the All-Together plunge

From day to day I revise every position I take on every aspect of life.  I must seem as insane from the outside as other people seem to me.  We are standing on the edge... A few nights ago, half asleep in a state of utter intoxication, I mumbled something to my wife to the effect that living in this time is like learning deep sea diving:  there is an utterly strange moment when you first go under the water with a regulator in your mouth when you must inhale, though every part of your conditioning resists what seems to be an existential threat.  I feel now that I am standing on a high ledge and I must jump, but my body is frozen and I have not the courage to take the plunge. 

Am I afraid of losing myself?  Of being cast out?  Of madness?  Am I mad?  No, I only fear the strangeness of what is coming.  To be stripped bare of the safety net of culture and its comforts is appallingly exciting.  Is that what is happening?  Are we wading back to the shore of immediate experience and a pure state of pagan eros and vegetable consciousness as if civilization was a bad dream?  No, of course we will take some kind of insight back with us, but what will it be?  Is there some leap of technology yet to be taken that will give us the One Great Thing to take back into the naked forest ?  Teleportation, time travel, telepathy?  Probably a form of telepathy is what we’re after; it would be the only thing that would be worth 10,000 years of hell.   Perhaps what we really want is to hardwire all of our minds together to become one great big overmind.  Sounds like science fiction horror, but maybe that’s just an expression of ego-fear from the insane civilized western head.  What we truly fear is being alone, so we will engineer ourselves out of it entirely and become All-Together. 

That must be the foundation of the great nervousness of our time.  We are all growing less anonymous to each other through digital connectivity, and we are very uneasy about the implications going forward.  It is unnerving enough to spend a day together, to talk about traumas and fears together, to be naked together.  We tend to cling to our isolation so that we don’t become too vulnerable but this is actually the source of all of our psychosis and despair.  In fact, we really do want total intimacy, and I think we are going to have it.  The moment (and the technology) will come when some of us will summon the courage to jump and become absolutely intimate, totally merged and in full communication- this would equate to liberation from the human tragedy.  We’ll have it, and the implications will make a future that is unimaginable and an experience of multiple-subjectivity that will probably be quite beautiful.

more about media

You see I rant and rave against "the electronic media blitz of the 20th century", implicating the internet in the insanity but I don't really see it as so good vs. evil.  It is what it is, which is an extension of the printing press which is an extension of alphabets…. after all, are books evil?

Of course, I say that as if I'm obviously retracting my venom against media because obviously books are good, right?  Hey, there's lots of books on the internet.  But you know, half the time I do feel that books are not good at all, that ALL mediated experience is keeping us in a kind of virtual prison that's been going on for thousands of years, constructed out of alphabets and linear thinking and symbol systems.  But of course there's no limit once you start trying to look at the situation that way because ALL culture is a virtual reality and in fact ALL experience is mediated experience.  The only direct experience is death, and we don't know a damn thing about that.  

So if mediated experience is alright, then why not sail off into a virtual headspace in the vast halls of the future internet?  Somehow we have to reach a decision about the monkey body.  Is it the neglected shadow that haunts civilized history to which we must return via feral society?  Or is it a troublesome vestige of animal evolution that brought us to the point of imagination and that we've been struggling to shed since civilization began?  I honestly find these two viewpoints to coincide so maddeningly and so often that I don't even know what to say about it at all.  

Of course I tend to vote for the body… just not without my suspicions.  I assume though that these suspicions are the result of being born into a worldview that descended from Christianity.  Suppose I should strip and go live off of wild rabbits for a while.  But you know, we've been there before, for thousands of years before civilization.  I'm not sure it was entirely pleasant; there must have been a reason to want to engineer ourselves into civilization.  I suppose we will return to that feral state but with some value system and/or techological artifact that will make human society less animalistic and more angelic.  

age of triviality

I truly thought that the age of triviality was coming to a close with the demise of boy bands and britney spears in the late 90's.  After 9/11, I thought that we were entering a new cultural age simply because the veneer of pop culture that had dominated the previous 20 (or 30 or 50) years had been utterly stripped away by the trauma of foreign attack.  The age of cellphones and web 2.0 was dawning and it seemed to me that by bypassing the enshrined institutions of shit-brained culture, that we would all create a new culture with our own values, not the consumerist values handed down from on high via cable TV, hollywood, and clear channel.  

What I neglected to see was that the values handed down from these dead media giants had already become our values.  Now, a decade later, we have all become content producers, but the content we produce has the same stale taste of all the garbage we were brought up with, with the same fictional, one-dimensional, non-human anti-characters, the same easy morality, exploitational sexuality, black and white thinking, absence of dialogue about social problems or any self-awareness about harmful lifestyle excesses, male-dominated relationship patterns, the errancy of cliques and factions, hard-hearted communication styles, easy judgement of people who are different, etc.

The internet is, at the moment, nothing new or revolutionary or even helpful, it's just a massive expansion of the electronic media blitz of 20th century consumer culture that was killing us in the first place.  Actually, the internet is even more effective at robbing us of embodied experience and human connection.  The human body, incarnated in time and space, is where the real learning unfolds, where Being is experienced and understood.  Time is an undulating experience of metabolism, not the cold click of a digital clock.  Sex and consciousness are primary, technology is just so many toys.  At the present, the body is being swept away by techno-fetishism.  We're experiencing an inflated headspace, severed at the neck, cut off from the body. Surely this is a crime against nature, spirit, or whatever god you believe in.   

global alchemical

global alchemical civilization

global- no borders, no lines as the central moral principle.  unity of human group.  Earthers.  No identity other than maybe "human".  No nationality, no ideology.  No religion other than experiential spirituality.

Alchemical- inversion of values- internally sought rather than externally sought.  the opposite of consumer culture.  identity created from internal world.  meditation and shamanic trance as primary forms of culture.  the entire universe beheld in the imagination.  inward exploration.  There must be no such thing as the unconscious.  It must be fully illuminated and brought out in front of us, wild and screaming, alive, erotic.  Outside world re-engineered as a global food forest, no technological residue aside from transportation and communication / internet infrastructure.  all external world must have the holistic health of physical bodies of all species as its only goal.  vast halls of meditation schools and underground chunks of circuitry the size of city blocks.   all religion must become experiential, empirically validated living morality.  

inward exploration always looks like woo within the context of a consumer culture.  it can't go on in any productive way until consumer culture is unravelled.  

it isn't just scripture that is metaphor.  Everything is metaphor.  Reality shouldn't be taken to literally.  

sin of certainty

The most severe "sin" (maybe the only real one, actually) is to draw a line between yourself/your group and the rest of humanity/life.  This sin is committed by most people who adhere to ideology.  Religion is an easy target, but I'm talking about ALL ideology.  We are all swimming in contradictory, confusing experiences.  The whole task of living is to experience this maddening life fully, admit our fear and weakness, and learn to sympathize with each other in our suffering and confusion.  This tender, raw place is the only thing of value in this whole big stupid life.  Most adherents to ideology exempt themelves from this condition of uncertainty.  "We have the REAL truth/scripture/doctrine.  Search is over, just stick to the script.  If only those poor (everyone else) knew about this!"  Listen- there is nothing concrete or literal that can be known about the afterlife or the nature of god or spirit as long as we are bound to this monkey flesh, embedded in time and space.  All religious speculation is, at best, metaphorical.  All literal claims to knowledge of divinity are guilty of the sin of certainty.  

The same is basically true of the secular community.   "Oh those silly religious people, if only they would accept the simple explanation for everything…"  It's the same trembling in the face of overwhelming tragic / ecstatic mystery.  This kind cowardice of isolating your group in a bubble of certainty and pitying all others is deep in the roots of human societies and is the basis for most or all forms of malice and discrimination.  "Us civilized white people understand life and how to live it; if only we can educate all those poor, savage brown people!"  And so the bloodshed goes on and on, always coming down to this basic prejudice of viewing The Others as more ignorant than the group you belong to.  

This prejudice is wrong, not because god said so but because it is incorrect.  No one is any more privileged to truth than anyone else, no human culture is any more ignorant than another.  There is no privileged location in history from which to understand the human condition.  

I see you object to the fact that I'm asserting all of these things as true, while asserting that nothing is true.  Well, I'm certain of uncertainty.  And anyways, I don't believe any of this.  

May notes to self

The dreamtime of youth is short and interesting but ultimately a deception because you aren't actually going to take anything out of it for the community of the aged; there is nothing you can tell us about it that hasn't been well known for 10,000 years.  Hit songs and dance crazes aside.  

White wine and French camp and baking pavement dribbling along sweating and dreaming of zinc bars with white widows marching and infidelity on summer streaked streets and coffee under lamps and honey smelling necks and napes, blackout drapes.

Campaigns always begin this way, with something to say.  Without that first step you are pissing in the wind.  Beating a dead horse.  Shitting the mains.  Blowing the big top.  Topping off the lunch table.  Tying up the tripwire.  Spitting on grandma.  Coming and going into a coma.  Flipping your lid.  Slipping on hobos.  Eating the loaf.  

A commemoration for the humans, a once noble race swallowed whole by its own vices, unable to pry itself out of toxic greed and laziness, given over fully to willful ignorance.  Weak flesh constrained promising spirit, pulled ever downward into the hellmaze or trivial pursuits, unbending toward the white light that called ahead into transcendence.  No thank you, no thanks, we're all good here, going to load up and enjoy the plunge.  

techno pagan parade

As I braced against the wind blowing my hair to the east the full moonlight poured bright and silver across the field over the single row of evergreens, I could faintly feel distant shimmering chords from a spirit-ukelele comforting me with the sense that life carries on and on amen and that everything will be just fine despite the discomforts and pains and toil and hungers and morbidity of life.  The Techno Pagan Parade Through The End of Time went on and on amen that night and it was all the best and worst parts of living stripped bare all alone telling themselves to me and through me forcing me to summon up all the strength I had to make peace with death and work and always the loneliness.  I had two friends that night- a bottle of wine and a very large scarf that my mother knit me for Christmas that reminded me of something a Norseman or some other ruddy Northerner might have worn in the dead of winter a thousand years ago.  I felt that I belonged to such an ancient time but that I also belonged to unimaginable futures of blinking and buzzing and living.  Some part of me also belonged to that present moment, New Years Eve 2011.  The paradoxes and pains of my unhinged location in space and time were maddening to the limit of my ability to cope but also they were life-affirming and magical and beautiful and the magic was pouring out of my hands and eyes into the world and everything was going to be just fine despite the discomfort and pains and travail and hungers and morbidity of Life.  And always, always the loneliness, on and on and on amen.  

Narrating all of this madness was a large spirit whale who happily and without mercy or guilt devoured scores of plankton with every twitch of his tail and recanted the nature of eating and being eaten; all too clearly I was aware that I too would be swallowed whole one day without thought or remorse and I would be dead and gone and buried and dead as a doornail and probably much sooner than I could imagine or hope for but this was perfectly alright and in fact was the fate of all living things who gladly accept the price for being alive and who all, without guilt or mercy, gleefully consume scores and scores of their fellow sentient beings so that they can wake once again in the clear and wonderful morning and smell the fresh dew and reflect on the beauty of the new day and shit out the useless remains of a once noble and beautiful living creature.  Whale told me that life is 49.5% shit and compost and trouble and problems and 50.5% finery and beauty and magic and that the 1% difference between them makes it all worthwhile and so life goes on and on amen but only on the slimmest of margins and you better believe that you are gonna be dead and buried and your children will eat you and the world will swallow you whole no matter what and even while you are alive and well you will be halfway submerged in shit, work and stress my god but always you will get that 1% margin to make it worthwhile.  Nothing can change this figure and you are damned lucky to exist in a universe that permits it.

Later on I was incredibly lonely and the pain lingered for days that there was simply no one to talk to, no way to make your entire self known to another no matter how closely connected.  But then, talk is cheap and that's ok and really most of what comes out of your mouth on a daily basis is not only useless but sinful in its veiled attempt to stave off the loneliness that we must all truly face.  You will get your beautiful mornings and moments of profound insight and your share of good food and drink and sometimes there will be fun parties that you never forget and people and friends and children and sometimes you will have very real and lasting connections and you will be able to articulate some of the loneliness and comfort each other wonderfully but it will all cost you 49.5% of your time and energy spent toiling and sinking into utter shit and misery and work and pain and you better believe you will be dead and fucking gone but the equation is always in your favor on the slimmest of margins on and on amen.