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A brief and unpretentious dive into the Castañeda/Lynch connection through the show Twin Peaks and the book The Eagle’s Gift (the last one before Carlitos’ descent/capture). The key non-thesis of the speculation thus: David Lynch, finding himself in a similar condition as Carlos Castañeda, fighting assimilation of his vision by Hollywood, produced, more specifically with The Return, a critique of the descent in-itself, sketching a diagram of his own escape (which Carlos himself failed to perform). If Lynch ever read Castañeda is beyond the point. Here are fragments of conversations held at the CEO.

I wonder if we could think of Judy (Jowday), that is represented by the beloved “Owl Peaks” symbol as the dark side/counterpart of the Eagle (or really just the nightly aspect of the Eagle, for what is an owl if not an eagle one sees at night). If we assume Jowday is a manifestation tied to the Black Lodge, it seems to be the case. Even more because, in this book particularly, and its transition to the next, Carlitos fails (like our beloved agent Cooper) and is captured (as is expressed in the mythos of his own cult always torn and in constant war from within).

“We are luminous beings, we are better than that”, the motto La Gorda keeps repeating to Carlitos each time he starts worrying or wimping too much, the one thing she supposedly kept on repeating as she tried to “save” Carlitos from the jaws of the jaguar, fits very well with the White Lodge’s ‘residents’ true face:

Or at least Laura’s (since she is luminescence and good herself)

Laura truly is the Twin Peaks equivalent of the infamous Nagual woman: a prodigious, luminous being that got snatched too early in her life and exhausted her potential by the suffering her captors imposed on her, into and onto, for the very teleological motif that is the production of garmonbozia. And they did it all, the Black Lodge’s rogues, to feed on this secreted creamed corn. It sounds too much like the story of the beautiful forgotten Nagual woman. By the end of Twin Peaks (The Return), everything in one timeline is corrected and Laura’s corpse even disappears as if either she never existed there or was saved (I think she was erased from that timeline and jumped, only unwillingly via Coop — who thought he was doing good by that, when in fact he was only reviving her death and so prolonging her suffering, pain and sorrow, much like Carlitos and Carol Tiggs joining the cult). If more pain and sorrow, that is, garmonbozia, is the result of Coop’s failure to fix his heart, and said creamed corn comes from a continually doubled Laura, doesn’t this mean he is worse than BOB? Upgraded BOB, in fact, that feed us the garmonbozia while reciprocally being fed by our need to hear that lovely scream.

The Nagual/Tonal–Right/Left side quadratic polarity is also very reminiscent, to me, of Coop’s multi-self:

BOB-Coop (or Doppelganger, The Lovers Reverse and The Magician Reverse),

Homo hermaphroditus masculinus, failed

Dougie Jones (or Tulpa, The Lovers Upright and The Fool sideways),

The golden ball, the core of the tulpa, expands until finally disappearing from the screen. The true shape of humans according to Don Juan. This one is artificial, however, a golem, and upon expansion to determine the totality of oneself, it vanishes and the tulpa ceases.

‘Original’ Coop (or The Fool Upright and The Magician Upright),

The Fool’s Magic Trick

the guy Coop snatches the body by the end (or The Fool Reverse and The Hanged Man Reverse).

Relationship with Carlos Castañeda (or Carlitos, for the “fictional” character), following the diagram of the Seer:

Courtesy of Ken Eagle Feather

Tulpa/Dougie: fake double, Carlitos’ right side that forgot his Naguality.

Trapped in the Sphere of Direct Knowledge, devoid of access to the Sphere of Self-reflective Worlds.

BOB-Coop/Doppelganger: fake nagual, Coop’s and Carlitos’ snatched left side that does not remember but that still subsists due to power-momentum (Bad-Coop managed to contain BOB, still inside him, for 25 years). Its destruction is the rejoining of the left and right sides and Coop/Carlitos put back together.

Trapped in the Sphere of Self-reflective Worlds (like BOB), devoid of access to the Sphere of Direct Knowledge.

Original Coop: the Tonal, Carlitos before the split performed by Don Juan and Don Genaro.

Composed by and composing of the gra-tree-like structure, the hero’s journey proper is the dissolution of this harmony via the scission/split between spheres, resulting in the Doppelganger effect where communication is made difficult and an antagonist projected/manifested.

‘Spirit’ Coop/Coop of the end/Coop snatching the body of the guy at the end: Coop failed to remember and rejoin what was split properly, just as Carlitos, and his Naguality then, instead of entering the third world like his masters, jumped back into the island of the Tonal to snatch the body of another person (by invading another’s dream, other TV show). He indulged to the very end and became like BOB, a vampiric specter, only by the end we got to finally see the world from BOB’s perspective, or an upgraded version of a rogue of the Grey Lodge, the in-between that is the failure of proper conjunction. We are invading the automaton carcass that is “Cooper” in the same way he is invading people from another dream, supposedly our dream. It is, instead of a mutualistic symbiosis, a reciprocal parasitism (where the audience may find some enjoyment in the confusion, and Coop find some purpose in continuity as we feed him energy to continue his task of failing to do the good he wants).

Lost in the Third Field of the Unknowable (3), and in fact the avatar for such. He finally did it, but failed in doing it properly.

If Lynch would comment on the later activities of CC, I think he would say something along these lines, that he “didn’t fix his heart — but he did not die either”.

The house of the spirit (Cooper), now as pure electricity, the synthetic fire that walks as you. Cooper achieved immortality in the perpetual act of drifting at the speed of light without control. A proper cosmic neuron, which is sadly not a person anymore. Not even a character now, he is the stuff of dreams, a symbol. He opened Pandora’s box from the inside and became hope. Our hope.

But there are things worse than dying, as the Naguals would say.

25 years on and Laura is still (back?) inside her mother, in the worst way

Carlitos Cooper continues to refuse to die, like the fabled Hope of the myth, their leftover residue just symbols now. The dreamer vs. dream debate is over, nobody is the dreamer, there is only nightmare.

Meanwhile…

Final shot of the series, before the lights go out.

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by T.W. Selvey

Those who can’t, teach. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Or forget how to repeat it. Wiping memory doesn’t wipe history. I’m here to teach, because I can’t. The LAPD tech wizards have memory stick wands and the forehead on sale at Best Buy is equipped with five USBs. Is that enough? The mouse is wireless, so control is unimpeded, however. One click does the job like one savior does the saving. Before the dawn of electricity and mobile persecution pods. Before the plug was pulled. Before oxygen tubes had softly blown in the last oxygen, the last breath as a figure read Fukuyama in a convalescent bed. Before the beginning of the decade, in the first century, or in the last century or this century. The global empire named Figure trudged along, sweeping up countries into a dusty corner pile. But now, global civilization faces a dissatisfied cataclysm, which is unapologetically hungover, grouchy, and unmotivated.

Norms, democracies, wars, nation-states, and the 20th century ridicule cataclysm, the young destroyer corrupted by pubescence. It’s unprecedented. Rulers and demagogues laugh and laugh, believing their own brain stew propaganda, since private prisonsunder the aegis of global enterprise gathered all oppositional politics into a gulag. The freedom to make money is the only freedom that counts. The climate sours. The populace tastes bad, like imitation Chanel, but mobs keep getting devoured by the thousands anyway.

Criticize if you want but the wait staff are blameless. The wait staff threaten. No more water. Doilies are nicotine stained but liminal. The back burner kept the sidelined issue warm, but it’s time to starve. Destabilization complains. The Secretary of State said it’s a good time to invade us. Air strikes were called in because all the insurgents were gathered in the streets, making it easy to end the domestic dispute. The theorists celebrated the decentering. Flattering, I know. The cataclysm might breakdown in plentitude, when the crisis intended austerity, falling wages, and escape tunneling. Not going to engage the tormenter on Facebook since problems exist and intersect in me, a socially aware paradigm that’s intersecting a shitty old syntagma called ‘me’ again.

Frank talk coming from a hotdog, a hot-god, a hog rod. I was trying to say ‘rot-god’ but the censors are genetic now, but in quotes means I don’t mean it. Sex privatization became the rage and the new investment instruments were binary chromosomes, which pleased Evangelicals, eukaryotic and dualistic down to their lexical cells. A hodgepodge of greedy men yanking and touching stagnating gonads. What is the opposite of a death spiral? Welfare check on the cataclysm.

Cataclysm reemerged from hiding, and begrudgingly agreed to render society into lard and tallow. Much more useable now, and, it pays. The robots’ severance package included blood depletion and free VHS copies of Robocop, each driving a Ford in a sprawling fleet, a line of individuals engaging in solo mass production to revive the cancelled Taurus. Industrious, he became a factory, a cyborg coughing up sulfur and coal mines, usurping dioxide, cross-legged, exploiting ant and beetle labor, a stretched forearm skin canopy draped over machinic cock output. Sit down, focus, and fix the annihilation, before it withers and retreats. Since 1979, Bretton Woods has been logged and razed. The reflecting pool is a hollowing cataclysm. Take 1 cup of this year and flush it away.

Hold up for a second. Who’s ‘he,’ because I assumed briefly it was Robocop. (Robocopy.) No, but any ‘he’ will do. Move on.

The organization came up with a competing ideology based on ruining self through rapid self-preservation. DNA tablets. Tubs of de-aging, anti-wrinkle cream erased millions of faces. The earlier part of the year had a resurgence. I got my face back. A face on my lower back, a tattoo of a clock. I owe everything to time, this time. Very basic economics lesson, bitch: Capitalism does not run fast in one direction or treadmill in one place! Sidetracks and loops beset the course, which is angular, uphill or hitting the front tire on a gutter and spinning around on the back tire, the hood dented by an asteroid or an operative defenestrated from heaven or from a ghostly Twin Tower. Speed is not fast. Boredom beget orgies. Stop here and fuck. Fuck stop signs. The entanglement of the roots with the mycorrhizae is a chance to inject drugs, but they were rented. Rent to own drugs. An underground drug dungeon, the American dream. Bank of America dealt me an FHA-backed bank loan. It’s my dream. Wake me up. Tacky, kitsch morals tacked on the intensified exploitation. Slowdowns more than inconvenience the system. Glue and tar streets, alleyways, and the sidewalks, since the system will rear up and jump on dry surfaces. Since 1979, the unfettered market and greed was celebrated and individualism was heralded as rewarding, more so than collective action and union solidarity. But in fact, the right-wing ascendancy in politics turned individuals into pigs on a spit. Trunks of individuals. Turned. Tender. Obesity dripping extra-large pizza, gut fat eagerly dripping on the fire. Lowered pay to them by buckets because they were in a pit. Bragging about being a major ad recipient, getting all the best ads at maximum speed and in every dimension while you pay to work in a mental factory, bored, slow, and out of this month’s data allowance. Fast phone runs 500 apps. That’s not fast. That’s revolutionary technology, a great opportunity, cataclysm, a chance to catch us unguarded, as there is no factory reset. Feed is out of order and I don’t know what the fuck is happening today, as if today happened in this timeline, a microprocessor clock speed that is slowing at a slowing rate. The chronology adapts, accelerating backwards, backing into a repair bay, where I say it’s time to change the transmission fluid for an extortionary amount but shoving the credit card in my back pocket, actually I cut the brakes. Actually, I committed theft, caught time, a time trap, and drove off a cliff, mashing the forgetful pedal, the pedal forgetting to contact the absentee brakes, the absentminded brakes listening instead to a memory loss track set on repeat, the fire ball on the embankment, exploding me, stopped on repeat.

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The concept of hypostition is simple to bring about, one simply has to ask the question ‘what is the opposite of a hypersition?’. I am aware there are a couple of takes on this term available on line. These notes concern my interpretation -or grab for the vector.

Hyperstitions are incursions from fiction into reality. A hyperstitional entity may be deliberately created to blur the lines, e.g. the CCRU’s now famous D.C. Barker. Upon coming across this name, the unknowing will start trying to track down who on earth Barker was -to little or no avail. In a world rife with paranoia and conspiracy, the various hints of possible reality that one can come across regarding Barker only exacerbate the confusion -which is of course the point. Even when you do sort of know the actual nature of it, you can still end up wondering if there is some grain of actuality to these kinds of phenomena. As I have pointed out elsewhere, receding time plays a powerful role in increasing hyperstitional potential. Something, created at one point in time very clearly intended as a playful fictional device, can later look even more like it might have actually been real and passed off as a fictional device to hide the ‘terrible truth’.

For a hyperstition to qualify as one, it must blur the reality/fiction lines sufficiently such that it is capable of exerting force in reality (I’m using this term rather loosely in a rather non-philosophical sense of our everyday solidity). Classic examples are ‘Great Cthulhu’ and the activities of economic traders. Cthulhu is now sufficiently real that various occultists can and do try to invoke it, contact it, and who knows maybe even sacrifice to it. The economic example is more banal but no less powerful (indeed more so in a sense). It is simply the ability of a trader to create fictional economic information in order to manipulate the market. Rumors about the status of company’s health, erroneous hints at shadowy takeovers imminent etc. can all have a profound effect on the actual economic situation.

The term ‘fiction into fact’ is clearly too strong for a precise description of a hyperstition, but it gives an idea of the direction in which it acts. It moves from something that would be generally accepted as not true, towards a level of actually obtaining. This direction gives us the way in which we may attempt to unfold its opposite: the hypostition. A hypostition necessarily moves from fact towards fiction (or untruth). This seems kind of intuitively correct momentarily  e.g. as a concept to think about post-truth activities. However the picture is far muddier than this simplicity suggests, for in order to consider a hypostition we must consider what counts as something that is actually true in the first place.

I’m not going to be able to unravel the problem of truth here or at any other time for that matter. But like any philosopher I can make my suggestion to this issue in hand. I consider that the stuff of all kinds (what we call mental or physical) can be broken into post hoc vectors (where by vector I mean a region that has become a carrier for a concept). We must consider them as post hoc or transcendental vectors as they are discoverable as the condition for the applicability of the concept. A given vectors can take different concepts but cannot (unless maybe God) take all concepts. So a tree stump vector can take the concept tree stump and seat but it cannot take the concept mouse. In this way all vectors have differing abilities to house different concepts. I believe we can use the same notion in a non-physical realm also, different vector regions exist in the physical feeling, emotional and cognitive realms that we give concepts to. These maybe more inflexible at housing multiples, though of course the regions can be broken down in different ways across different cultures -colour being a classic example.

So if we can use a concept to describe a vector we can communicate it, if it doesn’t fit the vector in any meaningful way then communication will not be possible e.g. if every time I ask for the spanner you pass me a mouse, the garage will not function, despite your desire to use spanner concept on the vector usually called mouse no meaningful result will be possible -except possibly for a pet mouse called spanner. So this means If we try to use a concept that does not fit the vector it always will not work, right? Wrong. This is an unclear issue for two reasons. One is the problem of magick, which as an embedded possibility in our consciousness is not removable and magick is precisely the possibility that we can apply a concept to a vector that would not ordinarily take it and it will still exert some effect upon the vector. Two is that there are of course many phenomena where we do not have a concept that can be applied to a vector region with any kind of agreement. The human relation to climate change is a particularly relevant example. Even if consensus is growing on there being a relation, people are still quite capable of perceiving the climate change as not related to fossil fuels etc. There is no everyday acceptance of this as something unequivocally certain.

Wherever there is even slight ambiguity potential in the vector field, some humans will be agents for the cracks. Flat earth is a good example of this; the everyday reasonableness of the earth’s spherical nature can be challenged with recourse the first person ‘obvious’ data and some extensive paranoia about the scientific world. The ground of truth is itself already a battleground of hypostitional emergence. Science as a field involved in falsification is awash with agents attempting to hypostitionalise various established positions. To speak in such way suggests we must split the hypostition into at least two forms: i) the practice of showing to be untrue previously held claims in a scientific context ii) the active practice outside of science of something reasonably accepted being deliberately rendered as fictional or untrue.

We need to include (i) just because to exclude seems mistaken as it does in a sense fit the description/direction -we would need to untangle fiction and untrue in order to be able to refine the distinction. However the sense of hypostition that rings as most appropriate is of course (ii). (ii) means that an accepted claim that is perfectly embedded in (many people’s) everyday reality is deliberately and knowingly replaced by a version that has few criteria for its truth (the vector does not obviously fit the new concept) and yet can use the overlapping wriggle room of receding time/not yet occurred time, slight ambiguities/possible doubts and non-first person presence to state the plausibility of the alternative. Holocaust denial seems a good hypostition. The fading into history of the event coupled with what seem like outrageous claims (to sane people) about WW2 footage enable the hypostition. I italicised the word ‘possible’ in an almost Cartesian doubt type level. Hypostitions of this kind are genuinely asking for you to doubt historical footage and of course as we enter an age of increasingly capable computer graphics, such doubts can be made more cogent to believers of the hypostition.

Two further notes. Firstly just to increase the paranoic levels involved here, we also need to recognise that it is possible there are strictly no hypostitions, as the hypostition definition (ii) presupposed the vector invasion was knowingly untrue -the hypostitional agents sought to deliberately alter something they new to be true. It is possible that all perceived hypostitional incursions are in fact simply ‘honest’ attempts to reterritorialze ontological territory as these agents perceive it as true. In this sense then -whilst unlikely- it is possible that hypostition is only ever the paranoid projection of re-writing truth projected upon an enemy agent, when from the enemy agents point of view it is simply truth establishing. I find this last note unconvincing and yet it seems a necessary phenomenological footnote.

Secondly we can note that the difference between hypostition and hyperstition is possibly questionable. We must knowingly create an untruth and seek to apply it over a supposed truth, yet in doing so we have created a fictional entity and unleashed it -a hyperstition. By this logic the trading economical example could in fact be said to be hypostitional. The difference could be posed: 1)  Hyperstition: The creation of fictional entities whose physical vectors do not exist, yet are treated as if the vectors did obtain. As opposed to 2) Hypostition: The creation of fictional/untrue concepts for the purpose of replacing a set of concepts that currently occupy a vector or series of vectors.