Architecture Hermeneutics

Are you ready to have your mind blown?

What if you can't count on another intelligence to speak your language? How do you communicate your accumulated knowledge? This is essentially the problem facing terrestrials in search of life "out there."

We can take a clue from a past culture so strangely advanced (even by today's standards) that they may as well have been aliens.

Check out this episode of Magical Egypt about the temple of Luxor aka the Temple in Man.

"Temples were not the location of the teaching. They were the teaching."

The information we can tease out of this architecture is incredible. It speaks volumes of our collective ignorance and the despicable practice of erased wisdom here on earth.

What's more, it's instructive to us on how we ought to really go about teaching ourselves and potentially reaching out to the "other."

WE HAVE TO BUILD AND THEN INHABIT THE CITIES OF OUR WILDEST DREAMS, constructed willfully to reflect our highest knowledge. The whole text-based, test-based, 2D style of instruction we're feeding the kids right now is weak in the knees.

When we encourage meaning to permeate the exo-structures from smallest to largest, something weird is going to happen. Back when, only the mason and his lodge buddies knew the full meaning of the great structures they put together. The way we trade info these days, there would be no more secrets. Every brick could come alive with meaning.

Picture the flatland. The sheet of paper, in a book of bound pages. To flatlanders on the page, their page is the only one that is. To them, a symbol will only be meaningful to the other beings on their sheet of paper. They'll sit all day and think about getting their symbol to the furthest edge of their paper possible.

They can't comprehend that there is someone comfortably resting in a study, flipping through the pages of a book, looking for something interesting to read.


















... I suspect they're looking for us as hard we're looking for them.

Wed, Feb 13, 2008  Permanent link

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Visioning Life in Space

The National Space Society's art contest has announced its winning entries to illustrate the NSS 2009 Space Settlement Calendar.

Grand prize went to:



...but it wasn't exactly my favorite. Here are some other good ones of the bunch, imho.







Man, I really love daydreaming about the hunkered down, bunker filled landscape of Mars. Sometimes it gets claustrophobic, though, so I turn to the free-wheeling deep space fantasies instead:





Either way, I think the key to dealing with cabin fever is the ability to look within. Have y'all read the Divine Invasion? Spectacular novel; opens with an exploration on solitary existence in a far off space colony.

Fri, Feb 8, 2008  Permanent link

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I may just be Paranoid, but... pt 2

Wed, Feb 6, 2008  Permanent link

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I may just be Paranoid, but...

...4 times in as many weeks sounds like a tactic, not a coincidence.

Somebody or something is cutting cables at the bottom of the sea floor.

This is a technique that will be applied in the coming (if not fully present) info wars. To the pure naturalist, technology is a slave, not a partner - a privilege, not a right - a token to be given and taken away, a piece on the eternal chessboard -

a cable to be placed and removed.

Tue, Feb 5, 2008  Permanent link

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New Tattoo

Got it this weekend. It wasn't my first, but it felt much more sensitive than the one on my arm - especially the parts directly on the spine.

The geometry there is called the Flower of Life and it's significant to me on a number of levels.

Sun, Jan 27, 2008  Permanent link

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MYTH and LOGOS

This whole post is a response to a fascinating series of articles by space collective member Obvious on a very favorite subject of mine. Intuitive wisdom has been much disabused by the scientific establishment, to the drastic detriment of the species and culminating in our current state of possessing destructive power well beyond the wisdom required to wield it.

I'd like to begin by asserting that myth and logos are two facets of the spinning jewel that is conscious experience. We perceive them as opposite or mutually exclusive because we are designed with an underlying bilateral symmetry. Our geometry flavors the manner in which we perceive the world - both physical and mental.

Specifically, Myth and Logos are two facets of conscious experience as manifested by/in/through/with/as our brains at this juncture in time and space. Like everything else down here in the kingdom, they are constantly in flux and what we say about either today may or may not be true tomorrow. As space collective members, we have to be able to accept the reality of many animals in the zoo. There are stars which emit; there are black holes which absorb.

Just so, there is Logos, there is rationality, there is Science and all that it may reason. There is also Myth, there is also narrative, there is also dreaming and shared dreams. One does not replace the other, like taking the next step on a set of stairs. The two facets function very differently, independent of each other.

It is imperative that the sincere psychonaut/astronaut overcome simple dualism.

I'd also like to reframe this discussion of myth because it's easy to lose our way. Scientific rationalism has flattened the world into bits of its and denies the existence of inner experience. This has been a disaster for mankind because it created in the 20th century a blissful blindness to mental reality, even as that mental reality inexorably worked its magic on every being.

If science were to described by a single word, that word would be: explanation.
If myth were to described by a single word, that world would be: revelation.

It's easy to say that the only thing to do with myth is academically study those who believed in them in the past, like dissecting a frog. It's easy to look at myth and think "belief." But that misses the point. Myths don't function like scientific explanations, for which there is one supreme truth, each new and better explanation replacing the one before it. They're actualities, landmarks, and are very specific to time and place.

Let's take a living myth. There are lots! But let's take one. Zombies. Zombies are mythical creatures. You can find some tenuous threads of physical existence - voodoun poisoning victims with what amounts to horse tranquilizer daily... but that's not really what zombies are about.

Zombies are on the short list of things we like to think about.

Zombies are a way to collectively discuss the horrors of modern life. They're a frame, an outline, onto which we may project communism, hippies, AIDS... or just generally fear, malaise, disconnection. To say zombies do not exist is to lie. The myth has extruded into physical reality in the form of books, films, songs, etc.

But these traces are not the locus. Science is located down and out in the kingdom, the Malkut, the final stop of consciousness here in meatspace. Where the myth lives is up one level higher in Yod, the foundation, alive in the heart of each individual on earth. I don't really get to have my own science. There is one science and I may add to it, amend it, argue with others over what it is... but it is not mine. Myth is mine. You have your own as well. We don't turn to it to discover how the world works. We use it to articulate what our world is.

Myths are conceptual entities we have run into out in the big ocean. Mind is like a vast ocean full of every critter imaginable. Literally. Each of us approaches it differently, attracted to this or that aspect, drawing from it what we need, creating what must be made, PARTICIPATING in that something which for now is called culture.

In the future, technology will allow our myth-making function to transcend language and speak directly in the images provided us by our subconscious intuitive wisdom.

This will be the turning point necessary to communicate with other forms of intelligence.

Exercises like the Voyager update project are like touching your toes before you go run a mile. Reframing the myth of humanity will alter the dreams of our neighbors in ways we cannot imagine.

The Zeus thing is played out. The All-Father in the sky thing is more or less done and we're just not INTO it. We don't have to kill it with mathematical proofs, and bullets in meatspace will accomplish even less. A myth dies when it's day is done, generally to be replaced BY A BETTER MYTH.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

I'm a geometry guy and I happen to believe that meaning is sewn into space-time. As we hurtle through space-time at 150 miles per second, we are covering territories of meaning which seek to express themselves through conscious beings. By refining our myth-making abilities, we are broadcasting to others throughout the universe the information they REALLY need in order to find us.

Folks living around Betelgeuse have never heard of our sun, much less our moon, our tiny scrap of Terra. But they damn well remember their Zombie phase.

On memes, which will help you think about myths
(I meant to sew this link into the above, but I've been out of college for a minute now so my paper writing skills are for shit)

Thu, Jan 24, 2008  Permanent link

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Translucent Ham Sandwich Band

In July, a very crazy friend of mine approached me with a project idea. Evan Stone is one of the best drummers in Los Angeles, sought after for lessons by rock and jazz musicians alike. I know him through my lady friend, the jazz singer Sara Gazarek.

Evan had an idea. He'd been scouring the internet, collecting almost 10,000 images. He wanted me to create a slide-show to project while he and a band of seriously far-out musicians improvised to the imagery. He calls it the Translucent Ham Sandwich Band.

This is the kind of job I dream about. I married his material with my own and we created a pretty intense one hour video presentation. But I had no way of preparing myself for how completely OUT the total experience would be.




The live energy of improvisation, coupled with evocative imagery, and certain sideshows (a juggling rabbi, a magician, sometimes a belly dancer) - the whole scene creates a weird limbo in meaning, a strange twilight world of floating concepts and sensations. It's a mental weightlessness, a truly liberated state. Intense. Crazy. Sun Ra's Arkestra concept honed to a knife's edge and practiced with all sincerity.

Forget about drugs. The real way to explore inner space is to purposefully collide your right and left tendencies (logic & intuition) and thereby hover somewhere above both. This show can help you do that.

If you live in the LA area, I highly recommend you drop by and check us out. We've got every Tuesday in November at the Mint.

Fri, Nov 9, 2007  Permanent link

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Nousnaut, reporting for duty

Wow. I'm blushing.

I made a video for fun about a year ago. The whole thing, from conception to finish, was very quick - all finished & on youtube perhaps a week after I shot the source footage on a Thanksgiving roadtrip.



Somehow it has built more steam than my more complex examples of video art. I think people respond to direct statements, which is really a testament to widespread symbol illiteracy. However, it's always shocking (for me anyways) to discover people around me who think like I do.

I'm also terribly shy. And paranoid.

So imagine my embarrassed glee to discover that the Institute of Noetic Sciences rates my small slice of video meditation highly in its newest periodical! Damn do I wish I knew how to hyperlink. Here's their thing:

www.noetic.org

They were founded by Edgar Mitchell, an amazing specimen of human, who had a profound mystical experience while onboard Apollo 14. He teamed with a wealthy industrialist to... well to research the nousphere by every means.

The Institute has been around since the '70s, but I guess they're now launching a video hosting site, and here's a sample from the flagship newsletter (I wish I was savvy enough to have the whole thing linked up, but instead it's just jpeg grabs off my screen. Don't worry - google makes accessible anything that might tickle your curiosity)

Here's the banner:


Here's the very top of the newsletter, some info on the dude who puts the thing together


And here's a top ten list. My favorite film of 2007 is down there on the very bottom. It's not fair, though, because the others of us are virals and Zeitgeist is a full-blown feature. I checked out number one and it's INCREDIBLE so check it out asap. And at lucky number 3 there's little ol' thought-he-was-making-video-in-a-vacuum = me.


Word.

Wed, Nov 7, 2007  Permanent link

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