The gnostic space opera rides again…

I’m noticing a resurgence of interest these days in the whole counter-initiatory, gnostic paranoia, school of analysis out on the internets these days, and I suppose that’s natural when all the bleakest wet dreams of malthusians, libertarian psychotics and primitivists all appear to unfolding on schedule.

I can’t really point the finger, because I arguably played a major role in taking this stuff to another level. At least among left wing occultists, and spiritually minded social liberals. Let’s just call it the Jeff Wells school.

To me it’s just a bit of fun. Adds some color to the otherwise gut-wrenching parade of daily tragedies and cycling through the dukkha nanas of insight practice, so let us dance around a bit.

It’s important to remember that the core feature of gnosticism, at least the branch that concerns us here, is the predominance of dualistic themes of ignorance, and knowledge, evil and good, light and darkness, etc. The more modern re constructionist tendencies in the gnostic community tend more towards something that resembles mahayanna buddhism for Christians, only without the clear practice instructions, but that’s neither here nor there.

Historically gnosticism is absolutely and unequivocally an offshoot of the hellenistic philosophies. All you have to do is look at their terminology. “demiurgos” is straight out of platonism, for example. Their cosmology is likewise straight up neo-platonism, like most early Christianity. Modern scholarship leads us to believe that jesus himself was a hellenistic philosopher, not a judaic rabbi, or an independent flowering of some kind, so there’s no reason to think gnosticism is anything but another side branch of greek thought.

Where these derivations stray is that platonism doesn’t invest in dualism, which is basically a recipe for ideological trench warfare that goes nowhere. There is only the One, also known as the Good, and anything else is only absence of the good, or of oneness. There is no opposing force. Full stop.

So really the gnostic paranoid notion of evil, or the neo-traditionalist pattern of degeneration is only a perceptual phenomenon, not an actuality. Which is a safer and saner way of dealing with this stuff: as a perceptual filter, not an ontological reality.

To me, whether or not the most wildly depraved thing in the universe actually happens or not, is an open question. What isn’t open is whether or not people think that they happen, which in and of itself opens up some rather disturbing and interesting areas of inquiry. For instance: whether or not aliens actually exist, you have a profound number of people who really do think that aliens exist and interact with them, physically. That’s not a curiosity, it’s a psychic epidemic.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I thought I’d spend a little time on a more top-down view of this then you usually get, and march it down through a few layers until we get to the ground level.

So we start with the one, also known as the good.  What makes things one unto themselves, and thus provides for their existence. What provides for existence is the highest good and hence the two terms are considered the same. And because it is “The One”, not “A One”, when you talk about it in this way, there is no other, and hence the one encompasses everything. Hence, everything is good. Period. It is the principle of absolute unity and non-duality.

Now, here’s where we get into gnostic territory: at some point the One decides to make something. Because it is the only thing that exists, and because it is good, it can only make something good, and can only use itself as a model for that making. It thus generates a copy of itself that will be the ‘idea in the mind of god’ that will serve as the model for creation itself, also known as the Logos, or the Word. In every case  of a rational principle at work there must be intent, which requires a model for actions, or the ideal goal, thus the model must precede the copy, which in this case means the One must precede the logos, and the logos must precede the creation of the material universe.

But a funny thing happens when the one does this: because it possesses the quality known as Ousia, it is fully transparent to itself, it can turn on itself and know itself in all ways ( this is the analogous principle to mindfulness in humans) and thus can lend all of it’s features to the model, with a major and profound exception: Because as soon as there are two things, the creator and the creation, there is no longer “The One”, but rather two things that are “ones-unto-themselves”, so to that extent, neither one of them is any longer the perfect one, or likewise, the perfect good, at least when regarded in this way.

From the first perspective, nothing has actually changed, and “The One” is still the same, and indeed, the one lacks any qualities that would allow it to change in any way, as any change can only deviate from perfection. Complex eh?

So from our second perspective, there are now two things: the transcendant maker, also known as the demiurge, and the first creation, also known as the logos. Both are subordinate to the one, and can thus both be regarded as creations of the one.

So even here, at this early stage, there is no dualism, but a trinity. The One, the demiurge, and the logos. And every further step from the perfect one, no matter how perfect of a copy it is, can only be less and less a perfect good, because each new thing only introduces new division and new disunity. Just as when the one tries to reproduce itself and loses the quality of perfect oneness, because every copy can theoretically reproduce everything except that which makes a thing what is it is unto itself, every copy is slightly distorted from its model. Thus, the farther you go down this chain of perception, the less good there is.

This is where we get the illusion of evil.

to be continued…

The Mosaic Effect: season 2,episode 7: it’s just a myth

     this one’s gift-wrapped for all my fundamentalist friends out there…

  a slightly out of sequence podcast, but it took me a couple weeks to edit down to something reasonable, wherein we examine the mania for true facts and the mistaken belief that this is always a good thing.

 And by way of illustration we bump that up against some recent research I’ve been doing into christian scholarship, and we can look forward to delighting our dispensationalist friends with a bunch of things that they probably won’t understand, but it’s probably better that they don’t, anyway. That’s how we got into this mess.

 and therein lies the point…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.7-its_just_a_myth.mp3

The Mosaic Effect: season 2, episode 5: the illusion of safety

     This one goes every which way, as we continue variations on our theme, and discuss the human desire for stability and predictability from many angles.

 We touch on nassim nicholas taleb and black swan events,  the buddhist marks of existance, james lovelock and the three legged stool of gaia, metastability vs equilibrium,  the futility of prediction, and the dangers of waking up out of the swarm.

podcast page here

 Direct download: TME2.5-The_illusion_of_safety.mp3

Producing the Means for Seizure

part two: life on the edge of the power curve 2012-2050

Okay, so let’s change our approach a little bit. I’m assuming you can and have read this… so what might that look like, in a little more detail?

  Let’s start with the basics: chances are, within a few years, you will have been more or less priced out of the market for oil and gas. You might be able to snag a bit for emergency use, or critical transport, but most everyone has to carpool, bike or bus it. If you’re fortunate enough to have trains where you live, then that’s great. This trend gets worse as time goes on. Expect something similar to cuba, where traffic cops routinely stop and stuff cars with extra seats, or huge flatbed trucks take on the function of busses.

  The good news is, the cottage industry for ethanol is ramping up. And no, I don’t mean this corn ethanol bullshit. I mean decomposing waste matter into alcohol on a radically decentralised basis. Eventually this becomes an integrated part of all farming operations, as the technology for alcohol distillation is refined and the design of organisms that digest sugar ( and eventually cellulose)  efficiently become more common.  There will almost certainly never be enough of this to replace all the gas we used to use, but it will be able to take over the critical stuff. The need will create the results. This is not new technology mind you. The first diesel engines were made to work on alcohol, after all, and it’s only a historical curveball that hooked us into ‘rock oil’. Most people will eventually have something the size of a rainbarrel that breaks down kitchen waste and dead plant matter into usable fuel. You will occasionally have to deal with the nuisance of these mutant bugs eating holes in your clothes, or some minor structural damage to wood objects… but hey, shit happens.

  Something similar starts to happen with food. A combination of price inflation,  wage deflation and contraction of economic activity makes imports of food pretty dodgy, and expensive. Wall mart, Safeway, all the globalised chains…these all go away. Food in general gets more expensive, and most people take up gardening on their balcony, backyard or community park. 

  This is all well and good until people start actually starving. You’d yank a couple tomatoes if you were starving, right? Eventually a combination of food riots, influxes of starving refugees, and general anxiety lead to most communities, or even neighborhoods, to form up into gangs/militias for self protection, and preservation of resources. You will probably have to deal with the sad spectacle of families going door to door begging for food, or offering to work for it.

  One starts to spend a lot of time pulling up pavement to expose useful soil, composting waste and capturing rainwater. There’s a pretty good chance you don’t have a job anyway. If you do, you probably work from home. It’s cheaper for everyone that way.

 Which brings us to the low end of the technology situation. I mean, we have iphones now, and wireless broadband is becoming ubiquitous. Eventually technology will be cheaper than food. You can already talk to anyone on earth with a device in your pocket, and carry around every piece of music you own. Eventually it’ll be all the music, all the video, all the pictures and all the books. In your pocket. You can put on a headset and carry on a conversation as if you were in the same room with anyone, or any number of anyones, from anywhere. Why even leave the house? Except to harvest the garlic, that is. The ability to make and hyperdistribute your own cultural material worldwide only accelerates the breakdown of centralised forms of media.

  A small blip occurs when the rolling blackouts start. Or depending on where you live, they started a long time ago, and become permanent. Most of the essential widgets are run by efficient integrated solar panels, and everything else gets run by ethanol generators. Once again, not enough electricity to run your air conditioning, or baseboard heaters; but enough for the lights, the cooking and to recharge your widgets.

 Now all of this so far presumes that you’re really lucky and you live in a (reasonably) sane part of the world. Either that, or you’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall and get the fuck out of dodge when things get bad. A lot of places will be subject to the no-go zone effect. The government loses the ability to project force, and provide services to a region, and said region is simply dispensed with. No cops, no soldiers, no utilities, and no trucks bringing anything. It is entirely possible to fill in all those parts of the equation, as I’ve said above, but the story of any particular place comes in how well that happens, or doesn’t.

  All of this really means a radical redefinition of the power dynamics in society and in the world. What happens when you have the ability to provide your own security, your own services, your own food, energy, culture? Whether by your choice or not, this is what is going to happen. Embracing it will make it easier. The whole idea of  ‘top down’ is going to fall by the wayside. Technology, the proliferation of ideas and institutional de-evolution will level the power curve for everyone to large degree.

   No, you won’t have cruise missiles, tanks and stealth bombers, but within a short time those things will be mostly irrelevant, just as they are mostly irrelevant in iraq or afghanistan. You don’t subdue a wireless, super-empowered, self-sufficient open source retribalised 21st century hyperculture with tanks and bombs. It’s impossible.

  But there are bound to be those stupid enough to try, and this is where it gets a bit scary. You see, it’s already possible right now, for someone of modest education and skills to manufacture a deadly infectious pathogen and it’s only going to get easier. The kind of people who do this are mostly dysfunctional reactionaries, but when you place the whole world in a hyper-connected echo chamber of threatening ideas, there will be no shortage of people with intelligence, equipment, and substandard coping skills.

  The biotech revolution is following an accelerating curve even faster than the one for computing. Eventually, you will know at least a few people who are running a gene sequencer in the basement. Which is good for when some fuckstick lets loose a hemorrhagic fever in your vicinity, and you need a vaccine, but not so good when the backlash comes from what remains of the ‘powers that be’, and a platoon of special forces drops out of a helicopter to machine gun you and burn down your neighborhood. 

 I mean, yeah we expect government to protect us from psychotic people with bioweapons, that’s a good thing. But they won’t discriminate. The crackdown against biotech will threaten to take away the radical life extension, disease elimination, stem-cell regeneration and every kind of weird gene alteration imaginable being cooked up in an environment like this.

  The instructive analogy is filesharing. Every so often, the big boys smash a central hub of filesharing with lawsuits, raids and jail time. And then what? They can’t arrest everyone, they can’t even find everyone, so all that happens is darwinism. The survivors get smarter, sneakier, harder to track and develop more and better ways to keep filesharing.

   But what if that file is a complete genome? And if people these days can crack iphones, they will sure as hell be able to make biotech equipment, when the time comes.

  The sort of chaos you see in the world of intellectual property, will soon be the chaos of our own genetics. And all of this taking place in the social and political chaos of what was the world we once knew. And this is chaos in the mathematical sense, which opens the doorway to a hidden order…

next???

a kind of madness

a bit of a one-off podcast to get the muscles going again.  More of a emotional tinge to this one, as we talk about the epidemic of depression, and what it might mean.

 podcast page here

Direct download: a_kind_of_madness.mp3

… I’m rethinking my approach to a number of things right now, so expect some twists sometime soon.

Your christmas message…

Leaving aside any solipsism, it’s fair to say that the outside world doesn’t really exist. not to you anyway.

  think about it: everything you think you know about the world is a representation of the information processed by your nervous system and assembled into a coherent gestalt to be thrown up on the screen of your awareness.

  What that means is, you don’t really know anything about other people. you know a lot of things about the inside of your own nervous system, and how it processes information.

  the good news is, the most exhaltedly saintly, christlike and wonderful person you ever met or imagined, is really just an assemblage of qualities that you have already internalised. In effect, the qualities of such a person are really your qualities. You just map them onto the signals you may or may not be getting from the outside world.

 The bad news is, the most fucked up, depraved evil bastard you ever met or imagined, is also just a collection of qualities that exist in your repertoire.

   As far as your nervous system is concerned, other people don’t even exist. Just placeholders for a spectrum of feelings, emotions and perceptions that you’ve already learned to recognise. Those aren’t their emotions, those are your emotions.

   It has always been you, all along.

    Be nice. Merry Christmas.

   If you haven’t all achieved enlightenment by the time I get back, heads will roll. This is your only warning.

The New Regime

   

Well here we are again, chewed over nicely in some self-generated paranoid dark night hell realms. I always suspected producing for this site is what kept me sane, but I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t true.   

Some people are empowered to spread the dharma, others do it because they are too gibbled to do otherwise. I happily tread this fine line. Closure and certitude are even more debased currencies than the US dollar.  

 I’m somewhat sleep deprived at the moment and can barely summon enough neurotransmitters to recall my own phone number, so I’ll keep this brief. I thought I might do a bit of Tim Boucher style brief daily postings, until my brain starts working again.

Not much point trying to birth any fully formed revelations at the moment. So expect all the channels to start firing away, as I rise from the grave like some dessicated clive barker-ish death god.  

No time to waste. I mean, if this isn’t the apocalypse, it’ll do till the fucking apocalypse gets here, man.

All Gone Quiet

Well, I appreciate everyone’s indulgence while I get my act together on this end. I probably needed a bit of a break to incubate things for awhile anyway.

I should only be a little while longer. I’ve finished moving, my application for the new job is working it’s way through the halls of power, and once the internet is hooked up for the new place, things should be in motion once again.

In the last week, I’ve taken up a new round of dedicated concentration practice, moatly to give my mind something to focus on, and I recommend highly for anyone to try doing it for six or seven hours a day for a month or more. granted i usually take a day or two off a week just to catch up on things that require a more scattered focus, but the overall cumulative effect is noticable and quite strong.

anyway, I shant linger too long just yet, but expect the initiative to return in full force before too long.

Magickal Record 11-03-07

M’kay, so where are we at now?

I’m pleased with the results of my month long dharma retreat ( and I mean retreat in the loosest possible sense ). Things seems to work better when I give myself one clear thing to focus on for some time. It’s nice to have your anthony robbins style goals list, but it’s easy to get fragmented when you don’t set rigid priorities.

So this month is the get-out-of-poverty month. It was all well and good to live a threadbare existance on the margins of society while I carried out my great magickal work in obscurity. That was just fine when material distractions were exactly that.

However, these days, being poor is turning into an impediment. When most of the things on my to-do list can’t get done cause I’m too damn po’, then that’s what they call a hint.

And god bless everyone who’s donated in the past to the alchemical initiative. I haven’t forgetten you, and I didn’t shoot all the money up my arm, I promise. My name is not aliester crowley after all. I appreciate the help and I welcome it, but this is not a solicitation. I need a real job, that isn’t going to make sick to my stomach on a regular basis.

I have a few ideas that should pan out in a short period of time. No more than a month one way or another. Probably more like a week or two. I will keep you posted.

One I’ve done that, we will see some hardware upgrades on this end that should let me take the initiative to another level. I was exploring avenues like skype and youtube for various uses before my old computer killed itself. Even being able to do sound editing at home with a machine that doesn’t run on a hampster wheel would be helpfull.

And the truth is, I need to be getting on with this part of my life anyway. I had my midlife crisis when I was about twenty and spent ten years on the flipside of reality, but it’s time to do what it takes to embody my vision in a more concrete way, and that means more $$ and it means more education in certain technical fields, and it means credentials that will open doors, and to do all of that, I need to know I’m not going go broke if something in my life zigs instead of zags.

This is not me capitulating to the system, mind you, I had always planned to storm the corridoors of power at some point, but not until I knew how to do it on my terms, and now I do. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong, and the poorhouse will always be waiting if I feel like reclaiming any dubious authenticity.

So, my updated, revised and prioritised list of goals:

-get a real job, this month

- when and if that is done, or when I’m not likewise engaged, maintain the dharma practice, specifically jhana and vipassana. the conduct side should take care of itself, if I can pull the job stuff off.

-produce some new content for the site. several ideas along these lines, although the one that comes to mind first may end being a worthy contribution to the field of 911 research, of all things.

- with the understanding that I will have some more money in short order, scout out a new computer, webcam, cd burner etc…

-get my flexibility routine back in order

-schedule another water fast, and prepare to see it though, armed with the experience gleaned from our first one.

the world belongs to us! even if it ends up being nothing but smoldering ruins, at the rate things are going…

Victory or Death!

Farther Down the Fractal

Well, so far as I can tell, I’m not an arahat. And if I am, it’s an exceptionally subtle condition of being, which it may well be.

Not that I’m complaining mind you, as all aspects of my practice have made quantum leaps in clarity and precision.

One secret that I’ve learned to build my life around is this: quantifiable goals + measurable progress + time = guaranteed success. All you have to do is not give up, or die, and success is inevitable.

One might think of this excercise as something in line with ’shooting the curve’. Where one isn’t really aiming for goals, but to change the rate of change in the system. By that standard, I’m now much farther ahead on the timeline than I was a month ago. If I were to plug another month like this into the system, who knows what might be accomplished, and I may well do just that.

For now though, the full spectrum catastophe is ramping up everywhere you look, and it’s time to get back down to color commentary on the kali yuga.

Which means we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, for awhile at least.

Expect a more detailed list of goals, progress reports and itinerary of upcoming items is short order…