by on

Almost everything that is written here is a combination of two things: experience of synchronicity and an intuition/thought sequence I once had over 30 years ago concerning establishing a sort of metaphysical value to regional art/creative endeavours in which it could be easily seen that they did not need to be seen as compared to ‘real’ works. This latter chain of thought I have never been able to establish properly again since the original insight, though I do remember feeling something similar to it in reading a book on Laruelle.

I think the hegemonic materialism that has gained greater and greater traction since the renaissance is actually more powerful than I realised. I see in my philosophy, everything is an apology in a way. The agnostic disjunction is a fence sitting move that pays homage to this materialism, it acknowledges it might be right, even though really I feel it isn’t right at all. But that’s the point of that philosophy isn’t it? You cannot trust how you feel about things. Surely there is actually wisdom in this, furthermore if I were just to wax unfettered metaphysics I would be part of a new age ish culture that I long ago rejected. So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on the agnostic disjunction.

What is maybe more illuminating is my feeling of a certain liberation after reading Federico Faggin’s Irreducible. Not because I agree with it all, but because a figure, like Faggin who was deeply embedded in the materialist computer science world has come to think that this is almost certainly wrong and puts forward a powerful picture to suggest that our experience of consciousness is a quantum process, which puts it forever out of reach of AI, no matter how machinically capable it becomes (because the quantum nature of consciousness means it is non-algorithmic). He reminds us how little we actually understand at this level of physics, how reasonable it is that quantum processes will be going on in biological organisms and how perfectly reasonable it is that we are some kind of part of larger conscious field that exists in something like a Hilbert space.

Ideas, at least like the last point have existed in mysticism for a long time. Indeed the new age movement has been using quantum physics for a long time to make various claims. Often though, these just sounded like putting the word quantum in front of something to make it sound a bit funky. I think the actual processing of Faggin’s point gives a strange liberation that I have not properly unpacked yet, but it reminds me of the insight into meaning that I had 30 years ago.

Back to hegemonic materialism, I don’t like it that for all my work on pneuma, for all the weird things that have happened, for all the books on this area I have read, it has taken an albeit changed, but still authority figure (white male scientist let’s be clear) for my consciousness to feel it is allowed to feel this possibility less tied to the apologetic agnostic disjunction. That shows me how deep it goes (maybe not for other people, but for me).

But I feel this won’t be just about me, this will be something true for a lot of people. People who think they might think things are a bit strange but actually have the materialist thing holding sway. Interestingly it’s almost an inverted Nietzsche, who thought the shadow of Christianity was long (it is), but here we have a lurking materialism, that removes meaning, and for Nietzsche supposedly frees us to make ourselves. What it really did was kill us inside, it wasn’t liberation.

But here is maybe a true way forwards (maybe). The new age movement and similar notions get’s things wrong. We can’t go backwards, we can’t start believing in all that old shit, because it’s just wrong. All those, gods, spirits, astrological ideas, tarot cards, they aren’t ancient real science. But equally they all can kind of work and they work because reality is some massive feedback kind of mess made of pure information (pneuma as I call it). But that doesn’t make them the true system/tools.

Back to the quantum consciousness bit, our consciousness, our pneuminous field , isn’t epiphenomenal, it isn’t inert, it’s an active system that is interacting with the fields around us in who knows what kinds of ways. My recent theorising suggests different directional temporalities may be responsible for beings being able to manifest information orthogonally into temporal flows (synchronicity), but this is only theorising.

The whole task is nearly impossible. It involves recognising the forces involved in this reality as actually what we call weird (but really that’s just normal) and at the same time not listening to nearly any voice that speaks from the deep pneuminous layers. Why? Because these layers lie. They will produce more magic books, they will pronounce more messiahs, more strange rituals, more blood sacrifices.

We don’t have to lose reason, that’s not the point. We have to apply reason (and other regions of consciousness) to how this works but equally recognise we’re involved in something so mysterious and strange and we should be embarrassed that we every tried to label it with this brutal materialism. It’s listening, it’s all listening. Just don’t listen to everything it says back.

by on

The relation of pneuma to time can only be played with speculatively. This however does not mean that reasonable speculations cannot be made, and even if they are speculative they may have merit as ideas to be experienced if nothing else.

Difficult as it is to unpick, it is necessarily true that time is an accretion of pneuma. That is to say, since it is a concept like any other, this must be the case. There is a vector, or maybe several vectors that have the time concept applied to them. This sense of movement and change accompanied by regular patterns of lengthening and shortening days, altering seasons, decay, birth. These are the overlapping vector regions that we call time. For us, it goes in one direction, or at least for the consciously aware parts of ourselves. As Bergson recognised, it has different natures, it has an experiential qualitative dimension in which it can drag or quicken and it has a seemingly objective nature in which we can demonstrate its measurable nature by means of time pieces.

As time has gone by the latter version has become more and more accepted as the only time, and Bergon’s time becomes more like an interesting thought, an epiphenomenal time that we can recognise but know isn’t ‘real’. The pneuminous accretive model suggests a feedback system in which the accretion employed feeds back onto th vector to make it ‘more like the accretion’ in some way. This direction in which this is the case could now reasonably be identified as sideways (see the previous post on sideways perspectives).

So time is an accretion, but part of its vector structure is (as stated) the sense of change. There is a conceptual (accretive) parade in front of us as we move around, an endless series of conceptually understood beings litter the place. Internally (in the mind, another accretion) it is, if not similar, also accretively littered. The internal dialogue, for most people, constantly pours over various ideas, scenarios, worries.

An extension of this observation is that since time is an accretion, a background accretion for this parade of accretions then there is, in a sense, a way to stop it. To not be too crazy about it, I would have to concede that, barring possible extreme spiritual practices that I could only hypothesise about and have no particular evidence to suppose exist, such a notion would not alter reality in the sense of the absolute cessation of time. However I do find cogent the possiblity that whilst the vector field is indubitably changing, the engagement we call time could in some sense be severed.

This would in its most basic sense be meditation, but a meditation that did not focus on any rhythmical pattern, breath or otherwise that tied it to the forward facing time accretion. Such an absolute stillness, with an absence of intruding accretions, coupled with a re-perception of external reality that removed its comprehending concepts (successfully bracketed them off) would essentially form an absence of temporal perception (the removal of the time accretion). This removal would in turn remove the feedback, at least in the region of the individuals accretive connections. There would be no time. Of course the nagging sense that the body would continue to be forward facing persists. It’s a primary manifestation, however there is a secondary manifestation that presents an uncertainty as to how much ontological effect one might achieve by this action. If there is any ontological interaction then it seems to follow that lesser versions of such a practce might also precipitate lesser versions of reduced temporality.

So whilst internal dialogue stopping practices might fail at being as extreme as the one described above, any silence of the mind, removes accretive flow, disconnects us from it, and in a sense places us slightly outside of time (in a way that we should not feel is necessarily simply epiphenomenal). This fits quite well with pretty much all occult/esoteric systems, as they always encourage the cessation of the internal dialogue to achieve anything. Contemplating again the notion of sideways, we might hypothesise that, the removal of internal dialogue that directs the flow of the being forwards, allows it to face sideways. Sideways being the direction in which plant and other beings, often considered not conscious in our sense, direct their awareness. This direction may actually also be a kind of time (in the sense that there might be moving change within it), just time as we do not understand it, orthogonal or diagonal to ours. Certainly sideways has access to our time; this is speculatively, the direction from which synchroncity emits. Thought in this way, whilst Bergson’s duree, is still within forwards facing time, it could be considered to accept a certain wobble, and tendency that takes the being closer to the sideways perspective. From this perspective it would certainly achieve ontological parity with chronological time.

by on

Here we posit that there is an influence in this reality that comes heuristically from the side (though the picture is probably more complicated than that). It’s quite hard to explain what we mean by this, though the sense may well be intuited readily enough. Let’s say we face forwards in time, fundamentally we are doomed to do this. We can sort of face backwards (this is what we call memory), but we cannot face sideways. At least our consciousness awareness cannot.

What we call information making sense, is when it comes to us from facing forwards, we also make sense of it happily when we look at it facing backwards. But when it comes from the side, we don’t really understand it and we try to say it isn’t there. Of course it may not be there, we are back in an agnostic disjunctive situation, the same one essentially as I have endlessly written about. This talk of sideways is just a differently articulated speculation.

Interestingly though, the speculation came from sideways. Let’s spell this out. Sideways is the synchronicities, the intuitions, the bursts of creativity from nowhere. Probably it’s more, probably if it it can’t be understood from facing forwards or backwards then it must have come sideways. Note that doesn’t deny the power of forwards and backwards facing; sometimes something looks like it came from sideways but really, when you look at it closely, it can be seen to be a phenomenon that came from forwards.

The speculation came from plants. I was looking at plants and thinking about plant awareness and how we assume its primitiveness in relation to ours. But then I felt the sideways direction and thought that maybe the plant awareness wasn’t primitive but simply facing a different direction. Plant awareness faces sideways (maybe). This makes sense at least in the context of occult/shamanic type practices. In such systems plants exert effects, some are forward facing —medicine- but others are sideways. Plants can protect or even extract revenge, how? From sideways actions. Damaging fairy property brings about action from sideways not from forwards or backwards. The same thing.

But this can be extended. If the unconscious (to us) plant world, has a sort of conscious operating sphere that extends in a different direction —it thinks in a different direction- then maybe other putatively unconscious beings also do so. Possibly, life as it tends towards consciousness as we think of it, it simply bending its gaze forwards. Many animals may have this tendency but still also have access to sideways consciousness —they have their spirit counterparts. Maybe the intelligence of rocks, water, fire and air faces sideways, more so even than plants (who must face forwards a little). Maybe there is a kind of spiral that bends from sideways slowly round, with a continuum of beings on it, leaning towards forwards (maybe some beings face even more forwards than we do?).

And what of us? Can we only face forwards and backwards? No, we have the sideways facing part, but it is so hard to see it, and without wanting to fall into cliches (but doing so) even harder to trust it, or even to know it, so as to trust it. We must becareful here though, because if we think it wrongly we will think that facing sideways is about a special way of knowing things; one that is there to help us facing forwards, and it isn’t like this. Sideways facing is its own direction. Power comes from sideways. Things live in the sideways (the faeries we used to see for one, probably the UFOs too). Sideways is not at the service of facing forwards (or backwards), we don’t even know what it is. The contemplation of sideways is quite strange, this is a good thing. We should contemplate it more.

by on

“Ok, I choose neither, they’re both awful.”

“You can’t choose neither. You have to pick one.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the game, that’s the whole point of these kinds of questions.”

“Ok so, I have to go for the cyber-city techno, one.”

“Ha, you nearly said technocapital.”

“Did not.”

“You so did.”

“I didn’t, but even if I did, I stopped myself because I had the speed and insight to realise what a dumb annoying thing it would have been to say.”

“Whatever. So seriously, you still think that horrible, horrible world is better than endless happiness. What is wrong with you?”

“I’m defending our humanity, from techno-oppression.”

“Techno-oppression? That’s not even a thing, and it sounds bad.”

“I can call it TOP for short, and in my campaign, I can say, don’t TOP yourself and that makes it cool.”

“It might sound cool, but it’s still wrong, it’s not oppression, it’s liberation, it’s freedom from human misery, to freedom to be happy, our birthright.”

“Is that some weird Eric Fromm thing you’re quoting there?”

“It is. I think he can be gainfully employed here, so long as we define human potential as happiness.”

“And ignore everything he says about human authenticity.”

“Look, don’t get caught up on my bad academia, maybe think of it as his bad academia. He didn’t spot that true liberation is hampered by so called authenticity, not gained by it, in fact who’s to say that ACMB isn’t actually authentic happiness? What’s more authentic than perpetual happiness?”

“Do I have to answer that?”

“Ok let’s say the universe is fundamentally peaceful and it’s only consciousness in its form as organism that produces suffering. Therefore, the authentic state is peace and the inauthentic suffering.”

“But we’re organisms, you even specified that conscious organisms produce suffering, it’s authentic to them. We’re not rocks.”

“But if materiality is antecedent to organisms, then it’s a more authentic state of the universe; it’s what we’re always trying to get back to. This system perfectly synthesises the non-suffering of the universe with the happiness of the organism. It’s literally the meaning of progress.”

“Only if materiality is antecedent to consciousness.”

“I didn’t say that, I said to organisms. Consciousness in its form as organism.”

“But then what if it suffers when it’s not an organism?”

“Then it’s still an improvement, now we’ve improved on matter itself. It’s a win win.”

“So, look, ok. What does everyone do in this happy world? We wouldn’t be fit to do much.”

“No, there isn’t much to do, I guess. It’s not a total eradication of achievement and reward, it’s just all modulated away to a safe non-driving level. But I do keep thinking there’s probably something like a kind of work.”

“What kind of work?”

“Well not real work, I mean no real work needs to be done as such. But maybe there’s like a big flat field type thing with big buttons that come up and down and you have to push them down when they come up.”

“Like whack a mole?”

“Yeah, maybe a bit like that. Big buttons, over a big space so you’d have to walk to get to the different ones as they came up. Then you push them down.”

“But for no reason as such.”

“I mean not one you’d think about or question. But maybe there’s a bonus or even a kind of fake bonus that happens anyway, like extra cheese or something.”

“Extra cheese?”

“There’s the meals, which I imagine are all a bit like different kinds of takeaway but nutritionally adjusted, and maybe for sort of rewards, there could be extra cheese or extra mayo. But it wouldn’t really be merit based as that would trigger striving, it would just kind of have the modulated appearance of reward with none of the danger.”

“No pernicious freedom.”

“Exactly, no pernicious freedom. I mean you could probably still have sex of some kind. It just wouldn’t have any kind of rude or dirty connotation, it would be more like a kind of game type thing.”

“You need to watch that one.”

“Hey, nothing evil here. If it did it would all be adult only modulated sex.”

“Where do I sign?”

“You keep thinking about it the wrong way, you’re still thinking about it the wrong way. You think humanity needs to technologically improve, to strive, to have dirty thoughts. If you have no transcendent power to say there is anything we should do, then there is no point striving in misery for non-existent goals or exalting in the world through the sublimity of art only to crash down to its mundanity later on. Flattish, endless happiness is just a superior option. I mean, even a transcendent deity might look down at it and think, ‘good job people’. You think it’s bad because you’re used to thinking cool stuff and desiring things and going places. But if you had the chip, you wouldn’t miss any of it. You’d be happy with noodle Wednesday or whatever.”

“Noodle Wednesday?”

by on

A driving force causes the essential pairing that is only disclosed to the Canaanites. A hole lot of sense it will make to you to comprehend this line of reasoning. It is well known that the inhabitants of Sirius have knowledge of Joe Hoover. One may legitimately wonder if this is indeed a divine sphere. When the ambiguous figure that is defined is imbued with a strong desire to do something we must paye a ten shun. A Loki figure is suggested, even enforced as a cooking utensil. Fabrication is doubtless a present. Cloth is knowledge or so they say. These hints try hard to bring us closer. This is literally a path. There is nothing here-hare. A white hare? A coarse hare being chaste. Givods this day. Speed is time and time is a line.