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Search
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…one can speak about music only with a man
who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.

--Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game


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League of Spiritual Discovery Medallion, Millbrook

′′ What you call passion is not psychic energy, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion is dominant, there is no more desire and aspiration, but it is directed to a false and isolated destination, hence the tension and heaviness of the atmosphere. Who directs the supreme energy of desire towards the center, towards the real being, [...] seems calmer than the enthusiast because you always see the flame of his ardor, because for example in disputing he doesn't scream and doesn't shake his arms. But I say to you: he must burn and burn! ′′
--Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
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the bead game

Overview

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insist on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." --Dickens, Tale of Two Cities


From ancient history there has been an ideal of means of human inquiry and analysis -- to unwrap further the significance of phenomena and relations described. The Bead Game is certainly not the only possible perspective, but is a central one, like modern mathematical notation. Data processing grew ever more different from the way humans naturally think -- and ever more important.

"A person who wishes to influence the decisions of governments, organizations and companies must therefore learn to speak in numbers. Experts do their best to translate even ideas such as 'poverty', 'happiness' and 'honesty' into numbers ('the poverty line', 'subjective well-being levels', 'credit rating'). Entire fields of knowledge, such as physics and engineering, have already lost almost all touch with the spoken human language, and are maintained solely by mathematical script.

"More recently, mathematical script has given rise to an even more revolutionary writing system, a computerised binary script consisting of only two signs: 0 and 1. The words I am now typing on my keyboard are written within my computer by different combinations of 0 and 1.
"Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams.

So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. And this is not the end of the story. The field of artificial intelligence is seeking to create a new kind of intelligence based solely on the binary script of computers."
https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3392

Math is the World's Dominant Language
All data is freely associated in the brain.
"The dominant languages of the world today are those of bureaucracy, machines and mathematics, and they have gradually changed the way humans think and view the world:"


The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi (set in the 23rd Century) describes a cadre of individuals and their headmaster -- the Magister Ludi -- engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectronics.

The Glass Bead Game requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture. It plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. The Game's synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of postmodernism, virtual reality, and now Critical Reality.


After each symbol conjured up by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, origin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique and practice of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care.

The variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Thus, "realizing" was a favorite expression among the players. They considered their Games a path from Becoming to Being, from potentiality to reality...For the small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship.

The Glass Bead Game is a commentary on how we construct our realities. It requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy, making deep connections from seemingly unrelated topics. Mystic game players use interdisciplinary symbols to manipulate multi-level metaphors. In the end, the Magister Ludi realizes the futility of the game, and leaves it. He deprograms himself from his former goal.

It illustrates the ways that people position not just themselves but how they construct, deconstruct, signify, encode and program their entire perception of reality. One needs to understand reality before one can deliberately allocate it. It takes years of study to acquire the comprehensive backgrounds in the arts and sciences.

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. The Game's synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of virtual reality.

“Theoretically,” writes the Narrator Archivist, “this instrument is capable of producing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. The manuals, pedal, and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory.” And with this statement, he reveals the limitations of the game: its elitism, its hubris, its stagnation, and its sterility. In its infancy, the Game was played with delicate glass beads, which have since been discarded as too . . . real?

They connected the Game with the spiritual beads played by religious believers worldwide, as the robes, and secret language, and ceremonial trappings of the game form a mock religious experience in the time of the Narrator Archivist. Without them, the game flies into the ether without a tether to reality. In our world, prayer beads and the repetition of simple phrases serve as keys to transcendence.

CULTURAL ENGINEERING; GLOBAL ARCHITECTRONICS

“The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.” -Ervin Laszlo

New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in a system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the mindbody is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.

We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor. Yet, highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview.

Life includes chaos and order, good and bad experiences, even catastrophes that require us to adapt or die. The important thing is how we meet and react to chaos, finding ways to replenish our depletion. Observation of the subquantal domain reveals an inexhaustible realm of negentropy from which we can draw our psychophysical sustenance. When healthy, our entire system is designed to reduce entropy, in different scales and domains.

We live in a persistent delusion of separateness. However, we are all nonlocally connected in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level, connecting and diverging. Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.

We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions, our self-expression and self-image. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.

How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. Most of us are, indeed, "sick and tired" of the way things are, but what do we do to change them and ourselves?

We can learn simple techniques for self-care and self-regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.

This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation: subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image.

By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.

The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.

SOMA SOPHIA: Body Wisdom and Golden Flesh

"The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another ... and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy" ~ William Butler Yeats

Do we actively value our psychic well being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?

Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.

Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.

To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of mental and physical well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.

A dynamic combination of focus, concentration and flow undergirds our conscious existence and how we relate to others and the world. In meditation and holistic mindbody therapies, such as biofeedback, Tai Chi or Top-Down Yoga, we intentionally create dynamic changes in our psychophysiology. We temporarily drop our identification with the body only to reinhabit it with even more awareness or mindfulness. This is the artful life; creative fulfillment of our collective destiny.

We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the alchemical "gold", whether we call that essence health, creativity, art, flow, inspiration or wisdom. Lifeforce is found within; psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.

We can return to Nature and our own nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory that integrates physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs. We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment.

We are each a temple of living light.

"There was a passionate craving among all ... [intelligentsia] ... for a means to express their new concepts. They longed for philosophy, for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar broke through the barriers of his specialty and tried to advance into the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences."
--Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

 "Here is the ancient tension. To be. To know. Well, the magician has a spell to weave here, too. The intellect divorced from old-fashioned neurosis, freed from egocentricity, from semantic reification. The mind illuminated by meditation ready to play with the lawful rhythm of concepts. The Bead Game." --Leary, Metzner

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Fellowship of the Indole Ring

"...IFIF, the organization for which Tim had once had such high hopes, was now being reconstituted as the Castalia Foundation, the name Hermann Hess had given to the fellowship of the mystic scientists in his novel Magister Ludi (also called The Bead Game). Those who lived in the big house at Millbrook consciously modeled their lives after the book. In Hesse's novel, set in the Alpine province of Kastalien around the year 2400, the elite monastic Castalian order displayed its intellectual mastery by playing a ritualized game of glass beads...Dissatisfied with the game, he [Magister Ludi, the high priest of the order] sought a new life in the outside world." --
Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography

Here at the Millbrook estate Leary established the Castalia Foundation, named after the priestly sect in Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, which was dedicated to the scholarly study of LSD and its spiritual applications. Apparently Leary saw himself as a latter-day Joseph Knecht and proceeded to hold court with anybody who cared to visit, partake of the LSD experience, and discuss the matter with him.

As a guide to the direction and understanding of LSD-induced psychedelic experience, Leary used the Tibetan Book of the Dead which deals explicitly with different states of consciousness. Leary reinterpreted this so that it ended up as a sort of mixture of Buddhist wisdom and Scientology. Clearly at this point Leary had become the high priest of an LSD-fueled religion complete with its own bible. Millbrook was visited by a wide variety of high-profile individuals from the arts and politics, and its place in the general public’s consciousness rapidly increased.

This story is not about drugs or Leary's beliefs but acknowledges the antecedent in his Castalia Foundation as he recognized the literary precedent.


    Tim thought most people missed the real message of Hesse, himself the member of the Hermetic Circle; entranced by the pretty dance of words and theme, they overlook the seed message, for Hesse, in the spirit of Mercurious, is a trickster. Like nature in April, he dresses up his code in fancy plumage. The literary reader picks the fruit, eats quickly, and tosses the core to the ground. But the seed, the electrical message, the code, is in the core. The seed meaning is within, concealed behind the net of symbols. Millbrook's Castalia Foundation was its own 'sublime alchemy', and its own High Priest in Timothy Leary, who saw in Hesse's story of the Castalian Order, both an inspiration and a warning against constricting rigidity.

'Groups which attempt to apply psychedelic experiences to social living will find in the story of Castalia all the features and problems which such attempts inevitably encounter: the need for a new language or set of symbols to do justice to the incredible complexity and power of the human cerebral machinery; the central importance of maintaining direct contact with the regenerative forces of the life-process through meditation or other methods of altering consciousness; the crucial and essentially insoluble problem of the relation of the mystic community to the world at large. Can the order remain an educative, spiritual force in the society, or must it degenerate through isolation and inattention to a detached, alienated group of idealists ?' [Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Review, Cambridge, Mass., Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1963, p. 179.]

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The Music Master in The Glass Bead Game who symbolizes ultimate creative wisdom, advises his student:   “The deity is within you, not in ideas and books.  Truth is lived, not taught.”

Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.
~Carl Jung; CW 13; Para 229.


Hesse called the Glass Bead Game an “eternal idea,” a mastery of mystery:​ "This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a universities litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion."

        "The game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. It is "a kind of synthesis of human learning" in which themes, such as a musical phrase or a philosophical thought, are stated. As the game progresses, associations between the themes become deeper and more varied. The game uses artistic forms, and eventually cultural symbols. Themes are developed almost as a poet would, andbuilding variations as a composer. It was a way of symbolizing music and of building broad insights into the world."

"All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that    subsequent periods of scholarly study are reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass  Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing the game the entire intellectual content of the universe."

We see the Glass Bead Game as a metaphor for a tradition of esoteric philosophical cosmology which has existed throughout every culture known to man. This philosophical cosmology is an expression of the fundamental system of order existent in the universe.

These systems of cosmology are usually expressed in symbolic forms such as sacred geometry, alchemy, hieroglyphics, mythology, harmonics, arithmetic, astronomy, magic, and the like, but what they all have in common is a unified vision of the process of manifestation of the universe from the absolute to the relative.


The Glass Bead Game is the artistic, philosophical or cosmological manipulation of the symbolic forms which express these systems of knowledge. These symbolic forms, or what we would call the Glass Beads represent a system of language unknown to all but a few who have searched for or been initiated into this rare and most valuable wisdom. We face a grim reality many would like to transcend through a variety of means.

Schwaller de Lubicz called this form of expression "symbolique", or the "Language of the Gods", or the "Language of the Birds". He explains it as a language that uses symbols as letters in an alphabet expressing am unknown language. When one is able to read this language, one can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, Medieval alchemical texts or Gothic cathedrals, and realize that they all say the same thing. He also informs us that there is no way to study "symbolique", but at the same time recommends sacred geometry as the best place to start.

http://www.sacredscience.com/store/commerce.cgi?page=GBG2.htm
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21ST CENTURY GLASS BEAD GAME
The Multimedia Field & Total Work of Art
MANIFESTO 2017

Catch Me If You Can

By Iona Miller, 2017

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“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 symbol 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 truly a 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.” --Hesse, Magister Ludi

"The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe." ~Hesse


"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better." --Albert Einstein

Though the human brain has not changed in over 200,000 years, human beings developed language, art, technology, and culture. Still the nature of consciousness remains speculative though we have many theories. Philosophy fills the gap we perceive between the world as it bluntly is and how it ought to be, good and beautiful as it is in our mental pictures, intuitions, gnosis, or latent rich information still unknown.

If that gap is closed with the unity of the true we perceive a philosophical world, a projection of our internally realized philosopher's stone. We now understand literally that space is within as well as without us. Our world becomes philosophical, the fine line between what is and what must and ought to be.


A progress trap is the inadvertent condition created by  human ingenuity in which solutions to problems create new unforeseen problems. Progress traps are inherent and unavoidable aspect of human consciousness, a particular result of our dualistic, abstract and ultimately incomplete way of gaining knowledge about nature. While nature herself is limitless in her complexity, human knowledge, for all it’s lofty achievements will forever remain incomplete. Indra’s Net, an ancient Buddhist parable, provides us with an enlightening metaphor.  It tells the story that every single jewel in Indra’s universe reflects every other jewel. Nature is infinitely inter-connected and inter-dependent at every level. Our analytic knowledge is only ever capable of revealing a small portion of the infinite number of relationships between one aspect of the universe and any other part. When we attempt to manipulate any part of nature, we are playing an infinitely complex game ...
http://ingienous.com/the-challenge/progress-traps/

Fugue Techniques

Futurists claim the final step in our communication evolution is to merge our minds together into a single consciousness—the hive mind. If that is so it brings us full circle from the purely instinctive collective unconscious with its balancing counterpoint. Whether we survive long enough to achieve such a state remains open to question. Jean Gebser identifies four structures of consciousness: Archaic, Magic, Mythic, and Mental. He imagines we are mutating into a new structure -- Integral Consciousness (The Ever Present Origin).


Camille Paglia described in Sexual Personae how women are inherently tied to natural cycles and immanence and could never come up with a nature-denying dominator myth. She notes:

"The Western idea of history as a propulsive movement into the future a progressive or Providential design climaxing in the Second Coming, is a male formulation.
No woman, I submit, could have coined such an idea, since it is a strategy of evasion of woman's own cyclic nature, in which man dreads being caught. Evolutionary or apocalyptic history is a male wish list with a happy ending, a phallic peak. Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle since she is that cycle."

This suggests that the natural essence lies in the balance. Harmonization of immanence and transcendence. The earth cult is absorption by the chthonian natural world of amoral necessity, while the sky cult is suppression of and spiritual flight from nature.



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
'Consciousness' is the final frontier for science, the 'hard problem' of philosophy, and mysticism's greatest mystery. It is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. But different scholars and different disciplines use that same word to mean very different things, from simple awareness to the very basis of existence. There is confusion among the very scholars, mystics, and scientists who explore the nature of mind, matter, and the nature of existence.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality, transcending those of any particular science. It traditionally includes cosmology, ontology and speculative philosophy. Cosmology is the general philosophy of the universe considered as a totality of its parts and phenomena subject to laws -- the origin, nature and structure of the universe. Ontology is the study of being -- that branch of metaphysics which deals with the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality.

Epistemology relates to "how we know what we know." This branch of philosophy critically investigates the nature, grounds, limits, and criteria of any particular theory of cognition. It helps us analyze facts, thought processes, and value-judgments.

This personal synthesis helps us adapt or individuate and perhaps even self-actualize high well-being, or even extraordinary human potential. This comprehensive synthesis is mirrored in synoptic philosophy, which helps us fit the pieces of life into the whole mental jigsaw puzzle. A love of wisdom emerges from
a coherent understanding of everything together.

Synoptic philosophy helps us achieve an all-inclusive view of our subject matter, seeing all parts in relationship to one another. To a greater or lesser degree, it erases the mental barriers that separate branches of knowledge in a holistic vision. Taken together, the personal synthesis of a holistic experiential worldview and the cultural synthesis symbolized by the synoptic wheel is what we refer to here, in shorthand, as "metasyn."

This open-ended philosophic journey has certain milestones:

1). When you have any philosophical question proceed as far as possible with philosophical analysis, clarifying and drawing out all the hidden meanings that you can, dissolving the problem completely if possible.

2). If not, find out what philosophers of the past have thought about the problem.

3). Rephrasing the question in a variety of meaningful ways helps reveal what kinds of information will help solve it.

4). Develop an intuition for asking and re-asking questions from different angles until they point to the data that illuminates them.

5). What fields most likely contain information related to the problem? Begin by asking questions about the problem and how it might connect one by one, to the various fields.

6). Go to these promising fields and gather information, looking for conclusions, hypotheses, and models currently used by field specialists. Keep asking questions relating the data to your central problem and cross-relating insights and drawing parallels from these fields themselves.

7). Network and integrate these insights refocusing new ideas on the initial problem to see what understanding and creative insights emerge. Weave these illuminative strands together into a glowing tapestry.

So, to envision our new paradigm we have to paint a multidisciplinary picture. We will draw on philosophy, physics, psychology, medicine, genetics, biology, politics, religion, anthropology, ecology, astronomy, geometry, mathematics, computer theory, economics, the humanities and the arts for our metaphors -- for our vocabulary -- to frame and reframe our questions.

Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the collective and individual level. They act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception.

Plato argued that to discover the true nature of political and social justice it is necessary to ‘first look for its quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less’ (Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in Hamilton and Cairns, eds., Collected Dialogues, 368e-369a).

Plato’s approach
was a strong influence upon philosopher Immanuel Kant, who tended to state his argument in architectonic terms: 'there is yet another consideration which is more philosophical and architectonic in character; namely to grasp the idea of the whole correctly and thence to view all parts in their mutual relations' (Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason)


The architectonic is a crucial concept and it is clear that it influenced Marx. The reference to architectonics indicates that Marx believed that a true theory is compelled by the very force of its 'deep insight' to develop an elegant conceptual structure. That ‘deep insight’ is what Plato called ‘the eye of the mind’. Marx, therefore, is working in the tradition of Pythagoras and Plato in affirming the harmony between truth, goodness and beauty in a rational universe.

That rational universe is philosophy’s ‘ought to be’. The big question is, could this ‘ought’ ever be realised to form the ‘is’? Philosophy is therefore a critical mode of thinking which seeks to penetrate beyond the fetish systems of the world as it is and expose the true, the good and the beautiful behind the veil of illusion. The defetishisation of the world is the criticism of
what “is” from the viewpoint of what “ought to be."

https://www.academia.edu/3203399/Immanence_Transcendence_and_Essence

"The American cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have been following the track of the symbolism of bodies for a quarter of a century. They have been able to prove that poetic expression is not the exception, reserved for over-sensitive souls and forgetful school teachers, but the norm. It is the benchmark of our rationality.Language does not obey a strict logic, as the majority of philosophers believed throughout the 20th century. Language is not abstract and rule-driven. On the contrary, the images we use in everyday language are full of unconscious references to the body and its irregularities and contingencies. They map the core self in a complex way. Because we do not look with the right perspective, however, most of the available insights remain hidden from view. Lakoff and Johnson, unlike their more order-obsessed colleagues, do not dismiss the imaginative and metaphorical dimensions of language as a sort of contamination.

For them, and I submit us, this colorful and contradictory dimension is the most promising way to understand ourselves. Only through the opacity of the symbol can we become transparent to ourselves." --Weber, Andreas. (2016) Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (p. 135). New Society Publishers. Kindle Edition.

"If feeling is a physical force and the expression of this feeling is a physical reality whose meaning motivates organisms to act, then we might understand living beings better if we imagine what is happening in the biosphere as, in a way, resembling artistic expression. This has another interesting consequence. Art then is no longer what separates humans from nature, but rather it is life’s voice fully in us. Its message is that beauty has no function. It is rather the essence of reality." --Weber, Andreas. 2016 Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (p. 196). New Society Publishers.
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"A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word -- and angel means originally "emissary," "message bearer" -- how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? . . . We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects." --James Hillman, "A Blue Fire," Thomas Moore, Ed. (Harper Perennial), pg. 28.
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"The most effective weapon against the flux of nature is art. Religion, ritual, and art began as one, and a religious or metaphysical element is still present in all art. Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic reordering of reality. The enterprise of art, in a stable collective era or an unsettled individualistic one, is inspired by anxiety. Every subject localized and honored by art is endangered by its opposite. Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. The first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature’s daemonic energy in a moment of perceptual stillness. Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as stasis and fixation as obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line across a page is still trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act." —Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae.

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CRITICAL REALISM

Critical realism is concerned with the nature of causation, agency, structure, and relations, and the implicit or explicit ontologies we are operating with. It asks what we mean by realism in the social world? While our models need to be answerable to empirical investigations, we need to be sufficiently “ontologically reflexive” and “vigilant” about our investigations.  ​We need to examine our presuppositions about the nature of the social world and the ontological baggage behind the terms we use (structure, causation), and, in general, we need to have a means by which we can reflexively attend to what our accounts are claiming about the world (Rutzou 2016).
http://www.asatheory.org/current-newsletter-online/what-is-critical-realism
​
Secondly, CR argues against the implicit ontology of the empiricists and idealists. The reduction of being to thought, language, belief, custom, or experience implicitly reproduces a certain ontology, a certain understanding of the world which sustains that reduction. Like it or not, we do ontology. So the thought is why not do it well? With this reflexivity CR argues that to understand the reality uncovered by science and social science we need a structured and differentiated account in which openness, difference, stratification and change is central. In short, we might say CR argues for ontology, and for a new ontology.

Critical realism is a series of philosophical positions on a range of matters including ontology, causation, structure, persons, and forms of explanation. an alternative paradigm both to scientistic forms of positivism concerned with regularities, regression-based variables models, and the quest for law-like forms; and also to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn which denied explanation in favor of interpretation, with a focus on hermeneutics and description at the cost of causation.

There is not one unitary framework, set of beliefs, methodology, or dogma that unites critical realists as a whole. Instead, critical realism is much more like a series of family resemblances in which there are various commonalities that exist between the members of a family, but these commonalities overlap and crisscross in different ways. a heterogeneous assemblage of elements drawn from a relatively common “genetic” pool.

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https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-postmodernism
http://www.focusing.org/gendlin_beyond_postmodernism_excerpt.html
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"Since we're talking social science, the big practical issue now is between neo-positivists and design thinking -- it seems never the twain shall meet." --Iona Miller

 "A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image
into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis
." --Umberto Eco


"...every beginning contains magic
Protecting us and living helps us
..."
--Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game


"There was a passionate craving among all ... [intelligentsia] ... for a means to express their new concepts. They longed for philosophy, for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar broke through the barriers of his specialty and tried to advance into the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences."
--Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

 "Here is the ancient tension. To be. To know. Well, the magician has a spell to weave here, too. The intellect divorced from old-fashioned neurosis, freed from egocentricity, from semantic reification. The mind illuminated by meditation ready to play with the lawful rhythm of concepts. The Bead Game." ~Leary, Metzner

Bead Game
Hermann Hesse not only wrote the classic introspective novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, but won the Nobel prize in Literature (1946) for his final masterwork published under two titles in English: The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi.

This work (set in the 23rd Century) describes a cadre of individuals and their headmaster -- the Magister Ludi -- engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Castalia is a parody of Paradise and the prototype of a super thinktank. The Bead Game is a thought enhancing, processing, and accelerating device. Thoughts have become enhanced digitized memories.

Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectonics, which in today's computer-assisted world reads Architectronics. Arguably, it makes us more out of touch with human realities, rather than closer to them.


Understandably, Hesse never gives a detailed description of this pre-electronic data-processing appliance called the Bead Game, but he does explain its function. Players learned how to digitize thought - convert decimal numbers, musical notes, words, thoughts, images into elements, glass beads which could be strung in endless abacus combinations and rhythmic fugue sequences to create a higher level language of clarity, purity and ultimate complexity.

Hesse described the Bead Game as “a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and interfacing of concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics."In time, wrote Hesse, “... the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another."
In the beginning the Thought Game was designed, constructed, and continually updated by a guild of mathematicians called Castalia.

Later generations of hacks used the Bead Game for educational, intellectual and aesthetic purposes. Eventually the Bead Game became a global science of mind, and indispensable method for digitizing thoughts, clarifying thoughts and communicating them precisely.

http://downlode.org/Etext/huxley_hesse_cybernetic.html

Post-postmodernism is a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism. Another similar recent term is metamodernism.

Multimedia Field
The Bead Game began as a scholarly game using musical themes and fugue-like variations, expanded into other artistic and scientific forms, culminating in cultural symbols. It was a way of symbolizing and building global insights on the world, synthesizing a Big Picture. Its genius depends on an ability to use memory properly to find the analogies from which new ideas emerge.

With empirical approaches, sociology has focused on how we know what we know (epistemology), while questions about the nature of the known (ontology) are largely treated as an afterthought. A focus on methods and forms of explanation gives insufficient, naïve, and misguided attention to ontological questions. What kind of entities actually exist in the social world and what are they like?

The transdisciplinarian mode plays with all the contents and values of culture from all creative eras as its palette. Rather than a hermeneutical interpretation, what is required is a wider contextualization. Analogies and metaphors are drawn across multiple disciplines. This mighty conceptual organ is theoretically capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual, poetic, and psychic content of the universe.

It imagines where things can potentially go from there. In this sense, it is the psychic equivalent of superposed intelligence analysis scenarios -- a way of futuring -- through a sort of well-informed remote viewing. The meditative aspect brings together forms from different disciplines within a field to be contemplated together. They can be amplified and take on a certain resonance that informs and integrates them all -- meta-patterns.


Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself. We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment, beyond social collusion and confusion.

There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.

Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can't keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.

What doesn't effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium. Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now.

Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get -- lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.

There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.


Critical Reality
The Glass Bead Game requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture. It plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. The Game's synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of postmodernism, virtual reality, and now Critical Reality, a philosophy of perception describing an interface between the natural and social worlds.

Critical Realism (Bhaskar) is a metatheory, not a method or program. It doesn't explain anything like a theory does. It is a reflexive philosophical position that informs empirical investigation in science and social science—the theory and the philosophy behind our theories. It's an alternative paradigm to postmodern and even post-postmodern thought.

Critical realism quests for law-like forms within a series of non-reductive philosophical positions on a range of matters including ontology, causation, structure, persons, and forms of explanation. It is an alternative to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn which denied explanation in favor of interpretation, with a focus on hermeneutics and description at the cost of causation. CR rivals hermeneuticism. It helps is understand and say something about ‘things themselves’ and not simply about our beliefs, experiences, or our current knowledge and understanding of those things.  

In the Bead Game, after each symbol conjured up by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, origin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique and practice of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care.

The variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Thus, "realizing" was a favorite expression among the players. They considered their Games a path from Becoming to Being, from potentiality to reality...We would scarcely be exaggerating if we ventured to say that for the small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship.

The Glass Bead Game is a commentary on how we construct our realities. It requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy, making deep connections from seemingly unrelated topics. Mystic game players use interdisciplinary symbols to manipulate multi-level metaphors. In the end, the Magister Ludi realizes the futility of the game, and leaves it. He deprograms himself from his former goal.

It illustrates the ways that people position not just themselves but how they construct, deconstruct, signify, encode and program their entire perception of reality. One needs to understand reality before one can deliberately allocate it. It takes years of study to acquire the comprehensive backgrounds in the arts and sciences.

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. The Game's synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of virtual reality.

“Theoretically,” writes the Narrator Archivist, “this instrument is capable of producing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. The manuals, pedal, and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory.” And with this statement, he reveals the limitations of the game: its elitism, its hubris, its stagnation, and its sterility. In its infancy, the Game was played with delicate glass beads, which have since been discarded as too . . . real?

They connected the Game with the spiritual beads played by religious believers worldwide, as the robes, and secret language, and ceremonial trappings of the game form a mock religious experience in the time of the Narrator Archivist. Without them, the game flies into the ether without a tether to reality. In our world, prayer beads and the repetition of simple phrases serve as keys to transcendence.

In Castalia, they are discarded and the key is lost. The Narrator Archivist makes no reference to the ecstatic states that might be achieved by Glass Bead Game players. The games as he describes them in Knecht’s time (the twenty-second century) and his own (the twenty-fourth century) apparently fall short of what seems the obvious goal. "

The name Castaglia, the place of knowledge, is the Italian form of the Latin Castalia, which was the Roman name for the spring on Mount Parnassus where dwelt the mythical Muses. Castalia was also the name for the abstract realm of the intelligentsia. Under the shifting hegemony of now this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another. Let the game begin?


Freestyle
The drive comes from a committed perspective on the fundamental nature of reality and our nature. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic. The art of survival equals the survival of art.

Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness – “getting” the Big Picture – and perhaps doing something about it.

Creativity is a local embodiment, an essentially holistic process of a spontaneous non-local field of influence that can permeate the globe. The creative process, like a hologram encapsultes the entire gestalt at several levels of observation; each part reflects the whole if at lower resolution. In this way we find meaning in an idea, a piece of art, a performance, or a culturally revolutionary invention.

The thrust and dynamics of the creative process are such that intentionality encompasses multiple threads of creation simultaneously – rhapsodies of multi-tasking without drudgery. Therefore, there can be no “failure”, for a lost project is easily replaced by another project or process – another thread to weave, another melody to play.

“Free-styling” is a spontaneous eruption of the ever-renewing geyser of creativity – it means embodying the process of inspirational flow in each moment – artful living. This form of creativity can originate in the sciences/technology or the arts or any combination thereof (i.e., Hypermedia; Science-Art; Poetry Science; Nonlocal Healing; Global Architectronics). It describes the mutual interpenetration of life and art, a recurrent theme in contemporary art.

This negentropic energy leads to the embodiment of something intrinsically valuable and emotionally meaningful from essentially nothing. Therefore, free style is always breaking news; it cannot be anything but fresh.


Characterized mainly by deep feelings and heartfelt authenticity and intensity, freestyling creates a hyperreal random movement that nevertheless has its own tempo and internal cohesion, even when it moves in quantum leaps. A good example is an incredibly stimulating and cross-pollinating conversation or interview, where real rapport is established with context and depth allowed to emerge. It springs from an open-minded perspective based in authentic emergence rather than contrived product.

The medium may be people, behind-the-scenes influence, mentoring, cross-pollination, dreaming out loud, brainstorming, contributing to global dialogue on topical issues, technological shift, process-oriented therapies, Socratic method, or immersive experiences that transform those who experience them. There are many more.

The often unrecognized modalities are virtually infinite and range from formal to informal, academic and highly technical to “street”. All are means of influencing people and environments, through revealing meaning with little or no commercial or corporate interests. Freestyling tells it like it is. It is art that reveals Truth.

The significance or meaning of life is a central topic in philosophy, art, religion, medicine and psychology though any definitive answer remains elusive. Ethics or morals (personal accountability) should help us cooperate with one another. But there is no moral super-principle that undergirds us all besides humankind’s survival. It is clear, however, if humanity should cease to exist, it all becomes moot. We may be throwing away the entire arc of evolution through poor choices.

If we have values, we have to stand up and be counted and speak out for them. Moral agency and status are relative. Meta-ethics examines our notions about what constitutes ethics or morality relative to the position of others. Related issues are lifestyle choices, decisions, respect, impartiality, responsibility, identity, duty, principles, empathy, compassion, and conscience or consciousness.

The flattening of affect or emotional neutrality is the enemy – the aspect that conditions poor choices and ethical erosion as the acceleration or speed of cognition increases in our mindnumbing modern lives and we become dulled to the field of perception (Damasio 2004). Its been called information overload and future shock.

Ethics is Aesthetic

How can we rectify our guilt and shame for living so heavily on the planet? We are born and die consuming non-renewable resources, at least under current technological conditions. If there is any ‘original sin’, arguably the necessary evil of consumption is it. This fact of life has led our world into ecolo-nomic crisis, which has spawned multidimensional sociopolitical crisis where no one problem can be solved in isolation and change can wreak havoc in other domains.

Ethics relates to intentionality which means more than self-serving, so-called “good intentions,” individually and collectively. It means living deliberately, with global intentionality, which is an artform in itself – living with awareness and acting from that center. It is an aesthetic choice for ‘artful living’, living life in an artful manner in harmony with flow and creativity, choosing enriching experiences over consumerism. Art, which has its roots in primal shamanic culture, has traditionally been associated with the optimistic ‘Bohemian’ ethos rooted in Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love.

The question of what makes for a human life that is good for the person living it has been at the heart of ethics since the Greek philosophers inquired into eudaimonia (‘happiness’) (see Aristotle; Eudaimonia; Happiness; Life, meaning of; Plato; Socrates). Once again, a philosopher’s theory of the good will almost always be closely bound up with their views on other central matters (see Good, theories of the).

For example, some of those who put weight on sense experience in our understanding of the world have been tempted by the view that the good consists entirely in a particular kind of experience, pleasure (see Empiricism; Pleasure). Others have claimed that there is more to life than mere pleasure, and that the good life consists in fulfilling our complex human nature (see Perfectionism; Self-realization). Nor have philosophers forgotten ‘the bad’ (see Evil; Suffering; Suffering, Buddhist views of origination of). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Our philosophical ethics are tied to our aesthetic sense and metaphysics, to our worldview – especially for artists and scientists. The mechanistic view is one of greed-creating scarcity, a sense of there not being enough of whatever resources to go around (Fuller). The worldview provides the ground for our beliefs, ideas and lifestyle choices about what is right and what is wrong.

This paradigm is tied to our health, both logistically (through the locked-down healthcare delivery system) and biologically. Healing is the biological form of creativity, and it is both a science and an art, which is why it is practiced. In a mechanistic view our bodies are machines which get worked upon by experts, rather than holistically healed by compassionate providers who cooperate with us in our healing process. For much of the planet, none of this is even an option.

Everyday we witness the reckless extinction of species after species, culture after culture. We live at their expense, and some even find that acceptable. The planet has degraded and its fundamental resources such as water and soils depleted and mined out. Meanwhile the human population has bloomed like algae. Who is to say how long it is before human existence becomes untenable?

This is not a new topic, obviously. It has been the subject of earnest speculation for some time, even before public awareness of the global population bomb (see ZPG). In 1968, the Club of Rome formed a multidisciplinarian team to analyze the precarious predicament of mankind. As an experiment, this endeavor gets mixed reviews as the results have been used to justify another round of Western imperialism.

Recognizing the complex interactions, scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists, and national and international civil servants from ten countries began to think and act globally. Their stated aims were to bring new understanding to policy-makers and the public, and to promote new global policy initiatives and action. This benign-seeming program got twisted into the agenda of the neo-con(servative) parties, and came under the umbrella known as New World Order, who’s hallmark is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But they only have the power we give them by denying our own.

Predicament of Mankind

The institutions and patterns of thought of the (military/industrial/academic) World-Machine have created an interconnecting set of world-wide problems of an ecological, economic and political nature. Machine-minded think tanks, even if they are thinking globally, can only see entropic decay through their own worldview. They cannot think out of the box, unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift that is reflected in the sciences, and likely foreseen in the arts.

The energy shortage, rise of food prices, scandals in government, and un-winable wars against ideas like ideologies and ‘terrorism’ are the first harbingers of the approaching crisis. There are two routes from here: The route of stagnation and eventual total collapse, and the route of flexibility and growth, which could lead to a golden age. Chaos Theory reveals both catastrophe (bifurcation) and renewal are likely inevitable.

Rather than the obsolete paradigm of a ‘world machine’, we need to think in more organic terms of holistic self-organization – reorganization at a higher level -- as revealed in Chaos Theory, which demonstrates nature’s own creative way of evolutionary assembly. All things are simply connected.

Order emerges spontaneously and unpredictably from the creative edge of chaos – it emerges suddenly from disorder: from the unconscious chaos the concept finally forms, the artistic inspiration is captured, the photographic composition suddenly appears in the frame with just the proper atmosphere. Aesthetic principles of multisensory harmony reflect similar structuring.

With a change in paradigms that is fundamental not merely conceptual, the dangers and the possibilities are as great for us in this 21st century as they were for those in the sixteenth century. In chaos theory, the old system typically undergoes a catastrophic collapse before the new order emerges. The “new order” cannot be imposed on the old system by will nor intentionality.

When all the available world's arable land is required to feed the world's population , even with perfect world-wide systems of land use and distribution of food, there will inevitably be mass famine. Even if productivity is quadrupled it only gives us roughly 50 more years. Once all the land is used to full capacity and the soil mined-out, there is simply no more land. Once the non-renewable resources are gone, that's it. The geological processes that created those resources took hundreds of millions of years.

We are using them all up while simultaneously polluting the ecosphere for decades. The ecosphere is flexible, but not infinitely. We have made massive assaults on it with little understanding of the ultimate effect. Sudden increases in the temperature of the earth and melting of ice caps, death of the oceans and rainforests that produce our oxygen are horrible possibilities that such worldwide pollution produces if exponentially continued long enough.

The shut down of the vast oceanic pump from melting fresh water near Greenland would usher in a new Ice Age. Other unpredictable catastrophes include collisions with meteors or comets, pole shifts, or the collapse of the ionosphere with solar scorching of the biosphere. With all this and more to fight against, you’d think we could just get along on our small blue planet, but such is not human nature.

With these scenarios in mind, the human race has a mandate to reinvent entropic technology and revision our existence with an ethically based negentropic technology, based in the proven notion of a virtually infinite universe of potential. Only in this way can we (all) become part of the solution, rather than the problem.

There are many psychic prophecies down through the centuries of a great worldwide war ending this period of history. When social groups become about equally powerful and equally dangerous to each other, some conclude it is time to put them under a common government, and a synthesized civilization. Yet, this process cannot be forced nor engineered.

We must avoid the specialized way of thinking that blindly leads toward these frightful collisions of ideology. We must have a tolerant humanist government – the democratic ideal we inherited from the Greeks whose philosophical culture and aesthetics was based on geometrical harmonies.

This dynamic existential aesthetic is what has come to be known lately as the “DaVinci Code”, that was foundational in the emergence of the Renaissance flowering. The democratic ideal shelters and even fosters idiosyncratic processes and thinking along the spectrum of potentiality that lead toward creative emergence – at the fringes of society and research.

Western civilization of the World-Machine has lost its direction and vitality in the Twentieth Century. There are numerous symptoms of this, ranging from crime in the streets, to the ugly unlivability of modern cities, to political corruption, to the pandering tendencies of the information/entertainment industries, to the thickening rigidity and irrelevance of schools and universities. There is no longer any higher center in Western civilization, not religiously, aesthetically, or politically. Christian religion ceased to be vital in the 17th Century; Faustian consciousness has produced a fragmentation of 'higher' cultural worlds and Practical consciousness gives us the total impoverishment of the ordinary aesthetic environment that is one of the chief reasons for the boredom and alienation that most people feel in our cities.

The first sign of rigidity in the schools and universities probably came with their reaction to psychical research in the twenties and thirties. Today, swollen hierarchies of administrators absorb half the budget and contribute nothing but obstruction and useless regulation for faculty and students. No alternatives to the World-Machine materialism/Christianity nor to its specialism nor to its teacherism can be explored. Humanist, empirical religionist, open learning schools are actually illegal most places.One of the symptoms of the corruption of Western civilization is that no one feels any higher responsibility anymore. This is especially evident in the publishing industry and in the information/entertainment industry. The importance of an idea for mankind is of no relevance at all in determining if a book or article is published or reviewed. Things are judged from a very narrowly (and in the long run stupidly) commercial viewpoint. Thus, what is published and made famous are trashy, trivial, intellectually flyweight books about future schlock, massaging the media, Dr. Blank's new fad diet, or some white specialist's universalization of his latest rat studies (or studies of human sexual plumbing). ~Limits of Power

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Introduction

Free Style is an improvisational aesthetic that uses one’s realtime local surroundings and (synthetic) synchronicities and virtualities from which to create new expressions in any medium or discipline. We can deal with and use “what comes up” in a creative and therapeutic manner; we can intuit, invent, and concoct from the nonlocal information that is at hand if we simply open to that, living artfully from that spontaneous place.

Free style is an intuitive act that is at once intentionally connective with source and presence, thus freeing and directing that which is inside desiring to emerge – meta-creativity. Freestyle breaks free from the vault of derivative, corporate, or audience-driven formula production. After all, it takes risk to either succeed or fail.

This is the source of artistic and scientific freedom. We must trust the process; trust our own vision – the womb of our subconscious that gives birth to full-blown ideas and inspirations. Freedom of expression means each artist is free to create their own style, weaving into the existing genres of expression, combining, contrasting and injecting their own unique rhythms, modulations, and vision by working at their dynamic edge.

Free style results may be concrete or ephemeral, but the drive comes from a commited perspective on the fundamental nature of reality and our nature. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic. The art of survival equals the survival of art.

Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness – “getting” the Big Picture – and perhaps doing something about it.

Creativity is a local embodiment, an essentially holistic process of a spontaneous non-local field of influence that can permeate the globe. The creative process, like a hologram encapsultes the entire gestalt at several levels of observation; each part reflects the whole if at lower resolution. In this way we find meaning in an idea, a piece of art, a performance, or a culturally revolutionary invention.

The thrust and dynamics of the creative process are such that intentionality encompasses multiple threads of creation simultaneously – rhapsodies of multi-tasking without drudgery. Therefore, there can be no “failure”, for a lost project is easily replaced by another project or process – another thread to weave, another melody to play.

“Free-styling” is a spontaneous eruption of the ever-renewing geyser of creativity – it means embodying the process of inspirational flow in each moment – artful living. This form of creativity can originate in the sciences/technology or the arts or any combination thereof (i.e., Hypermedia; Science-Art; Poetry Science; Nonlocal Healing; Global Architectronics). It describes the mutual interpenetration of life and art, a recurrent theme in contemporary art.

This negentropic energy leads to the embodiment of something intrinsically valuable and emotionally meaningful from essentially nothing. Therefore, free style is always breaking news; it cannot be anything but fresh.

Characterized mainly by deep feelings and heartfelt authenticity and intensity, freestyling creates a hyperreal random movement that nevertheless has its own tempo and internal cohesion, even when it moves in quantum leaps. A good example is an incredibly stimulating and cross-pollinating conversation or interview, where real rapport is established with context and depth allowed to emerge. It springs from an open-minded perspective based in authentic emergence rather than contrived product.

The medium may be people, behind-the-scenes influence, mentoring, cross-pollination, dreaming out loud, brainstorming, contributing to global dialogue on topical issues, technological shift, process-oriented therapies, Socratic method, or immersive experiences that transform those who experience them. There are many more.

The often unrecognized modalities are virtually infinite and range from formal to informal, academic and highly technical to “street”. All are means of influencing people and environments, through revealing meaning with little or no commercial or corporate interests. Freestyling tells it like it is. It is art that reveals Truth.

The significance or meaning of life is a central topic in philosophy, art, religion, medicine and psychology though any definitive answer remains elusive. Ethics or morals (personal accountability) should help us cooperate with one another. But there is no moral super-principle that undergirds us all besides humankind’s survival. It is clear, however, if humanity should cease to exist, it all becomes moot. We may be throwing away the entire arc of evolution through poor choices.

If we have values, we have to stand up and be counted and speak out for them. Moral agency and status are relative. Meta-ethics examines our notions about what constitutes ethics or morality relative to the position of others. Related issues are lifestyle choices, decisions, respect, impartiality, responsibility, identity, duty, principles, empathy, compassion, and conscience or consciousness.

The flattening of affect or emotional neutrality is the enemy – the aspect that conditions poor choices and ethical erosion as the acceleration or speed of cognition increases in our mindnumbing modern lives and we become dulled to the field of perception (Damasio 2004). Its been called information overload and future shock.

Ethics is Aesthetic

How can we rectify our guilt and shame for living so heavily on the planet? We are born and die consuming non-renewable resources, at least under current technological conditions. If there is any ‘original sin’, arguably the necessary evil of consumption is it. This fact of life has led our world into ecolo-nomic crisis, which has spawned multidimensional sociopolitical crisis where no one problem can be solved in isolation and change can wreak havoc in other domains.

Ethics relates to intentionality which means more than self-serving, so-called “good intentions,” individually and collectively. It means living deliberately, with global intentionality, which is an artform in itself – living with awareness and acting from that center. It is an aesthetic choice for ‘artful living’, living life in an artful manner in harmony with flow and creativity, choosing enriching experiences over consumerism. Art, which has its roots in primal shamanic culture, has traditionally been associated with the optimistic ‘Bohemian’ ethos rooted in Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love.

The question of what makes for a human life that is good for the person living it has been at the heart of ethics since the Greek philosophers inquired into eudaimonia (‘happiness’) (see Aristotle; Eudaimonia; Happiness; Life, meaning of; Plato; Socrates). Once again, a philosopher’s theory of the good will almost always be closely bound up with their views on other central matters (see Good, theories of the). For example, some of those who put weight on sense experience in our understanding of the world have been tempted by the view that the good consists entirely in a particular kind of experience, pleasure (see Empiricism; Pleasure). Others have claimed that there is more to life than mere pleasure, and that the good life consists in fulfilling our complex human nature (see Perfectionism; Self-realization). Nor have philosophers forgotten ‘the bad’ (see Evil; Suffering; Suffering, Buddhist views of origination of). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Our philosophical ethics are tied to our aesthetic sense and metaphysics, to our worldview – especially for artists and scientists. The mechanistic view is one of greed-creating scarcity, a sense of there not being enough of whatever resources to go around (Fuller). The worldview provides the ground for our beliefs, ideas and lifestyle choices about what is right and what is wrong.

This paradigm is tied to our health, both logistically (through the locked-down healthcare delivery system) and biologically. Healing is the biological form of creativity, and it is both a science and an art, which is why it is practiced. In a mechanistic view our bodies are machines which get worked upon by experts, rather than holistically healed by compassionate providers who cooperate with us in our healing process. For much of the planet, none of this is even an option.

Everyday we witness the reckless extinction of species after species, culture after culture. We live at their expense, and some even find that acceptable. The planet has degraded and its fundamental resources such as water and soils depleted and mined out. Meanwhile the human population has bloomed like algae. Who is to say how long it is before human existence becomes untenable?

This is not a new topic, obviously. It has been the subject of earnest speculation for some time, even before public awareness of the global population bomb (see ZPG). In 1968, the Club of Rome formed a multidisciplinarian team to analyze the precarious predicament of mankind. As an experiment, this endeavor gets mixed reviews as the results have been used to justify another round of Western imperialism.

Recognizing the complex interactions, scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists, and national and international civil servants from ten countries began to think and act globally. Their stated aims were to bring new understanding to policy-makers and the public, and to promote new global policy initiatives and action. This benign-seeming program got twisted into the agenda of the neo-con(servative) parties, and came under the umbrella known as New World Order, who’s hallmark is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But they only have the power we give them by denying our own.

Predicament of Mankind

The institutions and patterns of thought of the (military/industrial/academic) World-Machine have created an interconnecting set of world-wide problems of an ecological, economic and political nature. Machine-minded think tanks, even if they are thinking globally, can only see entropic decay through their own worldview. They cannot think out of the box, unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift that is reflected in the sciences, and likely foreseen in the arts.

The energy shortage, rise of food prices, scandals in government, and unwinable wars against ideas like idiologies and ‘terrorism’ are the first harbingers of the approaching crisis. There are two routes from here: The route of stagnation and eventual total collapse, and the route of flexibility and growth, which could lead to a golden age. Chaos Theory reveals both catastrophe (bifurcation) and renewal are likely inevitable.

Rather than the obsolete paradigm of a ‘world machine’, we need to think in more organic terms of holistic self-organization – reorganization at a higher level -- as revealed in Chaos Theory, which demonstrates nature’s own creative way of evolutionary assembly. All things are simply connected.

Order emerges spontaneously and unpredictably from the creative edge of chaos – it emerges suddenly from disorder: from the unconscious chaos the concept finally forms, the artistic inspiration is captured, the photographic composition suddenly appears in the frame with just the proper atmosphere. Aesthetic principles of multisensory harmony reflect similar structuring.

With a change in paradigms that is fundamental not merely conceptual, the dangers and the possibilities are as great for us in this 21st century as they were for those in the sixteenth century. In chaos theory, the old system typically undergoes a catastrophic collapse before the new order emerges. The “new order” cannot be imposed on the old system by will nor intentionality.

When all the available world's arable land is required to feed the world's population , even with perfect world-wide systems of land use and distribution of food, there will inevitably be mass famine. Even if productivity is quadrupled it only gives us roughly 50 more years. Once all the land is used to full capacity and the soil mined-out, there is simply no more land. Once the non-renewable resources are gone, that's it. The geological processes that created those resources took hundreds of millions of years.

With these scenarios in mind, the human race has a mandate to reinvent entropic technology and revision our existence with an ethically based negentropic technology, based in the proven notion of a virtually infinite universe of potential. Only in this way can we (all) become part of the solution, rather than the problem.

There are many psychic prophecies down through the centuries of a great worldwide war ending this period of history. When social groups become about equally powerful and equally dangerous to each other, some conclude it is time to put them under a common government, and a synthesized civilization. Yet, this process cannot be forced nor engineered.

We must avoid the specialized way of thinking that blindly leads toward these frightful collisions of ideology. We must have a tolerant humanist government – the democratic ideal we inherited from the Greeks whose philosophical culture and aesthetics was based on geometrical harmonies.

Intentional Communities

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. ~Hesse

We are so used to having our cake and eating it too that we assume there are technological solutions to all these entropic problems. One early sign that this is not so is the collision of pollution control requirements and energy conservation in the design of automobiles. It is possible to reduce pollution technologically, but each further improvement is exponentially more expensive in non-renewable resources (such as platinum for catalysts), and in gasoline used, and in performance and cost of the automobile.

Commercial pandering is typical of industry which first does motivation research, then invents and sells a product, not because there is any prior desire or any real need for such a thing, but simply because it is something people can be manipulated into believing they want. Such pandering produces degraded tastes. Image is everything and triumphs over substance. The final result of entropic capitalism and democracy is the same decadence suffered by late Hellenic (Roman) civilization.


Entropic Agendas

Entropic agendas can arguably be called “diabolical” based on their essential nature: they are death-oriented, self-fulfilling prophecies – “No Exit” nightmarish futures. There is philosophical precedence for this position condemning closed-system paradigms. Applied ethics is of immediate importance not only in public policy but in science, art and medicine where it relates to best practice.

Public policy must therefore support best practice in all the arts and sciences, including the healing arts. It is our undeniable responsibility to the future, to our progeny. It is our legacy, for good or evil. It will in fact determine whether we actually remain human beings, or not – and even whether humanity survives at all. Institutions founded on entropic principles cannot engage, therefore, in best practice, and shortchange future generations at every level of cultural enrichment and sustainability.

"The question of what makes for a human life that is good for the person living it has been at the heart of ethics since the Greek philosophers enquired into eudaimonia (‘happiness’) (see Aristotle; Eudaimonia; Happiness; Life, meaning of; Plato; Socrates). Once again, a philosopher’s theory of the good will almost always be closely bound upwith their views on other central matters (see Good, theories of the). Fore xample, some of those who put weight on sense experience in our understanding of the world have been tempted by the view that the good consists entirely in a particular kind of experience, pleasure (see Empiricism; Pleasure). Others have claimed that there is more to life than mere pleasure, and that the good life consists in fulfilling our complex human nature (see Perfectionism; Self-realization). Nor have philosophers forgotten ‘the bad’ (see Evil; Suffering; Suffering, Buddhist views of origination of)." ~Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Sound geometrical principles have been linked to the emergence of scientific thought. They are also fundamental in the formation of geopolitical and secret societies, where “secret” knowledge of these verities undergird technologies of human development and applied wisdom.

For Immanuel Kant, (paradigmatic philosopher of the European Enlightenment), Euclidean geometry characterized that ‘pure form of our sensible intuition’ which is space, a condition imposed by the mind upon the experience of the outer sensible world and thus a condition of the possibility of experience of this world.

Kant joined the key ideas of earlier rationalism and empiricism into a powerful model of the subjective origins of the fundamental principles of both science and morality, and laid the ground for much in the philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Above all, Kant was the philosopher of human autonomy. But once Descarte got ahold of rationalism we were plunge into an era of rational enlightenment, which may come to be seen as the second Dark Ages by future generations.

"Kant held that both the laws of nature and the laws of free human conduct must be compatible because they are both products of human thought imposed by us on the data of our experience by the exercise of our own powers. This was clearly stated in his last book, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798):Philosophy is not some sort of science of representations,concepts, and ideas, or a science of all sciences, or anything else of this sort; rather, it is a science of the human being, of its representing, thinking, and acting - it should present the human being in all of its components, as it is and ought to be, that is, in accordance with its natural determinations as well as its relationship of morality and freedom. Ancient philosophy adopted an entirely inappropriate standpoint towards the human being in the world, for it made it into a machine in it,which as such had to be entirely dependent on the world or on external things and circumstances; it thus made the human being into an all but merely passive part of the world. Now the critique of reason has appeared and determined the human being to a thoroughly active place in the world. The human being itself is the original creator of all its representations and concepts and ought to be the sole author of all its actions." (7: 69-70)

Kant’s view was that by the use of our own reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and live up to the basic principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance, above all without divine support or intervention. Geometry’s demonstrable truths led directly to scientific hypotheses and the experimental method of inquiry. Euclidean geometry began as the science of space and non-Euclidean geometry is now that of spacetime and complexity.

This same fundamental geometrical wisdom forms the basis of sacred sciences as expressed for example in kabbalism, fen shui, Islamic art, Renaissance and Gothic architecture and great monuments. It is the basis of Masonry, and formed an underlying matrix for the philosophy of the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution with its democratic principles. It reveals the harmonies of nature, God and man – and we have applied it as an ideal model and technological basis for our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual lives.

The earliest records of activity in geometry come from Babylon. What we know as Pythagoras’ theorem appears in cuneiform texts of around2600 BC, where it is given an empirical and approximate verification. As the name indicates, the subject of geometry originated in the practical pursuits of land measurement and surveying (though probably not first among the Egyptians, as Herodotus famously reports). Although the Greeks did not originate geometry, it is to them that we owe the conception of geometry as an exact demonstrative science as against an empirical and practical discipline. While anecdotal evidence identifies Thales of Miletus as the originator of the idea that geometric statement sare to be proved, it is generally accepted that the Pythagoreans had transformed mathematics into a deductive science by around 500 BC.Pythagoras himself is said to have conferred upon geometry the standing of theoria, the manner of contemplative knowledge alone worthy of a free and not a slave people; and to have propounded the belief that its true subject matter pertained to intelligible objects rather than to sense experience. Later, in Plato, geometric figures - circles, triangles, the regular solids - became archetypal ideal forms: perfect, universal,absolute, eternal and harmonious; whereas their sensible instantiations in matter were seen as inexact, particular, relative, temporal and discordant(see Pythagoreanism §2). …While such methods were suitable to the discovery of simple arithmetic and geometric facts, they were not as conclusive as the deductive methods canonically compiled in Euclid’s Elements of Geometry (c.300bc). Through its influence, the idea of a demonstrative science was established and geometry became the paradigm of systematic presentation of a body of knowledge in terms of logical deductions from axioms, whose truth was antecedently recognized. --Routledge

R. Buckminster Fuller and E.J. Applewhite made brilliant new geomerical discoveries about the process of natural transformations in the atomic nucleus and nature’s own means of assembly. They applied Synergetic or tetrahedrally based geometries, rather than the crude Cartesian coordinate system, which is never employed by nature.

As Fuller pointed out, there are no right angles in nature and she uses great circle economies. This is Nature’s aesthetic expressed geometrically and fractally in all Her creations. 21st century science and arts is still trying to absorb this revelation as more than a concept. It may lead to negentropic technologies that save mankind as a species from itself, from its entropic shadow.

Aesthetics and Ethics

Aesthetics is a kind of interest in certain things, expressed in a kind of judgment, which is concerned with things quite apart from their utilitarian use. Kant even declares aeshetic interest independent of whether they actually exist. Aesthetics is an interest and valuing which is without interest, in the common sense. We are caught imagistically somewhere between the infinitly repeatable with variations and the truly infinite.

Kant drew a sharp difference between an aesthetic and utilitarian interest in things, which is as relevant today in the context of the sciences as in the arts and humanities. He considered this distinction urgent, and it remains so, in that artists are often at the spearhead of human culture (Miller, 2004), and the engineering of that culture through consensus and contagion (fads; memes; mind control). Issues include uniqueness, taste, evaluation, discrimination, virtuosity; objects of devotion and absorption, if not de facto ‘worship’.

Leading edge ideas often emerge in the arts before science or technology catches up with its symbolic yet prescient vision. New technologies now commonly appear as art installations, followed by their ubiquitous appearance in the mainstream. In Kant’s era, aesthetics appeared with the emergence of a merchant class and related to what was desirable to possess or consume. In today’s global economy, formerly isolated parts of the world are newly faced with this dilemma, as are the nouveau riche.

What is intrinsically desirable, individually and by consensus? Kant reduced it to “the Beautiful”…but in today’s world this can be superficially dismissed by confusing it with “the pretty.” Contrived beauty often fails to deliver on its promise, being somewhat akin to rule by committee. To be truly beautiful, technology must reflect nature’s creativity by springing from a negentropic paradigm or worldview. It must add to our well being in some fundamental and sustainable way.

Aesthetic experience is directly related to evaluation of all other kinds of experience, including ethics and politics. Aesthetics is seamlessly woven into our cultural and biological existence. Aesthetic sensibility underlies both the arts and nature, and therefore we find beauty and harmonies in nature experiences, mathematics and science, just as we do in the arts. Artists and scientists are earnestly involved in creative expression in the now as well as hunting the future.

Aesthetics implies sense abilities – and we call it sensibilities. When we agree artistically, what we share is an aesthetic sensibility. A certain rhythm and harmony can also express our emotional rhythms, tone, hue, value, intensity, clarity, etc. Symbolization and signification are also relevant.

"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street." ~ James Hillman

Robert Rauschenberg originally legitimized collage as a valid artform with his curatorial manifestos, The Art of Assemblage (1961) and Random Order (1963). He revisioned many presuppositions about art and older notions of the avant-garde in his own non-nihilistic oppositional strain. In fact, his notion of “random order” prophetically prefigures the scientific discovery of Chaos Theory by decades.

At his most ambitious, Rauschenberg hoped technology would allow him to create a machine to integrate spectators into its functioning, reactions setting it in motion transforming the participants. This is multimedia interactivity, with feedback and feedforward loops. He wanted to educate the predictable public to risk, including in the realm of sexuality. He wanted to reflect and modify the desires of the viewer.

Many of the goals of today’s multimedia “Know-Brow” artists are similar, aiming at embodied experience and pushing those insights further as CG images become more compelling. The larger question remains, “What does it mean to be human?” American film and video critic Gene Youngblood once wrote that “all art is experimental, or it isn’t art.” Innovation brings radically new frames of reference or discards frames entirely.

“Indeed the new materials artists use today have radically transformed art, and our globally-linked planet has brought the plurality of artistic forms, the diversity of styles, the ways in which statements about art can be formed and framed to the surface. Within this we find that the wide array of technical practices, this virtual reality theatre being one example, now make it easy to see that technology has had a tremendous impact on how we engage with art, how we engage with the question of what art is, and how we view the many ways artists exploit technology in our time.“New tools, of course, have always resulted in new forms and, in the largest sense, we can say that technological innovations add imaginative possibilities to the artistic toolbox. When we place the results into a mix that includes social, cultural, political, and scientific contributions we find the enlarged vantage points new technologies offer are even more intriguing. “Perhaps as striking as the number of ways in which artists use technology is that forms of experimentation, like artistic goals, vary widely today. Given this it is not surprising that, sometimes, technologically informed work simply excites our senses and, at other times, even an educated viewer may wonder how best to address a work he or she simply does not understand. There is also the challenge of engaging with work that invites us to be participants rather than passive spectators. And, of course, work presented in more traditional ways, so to speak, continues to raise traditional questions about what art is. “One might ask: Is it the visceral quality of a work that excites us or will we more fully experience an artist’s intention if we read the work as a text and interpret the levels of meaning embedded in the project? Then, again, perhaps an interpretation based on ferreting out meaning compromises key elements that might be optically-centered or intended to emotionally-charge our experience?” ~Amy Ione, 2000, http://users.lmi.net/ione/sf3.html

Philosophically defined concepts such as ideology, aesthetics, meaning, emotion, embodied or situated cognition, complexity, anticipation, inspiration, signification, psychophysical coordination, emergentism, depiction, focal-point conflict, and other elusive models fit into the well-honed categories, bracketing themes such as picture organization and gestalt, metaphor, interpretation, subjectivity, enculturation, neural processing, language and history.

They depend crucially on our psychophysical constraints (compensation, accentuation, contrast, occlusion, dissonance, blur, grain, codes, projection, distortion, denotation, etc.) and enabling of our sensorimotor apparatus. They also depend on the ecological and sociocultural environment in which our apprehending and productive capacities come into being. Rhythm perception and production involve a complex, whole-body experience.

The avant-garde attempted to break down the false division between “art” and “life.” This medium has morphed again, and the message of the art and science of depiction morphs with it. The generative approach is multidisciplinary. Insightful connections and correlaries are described, not truths or explanations. Collage, montage, and assemblage have gone digital -- jumped the juxtaposed canvas into graffiti, into digital fine art, into art music as sampling and into animation, which draws from the entirety of art history stringing together its pastiche.

Early digital films of the 1990’s such as “The Mind’s Eye,” “Beyond the Mind’s Eye,” and “The Gate,” are good examples of the later. Some of these vignettes draw explicitly from art history, using works of Picasso, allusions to Dali, Magritte, etc. They also draw on the genre of science-art. Their immediate predecessors were computer-generated dynamics, such as “Fractal Fantasy”, and a host of other mathematically driven animations like “Voyage To the Planets”.

Multimedia with its efficiency of rendering takes us beyond the aesthetic block of static art that hangs on the wall and becomes p(art) of our lives. Home studios and user-friendly programs and interfaces now allow individual digital fine artists to produce their own audio-visual visions on DVD. Trial and error process focus the artist’s eye on the current state of he image and his/her reactions to it. Trained image makers know what they need and choose the relevant tool.

Art history language is translative and descriptive, not generative. Validity has standards, but they become outmoded periodically, and must be revisioned to prefigure inevitable transformations. The aesthetics of juxtaposition is fundamental; it is a primary modality of simultaneous display that can either 1) temporarily shock, negate, or scandalize, (cultural value); or 2) lead toward lasting aesthetic and symbolic tensions (aesthetic and psychological value).

Juxtaposition can shock, surprise or inform. However, once the shock circuit [artifact of the DaDa era] is closed, the effect will not repeat again in the same individual. There is a world of difference between threat and shock or lasting aesthetic effect. Primary tropes tend to characterize the creations of those who work in this assemblage modality, revealing their mental shorthand, their private symbolic and iconographic lexicons.

The second form ignites the potential of disparate elements in a new ‘force field.’ It becomes a ‘strange attractor’ around which our eye and consciousness can circulate and recirculate. This is one form of the iconography of high art, Rauschenberg effectively argued. His was a challenging balance between aesthetic signification and spectatorial reception.

Collage can seem random or purposeful, assembling symbols or elements that “want to live with one another.” Some artists just ‘know’ what wants to live together, what is aesthetically pleasing and psychologically congruent or challenging, what juxtaposition still has something to say beyond simple pattern saturation. Minimalism, or classical juxtapositions of opposites, is too sparse for such rich, complex vision.

Rauschenberg continually rejected an aesthetic of nihilism, shock and negation through his whole career preferring complete esthetic freedom, eschewing art and historical battles already waged by predecessors. His works changed focus, evoked multiplicity, and multiple perspectives. He preferred the unresolved.

Neo-dada attitudes of the pre- and post WWII era have carried over into post Postmodern underground art with multimedia performance artists, who are socially disengaged or culturally and politically frustrated. Even this seemingly negative response to pain seeks to engage with “process” and “life” which is not separate from “art.” But, by definition, much of this “art”, often identified with the Fluxus movement, is not lasting, frequently consisting of artifacts or ephemera.

These edge and extreme artists are idiosyncratic and narcissistic, but generally not socially toxic, anarchistic or apolitical – but quite political and often spiritual in their statements, rhetoric, and performances. They have broken free of the museum and the artworld and found their own validation. But provocation can’t last indefinitely.

The history of the avant garde is discontinuous, turbulent, nonlinear – chaotic, just like its art. All of its metaphors strongly suggest the randomly punctuated rhythms of Chaos Theory. Its reference points reinforce this description, reiterating complex feedback loops, strange attractors, and producing big effects [such as radical cultural and political effects] from minor perturbations.

Iona Miller’s Psychogenesis: Updates: In the 1990’s, Iona Miller created 400 posters, 24 x 36, from the most prevalent form of trash available – discarded magazines, the base of the garbage pyramid. While they are commonly used, she found a unique means of doing so. Of course, the strongest constraint of this medium is availability, listening to one’s inner voice on where to go when to find the raw materials. If you listen closely enough, knowing what to save and discard, they call to you.

Miller recycled this ‘found’ imagery into a series of self-therapeutic works, which she later discovered contained a virtual encyclopedia of psychological archetypes, the “strange attractors” of the psyche. She compiled the more symbolic, rather than merely aesthetic, of these process art works in Psychogenesis: A Journey through Inner Realms of Wonder and Imagination via Modern Iconography and Recycled Imagery, at the turn of the Millennium.

The avant garde alleged the praxis of life is to be renewed and renewal was the unrelated therapeutic purpose of this project. But this ‘art’ was uncontrived, naïve, claiming no commercial purpose or drive. It has nothing to do with the institutionalization of art nor discursive rules, nor social criticism, nor overarching historical frameworks.

Nor is it expressing the avant garde strategy of using shocking assault on the division of art and life. It had to do with getting what was inside out. It is life in motion and its strategy is to take the commonest most discarded thing, appropriate it and activate its healing talismanic potential, turn lead into gold, giving it a new potency beyond the transgressive power – a force that comes from the emergent power of the one true thing.

These works reappropriate the ordinary, the mundane and recontextualize it within a meaningful whole of which the viewer is an integral part. It is motivated by the urge to connect with the life stream, the flow of psychophysical energy or libido that animates us. It is driven by jealousy of time to fulfill its expressive goal before death finds another unreleasable hostage, for even as I am writing this I hear about the sudden death of a friend of 25 years. Now, I have gone digital and begun merging myself in this series, particularizing the images even further.

The Psychogenesis preface begins:

“Welcome to my world--a world ensouled and enlivened by imagery. A world of the seemingly familiar, yet peculiarly mysterious…the vast landscape of consciousness, fluid temporal movement, the undivided flux of creation. Many people have allowed me to tap into their dreams, their inner streams of realities, their nether realms. I conclude that our local existence is nested in a vast collective domain, abode of symbols, guiding archetypes, and myths. We contain and are contained by Universe, and we are not different from that. This eternal world outside spacetime is the contact point for sacred time and space, the container for that which never was but is always happening. Since its source is complex, its coding is intense. Archetypal images enfold multiple meanings, modes, potentials, dimensions. The human psyche is inherently polytheistic, polymorphous, continually in motion.We are experiencing not just the revival of ancient images, but also the harvest of all the world's cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing, seeing, doing, being. Gradually we discover that these stories are our own stories, that they drive the amplified rhythms of our own lives, depending on and enhancing us, filling us with a sense of the fractal resonance of the mythic life within our own.In our modern culture every image, mundane or divine, has been used and abused. In the Postmodern Era there is no new iconography. In imagery and art, there is nothing new under the Sun. Everything, which can be used from religion, myth and symbolism, has been used and can only be recycled -- recycled like these collaged images from the trash-heap of society. The material for these images was literally someone's garbage. My task was therefore, as usual whether doing art or therapy, trying to turn alchemical lead into gold."

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Post-POMO CRITICAL REALITY

OBSOLETE REALITY TUNNELS: DigI/Osophy.
The digital universe consists of 1’s ad 0’s; input and output: I/O. Likewise, our subjective experience consists solely of Input and Output, even though as human beings we can’t be reduced to purely mechanistic descriptions. There is organic and mechanical logic, that both hold true philosophically: garbage in, garbage out. But ‘self-organization' and ‘self-steering' provide an alternative dynamic perspective on the causal effects of conscious will in Chaosmos. The structure of digital information is decentralized, heralding the end of cultural and individual control fantasies.

Crumbling truths were simulacra all along. Meaning has imploded into digital binaries of electronic society. Reality has imploded into hyperreality. For example, digital art can be a copy of photorealism that is tweeked into a reflection of the imaginal theater of the mind; a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, bearing only a surface resemblance. Multiplied stylized images take on a life of their own, shattering the grid of repreentation (Deleuze, Guattari).

Metaphysical beauty hides the rotting corpse of new age thought, the eclectic pastiche of rotting and ruined abstractions. Seeking a root in today’s creatively evolving culture, many look backward, recursively adopting an outdated philosophy. R.A. Wilson and Tim Leary called them “reality tunnels” while McKenna dubbed it an archaic revival. Tunnelling make us “see” in a certain way; create our often myopic beliefs about self, others and world at any time. They are belief wormholes that take us to potential universes that don’t necessarily match up with Reality. They are a way of sticking our metaphysical head in the sand.

Physics and art face similar problems with imaginary universes that do not match up with this existant one. Even Renaissance art was trying to re-capture some values from the past, technologically. It’s good to ask yourself just where you think you are going? Where do you go from here?

You are already living a Hyperreality. Debord calls it the Spectacle; Baudrillard calls it the Similacrum. Beliefs are false promises to restore a mythical truth underlying the simulation. Belief maps create the fabled territory that claims to be salvation but is a well-disguised trap, mentally and spiritually. Do you opt for magical concepts that are tricks of the mind or the charm of the so-called real? Imaginal representations are metaphysical simulations, virtual realities.



Metaphysics is a dead end; all points of reference are liquidated by the universal solvent: chaos. Likewise the preferred terrain of popular religions. There is a short-circuit in our psychological position. There is no touchstone of reality or truth, beyond the simulation of the sacred, the content of sacred technologies. We have mass murdered our own models, creating a power vacuum. Only the simulation of power masks the political fiction.

Baudrillard concludes, "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference."


CLICHES AND ARCHETYPES: Are you creating a unique reality tunnel reflecting your aesthetic like an artist, or a haphazard victim of dogmatic programming and conditioning? There are no ideals and no ultimate negation. Those choices just buffer us in archaic perceptual cocoons, rather than drawing us into the vortex of developing future. McLuhan pointed this out long ago, saying, "Utopians and anti-utopians are always obsessed with a period preceding their own. Orwell's 1984 happened in 1930." - MM, Take Today, p.75.

Most of New Age culture is either Theosophical or Utopian, sometimes in a very saccharin kind of way, sickly sweet if not toxic and phony; full of New Age “guilt”, parroting, parody, self-sell and put ons. Of course, it is good to root in tradition, but we can get caught in the web of living metaphors. But reality tunnels create tunnel vision, a subconscious filter of belief-congruent experience, confirmation bias. In the womb we recapitulate the phylogeny of species, and after birth our beliefs evolve following the historical arc. Yet, we never stop in our arc to live like a reptile, for example.

The human mind is a competitive memescape. Its 'normal' to have our desires shaped by the social grid and social codification (groupthink), but it makes us neurotic. The effect of pop culture is conformity; even our subcultures are homogenizing and recur in an infinity of fractal forms. Pop art is an oxymoron since it cannot fulfill the promise of art to deliver us from the conformity of market forces. The 'original' becomes a fiction; nothing is original since it is all derivative. But it may reflect the zeitgeist of the moment.

Everyone is a fundamental slave to the system because virtually no one can ever fulfill their desires. There is the saying those who forget or do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. But, in the post-postmodern world, what hasn’t been done? And done to death probably as good or better than it can be redone? Where is the unexplored territory?

BEYOND BELIEFS: Neurotheology has shown that spirituality is a natural phenomenon, hardwired into humans as a biosocial survival strategy that bonds groups with common beliefs and goals, personal and collective. This current runs so deep that for the majority of people, nothing is more important. It infuses all life passages with Presence and meaning in animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, even science-ism. We believe in belief even over uniformity of belief. But there is a deeper causal vector than beliefs, rituals, customs, commitments, and sacrifices: evolutionary value or fitness. It is the source of mythmaking, morality, sociality, and redemptive values.

Belief systems and paradigms provide rigid structures, the matrix of belief, we can use as our medium for self-expression. They allow us to investigate existence in conventional or unconventional ways. Research methods include setting aside received wisdom, burrowing deep inside your subject and learning to think like your material.

A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. They spread through motivating their "host population," novel configurations of old ideas, and by proselytizers. Popular beliefs spread like contagions, cognitive viruses. Memes are informational viruses that influence our thinking, feelings, even our physical regulation.

Memes function like evolving cultural viruses taking on a fractal life of their own as the trances we live. They engineer our cultures and subcultures; what we will, won’t and can’t do, and believe. In short, self-replicating memes condition our lifestyles as “True Believers”. Each meme is an existential trance state. Memetic structures compel our attention; we propel and persuade one another toward them socially; sociocultural programming.

VIRTUAL REALITY CHECK: Korzybski pointed out that there are two ways to slice easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. So, from time to time you have to give yourself a Virtual Reality Check. The hallmark of postmodern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all "metanarratives," or translations of reality. Postmodernism has even turned its profound skepticism on such important humanist concepts as "objective truth" and reason.

Yet, for a deconstructionist postmodern society, individually we are still riddled with superstition and gullibility, and open to manipulation through our belief systems as any politician, philosopher, clergy, or salesperson will attest. Further, most people are painfully naive when it comes to even the simplest scientific understanding. Most of us don't have a clue about the fundamental nature of physical reality or our own psychological nature, and our ability to be fooled by our senses and mind, or methods of social and technological persuasion. We may think we know, but the penetration is deeper than we dare imagine.

Nature rejects the naivete that seeks absolute truth. We are beginning to realize, individually and culturally, that "realities" are all human constructions. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience. The challenge of the therapist in these times of chaotic change is to validate the concept that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are.

We can embrace this disruptive chaos, trusting that it is an emergent self-organizing process. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system (the "box" we live in), nor our belief in absolute truth. A strong desire to engage in the "quest for uncertainty" complements our anxiety that perhaps there is no absolute, objective ground to reality. The warrant of Truth is ever elusive when we deconstruct the foundational justifications of our convenient notions about the way the world works.

It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology. Science offers no ontological Scientific Picture of the World but substitutes a number of applied theories as meta-theory. It’s close, powerful and useful: it ‘works’ and allows use to do work. But the still mysterious “true” metatheory may reveal the basis of consciousness. But who knows when we will lift that veil?

Permeating the living reality of our culture are certain contagious notions, fads and trends that have the ability to influence the way we think about the nature of Reality and ourselves. Some of them are toxic and can consume you; others are just whims of pop culture infectious and benign as the common cold. Jung described the concept of psychic contagion by certain archetypal forces inherent in the human psyche, which manifest in our spiritual lives and belief systems. He spoke of both conscious and unconscious contamination. Notions like this range from simple superstitions to scientific concepts, to urban myths.

Notions sweep through our culture and insinuate themselves within its fabric, as fads, whether they are "real" or not, they can be influential. They mood alter us, make us feel we belong. An analysis of these notions is useful in distinguishing a common human phenomenon from any potential "alien influence" which may or may not be exerted on us from an unknown source.

BREAKING THE SPELL: Skeptic, Daniel Dennett takes a hard look at beliefs and attendant phenomena in his new book of this name, and asks: Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In a spirited investigation that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. He contends that the “belief in belief” has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need.

Ask yourself how adaptive it is to remain spiritually, mentally, or emotionally stuck in the past, for whatever reason. In my written archive you can catch me at virtually every phase, yet never stuck in one. Most forms of ‘worship’ are either archetypes or clichés, perhaps both. Personal revelatory experiences are no measure; they are often fraught with strong emotional content, but faulty thinking built on a grain of Truth. Often it is a compensatory mechanism to help us maintain specialness, a trick of the mind and self-image. If you recycle a retrievalist reality tunnel you are blinded to other options. It’s like being a scientific or artistic specialist; you know more and more about less and less.

What organic robotoid, parroting perennial philosophy is truly spiritual? Future-resistance stops the process of maturation, as well. What we procrastinate about can take on overwhelming dimensions. It is a way of not “letting go” of outmoded forms that stunt developmental potential. Be careful what models you let colonize your imagination. Are the terms you define yourself with irrelevant? Those whose cherished beliefs are challenged in the context of traumatic life events are likely to experience severe spiritual disequilibrium; manifesting chaos instead of self-organization.

Spiritual disequilibrium can be a blessing, heralding rebirth: emergence from the destructuring of emergency, breakthrough from breakdown. The future draws us forward like a handshake reaching back from somewhere between our fate and destiny, the strange attractor of our own futurity. It does not squeeze us into a recycled mold, and send us down a dusty rabbit hole of myopic vision. That is not focus, but self-deception, disinformation. You are probably not the “reincarnated alien-hybrid messiah of world peace and environmental restoration”. But you do make your own global contribution to the commonweal, especially through self-awareness, practice, service, and compassion.

The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval mystic text, describes the human soul as embodied in one's memory, reason, will, imagination, and senses. Yet, all these faculties are falsifiable or easily subject to distortion. Unless USED artistically, rather than passively, media is an interruption of our internal narrative, our self-talk; a detour in content and focal point. Is your phone more important than your movie, or your loved one?

Interruption enables incoming messages by lending them shape and hijacking our attention, or they enter subliminally. Particularity is content and momentary truth. The goal is not to pick the right reality tunnel or be psychically tunneled by obsolete beliefs but to live freestyle on the tunnelless edge of dissolving boundaries, the anticipatory/participatory fusion of NOW.

BOUNDARY FREE CREATIVE EDGE: In part, this is the source of the generation gap. The imaginative and adaptive faculties play a big role in what century (archaic revival) we choose to live in, according to our adopted beliefs, which condition our perceptions. Popular options include eclectic adaptations of the world’s religions, neo-tribalism, psychics, and gurus; even science and art have their own historical POVs.

The so-called New Age of spiritual snake oil sales actually harbors the agenda of hijacking the Holy Grail of new paradigm thinking, as long your new vision resonates with a polyglot of poor research protocols, implausible assumptions and lack of critical thinking. Radical pointlessness is the least occupied position, having no POV the toughest to maintain. The poetic vision of Science-Art does not split the material base of Multiverse from the reflexive component of Spirit. It encourages mythopoesis but not literalization at the expense of common sense.

There is a paradoxical dissonance between old and new ways of being in the environment; things that should be preserved and those that are emerging. Things that stay the same are isomorphic constants; but metamorphosis, metaphoric change creates a sense of novelty and newness. The new excites us by emotional appeal, overwhelming our senses, shocking us, thrilling us, or otherwise modulating our systems in a way the old cannot. It reflects the future of our dreams.

Our own epistemological metaphors describe how we know what we know and what it is like. Harking back to the past for a point of reference helps us move from the known to the Unknown in our descriptions, but if we take our metaphors literally, our beliefs stay archaic. We continue to recapitulate the philosophical evolution of mankind, but not truly move forward into new territory. The same is seen in the iconography of “sofa” art, which recycles the same tired themes and styles in the same media, over and over.

ALL the creative juice of science and art is at the leading edge, the living edge. Chaos theory defines the “edge of chaos” as a special dynamical balance. Science has shown that order emerges from the critical paths of chaos. In psychology, it means sticking to the image as given in Imagination, rather than resorting to glib dream or symbol interpretations. Shamanic personalities work at the edge of chaos for healing. Talent expresses at the edge. Phase transitions occur here, state changes, quantum leaps of consciousness, complexity. Like Schrodinger’s Box, it separates the Living from the Dead.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: Wyndham Lewis wrote that all "living art is the history of the future". The formula is we become what we behold. What our culture compels us to behold is the holographic ICONOSCOPE: all the new media that both virtually surround and contain, as well as permeate our lives, and comprise an intrinsic part of our environment. The mind-numbing rate of change in our society is so unprecedented it is called Future shock. It’s a technological tsunami.

Debord called it a Society of the Spectacle, emphasizing its visual nature. Everyone is a player. Spectacle as a commodity is embodied in so-called Reality TV. The War on Terror is a materialized ideology, fighting an Idea. It is unwinable since you can’t wage war on an idea. Ideology is the problem, not the solution to human survival technology. Coercive ideas foster looting of natural resources, coercive institutional power and imported orthodoxies. The same dynamic produces trends, fads and memes, which permeate thinking as well as lifestyle. All gnostic forms are based in an ideology and theology of truth and secrecy.

Baudrillard speaks of successive phases of the image: 1) It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2) It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3) It masks the absence of a basic reality.4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.


YOU TURN ME I-ON-A: We literally have the electromagnetic capacity to broadcast our images if not ourselves to the stars. We broadcast our identities as a fusion of recombinant personae, cliches, and archetypes: infinite fractal use of finite iconography: technological self-amplification of our bodyminds. You turn me on; I turn you on in a fusion of knower and known. I call my broadcast "Radio Free Qabala". coming to you from station IONA, sponsored by the Temple of Living Light. Channels may vary in your locale, that is, by your capacity to tune in and comprehend my essential nature.

Hegel said, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged.” Likewise, only relationships between objects are observable. Arguably, language was the first real technology, and all others mere extensions of our five senses. Metamagic, the original reality medium, is a hypercharged spiritual technology, driven by ritual and belief: active attention is synonymous with “worship”. We are a fractalization of collective history. We are carried forward by the anticipation of our own lives, their emergent qualities. Infinite mirroring and anticipation is beyond synchronicity; Xenochrony is the holomovement of Xenochronicity. Only the level of resolution changes, not the content.

LIFE IS A HOLOGRAPHIC PROJECTION: The team of physicist Peter Gariaev detected DNA Phantoms in their research and concluded that we are human biocomputers. The genome is a quasi-intelligent system, but the wave level of genetic coding programs and organizes our 3-D spatial/temporal organism. Gariaev describes DNA expression as a meaningful text that is read and projected by DNA in 3-D in a bioholographic process with sound and light, much like programs of DNA movies or videotape. The digital analogy is probably even closer to the process of development and maintenance.

These movies get corrupted over time and produce aging and mutations. Wave genetics offers new healing and life extension possibilities. Morphogenic information is holographically transmitted and programmed. DNA is not 98% junk, but the formative and transmissive text.

All the cells of our organism combine to form a unified informational space which functions as a DNA wave biocomputer regulating morphogenesis and metabolic information, activated by transduced coherent light and modulated sound. This is more fundamental than genetics or molecular biology. Disturbances in the field that presage disease can be treated.

Healing information can be transmitted in waveform by resonance, sound and light, correcting error patterns or missing information. Video morphogenic information is regenerative, patterning a healing matrix. The bio-computer reads or scans the data and adapts according to the DNA-movie of healthy form and function. A weak field produces a powerful result. We are mutually linked material and nonlocal energy-informational substances that dynamically exchange energy and information. Soon we’ll be able to “change the movie” physically with quantum bioholography as the medium. This is another aspect of the Acoustic Environment: structural cymatics.

TECHNOTOPIA: Evolving technology resonates like feedback in our phenomenology. Buckminster Fuller did not view technology as separate from nature and our nature, biological intelligence and technological evolution, including speech. Our separateness has created the pursuit of infinite individual "reality wormholes" which reconnect us with collective unconscious, collective identity through "voluntary ESP".

We no longer live as point-particles but in our waveforms, often spread simultaneously over several time zones. We can read the entire holographic time log of the Akashic Records at our local theater or on DVD. In Dobb’s vernacular, “past times have become our passtimes”, including interests in deep nature as the province of science and art, and obsolete gnostic and spiritual technologies.

According to Baudrillard, when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

KINETIC FIELD OF DREAMS: The Digital Revolution is here and it IS being televised in a myriad of fractal incarnations, but not on your Grandmother's screen. For artists, the 21st Century is a Digital Universe. In the perceptual-space we now occupy, the gender of presence is neither male nor female, but discarnate! It is the era of the metamorph. Even conventional artists can manipulate their images into a myriad of morphs. Because of insurance problems, fine art has moved toward the giclee print where originals are printed onto canvas and overpainted with a topcoat of paint. But why even bother with the smelly stuff? High end galleries are installing projectors. Popular art is being displayed as virtual paintings on plasma screens in private homes.

NEW MEDIA: Media guru Mark Stahlman defines this term he coined as the media, which replace the ‘cinesthesia’ of TELEVISION as the dominant environment in our lives and culture. Surround sound is already the medium that replaced television. Home theaters now dominate the consumer electronics business. They are simply big television sets with multi-channel sound added, replicating the experience of multi-channel sound in movie theaters. Acoustic space as surround sound replaced the "tactility" of television.

Media analyst/cultural theorist, Marshall McLuhan stressed that ALL media are ultimately a matter of sensory balances and sensory biases. He believed that artists need to integrate, analyze and utilize rapid changes in technology, in order to truly have a mass impact on people in the modern age. But the electronic environment isn't limited to artists but is available to virtually everyone. No one escapes its influence. Rapid evolution of communication devices enables and future-shocks us at the same time.

On the other hand, some new media are in the hands of individual artists, who have the capacity to produce desktop films, find innovative new means of distribution, or create art that helps us meet our future. It doesn't take a multimedia studio to create meaningful work. But cultural and political factors are still limiting factors in the global arena of spiritless totalitarianism.

The era of revolutionary democracies is over, replaced by corporate feudalism which holds our attention in a vice grip of technological self-absorption and self-interest that infiltrates the thinking of both left and right with media propaganda. The Fear-Media Machine fights democracy and liberty with fear and racism, creating a mass culture of disembodied cyborg mutants.

The alluring promise of full-immersion Virtual Reality is the ersatz embodiment of this disembodiment, naturalized technological alienation. Still, the so-called New Age is still focused on 19th and 20th century out-of-body experiences, apparently ignoring they are rarely in-habiting their physical bodies. By subverting new media, the artist introduces a new way of being: Homo Lumen, who recognizes our essential nature is nothing but light. It is the old shamanic function of art and artist in 21st century form, artists and scientists who make the electrons dance.

In Simulacra and Simulation, French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that our "postmodern" culture is a world of signs that have made a fundamental break from referring to "reality." Reality is simulation of the simulation of reality. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth, which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

For Baudrillard all the media of information and communication neutralize meaning and involve the audience in a flat, one-dimensional media experience which he defines in terms of a passive absorption of images, or a resistance of meaning, rather than the active processing or production of meaning. The electronic media therefore on this account have nothing to do with myth, image, history, or the construction of meaning (or ideology).

Television is interpreted instead as a media "which suggests nothing, which magnetizes, which is only a screen, or is rather a miniaturized terminal which in fact is found immediately in your head -- you are the screen and the television is watching you. Television transistorizes all neurons and operates as a magnetic tape -- a tape not an image"” (from Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?)

Welcome to The Media Matrix, the 'machine war'. Are you the One; a Neo trying to figure it all out in a world where nothing makes sense but Ones and Zeros? New Media paradoxically sucks us into the vortex of disembodiment and is simultaneously the anodyne that assuages the resulting pain of alienation. We have fused our nervous systems with the information environment, fusing and morphing both art and nature. Biomedia, genetics and wave genetics are not human survival technologies, but just the opposite, by making us transhuman.


FIGURE-GROUND SHIFT: Shift happens. It is the ground that is the medium, for the most part, and the figure-ground relationship that creates the message. It is the capability of the underlying medium to appear in and through fundamental changes and to sustain fundamental change in this way which is the message (mission), the sending.
It might be said that the message of (genitive?) medium/media exceeds any figure-ground relationship by ex-posing the passing of some previous ground or grounds in the past and pointing to the analogous passing of the present one in the future.

Exceeding figure/ground indicates grounds (plural), indicates medium indicates message: "changes the medium, which is the message." The medium is the message because the medium, aka the plurality and dynamics of media, is what the message is always going on about. In Take Today, McLuhan states, “Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.” - p.11

New Media are the various implementations and the profound implications of the shift by acoustic space from the ground of our lives under the conditions of the electric media environment (i.e. television). They are becoming the figures of expression in our increasingly post-electric world -- in particular, as reflected in three-channel stereo (3CS.) When you run your own multimedia content through your home theater, it becomes your own Church of Self-Amplification.

The post-electronic environment is the ground that is the true medium which creates the message, altering our perceptions of self, others and world. The ground of consciousness itself is necessarily double. It includes the nothing part of itself and the something part of itself; and can’t see itself. Conspiracy is the ground of the shifting paradigm. Bob Dobbs points out, “I would say, the reason why the profane think (increasingly) conspiratorially, is: we have disappeared. So, we are not manipulable anymore. Therefore, the whole social engineering through the media, controlling masses as puppets (conspicuous consumers) - it’s a rearview mirror image. We can now see it aesthetically; or as an artform. So WE like to think and project that we’re being manipulated. Thus, conspiracy is the crude popular slang version of watching (Orwellian) TV and seeing the arty ego-ads manipulate you - saying: hmmm, they’re manipulating me. And I know they’re manipulating me! And they know I’m knowing that. There you have a menippean irony going on! And so, an alphabetic distillation of this process is: "We’re being controlled and it’s a conspiracy."




What's New with My Subject?BYTE ME: Media are unconscious extensions of our sensorium. In 2006, New Media are Broadband, Wireless, High Def, and creating portable environments: the cell phone, high rez digicam, digital video recorder, gaming, podcasting, V-cast. The cell phone has become both the mini computer and TV screen with on demand self-programming of content. Portable screens represent a crucial inflection in the arc of digital media development.

McLuhan's famous dictum, "The Medium is the Message" had a second part -- "The Audience is the Content." Entertainment content must become more and more compelling or we simply make our own. We all now have the capacity to capture virtually every nuance of our lives digitally. We don't have to "download" our psyches into the computer; they are already out there in the data streams as disembodied bytes in the aethyr, each with discrete wavelengths: our images, thoughts, and emotions.

LUMONICS: High Brow art dominated the artworld before Duchamp, followed by Low Brow postmodern rejection of all metanarratives. Arguably video guru Nam June Paik ushered in Know-Brow art based in electronic media. Only light can capture the nuance of energetic processes. Special FX pushes it imaginatively over the top. The multisensory electronic moving image is now an artist's medium. It can be employed to express representational and abstract imagery through recorded and virtual technologies.

The moving image is central to our visual culture, articulating new strategies and forms of image making. The kinetic image fuses electronic and digital media into a new form of expression. We can easily alter both materiality and composition of the electronic image; we can refashion its content, visual vocabulary, and plastic forms. Desk-top cinema has made individual productions a possibility that has jumped the Theatre of the Mind, to become sensuously embodied as a "body without organs", an Android Meme. In the vernacular of paramedia ecologist Bob Dobbs, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. But in an era in which everyone is a filmmaker, who is the audience?

PARAMEDIA ECOLOGY: Primal man made his environment by magic rituals that were re-enactments and dramatizations of the creative process by which the world comes into being. Even Renaissance art was trying to capture the values of the past technologically, but 21st Century art is a holographic time machine. Your beliefs determine what century you are inhabiting. Technology has the power to be environmental entirely independent of art as environmental.

Even Jung had no dynamic idea of the psychic role in creating technologies or in responding and reacting to them. Yet technologies, especially electronic tech, are extensions of the body, making us all Cyborgs. The psychic and social saturation resulting from electric extension of the nerves is much swifter than effects of mere extensions to our physical being, such as clothing, or the wheel, or mirrors. The environmental role of art can be spiritual or concretely physical. The actual effects of new technologies turns old environments into art forms that help define us as modern humans.

Dobbs defines the Android Meme as the ability of human-invented technology to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition. In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of "being alive". McLuhan’s chief characteristic of modern media is that they're living organisms. That means they can communicate. The Android Meme wants to join with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism. The Android Meme is a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human. There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it. It is collective mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance).

We actually download the archetype of the Android Meme into our nervous systems through television and multimedia. Bob says, “The Android Meme absorbs any response made to it. The artist's task is to understand and meditate upon the why's and wherefore's of its present techniques. This effort has nothing to do with how an artist survives economically.” So, don’t quit your dayjob.

"Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come to us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't wash over us and then go "out of mind." It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious....Such experiences are difficult to describe in words. Like dreams or sports, they evade verbal classification." (Edmund Carpenter; They Became What They Beheld 63)

According to anthropologist Carpenter, we are forced into new modes of communication and forced to create our own environments of declassified information when media render old patterns of perception obsolete. When we program our own psychic and sensory lives, we turn to artists who practice creating their own lives for reference. In many ways we are forced to improvise, taking what is at hand, and forming it into something that could be, into something new, but which is made from the parts of the old in a fractal reiteration.

ANTI-MYSTERY SCHOOL: SACRED AND PROFANE. We virtually 'worship' that which we give our attention; the more energy we give it the more we worship it. Our society is compulsive. Technology as the "demon of progress" is a spiritual rival, a rival to spiritual technologies, our "technical destiny". Naturally in the electric age this rivalry for the soul of man is far more intense than ever before: inner vs. outer quest. McLuhan’s thesis was revolutionary: each medium has a larger effect than its mere content, overloading, compensating and extending our physical senses, forcing individual minds and whole societies to adapt.

Today's 21st Century Media Mystery Schools retrain our perceptions even reviewing obsolete Reality Tunneling of the past: ritualized utility and understanding without boundaries or satcom interconnectedness. Technology competes for and effects human senses and perceptions. Art is inherently and seamlessly wed to media ecology. In some sense, the environment can be seen as merely a war between good and bad art. The question becomes not what do we believe and have faith in, but how can we live more artfully and heartfully, developing human survival technologies that feed our souls and spirits.

RECYCLING CONSCIOUSNESS: McLuhan taught that the environment is a programmed teaching machine. He was arguably the first feedback artist, hungry for people with new ideas, angles, insights, so he could use that material to generate more of his own. Feedback of feedback is bad feed, imitation and parody rather than the chaotic creative edge. Now, with weblife, cell phone/cameras, Blackberries and Sidekicks we all live in our nonlocal "chip bodies" and have become feedback artists, perhaps imagining we are generating our own content of infinite fractal reiterations in a vast parody of ourselves-the put on, the spectacle. Is there any CONTENT without an audience to receive it? Is there any reason to DO anything if it isn't a PhotoOp? At art shows now people are more interested in taking their own photo with the art, than in looking at it firsthand. The same is true for travel; everyone has a camera or digital video attached to his or her POV.

Between space and ground camera surveillance and GPS accountability no one is ever really ALONE; no first-person singular exists anymore. In Dobbs-speak, between voluntary ESP (net) and synthetic telepathy we no longer own our own thoughts and can't even know what they are or might have been without that perturbation. No wonder there is so much static on the Reality Channel of the Digital Universe. Also see http://www.fivebodied.com/project/

METAMAGICK; TECHNOSHAMANISM: Shamanic beliefs are based on the notions that 1) the matrix of reality can be manipulated with artistic endeavor and spiritual technologies, and 2) powerful artwork can be stimulated by a variety of consciousness altering experiences, or initiations. Technoshamanism is the process of altering consciousness through technology. It implies using the artistic, psychosexual, healing and mind altering techniques of ancient shamanism combined with modern technologies for altering consciousness, culture, and the holistic mindbody.

Technoshamanism is the interactive integration of futuristic technology with ancient pathways of the past. As an artform, it implies access to full-immersion experiences, virtual realities that have consequences in the real world. Magickal technologies evolve; belief systems are technologies. Magic means intentionally defining a state of reality through the transmission of information; the medium is the message. Ritual technology is manipulation of categories of information as data and instructions. Contemporary magic claims that the human mind can directly influence the state of reality, though old-fashioned magic attributed it to manipulation of spirits or occult forces.

This gnostic experience for the new millennium explores the final frontier: the untapped powers of the human mind: spiritual technology without the straightjacket of fixed belief. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of the unfettered collective imagination. The world of mage and shaman is the world of the spirits, psi powers, psychic phenomena, initiation, altered states, dreams, death, rebirth, and healing. It is the irrational realm of body, faith, trust, and belief. Shamanism reveals the uncanny world of superstition, disruption, dissolution, intuition, mysticism, transcendence, psychedelia, cosmic consciousness. It controls societies, revealing Dionysian and Apollonian spirit: sex and madness vs. conventionality, intellect, morality, and dogma.

Technoshamanism is also the world of what we can call extrasensory science. We can bridge the archaic and modern with cutting edge science and art, which dares to trespass into the forbidden realms. We can play the human sensorium with modulated electromagnetic energy. We can move shamanically through our blocks by heading directly into the fear and pain, which are the doorways to our transformation and head chaotically toward the creative Source. This is the shamanic journey. It is a restructuring process that dissolves old, outworn forms, and fosters spontaneously emergent new images and manifestations.

Technoshamanism is a voyage into the holographic matrix of experience, reflecting both our tribal heritage and global citizenship. In mythology Prometheus, staling fire from the gods, represents the archetypal technological man. Arguably, two defining characteristics of the modern age, icons of our times, are the omnipresence of the Promethean spirit and the pervasiveness of sexuality and its imagery, soft and hardcore pornography. But even more important and fundamental is the power of imagination, passion, and pathos. We can each tap the spirit of Prometheus and Promethea, grasping our share of the fire of the gods, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit.

To the extent that the shamanic personality (like any artist) has great power, he or she penetrates deeply into the basic roots of the structuralizing process, and brings that symbolic information back. In the realm of “metaphorms” our brain images reality and the universe in its own structural terms. This surreal vision attempts to portray the working of the subconscious mind. The future is being created in the imagination of the now. Herein lies the tremendous power of both art and invention. All the symbolic iconography of the ages is perpetually recycled and morphed at warp speed, and the vanguard senses that breakthrough is near. The morphology of this repertoire is embodied in Know Brow Art, neither high nor lowbrow, but cutting edge electronic media.

TRUTH VALUES: Categories of the "real" include not only the symbolic and imaginal, but also the hyperreal. Even our libidos have been hijacked and short-circuited by the therapeutic medium. Truth changes what we think and what we think is possible. All forms of psychotherapy are riddled with fads, buzzwords, and belief systems about how and when healing and transformation can and do occur, and what constitutes the valid content of the trusted process that leads to the healthy, authentic life, self-actualization. It may be an oxymoron.

Is the search for the “holy grail” of Truth the ultimate Quest, a journey rather than a goal, as so many philosophers imply? It has taken humanity through the physical rigors of horizontal exploration, and accompanied us on our trips down the rabbit hole of conceptual and spiritual exploration. But, as we know, there is ‘truth’ and ‘Truth’. Our beliefs compel us to engage in confirmatory searches, where we support, corroborate and verify to our own personal satisfaction.

It is the same drive that motivates both scientist and spiritual seeker to bite off an experiential piece of the Great Unknown. Is Truth primary or emergent? What is Truth? We may know nothing about truth but presume it knows everything about us. Our concept of truth is actually pretty flimsy. Metaphysical truth is by definition beyond observation, beyond the physically observable, yet perhaps available by deduction or inference.

The very first and foundational inner experience in Kabbalah (the art of being fully human) is the Vision of the Mechanics of the Universe, in order to foster a critical eye toward Reality and its underlying physical laws. How can you possibly comprehend yourself if you don’t know the fundamental laws of physics and psychobiology? A common existential “mistake” is viewing ourselves primarily as a solid meatbody, rather than as an electromagnetic wavefront in space that science suggests.

If you are wrong about the fundamental truth of your own existence, how distorted will your other notions be? Kabbalah is radically pragmatic, though not objective, empirical, or reductionist in its approach. It invites you to subjectively make the experiment yourself. We should take care that our protocols and resulting theories have a sound rational basis, taking the best from both ancient and modern worlds. The brain can register the same result for a simulated or real event; that is a double-edged sword that leads many to faulty conclusions. Can Truth be extracted from Cosmos; will the Truth ever come out? And if so, where is it hiding? All we know right now about the primary groundstate of human existence is that it is Pure Nothing (vacuum fluctuation; ZPE).

The physical and metaphysical roots of different kinds of Truth, relative and Absolute, include physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions; scientific and metaphysical truth. Truth relates to the Big Picture, adaptation and human survival. Even beautiful and convincing explanations can be wrong. Science often doesn’t know if it is ‘true’ and that is why ‘falsifiability’ is a keystone of the scientific process. We have various forms of truth but they are not reliable for understanding ourselves or Cosmos in the sense of a final and absolute Truth.

We try to obtain the most accurate explanation we can at the moment. Still, we cannot say there will never be an absolute Truth. Yet partial truths remain approximations. But this very lack of absoluteness keeps the future open. What most attracts our concern is often at the creative frontier of the mind.

Our understanding and definitions are refined as data are refined and our perceptions become more enlightened. It doesn’t change what is true, but it doesn’t mean we can never comprehend an Absolute Truth that is currently beyond our ability. We can’t really know. But expansion of our previous understanding doesn’t change the reality or truthfulness of existence. In black and white: what exists and true and what does not is false or a lie. Our perceptions can be wrong and sensible.

Reality can be strongly counterintuitive or contain hidden options at the point of observation. Truth fits happier with philosophy, but should not be confused with probability, as shown in the nature of paradox. Seemingly obvious truths are often not correct at all. We all harbor unwitting biases that distort the signals received by our senses and generated in our own psychophysical systems. Experiments in sensory deprivation have exposed the intense power of inner-generated imagery/feeling states. We can’t remove this distorting prejudice from our viewpoint so Truth remains elusive, if not completely partial and relative.

DISSONANCE RESOLUTION: Philosophy is about what is changing and not changing: the Absolute vs. Flux. The rate of change is higher for our culture than perhaps any in history. In all cultures, flocks of phone-users can be observed stumbling around in huge crowds through congested traffic, seemingly oblivious to every thing but what is occurring on the miniscule screen in their hand. The ubiquitous cellular device is paradoxically robbing us of our individualities and enhancing our creativity by adding the dimension of immediacy. No one is self-contained. In today’s world of instant communication our youngest appear to be losing touch with opportunities for communication with the self, for self-regulation. Children are growing up 'connected' at all times. Failure to be reached requires an explanation. We have changed our sense of a right to privacy, the sanctity of the individual: the power of one. It can be regained through focused self-care.

Dissonance resolution meditation can be learned in a variety of virtual environments, with the goal of self-regulation, stress-reduction, and wellness. By continually focusing on something that is mildly disruptive, the human system calls into play its own balancing and centering mechanisms and “overcomes” the mild disruption. Dissonance resolution within the nervous system is easy to demonstrate neurophysiologically because coherence, resonance, and entrainment of electrical fields and currents can be detected by analyzing neural activity with EKG (heart) and EEG (brain) techniques. Neurological aspects of dissonance resolution include becoming sensitive to very subtle levels of internal disharmony through growth, learning and expertise. Learning to identify the internal disharmony is similar to learning the “passive volition” of EEG or EKG control. The result once the individual has dealt with the mildly unpleasant stimulus is greater balance, greater focus.

A person can learn to control various aspects of the mind and body in pleasant, non-painful ways. Resolving the finer degrees of dissonance is another route to mastery of stress and achievement of high-level wellness. The basic idea is to involve the viewer in focusing simultaneously on both visual and stereo sound stimulation on a regular basis to establish both mind and body discipline.

This consciousness tool is very much of a scaled-down version of what happens to the viewer as a participant when he or she is focusing on a matrix of shapes and sounds that are constantly changing in real life. That is a definition of DR at one level. But as a technique that is practiced and becomes a clear habit pattern, DR is still an effective type of meditation. Combining visual stimulation with stereo auditory patterns initially evokes internal dissonance. Conscious and unconscious processes serve to resolve as the viewer-participant becomes involved and then progressively engrossed in the stimuli.

Neurological visual and auditory meditations can be learned, creating habit patterns to improve the ability to focus. In this study’s form of meditation, dissonance resolution, the student is first given a mildly distorted signal to focus on. After overcoming the mild irritation of the distorted signal, the nervous system rebalances itself in order to accommodate that signal. One function of the dissonance is to attract the subject’s attention. After practicing this rebalancing skill, we feel the effect of mental effort as a sense of mild relief and increased focus.

However, any meditative type activity can have similar benefits, whether there is dissonance or not. Because of the considerably enhanced focus derived from regular meditation, a person can learn to control various aspects of the mind and body in pleasant, non-painful ways (Gilula, 2005). Mind machines and binaural beat technology such as Hemisynch and Holosynch CDs are alternatives for self-regulation.

DIGITAL CONTEXT: In 1993 I wrote an article on the Digital Universe for CHAOSOPHY Journal based on Fredkin's theory of digital physics, that information is more fundamental than matter and energy, that atoms, electrons, and quarks consist ultimately of bits--binary units of information.
Online at http://asklepia.tripod.com/Chaosophy/chaosophy21.html

A DIGITAL UNIVERSE?
SCIENCE MIRRORS ART; ART MIRRORS SCIENCE
DIGITAL CONTENT: The interface of computer science and physics has led to the concept that information may be as fundamental as matter and energy. Some believe that information is just one of many forms of matter and energy, which is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings. Others suggest information should be part of the new scientific triad--matter/energy/information--the main ingredients of reality.

Ed Fredkin goes one step further, with his notion of "digital physics." In this, and other systems, information is more fundamental than matter and energy. He believes that atoms, electrons, and quarks are ultimately binary bits of information. These discrete bits of information may be compared to the quantization of energy in light (photons). The work of Nobel laureate, T.D. Lee suggests that time may also be discrete.

Discrete states are the essence of the digital nature of computer operation. Discreteness depends ultimately on quantum mechanics. A general state which 'spreads' is a superposition of such discrete states.

Fredkin suggests that the universe may be a vast computer which creates reality through ceaseless repetition--taking information it has just transformed and transforming it further to generate pervasive complexity. Space and time are discrete, the laws of the universe are algorithmic, and the universe works according to the same principles as a computer.

According to Fredkin, not everything is best viewed as information, but it helps us model reality and create programs to test our notions. What he is saying is that "at the most basic level of complexity an information process runs what we think of as physics. At the much higher level of complexity life, DNA--the biochemical functions--are controlled by a digital information process. Then, at another level, our thought processes are basically information processing."
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"...‘our rulers’...are engaged in the manipulation of symbols. We must consider ourselves a symbolic, semantic class of life, and cannot cease from being so those who control the symbols rule us. "Bankers, priests, lawyers, politicians, [and news media] constitute one class [of our rulers] and work together. They do not produce any values but manipulate the values produced by others, and often pass signs for no value at all. Scientists and teachers also comprise a ruling class. They produce the main values mankind has, but, at present, they do not realize this. They are, in the main, ruled by the cunning methods of the first class." - Korzybski
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"The fault with modern society lies in its suppression of difference and its alienation of persons from what they can do. We must overturn established identities and affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, and so become all that we can become -- though we cannot know what that is in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?" -Deleuze



The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”

 
There are several subcultures whose worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do. They range through governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be compartmentalized or even superstitious in his or her subjective thinking at times.
 
To conduct sound reseach, we must catch ourselves in the act of trying to verify our own preconceptions, a “perception Lab.”  This is an intrisic problem of armchair scientists who are long on theory and short on experimentation. We have to pierce beyond the perceptual artifact to solid postulates, testable hypotheses, rigorous protocols, and acurate statistical analysis.
 
But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief. Meta-narratives emerge as mythologizing, literature, psychology, sociology, religion or philosophy and cutting-edge science theories. The philosophy of science describes the dynamics of the scientific method.
 
Just because the subject of psi remains objectively problematical doesn’t mean we should stop systematic investigation, both scientifically and metaphysically. Babies don’t know how the world works so they constantly keep testing their environment, over and over. Are we just cosmic babies, feeling our way along, blindly? We are when it comes to proofs of mind over matter.
 
Quantum Chaos
 
We must be willing to question our own beliefs, comprehending the nature of subjectivity, experimenter bias, and that the mind deploys them as explanations for unknown agency, the blindspots of our consciousness. As ever, any postulate and hypothesis we can make depends on "which" physics it is based in, since there are several competing models: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Transactional, M-Theory, Plenum Physics, and a wide variety of idiosyncratic theories.
 
This simple fact makes quantum physics a domain of self-contained, mutually exclusive belief systems with their own presumed truths about the primordial nature of Reality. New Agers and armchair philosophers often confound and cobble them together into half-baked theories, sometimes with fantasies of “ascension”, aliens, and evolution.
 
“Fill in the blank” explanations can be outlandish, possible, plausible, probable, or match reality. The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, nested hierarchies, holistic mysticism, or physicalism.
 
A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations of “agency” to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness,. A debunker is dismissive. A true skeptic remains open-minded, at home in the ambiguity.  And the loose use of the buzzword ‘intentionality’ leaves its agent or means totally ambiguous.
 
My Karma Ran Over My Dogma
 
This fashionable term for mind/matter interaction, "intentionality", fails as a shorthand to explain anything. You may as well call it karma, luck, or free will, or True Will, like the magicians do. Karma, whether you believe in it or not, at its root just means natural consequences of behavior.
 
Does it really work to claim an intention to be intentional? Doesn’t intentionality always imply future tense rather than concrete results?  If the implication is an ‘intentional result’ isn’t that an acausal pretzel-twist in logic?  Jung tried to account for an acausal factor with his notion of synchronicity, but it is hardly testable, though most of us notice meaningful coicidences all the time.
 
Even in clinical research, to name psi expression intentionality doesn't make it so. In actual fact, most of us can’t form enough intentionality to drink the amount of water the body needs each day or eat healthy. The unresolved New Year’s resolution is a truism.
 
What makes us think we can be more consistently intentional in the extradimensional? It is a ‘fantasy of intentionality,’ a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at some subtle level perturbs outcomes in some desirable manner. It might express our insecurity in an uncertain, uncontrollable world more than a physics process.
 
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. It is endlessly interesting to speculate on, but the notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoesis, myth-making.
 
In mythopoesis many cultural forms meet and form an organic fusion. Does the contemporary revival of myth with focus on our creative potential point to the possibility of a unified world, a neo-Utopian variant where we wish and make it so?
 
The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Mythopoesis means change, re-mythologizing in times of cultural chaos. What I mean here is not a mis-spelling, but an amalgamation of mythopoesis or story-making and the autopoeitic self-organization of chaos theory; self-maintaining unity.
 
Autopoiesis describes the way living systems address and engage domains in which they operate. What human need do these mythically patterned meta-theories fill? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable, to push the agent beyond the threshold of observability.
 
The Emperor’s New Intentionality
 
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth.  From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetyal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Existentially, we are moved by more than a single metaphor, a single role, a singlular self-image.  Whatever you choose to call them, we harbor nested competing agendas, conscious and unconscious.
 
Even in chaos theory, many forget there are strange repellors as well as strange attractors. Resonance is another buzzword rapidly equalling the old standby of spiritualism, “vibrations”, which has found vindication in quantum and vacuum fluctuation But somehow, both in our lives and quantum mechanics, these extradimensional entanglements are unobservable, beyond physics, and therefore strictly speaking, metaphysical.
 
The ancients conceived of magic working through focus and will.  Now a diffuse holistic awareness is preferred, perturbing the quantum flow. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in perennial truths and pseudo-scientific terms.
 
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds". In Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion.
 
Is this notion harboring a demiurgic God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world?  If we believe in God, why do we presume to interfere with that fiat by introjecting our small agendas? Does it conceal a spiritual hubris to be co-equal or co-creator with divinity? Or, more to the point, why would we look to the divine as an agent of psychophysical dynamics?
 
Nonlocal Intentions
 
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; just the opposite, by criticality.
 
Correlation is not identity. There is appearance being and process being, which correlate with particle/wave. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. The ego somehow facilitating the holistic self to manifest is solipsistic, because the field self is in no way diminished even by negative thinking by personality.
 
If you think intentionality works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated and/or statistically irrelevant. Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
 
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations.
 
Psi and Intentionality
 
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
 
To get to the Truth we have to follow the age-old axiom to ‘Know Thyself,’ and be willing to engage in some conceptual atom-smashing of our cherished notions. Otherwise, one engages in a pre-conceived, self-confirmatory journey for validation not a Quest for knowledge.

Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, intentionality may function mystically in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. Those most concerned with “changing the paradigm” may be among those most firmly attached to their own idiosyncratic interpretations.


If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both. We are components of mythic culture which recursively regenerates itself in a network of self-similar productions.

 
Anywhere there is non-equilibrium, a gap in personal or cultural awareness, myth will self-organize a meta-narrative to fill the lacuna. Mythic beliefs are self-contained. Even fantasies of holism automatically exclude other options, except through embedding and hierarchy.

 
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others.  ESP (information transfer) is the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting.
 
Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction or the influence of one mind on another organism. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.

The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it. And remember common sense, such as, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Even though we’d all like to think so, wishing and even earnest visualization doesn’t always make it so.




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Imagine for a moment that the fate of the entire human race rested on your shoulders alone. That humanity's evolution out of brute self-interest depended entirely on your willingness to transform your consciousness.

What if you knew that the human race could advance past its smallness and negative conditioning --if you only became an exemplar of humanity's highest potential for the world? Imagine that for you, evolving beyond ego became an evolutionary imperative.

Would you approach your path any differently? Would the energy you brought to your spiritual practice intensify? Would the quality of awareness and care with which you approached your interactions with others become more profound? Would you find yourself reaching with inner muscles you didn't even know you had to actually stay awake to the depth you've tasted in your most profound spiritual moments? If you knew it all rested on you, would you have any choice but to change?

The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi once said that the spiritual aspirant must want liberation like a drowning person wants air. Why? Because the challenges of authentic spiritual growth and transformation are so great that most of us will choose to continue suffering in our smallness, rather than feel the pain of allowing that smallness to die forever.

Modern science has in recent decades been verifying what the ancient traditions intuited long ago: that, in both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected. Any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole. 

Add to that the reality that we are evolving beings living in an evolving universe. We are all part of a grand, cosmic evolutionary process. Then the question of our obligation to the whole starts to cut close to the bone.

What if you realized that the entire human endeavor, the evolution of consciousness itself, depended on your willingness to evolve your own consciousness? How would it affect the choices you make every day if you knew that in a very real sense, those choices were either contributing to the evolution of the whole--or holding it back? At this time when it seems that our very future depends on our willingness to evolve as a species, would you have any choice but to act in alignment with the greatest evolutionary good?

The point is that when we take a closer look at what spiritual work and growth is actually for, it quickly becomes clear that the path of awakening is not primarily about freeing ourselves from suffering or securing our own happiness. Sure, that's a nice by-product. But, as long as that's all we're seeking, we probably won't get very far.

Where the spiritual path really begins to get interesting is when we recognize that transforming ourselves in the deepest possible way is in fact an evolutionary imperative, with profound consequences far beyond ourselves.

If we begin to embrace the fact that our lives are not simply our own to do with as we please--that in everything we do, we are in fact accountable to the Whole--something truly miraculous begins to happen. Faced with the palpable responsibility to evolve for a greater good, we find that we suddenly have access to a seemingly infinite source of energy, intention, passion and courage to confront whatever challenges present themselves on our path.

What's more, all of the personal issues and problems--all of the fears and doubts and resistances that once seemed so insurmountable--begin to seem a lot less significant. Why? Because our attention is now captivated by something much bigger than ourselves. This is the power of context. We see our individual concerns, the worries we fret over day to day, from a different vantage point.

Held up against this larger picture and greater purpose, those concerns suddenly seem very small indeed. Realizing "it's not all about me," and ignited by a noble calling to participate in the grand adventure of conscious evolution, we find we no longer even want to give those worries the time of day.

And in this freedom from self-concern, before long we discover that the deep inner peace and joy we were seeking all along has become the very ground we are walking on. To get a taste of the liberating context I'm pointing to, try the following experiments:

1) Before you meditate or engage in any spiritual practice, take 10 minutes to reflect on the profound significance of your practice. Ask yourself:


  • Why do I need to awaken for myself?
  • Why do other people need me to awaken?
  • Why does God/evolution/humanity (your choice) need me to awaken?

Allow yourself to feel deeply into the most authentic answer you can find. Then, invite that deeper answer to come forward as a clear and present intention to engage your spiritual practice wholeheartedly, as if the universe depended on it. And engage your practice from this deeper intention. Notice how this exercise impacts the quality of your spiritual practice.

2) When you encounter a challenging and emotionally charged situation in your life, before you respond, take a few minutes to ask yourself:


  • What is the most enlightened or evolved response I could have in this situation?
  • Why is it important for my own evolution that I respond in the most enlightened, evolved way I can?
  • Why does God/evolution/humanity (your choice) need me to respond in the most enlightened, evolved way I can?

Allow yourself to feel into the larger significance of your response to this challenging moment. Ground yourself in an intention to show up as an exemplar of humanity's potential. And then respond from this deeper intention. Notice how this approach changes your perspective on the situation and your ability to meet it. There is deep and powerful work that can be done to cultivate this perspective, to truly ground your life in this way of seeing--and even more importantly, acting.
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PARAMEDIA MANIFESTO
DIGITAL UNIVERSE:
SCIENCE-ART MANIFESTO 2006
New Media Morphs the Memescape

By Iona Miller 2/2006


From Global Village to Chaosmos

1929: "But the fact remains that, so recently that most people have not realized it, the Earth has become ONE place, instead of a romantic tribal patchwork of places.... What has fact on its side is still this strange synthesis of cultures and times (which we named Vorticism in England) and which is the first projection of a world-art, and also I think the clearest trail promising us delivery from the mechanical impasse." - Wyndham Lewis, "A World Art and Tradition", Drawing and Design Magazine, February, 1929.

1946: "But I should perhaps add, before concluding, that just as eclecticism as a policy would find its justification in a new synthesis, so, in the case of an individual artist, his personality will all the time be creating a personal synthesis ...When all the cultures have been digested , we shall become a new cultural creature: an Earth Man."--Wyndham Lewis, Towards an Earth Culture, The Eclectic Culture of Transition, 1946

1960: “Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development." - Marshall McLuhan, Report on Project in Understanding New Media, Part VII(Exhibits), p.i, 1960

2003: "It is now possible to probe the role of politics within the vision of communications beyond media. Particularly now the political element within communication is of the very essence of the process of creating probes and percepts that will ultimately lead to the decentering of the global megalopolis. And this must be done with the awareness that the 20th century launched a "new science" a "poetic science" that will permit analysis of the interplay of contrapuntal oppositions within the cosmic chaosmos--- the post-global village." Donald Theall, ParaMcLuhan and Poetic Exploration. 2003


ARTIST'S STATEMENT: THE QUANTUM PAINTBOX
STATE OF THE ART: The cry of Post-Postmodern art is "NOMO POMO: Stop! We've had enough!" We're full of appropriations, sampling, graffiti, data glut, quick-cut image glut, new media and new protocols. We’ve seen so much cool it’s left us cold. We've Flashed into a collective spasm that verges on panic. We can't fight or flee the technological juggernaut, and why should we? The price of entry to this Brave New World is surrender of your belief barrier.

We can use new media as our medium for self-expression, joyously making technological and experiential works, body-based works, and mythopoetic works. They aren't machine-made; they are informed, considered executions of our vision, not just mechanical programs or aesthetic accidents. Art connected to Source and the zeitgeist of its times has a living taproot in the matrix of evolution.

There is as much unlimited digital aesthetic content as there is in nature. Our works "work" when they work themselves through our culture, based on that culture's underlying psychological need. They become meaningful if perceived as carrying revelatory weight that somehow illuminates our collective lives. They may not be "true", but good things come of this generative vision, reaffirming and celebrating our humanity. To be art, it just has to be significant, reflecting or steering culture. As artists, we use our own experiential vision to create perceptual embodiments in our medium of choice.

We can still take a fresh look at the world, inspired by the entire spectrum of human artistic endeavor, without resurrecting or imitating the past, but taking it that strategic step further with contextualized elements. We have attained a degree of technological sophistication to open most, if not all, of the new realms to the creative process.

Unexplored media in the quantum paintbox include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnotism, which assault as many of the senses and emotions as possible in order to break open the door of the five senses and drive our audience into the infinitude beyond, newer vistas of participatory experience and expression. Soon artists will be designing new bodies, new senses, and synthetic environments. The path of our unManifest Destiny clearly leads toward a transhuman biological imperative in the evolutionary eventstream.

STATE OF THE HEART: Higher art must be intensely personal while being universal and universally accessible. It must show refined knowledge, understanding and respect for the art that has come before to enrich those around us. Much the same can be said for an artfully and heartfully lived life. We can apply a similar strategy to our spirituality, drawing on the best of what the past offers while keeping our practice and service contemporary and relevant. Our lives become multidimensional artful expressions without frames, embodied in living Light.

Process-oriented spirituality is eclectic and intensely personal. The connection we have with the inspirational Source that nourishes creative life is the same source that sustains our spirits and funds our compassion. It is a deep well from which we can drink at will, the abundant lifesprings of our essential being. The Romantics, arguably beginning with Blake, turned art into a kind of substitute for religion. The East emphasizes a mystical-magical orientation, the West a humanist-rationalist POV.

Romanticism is an essentially gnostic spirituality, a Mystery religion. But now there is no intergenerational priesthood to have our visions for us; we have them for ourselves. Rather than anti-scientifically considering cognition and technofacility an anti-artistic dirty little secret, digital art and multimedia embrace the fusion. There is no Romantic terror of human cognition nor need for anti-technical transcendence with direct interface on the horizon. Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself with self-awareness and self-responsibility. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.


Key Concepts: DigI/0sophy; No Naked Free Lunch; Hypermedia; White Noise; Obsolete Reality Tunnels; Cliches and Archtypes; Beyond Belief; Virtual Reality Check; Breaking the Spell; Boundary Free Creative Edge; Metamedia; You Turn Me IONA; Bioholography; Technotopia; Kinetic Field of Dreams; New Media; Venture in the Slipstream; Figure/Ground Switch; Byte Me; Lumonics; Paramedia Ecology; Anti-Mystery School; Recycling Consciousness; Metamagic and Technoshamanism; Truth Values; Dissonance Resolution; Digital Universe

2006: POST-POMO DIGI/OSOPHY. What Picture of the World do we need? How can we imagine it into existence, realizing there is no perfect world? Reality is the ultimate medium. To some extent we are all “reality-hackers” because we concoct unique worldviews about self, others and world. We learn ways to make the system work for us, but often fail to notice how it works on us, too. We can now make the electrons dance with Science-Art, and soon, moreso.

Two generations of scientists and engineers were inspired by Star Trek to create what was envisioned there, in an idealized future, and we got cell phones, non-invasive medical scans, the PC, and someday perhaps a Holodeck. On the horizon is Real Fantasy VR full immersion simulation, nanotech subatomic assembly and repair, neural biochip computer interface, cold fusion and/or free energy devices, intervention in the germ line, pharmacogenetics, and healing with quantum bioholography. Low intensity laser therapy (LILT) is already approved for pain control and tissue repair, and promises tissue regeneration. Biotech is poised to take us into the posthuman era of global engineering.

Arthur Kroker, cultural theorist, delineates a dehumanizing vector: “what we traditionally have meant by human perception, (vision, insight, ethical judgment, discriminating between reality and illusion) has been effectively shut down, almost surgically replaced by the virtual vision machine of the militarized imagination. We are suddenly rendered vulnerable to the new virtual myths about the supposedly hygienic character of posthuman warfare.” Information warfare (PSYOPS; Agitprop; psychotronics) is bloodless but just as pernicious.

We live in a complex physical and social structure, historically located in space and time. Kroker suggests we develop filters against such psychic infiltration. He suggests that in radical crisis the individual must courageously refuse to assent to totalitarian power. The destiny of individual freedom depends on maintaining critical ethical judgment and a clarity that can filter out propaganda and rebel against it. He seems to suggest being a rebel with a cause, a novel notion in the anarchist pomo world.

A post-Postmodern movement (Science-Art and Know Brow art) is outlining a new ethic, as one counterpoint to the postmodern message, which rejected all utopian ideals and humanism for cultural relativism, alienation, and disillusionment. It is based on the fundamental nature of the zero-point vacuum. This plenum is an untapped source of virtually infinite free energy potential. ZPE is the physical basis of a negentropic paradigm. It infuses us with a new form of optimism based in evolutionaryism rather than survivalism. We can, for example, have an optimistic spirit without insisting on perfecting society; we can prioritize social safety nets putting people’s real needs above ideology and corporate cycles of business and war.

Although postmodernism claims opposition to the arrogant values of the world order as it exists today, this rather hopeless view never offered positive advice for future generations. It fosters ambivalence, ennui, and resignation over the healthy self-esteem of recognition for accomplishments rather than negative attention from "acting out". This attitude is ironic because we lose some of our humanity toward our fellow beings and it has left a craving for attention from a continuously preoccupied world.

Postmodernism ratifies trauma and drama, offering no new meaning, encouraging no search for identity. It considered humanism and any idealism painfully banal; but is it any better, any less predictable once you know the rules of its transgressive game? How "bourgeois" will humanism be once humanity is posthuman? We realize science hasn't and won’t solve today's problems and remains poised to complicate existence further. We must appeal to our own humanity to “Save the Humans”.

We already have freed ourselves from established order with transgression, emotion, intuition, fantasy, contemplation, mysticism, eroticism, and eclecticism, even magick. We claimed the subconscious and elevated the trance state; we've recycled the entire iconography of human history. We've appropriated, sampled, and graffitied our global cultural heritage. We should have integrated the lexicon of both the rational and irrational by now.

Instead of anarchy, what's wrong with being free AND humane, turning our spirituality back to the real world? Can we find our humanity through apolitical ambivalence, pleasure-seeking narcissism, without identity, purpose, or attachment? This question is acute since we are among the last generations of purely organic humans. Science is meddling in changing human nature as well as the blueprint of life.

We are facing unprecedented challenge as a species. Biotech is on the verge of revolutionizing our species for good or evil. It's one thing to know about futuristic tech that can transform society, and something else to continuously adapt to it. Who will help us if we don't help one another? We are facing unprecedented challenge as a species.

It is one thing to know about futuristic tech that can transform society, and something else to continuously adapt to it. Who will help us if we don't help one another? We'll still be here, just not quite human anymore, with obvious benefits and some subtle, physical and spiritual harms. As spiritual orphans, we are vulnerable to the resurgence of old archetypes and stereotypes.

Maybe this is why New Age prophets claim history ends in 2012. Maybe that is the official end of our "human" history. History can’t really end till science ends. Military apps drive most of the technology upgrades. Mechanistic augmentation is already here from the heart transplant, pacemaker, and prosthetics, to the hearing aid, and beyond. Then there are the media extensions of our nervous system, from computer to cell phone. Ironically, we're fighting a posthuman war that recently destroyed precisely the artifacts of the dawn of human civilization in Mesopotamia and Sumeria.

Meanwhile, marketers are on the verge of deploying HyperSonic advertising, which aims an aural laser at your head and drills an advert wormhole into your thoughts and biophysical reactions. Hypersonic sound is inaudible to anyone standing outside the beam. Tightly focused ultrasound (HSS) can hit a single person in a crowd 200 feet away. Pitches will be matched to items on the shelves. Your purchasing ideas won't be your own and you won't know the difference. The frequency will put you in a receptive alpha state and sell you at the same time. You're a sitting duck; they are inside your head. HSS is also being incorporated into consumer electronics for direct sound TV and music.

Hyper-space even makes common time and space obsolete, eliminating customary boundaries. This nihilism reflected the prevailing skepticism of the late 20th Century, with it's meltdown Millennial Fever and, but hardly reflects life moving well into the 21st Century. It substitutes an ideological Truth in the vacuum it created by rejecting existential truth for functional truth. In the end, how alive or lively can we be without ideals and love?

The Information Age is obsessed with meaning and lack of meaning. The relationship between sign and meaning is complex. At this stage, most Postmodern art is more symptomatic than memorable, more eclectic than revelatory, more predictable than ironic. Private artistic universes, such as installation and performance art, are obsolete, because now we are all performers in the world of new media. Their predictive element is gone. Everyone stars in his or her own reality show.

In the end, Postmodernism is just a body of complex academic theory without much heart or compassion. But we need to find a sociological way to fund that art, heart and compassion in disaffected youth who have been psychically abused and disenfranchised without spiritual hope for the future. A broader view shows that more than one thing happens. The most progressive thinkers can fear the future they envision, and the most anarchistic person can care deeply for his or her peers. So why hide behind an outmoded trendy academic philosophy, which shaped the 90s but now is just another mask of tattooed conformity?

Reality can be manipulated through physics and technology, through cultural engineering, through media, through hypnosis, through creativity, through contagious ideas, agitprop, psychological propaganda and misdirection. The global dispersal of illicit and pharmaceutical drugs, weapons, and consumer goods is not unrelated to the secret war for your mind, which ranges from economic and sociopolitical objectives to overt spiritual manipulation. If you are an end-user, you are the final link in a causal chain of supply and demand driven by brainwashing.

Democracy went extinct in a hostile corporate takeover. Corporate raiders are now gutting the US economy just as they did the Third World nations. Religion and metaphysics have been hijacked as tools of manipulation of large populations. Marx said as much last century, calling it the "opium of the masses". We might say the same now for plasma TV, X-Box, Play Station and even the web.

Likewise, much of the so-called New Age consists largely of numbed-out dilettante idealists: blue-hairs, beamers, and bliss bunnies. Your cherished beliefs, focus and attention are the most potent weapons of a system gone mad. The battle for your mind is a competition for your screen, including the internal Theater of your Mind. Soon it will be the race for your neural interface. To the extent you are a passive consumer, they have essentially won. If you have otherworldly concerns, you have abdicated control of the only reality we can know: this one. Someone else’s ideas are playing your strings.

DIGIOSOPHY is a metaphysical perspective, a philosophy with its own technopriests, structure of unseen realms (virtualities), subtle bodies, energy/matter fields, technological metaphors (systems, processing, software, networking, interface), rituals (protocols), and visions of the future of mankind. Its rite of passage is a golden ticket to the 21st Century. It may or may not be a human survival technology since its very nature is leading inexorably toward transhumanism. However, it is a form of culture that creates its own context, process, and content.

We've already fused our nervous systems with electronics, essentially making ourselves cyborgs. Next comes the biochip implant, the transducer/biology interface that will be able to automatically modulate mood and regulate the body more optimally than our metabolism. Then comes its first cousin, the nanites to repair and restore the tissues and battle intruders. The inevitable future of medicine, communications, data management and nanotech can only make it more so. The interfaces for computer and communications tech will become less and less noticeable and more organic, a seamless interface between user and information.

The digital universe consists of a matrix of 1’s ad 0’s; input and output: I/O. Likewise, our subjective experience consists solely of Input and Output. Human beings can’t be reduced to purely mechanistic descriptions. Still, the maxim "garbage in, garbage out" holds in both organic and mechanical logic. Often we generate our own garbage internally, playing on our own nervous systems with self-generated signals, self talk, emotional reactions, and self-defeating patterns. Negative patterns both arise from and take root in the lacunae of our unconscious. But faulty ideas take root in both the rational and emotional parts of our mind.

Biology and information converge in bioinformatics. Information is generated by the interaction of systems, composed of matter/energy. Consciousness is generated by the integration of information in special conditions. For each individual, a large part of this information naturally comes from the social/cultural environment. Information integration is focused on brain processes. However, the brain is an interactive system that develops and functions with the body and environment.

We are subjected to philosophical, religious and political propaganda continuously. Culturalization colonizes us at the belief system layer of psyche and infects our self talk and self-image from birth forward. The same process happens at the national and multinational level. People are controlled and manipulated through their belief systems, often based on the most outrageous primary assumptions about how things work. But what if they/we are completely wrong? Our beliefs condition how we think, feel and act.

But our beliefs are recursively conditioned by centuries of cultural programming and mythic patterns that control and manipulates entire populations, socio-politically and spiritually. What if your most cherished beliefs about your spiritual life were undermined with less glamorous revelations about the manipulation of human nature? Why do we seek Truth, and more importantly, why do we seek it outside ourselves in some mysterious authority or mystical signs?

We have to learn how to stop gobbling down propaganda, consumerism, and phony beliefs and make ourselves immune to such manipulation because the onslaught is virtually relentless. Why is the Information Age riddled with gurus? Different classes of belief diseases poison not only what we think, but also HOW we think. Our beliefs about belief are the deeper problem.

We need to build our psychological immunity to such psychotropic infections with DIY mind control. Organized arrays of opinions on economics, philosophy and theology battle for our human minds, seducing and then abandoning us when their false promises fail to manifest. But perhaps if we believe we can, we can solve the problems we claim are unsolvable because of our stupefication, without resort to “higher powers”. We have to focus on what these arcane and banal beliefs deflect us from thinking about, learning to cope without mental crutches. Propaganda misdirects our attention down a dead end path.

First we have to reclaim our brains and our true power of manipulating and regulating our own nervous systems because beliefs work through punishment and reward and the thrills of discovery and belonging. They work by playing a neurotransmitter symphony on our sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of sensory overload and deprivation, our enthusiasm and ennui. The neurochemistry of love works through the same pathways creating addictive patterns that rivet our focus in delight and obsession. We need to learn some measure of self-soothing and self-care.

We’re supposed to love Truth, yet there is none. We’re supposed to love Beauty but we are drugged into a zombified oblivion by the narcotizing false standards of consumer culture that would homogenize us all. We’re supposed to love love itself, which science reveals as an obsessive, addictive process. The more we are calculatedly instructed to be freedom loving the less we can realize it. If that doesn't numb you, they give you Prozac. Shareholder values control your life, the plutocracy, the oil-ogarchy, global corporate feudalism. We are stuck between myths and the system, the decaying American Dream and unaffordable, non-sustainable globalization.

Even though it's an entertaining idea, let's not go down the cinematic black hole that claims we're storage batteries for alien life in the digital Matrix. The tides of human history are sufficient to program most of us into a myopic self-absorbed stupor. Everyone is missing the Big Picture because their attention is waylaid by survival, mindless entertainment, or cultural and religious myths. Just try working yourself out of that labyrinth.

Self-organization and self-steering provide alternative dynamics for the subjective experience of will in Chaosmos. We think we are autonomous, but consciousness studies cannot confirm free will or True Will. We may tell ourselves we have intentionally aligned our will with cosmos for some greater good and experience "cosmic flow", but that could be a bigger fantasy than The Matrix. You may as well rage against the Machine. As long as sociopolitical forces anticipate your next thought you are conditioned to think that way. We think we experience free choice if the determinants are hidden from us. What, if anything, makes our discontent "divine"?

Free Will is arguably as improbable as Free Lunch or Free Energy, according to today's Science. If it exists, we can't find it or tap into it at this time, except conceptually. But we like to speculate and dream about these potential freedoms, which could magically fulfill our desires, security, and power needs. THEN, we might feel "in control". But we fear we aren't in control of our lives except in small ways; the world at large is completely different than we have been led to believe. And freedom remains a "potential". The structure of digital information is decentralized, heralding the end of cultural and individual control fantasies.

Nobody controls anything. It's so complex, everything affects everything else, and we can't anticipate, plan for, or escape it all, despite our intentions or the quantum-mind magic buzzword, "intentionality". Perhaps we seek a domain of control of our lives and health and futures precisely because we feel so OUT of control. We see the flux of chaos and sense the fear and pain in its wake.

In his theory of the virtual class, Pomo social and political theorist Arthur Kroker raises this fear to double irony, to hysteria, to spasm in his reflections on technoculture. In 'Hacking the Media', he says "We like the notion of overidentifying with the feared and desired object, to such a point of obsession that you begin to take a bath in its acid juices. You travel so deeply and quickly in cyberculture that you force it to do things it never wanted to. I try to live my philosophy through cyberculture."

The mind is a factory of illusions, therefore disillusionment. The directed mind also has the capacity to SEE THROUGH its former illusions. We are constantly under the influence of subliminal and overt messages, both internal and external, that create natural trance states and associated beliefs. They color our self-image, relationships, worldview, existential and spiritual beliefs. They self-generate signals that attempt to fill the existential void with some repertoire of multisensory iconography, the linguistic and visual grammar and vernacular of a belief system.

Metaphysics is more than an umbrella term for eclectic spiritual practice or a spiritual study of the Arcane, magick, and hierarchies of altered states and Unknowable Truths. It is the domain of philosophy. In physics it means that which by its very nature is beyond physics, beyond physical corporeality and observability and experimentation. In thought, truth passes as the resonance felt when an old opinion marries a new fact. If it performs this function for you, you consider it “true”; you vibrate with the bliss of recognition, the “ring” of truth.

But metaphysics has been fused with the gnostic lie: The fundamental idea being that there are no knowable ideas, only Mysteries which some elite people have been given the key to and others haven't. God likes some and doesn't like others, and that's all there is to it, and we know who we are, and we know who you are. Like Parsifal in the mythic struggle of the Grail Quest, you have to ask yourself, “Who do these things serve?" Then follow the money. Some myths are worth believing; they have a cash value.

Again, it is well to notice what your attention is being misdirected from while pondering the imponderables in the echochamber of religions. The whole arena is a tableau of magician's misdirection. While you became drowsy digesting the gluttonous banquet of the global cultural content of the collective unconscious something else is going on in the world. You have to ask, where are these ideas really coming from; where did they originate, and what was their functional purpose in society? The real questions is WHAT IS IT PREVENTING YOU FROM THINKING ABOUT - WHAT OTHER COMPELLING PERSONAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES?

Passion for unattainable Truth and Beauty is just as big a deflection as the narcissistic pragmatics of ambition, lust and greed. They can both be carrots to chase. Both naturalism and pragmatism may be doomed by the exponential acceleration toward a transhuman technofuture. Manipulative intervention is possible at multiple points in these belief cycles to reinforce them. In the end, they are concepts of ways of being and becoming. The history of metaphysical ideas is riddled with political and social intrigue. They are deployed to strengthen and manifest downright feudal agendas. There are many new names for old ways of thinking and being.

Ontology is the philosophical investigation of existence, or being. It may be directed towards the concept of being, asking what ‘being’ means, or what it is for something to exist and/or what exists?’, or ‘what general sorts of thing are there?’ It is common to speak of a philosopher’s ontology, meaning the kinds of thing they take to exist, or the ontology of a theory, meaning the things that would have to exist for that theory to be true. All seekers have these basic assumptions about reality based on their experience and worldview.

Epistemology describes how we know what we know and what it is subjectively like, metaphorically. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. There is a vast array of views about those topics, but one virtually universal presupposition is that knowledge is true belief, but not mere true belief. Our own personal epistemological metaphors are how we describe our subjective experiences to ourselves. They condition our experience, but they can be morphed in therapy, through trauma, by propaganda and enculturation.

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of reality: are there principles applying to everything that is real, to all that is? We can abstract from the particular nature of existing things what distinguishes them from each other, and what can we know about them simply because they exist?

The second type of inquiry seeks to uncover what is ultimately real, frequently offering answers in sharp contrast to our everyday experience of the world. Understood in terms of these two questions, metaphysics is very closely related to ontology, which is usually taken to involve both ‘what is existence (being)?’ and ‘what (fundamentally distinct) types of thing exist?’

Even the philosopher with a low opinion of the prospects for traditional and "woo woo" metaphysics can believe that there is a general framework which we in fact use for thinking about reality, and can undertake to describe and explore it. We can inquire into our most general patterns of thought, and the nature of things themselves only indirectly, if at all. Perhaps it does imply that there is a small but fairly stable core of human thought for it to investigate, but this collides with Postmodern thought which rejects meta-narratives.

When we waken from one of these philosophical dreams into another, we find the crumbling 'truths' were simulations or simulacra all along. What felt authentic, even sacred, at the time is revealed as a sham. A change of heart correlates with the revisioning. The belief's charge of divinity came from the believer's attribution, not its inherent qualities. It is now revealed as a projection.

We have scientific explanations for most of the phenomena that were considered divine powers until a few decades ago. Pre-scientific explanations usually included magic or divine intervention. We've plumbed the galaxies and universe back to the beginning of time, cracked the codes of life, and the workings of the brain. But we can't explain ourselves, much less how we are frequently duped by our subjective experience - or our interpretations of that experience.

Our environment is no longer more mysterious than the unsolved Mystery inside ourselves. We've consumed subject after subject in science and metaphysics in a feeding frenzy. But, we still haven't plumbed the depths of our own consciousness, which is riddled with paradoxes and weird properties. Our sense of Self imposes a sense of unity on our morphing essence, but science can't find this core self in our hardwiring. The "I's have it" and try to make sense of what the other "I's" are doing.

Consciousness eludes both scientists and the common person, but we remain sure we exist, even though physics has shown that the basis of all existence is quite ephemeral. The world of objects has disappeared in the waves of a quantum magic wand. So-called Reality is not at all solid, emerging from the primordial Nothingness beyond the mystic veil of biological and inorganic corporeality.

Nothing Matters. Nothing has been the same since science convinced us we DO live in a vacuum (fluctuation). The ideological equivalent was the diversified relativity of Postmodernism, a bleak vision which can be summed up as the philosophical, intellectual and aesthetic equivalent of "Been There; Done That".

NO NAKED FREE LUNCH: There is no Common Sense; it is the least common attribute. There are plenty of compulsives, sociopaths, toxic narcissists and hyperactives. Illogical reasoning abounds; critical thinking is virtually nonexistent. Intuition works no better though it is trotted out as buzzword and viable alternative. Often intuition means "anti-rational" or "anti-scientific" to those who "trust" it. They can recite a litany of how it has worked for them, conveniently overlooking times it did not.

Intuition is described as a mystic resonance, and zealously defended, but is essentially an emotional argument tied to "felt" sense. I'm not saying we shouldn't listen to intuition; it is a basic way of apprehending, but why is it being reified now? It's another way of pretending there is choice and control; in other words, a form of denial of reality. The fantasy of meaningful intuition is a way of seeking divine connection, mystic signs, confirmation and validation from the Beyond. Meaning has imploded into digital binaries of electronic society. Reality has imploded into hyperreality in life and art. Imagination is reality.

What happens to our social instincts in the age of media? Nothing is as it seems at "face value". Metaphor is a linguistic and visual shorthand of primal sensory experiences that help us map and understand domains of experience. Something stands for something else. When metaphor is a transaction between two concepts, interpretation of each concept is changed in the catalytic process. They trade meaning. Metaphor creates and expresses rather than reveals similarities.

HYPERMEDIA: For the simplest example, digital art can be a copy of a photo of a painting, that is further tweeked into a reflection of the artist's vision in the theater of the mind. Where photography stops, digital art begins it's fractal reiterations of reality. So the Digital Art image or icon is a copy of a copy of a copy of the original. It bears only a surface resemblance having become hyperreal, what Umberto Eco might call an authentic fake, a recombinant commodity. Multiplied stylized images take on a life of their own, shattering the grid of representation.

There is an implicit aesthetic in our experience, and in our virtual experiences. We are hyper-connected yet perhaps less intimate than ever in our technological disembodiment. There are many brands of technological determinism, from utopian to neo-conservative. The utopian 'global village' is replaced with the hyperreal simulation. (Deleuze, Guattari).

Likewise, cultural life has become a hyperreal parody of itself, in the arenas of new media, class, science, politics, celebrity, money, sexuality, power, work, relationships, health, madness, and values. There is no empirical science, just subjective relativism. The virtual class is invisible, dispersed. Cyberpunk is stuck somewhere between resistance and arrogance that everyone "will be assimilated" or become merely obsolete eaters.

Neither the artworld nor spirituality has escaped this flux. Both are full of self-styled gurus and pundits. Classically, the means employed by fakirs are simple misdirection, hypnosis and Psychology 101, which seem to gain in effect as they are divinized and employed beyond the consulting room. After all the psychobabble, vergiberage and bafflegab, we don't need more interpretations or programming; we need to WAKE UP.

Instead of promoting human-centered value systems, fashionable buzzwords twist their meanings often into the functional equivalents of their exact opposites in New Speak. We go to war to insure a peace that never materializes. Our 'salvation' comes at the expense of the whole biosphere; 'rapture' justifies rape of the planet. Human values are touted as reasons to infringe on our autonomy and civil rights. Love means hate; peace means war; security means corporate slavery. Health means mechanization, hybridization. Democratization means corporate looting and exploitation. "Sick" means cool; "Peace Out" notices there is certainly none within us.

There is a subliminal war being waged for our minds, which the Not-Sees would like to hijack for their agenda. Democracy has crahed. Culture only requires a few progressive or innovative thinkers, and a vast army of passive followers who can't or won't think for themselves. Those who don't passively follow the groupthink are labelled weird or eccentric, dancing to a different drum. "Eccentric" means you use your brain instead of letting an external phenomenon condition your brain. The more "conscious" you are, the more eccentric "they" consider you. Well, maybe "they" are boring and predictable.

WHITE NOISE: The cacophonous sumtotal of all frequencies and symbols is white noise. Our culture is stratified by classes (elite, intellectual, bourgeois, wage slave) and racism. The same psychological dynamics, prejudices and misapprehensions prevail in the jumbled philosophies of the spiritual arena, aka the "spiritual supermarket". Metaphysical beauty hides the rotting corpse of new age thought, the eclectic pastiche of incompatible decaying and ruined abstractions.

Seeking a root in today’s creatively evolving culture, many look backward and start digging in the fertile soil of perennial philosophy and gnostic thought. Maybe it is fertile because it contains millennia of conceptual shit, faulty restrictive beliefs. So what do we resurrect when we recursively adopt bits and pieces of outdated philosophy extracted from their native cultures? The sampling and remixing of previous cultural forms.

Others take their cues from psifi Utopias or dark futures. Punk may be edgier, but is oppositional, and therefore stuck in a 19th century dialectical struggle with conventionality and the banal, expressed largely in transgressive and anti-Christian iconography. Post-apocalypsis has become predictable Gothic neo-tribalism, an ancient-future fusion, a pagan occult revival, cyberpunk.

Eclectic philosophical fusions possible are as numerous as drops of water, and some of them are outright rackets. Their roots are all intermingled in our collective heritage. In many cases, the so-called Wisdom of the past is over-rated or an unworkable program in today's world, but nostalgia draws us back like an undertow. Does being dead or discarnate make one smarter? Just how many incarnations or spiritual rebirths does it take to WISE UP? How many bytes of revivalist or transcendent Pie in the Sky does it take; how many trips down the rabbithole?

OBSOLETE REALITY TUNNELS: Tim Leary and R.A. Wilson called them “reality tunnels” while McKenna dubbed it an archaic revival. Tunnelling makes us “see” in a certain way; it creates our often myopic beliefs about self, others and world at any time. Belief wormholes that take us to imaginal or potential universes don’t necessarily match up with Reality. They are a way of sticking our metaphysical heads in the sand, giving our spirits a premature burial in the past.

Physics and art face similar problems with imaginary universes that do not match up with this existant one. Even Renaissance art was trying to re-capture some values from the past, technologically. It’s good to ask yourself just where you think you are going? Where do you go from here?

You are already living a Hyperreality. Debord calls it the Spectacle; Baudrillard calls it the Similacrum. Beliefs are false promises to restore a mythical truth underlying the simulation. Belief maps create the fabled territory that claims to be salvation but is a well-disguised trap, mentally and spiritually. Do you opt for magical concepts that are tricks of the mind or the charm of the so-called real? Imaginal representations are metaphysical simulations, virtual realities. The map isn't the territory of the mindscape, even if it's a good map.

Metaphysics is a dead end; all points of reference are liquidated by the universal solvent: chaos. Likewise, the preferred terrain of popular religions. There is a short-circuit in our psychological position. There is no touchstone of reality or truth, beyond the simulation of the sacred, the content of sacred technologies. We have mass murdered our own models, creating a power vacuum. Only the simulation of power masks the political fiction. Democracy has disappeared from the landscape leaving an existential vacuum. Capitalism has mutated into virtuality, a theater of advertising.

Baudrillard concludes, "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference."


CLICHES AND ARCHETYPES: Are you creating a unique reality tunnel reflecting your aesthetic like an artist, or a haphazard victim of dogmatic programming and conditioning? McLuhan said the archetype is born of the encounter of cliches. Michelangelo artistically forces intuition to metaphysical exhaustion. The technique of metamorphosis consists in arresting processes in full flight in the act of infinite fractal reiterations.

Each new medium is a cliche that burrows and borrows and barrows, or dumps, earlier cliches. Media as environments are quotation devices for psychic and sensory hooks that stick in the mind. The electric media retrieved the unconscious, the old cliches of tribal man, and scrapped private identity and consciousness built up over centuries of repressing the corporate and tribal life, etc.

Jung suggests that archetypes are dynamic energetic forces, universal templates of generic human experience, that act as lenses on our perceptions. In ancient times they were revered as gods and goddesses. They subvert and control our personalities unconsciously, playing out their eternal stories in our personal mythology. To the extent they dominate our personality we fail to carve out a unique individuality. Often we consciously identify with and idealize some over others, such as the Goddess revival.

The myth of the eternal return of the repressed feminine is the emotional appeal behind the popularity of The DaVinci Code, despite its historical inaccuracies. The humanist, rather than feminist perspective realizes the feminine has been here all along, working in its archetypal ways, suppressed or not. You never hear a self-styled Feminist man asking how to balance his work and family life. We don't really "get it" till we have transcended the essential dichotomies that actually perpetuate the struggle. In terms of gender reunion it is a biologically-based power struggle. So, yearning to free the repressed feminine, rather than just being a free human being perpetuates the split rather than resolves it.

There are no ideals and no ultimate negation. Those choices just buffer us in archaic perceptual cocoons, rather than drawing us into the vortex of developing futures. McLuhan pointed this out long ago, saying, "Utopians and anti-utopians are always obsessed with a period preceding their own. Orwell's 1984 happened in 1930." - MM, Take Today, p.75.

Most of New Age culture is either Gnostic, Theosophical or Utopian, sometimes in a very saccharin kind of way, sickly sweet if not toxic, smug and phony; full of New Age “guilt”, parroting, parody, and put ons. Sincerity just means you believe your own delusory pitch. Many speaking careers are based on charisma, the cult of personality, rather than strong content; a triumph of style over substance, validated by "True Believers", consumers. It is based in promotional culture, not necessarily its spiritual content. But no one seems to want to admit that blunt truth; it is the ghost in the shameless self-promotional machine. Often both leaders and followers build their whole personas around their beliefs, adopting the jargon, clothing, music, friends and lifestyle of a particular subculture or cult.

Of course, it is good to root in tradition, but we can get caught in the web of living metaphors. But reality tunnels create tunnel vision, a subconscious filter of belief-congruent experience, confirmation bias. In the womb we recapitulate the phylogeny of species, and after birth our beliefs evolve following the historical arc. Yet, we never stop in our arc to live like a reptile, for example.

R. Buckminster Fuller pointed out that rulers in the past made it virtually mandatory through the rules of academic advancement that the smartest minds became specialists knowing more and more about less and less, thus missing the Big Picture. In this way they sought to suppress their own overthrow by those more intelligent than themselves by containing their thought-processes. This system creates stricture in scientific and artistic freedom. Much the same is true of the culture of corporate seduction and consumerism.

The human mind is a competitive memescape. Small numbers of metaphors can define whole systems of thought; metaphors which are "fuzzy" are described with a truth scale from Zero (absolute falsehood) to One. Its 'normal' to have our desires shaped by the social grid and social codification (groupthink), but it makes us neurotic.

The effect of pop culture is conformity; even our subcultures are homogenized and reappear over the years in an infinity of fractal forms. Pop art is an oxymoron since it cannot fulfill the promise of art to deliver us from the conformity of market forces. The 'original' becomes a fiction; nothing is original since it is all derivative. But, like fashion, it may reflect the zeitgeist of the moment, and include the individualized touch, the artist's stamp of style.

Everyone is a fundamental slave to the system because virtually no one can ever fulfill their desires. If you think you are happy, it may just be the bliss of the "comfortably numb". There is the saying that those who forget or do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. But, in the post-postmodern world, what hasn’t been done? And done to death probably as good or better than it can be redone? Where is the unexplored territory?

BEYOND BELIEFS: Neurotheology has shown that spirituality is a natural phenomenon, hardwired into humans as a biosocial survival strategy that bonds groups with common beliefs and goals, personal and collective. This current runs so deep that for the majority of people, nothing is more important. It infuses all life passages with Presence and meaning in animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, even science-ism. We believe in belief even over uniformity of belief. But there is a deeper causal vector than beliefs, rituals, customs, commitments, and sacrifices: evolutionary value or fitness. It is the source of mythmaking, morality, sociality, and redemptive values.

Belief systems and paradigms provide rigid structures, the matrix of belief, we can use as our medium for self-expression. They allow us to investigate existence in conventional or unconventional ways. Research methods include setting aside received wisdom, burrowing deep inside your subject and learning to think like your material, becoming fluent in its vernacular.

Hypnotic trances can be instilled but are often a self-generated, self-created reality that appears to happen to us. Instead of being emanacipated, we are hyperdependant. Once we can acknowledge our role in creating these trances we can assume responsibility for the part we play in consciously or unconsciously creating our own realities.

Just as one trauma can lead to a recurrent syndrome, one deprogramming can eliminate it. We can do it ourselves, much like we create belief trances, by burrowing underneath the roots of our belief to a deeper clarity. We can "overwrite" obsolete or imported programs that have taken on a life of their own within us.

A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. They spread through motivating their "host population," novel configurations of old ideas, and by proselytizers. Popular beliefs spread like contagions, cognitive viruses. Memes are informational viruses that influence our thinking, feelings, even our physical regulation.

Memes evolve as cultural viruses taking on a fractal life of their own in the trances we live. They engineer our cultures and subcultures; what we will, won’t and can’t do, and believe. In short, self-replicating memes condition our lifestyles as “True Believers”. Each meme is an existential trance state. Memetic structures compel our attention; we propel and persuade one another toward them socially; they are the basis of sociocultural programming.

VIRTUAL REALITY CHECK: Korzybski pointed out that there are two ways to slice easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. So, from time to time you have to give yourself a Virtual Reality Check by playing Devil's Advocate to your own cherished ideals. How do they look from 180 degrees away? The hallmark of postmodern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all "metanarratives," or translations of reality. Postmodernism has even turned its profound skepticism on such important humanist concepts as "objective truth" and reason.

Yet, for a deconstructionist postmodern society, individually we are still riddled with superstition and gullibility, and open to manipulation through our belief systems as any politician, philosopher, clergy, or salesperson will attest. Further, most people are painfully naive when it comes to even the simplest scientific understanding. Most of us don't have a clue about the fundamental nature of physical reality or our own psychological nature, and our ability to be fooled by our senses and mind, or methods of social and technological persuasion. We may think we know, but the penetration is deeper than we dare imagine.

Nature rejects the naivete that seeks absolute truth. We are beginning to realize, individually and culturally, that "realities" are all human constructions. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience. The challenge of the therapist in these times of chaotic change is to validate the concept that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are.

We can embrace this disruptive chaos, trusting that it is an emergent self-organizing process. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system (the "box" we live in), nor our belief in absolute truth. A strong desire to engage in the "quest for uncertainty" complements our anxiety that perhaps there is no absolute, objective ground to reality. The warrant of Truth is ever elusive when we deconstruct the foundational justifications of our convenient notions about the way the world works.

It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology. Science offers no ontological Scientific Picture of the World but substitutes a number of applied theories as meta-theory. It’s close, powerful and useful: it ‘works’ and allows us to do work. But the still mysterious “true” metatheory may reveal the basis of consciousness. But who knows when we will lift that veil of Nature?

Permeating the living reality of our culture are certain contagious notions, fads and trends that have the ability to influence the way we think about the nature of Reality and ourselves. Some of them are toxic and can consume you; others are just whims of pop culture infectious and benign as the common cold. Jung described the concept of psychic contagion by certain archetypal forces inherent in the human psyche, which manifest in our spiritual lives and belief systems. He spoke of both conscious and unconscious contamination. Notions like this range from simple superstitions to scientific concepts, to urban myths.

Psychologically, when you change your internal imagery, you automatically change the attitudes associated with those mental pictures and old tape loops. All symbols and signs have been fetishized; every ethnicity and its native imagery has cycles of fashionability. They sweep in and out like the winds of March. Notions burn through our cultural landscape and insinuate themselves hyponotically within its fabric, as fads, whether they are "real" or not, they can be influential. They change us, how we think and feel. They mood alter us, make us feel we belong. An analysis of these notions is useful in distinguishing a common human phenomenon from any potential "alien influence" which may or may not be exerted on us from an unknown source.

BREAKING THE SPELL: Skeptic, Daniel Dennett takes a hard look at beliefs and attendant phenomena in his new book of this name, and asks: Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In a spirited investigation that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. He contends that the “belief in belief” has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need.

Ask yourself how adaptive it is to remain spiritually, mentally, or emotionally stuck in the past, for whatever reason. In my written archive you can catch me at virtually every phase, yet never stuck in one. Most forms of ‘worship’ are either archetypes or cliches, perhaps both. Personal revelatory experiences are no measure; they are often fraught with strong emotional content, but faulty thinking built on a grain of Truth. Often it is a compensatory mechanism to help us maintain specialness, a trick of the mind and self-image. If you recycle a retrievalist reality tunnel you are blinded to other options. It’s like being a scientific or artistic specialist; you know more and more about less and less.

What organic robotoid, parroting perennial philosophy is truly spiritual? Devotees often have a blank look in their eyes when they recruit. Future-resistance stops the process of maturation, as well. What we procrastinate about can take on overwhelming dimensions. It is a way of not “letting go” of outmoded forms that stunt developmental potential, a way of staying stuck. Be careful what models you let colonize your imagination. Are the terms you define yourself with irrelevant; is living up to your old dreams preventing your potential from manifesting?

Those whose cherished beliefs are challenged in the context of traumatic life events are likely to experience severe spiritual disequilibrium; manifesting chaos instead of self-organization. Spiritual disequilibrium can be a blessing, heralding rebirth: emergence from the destructuring of emergency, breakthrough from breakdown. The old structure must "die" before psychic rebirth is possible.

The future draws us forward like a handshake reaching back from somewhere between our fate and destiny, the strange attractor of our own futurity. It does not squeeze us into a recycled mold, and send us down a dusty rabbit hole of myopic vision. That is not focus, but self-deception, disinformation. You are probably not the “reincarnated alien-hybrid messiah of world peace and environmental restoration”. But you do make your own global contribution to the commonweal, especially through self-awareness, practice, service, and compassion.

The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval mystic text, describes the human soul as embodied in one's memory, reason, will, imagination, and senses. Yet, all these faculties are falsifiable or easily subject to distortion. Unless USED artistically, rather than experienced passively, media is an interruption of our internal narrative, our self-talk; a detour in content and focal point. Is your phone more important than your movie, or your loved one?

Interruption enables incoming messages by lending them shape and hijacking our attention, or they enter subliminally. Particularity is content and momentary truth. The goal is not to pick the right reality tunnel or be psychically tunneled by obsolete beliefs but to live freestyle on the tunnelless edge of dissolving boundaries, the anticipatory/participatory fusion of NOW.

BOUNDARY FREE CREATIVE EDGE: Welcome to the Edge, existential free fall, er, "free-style", since there is literally NoWhere to go. The multimedia field gives rise to the possibility of a work-of-total-art. The avant-garde is software, new interfaces. Computers are personal expression media that simulate old media interfaces. Outside of the professional and scientific domains, consumers think of computers as machines for downloading, storing, transmitting and editing media. Software such as media players and editors, CD and DVD burners, ports to connect digital still and video cameras or MP3 players are what consumer computing is about today.

In part, conceptual gaps and different technical metaphors are the source of generation gaps. The imaginative and adaptive faculties play a big role in what century (archaic revival) we choose to live in, according to our adopted beliefs, which condition our perceptions. Popular options include eclectic adaptations of the world’s religions, neo-tribalism, psychics, and gurus; even science and art have their own historical POVs.

The so-called New Age of spiritual snake oil sales actually harbors the agenda of hijacking the Holy Grail of new paradigm thinking, as long your new vision resonates with a polyglot of poor research protocols, implausible assumptions and lack of critical thinking. Radical pointlessness is the least occupied position, having no POV, it is the toughest to maintain. The poetic vision of Science-Art does not split the material base of Multiverse from the reflexive component of Spirit. It encourages mythopoesis but not literalization at the expense of common sense.

There is a paradoxical dissonance between old and new ways of being in the environment; things that should be preserved and those that are emerging. Things that stay the same are isomorphic constants; but metamorphosis, metaphoric change creates a sense of novelty and newness. The new excites us by emotional appeal, overwhelming our senses, shocking us, thrilling us, or otherwise modulating our systems in a way the old cannot. It reflects the future of our dreams, as leading edge art reveals the future of culture.

Our own epistemological metaphors describe how we know what we know and what it is like. Harking back to the past for a point of reference helps us move from the known to the Unknown in our descriptions, but if we take our metaphors literally, our beliefs stay archaic. We continue to recapitulate the philosophical evolution of mankind, but not truly move forward into new territory. The same is seen in the iconography of “sofa” art, which recycles the same tired themes and styles in the same media, over and over.

Free Style is an improvisational aesthetic that uses one’s realtime local surroundings and (synthetic) synchronicities and virtualities from which to create new expressions in any medium or discipline. We can deal with and use “what comes up” in a creative and therapeutic manner; we can intuit, invent, and concoct from the nonlocal information that is at hand if we simply open to that, living artfully from that spontaneous place.

Free style is an intuitive act that is at once intentionally connective with source and presence, thus freeing and directing that which is inside desiring to emerge: meta-creativity. Freestyle breaks free from the vault of derivative, corporate, or audience-driven formula production. After all, it takes risk to either succeed or fail.

This is the source of artistic and scientific freedom. We must trust the process; trust our own vision as the womb of our subconscious that gives birth to full-blown ideas and inspirations. Freedom of expression means each artist is free to create their own style, weaving into the existing genres of expression, combining, contrasting and injecting their own unique rhythms, modulations, and vision by working at their dynamic edge.

Free style results may be concrete or ephemeral, but the drive comes from a commited perspective on the fundamental nature of reality and our nature. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic. The art of survival equals the survival of art. Art is a human survival technology, in every personal and collective sense of the words.

The Glass Bead Game is a metaphor for playing with the total contents and values of our culture. It plays with them like a painter might play with the colors of his palette. The creative elements are all the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras. The freestyle artist plays like an organist on this immense body of intellectual and spiritual values.

Ideally, we surf the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness that gets the Big Picture, and perhaps even does something about it. ALL the creative juice of science and art is at the leading edge, the living edge.

Chaos theory defines the “edge of chaos” as a special dynamical balance. Science has shown that order emerges from the critical paths of chaos. In psychology, it means sticking to the image as given in Imagination, rather than resorting to glib dream or symbol interpretations. Shamanic personalities work at the edge of chaos for healing. Talent expresses at the edge. Phase transitions occur here, state changes, quantum leaps of consciousness, complexity. Like Schrodinger’s Box, it separates the Living from the Dead.

METAMEDIA: Wyndham Lewis wrote that all "living art is the history of the future". The formula is we become what we behold. What our culture compels us to behold is the holographic ICONOSCOPE: all the new media that both virtually surround and contain, as well as permeate our lives, and comprise an intrinsic part of our environment. The mind-numbing rate of change in our society is so unprecedented it is called Future shock. It’s a technological tsunami.

Debord called it a Society of the Spectacle, emphasizing its visual nature. Everyone is a player. We feed our human selves into seductive processing machines, dreaming of hyper acceleration. Some would say we ourselves are being superseded by technology, having fused with it already in a virtually religious epiphany. We're just the dangling flesh at the end of the terminal. The historical velocity of technoculture is so intense it's created a new autistic species: Homo Mutans.

All the high tech hype is to create a hypnotic fascination, hyper-fascination. Spectacle as a culture commodity is embodied in so-called Reality TV. The War on Terror is a materialized ideology, fighting an Idea. It is unwinable since you can’t wage war on an idea. Ideology is the problem, not the solution to human survival technology. Coercive ideas foster looting of natural resources, coercive institutional power and imported orthodoxies. The same dynamic produces trends, fads and memes, which permeate thinking as well as lifestyle. All gnostic forms are based in an ideology and theology of elitism, truth and secrecy.

Virilo relates all physical dimensions to simulacra, hyperdimensionality, physical presence vs. telepresence. We pass through time and space leaving trails of transmissions. Bluetooth and Broadband expands our aura with portable peripherals. The artistic object can also be dispersed at the speed of light; art rides at the speed of light. This action connects two distant places with a reality wormhole that can make the piece interactive.

Baudrillard speaks of successive phases of the image: 1) It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2) It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3) It masks the absence of a basic reality.4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

YOU TURN ME I-ON-A: We literally have the electromagnetic capacity to broadcast our images if not ourselves to the stars. We broadcast our identities as a fusion of recombinant personae, cliches, and archetypes: infinite fractal use of finite iconography: technological self-amplification of our bodyminds. You turn me on; I turn you on in a fusion of knower and known. I call my broadcast "Radio Free Qabala". coming to you from station IONA, sponsored by the Temple of Living Light. Channels may vary in your locale, that is, by your capacity to tune in and comprehend my essential nature.

Hegel said, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged.” Likewise, only relationships between objects are observable. Arguably, language was the first real technology, and all others mere extensions of our five senses.

Metamagic, the original reality medium, is a hypercharged spiritual technology, driven by ritual and belief: active attention is synonymous with “worship”. We are a fractalization of collective history. We are carried forward by the anticipation of our own lives, their emergent qualities. Infinite mirroring and anticipation is beyond synchronicity; Xenochrony is the holomovement of Xenochronicity. Only the level of resolution changes, not the content.

LIFE IS A HOLOGRAPHIC PROJECTION: Technology that allows us to manipulate our biophysics makes the body a true medium. We already manage our psyches and moods from a pill bottle, and soon we will be able to achieve similar results with our bodies.

Because we are so often overwhelmed by input and the light-speed of cultural change is it any wonder that stress, panic attacks and anxiety top the list of psychophysical maladies? Add the biological pressures of chemical and electronic "smog" and we can barely function. We are being poisoned slowly but surely by the environment and denatured or modified food.

The advance wave of transhumanism appears in the tattoo and body mod culture, which also carries a heavy nostalgic tone. Body modification is a neo-tribal fad that has allowed us to use the fabric of our being as a medium, to create body art or make our own bodies works of art through exercise, modification and embellishment. For some this is a soulful emergence and natural way of being, for others a desperate attempt to be "different", and for those who jump on the bandwagon mere conformity. This same notion is applied conventionally in plastic surgery. We all want to feel and look better, and that trend has become frantic in an increasingly competetive world.

We can modify our appearance to achieve a variety of desires. Soon we will be able to engineer ourselves from birth, and modulate our existential holograms at any point. It is difficult to imagine the repurcussions and endless possibilities this opens. When we interfere in our own morphogenesis can we continue to be "human" at all? What unnatural acts will becom embodied somewhere between desire and obsession?

The team of physicist Peter Gariaev detected DNA Phantoms in their research and concluded that we are human biocomputers. The genome is a quasi-intelligent system, but the wave level of genetic coding programs and organizes our 3-D spatial/temporal organism. Gariaev describes DNA expression as a meaningful text that is read and projected by DNA in 3-D in a bioholographic process with sound and light, much like programs of DNA movies or videotape. The digital analogy is probably even closer to the process of development and maintenance.

These movies get corrupted over time and produce aging and mutations. Wave genetics offers new healing and life extension possibilities. Morphogenic information is holographically transmitted and programmed. DNA is not 98% junk, but the formative and transmissive text.

All the cells of our organism combine to form a unified informational space which functions as a DNA wave biocomputer regulating morphogenesis and metabolic information, activated by transduced coherent light and modulated sound. This is more fundamental than genetics or molecular biology. Disturbances in the field that presage disease can be treated.

Healing information can be transmitted in waveform by resonance, sound and light, correcting error patterns or missing information. Video morphogenic information is regenerative, patterning a healing matrix. The bio-computer reads or scans the data and adapts according to the DNA-movie of healthy form and function. A weak field produces a powerful result. We are mutually linked material and nonlocal energy-informational substances that dynamically exchange energy and information. Soon we’ll be able to “change the movie” physically with quantum bioholography as the medium. This is another aspect of the Acoustic Environment: structural cymatics.

TECHNOTOPIA: Technology impacts socity for good or ill. McLuhan might say warfare itself has become its own virtual simulacrum: a self-contained, self-promoting, self-transforming virtual phenomenon stretching from abusive physical violence to the psychological colonization of human perception. Kroker speculates that for McLuhan, the empire of technology performs “psychic surgery” on the global village by means of the war on terrorism. McLuhan wasn't a technotopian because he was pessimistic about the applications of hitech as a humanist and leery of the media hype of the military-industrialists.

Evolving technology resonates like feedback in our phenomenology. Buckminster Fuller did not view technology as separate from nature and our nature, biological intelligence and technological evolution, including speech. Our separateness has created the pursuit of infinite individual "reality wormholes" which reconnect us with the collective unconscious and collective conscious identity through "voluntary ESP".

Media can be defined as devices that transfer a message between human beings. Cyberspace is electronic space, composed of computer networks like the Internet; in them information moves at the speed of light. At that speed less than 0.1 seconds is needed for an electronic signal to join the two most distant points on Earth. computer terminals, scanners, cameras, television, microphones, telephones, cell phones, and other sensors convert the real world into digital information.

Within about 200 years the human body has accelerated from the speed of walking to the speed of light. We no longer live as point-particles but in our waveforms, often spread simultaneously over several time zones. We can read the entire holographic time log of the Akashic Records at our local theater or on DVD. In Dobb’s vernacular, “past times have become our passtimes”, including interests in deep nature as the province of science and art, and obsolete gnostic and spiritual technologies.

According to Baudrillard, when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

KINETIC FIELD OF DREAMS: The Digital Revolution is here and it IS being televised in a myriad of fractal incarnations, but not on your Grandmother's screen. For artists, the 21st Century is a Digital Universe. In the perceptual-space we now occupy, the gender of presence is neither male nor female, but discarnate! It is the era of the metamorph. Even conventional artists can manipulate their images into a myriad of morphs. Because of insurance problems, fine art has moved toward the giclee print where originals are printed onto canvas and overpainted with a topcoat of paint. But why even bother with the smelly stuff? Why not just slip through the datastream? High end galleries are installing projectors. Popular art is being displayed as virtual paintings on plasma screens in private homes.

NEW MEDIA: That's HOT! And the hottest IT is multimedia, new media. Media guru Mark Stahlman defines this term he coined as the media, which replace the ‘cinesthesia’ of TELEVISION as the dominant environment in our lives and culture. Surround sound is already the medium that replaced television. Home theaters now dominate the consumer electronics business. They are simply big television sets with multi-channel sound added, replicating the experience of multi-channel sound in movie theaters. Acoustic space as surround sound replaced the "tactility" of television.

Media analyst/cultural theorist, Marshall McLuhan dubbed various media hot or cool. He stressed that ALL media are ultimately a matter of sensory balances and sensory biases. He believed that artists need to integrate, analyze and utilize rapid changes in technology, in order to truly have a mass impact on people in the modern age. But the electronic environment isn't limited to artists but is available to virtually everyone. No one escapes its influence. Rapid evolution of communication devices enables and future-shocks us at the same time.

On the other hand, some new media are in the hands of individual artists, who have the capacity to produce desktop films, find innovative new means of distribution, or create art that helps us meet our future. It doesn't take a multimedia studio to create meaningful work. But cultural and political factors are still limiting factors in the global arena of spiritless totalitarianism.

The era of revolutionary democracies is over, replaced by corporate feudalism which holds our attention in a vice grip of technological self-absorption and self-interest that infiltrates the thinking of both left and right with media propaganda. The Fear-Media Machine fights democracy and liberty with fear and racism, creating a mass culture of disembodied cyborg mutants.

The alluring promise of full-immersion Virtual Reality is the ersatz embodiment of this disembodiment, naturalized technological alienation. Still, the so-called New Age is still focused on 19th and 20th century out-of-body experiences, apparently ignoring they are rarely in-habiting their physical bodies. By subverting new media, the artist introduces a new way of being: Homo Lumen, who recognizes our essential nature is nothing but light. It is the old shamanic function of art and artist in 21st century form, artists and scientists who make the electrons dance. Biophilosopy reflects patterns of the ceaseless transformation of life, disclosing the networks of relations that draw the living thng outside itself.

In Simulacra and Simulation, French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that our "postmodern" culture is a world of signs that have made a fundamental break from referring to "reality." Reality is simulation of the simulation of reality. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth, which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

For Baudrillard all the media of information and communication neutralize meaning and involve the audience in a flat, one-dimensional media experience which he defines in terms of a passive absorption of images, or a resistance of meaning, rather than the active processing or production of meaning. The electronic media therefore on this account have nothing to do with myth, image, history, or the construction of meaning (or ideology).

Television is interpreted instead as a media "which suggests nothing, which magnetizes, which is only a screen, or is rather a miniaturized terminal which in fact is found immediately in your head -- you are the screen and the television is watching you. Television transistorizes all neurons and operates as a magnetic tape -- a tape not an image"” (from Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?)

VENTURING IN THE SLIPSTREAM: Welcome to The Media Matrix, the 'machine war'. Are you the One, a Neo trying to figure it all out in a world where nothing makes sense but Ones and Zeros? New Media paradoxically sucks us into the vortex of disembodiment and is simultaneously the anodyne that assuages the resulting pain of alienation. This is metaphorically presented as Aliens from UFOs, paranoid abducton phenomena, hybridization, and cattle mutilations. We used to be fed a steady diet of these hyperdimensional mysteries on the Discovery Channel, but now they have spread to the History Channel, as if they have migrated from phenomena of the natural world to factoids of human culture.

We have fused our nervous systems with the information environment, fusing and morphing both art and nature. We have met the cyborg aliens and they are us. Biomedia, genetics and wave genetics are not human survival technologies, but just the opposite, by making us transhuman.

FIGURE-GROUND SHIFT: Shift happens. It is the ground that is the medium, for the most part, and the figure-ground relationship that creates the message. It is the capability of the underlying medium to appear in and through fundamental changes and to sustain fundamental change in this way which is the message (mission), the sending. It might be said that the message of medium/media exceeds any figure-ground relationship by ex-posing the passing of some previous ground or grounds in the past and pointing to the analogous passing of the present one in the future.

Exceeding figure/ground indicates grounds (plural), indicates medium indicates message: "changes the medium, which is the message." The medium is the message because the medium, aka the plurality and dynamics of media, is what the message is always going on about.

In Take Today, McLuhan states, “Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.” - p.11

New Media are the various implementations and the profound implications of the shift by acoustic space from the ground of our lives under the conditions of the electric media environment (i.e. television). They are becoming the figures of expression in our increasingly post-electric world -- in particular, as reflected in three-channel stereo (3CS.) When you run your own multimedia content through your home theater, it becomes your own Church of Self-Amplification.

The post-electronic environment is the ground that is the true medium which creates the message, altering our perceptions of self, others and world. The ground of consciousness itself is necessarily double. It includes the nothing part of itself and the something part of itself; and can’t see itself. Conspiracy is the ground of the shifting paradigm.

Bob Dobbs points out, “I would say, the reason why the profane think (increasingly) conspiratorially, is: we have disappeared. So, we are not manipulable anymore. Therefore, the whole social engineering through the media, controlling masses as puppets (conspicuous consumers) - it’s a rearview mirror image. We can now see it aesthetically; or as an artform. So WE like to think and project that we’re being manipulated. Thus, conspiracy is the crude popular slang version of watching (Orwellian) TV and seeing the arty ego-ads manipulate you - saying: hmmm, they’re manipulating me. And I know they’re manipulating me! And they know I’m knowing that. There you have a menippean irony going on! And so, an alphabetic distillation of this process is: "We’re being controlled and it’s a conspiracy."

BYTE ME: Media are unconscious extensions of our sensorium. In 2006, New Media are Broadband, Wireless, High Def, and creating portable environments: the cell phone, high rez digicam, digital video recorder, gaming, podcasting, V-cast. The cell phone has become both the mini computer and TV screen with on demand self-programming of content. Portable screens represent a crucial inflection in the arc of digital media development.

McLuhan's famous dictum, "The Medium is the Message" had a second part -- "The Audience is the Content." Entertainment content must become more and more compelling or we simply make our own, instead. We all now have the capacity to capture virtually every nuance of our lives digitally. We don't have to "download" our psyches into the computer; they are already out there in the data streams as disembodied bytes in the aethyr, each with discrete wavelengths: our images, thoughts, and emotions.

LUMONICS: High Brow art dominated the artworld before Duchamp, followed by Low Brow postmodern rejection of all metanarratives. Arguably video guru Nam June Paik ushered in Know-Brow art based in electronic media. Only light can capture the nuance of energetic processes. Special FX pushes it imaginatively over the top.

The multisensory electronic moving image is now an artist's medium. The identity of the artist is not sublimated in the machine. Deliberately manipulating software in a considered way to create one's vision is quite different from creating art by letting the software run. The creative process between the body and the machine creates a dynamic unified trance presence. The body pushes on the machine and the data-body of the machine pulls the physical body into the generative process, sometimes in realtime.

We don't conquer the process; we link directly or celebrate with multimedia authoring tools in a private ritual wit more layers than Photoshop could ever provide. Is there anything we don't want to see or know? The body is still immanent in the work, in electronic and net-based media. We launch outside of ourselves. There is a metaphoric connection between the finished image and original data. It can be employed to express representational and abstract imagery through recorded and virtual technologies.

The moving image is central to our visual culture, articulating new strategies and forms of image making. The kinetic image fuses electronic and digital media into a new form of expression. We can easily alter both materiality and composition of the electronic image; we can refashion its content, visual vocabulary, and plastic forms. Desk-top cinema has made individual productions a possibility that has jumped the Theatre of the Mind, to become sensuously embodied as a "body without organs", an Android Meme. In the vernacular of paramedia ecologist Bob Dobbs, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. But in an era in which everyone is a filmmaker, who is the audience?

PARAMEDIA ECOLOGY: Primal man made his environment by magic rituals that were re-enactments and dramatizations of the creative process by which the world comes into being. Even Renaissance art was trying to capture the values of the past technologically, but 21st Century art is a holographic time machine. Your beliefs determine what century you are inhabiting. Technology has the power to be environmental entirely independent of art as environmental.

Even Jung had no dynamic idea of the psychic role in creating technologies or in responding and reacting to them. Yet technologies, especially electronic tech, are extensions of the body, making us all Cyborgs. The psychic and social saturation resulting from electric extension of the nerves is much swifter than effects of mere extensions to our physical being, such as clothing, or the wheel, or mirrors. The environmental role of art can be spiritual or concretely physical. The actual effects of new technologies turns old environments into art forms that help define us as modern humans.

Dobbs defines the Android Meme as the ability of human-invented technology to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition. In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of "being alive". McLuhan’s chief characteristic of modern media is that they're living organisms. That means they can communicate. The Android Meme wants to join with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism.

The Android Meme is a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human. There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it. It is collective mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance).

We actually download the archetype of the Android Meme into our nervous systems through television and multimedia. Bob says, “The Android Meme absorbs any response made to it. The artist's task is to understand and meditate upon the why's and wherefore's of its present techniques. This effort has nothing to do with how an artist survives economically.” So, don’t quit your dayjob.

"Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come to us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't wash over us and then go "out of mind." It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious....Such experiences are difficult to describe in words. Like dreams or sports, they evade verbal classification." (Edmund Carpenter; They Became What They Beheld 63)

According to anthropologist Carpenter, we are forced into new modes of communication and forced to create our own environments of declassified information when media render old patterns of perception obsolete. When we program our own psychic and sensory lives, we turn to artists who practice creating their own lives for reference. In many ways we are forced to improvise, taking what is at hand, and forming it into something that could be, into something new, but which is made from the parts of the old in a fractal reiteration.

ANTI-MYSTERY SCHOOL: SACRED AND PROFANE. We virtually 'worship' that which we give our attention; the more energy we give it the more we worship it. Our society is compulsive. Technology as the "demon of progress" is a spiritual rival, a rival to spiritual technologies, our "technical destiny". Naturally in the electric age this rivalry for the soul of man is far more intense than ever before: inner vs. outer quest. McLuhan’s thesis was revolutionary: each medium has a larger effect than its mere content, overloading, compensating and extending our physical senses, forcing individual minds and whole societies to adapt.

Today's 21st Century Media Mystery Schools retrain our perceptions even reviewing obsolete Reality Tunneling of the past: ritualized utility and understanding without boundaries or satcom interconnectedness. Technology competes for and effects human senses and perceptions. Art is inherently and seamlessly wed to media ecology. In some sense, the environment can be seen as merely a war between good and bad art. The question becomes not what do we believe and have faith in, but how can we live more artfully and heartfully, developing human survival technologies that feed our souls and spirits.

RECYCLING CONSCIOUSNESS: McLuhan taught that the environment is a programmed teaching machine. He was arguably the first feedback artist, hungry for people with new ideas, angles, insights, so he could use that material to generate more of his own. Feedback of feedback is bad feed, imitation and parody rather than the chaotic creative edge.

Now, with weblife, cell phone/cameras, Blackberries and Sidekicks we all live in our nonlocal "chip bodies" and have become feedback artists, perhaps imagining we are generating our own content of infinite fractal reiterations in a vast parody of ourselves-the put on, the spectacle. Is there any CONTENT without an audience to receive it? Is there any reason to DO anything if it isn't a PhotoOp? At art shows now people are more interested in taking their own photo with the art, than in looking at it firsthand. The same is true for travel; no one looks at the scenery exceptthrough the camera or digital video.

Between space and ground camera surveillance and GPS accountability no one is ever really ALONE; no first-person singular exists anymore. In Dobbs-speak, between voluntary ESP (net) and synthetic telepathy we no longer own our own thoughts and can't even know what they are or might have been without that perturbation. No wonder there is so much static on the Reality Channel of the Digital Universe. Also see http://www.fivebodied.com/project/

METAMAGICK; TECHNOSHAMANISM:
Shamanic beliefs are based on the notions that 1) the matrix of reality can be manipulated with artistic endeavor and spiritual technologies, and 2) powerful artwork can be stimulated by a variety of consciousness altering experiences, or initiations. Technoshamanism is the process of altering consciousness through technology. It implies using the artistic, psychosexual, healing and mind altering techniques of ancient shamanism combined with modern technologies for altering consciousness, culture, and the holistic mindbody.

Technoshamanism is the interactive integration of futuristic technology with ancient pathways of the past. As an artform, it implies access to full-immersion experiences, virtual realities that have consequences in the real world. Magickal technologies evolve; belief systems are technologies. Magic means intentionally defining a state of reality through the transmission of information; the medium is the message. Ritual technology is manipulation of categories of information as data and instructions. Contemporary magic claims that the human mind can directly influence the state of reality, though old-fashioned magic attributed it to manipulation of spirits or occult forces.

This gnostic experience for the new millennium explores the final frontier: the untapped powers of the human mind: spiritual technology without the straightjacket of fixed belief. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of the unfettered collective imagination.

The world of mage and shaman is the world of the spirits, psi powers, psychic phenomena, initiation, altered states, dreams, death, rebirth, and healing. It is the irrational realm of body, faith, trust, and belief. Shamanism reveals the uncanny world of superstition, disruption, dissolution, intuition, mysticism, transcendence, psychedelia, cosmic consciousness. It controls societies, revealing Dionysian and Apollonian spirit: sex and madness vs. conventionality, intellect, morality, and dogma.

Technoshamanism is also the world of what we can call extrasensory science. We can bridge the archaic and modern with cutting edge science and art, which dares to trespass into the forbidden realms. We can play the human sensorium with modulated electromagnetic energy. We can move shamanically through our blocks by heading directly into the fear and pain, which are the doorways to our transformation and head chaotically toward the creative Source. This is the shamanic journey. It is a restructuring process that dissolves old, outworn forms, and fosters spontaneously emergent new images and manifestations.

Technoshamanism is a voyage into the holographic matrix of experience, reflecting both our tribal heritage and global citizenship. In mythology Prometheus, staling fire from the gods, represents the archetypal technological man.

Arguably, two defining characteristics of the modern age, icons of our times, are the omnipresence of the Promethean spirit and the pervasiveness of sexuality and its imagery, soft and hardcore pornography. But even more important and fundamental is the power of imagination, passion, and pathos. We can each tap the spirit of Prometheus and Promethea, grasping our share of the fire of the gods, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit.

To the extent that the shamanic personality (like any artist) has great power, he or she penetrates deeply into the basic roots of the structuralizing process, and brings that symbolic information back. In the realm of “metaphorms” our brain images reality and the universe in its own structural terms. This surreal vision attempts to portray the working of the subconscious mind.

The future is being created in the imagination of the now. Herein lies the tremendous power of both art and invention. All the symbolic iconography of the ages is perpetually recycled and morphed at warp speed, and the vanguard senses that breakthrough is near. The morphology of this repertoire is embodied in Know Brow Art, neither high nor lowbrow, but cutting edge electronic media.

TRUTH VALUES: Is "Truth" destined to remain an eternally displaced metaphor, always just out of reach in the future or another domain? Categories of the "real" include not only the symbolic and imaginal, but also the hyperreal. Even our libidos have been hijacked and short-circuited by the therapeutic medium. Truth changes what we think and what we think is possible.

All forms of psychotherapy are riddled with fads, buzzwords, and belief systems about how and when healing and transformation can and do occur, and what constitutes the valid content of the trusted process that leads to the healthy, authentic life, self-actualization. It may be an oxymoron.

Is the search for the “holy grail” of Truth the ultimate Quest, a journey rather than a goal, as so many philosophers imply? It has taken humanity through the physical rigors of horizontal exploration, and accompanied us on our trips down the rabbit hole of conceptual and spiritual exploration. But, as we know, there is ‘truth’ and ‘Truth’. In Fuzzy Logic, which models vagueness, very precise assertions are almost never certain. Probabilites are uncertain; fuzzy logic is ambiguous.

Our beliefs compel us to engage in confirmatory searches, where we support, corroborate and verify to our own personal satisfaction. There is dissonance between the possible, the plausible, and the probable; then we hit the philosophical wall of the Uncertainty Principle as the deepest nature of reality. There is scant foundation of truth to build on. Can truth be refined in revisionist steps beginning with faulty assumptions?

It is the same drive that motivates both scientist and spiritual seeker to bite off an experiential piece of the Great Unknown. Is Truth primary or emergent? What is Truth? We may know nothing about truth but presume it knows everything about us. Our concept of truth is actually pretty flimsy.

Metaphysical truth is by definition beyond observation, beyond the physically observable, yet perhaps available by deduction or inference. What any given person considers a probability is conditioned by his or her beliefs. The probability of an event as not merely the frequency with which that event occurs, but also as a measure of the degree to which someone believes it "will" happen.

Some even contend they can influence proability with the buzzword, "intentionality". Is that a reality or a fantasy of mind over matter through minute perturbations of quantum mind? It all works logically if you embrace the foundational mythopoesis.

The very first and foundational inner experience in Kabbalah (the art of being fully human) is the Vision of the Mechanics of the Universe, in order to foster a critical eye toward Reality and its underlying physical laws. How can you possibly comprehend yourself if you don’t know the fundamental laws of physics and psychobiology? A common existential “mistake” is viewing ourselves primarily as a solid meatbody, rather than as an electromagnetic wavefront in space that science suggests.

If you are wrong about the fundamental truth of your own existence, how distorted will your other notions be? Kabbalah is radically pragmatic, though not objective, empirical, or reductionist in its approach. It invites you to subjectively make the experiment yourself.

We should take care that our protocols and resulting theories have a sound rational basis, taking the best from both ancient and modern worlds. The brain can register the same result for a simulated or real event; that is a double-edged sword that leads many to faulty conclusions. Can Truth be extracted from Cosmos; will the Truth ever come out? And if so, where is it hiding? All we know right now about the primary groundstate of human existence is that it is Pure Nothing (vacuum fluctuation; ZPE).

The physical and metaphysical roots of different kinds of Truth, relative and Absolute, include physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions; scientific and metaphysical truth. Truth relates to the Big Picture, adaptation and human survival. Even beautiful and convincing explanations can be wrong. Science often doesn’t know if it is ‘true’ and that is why ‘falsifiability’ is a keystone of the scientific process. We have various forms of truth but they are not reliable for understanding ourselves or Cosmos in the sense of a final and absolute Truth.

We try to obtain the most accurate explanation we can at the moment. Still, we cannot say there will never be an absolute Truth. Yet partial truths remain approximations. But this very lack of absoluteness keeps the future open. What most attracts our concern is often at the creative frontier of the mind.

Our understanding and definitions are refined as data are refined and our perceptions become more enlightened. It doesn’t change what is true, but it doesn’t mean we can never comprehend an Absolute Truth that is currently beyond our ability. We can’t really know. But expansion of our previous understanding doesn’t change the reality or truthfulness of existence. In black and white: what exists and true and what does not is false or a lie. Our perceptions can be wrong and sensible.

Reality can be strongly counterintuitive or contain hidden options at the point of observation. Truth fits happier with philosophy, but should not be confused with probability, as shown in the nature of paradox. Seemingly obvious truths are often not correct at all. We all harbor unwitting biases that distort the signals received by our senses and generated in our own psychophysical systems. Experiments in sensory deprivation have exposed the intense power of inner-generated imagery/feeling states. We can’t remove this distorting prejudice from our viewpoint so Truth remains elusive, if not completely partial and relative.

DISSONANCE RESOLUTION: Cognitive dissonance is the term for discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. When we need to accommodate new ideas it is necessary to become receptive to even painful revelations when faced with 'new learning' that 'contradicts' prior accepted 'knowledge'.

But we don’t like to expend more effort than absolutely necessary. THAT is why we get and stay stuck in discontent, ruling out the emotionally challenging which is too painful or unpleasant. But that very feelings fuels creativity and innovation, the willingness to try another way. We have to feel the pain and fear first to move on. Synthesizing paradox leads to resolving ambiguity. In a healthy person, dissatisfaction leads to creative action and new patterns of behavior.

Cognitive mismatches are emotionally painful, precisely because that pain signals a need for adjustment. Because it is psychologically uncomfortable, we try to avoid exposure to such ideas and situations. We have to learn how to not “tune out” when faced with ideas that threaten our biases and preconceptions, that is, IF they represent a better adaptation.

Accurate information increases ability to cope in the environment; contradictory and incoherent information naturally creates anxiety. Changing paradigms requires a shift in the level of explanation. Holistic ideas bridge conflicts like idealism vs. pragmatism, reason vs. emotion with global thinking.

Neurologist, Antonio Damasio says neural synapses in the brain are literally 'destroyed' when confronted by new 'knowledge'. This 'destruction' causes actual physical pain for us. To grow or adapt, we have to accept the “death” of the outmoded neural patterns and form new ones, even if it is painful while we evaluate and resolve discrepancies. We must learn strategies for resolving inconsistencies through integration and cognitive restructuring. It is a creative process. Self-actualizers develop integrative strategies for absorbing conflicting information.

Would you rather actually 'die' than 'learn' something new? Are you willing to live with partial satisfaction, or satisfiction? We must still learn to make life saving 'painful' judgments. Self-actualizing people are less likely to selectively repress information about their environment and more likely to find a new synthesis rather than short-circuit from conflict. They may be biologically organized differently.

Dominator cultures are riddled with nonsense that limits our potential, and prevents global responses based in self-actualizing partnership qualities like love, common sense and cooperation. Individually, influences propel us toward or away from self-actualizing alternatives. Some people are more willing to risk, while others are more sensitive to competiton among needs. We can short-cicrcuit the meaning, self-expression and richness of life with learned helplessness. Perception of our environment is a key factor in this process.

Philosophy is about what is changing and not changing: the Absolute vs. Flux. The rate of change is higher for our culture than perhaps any in history. In all cultures, flocks of phone-users can be observed stumbling around in huge crowds through congested traffic, seemingly oblivious to every thing but what is occurring on the miniscule screen in their hand. The ubiquitous cellular device is paradoxically robbing us of our individualities and enhancing our creativity by adding the dimension of immediacy.

No one is self-contained. In today’s world of instant communication our youngest appear to be losing touch with opportunities for communication with the self, for self-regulation. Children are growing up 'connected' at all times. Failure to be reached requires an explanation. We have changed our sense of a right to privacy, the sanctity of the individual: the power of one. It can be regained through focused self-care.

Dissonance resolution meditation can be learned in a variety of virtual environments, with the goal of self-regulation, stress-reduction, and wellness. By continually focusing on something that is mildly disruptive, the human system calls into play its own balancing and centering mechanisms and “overcomes” the mild disruption.

Dissonance resolution within the nervous system is easy to demonstrate neurophysiologically because coherence, resonance, and entrainment of electrical fields and currents can be detected by analyzing neural activity with EKG (heart) and EEG (brain) techniques.

Neurological aspects of dissonance resolution include becoming sensitive to very subtle levels of internal disharmony through growth, learning and expertise. Learning to identify the internal disharmony is similar to learning the “passive volition” of EEG or EKG control. The result once the individual has dealt with the mildly unpleasant stimulus is greater balance, greater focus.

A person can learn to control various aspects of the mind and body in pleasant, non-painful ways. Resolving the finer degrees of dissonance is another route to mastery of stress and achievement of high-level wellness. The basic idea is to involve the viewer in focusing simultaneously on both visual and stereo sound stimulation on a regular basis to establish both mind and body discipline.

This consciousness tool is very much of a scaled-down version of what happens to the viewer as a participant when he or she is focusing on a matrix of shapes and sounds that are constantly changing in real life. That is a definition of DR at one level. But as a technique that is practiced and becomes a clear habit pattern, DR is still an effective type of meditation. Combining visual stimulation with stereo auditory patterns initially evokes internal dissonance. Conscious and unconscious processes serve to resolve as the viewer-participant becomes involved and then progressively engrossed in the stimuli.

Neurological visual and auditory meditations can be learned, creating habit patterns to improve the ability to focus. In this study’s form of meditation, dissonance resolution, the student is first given a mildly distorted signal to focus on. After overcoming the mild irritation of the distorted signal, the nervous system rebalances itself in order to accommodate that signal. One function of the dissonance is to attract the subject’s attention. After practicing this rebalancing skill, we feel the effect of mental effort as a sense of mild relief and increased focus.

However, any meditative type activity can have similar benefits, whether there is dissonance or not. Because of the considerably enhanced focus derived from regular meditation, a person can learn to control various aspects of the mind and body in pleasant, non-painful ways (Gilula, 2005). Mind machines and binaural beat technology such as Hemisynch and Holosynch CDs are alternatives for self-regulation.

DIGITAL CONTEXT: In 1993 I wrote an article on the Digital Universe for CHAOSOPHY Journal based on Fredkin's theory of digital physics, that information is more fundamental than matter and energy, that atoms, electrons, and quarks consist ultimately of bits--binary units of information. Online at http://asklepia.tripod.com/
Chaosophy/chaosophy21.html


A DIGITAL UNIVERSE?
SCIENCE MIRRORS ART; ART MIRRORS SCIENCE


DIGITAL CONTENT: The interface of computer science and physics has led to the concept that information may be as fundamental as matter and energy. Some believe that information is just one of many forms of matter and energy, which is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings. Others suggest information should be part of the new scientific triad--matter/energy/information--the main ingredients of reality.

Ed Fredkin goes one step further, with his notion of "digital physics." In this, and other systems, information is more fundamental than matter and energy. He believes that atoms, electrons, and quarks are ultimately binary bits of information. These discrete bits of information may be compared to the quantization of energy in light (photons). The work of Nobel laureate, T.D. Lee suggests that time may also be discrete.

Discrete states are the essence of the digital nature of computer operation. Discreteness depends ultimately on quantum mechanics. A general state which 'spreads' is a superposition of such discrete states.

Fredkin suggests that the universe may be a vast computer which creates reality through ceaseless repetition--taking information it has just transformed and transforming it further to generate pervasive complexity. Space and time are discrete, the laws of the universe are algorithmic, and the universe works according to the same principles as a computer.

According to Fredkin, not everything is best viewed as information, but it helps us model reality and create programs to test our notions. What he is saying is that "at the most basic level of complexity an information process runs what we think of as physics. At the much higher level of complexity life, DNA--the biochemical functions--are controlled by a digital information process. Then, at another level, our thought processes are basically information processing."


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Biopsychosocial Model, and the interconnection of all things.
Michael C. Barnhill, Philosopher

 I am utterly intrigued by philosophy and science. I am an intellectual and an artist. I believe that--to develop a complete mind-- we must study the science of art; and study the art of science. We must learn to think; and we must learn to see the interconnection one thing has with all other things. The Universe has always intrigued me, and I have always sought to understand it--through both, a quantifiable scientific standpoint-- and through a deep transcendental-philosophical standpoint. Philosophy and scientific quantification are both equally important. In fact, they [should be] interconnected—reality [is] one and the same.
To understand Humans, we must look through the lens of the biopsychosocial model, and we must understand the utter interconnection the biological, the psychological, and the social aspects have with one another. 
We must also understand the nature of the Universe in its entirity-- that we are on a continuum of space and time, and our biological and psychological states are constantly evolving, as well as the social environment. We must be all seeing.

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GAME CHANGERS
Once 'the Cheese' Has Moved


Today's world can be conceived within three spheres: Western, Eastern, and Digital where we all overlap. Each has its own worldviews and presuppositions. National, transnational, and criminal enterprises are not limited to playing by any acceptable rules of engagement. Self-motivated or political sociopaths can create instant havoc; this threat is a given, even with current malware defense adopters. Human and robotic attacks are launched from large farms of servers and support systems.


All humans will not interact with the software-robots in the same way, however.  Humanity has organized itself into different civilizations and these civilizations have different memories.  Crucially, the ways that the East and the West have dealt with their inventions -- always in the context of their own civilizations -- has been radically different.  While the West has submitted itself to what Pope Francis calls the "technocratic paradigm" (under which technological imperatives largely "rule" society), the East has taken a very different approach.  Understanding these differences will be quite important for how humanity takes responsibility for its future digital life.

As a result of these developments, we now live in a world in which global affairs are driven by three distinct civilizations: East, West and Digital.  While it is not necessary that these civilizations clash with each other, earlier forms of thinking, such as the late-20th century notion of "globalism" which tries to erase these distinctions, can point us towards dangerous confrontations.  Among our greatest responsibilities today will be to avoid that outcome.  We believe that understanding how digital technologies shape ourselves and our world is essential for fulfilling these responsibilities and ensuring our survival. --Stahlman, Digital Studies

In social science, the big practical issue now is between neo-positivists and design thinking -- it seems never the 'twain' shall meet. Transformative innovation has its own risks and exploitable vulnerabilities, particularly in terms of cybersecurity.

The starting point for cybersecurity has changed since the shadow brokering of government security codes. The ransomware industry can lock up your system and shut down your business.

The global digital environment has collapsed the distance barriers allowing threat agents to potentially impact all data and vulnerable infrastructure. Those tools are available on the dark market for a price. Make sure it is not your organization that has to pay the price, by ransom or situation response.


A "need to present one cohesive story to the world” is fine depending on how 'constrained focus' limits system security. Not all systems, such as strategic infrastructure, have a customer base that requires input or protection. In that case, a quantized or quantified approach provides the best solutions for framing 'how we know what we know' in both empirical and behaviorist terms...a reality-check on data management and risks to systems operations.

The old way is that you come up with a new product idea and then try to sell it to customers. In the design thinking way, the idea is to identify users’ needs as a starting point... “Iteration cycles,” “lateral thinking,” “user journeys” and “empathy maps” may work in some areas, but block specific solutions in others. To the uninitiated, the canons of design thinking can sound mushy and self-evident.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/business/ibms-design-centered-strategy-to-set-free-the-squares.html

Design Thinking is Human-Centered

Cronin says. “That’s a pretty tall order—we were asked to perform design at scale and along the way create cultural change.”
Design thinking, a problem solving process, is an essential tool
for simplifying and humanizing.


We are Solution Providers

“Framing the right problem is the only way to create the right solution.”

We address risks and problems for stakeholders that will effect many people's lives, beyond the client, with clarity and focus for a meaningful and actionable problem statement. There are many processes available to help leaders solve problems, manage change, and grow and innovate.

Healthcare, judicial, and energy sectors

Managing risk and protecting infrastructure are vital. Security risk intelligence is a core element meaningful actionable intelligence. Information within a business is a critical asset that can be impacted by threat actors. The cybersecurity paradigm now presumes the wide-spread availability of government and military level programs to a wide-range of threat agents. An integrative perspective and context is the heart of the problem.

Recently you may have heard of an approach circulating in the business-management landscape: the Intelligence Field. Because the weapons used by intelligence are now avaiable to others, the analysis of intelligence has become a business requirement.

The contextual picture is an intelligence picture of cyber risk threat actors who exploit vulnerabilities present in all systems. Threat intelligence is a relevant countermeasure option that also protects critical infrastructure BEFORE situation response is required.

Blockchain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEWJ2MtZr-s

countermeasure BEFORE SITUATION RESPONSE IS REQUIRED
CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE CLIENT  [THE GOV ONLY PROVIDES ABOVE - reaction]
-we are- SOLUTION PROVIDERS
THREAT   VULNERABILITY/DEPENDENCIES   specific CONSEQUENCES    RISK /IMPACT
CONTEXTUAL PICTURE/INTELLIGENCE PICTURE
THREAT INTELLIGENCE  relevant COUNTERMEASURE OPTIONS
CYBER RISK  THREAT ACTOR  turtle blue double profile

  • Analyze design constraints, trade-offs, and detailed system and security designs to identify necessary lifecycle support.
    • Assess threats to and vulnerabilities of computer system(s) to develop a security risk profile.
      • Conduct assessments of the application's security design for the appropriate security controls, which protect the confidentiality and integrity Information.
  • Analyze design constraints, trade-offs, and detailed system and security designs to identify necessary lifecycle support.
  • Apply security policies to applications that interface with one another. Assess the effectiveness of information protection measures utilized by system(s).
  • Assess threats to and vulnerabilities of computer system(s) to develop a security risk profile.
  • Build, test, and modify product prototypes using working or theoretical models.
  • Conduct assessments of the application's security design for the appropriate security controls, which protect the confidentiality and integrity Information.
  • Integrate information assurance (IA) or IA-enabled products.
  • Design and develop secure interface specifications between interconnected systems.
  • Design, develop, integrate, and update system security measures (including policies and requirements) that provide confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, and non-repudiation.
  • Design hardware, operating systems, and software applications to adequately address information assurance (IA) security requirements.
  • Design or integrate appropriate data backup capabilities into overall system designs, and ensure appropriate technical and procedural processes exist for secure system backups and protected storage of backup data.
  • Design to minimum security requirements to ensure requirements are met for all systems and/or applications.
  • Develop architectures or system components consistent with technical specifications.
  • Develop detailed security design documentation for component and interface specifications to support system design and development.
  • Analyze information to determine, recommend, and plan the development of a new application or modification of an existing application.
  • Analyze user needs and software requirements to determine feasibility of design within time and cost constraints.
https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age
https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/wiki/36873/attachments/8a846/ModeGuideBOOTCAMP2010.pdf?sessionID=573efa71aea50503341224491c862e32f5edc0a9

Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients. A design mindset is not problem-focused;  it's solution focused and action oriented towards creating a preferred future.
https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking“
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

Neo-Positivism is Quantized or Quantified

Neo-positivism is a movement from early twentieth-century American sociology which blended together the three themes of quantification, behaviorism, and positivist epistemology -- to frame how we know what we know. When we quantify something, we put it into numbers or discrete packets.

Logical positivism and logical empiricism together formed neopositivism.

This
movement in Western philosophy was a thesis centered in verificationism, a theory of knowledge which asserted that only statements verifiable through empirical observation are cognitively meaningful. The movement flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in several European centers.
Efforts to convert philosophy to this new "scientific philosophy", shared with empirical sciences' best examples, such as Einstein's general theory of relativity, sought to prevent confusion rooted in unclear language and unverifiable claims.[1]
The Berlin Circle and Vienna Circle—groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians in Berlin and Vienna—propounded logical positivism, starting in the late 1920s.

__________________________________________
Contexts and Dialogue:
Yogacara Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind
Author: Jiang, Tao;
Are there Buddhist conceptions of the unconscious? If so, are they more Freudian, Jungian, or something else? If not, can Buddhist conceptions be reconciled with the Freudian, Jungian, or other models? These are some of the questions that have motivated modern scholarship to approach ālayavijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, formulated in Yogācāra Buddhism as a subliminal reservoir of tendencies, habits, and future possibilities.

Tao Jiang argues convincingly that such questions are inherently problematic because they frame their interpretations of the Buddhist notion largely in terms of responses to modern psychology. He proposes that, if we are to understand ālayavijñāna properly and compare it with the unconscious responsibly, we need to change the way the questions are posed so that ālayavijñāna and the unconscious can first be understood within their own contexts and then recontextualized within a dialogical setting. In so doing, certain paradigmatic assumptions embedded in the original frameworks of Buddhist and modern psychological theories are exposed. Jiang brings together Xuan Zang’s ālayavijñāna and Freud’s and Jung’s unconscious to focus on what the differences are in the thematic concerns of the three theories, why such differences exist in terms of their objectives, and how their methods of theorization contribute to these differences.

Contexts and Dialogue puts forth a fascinating, erudite, and carefully argued presentation of the subliminal mind. It proposes a new paradigm in comparative philosophy that examines the what, why, and how in navigating the similarities and differences of philosophical systems through contextualization and recontextualization.
Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monographs List, No. 21
Managing Your Risks for a Brighter Future
Turning Risk into Opportunity
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Managing Risk While Preserving Firm Value
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Information Life Cycle Protocol (IDD; RM)
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Risk Management (BSI)
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“They claimed only that the group was a collection of individuals with a common goal, to end tyranny, censorship, and oppression”.
Ultimately, these are some of the selfsame principles Anonymous holds near and dear. However, Cicada 3301 has not advocated illegal activities or hacking in any way. Ultimately, they appear to be, as TechDigg claims, a group “exclusively dedicated to researching and developing techniques and technology to aid in the ideas they advocate which are liberty, transparency, and security through technology”.
In addition to using many varying techniques to encrypt, encode, or hide data, these clues also have referenced cryptographic, mathematical, technological literary, artistic, and philosophical sources including:
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a poem by William Gibson
The Ancient of Days, a design by William Blake
Anglo-Saxon Rune alphabet
Johann Sebastian Bach
Cuneiform
C. Escher
Francisco Goya
Gödel, Escher, Bach, a book by Douglas Hofstadter
Kōans
Liber AL vel Legis by Aleister Crowley
The Lady of Shalott, a painting by John William Waterhouse
The Mabinogion, a series of pre-Christian Welsh manuscripts
Mayan Numerology
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a book by William Blake
Nebuchadnezzar, a design by William Blake
Newton, a design by William Blake
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Song of Liberty, a poem by William Blake
Collective consciousness and collective intelligence
Ego death
Esotericism
Gematria
Carl Jung
Kabbalah and Hermetic Qabalah
Søren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche
Grigori Rasputin
Jean-Paul Sartre
Robert Anton Wilson
Zen Buddhism
Atbash cipher
Book ciphers
Caesar cipher
Diffie–Hellman key exchange
Factorization
General number field sieve
Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems
GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG)
Francis Heylighen
GNU/Linux
Magic squares
Number theory
Prime numbers
Pretty Good Privacy
RSA Encryption Algorithm
Self-reference
Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme
Steganography in digital images, text, and network protocols
Strange loops
The Onion Router (Tor)
Transposition ciphers
The Vigenère Cipher
What was the Goal of the Cicada 3301 Puzzle?
Since 2012, it has been widely speculated as to who Cicada 3301 is and what their ultimate goals are.

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