Wow here I am back here and writing another post. Who would have thought after another long abscence that I would think to post something back here. But here I am, full of suprises.
For those of you that stop by and have a look, I give you this insightful jpg.
It makes a very valid point. Technology only goes so far at doing so much. Beyond that its time for people to wake up and realise that there is more to the world then pixels and chips and AI driven wish machines.
Culture as a whole may not be your friend, but the edge of culture is an area that you should be very friendly with. For every marketing driven fad and gimmicky flash in the pan, there are also beginnings of movements that could shake the established ways of society to the core. New styles of writing, music, dance, art, as well as world views and social theories all present the world to us in a different way that we haven’t seen before. To bring it back to a theme that I talk about a bit on this site, what they do is create noise that disrupts the signal that mainstream culture and established forms pump out to the population, and make people re-evaluate what they like, and how they see the world.
These new form then become part of the overall evolving cultural framework, merging with other forms, morphing, changing and spawning new forms and movements
Emerging cultural trends are the only place that there is any chance for something vital to occur. They either become new movements, or merge into existing forms and change them, resetting their direction. All of this happens in very strange ways, with movements becoming vectors for ideas, inserting viral memes into subcultures and the over culture as a whole. Look at what late 60’s rock music did for the hippy lifestyle. Because people dug the tunes, a whole lot of other ideas piggybacked into their lives as well like peace, love, environmentalism, drug use, eastern philosophy, new age ideas, fashion trends and lifestyle choices.
Of course, eventually every cultural trend will eventually be co-opted by the marketing driven corporate machine and ground down through a predictable, vampiristic cycle of abuse and over exposure. The key is to go back and look at the original spirit of the movement, and look at what made the originators come up with the style.
Also, I don’t want to contradict myself, but I do see a lot of sense in people using traditional forms to express themselves and their ideas. Traditional views of things like magick, shamanism, meditation have worked well and served people for thousands of years. If you really look at these things that appear on the surface as timelines, what you see is the most staid and steady cultures are still not too stagnated and full of dogmatism (at least in some areas and by some practitioners). They still allow themselves to be vital, for the nuances of the form to flourish, for fresh insights to allow the practice to evolve and mature. As soon as everyone knows all the tricks, the fun soon goes out of the game.
Apr 28
For a message to be understood from any source of information, first you must have the algorithm/filter to uncompress, translate or understand it. You must have a pre-defined understanding, like know the language, or the symbol set used, in order interpret the reality in front of you in the right context.
For the full understanding to arise you must uncompress the concept held in the words, symbols or data
The Buddha talks of nirvana as an uncompressed reality, and a unity of all consciousness. The Buddha obtained this state is by shutting down the external Inputs and Outputs to your consciousness. Block out all the data that is possible coming in to be processed. Once that is achieved, starts to look for something else to process. It works over its backlog of thoughts and starts to bring things to the surface.
The Buddha would then start to shut down the internal Inputs/Outputs’ between the minds internal systems. Not identify with any of the thoughts, see each arising and departing separately. The internal thought filters that you use start to fall away, and you start to get a sense of the whole system as one thing.
Perhaps this nirvana is seeing the whole stream of data as one indefinable chunk. Of not labeling internal or external, of just living a pure, undifferentiated, unlabelled experience (or at least having a living comprehension of this idea). An un-compressed, unfiltered view of reality.
The modern subconscious has been so filled up with media, conditioning, schooling, parenting and working that it must be one of the most dense information stores in the history of the universe. The thing is that we are not really provided with any nets or fishing gear at the moment (that’s what shamans etc were good for), and the things found in its murky depths are not taken to be of any value.
By looking into sources of information noise, such as random wikipedia sources (method) and looking within yourself, you stir these waters and can see thoughts as the arise to the surface from the pressurized depths. These strange creatures are the whole basis for our civilization, culture.
This is a great tool to explore your own inner and outer reality.
Its just like tarot cards. They are just symbols on a page, with no actual absolute value. The interpretation of each card changes from person to person, even in subtle ways. The literal meaning of the cards is not the important bit. How these random media work is that they stir the mind in unexpected and unpredicted ways, and allow fresh insights to emerge. Signal from noise.
Here is the method for those of you that want to play along at home :
1. Get random information noise from the internet. There are now some great services out there online that will give you something TOTALLY random, be it some text, a picture or a video. The scryers and card readers of old would go crazy if they had power like that
2.Feed that random search back through some more random generators. Put the random seed through another set of filters, such as google image ripper, or even a straight google / wikipedia search to get some more background to the concept that you have uncovered.
3. Reflect on what this random noise drags up from your mind. Think, remember and start to take notes.
4. Write down the thoughts that have been agitated to the surface from this random intake of information
There is also another step at the very start, if you want to take the divination part a bit further.. Ask a question before you begin
I was just thinking today that one of the reasons that human society is on such shaky ground is that we really don’t care how much damage the current system does to the mental space of people.
Depending on who and how much you read, modern life is screwing us all up to a small or a large degree, making us all dependent, semi psychopathic, despondent and depressed. This is only taking into account those of us lucky enough to be in developed, western countries. For people in the third world, or currently suffering through war or extreme poverty i can only barely imagine the day to day stresses that it places on man, woman and child.
People broken inside are not going to be thinking for ways to turn the system around, to build a better world for their children and start caring for the physical space around them. No, they are most likely to be looking at ways to drown out the nagging voice inside them telling them they are wasting their lives, or consuming more and more to feel like they are winning a game of which there are only losers.
We have to realise that the total health of all of our personal mental realms is just as important and valid as the physical realm we all live in. To build a different system, one that we will need when this endless cycle of growth and consumerism has reached its limit (very soon) we need everyone to know the unlimited potential that we as humanity hold.