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Days of Future Past…
Last night I saw a number of weird things. One of them was a printshop across the street from the cafe I was sitting at called Alphagraphics. The tagline next to the main title was “Printshops of the Future.” Except… the shop itself had been abandoned for years, JK told me.
This weird irony though, the temporal dissonance of the whole thing brought into focus something interesting on Kylark’s blog the other day, when she wrote:
I feel like we’re in a swirl in history. All these predictions here and elsewhere of the machine waking up seem to be echoes of a thing that has already happened. I believe the silicon-consciousness(es) and the organic consciousness(es) are circling each other, in a dance through history trying to find a way to love one another without destroying each other. The Singularity is close enough that it may be happening now, long slow circles, reverberations while mind divides once again.
Though I’m not sure about the Singularity and all that, I do find this idea of the present being some kind of repetition really fascinating. Have you ever thought about this? Have you ever had the feeling not just of a moment of deja vu, but that the whole course of your life, your conversations, your actions and interactions have all come and gone like this before? Not reincarnation, where your soul jumps from body to body - but living this one life over and over. Not so much predestination even, but that life is going round and round, caught in a groove on a broken record.
If that’s the case, how does evolution take place, if at all? Does the ability exist to alter the recording each time it is played? Is there a way to break through to tinker with the implicate source, the signal at the beginning of time?
I’ve always liked the show Quantum Leap for this reason, because it depicts God or some mysterious process projecting backward into linear time to try and correct itself through the means of a human agent. It very much falls in line with Philip K. Dick’s line from the Exegesis, where he explains:
we are moving backward in time. The universe in fact is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. These healers learned to move forward in time, which is retrograde to us.
All this spawned by a “printshop of the future” which has been long since abandoned to the forces of decay. Where did the future go that was described by that shop sign? Are we moving backwards to meet it? Has it already came and went while we weren’t looking?
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May 31st, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Is there a way to break through to tinker with the implicate source, the signal at the beginning of time?
I think thats what the gnostic myths are - a form of retroactive causation. Linda like the way the scientists who try to observe or measure the big bang are actually affecting it, per the Participatory Anthropic Priniciple
May 31st, 2006 at 3:19 pm
absolutely. processing speed and power is accelerating and so is time. are we doing it? it is the observer effect that physicists have seen in thier experiments and what shamans have been talking about forever.
the big bang is an observer effect too. so is the very next thing we all do.
i wonder what the observer cause is?
May 31st, 2006 at 3:24 pm
PKD has gone into this theme elsewhere - I think he even used the record groove analogy. His speculation was that this may be true, and we are stuck this way due to an unlearned lesson or a bad choice on the previous playing, and that “salvation” was the opportunity to do the right thing THIS TIME ROUND - ever present - and so break yourself out of the groove.
May 31st, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I AM THAT I AM, the one uncontingent, most accurately conceived of apophatically.
—
How is the future mentally distinguished from the past?
In Fiasco, Lem said that for a man falling into a black hole, space would take on the aspect of time, since the spacial degrees of freedom would be reduced as the observer collapsed into singularity.
My own, possibly not incompatible, feeling is that our experience of “the past” is uniquely determined by exactly the section of the universe’s phase space that is available to an observer at any arbitrary point. Any information not contained in this set is relatively undetermined and indeterminable to a degree and possesses the aspect of “the future”, impenetrability, subjectively arbitrary, unappealable.
In QBL, there is frequent reference to “the Future World”, Abulafia wrote a text with the phrase in the title.
“Silence will be the language of the future world.” - St. Isaac of Ninevah
On the to-read list: “The End of Time” by Julian Barbour
May 31st, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Funny you should post about that.
Try reading this Essay from PK Dick. He spells it out quite explicitely, and is spot on with your groove analogy (he uses the same one).
(Scroll down to the highlited part, it’s among other random stuff, only copy of this essay I did found online)
May 31st, 2006 at 7:16 pm
All this spawned by a “printshop of the future” which has been long since abandoned to the forces of decay. Where did the future go that was described by that shop sign? Are we moving backwards to meet it? Has it already came and went while we weren’t looking?
Well, for one FedEx/Kinkos ate it up. Alphagraphics was a bustling place during the dotcom boom years. Which is kinda strange when you think about it — The dotcom days.
What happened, what changed in those days within us all? I wish so much that I could view this all in its full gestalt glory.
May 31st, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Holy moly, this PKD essay is completely NUTS!
June 2nd, 2006 at 10:06 am
That PKD essay is in “Shifting Realities”
June 2nd, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Not really related, but there’s a print shop about halfway between there and downtown (sort of by the new feddie bldg.) called ‘Golem Copies’. I was tripping when I found it and thought it was fucking hilarious.
AReTe!
June 2nd, 2006 at 4:26 pm
” That PKD essay is in “Shifting Realities” ”
Hey! Didn’t notice you did post about that first when I posted my comment. Sorry for the dupe. Yes, it’s from ‘Shifting Realities’. The whole part before that essay is worth a read: Get it there
What is especially strange concerning this text are the synchronicities I had around it.
Freaked out from Barbelith in a really stupid way. Did stumble upon this text the very next day for the first time, and was amazed as how it echoed and expanded on the first post I did over there on retrocausation (which to me is the really interesting thing, it’s the way to break free from the groove according to Dick).
Then a few days later Tim post about that, close to the first time I’m reading his blog, and that was its last post at this time.
Substance M… Ain’t that the french title of ‘A Scanner Darkly’? Guess you’re french then. Me too. Way too freaky. SAM letter? Please.
Just when I meant to drop online interaction and give myself a break, I’m finding compelled to contribute, and the weirdness is increasing.
Sorry for the off-topic rant.
June 4th, 2006 at 5:02 am
About the Reptilians, you might consider research rather that just assuming the world around you is flat, it is a hard one to understand but without question, the Nagas of India, the Serpent Men, the Annuanaki, the Dragon Thrones around the world speak their presence, but only to those who are ready. The invasion is real, stay tuned, you’ll see.
June 4th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Ooh! Both cryptic *and* condescending.. my favorite esoteric combination!