The Good, The Bad, and The Indifferent Pt. 3: Processing

With the acid came a sense of expansion and a loosening of the superego, as it were. However with time everything tightened back up, almost to where it was before, with the addition of the memory of the experience and the added knowledge that was there but currently out of reach. So what exactly was happening here?

We come back to this concept of homeostasis. Yes you can trigger chemical events in your brain that lead to profound experiences upon taking something like a tab of acid, but in the end your own material reality is affected in part by the inputs from the environment you reside in - most importantly the social inputs from other people. You can maintain a certain tenuous sense of peace upon self-revelation and self-knowledge, but such a sense of peace has to be constantly maintained and buttressed against influential social and environmental forces from external sources.

To cite a crude example, if you are a dick, you can have endless compassion for the prick in you, but you will still be treated like a prick by others if you manifest that behavior, which will pull you temporarily into a position of social instability until you can manage to stabilize yourself again. Neuroscience has found our brains to be these vast ecosystems of competing tribes and alliances of neural networks. We have a "perception of insults" network that becomes inflamed and strengthened upon its activation, riling up our emotions even against the wishes of our executive networks. We also have an "exchange logic" network that kicks in when we have to pay rent or buy food and procure wages for that purpose, which upon inflammation orders our social interactions in ways that are no longer useful in a world where some have much less to exchange than others.

The nice thing about this is that we can consciously choose the type of person that we want to be, or even the types of societies that we want to work towards having. The choice itself might be determined on a cosmic level, but we still have the experience of making the choice. We can choose to exercise a given neural network by feeding it, and many of these networks interface with others to produce complex and often unforeseen results. For example, if you choose to meditate with regularity, you are diverting energy away from certain executive networks that may be having a negative effect, feeding emotional networks that may be giving you anxiety or feelings of guilt or worthlessness. In doing so you are also thinking slightly different and diverting your attention to different things, which can lead to greater changes in the way your brain functions.

What I am driving at is that I myself had certain revelations that were very useful, but to take advantage of these revelations in a practical matter, that is, act on the revelations in physical space as opposed to simply thinking about them, one needs a bit more than mere inner light.

Well, inner light itself manifests not only from a sudden turn of attention to realities within us that have always existed, but the actual external influences that make such a turn of attention possible in the first place. When one fails to be absorbed into the conventional external reality, in this case capitalist society, one has no choice but to turn inward and towards those instructional bodies of knowledge produced by others who have turned inward themselves.

So I found compassion for myself as this nervous nutcase obsessed with and fixated on certain ideas. It doesn't change the fact that I still act pretty strange many times and this produces effects in those around me and sometimes I worry about those effects. I still possess a broken self. I am resolved to improve myself as far as possible within the environment I find around me in order to harmonize with others, however one can only pursue this path so far. There comes a point when one's external environment becomes so contradictory to one's character (one is unlikely to be pleasant and sociable while dangling over a lava pit) that it becomes necessary either to transplant oneself into another environment altogether, or seek to change the existing environment in a radical way.

Broken selves like these exist in variations throughout our social totality. The pathologies that arise from my own self correlate to the functions of my character in social space; the breaks occurred along the very seams that make up my person, so to speak. Others will develop pathologies in accordance with their own characters, such as unnecessary aggression, excessive neediness, emotional distance, debilitating cynicism, etc.

So what's producing these broken selves? And are these selves really broken? I'm not so sure. The whole concept of brokenness is a slippery one and seems to relate to utility. For example, a broken gear is only broken in the sense that it no longer possesses the bodily integrity to function within a greater machine. The actual matter is still all there, just not situated in the specific way that it makes a specific system work.

Life has a way of producing bounded systems that function on repetition to sustain themselves. The moving parts do their work in repetitive movements again and again, even while the actual molecules within the moving parts vibrate away and the parts undergo a long process of decay.

It brings to mind Freud's studies of the interactions of the pleasure principle (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos) in trying to understand human psychology and human civilization. With the pleasure principle, life progresses by seeking pleasure and avoiding displeasure, and with the death drive, life seeks to restore itself to a past state through repetition of past events, arcing ever gradually toward an inanimate state. This is a fascinating concept but I think its incomplete.

There's this binary directional quality implied in the concepts: Eros is the principle of life, ever-changing and striving towards pleasure and vitality, while Thanatos is the principle of death, a tendency that moves in the direction of Absolute Zero towards increasing loss of energy, calcification and crystallization. But there's more to this dynamic than all that.

If pleasure is the experience of the generation of life itself, it seems that in order to experience such pleasures in the first place, life has to organize itself into an organized system that then begins to decay as soon as it is formed. This takes a repetition of the constituent elements which temporarily freezes organized matter into a living system that experiences. So the drive towards death is a necessary prerequisite for the striving of life itself and the experience of pleasure. And on top of that, the striving towards pleasure of each constituent of a living system tends towards greater entropy and resulting death. These binary concepts are only opposing each other as distinct concepts in our minds; they are really two sides of the same coin.

So here we are, each of our selves stuck within a society that desires a previous state of organized matter that is no longer possible due to the changing constitution of its constituents. Those of us who are broken are broken insofar as we no longer function correctly when plugged into the totality that is the decaying body of capitalist civilization. Revolution in this case would be to re-realize a society that is capable of absorbing each  of us as our characters exist now. Our tasks as individuals is to become what we are, as Nietzsche loved to say, and to become what we are, it is necessary to engage in forming a framework that allows that to happen in temporal material space. It is necessary to engage ourselves in the twin task of coming to terms with our true characters and forming an alternate society that reflects that reality, which will then begin its process of decay all over again. A tall order to be sure.

So now to bring this train wreck back to the matter of my confusion, my acid trip, my revelation of my broken self, and the resulting process of coming to terms with these realities. Many of the social pathologies and the resulting mental illnesses that arise from such pathologies are generated by what I find to be the following dynamic: one finds oneself to exist in a tension with greater society due to the contradictions between one's changing self and a society in stasis, so one sanctions one's new self via guilt and anti-social behavior in accordance with old ideals of what an individual should be and relate to society, which results in social conflicts and dissonance. Healing consists of not only coming to terms with the real self and generating new honest values to live by, but having that real self loved and appreciated by a genuine community bound by those forces of Eros (love), preferably in accordance with these new values. If such a community exists, excellent. If not, one must be created. In my case, merely talking to friends about these experiences and receiving their understanding was enough to loosen the knot greatly. But more must be done.

So that is that. All this to try to come to terms with a bundle of personal hangups!

The Good, The Bad, and the Indifferent Pt. 2: A Dose of Good Acid

I came to a point where I saw very clearly the absurdity of my position, so I shrugged my shoulders and took a tab of acid. Such actions can radically help or harm you based on the context, though acid-taking in moderation usually yields a net positive, yes it does.

It comes in waves. It comes on slowly and builds into a crescendo that plays out in movements.

Instead of what I thought would be a super-charged form of intoxication, dragging me into some sort of dream state, there was a moment of clear-eyed revelation: of course this festival was wrought with contradictions. Anything that grows this large has to be. With the birth of a new idea in material space comes a great expenditure of energy, which itself has magnetic properties. It holds sympathetic people together tight and attracts like-elements with its vitality. However as such an entity gains more and more mass, it achieves a gravity of its own, pulling contradictory elements into its orbit, which serves to dilute the signal in noise. It diminishes the thrust of the original idea. This can tie in with efforts at increased complexity to manage such a coherent mass, which upon reaching its limits, begins to break down and fragment as global capitalism is doing now. This is true for anything from ideas to social movements, trends and fads, institutions, recurring social events and etc. 

Leopold Kohr noted bigness as a problem in itself. You could see the very problem laid out in the mechanics of the festival. In the smaller, more intimate settings I saw glimmers of what I was looking for: groups of strangers caring for each other and celebrating each other's creative expression, usually spontaneously expressed and with humanity. However the larger grounds functioned very much like a marketplace of spectacle. The performances were all carefully constructed and orchestrated, with a plethora of light effects and saturated sound. Everything on a larger scale was carefully constructed to hold attention and keep it. Otherwise the drug-addled crowds would get bored and move on to the next sensation. It was a sad sight to watch a crowd melt away from a sincere performer who wasn't cutting it. It is this impersonal relation between people as means to each other's self-pleasure that we should really be questioning at this time. 

So here was an interesting dichotomy: you had people settling down around a certain idea or aesthetic and committing to it out of love for that idea, and this was usually in the more intimate settings. Otherwise the idea was no longer important, just the brilliance of its manifestation when it came to holding the attention of depersonalized market participants, which tended to be in the larger venues. There was much talk of consciousness and spiritual awakening, but for most of the observers at the festival, the experience had to do with what was giving them the most pleasurable sensations, and they would break whatever tenuous relationship formed with a performer if they weren't satisfied. This is the very tendency that characterizes our capitalist culture, a culture we supposedly came here to escape, ironically enough.

This did not mean the entire festival was a farce. It only meant that the festival had grown to such a size that there were bound to be elements attracted in that were contradictory to the underlying ideas. One had to take away what good one could take. Such is the case with all things in life.

Whilst on acid, even the most hopelessly depressed has the chance to experience the vibrant reality of the good in things. So what good was happening at this festival?

What one witnesses at a festival like this (not all of them achieve this) is the attempt at re-absorption of the un-absorbed, which is enough to produce some good. What I mean by this is that to be happy and to feel actualized in a society, an individual must have their expressive emotional self (no idea as to precisely what this is yet) respected and loved by those around them.

Not only should people be loved and respected in a community, they should be able to make expressive art, dance, sing, make music and otherwise create and alter the physical world in accordance with their person, and have those personal expressions appreciated by a greater community.

However this is a society that grossly undervalues creative acts. It only values creative acts insofar as the acts produce attractive forces that bring in paying traffic. We end up with this sort of lottery in which only a lucky few get to actually make a living expressing themselves (e.g. mainstream record companies only care for those artists capable of reaching the greatest numbers, producing the most sales), while the rest are condemned to perpetual wage slavery, to be slowly ground down over time, under-appreciated and un-actualized, feeding off of the emotional vitality of mass produced works and harboring secret fantasies of the self-expressive life.

These people are the un-absorbed. They exist as husks in a mechanical society that cares for them only as mechanical laborers, where the only expression that is allowed is in the privacy of their homes to be enjoyed by a limited few or none at all. So part of our task is to re-absorb these people into a community that loves and admires their characters and their expression. This festival provides a venue for such an activity, though it hasn't managed to integrate such a venue into a greater society. Still, it helps.

This isn't true for everyone of course. Others like to be appreciated for their excellent mechanical abilities or their skill with data or induction. We are just talking about the people these kinds of festivals appeal to.

The other thing that is happening in festivals like these is indicated by the first embers of a new religious awakening. There is an intense interest in the Eastern religions and spiritual philosophies in particular due in part to the spectacular failure of the Abrahamic religions, at least in terms of their mainstream manifestations, though there will surely be novel religious forms emerging in certain corners as well.

Many scholars believe the word "religion" itself can be traced back to the latin "re-ligare" which means to connect or bind...again. A very curious meaning that of course has been lost today. Here we have the early indications of a social body struggling to reconstitute itself.

So again, lots of good here, along with the bad, as is the case everywhere really, even within myself. So what was my problem?

Now to begin the second phase of the acid trip. I retreated to the tent and wrapped myself up in a sleeping bag, looking up through the ceiling mesh at the tree branches above. These branches formed staggering fractal patterns that reached down into the tent, becoming neon black and white, extending infinitely into the horizon, breathing with me as I gazed up. It seemed as though this tree was communicating.

I closed my eyes and experienced vast exotic desert landscapes, floating islands with cascading waterfalls and trees extended out over voids. Shimmering geometric patterns began to pulsate: snakes of endless shifting diamonds going from reds to oranges and yellows and greens and then melting back into the black.

My attention shifted to family and friends and I felt a great compassion and tenderness for them. Musical ideas were assembling themselves in the background and melting away. Finally my attention shifted to my own self.

I appeared to myself as a massive knot of competing hopes and desires. Certain behaviors and tendencies were cross-wired...sometimes conflicting. Certain obsessions and fixations had to be attended to in order to loosen the knot and allow other aspects of my personality to be worked on. I was broken. Emotionally gridlocked. Exerted on from the outside, my emotions would pull in one direction, pulling tighter a knot that wasn't going anywhere, precluding me from action.

Seeing this objective fact, I was able to feel compassion for my own brokenness. I felt the knot loosen. Such a revelation was pacifying, but it was not enough. As the acid trip subsided I felt things tighten once again. It would take subsequent processing to get things moving again. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent Pt. 1: Confusion

This is a three part piece that attempts to make sense of a series of personal, philosophical and spiritual revelations.

So last weekend at the Lucidity festival in Santa Barbara was a mixed experience for me, for various reasons that have come to appear far more complex the more I think about them. I spent the first half of the festival giving myself a good psychological lashing for various perceived internal and external shortcomings until I took a decent dose of good acid, which seems to have broken up much of the misplaced emotions and mistaken notions that had gathered up in a bottleneck before that point. A breakthrough wasn't reached immediately; I had to take time to process what I had experienced and talk to others as well to finally sort away the revelations and come to terms with my broken self. I'll try to walk through each phase. First we start with confusion.

I'm a problematic character. When I am in pain I withdraw. I also preemptively avoid pain by declining to engage, retreating to a world I've built and maintained in my head. This carries with it a set of benefits and drawbacks. I believe I can produce a set of tools from the world I've constructed in my head to eventually help others with. But to ensure that this created world is relevant, and in turn to produce good tools and share them effectively, one must walk in the world of people and engage. This wouldn't be the case if I lived in a time in which it wasn't so important to engage in creative practical action, a more stable time to be sure. An analytic intellectual work can be quite useful on its own, but in unstable times it seems to me necessary to produce a charged intellectual work that prescribes practical action. Now it is more crucial than ever to engage in activities that actively alter the external world, both social and ecological, for the material world as it exists now is an unacceptable place for most living things. That statement itself is pretty horrifying, but mostly true I think. So complete withdrawal into a constructed world has its problems in that sense. Maybe it is enough to create an intellectual work that sparks change, but there also seems to be a compelling moral imperative to attempt to do as much good as possible in the material world simultaneously.

The other problem is that many times when I withdraw it results in the alienation of others around me. When you close yourself off to another, when they can't see what is happening in your own head and you are not communicating to them what is happening, it hurts them. I know this because it hurts me when others close themselves to me. We are wired to begin surveying the various things our own person did wrong to bring about this closedness in another, even if it has nothing to do with us. Though the more sound and clear your mind is, the better you can avoid these heuristics and avoid self-harm.

Nevertheless, today it is important to do one's best to avoid harming others, because many of us are in pain for many different reasons, though all of those reasons can be traced back to being attached to a greater social vessel that is in fact disintegrating. Each of us has a responsibility to do our best to address those tendencies of ours that hurt other people. These tendencies are especially difficult to address because usually they are attached to the phenomenon of being in pain, but nevertheless it doesn't hurt to be conscious of them and to seek to address them as best as we can. We should all be looking out for one another now.

We should also be aware of a compound problem that arises when one hurts another. We are all attached in myriad ways to each other in networks. When one is in pain, one tends to engage in compensatory behaviors that are often not beneficial to those in the surrounding network. For example, one becomes depressed or withdrawn, possibly lowering the moods of others, or one lashes out in anger in another direction, possibly harming another. Such area damage can result in entire system changes in which everyone is behaving slightly differently in response to the disruption, possibly increasing the chances for further rupture, which itself contributes to even more system changes until the whole process bottoms out. Again, it is something to be aware of.

So! I've laid out what happens when I am in pain. What causes me pain? For the most part my own incessant question-begging saves me from getting tied up in the myriad social dramas that characterize our species. Someone does something that should hurt me and maybe the animal in me is initially hurt, but then the thinking starts and soon enough who knows what I am feeling. But one experiences social pain all the same by virtue of simply being alive, since we are all social creatures. Our very presence in space necessarily assumes we are in some sort of social arrangement. And our own characters in that social arrangement sooner or later affect the function of the social web we are part of.

My character is such that I become obsessed with certain ideas. For example the ideas of social cultivation, political revolution, change in consciousness, radical expression, those types of things. When my own practical actions and the social and environmental context around me don't match up with the prescriptive ideas I've become obsessed with, I become frustrated and withdraw, which probably causes pain in others, and the apprehension of this probable pain causes me social pain in turn because I've potentially caused it.

Now cause is always a slippery concept and who knows where everything starts and begins, but ego is tenacious in its projection in the world and we have this tendency to start our social-cause analysis from the actions of our own selves and from the actions of other selves in relation to us because it is the easiest place to start. Besides, we do have the ability to alter actions to attempt to meet some sort of constructed goal. The self is a good place to start for changes in action. We have some control over it.

Moving on, this festival did bother me a bit. What it initially appeared to be was another vast excuse to party and ignore our material plight. It was draped in notions of proper consciousness, social change, spiritual discovery and etc. but it seemed to be another glorified block party held in the woods, reconstituted with timely pleasing symbols and notions of the counterculture. We can take a whole bunch of drugs, forget about everything for a bit, and have nice pseudo-spiritual thoughts that can reassure our guilty consciences.  

Through the messaging we are offered to experience the sublimity of nature, though the hyper-saturation of light effects, loud music, spectacle and population all but obliterates the experience of nature. We are welcomed to think about the environment, though we all come in gas guzzling cars with bags and bags of store-bought supplies and play-things, all wrapped in petroleum plastics, our very activity still feeding empire. We are welcomed to treat our fellow man with reverence, but only if we have a 160 dollar ticket and the additional fortune in supplies to be able to make the trip, thereby barring the poor from entry. We talk of social revolution, but the secluded nature of the event serves as a mere escape which is to be compartmentalized and ultimately absorbed right into the capitalist society rejected by its culture.

Now the contradictions were everywhere. I get great pleasure out of harmony and continuity and then I am agitated and pained by contradictions and so of course at the time I sourly withdrew into myself upon surveying such a state of affairs. All of this was made worse upon contemplating the effects this withdrawal was having on my companions. I went out into the hills alone to escape the crowd and the noise and meditate on my inner conflicts. I realized I was making mistakes but the nature of the mistakes were eluding me. I realized my behavior was counterproductive but how to escape it? Sure there were problems with this culture, but where are there no problems? And what of the good aspects of the whole thing? There exist contradictions everywhere. There exist contradictions within me. And I engage in actions that feed empire in my own proportionate way. In my relative material comfort I am empire. I breathe it. What right, what standing do I have to judge? And yet I can't dispense of the sour taste. What to do? Well.

Bathing in the Afterglow

An extended weekend of revelations: the good, the bad, the cosmically indifferent...

More to come surely. For now, to sit and let the echo crashes subside.

The Goddess H

With "The Goddess H" by John McNamara, one can contemplate the imminent return of the feminine during a time in which we collectively writhe on the floor in pain from an overdose of the masculine. I'm honored to display an image that represents a great collective feminine power and so much more, from a good friend and a great artist. Enjoy.

People and Ideas

It is interesting to see how various people respond to certain ideas and acts of communication.

Some people are fluid and can learn quickly and change their minds if they need to. Others are gelatinous: they quiver a bit and then revert to their old shape. Yet others rise out of the ground like spires of rock, refusing to negotiate.

Such characteristics dramatically influence the shape our social totality takes. For a good social climate, one necessarily needs compassion and understanding.

Modern Madness, Complex Social Systems, and Other Similar Connected Phenomena

Aha! A flash of inspiration while doing the dishes. Curious how certain mundane mechanical tasks get the gears moving. Right then; now to get down in words this picture before it fades.

There's this tendency of living things to increase in complexity to a certain point in order to perpetuate themselves in the world. Of course we aren't talking about eternal progress. Certain branches of evolutionary chains hit relatively stable plateaus that will probably remain stable provided the environment stays relatively stable in turn.

Human beings themselves hit these incredible spurts of growth and innovation and then the process tapers off and whatever structures were built crumble, to be replaced with new structures that will of course borrow from the old. It is never a complete reset. We progress like the tide, ever-spiraling upwards but crashing at certain peaks and sloshing down to begin anew.

How did this process start? Strange thinking about it: each of us a packet of energy built up by incredibly complex organic arrangements...packets of energy working with other packets of energy in order to absorb still other packets of energy in turn, all to maintain existence. With the Big Bang came a radiation of energy outwards, culminating in our motley lot with our cellphones and tablet PCs and whatnot. Little delicate creatures like us...children of an ancient cosmic explosion. We carry on the old logic, the logic of the radiation and perpetuation outwards of energy into a void. And now here we are, organized intelligence self-constructing a better vessel to perpetuate ourselves with.

It is all culminating in these incredibly complex brains of ours, themselves giving birth to this strange, insectile technological tissue. Technology seems organic to me anyways. We don't consider the web of the spider  or the venom sacks of the rattlesnake unnatural, yet such organs wouldn't exist without the purpose of a living vessel with which to serve. Molecules with their electrons arranged in certain structures, structures that act on others to bind physical materials or separate them or break them down, depending on purpose. But I suppose I am going off track.

I find myself obsessively returning to this question of modern madness and its relation to our modern social systems. We produce madness. You could even say that our social totality has gone mad itself: here we sit as a large section of our society perpetuates the destruction of not only the cradle from which we grew but the very tissue of our own selves. Individual madness could be said to be born out of the pathological behavior of an errant emotional system: each person's emotional landscape can hitch itself to certain arbitrary objects of worship, objects of worship that can lead to all sorts of psychic pain upon the lack of fulfillment. We each have an emotional culture so to speak which is in danger of becoming pathological. In the same way, the very relations and functions of our social culture is resulting in great destruction. This madness reproduces itself in fractal patterns throughout our interconnected, nested systems.

We've come so far in the evolutionary chain to a point of great complexity; it is a shame this has to happen now. But certainly it is the way the physical world works. I think it was Hindu metaphysics that posited that life tends to hide from itself. It branches out in increasing complexity...perhaps in order to better manipulate the world in order to perpetuate its own bounded systems. However the further life branches out, each of the nodes working together in whatever vehicle takes shape become further removed from each other, until they can no longer collectively communicate the holistic messages required to sustain the entire structure.

So here we are. Our collective vehicle initially formed around a mechanistic, individualistic conception of society that worked decently for a while - well it solved the problem of decaying traditional institutions and broke the stranglehold the old churches had on the state - but now it is breaking down, with each individual zig-zagging away from the center, some completely powerless, while the rest of the power pools uselessly in a select few.

There's always that nagging question: what is to be done? To struggle towards a new conception of society of course. What is this new society going to look like? Many think that as the cheap energy runs out and the old industrial mechanisms unravel, there will be a decentralization and localization of political concentration. The consensus process currently being practiced by various radical political groups offers promise for a new model of government. Of course such processes work best on a small scale, which lines up nicely with the likelihood of fragmentation after the old empire falls. Which it will. It is looking very weak these days.

And what of the subjective experience of these changes? When this individualistic society was flourishing our consciousness was focused on our own selves and our relation to others. We would orient ourselves to become whatever figure we deemed both sympathetic to our own aspirations and collectively revered by greater society. But it seems to me like this focus is beginning to become inverted. As power continues to drain from each of us and an individual weakness sets in, we become concerned about the others around us.

We glance nervously at those around us, wondering what they must think, as we are no longer sure we can actualize ourselves as the old archetypes. And why should we? Such archetypes were from another time. There is no material power left to be the old individual. And as we become increasingly focused on others, we begin to see some things. Wow! It seems that above and beyond the fact that what people think about us matters to us, how other people behave actually alters the surrounding conditions in which our own individuality is expressed! The piece is getting long, so let's tackle that another time. But I'd like to end with this: our attention should re-align its focus from our selves to others. How to re-establish communication? How to re-align disparate skill sets? If a man or woman has a weakness, how can another's strength supplement that? And how can the very strengths of the ostensibly weak be harnessed in turn to reciprocate and to supplement those hidden weaknesses of the ostensibly strong?

So much to think about. There always is.