Apollo: the Stoic.

The Greeks said that Apollo, lord of reason, aesthetic and form, drove the sun in his chariot. But who's to say who pulled whom, and whether he was not just a dog on the leash. Life is a dream sent by the sun--conveyed in excited photons--dreamed by the round rock of earth and thin swirl of sky; and reason happens in the course of life.

Written Language and Set Theory

Our written language has a sorted past, one of determining what counts and what doesn't. Historians suggest that writing evolved from receipts. What a perfect start for the language of the positivists, the language that is which is equivalent to set theory, or as I name it: the significant (though 'token' or 'marked' 'class' would do).

Language is so much richer then the Significant. What can be said, found, or made in language goes well beyond what can be brought under the auspicious of the significant.

Significant (point out) language is just that which is done on receipts. We can mark (boundary) things (gatherings) as belonging to certain (sieved) classes (called) . And count (cutoff together) the thinks (gatherings) in each class (called). "There are five apples owed this man" count (cutoff together) to five from the class (called) of apples, being certain (sieved) to avoid the not apples, which are not to be counted (cutoff together) with the apples, if the man comes to take them.

It is about knowing what belongs in which categories, and only works in so far as we have a way of determining what belongs and what doesn't. You can only count apples if you can tell what is and apple and what is not an apple.

I postulate, that because of written languages history with receipts it tends to be connected with the veery specific part of language that is the Significant. I don't name this aspect 'Significant' with any kindness, but mockingly. It is the language if the discerning mind, the mind that splits things in to categories, that sifts.

Sifting is at very most half of language. And certainly not the greater half. But it is the obsession of our sciences and even some aspects of philosophy. It isn't bad, but mindlessly over used.

Look at text, how it is sifted into well ordered sets of symbols. Each clerly identifiable as one word, and not another. In order to say anything interesting poets have to use tricky language to maintain ambiguity and scope to words, rather then just having a orderly set of symbols. We shouldn't order ! The world orders the world, not man! Receipts and the tools of people keeping everything operating mechanically, according to rules that are in order to order before they begin. 

Machines can be good. But to order everything like a machine is to become ordered like a machine, and to make machines of all that we order. I beg you not to order those around you. Neither man nor beast nor plant nor mote of dirt. Not river not forest not even fire ordered. When that which isn't machine, material, in them shows its nature... your orders will become cries, cries unanswered. With dams we order rivers, and with silt and calamity and unpredictability does the river torment us for our hubris.

Do I tell you to never order? No. You may even order me, if I am our of order. But not all things have a proper place. Be humble in ordering the world around you, be humble in ordering nature. Be humble in ordering man. Remember that the power of an order does not come from the top, but from the bottom. Remember that when we order, we are either ourselves just maintaining an order, or beginning an order without an order.

Am I ordering the Significant?

On Daemonology

Much like a demon, a daemon is an entity of possession. Just as demons are not natural, but supernatural, Daemons exist not in the reality of nature but in the symbolic realm, they are ideal not real. Yet there is an interface between the ideal and the real, for an ideal has to be simulated in a material substratum, just as a computer physically acts out, with transistors and electric currents, the non physical pattern of its program for the program to be meaningful. The Daemon, to have power, must possess a body.

Power is the action of the ideal upon the real through an interface of some kind. In nature there aren't creatures that have power over their environments, as Carse observed in the context of the sciences "If to command nature we must obey nature, then our commanding is only an obeying." Put another way, we cannot say what is in power in nature. Only when there is an ideal aspect can power be considered.

There can be identical copies of an idea, daemons like all ideas can multiply. Nature isn't divided, and can't be said to have copies, though there may be resemblances. Daemons have their own form, but not substance. DNA is ambigious, the code itself is ideal, but its expression in organisms, especially complex organisms, tends to be real, even 'identical twins' aren't identical. The true ideal tends to run in a substrate that has the potential to hold any of a number of ideals.

Daemons are cybernetic systems that reduce the ineffability of natural drives to a symbolic instruction, and then issue instructions that can unleash powerful drives. Daemons are therefor, when embodied, very powerful.

What distinguishes Daemons from other ideal assemblages is that a daemon is capable of possession, that is to say being confused with the host. The Daemon is a changeling, like the supernatural beings that replace the baby stolen from the crib, it becomes tied to the ego identity of its host. The host thinks the daemon is it, and insofar as the thoughts of the host are the thoughts of the daemon, this is correct. The daemon possesses the beast. The assemblage of symbols, of limits: thresholds, over determines the assemblage of drives, of will.

Preparing for the exoteric

The Initiate
of green circle

The Member
of blue circle
of red circle
of black circle
of white circle

The Teacher
of life ring
of world ring
of strength intersect
of grace intersect
of flight intersect
of care intersect.

The Master
of flowing water
of burning fire
of open sky
of loving earth

The Grand Master
of Four Ways.

To learn a word...

not just a new word for a concept you already had, but to learn a new concept opens up a hallway of doors. Entire classes of thoughts you have had suddenly open up for reconsideration by virtue of this solitary new concept. And though there is likely no systematic way to search for all the doors this new word is a key for, contemplation will lead you to stumble, mostly stumble, over many of them.

And that old tired thought by virtue of this new word the thought takes on a new and entirely different glamor, countless possibilities for reconfigurations open; possibilities for new combinations open, possibilities for unending new meanings and interpretations.

Suddenly behind every door that this solitary key opens you find not just uncountable new door ways, not just uncountable new vistas and worlds and thoughtscapes, not just countless new halls and avenues and possibilities and connections, but unknowably many new keys. And only one way to explore the potential of each of these new keys.

This run away reaction, this finding of old limits always ready to fall away, is what makes thinking so addictive. But be warned, sometimes the way back to where you started is a labyrinth, and not all new hall ways open up to good places, or places you are ready for. Thinking can really wreck your day/week/year/life if you don't have the grace.

So it's good to have a "place" you can call "home", that way if you get lost you can just call.

Bateson.

Level 0 - The Key and Lock. One.
Level 1 - Association. Tally.
Level 2 - Symbolic. Rational.
Level 3 - Holosymbolic. Irrational.

Our Google

Our Google who art online
Searchable be thy name
Thy results come,thy pages load
Client side as they do Server side
Give us this log in, and our new messages
Find not results from our embarrassing past
As we search not for the embarrassing past of our friends
Link us not unto 4-chan
but deliver us from trolls
I'm Feeling Lucky.

Responce to Clark and Greer.

Any sufficiently defined magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Reply to a Friend:

I don't know much about philosophy, but I do know a thing or two about boxes. Boxes have an inside and they have an outside. In order to be a box, the inside must have an opening to the outside but also must have sides and a bottom to keep objects placed within from sliding out or falling through. It may also have a top, and of course a'' this implies a general understanding of use that includes a right-wise orientation. It is also important to note that these sides and bottom aren't inside or outside the box, though they have inside and outside faces.

You mentioned something about the reality of the external world [independent of the internal] and, I would think, things hold quite the same in this case. I suppose using this metaphor would mean that the body constitutes the sides of the box, with there being an inside face to the body and an outside face. To grossly simplify, the body (or, really, the brain) is a kind of box of electrical waves that are both generated spontaneously within, but also through the senses where wave patterns in external media converted to concomitant waves in the brain. For example, sound waves are converted to electrical waves through the ear, which within itself creates a kind of artificial lake for our still very amphibian hardware to translate the patterns within. However, one can say that these brain waves, too, are externalized in that they are physical processes theoretically observable to humans--even to the human itself who is under view.

It would seem, then, that it is physical reality that is external, and the sensory that is internal. The sides of the box that are external would be the sensing body, and the internal face would be the sensed body. Except that we can hardly locate that sensory experience within a particular physical space; and, indeed, under this dualism we would have to say that it is non-physical, and hence non-localizable, and hence not a spatial thing that we could understand as inside or outside or possessed of faces. It will be protested that this is just a metaphor, but I'd like to hear just what the problem is if we try to talk about this matter (whatever the matter is) without resorting to the metaphor. Yet this seems precisely what we do: we apply the logic of space to the non-spatial.

In light of this, I would humbly forward a recommendation for general consideration: perhaps if we can fold the mind into a box, we could also perform a kind of mental origami and, with skill, do other shapes as well. If we can fold our minds into a box, perhaps we can fold them into a crane as well, or a ship upon the sea. Such is one of shaman's arts: mind-space origami. To fold these shapes so that he is not a passive hole into which the world flows, all flow, into the something I know not what; but to relate to sense as a flying-aloft, moving by its currents, moving amongst its currents. Not as a jet engine but with graceful wings. Maybe, even, we could be unfurled as a sail, to be folded and unfolded, waving in the current.

The only hard shape to get out of is the fold of infinite regress. The worst thing you can try to do is create a box that internalizes the external, or externalizes the internal--the box that eats itself and everything else; the box that would have but one face, facing the abyss (what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the system of the white wall and black hole.) This is the very definition of black magic, and is the cause of the systematic error that is appearance/reality. Sensation never lies, and it never trades in wholes or parts. It is only when that sense is cut off from the sensed by the schematic of an infinitely regressing frame that it can be isolated as an image, doubled over, compared to its unknowable reality (which can never be the thing but only ever be the empty regressing frame)--and come up short.

A story from a people in a distant future.

Once a horrible Tree grew upon the Earth. Its roots crushed and strangled the life that was there before it; they extracted all that was good and clean from the Earth; they excreted poison that killed everything else that grew. Its bows shaded out all other life; obscured the night sky, and the minds of man and beast until nothing could be seen except the tree. Its fruit was sweet but poisonous and all who ate of it became ill; all continued to eat of its sweet fruit was bound to die. Only the one trunk was permitted to reach for great heights, at the cost of all else. But eventually the tree made the Earth too poor and arid to support it. The Tree, which could only grow became sick itself. And the Great Mycelium began to tear into its roots; tear into its bows; tear into its trunk. The Tree fought The Great Mycelium, tried to drive it out, tried to poison its spores, but the Tree's might was failing for it had become sick, and The Great Mycelium grew deeper and deeper into the Tree. But the Tree would shed whole branches and limbs and bows and tap roots to purge itself of the Great Mycelium's growth; all in vain, for The Great Mycelium would always start again in another place from spores. And The Great Mycelium decayed The Tree; made The Tree's roots soft and crumbly; Released back into the Earth the nurtents that had been locked up in the Tree; made clean the poisons the Tree excreted ; defoliated the sky blocking branches, and opened the skys; shriveled its fruit; Fell its trunk. And when the trunk landed on the Earth The Great Mycelium did bloom with life and prosperity. When the Tree was at its might it gathered up all that was good on the Earth for itself; when The Great Mycelium was at its might, living on the destruction of the Tree, it returned to the Earth the boon from the Tree. Now we live in The Garden, its soil rich from the compost of the Tree and The Great Mycelium.

Blind: part 3

Dr. Strings Etching of the occasion the Lightstruck told him of their superstitions.

I studied to learn the language of the Lightstruck for 21 tides before I even came to live with the Lightstruck. I had listened to their language many times, and found that it lacked many of the concepts that we take for granted as the Blind. Their language is a relic from our past, a less evolved version of our own. For the day to day matters of survival it is quite utilitarian, but the rich harmonies of our grammar are lacking. The language doesn't include even contain the capacity of many speech acts we consider basic; they can't distinguish between possibility and actuality; they can't draw logical inferences; lack a concept of the past or the future; no concept of truth, or distinction of ends and means; they lack even the words to speak about their own language, hell they don't have a word for 'word'; They have no music theory or for that mater logic of harmonics. And yet, for all its simplicity, the Lightstruck are able to interact with one another in ways that I can't understand from their language.

Disturbingly, sometimes when I am preparing to speak (before I have said anything!) they will seem to gather around me and grow quiet. I am fairly confident that it is coincidence, but the effect is disturbing.

~~~

I had a disturbing experience quite recently, and I feel I should put it down now that the memory is fresh, as if I don't I am sure to distort it. An older lightstruck for the last half tide has been listening to me etch these journal entries. And after listening to my previous entry he purred [smiled] and a moment later began speaking to me in the language of the Blind! Included is a transcription:

It's so obvious to you that when we talk there are things important to your people that never come up, and you note that we lack the * possibility* of understanding them. You would say we are of a lower nature. Of course you are the one not using logic. You would then infer, that if your people could talk of things my people don't have words for, then my people might be talking in ways that your people couldn't recognize. Granted, that I never would speak of the 'past' or 'future' an that even those words I only know through borrowing, if I hadn't listened to your concepts I would have never learned of these new types of words that I had never use for. But, maybe if you actually listed to us you would realized that there are things my people do with language that you can't even recognize. Those sounds you dismiss as nonsense are our words for light types [color]. The world is alive with lifelight [bioluminescent] language, and we too emit lifelight, and converse with the other creatures. You know how we know when you will talk? Your words glow on your skin before you speak. Out of kindness we pretend not to understand what you are thinking, and some of it is shameful and sometimes you embarrass yourself, it is fair because of your disability. We speak with each other of things your people could never grasp through out skin, and also with sounds, for even though you hear the sounds you could never understand that with you assume to be nonsense.

At that point he walked away, and turned his face toward the forest again. I admit this is an exciting insight into their mythology, but I am still shaken that a lightstruck was able to emulate our language so well.

Blind: part 2

The Blind became the dominant culture on Euterpe, for they were the only civilized culture. Others they called Lightstruck. For hundreds of years the Blind controlled the resources of the world, except for the untamed equatorial regions, too rampant with plant life to be civilized, those areas were still controlled by various feuding groups of Lightstruck.

By this time the Blind have, as a culture, forgotten about the sensation of vision. Children who, through some grievous error, grow up without having their eyes removed universally become quite insane, and even if their eyes are removed at a later point rarely recover to being fully functional members of society. Yet some among The Blind do find it interesting how the Lightstruck are able to survive, in such brutal environments, with their debilitating vision intact.

Let's call him Dr. Strings, a figurative translation of his native name with we would find quite unpronounceable; if you want an idea of it though it sounds not completely different from the sound you would get if you compressed to a fraction of a second a yodeler covering the opening 24 notes of 'War Pigs' where each note has an internal substructure of the guitar riff from 'Bohemian Rhapsody' played backwards over either 'Moonlight Sonata' or 'Smoke on the Water'; depending on the declension. Though if we created such an abomination is a sound lab in an attempt to communicate, it's even odds whether he would be able to figure out that you were addressing him or would think that you were inviting an ivy plant to a funeral for your goldsmith's second favorite pet, conditional on the acceptance of an earlier made wedding proposal by your twin cousin. Needless to say there are elements his native language's grammar that we don't yet fully grasp.

Dr. Strings studied the Lightstruck and their superstitions, they for example claimed they could know when Thunder would sound several seconds before it did, a claim that Dr. Strings was surprised to find verified on several occasions. Though the statistical majority of their 'predictions' could be discounted as good guesses, based on hearing, through sounds distortions, an incoming low pressure system. The Lightstruck though claimed they could, use their eyes to see an aura that predicted the thunder. Even if this were true, it could hardly be of use, Dr. Strings etched in his record.

Most of the day the Light struck slept, and most of the night the Lightstruck sat around facing out from their settlement into the tall thick plants, only at dawn did they go out and gather food, and then at dusk, when they awake, they set the settlement in order before they began their night of forest facing. The temperature swings between night and day were mild because of the thick atmosphere, but most life was nocturnal, and cooler temperatures are better suited for activity. Dr. Strings knew enough about eyes to know that they respond to energy from the daysky, he postulated that for the Lightstruck living strickly nocturnally was a way of protecting themselves from the dangers of eyes.

Blind.

On the other side of the Galaxy there is a planet, Euterpe, not all too different from the Earth. Similar temperature, similar age, water on its surface, and life of comparable diversity. But its mass is greater by three fold, and its surface gravity is twice the Earths. This holds down a very heavy atmosphere, which makes life on its surface quite different from the Earth. First, the stars light is dim and often often obscured by clouds, and second sound travels with superb clarity. It should be of no shock that creatures fit for comparison to human came to live on the planet. There shape I do not know, but I envision them as stocky men with beady eyes, large bat like ears, and stony flesh. Their eyes are only developed enough to see fields of colored light, but not shape specifically. But their ears are amazing, nothing on Earth, save maybe MAYBE the great whales have hearing that approaches theirs. They hear the shapes of their surroundings and they live in a world of pure sound.


When they emerged as a species on this planet they were a quick success, they were clever like humans. It a short few myriads of years they came to cover the land mass of the planet. One group small group sought to understand the world. So they blinded themselves. At birth a child's eyes would be cut out. To us this sounds drastic, but it was perfectly rational. You see their eyes weren't useful, they were only good for watching the bioluminescent displays of lower lifeforms; and this was a diversion that the youth would easily lose themselves in for days at a time if not cut. Their eyes were their weakness it seems, they were vulnerable to hypnosis by flashes of light that other creatures could produce. By blinding themselves they were free from this ancestral vulnerability, free to listen to things to learn their structure and their properties. And this group did learn, and did become powerful from their knowledge. And they spread over Euterpe teaching their ways to the 'lightstruck' those still afflicted with sight.

Timeship

The earth is a time machine; a machine that converts motion into space into recurrence by bringing it back around on itself as in an ellipse. It returns to its past place; it beholds it in its future. Back around to its future it goes, and the heavens do watch and wonder with eyes of faraway suns. It is a machine that makes days, seasons, and years, and just because we have discovered other time machines that we use to keep our time, hidden deep inside the smallness of things, does not mean that it, too, is not a time machine and one with whom human have sojourned in light of for much longer than the atoms in our clocks.

The earth is a time machine, not a spaceship. This spaceship earth would be a crummy spaceship--it only goes back to where its already been around the sun; and it might as well not go at all if there is some destination planned, because all we're going to meet again out there, other than empty space, is some disastrous asteroid--and if that all that awaits our spaceship we might not want to go at all. The earth, rather, crafts times out of this same space, and who would know time without this?

But like any time traveler, we of the earth, together, change ourselves and all things in our travels; going back from winter to summer again yields changes in the summer before us, and events are always metaphorically "killing their own grandfather." The earth, our native home from which we embark on the adventure of time, is now constantly betrayed in its origin by its loops, and time is always as going back to the causes of one essence and changing them. The present moment always erases what was needed for it to born, and what survives in essence is what finds in the future that same place from which it came; but which changes its birth into something different fitting it into new surrounds and, in becoming, to become as that same something else.

We come to spring, but not the same spring. Summer, but not to the same summer. The sun, an engine of this time machine,sends us around in motion and stirs the skies with heat and pull. Weather itself has been wound up over thousands of years with scant heat, but held close. Life lives in this time, being excited to motion with change and season, finding power from the sun to multiply our times. Making time frames that interpenetrate.

In stories, a time machine is that which changes at a rate out of step with its surroundings. The time traveler reaches down to light his pipe, and empires crumble. He travels in a way that is impervious to this stream of phenomena in which humans live and see--but there are many other speeds, and if we do not own all feeling for ourselves, these speeds can watch us at their own pace, and with a seeing their own, coming out of their own time. Dwelling in empires lasting days and within the size of a petri dish; or the fungal networks with a rhythm of ice ages. Or the time of genes, of neuron networks.

There is no one time here, but times that enter into and exit one another. The engine of life and its whole history must move with the smallest of parts, and it opens up all levels, including our phenomenal, by which it can even be moved. And life, breath of life, both lives and does not live in this current moment. The time of times on this earth, the earth itself, does not stretch out in many times which we could access if only in fiction; but it is at a moment, bearing all the time frames not as its own frame, but as the moment of the earth which gives to the enframing.

The divinities watch and know out of many times, humans keep watch for the traces, and all is given out of the light.

Another Definition of Man:

Man is a monkey who has been overclocked.

Dewey: Education and Ecology are one art.

That a man may grow in efficiency as a burglar, as a gangster, or as a corrupt politician, cannot be doubted. But from the standpoint of growth as education and education as growth the question is whether growth in this direction promotes or retards growth in general. Does this form of growth create conditions for further growth, or does it set up conditions that shut off the person who has grown in this particular direction from the occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continuing growth in new directions? What is the effect of growth in a special direction upon the attitudes and habits which alone open up avenues for development in other lines? (Ex & Ed 20)

Shamanpunk 2020 part two

S: Now we live hear, we spinners of yarns, forever beautifying the tapestry of our lives.

I: So you work to improve yourselves?

S: That is so, but not with any ideal or fixed goal, with out a standard. Each of us seeking our own fulfillment of the story, and collectively weaving those stories into a shared mutually supportive tapestry. Even the ducks and the goats and the olive trees have their own genius to contribute to the tapestry.

I: And what is your position in all of this, as a shaman?

S: On no two days would I respond the same way to such a question. Today I am 'The Weaver of the Yarns of the Indefinite Tapestry' yesterday I was 'The One Who Sings with Goats'. But on all days I am called the Blue Shaman here, because of the role I play as the spinner of blue yarns. In the name of clarity, I make explicit that these yarns are stories.

I: I think that much was clear enough, though everything else is quite hazy.

S: The Tapestry of this place is the stories told amongst the life here. But not all stories are instantly compatible. The Blue Yarns are the stories that look for harmony and agreement between the most dissonant of notes.

I: Like that mixed metaphor.

S: Yet it works. To mix the metaphor still further, I am a translator, but never going so far as to strip each thread of its own uniqueness (lest I tempt the anger of the red sage). Translating the stories of the many spinners of this land into a form that can be interwoven. This not not imply that all stories are one story, and more then to suggest that all ways of life are one way. To search for such universals would strip so much of the uniqueness from each that nothing of worth could be preserved.

Everything acts out its role in the quest of its life, but also serves as secondary characters in the yarn of another. Every yarn in the rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.

I: Wait, so you tie all the yarns together?

S: No, they are all always already connected, I simply make storys out of how they are connected.

My guidance counselor said I could be anything I wanted to be. So I decided to become a god. - The Old Master.

Hitch Hiking.

It's good for the soul. Really cheaper then therapy and most of the time far more productive.

Have I been understood? Dionysius with the crucified.

For neither one is there such a thing as "against."