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Word & Will
Just got the Disinfo Book of Lies. There’s some good stuff in it. And fortunately a lot of it relates really directly to the lines of study I’ve been following lately. This bit comes from Mark Pesce’s article, “The Executable Dreamtime”, and should be a good follow-up to some ideas I’ve been touching on with Landmark & Scientology and elsewhere.
It is impossible for a human being, in a “normal” level of consciousness - that is, without explicit training or “gratuitous grace” - to experience anything of the reality of the world. Language steps in to mediate, explain and define. [….]
In the battle between Word and Will, there are two paths, which diverge from a common entry point, and converge upon a final exit. We wish to release everything and become one with all; we wish to encompass everything and become one with all.
[…] The French philosophers have introduced us to the idea of forward acceleration. When you find yourself trapped in a seemingly hopeless situation, jam your foot down on the accelerator pedal, take it to the limit and drive straight on through to the culmination. Imminentize the Eschaton. What if we were to say, fine, bring it on, and accept language for all of it’s enslaving faults - but at the same time, keep a consciousness of these faults constantly before us? Where would we find ourselves? Could this lead to freedom, a freedom which is less an escape from imprisonment than an encompassing awareness that the world, with all its traps and cages, cannot be separated from the Absolute? (p. 27)
There’s also a Grant Morrison article, part of which discusses calling down Godforms. He talks about how it’s not necessary to “believe” in them to invoke them, as they are simply “Big Ideas” that have existed before you and will exist after you. He also adds:
In life we encounter these Big Ideas every day but we no longer use the word “god” to describe them. The magician constantly evokes those states and renames them gods in order to separate them from his or her Self, in order to study them and learn.
This sounds a whole heck of a lot like how Landmark teaches you to make “distinctions” between what happened and the “story of what happened.” While not an exact match, it seems like it’s pretty close because it involves an intentional distancing of the Self from it’s experiences. This is also good from him:
Think of these new qualities or gods as applications and upload them when you need to use them. The more you run the application the more convincing and intrinsic to Self it seems to become.
More from this book to follow…
- Transrationality
- In the Beginning was Microsoft Word
- Least Favorite Word of 2004
- Word of the day
- Shibboleth
- Prev: The Right to Remain Scared
- Next: Reason & The Hidden Will
June 30th, 2005 at 5:12 pm
That shit about the shimmering purple butterlies with silk top hats and venom-dripping fangs coccooned in massive sprawling mirrored cities in the DMT hyperspace was pretty mindblowing as well…
RE: acceleration, I’m reminded of Virlio’s (sp?) book on politics and speed (autonomedia press). Jean Baudrillard expresses some of the same ideas IIRC. But I have always seen Baudrillard as something of a disappointed Platonist a very lyrical and entertaining writer, almost like sci-fi philosphy but not much to grab onto except for maybe and excuse for weary cycnicism
June 30th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
(i was about to post this on the last topic, but realized there was a new one, it may be better here)
IMO, culture = os & language = software & words = code
or something like that.
culture is basically a agreed upon reality. and the words that make up the language of a culture define that reality.
im very much into culture hacking & open source reality…
i think the more we realize word power is the key, the better we become at communication, the better the world will be for all of us.
i also think that the english language itself is a occult experiment, along the lines of a Baconian New Atlantis…
i am basically blown away every time i realize what the words mean… and i think it has alot to do with sounds, more so than spelling or definitions… i think the sounds have meanings…. casting vibration spells…
like everything else though… you can either look at it as a prison cell or a art gallery, i prefer the latter..
one
human?
June 30th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
The reason the godform stuff sounds like Landmark is because it’s Crowley’s- and everything that came out of Hubbard was twisted from Crowley’s ideas (with some buddhist and freudian glosses). morrison peeves me off sometimes because he not only oversimplifies these things and appears too concerned with his pop culture angle. It’s almost like reading Spare dick and Jane style, or the DC guide to ritual magick. I wish he’d stick to comic books.
June 30th, 2005 at 6:04 pm
^^ kind of elitist no?
crowley didnt come up with anything new either…
the DC guide to ritual magick.
perhaps there is more to that than it would seem……
comic books and the like are way smarter than they seem… pop culture in general as well…..
hollywood = a magic wand… or perhaps holy word……
the ritual magick aspect of pop culture is overwhelming IMO.
June 30th, 2005 at 6:09 pm
overload. that`s the way to salvation. i had a friend who had a facial tick that appeared when he least needed it, when he had to make presentations. so i put him into a trance and allowed him to go to a presentation and begin to have the tick….more and more until he was screwing the whole side of his face up into a knot,like a clenched fist. his face was sore for a few days after, not unlike the day after laughing on acid, but he hasn`t had the tick again.
it`s a lot easier to ride a horse in the direction he`s going in. you look so much more in control.
culture hacking………i like that.
June 30th, 2005 at 6:46 pm
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the connective thread of ideas and interpretations throughout various groups and individuals. The more I study it, the less I feel like it’s such a “bad” thing as I previously thought.
I’m not sure I’m quite able to articulate it usefully yet, but it has to do with this idea of the separation between events, and the story that’s told about events. It seems like in some cases, people don’t actually use language to refer to events. They just use it to refer to other language. In that case, it’s only natural that we’re going to appropriate (or cannibalize) one another’s language ad nauseum.
I guess what I’m learning how to do is to figure out how to use the language to sort of “reverse-engineer” back to the original source material - the event itself.
Right, it seems like he engaged in the same reverse-engineering process until it brought him to “actual” events. Then from there, he reformulated language and symbol systems to match his own experience. He probably stole as much or maybe more as Hubbard did from him - or that’s my guess anyway, not having read much of his work directly.
June 30th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
uh oh dude, the only place to go from here is time..
June 30th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
what?
June 30th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
…our impulses are being redirected. We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep… …the movement was begun eight months ago by a small group of scientists who discovered, quite by accident, these signals being sent through television… …the poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices… …their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent, to ourselves, to others, we are focused only on our own gain. We ha… …please understand, they are safe as long as they are not discovered. That is their primary method of survival. Keep us asleep, keep us selfish, keep us sedated… …they are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery. The revolution… …we cannot break their signal, our transmitter is not powerful enough. The signal must be shut off at the source. We have…
June 30th, 2005 at 8:07 pm
…and to paraphrase Popo. they is us.
June 30th, 2005 at 8:07 pm
THEY LIVE!!!!!!!!!
what?
lol.
sorry, im abit odd.
welp, my thoughts went, reverse engineering, actual experience, then communication, writing down for future reading….. turned into a discussion about the nature of time in my head…
information, time & manifestation. what IS real? or maybe when? and what words (or maybe sounds) are the key to unlocking that door…. or shit, am i even at the right address? lol.
one
human?
June 30th, 2005 at 8:14 pm
it’s weird… i ALMOST knew what the hell you were saying when you said it becomes a discussion of time. like i can FEEL there’s some kind of true connection there, but my mind is recoiling away from it because i can’t put it into words… which is exactly the issue, i guess
June 30th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
terence mckenna (geez i keep bringing him up, he definitly has got me thinking recently…) said something along ther lines, imagine looking at the earth from space and see it covered in this swarm of information. biological genetic codes, travelling, changing swapping, and eventually out of this information stew comes man and his civilization based one words–information… and now look what we are doing! exchanging ideas almost instantly in the idea space media scape!!
before you build a building, you draw a blueprint. im not so sure how much thats different from ritual magick.
because i can’t put it into words… which is exactly the issue, i guess
definitly. but i dont know if its a issue in a negative way, as so far as i have come to enjoy the mystery and feel like we are making good progress…. things seem fucked up, but once we get past the growing pains, the future looks bright IMO.
one
human?
June 30th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
that should say “pogo,” not “popo.”
July 1st, 2005 at 7:28 am
To stretch the culture=OS analogy, if you work from the premise that “body and the mind are parts of a biological robot that our immaterial souls inhabit” [Alan Moore - Watchmen. Yes, I AM a geek, thank you.]…
…but if you work from the person=[part]robot/computer metaphor, and culture=OS, then NLP/est/Scientology is nothing more than learning a programming language, whereas magical/occultic practice is tweaking the source code of the OS.
I’m still trying to reconcile that with the Warren Ellis idea that magics are like cheat codes for video games…