants around this studio:Ah, the concept is beginning to form. It is a way of weaving together patterns, snippets of knowledge, symbols, music, art - everythingAlong the path, glued to the windowpanes or hung on the bushes or dangling from the ceiling, so that all free space was put to maximum use, hundreds of little placards were displayed. Each one carried a drawing, a photograph, or an inscription, and the whole constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call 'human knowledge.' A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff's periodic table of the elements, a key to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz's transformation formulae, each planet and its characteristics, fossil remains of the horse species in series, Mayan hieroglyphics, economic and demographic statistics, musical phrases, samples of the principal plant and animal families, crystal specimens, the ground plan of the Great Pyramid, brain diagrams, logistic equations, phonetic charts of the sounds employed in all languages, maps, genealogies -- everything in short which would fill the brain of a twentieth-century Pico della Mirandola...
"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created."Cool. A meditative mind directly accessing the cosmic mystery. Quanta of lucid comprehension and primal creation wowen together into universal wholeness. A system, a language for expressing and examing all of it. Playing complex patterns, no matter the media. Linking expressions of life in many dimensions, many senses. Synestesia. A passage from Hesse's book:
Highest culture: the bead game in many categories, embraces music, history, space, *mathematics*. X is now the highest of bead game players, plays the world symphony, varies it according to Plato, to Bach, to Mozart, expresses the most complicated of things in 10 lines of beads, is completely understood by three or four, half-understood by 1000s.So, is it a language? Maybe. Bertrand Russell has this to say about creating ideal languages:
The first requisite of an ideal language would be that there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples. A name is a simple symbol in the sense that it has no parts which are themselves symbols. In a logically perfect language nothing that is not simple will have a simple symbol.Breaking everything down into its most simple components, in such a way that they easily can be re-combined or communicated or played.
Computers. The web. Everything is broken down into ones and zeros. Whether it is music, words, ideas, math, paintings, video, conversation, genetics. All come down to ones and zeros. And back again. And the possibilities for re-combination are endless. So does the web provide a substrate for this game? From the author:
The Web allows the direct, digitized display of textual, musical, numerical and pictorial content, and thus provides the Game designer with a medium in which -- to take an example from one of my own Games -- TS Eliot's lyric "The dove descending" can be directly juxtaposed with Vaughan William's lovely piece, "The lark ascending". The counterpoint I am after is not simply between the two forms of words, although that is present, but also between the poem as it may be read aloud and the music as it may be played -- and beyond that, to the descent of the Paraclete on the disciples' heads in the form of flame and the rain of incindiary bombs on London during the Blitz, and to the English meadow lark and its prior celebration by Shakespeare and others.I tend to think, then, of the Web as a kind of "board" on which the Glass Bead Game or its variants can be played, not simply in natural language but by the direct juxtaposition of ideas -- verbal, musical, numerical, pictorial -- in their own nature.
But in fact this is not what is going on. My presentation of Vaughan Williams' "The lark ascending" on the web is no more the piece itself as played than the Vaughan Williams piece is the lark itself as it ascends. On the web, a performance of the Vaughan Williams and a reading of the Eliot poem can be juxtaposed by rendering them into a common *digital* language... And it is this digital language which I suggest is in practice the appropriate analytic language for the design of Glass Bead Games.
I don't know what he really did with those pieces of text or the music, but I get the idea, of how pieces can be brought together, juxtaposed, re-mixed, transferred between media, played in new ways. As he says, using the "web as an organ whose manuals and pedals can indeed range over the entire intellectual cosmos".
Too quick an answer to just let binary code be the magical symbolic language that can represent everything. Ones and zeros don't in themselves represent very much at all. Yeah, we can also split everything into sub-atomic particles, but that doesn't provide all the wisdom of how things combine and play in the universe at large. As a metaphor for having access to everything, it will work, I guess. But it would be a worthwhile venture to pursue the more full-featured abstract languages or pattern languages that might span a bigger and deeper range of life in one movement.
It is this approach which my colleague Terence MacNamee is currently pursuing, searching in his own field of specialty, linguistics, for "a more formal kind of game where there really are structural isomorphisms that are purely intellectual and have nothing to do with events" by converting his old Master's thesis -- which is about the foundations of historical linguistics in the 19th century -- into formal structures for use in games.Makes me dizzy too. Anyway, isomorphisms, yeah, that's good. Finding how things express certain deeper patterns, even if they might be manifested in very different media, and even though the superficial content might be different. A content and context and media independent language, facilitating the expression of infinite play. A poem from Hesse:I can see that the analysis of syntagms in language could establish isomorphisms between phenomena that are not otherwise related, such as:
(1) Ablaut in Germanic ("speak" vs. "spoke") (2) vowel harmony in languages like Turkish (a word must have all front vowels or all back vowels in it) (3) Semitic roots ("kitab - katab - ktab" - "writes - wrote - book").
The ramifications of this make me dizzy.
I intend, then, to work on these formal correspondences, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic, in the context of linguistics from Grimm to Saussure. The result will be a scholarly monograph which I hope to publish, and a series of games derived therefrom.
The pattern sings like crystal constellations, And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole, And cannot be dislodged or misdirected, Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.We've been drowning in information. We're on sensory and mental overload most of the time. The web plugs us into an ocean of information, pictures, sounds and bits in a number of media. So, now, the thought is there that we might deal with it all in different ways. There might be more wholistic ways of surfing. Seeing the waves and the ocean as a whole in motion, rather than as a whole lot of drops. Ways of comprehending large chunks at the same time, because we know the keys that tie them together. Seeing forests we didn't before know existed, because we couldn't fathom their trees or their leaves. Suddenly hearing the music of the spheres, once we know there are spheres. Tasting the soup when it dawns on us that it is a soup. If it is a game, I wanna play.
*I was blown away by this tonight, so I felt like sharing it again. I hope you enjoy it.
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We've probably all heard about hyperspace, but what about hyper-time? Is there such a thing? Well, most likely. Each bubble universe by definition has its own space-time continuum, and so it would only make sense that other bubble universes have their own space-time continuums. Since they have their own self-contained space-times, why then would these timelines synchronize with ours? Logically, since they are separate, they wouldn't. Which means each timeline operates independently of our own. Although in a way it's a meaningless statement, while millions of years passed there, no time at all would pass here. The same could be true from their perspective. It's possible, as hard as it might be to imagine, universes with 3 time dimensions and 6 spatial ones. Better still, why not universes without space and time at all, but something altogether different and more extraordinary? Why not intelligences from realms where time and space would be completely alien to them, even restrictive from their perspective? It all seems arbitrary really, so why not an infinite number of other dimensions? I think this is closer to the true nature of things. We get something beautiful, perfect already a universe becoming more permeable all the time - higher dimensions, wormholes, baby universes, superspace, and continuing beyond all that we can possibly understand right now. A universe without end, infinitely beyond our comprehemsion for all eternity - the lasting mystery that propels us forward, upwards, outwards, always becoming more free eternally. Sounds like sweet blissful perfection to me. So it's all just semantics really what we call the universe. That's why I like Bucky's fuller Universe.
We exist and perceive Universe within certain boundary conditions. However, we have also noticed that if you change your hyperspective those boundary conditions are broken or transcended. For example Universe becomes much larger, more interesting, bigger, better. This change in perspective is because of your increased intelligence. Measuring the universe simply as a result of our physical technologies is just one part of a larger expansive process going on.
From a psychological perspective our experience of Universe has been equally if not more profoundly changed and expanded since our ancestors were struggling with fire. Imagine further the gulf between our ontological space and that of an insect or small microbe. Now imagine looking beyond our current technology and psychology, to the future of post-human intelligence vastly exceeding our own. Who is to say that these other dimensions of space described by string theory and quantum gravity will not open up to us? Who is to say that parallel universes (which apparently are right next to us - less than a micrometer, just in a parallel dimension out of our 3d space) will not become known and experienced by our future post-human selves?
If David Bohm is correct about the implicate order, then there are an infinite number of dimensions of space, time and everything else, within us and all around us. All we need is believe in them and open ourselves up to them. It doesn't require any fancy technology, only a willingness inside you to go there. You'll soon learn that our physical bodies, space and time, and all that other stuff doesn't matter very much. It's just this tiny place we happen to be in at the moment. But the next moment, the one right after now, can become the first moment you are living in infinity. Many people who have taken sufficient amounts of psychedelics to have experienced these hyperdimesnions. The best part is we don't need drugs anymore to go to these places. The helped show many of us the way, but the way out is past the drug experience. I know this view has given me some flack here on this 'psychedelic' site, but I believe ultimately that drugs are a dead end. It's kind of like an old tool that has served us well, but is now no longer necessary. We cling to it because it gave us fond memories, but it no longer serves us. We have outgrown it. We have become one with these higher spaces, we are going there in dreams, in OBE's and NDE's. Death is an illusion.
The holographic theory provides a great map to understand and integrate this beautifully simple and inclusive worldview.
According to the Holographic theory - everything is an interconnected continuum, on up thru the highest of dimensions - accessible to us right here, right now. The universe bubble we see through our eyes, telescopes and microscopes are merely the arbitrary boundary conditions defined by a combination of our physical space-time body-apparatus, technological augmentation and psychological development.
The conclusion we can draw is that given sufficient intelligence increase we can access all time vectors, continuities, discontinuities, realities, hyper-realities - the akashic record itself.
Imagine a point in which your intelligence, a vast network and continuum of information, knowledge and wisdom, begins mapping this holographic universe using hyper-intelligent "semantic", hyper-synaesthetic meta-data, to use contemporary metaphors. Is higher intelligence already doing this with our most intimate moments now? Is this higher intelligence ourselves in "the future" living vicariously through our "past selves", having not reflected yet that is in fact a hyper-intelligence capable of transcending all of it? Better still, are such distinctions between our so-called "lowly" selves and this higher self a false dichotomy? Perhaps that is what all the great sages have been trying to tell us - we are already gods, are already this higher intelligence!
As I have written before (see Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis), time being an arbitrary boundary condition, then in the super-set of all that is there is no before or after. There was no beginning, and no end. Everything and nothing both exists simultaneously as a standing wave in eternity - all of it is consciousness - iterating, enfolding and unfolding upon itself infinitely in every direction. We are already this infinite intelligence - always have been always will be blissing out on the miracle of our own existence.
Some might say that this brings an experience of an infinite number of hells. Although all these random/hellish states exist as part of a ground state of consciousness, they are not necessarily self-conscious. I think it is reflective self-consciousnes, self realization as a co-creator of the universe that creates the necessary bootstrap (quantum observer looking upon itself) for transcending these hellish states and rising up into the highest of heavens.
Some Related Articles:
Before the Beginning Was the Void
God as Consciousness-Without-An-Object
What is Reality?
Levels of Samadhi
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardachev
Super Free Will
Via PuzzlePieces, an article from The Telegraph, about our highly selective vision. I.e. we see what we're looking for, and humans often have a shocking ability to overlook even large factors if we're not paying attention to them.
In one experiment, people who were walking across a college campus were asked by a stranger for directions. During the resulting chat, two men carrying a wooden door passed between the stranger and the subjects. After the door went by, the subjects were asked if they had noticed anything change.And then there's this one:Half of those tested failed to notice that, as the door passed by, the stranger had been substituted with a man who was of different height, of different build and who sounded different. He was also wearing different clothes.
Despite the fact that the subjects had talked to the stranger for 10-15 seconds before the swap, half of them did not detect that, after the passing of the door, they had ended up speaking to a different person. This phenomenon, called change blindness, highlights how we see much less than we think we do.
Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.Part of the problem is that most of us seem limited to paying attention to a small number of thngs at the same time. The number I've learned is that we can pay conscious attention to at the most 5-7 different items at the same time, and even that is a stretch. If we're exposed to more items, we'll start dropping some of them from our awareness. Naturally, if we've been asked to pay attention to a certain set of items, it is the other ones that we're likely to drop.Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.
However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.
Prof Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire recently repeated this experiment before a live audience in London (as part of his Theatre of Science, performed with the author Dr Simon Singh) and found that only 10 per cent of the 400 or so people who saw the show managed to spot the gorilla.
Really, that is very important. Not just for stage magic and fun psychology experiments. It is a key factor in our frequent inability to understand the world and make good decisions, and the ease with which we can be mislead.
If a certain problem space involves more than a handful of simultaneous inter-connected factors, we're in trouble. Chances are that a majority of people will refer to some simplified political or religious ideology or belief system, containing less than a handful of key points, rather than dealing with the actual complexity in front of them.
That provides both significant manipulative advantages and potential problems for any group that can organize themselves so as to deal with complex factors. If you want to manipulate, you just make sure the truth is too complex to understand for normal people, and you might get away with even the most horrendous activites, as long as they split up into enough independent pieces. And if you're actually trying to solve a problem that needs solving, with the best of intentions, and you could use some public support, but you can't explain the whole thing in a two-minute soundbite format with at the most 2 or 3 interlinked factors - people probably won't get it, and you might not get any support.
It is rather critically important that we become smarter. I.e. more able to make meaningful decisions about complex situations. That either means better information tools, better organization, or better thinking methods. The better tools might be a good place to start.
I just discovered this imaginative future history of space-born cosmic flora.
From the website:
Spaceblooms emerged at the end of a remarkably long period of unprecedented growth in human knowledge. Ninety percent of all patents ever issued – perhaps a poor, but quantifiable, way of measuring knowledge – were granted in the last 150 years. While some of the technologies used today have roots in the 21st century or earlier, many of their manifestations were not envisioned until much later. The successful population of Moon and the building of the new settlements are achievements that would not have been possible without the newclear or unimbler technology, without ifasto materials or atmospheric solutions, and without the millions of discoveries, inventions and innovations. The roots of this knowledge explosion can be traced to the middle of the 21st century, when, after many decades of empty rhetoric and grandiose posturing, a worldwide focus on equal access to all levels of education was realized.
I would like to post a link to this article by James Kent who was the publisher of Trip Magazine, which recently terminated with Issue #10.
The article summarizes Kent's views on the nature of visionary states as produced by psychedelics, basically concluding that things like the spiritual realm, or Mckenna's hyperspace are products of a misguided imagination at best and/or psychotic delusions at worse. Although he claims to be providing a fair and impartial survey of psychedelic experience, his biases are very clearly in the reductionist-materialist camp.
After reading the article there is no question that I disagree with many of his conclusions. Having been a subscriber to his magazine, and having read all 10 issues, I noticed not only a bias in the type and level of reporting, but an almost reckless, narcissitic, "bad boy", over-the-top level of drug consumption, both in combination and in quantity. I suppose someone's got to do it just to see what happens. Although it was great fun to read the exploits of James and Scotto on this Hunter S Thompsonian edge, I never once felt these guys actually "got it". When I finished reading each issue I felt a definite sense of compassion for these guys who were taking in so many drugs, and getting back out so little insight. Therefore, I'm not suprised inthe least at Kent's hindsight perspective.
Here is a quote from the above article which I think clearly illustrates Kent's fundamental shortcoming on this issue:
My ultimate conclusion on psychedelics is that in any trip they can produce three primary effects which often overlap: 1) a perceptual distortion of reality; 2) a magnification of reality; 3) imaginal renderings from the subconscious mixed over the two.
I can't help but suspect Kent may be overstating his claims of the genuine extent of his psychedelic experience There is no question things like upbringing, intention, set and setting determine the potential scope of your experience. I actually feel a bit sorry for Kent. The above three posibilities completely miss the essence of transcendence - the basic core of all genuine gnostic traditions. Kent and in turn Trip Magazine always seemed to over-emphasize the whole "visual" mind-distorting weirdness of the psychedelic experience, which in my opinion is on the lower end of what's possible in a hightened state of consciousness. Getting caught up in all this samsara is only going to get in the way of a +12, +6 or +3 experience (see Samadhi Levels).
I'm sure Kent's soon to be released book will be fun to read, and will be another useful contribution to the literature, but like Trip Magazine, I won't be taking it too seriously.
Reminds me of a line from Real Genius:
"Kent, this is God speaking".
From original story:
He's tried clinics and therapy, Narcotics Anonymous and rehab. He's taken up exercise and gone through reduction cures. He's even given up on giving up. Now, though, Sebastian Horsley thinks he may have found the answer to his lifelong craving for heroin. Only problem is, it's another dangerous drug...
This is another story among hundreds of people who have cured lifelong addictions and disorders after just one Ibogaine trip. This is probably why this drug is not on the street - it would put all the dealers out of business.
Hopefully organizations like MAPS can be successful in getting this off of Schedule 1 and into clinical trials.
Scaled Composites launched the first private astronaut Mike Melvill into space. I am so excited!
Although it was not as visually spectacular as a Saturn V launch, this milestone cannot be overstated. What makes this event so important is that a bunch of guys in a couple of hangars at a rinky-dink airport in the Mojave desert, with just $20 million in start-up capital launched a man into space. This event is as much a psychological milestone as it is a technological one. It is likely to get more investors looking at the potential of space tourism. Initial costs of using the SpaceshipOne design is likely to be around $100,000 per person. According to some polls, there are already over 5,000 people willing to pay that amount to become astronauts, even if only for a few minutes. That's a gross profit of 500 million dollars! After expenses that's still at least $300 million in profit. Imagine what Burt Rutan's company could do with that amount of cash.
Although Burt Rutan is remaining low-key on the subject, he's made no secret that he will continue to advance the state of the art in spacecraft, with his next big goal of being the first private company to launch people into orbit, not just low-earth orbit (LEO), but escape velocity out of earth's orbit altogether. If he suceeds in launching people into orbit, then the real space race will have begun, because it will set the psychological precedent that anyone can develop their own space craft with a modest sum of money.
Another factor to consider is as more of these vehicals are built, and more competitors enter the space tourist launch business, prices will continue to drop, more people will be able to afford a ticket, more vehicals will have to be built to meet the demand, prices will drop further, and so on. According to Rutan, it is not unreasonable to think a sub-orbital launch could cost as little as $5000 per person within 5-7 years.
From John Lilly
If we are a manifestation of Consciousness-Without-an-Object, and if, as Wolff says, we can go back into Consciousness-Without-an-Object, then my rather pessimistic view that we are merely noisy animals is wrong. If there is some way that we can work our origins out of the basic ground of the universe, bypassing our ideas that the evolutionary process generates us by generating our brains—if there is some contact, some connection between us and Consciousness-Without-an-Object and the Void, and if we can make that contact, that connection known to ourselves individually, as Wolff claims, then there is possible far more hope and optimism than I ever believed in the past. If what he says is true, we have potential far beyond what I have imagined we could possibly have. If what he says is true, we can be and realize our being as part of the Star Maker.
By Elwin Reed
Do you remember the last time when you heard, or saw, or read another of those predictions of doom and gloom for our civilization? Was it just yesterday, certainly sometime within the last week. Perhaps it was about how we are going to perish from a global warming brought about by any of perhaps a dozen of the currently popular doomsday theories, ranging from the decimation of the rain forests to the thinning of the ozone layer; and I don't deny it, these do loom large as problems on the planet earth.
Then there is the contrarian view, that instead of worrying about global warming, we should be pre-occupied with the onslaught of a new Ice Age; instead of burning up, we are going to freeze to death!
And if that particular end doesn't appeal to you, there are scientists who stand ready to persuade you that before you ever get a chance to fry from the heat, or freeze from the cold, the global changes in weather patterns are already underway that will result in such enormous meltoffs of the polar icecaps, that most of the human race will simply drown in the rising waters of the oceans.
And then there are the possibilities of the earth tilting on its axis, or a catastrophic series of earthquakes, or we might all perish in a thermonuclear holocaust.
Pretty grim stuff, isn't it? And we are surrounded by it, inundated in it, there seems to be no getting away from it some days.
As the wife said to her husband: "Shall we watch the six o'clock news and get indigestion, or wait for the ten o'clock news and have insomnia?"
There seems to be something in man's nature that just loves bad news [see Disasterbation]. Don't believe me? Just look at a newspaper.., any paper.., any day, and look for the good news. Since the dawn of our known civilization ten thousand years ago, it's been like that, and I don't think it's going to change now.
But it can change for you and I. We don't have to subscribe to all the doom and gloom scenarios that abound out there! There is too much to be positive about, there is too glorious a future ahead for our civilization, for us to get bogged down in the negativities of this present time, which in the over all scale of the human existence, may be measured as no more than a fleeting moment. And this isn't some kind of pollyann-ish optimism. It's not an optimism based on a positive attitude without anything to back it up.
We, the human race, have got an ace in the hole. We've got a MIND.
That's right, I said a mind! The human mind is what has got us this far and it's going to get us a lot farther. Just how far, no one knows, but later on I would like to suggest a few possibilities, possibilities that are so far reaching as to be beyond our present capacities of complete comprehension. We can understand the underlying logic of the possibility, we just can't grasp all the ramifications if "possibility" becomes "reality."
Few of us really appreciate the absolute marvel that is our minds. Everything you have - your work, your relationships, your philosophy of life, your material possessions - has come to you as a result of your using your mind. Now consider this: Experts say that we use less than ten per cent of our mental capacity, and some noted and well-known scientists, like Margaret Mead, and Abraham Maslow, believed the figure was actually closer to five or six per cent.
At UCLA, there is a Brain Research Institute and their work points to enormous abilities latent in everyone. Researchers there suggest an incredible hypothesis:
The ultimate creative capacity of the human brain may be, for all practical purposes, infinite.
A Russian scientist by the name of Yefremov, wrote this in a scientific journal:
Man, under average conditions of work and life, uses only a small part of his thinking equipment. If we were to use only half its capacity, we could, without any difficulty whatever, learn forty languages, memorize the largest encyclopedia from cover to cover, and complete the required courses for degrees in dozens of colleges.
Amongst the experts, that statement is not considered as an exaggeration; it is the generally accepted theoretical view of man's mental potentials.
And here is where the optimistic part comes into play. When Maslow and Mead were estimating that man was only using five or six per cent of his potential thinking capacity, that was thirty or forty years ago. There is reason to believe that today, forty years later, man is actually using closer to ten percent of his capacity.
Because of the dynamics of present day television and movies, for example, with the visual effects of space and starships, and the life-like replication of human anatomy in books and models, we are gradually changing the way we think, and it takes more of our mental capacity to think in this new way. Rather than a linear flow of thought and reasoning, we are slowly adapting to an holistic flow of thought and reasoning. Rather than solving a problem as a logical progression of reasoning from fact A, to fact B, and so on, to a resultant conclusion, we are sometimes using an holistic viewpoint, we see the problem in a more multi-dimensional fashion, which may or may not lead, ultimately, to the same conclusion as before, but more quickly, and having considered more possibilities.
And like the story of the one-hundredth monkey, this is happening to all of us; whether we are eight or eighty, we are all of us using more of our mental capacity now than our parents did, and who knows how much more those born one hundred years from now, will be using?
Think for a moment where we have been, and where we've come in terms of progress, and we must realize that it is the human mind that has brought it about. It's hard to believe that we've come farther in the realm of progress in the past fifty years than we have in all the preceding ten thousand years of human civilization. Of all the scientists that have ever lived, ninety per cent of them are alive today, which may account for another astounding fact, our scientific knowledge is estimated to have doubled in just the last forty years, that is, since 1955. And for some of us, that doesn't seem like such a long time ago!
We, the human race, are in the midst of an explosion of knowledge of all kinds. We are on a ride to the future, and we are positioned on the early quickening of an exponential curve. And we had better buckle in, because like it or not, we're all going along on this ride, there's no choice! You all know what an exponential curve looks like. There's this flat part at the start where at first there seems to be little discernible difference in the level of the line, it looks more like a straight line than a curve, then slowly it starts rising, then more and more quickly, until finally it begins to look like a straight line again, only now it's a vertical straight line, and the rate of increase becomes astronomical in value.
And that part at the bottom, where the flat straight line starts curving up into the vertical line, that's where we are right now. We're just starting on the really interesting part.
Hotel magnate Robert Bigelow is hoping to soon be able to send inflatable buildings into orbit, aiming to take over from a defunct Nasa project, TransHab. Article in The Statesman.
Space tourism, perhaps the most obvious target for a terrestrial hotel owner, is just one of several commercial possibilities. Once space hotels look a serious prospect, then entertainment venues, such as zero-gravity sporting arenas, are unlikely to be far behind. Bigelow forecasts that space’s near-zero gravity will make it a covetable destination for pharmaceutical companies. Protein crystals can be grown to larger sizes when liberated from the oppressive effects of gravity; larger crystals are easier to study, and so simplify drug design.Genesis and Nautilus are built on the legacy of TransHab, a Nasa project to design inflatable modules for space. The modules, which would be inflated once in space, were meant to provide living room at the International Space Station and to become the template for habitats on the moon and Mars. Even though TransHab was in the advanced stages of testing at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, its future was punctured by rising costs and the reluctance of Congress to give the ISS more money.
According to one report, the demise of TransHab, which was essentially a three-storey apartment inside a cylindrical balloon, coincided with a visit by Bigelow to Nasa. On learning about the programme’s fate, he pledged to keep it going, apparently even salvaging parts from the agency’s rubbish bins. Space.com, the online newspaper, says that Bigelow Aerospace has paid for three patents covering inflatable space structures and now holds the sole rights to commercial development. Nasa, however, remains closely involved: Genesis will undergo vibration and vacuum-chamber testing at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Inflatables are viewed as a cheap, practical way to house people in space. The modules can be “flatpacked” into the noses of rockets — which means that they are relatively cheap to launch. The original TransHab had a deflated diameter of about 4.5 metres that doubled when inflated (probably using nitrogen gas), and a full height of about 14 metres. Most importantly, the usable volume was planned to be 330 cubic metres, providing more spacious living quarters than are currently available, and thus easing some psychological pressures of residing in space.
Nautilus is planning to sport similar dimensions, and is likely to exhibit other features similar to its predecessor, such as a thick shell designed to protect its inhabitants from bullet-speed meteorites and extremes of hot and cold. TransHab’s shell was composed of 12 layers, including Kevlar, which is used in bullet-proof body armour, and Nextel, a ceramic fabric.
From the website:
The following timeline is by necessity somewhat arbitrary and quite partial. The point is not to chart the minutiae of events of what I am loosely calling the "consciousness movement," but to give a sense for a few prominent milestones. The last hundred years have witnessed the gradual creation of a new world philosophy, one that sees human beings engaged in an evolutionary process to access a deeper, richer, more playful consciousness and to manifest the fruits of that work in the world. This new amalgam of ideas and practices has drawn from dozens of traditions, thousands of books and experiments, and millions of lives. Drawing a firm boundary around this "movement" is thus misleading. It is better likened to the flow of a tumultuous river, its millions of eddies and currents creating, when seen from afar, a cohesive sense of direction. This timeline is best viewed as a snapshot of that river from high above.
Via bird-on-the-moon
Cross-posted from my site, LVX23.
Here's a curious document I ran across about market branding in the new age - it's a transcript of a speech by Cheryl Swanson given to the Business of Marketing Strategy Conference Institute for International Research, April 27, 2004 in Boston. While it is creepy to the core, explaining how branding must evolve to capitalise on the emerging humanism in our culture, it's also intriguing to note that the advertising world agrees that such humanism is indeed growing.
This highlights a conflict I've been struggling with for some time: is it ultimately beneficial when advertising co-opts the underground? Thinkers like Grant Morrison and Doug Rushkoff maintain that media advertising and it's desire to be ever-hip provide opportunities for radical artists and ontologists to present their visions to a huge audience, essentially using the exposure of the corporate brand as a vector to deliver the ideals of the progressive underground. But it begs the question, "Does corporate co-option dilute the message of the underground, tying it to consumerism and desire instead of engeandering progressive social evolution?"
Some excerpts:
The visual landscape of the 21st century is morphing from a masculine, machine-based vision, rational, geometric, linear and logical world, toward an organic, bright, sensory reality that celebrates the human spirit. This viewpoint provides a wake-up call filling us with optimism. Organic shapes and sensory textures reunite our biorhythms (if but for a moment) with our emotions. This new world combines masculine with feminine principles; organic, soulful, soft, inward oriented, producing a more humane landscape...As we compress the sleep cycle, man finds himself losing touch with his wellspring of myth and fantasy. Brands take on a subliminal, emotional role in society, replacing myth and fantasy to become the defining cultural artifacts of our hopes, dreams and fears...
How does this human inspired vision of the future affect design and brands?" The "human principle," a sharing of our imperfections, weaknesses, feelings, and idiosyncrasies, rather than the perfection of machines or a divine being, is highly relevant to brands. We have identified four themes that make brands relevant in this "Survival of the Fastest" era. Brands can remain relevant only when they remind us of our humanity. Brands need empathy, sensory, simplicity and optimism ("ESSO") to make a solid human connection...
Indoors we yearn for the colors, textures and forms of nature. In reaction, home design is integrating the sounds of water and natural light.
The yoga craze expresses our need to reunite with our bodies, to re-learn how to breathe, to stimulate our senses with aromatherapy, strong mints, body lotions.
Our senses hunger - we must nurture them.
A feeling of excitement and relief exists when our senses are engaged. Materials and manufacturing innovations will continue to create unique sensory shapes, textures, and colors.
The SOFT concept is being embraced at every level, from softer lines and materials with skin-like qualities to highly textured things that respond to touch. These products can be high-end like the Cappellini Gel Chair, or mass like the elastic techno-gel pens at the local drugstore.
Brands are investing in high-sensory experiences. Design is breathing new life into packaging in an almost magical way. Packages are becoming experiences, especially high-end fragrances and liquors, even waters like the Fiji brand...
Optimism is a celebration of the human form. We will continue to see fewer unapproachable corporate signatures as we favor lighter, brighter, more emotionally evocative symbols.
The human face and form is enjoying a renaissance in everything from corporate identity to product marketing to design. Institutions and utilities, insurance, medical, science and technology companies are choosing to visually communicate their human spirit.
There's an interesting article in Business Week about the growing convergence between media and personal communication devices. Most of the article is pretty business-oriented but there are some interesting bits that tie in to our ongoing discussions about convergence, paradigm shifts, and technological evolution. It's especially interesting to consider the impact these technologies will have on communication and information in the emerging global brain. Just as the complexity of the human mind evolved to become self-aware, will the global mind have in the not-too-distant future a similar awakening?
Some excerpts :
That sets up a collision of three massive industries. In one corner stands the $1.1 trillion computer and software biz, with its American leaders. In another is the $225 billion consumer-electronics sector, with its strong Asian roots and a host of aggressive new Chinese players. The third camp is the $2.2 trillion communications industry, a behemoth that extends from wireless powerhouses in Asia and Europe to the networking stars of Silicon Valley. All three groups will have a hand in building the digital wonders that are headed our way...The result is a Big Bang of convergence, and it's likely to produce the biggest explosion of innovation since the dawn of the Internet...Hossein Eslambolchi, president of AT&T Laboratories (T ), thinks the changes ahead will be as significant as the advent of commercial aviation in connecting people and communities. "This is going to be the most disruptive period in the past 50 years," he says...
Driving this long-awaited trend are two powerful factors: the relentless evolution of technology and the tech industry's hunger for growth. For decades, the mere idea of a computer company making Brazilian TVs or French phones would have been laughable. Those markets were cloistered behind varying standards and a maze of diverse technologies. But with the spread of digital technology and the rise of Internet standards, those differences are fast melting away...
As these technologies evolve over the next decade, a new digital world will emerge. Analysts predict that these nascent networks will speed up by an average of 50% a year, the historic norm... As networks grow and chips continue to strengthen, companies will work madly to come up with winning products and services. Within the next five years, industry analysts say, practically every machine in the wide realm of communications -- every gadget that sings, talks, beams images, or messages -- will sport a powerful computer and a network connection. And every bit of digital information, whether it's a phone call, a song, a Web page, or a movie, will flow among these machines in the very same river of data...
The dramatic shifts ahead are likely to shake up age-old concepts at the foundation of our economy. In the coming markets of moving bits, who owns what?
Newcomers have defined each stage of the Information Era. And the age of convergence offers perhaps the richest yet. Why? The networks now taking shape will link together more than 1 billion people, not just with words or voices, but with music, video, games, and commerce. A vast chunk of the world economy is going digital -- and for the next few years it's up for grabs. This revolution won't quiet down anytime soon.
Arthropods is a book I came across about 15 years ago. It was published in 1971, but the ideas, concepts, and many of the designs are still as relevant as ever. The book is out of print, so I took some of the highlights and made it available here at Future Hi.
From the book:
Future shock, or Possibilities for Creative Future Change?"In our time, the amount of change in the environment self psychologically is so great, and the pace of thispsyche's capacity to adapt." Nowhere, probably, are the forces of change Arnold Toynbee mentions so apparent and the means to deal with them creatively so diverse and protean as in the increasingly intertwined interfaces of art, architecture, science, and technology, public involvement in environmental change, and the other disciplines, talents, enthusiasms, and concerns that affect and/or are affected by man's environment and the ways he manipulates it.
This book is an examination of a number of approaches to the general aspects of environmental change. It discusses the work, practical and theoretical, of a number of individuals and groups from a number of countries who have as common ground an interest in ameliorating man's lot in an increasingly desensitized atmosphere, and of postulating ways in which he can have—in smaller or larger scale—a deciding influence on the ways he will live and the nature of the places in which he will live. Some of the work will appear fantastic to many readers; other proposals will seem commendably "practical" and worthy of support by governments, industries, and the rest of the bureaucratic hierarchy that has gotten us into the sorry fix we are in at the present time.
This book seeks not to make laudatory, or disparaging, judgments upon specific projects or to arbitrarily segregate the workable from the visionary (the visionary must be tomorrow's "workable," anyway, if we are to move ahead), but to investigate the forces at work in new fields of environmental creativity and the interests that provoke them.
To read the rest of this book (including some pictures), click here.
Back in the mid-80's I got hip to the latest craze at the time with Brain Machines, later popularized a bit by Michael Hutchison. A lot of these came out of the research of the late 50's and 60's with biofeedback, pioneered by people like Elmer and Alyce Green at the Menninger Foundation's Psychophysiology Laboratory. They hooked up electrodes to the bodies and brains of Yogi's from India, confirming their prodound powers of neurophysiological control (Leary's circuit 5). Brain machines differ from traditional biofeedback, in that they act directly on our physiology either through sending subtle electrical currents into the brain, or through light and sound machines. Not much came out of this field, and it seemed to disappear, but the basic science behind it is sound. The key to these devices is the process called entrainment. The idea is that with regular application of certain frequencies of sound and/or light you can train your brain to go voluntarily into different states. Here is a quick summary:
| State | Frequency range | State of mind |
|---|---|---|
| Delta | 0.5Hz - 4Hz | Deep sleep |
| Theta | 4Hz - 8Hz | Drowsiness (also first stage of sleep) |
| Alpha | 8Hz - 14Hz | Relaxed but alert |
| Beta | 14Hz - 30Hz | Highly alert and focused |
Well, it turns out this stuff has gone a bit open source. There are several programs available for download that generate these binarual beats to help you get into these different states. The one I just discovered and downloaded last night is Brainwave Generator
Not only can you download the program, but for a one-time fee of $40 you can download hundreds of open-sourced presets with names like Power Sleep, Daydreamer, LSD Stimulation, and Sexual Stimulation. I can't attest to the effectiveness of any of these, but in my experience the power is more subtle than most any psychoactive drug, so I don't see any danger to playing around with the different presets.
I haven't paid the $40 yet, so I'm still trying out the default presets. Some pople are claiming only a couple of minutes of listening to Too Much Coffee has the same effect of drinking a couple of cups.
There is even software available to record these generated sounds and turn them into .wav or .mp3 files so you can listen to them on your iPod. I first heard about all this in an article called, Hack Your Brain with an iPod
I had a vision last weekend concerning cultural/technological evolution and the concept of the Singularity (what follows is a rough outline of a larger paper I'm working on). The Singularity is alternatively imagined to be some apocalyptic transformation through fire which will purge the planet of the Old Ways and sweep the pure of heart into the next phase of existence, or it is a sudden shift in perception as technology is accelerating so quickly that life is indistinguishable from imagination. I tend to lean towards the latter, though I question how much of the Old Ways will disappear in the new paradigm.
But the vision I had was somewhat more mundane, acknowledging some of the current threads which will irrevocably necessitate a fundamental shift in the way we humans relate to each other and our world. Such a shift will undoubtedly call into question the entire edifice of western culture.
The first current is the shift from classical Newtonian Mechanics and Cartesian dualism which has laid the foundation of human logic for at least the past 400 years, producing the economic, industrial, and political theories which now rule the planet, to the emerging logic set informed by Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. This shift is already happening. Science is the new god and determines how we interpret ourselves and the world around us. Social relativism and quantum mechanical concepts such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Observer-Participant Paradox are eroding classical dualism and empiricism, replacing them with uncertainty and interconnectedness. Binary classification of nature is failing. Yes or No, right or wrong, black or white - these are increasingly becoming more and more fuzzy as the western mind grasps the gradients between such polarities. Dogma has only brought us ignorance, fear, and bloodshed. The separation and individuality that has typified the western mind is facing the realization that All is ultimately One, that certainty must yield to probabiity. In the Information Age - the Age of Light - the only functional ontology must be relativistic and subatomic.
Add to this the emergence of the global mind manifesting through the world wide web. Communication is faster and more dynamic than ever before. Information is being shared and iterated across the globe, accelerating technological innovation exponentially. Information feeds on itself. In a vast planetary network each mind is like a single neuron contributing to the processes of the digital brain. When information is so freely available the very foundations of society that have evolved under the guidance of elite priesthoods and governors - politics, religions, social castes, eductaion, economics - resolve clearly into outmoded traditions designed to keep the individual in a subservient role to the State.
Soon the advent of quantum computers will shift the binary substrate of the digital age into a fuzzy quaternary code infinitely more powerful and capable of crunching huge logic sets. Similarly, advancements in organic computing using proteins & DNA offer solutions to mathematical problems formerly impossible to solve. Imagine a global network of quantum DNA computers... Imagine how quickly scientific thought will be accelerated with such awesome computational power...
The currents of genetics and nanotechnology will perhaps have the greatest effect on the current paradigm. These two fields are tightly intertwined and their full realization will give humans the power to control nature on the atomic level. From engineering life to molecular manufacturing of resources, nanotech holds the possibility of endless resources available to anyone; of pinpoint medicine capable of treating any ailment or remedying any genetic error; of a post-industrial utopia where machiines run cleanly on less than a single volt of electricity. The utopia may be far off but the advancements of these fields and the integration of their products into society are already beginning to alter the landscape of reality. Hypermedia, virtual realities, genetic modification, mind-machine interfaces, life extension, and highly specialized and reactive nanomaterials are only a few of the technologies emerging that will challenge our perceptions and further erode the lines between imagination and reality.
As technology reconstructs the fabric of society, the society will be forced to upgrade its assumptions about every aspect of culture and governance. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the fundamental paradigm that has dominated western culture for the last 2000+ years will suddenly fail, to be replaced by the next paradigm. This event is gradually building but the powers that be - those invested in and trapped in the old ways - are actively fighting the challenges to their power base. The cost of evolution is often paid in blood. The momentum of history is building in such a way that the old ways will inevitably be sloughed off like dead skin; like the chrysalis from which the butterfly emerges, history as we know it may be left behind as an empty husk at the threshold of hyperspace.
Earlier today, I became aware of some beautiful work being done by visionary artist and community builder David Lightman. It's difficult to describe the multi-faceted nature of everything he's doing, so here is some info from his website:
Dlight is an artist by accident, a revolutionary by intent. His art is strictly functional, springing from serious attempts to further what he terms the New Tribalism. He is dedicated to creating spaces, systems and structures designed to foster the development of a new breed of focused communities which act as artistic, economic and spiritual vortexes – cultural incubators for the 21st century.His first architectural experiment was at Burning Man 1999. Two 30 ft reinforced mylar wings were attached to a metal ladder, creating a shade structure that kept people cool even in the peak of the searing desert heat. It resembled a bird attempting to take flight, with the wings alternately rising and falling. This structure was strong enough to withstand 60 mph winds surviving a week in this hostile environment. Although large enough to shelter 20 people comfortably, the whole structure weighed only about 30 pounds.
In February 2002 Dlight founded a project now called Tribal Oasis, (www.tribaloasis.org), a detailed plan for a self-sufficient eco-friendly arts village in the middle of Los Angeles. This pioneering project mobilized a large group of people to develop detailed architectural and financial plans to make this ambitious dream a reality. Dlight designed a community currency for this village called Ecos.
As a member of several communities that hold gatherings in harsh desert environments, Dlight has been fascinated with the idea of portable structures designed to be erected quickly and easily, yet providing a significant level of comfort, modularity and beauty. After learning about a new kind of structural mathematics called helical geometry, Dlight immediately realized that it might be the ultimate solution for the “movable city”. Although it was only a few weeks before Burning Man 2003, Dlight was able to create the first “Helix” in time. Later he erected a 23-panel Helix for the Solids show in December 2003.
Dlight studied physics and psychology at Cornell University. He was responsible for the computer graphics on the film “War Games”.
I really hope his group is successful in getting Tribal Oasis off the ground. There is no question that people are hungry for this type of community. I have hungred for it almost my entire adult life. The ideas are sound, and as always come back to economics. My thinking is if you can create a diverse and dynamic enough community it can become both economically and environmentally sustainable, whether it's in downtown LA like Tribal Oasis, or out in the country. If Dave and his group can make a go of this, it will become a prototype for other communities to emulate.
David's designs remind me a lot of of the stuff coming out of the late 60's in a book called, Arthropods by Jim Burns. I have an original signed and mint condition copy of this book. As revolutionary and radical as the ideas in this book were then, they are even more relevant and perhaps revolutionary today. I will definitely make a point of blogging about this book in the near future, and I will expand upon in it the growing archives section under Spaceship Earth.
This is a beautifully illustrated story that first appeared in Epic Magazine in October, 1981. I was a sophmore in high school then, and had a subscription. I found this story wonderful, and WAY ahead of its time. I think you will agree.
Each page is about 120kb, so if you have a slow connection, please be patient for each scanned image to download.
To begin, click here
"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." - Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies.
Flemming just reminded me of this quote, which is Aleister commenting on one of the most powerful magickal techniques ever devised.
The idea is to invoke a belief system which is contradictory to your current set of beliefs. For example if you are a liberal, become a conservative; a theist, become an atheist, etc. The idea is to do it fully, to live and breath this new belief system until you have some kind of manifestation or epiphany, in which you come to believe in it with all of your heart. Once you've accomplished that, immediately proceed to doubt all that you just invoked, until you once again hold the belief with complete skepticism.
Rinse, repeat, recycle.
If you can manage to do this faithfully, you will eventually transcend dogmatic belief, and dogmatic doubt entirely.
As Aleister once said, "a true skeptic doubts his own doubt".
In a comment liquis mentioned an article from 2001 in EE Times: "Quantum laser turns electron wave into memory". Some researchers have experimented with encoding information into the wave states of electrons. Or, rather, one electron appears to be enough:
How many electrons does it take to remember the entire contents of the Library of Congress? Only one, according to University of Michigan professor Philip Bucksbaum. Since electrons, like all elementary particles, are actually waves, Bucksbaum has found a way to phase-encode any number of ones and zeros along a single electron's continuously oscillating waveform.As there are an unlimited number of possible positions in a wave, and by modulating the phase, one can access them. At least theoretically. They apparently proved the concept, but were far off from putting it into practical applicaton."Our work in quantum-phase registers is highly experimental, but theoretically there is really no limit to how long a string of 1s and 0s you can store in one," said Bucksbaum.
More people seem to be writing about dreams they've had recently. And I've noticed myself that I'm suddenly dreaming a lot again. Every morning when I wake up, I've just been in an intensive dream. If I lie down for a nap, I dream very quickly. The dreamworld is suddenly much closer. And I have signs again of the more lucid kind of dreaming. Like flying dreams. Over the years I've had many dreams where I can fly. And in that kind of dream it always works the same way. Not like superman, but more like my body is really light, and if I kind of jump a certain way, I can then glide along for quite some time, only hitting the ground rarely. And once I get into the hang of it, I can take off a bit further over the ground. Always having to watch out for wires and that kind of thing. It requies quite some concentration and there's a certain aprehension involved in it. It is more like being able to miss the ground by a tricky balancing act than it is any rocket-powered superhero thing. But very cool, nevertheless.
I used to work much more deliberately on dreaming. I was into astral projection, lucid dreaming, Monroe's out of body experiences, Castaneda, Seth on Personal Reality, and whatever else I could get hold of that helped me dream more consciously or travel more deliberately in alternative realities. And one can quickly take it further if one puts one's mind to it. The most simple thing to start with is to write down one's dreams immediately, so one can get used to remembering them and being conscious of them. One can very well wake up several times every night and do that.
Then there are tricks for becoming more lucid. Lucid dreaming is essentially when you wake up inside the dream, being aware that you're dreaming, without leaving the reality you're in, but able to navigate around in it and explore it. One approach is to remind oneself frequently to check whether one is dreaming, even while awake. Then one might also remember to do so while in a dream. And then there are tricks like Castaneda's approach of trying to find one's hands when inside the dream. Which isn't easy. But if you can consciously become aware of your hands, then you can probably go a step further and do something with them.
For several years I had a job that allowed me to sit down and meditate for a few minutes every hour. And when I came home from the job I took a nap every day. This allowed me to be much closer to the dreamworld in general. I started frequently dreaming while awake. I'd sit by the computer and the wall to my side would dissolve and turn into a corridor or something, which I could walk down and interesting things would happen.
Or I would start dreaming by deliberately visualizing some other place before falling asleep. Frequently it turns into a dream reality, and things would start happening by themselves. And I would thus both fall asleep and wake up dreaming.
I would find that in the more lucid types of dreams, there would be certain places I'd frequently come back to. Not always the same place, but I'd often be aware that the place where I was a couple of nights before is "right over there". And the reality was very consistent. There's this place which is quite a bit like the society in the movie Brazil. It is very overcrowded, and there's like wires and cables and pipes everywhere, and shoddy building codes. I had a house and an appartment there. I'd often be driving or walking around looking for a place to sleep, ironically. And even if I found my own house, there would often be somebody else sleeping in my bed already. Very hard to hold on to one's property there.
Oh, and the more astral projection types of dreams that I could pretty much step into at will, where there were a number of consistencies too. My favorite approach of getting around was this surfboard, which I could fly on, like the Silver Surfer. Very different flying than the previously mentioned jumping and not hitting the ground type. And there was this blue-skinned Egyptian goddess ladyfriend I had there, whom I'd run into in all sorts of places.
Robert Monroe's out-of-body techniques is another approach again. I went through his various hemi-sync tapes, which essentially does some synchronization thing with the brain, to make it easy to let the body fall asleep while one stays awake. That part worked ok, but I didn't have any great success in going interesting places that way. You first have to drag your energy body out of your physical body, which isn't that straightforward. I didn't manage much more than lifting an arm or a leg that way. When I did manage by other means to do out-of-body experiences, I'd tend to be bouncing around and hitting walls in the darkness, finding it very hard to navigate.
Anyway, I do happen to believe that the worlds we can visit in dreaming is much more than just some recooked memories from one's day, or some random chemistry in the brain. I've seen too much to believe that kind of stuff. Although, sure, normal unconscious dreams have something to do with that. But the more interesting kinds of dreaming is something quite different. Something real.
I usually have found that my waking time is of higher quality when I spend more time dreaming. Solutions tend to appear by themselves, and inspiration is always close. Sometimes the full text of something I need to write appears fully formed.
So, I'm trying to form the intention here to dream more consciously again. I think we need to access more dimensions to solve our problems in the world. The reason we get stuck in things is usually that we think too one- or two-dimensionally about it. More fluidity and wholistic awareness is needed. And imagination and the ability to jump between diverse worlds and world views. Live, complex experience.
Message from Galactic Coincidence Control Office
Tune in, Turn On, Blast Off!
We are timespace vehicles with probability drives.
The probability fields in which we exist in and perceive may be nothing more than arbitrary creations of higher intelligence. Probabilities only expanding as fast as we are ready to navigate them.. As we begin communicating with higher intelligence we can begin to reprogram more of our own probability fields, creating our own synchronicities, luck and destiny. Those who figure this out will take us to the stars and beyond.
As we begin to reprogram and metaprogram our probabilistic realities we can accept only what we want to and reprogram the rest - transforming ourselves into higher intelligence.
Everything that exists in "our current universe", our consciousness has chosen out of the infinite possibilities available. Keep in mind there may be other intelligence's (even terrestrial) who have programmed you and "your universe" This may even include what you perceive as life, gravity, matter, time, space... Consider the possibility that these phenomena our probabilistic realities you have been programmed to operate in, purely arbitrary and nothing more.
Other entities almost certainly conceive their realities in terms of logical models of which we have the least intimation. I cannot help but wonder if perhaps "they" are already here. If the cosmobiological continuities which we seek are already "known", perhaps are controlled by... someone... something... some hyper-cybernetic energy structure - some cosmic information warp.
Seeding space with our phallic vehicles, we ourselves perhaps have already been seeded, are already embryonically becoming that creature who will enter the labial stargate in apotheosis to conceive yet another being.
We are forcing ourselves continually to mutate and reprogram our conceptions of the cosmos - in spite of psychocultural forces, we are creating a radically in-process, holistic open-system cosmology.
Read history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and religion along with mythology, science fiction and fantasy. Create your own mythology or religion. Make it historic scientific in foundation and science fiction fantasy in style. Sign on your best friend for the journey (the buddy system is a safety net).
The details of your shamanistic starship are up to you. Think for yourself and do it everyday. Strive for comprehensiveness - specialization is for insects. Each shaman must find hir own way. With practice, patience and endurance you will end up with a shamanistic starship capable of reliably taking you to worlds of beauty and religious depth that have only been available so far to humanity's great geniuses, artists and mystics. The possible destinations of your starship are infinite!
Welcome to the neopaleolithic where we poor monkeys get back to the unfinished business of re-creating our selves and going to the stars.
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As a prelude to an article I'm working on about The Singularity, here's a bit cross-posted from my blog:
CMC Magazine has a fascinating article by Rev. Philip J. Cunningham titled Tielhard de Chardin & the Noosphere. Chardin was a very forward-thinking Jesuit geologist and paleontologist born towards the end of the 19th century. After enduring the horrors of WW1 his ontology evolved into a highly spiritual conception of the human organism.
In the seeming myriad of entities around us, Teilhard perceives a unity: "My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him." Moreover, that unity reaches back in time and continues into the future: "If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness."His personal research led him to develop the concept of the Noosphere - "a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls" - and the notion that its coevolution with humanity would draw us all towards the inevitability of an Omega Point at the end of time.
"We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection." Yet such a unanimity of consciousness implies a condition that humans generally reject, depersonalization. Indeed, the conclusion seems inevitable: "So that at the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal." At this point, "Omega," the last letter in the Greek alphabet, simply refers to the final stage of evolution. At the end the noosphere become an "all" that absorbs all.In refining his description of "Omega" Teilhard seems to agree. "Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-time is necessarily of a convergent nature [and] must somewhere in the future become involuted to a point which we might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in itself." Here "Omega" takes on its deeper meaning. Noogenesis, as it evolves, inevitably reaches a single focus.
From the press release on Scaled Composites Website.
Mojave, CA: A privately-developed rocket plane will launch into history on June 21 on a mission to become the world’s first commercial manned space vehicle. Investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen and aviation legend Burt Rutan have teamed to create the program, which will attempt the first non-governmental flight to leave the earth’s atmosphere.SpaceShipOne will rocket to 100 kilometers (62 miles) into sub-orbital space above the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test Center, a commercial airport in the California desert. If successful, it will demonstrate that the space frontier is finally open to private enterprise. This event could be the breakthrough that will enable space access for future generations.
I'm definitely going to this event. I plan on camping somewhere in the vicinity, and attending the launch and return ceremonies. If you're interested in hookng up, just email me.
Predictable improvements in lithographic methods foretell continued increases in computer processing power. Economic growth and engineering evolution continue to increase the size of objects which can be manufactured and power that can be controlled by humans. Neuroscience is gradually disecting the components and functions of the structures in the brain. Advances in computer science and programming methodologies are increasingly able to emulate aspects of human intelligence. Continued progress in these areas leads to a convergence which results in megascale superintelligent thought machines. These machines, refered to as Matrioshka Brains, consume the entire power output of stars (~1026 W), consume all of the useful construction material of a solar system (~1026 kg), have thought capacities limited by the physics of the universe and are are essentially immortal.
A common practice encountered in literature discussing the search for extraterrestrial life is the perspective of assuming and applying human characteristics and interests to alien species. Authors limit themselves by assuming the technologies available to aliens are substantially similar or only somewhat greater than those we currently possess. These mistakes bias their conclusions, preventing us from recognizing signs of alien intelligence when we see it. They also misdirect our efforts in searching for such intelligence. We should start with the laws on which our particular universe operates and the limits they impose on us. Projections should be made to determine the rate at which intelligent civilizations, such as ours, approach the limits imposed by these laws. Using these time horizons, laws and limits, we may be better able to construct an image of what alien intelligence may be like and how we ourselves may evolve.
To read the rest of the article by Robert Bradbury click here.
The Hermetic Library is a huge online archive of some of the most important works in western esoterica and postmodern magickal thought. Some of the selections are:
The Libri of Aleister Crowley
Sam Webster: Initiate of the Mysteries
Corpus Stavish
The Magick and Mysticism of Bill Heidrick
The Enochian World of Benjamin Rowe
Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchy
Austin Osman Spare
The Exposed Adytum of Dionysos Thriambos
The Invisible Basilica of Sabazius
Norton's Imperium - Enochian Magick Papers & Links
The Works of Frater Osiris
Another brilliant post, this time from Ollapodrida: metaversal hyper-abyssic forecast, again pointed out to us by our pals over at DRT.
The world has become what it has become under the guidance of a sexually repressed priesthood and a moralistic fundamentalist political cabal that recently crucified a president for sexpl