the timboucher experience

One thing I’ve found that’s funny is as you begin having stranger and stranger experiences which stray more and more from consensciousness, you find yourself less willing to talk about them. It’s not that I want necessarily to keep them secret, but that I know there are certain people I can talk about them with who are sort of trusted confidants, and it’s like, I don’t know. I just don’t really want to blabber all of them on the internet anymore. Maybe that’s just beginner’s reticence - maybe it’s something more. Who knows? I’m also not as given to speculation as I once was… So anyway I find myself only wanting to talk about them in a kind of roundabout way… So I’ll just break you off some pieces and let your brain assemble them (or not) as need be.

Where Loko Atissou is the father of all kanzo initiates, Ayizan is the Mother of all Initiates. Ayizan Velekete is her full name, and she is often seen as a very old woman, with an apron that has deep pockets. Ayizan is a root lwa, bringing the mysteries of the Kanzo and of life and death to us here int he Marketplace. The Yoruba tradition refers to the earthy plane as the Marketplace, so it is fitting that Ayizan is the one who brings them down to us. She is the lwa that tears into the djevo during the Chire Ayizan, purifying it for the hunyos (the spirit children), who will birth into Mambos and Houngans.

I recently had a “dream” wherein someone taught me how to travel out of body. The trick was simple, make yourself float about a foot off the ground (while standing) and then lean forward like you’re an airplane or Superman and then focus completely on where you want to go. I am also going through a Robert Monroe book concurrently to all this (but hadn’t actively been experimenting when the above happened) and tried out the thing he says where you count upwards, each number referring to a specific body part, which you then focus on relaxing. I’ve seen another source online say it’s kind of like having a lead blanket slowly drawn up over you. I can get myself into that state pretty easily and completely, but haven’t yet mastered any of the standing up or rolling out techniques people talk about. Shit’s pretty interesting though.

I also spent part of last night working on that whole “drawing up Leviathan with a fishhook” thing. Pretty interesting as well. I have more to say about that sometime, as well as about the bombing of the Death Star and Goro Adachi’s acclaimed “hexagonal gate” but a lot of this stuff is like, well there’s really no putting it into words. It’s not just that I don’t want to let the genie out of the bottle, but that the imagery you have to use to describe it all is like, well it’s so obtuse.

Breo Saighead, or the “Fiery Arrow or Power,” is a Celtic three-fold goddess, the daughter of The Dagda, and the wife of Bres. Known by many names, Brighid’s three aspects are (1) Fire of Inspiration as patroness of poetry, (2) Fire of the Hearth, as patroness of healing and fertility, and (3) Fire of the Forge, as patroness of smithcraft and martial arts. She is mother to the craftsmen. Sons of Tuireann: Creidhne, Luchtaine and Giobhniu.

But this is where shared reference points come in really handy. More about that sometime soon.

This is more of a house-keeping post at this time. I don’t have any real grand master pattern that I (feel) like I am tapping into. Just scrawled out notes on my whiteboard that have been accumulating…

Oh, I know a good one. The other day somebody complained about how they thought that I thought I am being “creative” and “artistic” and all that shit, but that my work is unoriginal, etc. People have accused me of ripping of the Surrealists, the Dadaists, Burroughs, Joyce, etc. I get where these people are coming from, but it’s a silly way of looking at shit. Seriously. Do you know why? I’ll tell you why. Because there ARE ways of getting where we (or I specifically) have been trying to get. And the thing is that the techniques are actually fairly consistent and the toolbox is surprisingly small to get there. The only real difference I have been able to see is among the language-referent service packs that different people and groups were running. I’m not trying to put myself up there with “the greats” by any means. I think most of my writing is mediocre in retrospect. But the point is that an “artist” is one who follows the “Royal Art” and beauty, truth, love and all the rest flow from that striving.

Rap crossed musical genres and broke cultural barriers on Monday when the first hip-hop artists were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Moving along in my list of things to take care of: it’s funny that they call a group of lions a “pride.” No wonder!

I’ve started having dreams that are like commercials, blipverts actually. It’s like they are super-compacted and they unfold themselves into space. I think that’s actually quite how most dreams work, to tell you the truth. I had a conversation with someone the other day about their experiences on acid and he said that once he saw a bubble form from out of his mouth and the words he spoke inflated it as they visibly spiraled into this bubble. And when it reached a certain point, the bubble would break off, float over to his friend and them reverse/flush itself into his friend’s ear.

One of the blipvert dreams was for a shamanism workshop in the Southwest (I know where if this rings anybody’s bells). I heard drumming and vaguely saw people dancing, etc. It was ridiculous. I was like, “What the hell, these people are sending me dream commercials now? What the hell?”

In the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, druid is one of the base character classes. The Druid is a versatile class, capable in combat and of casting divine spells. They gain divine magic from being at one with nature, or from one of several patron gods of the wild. Unlike the cleric, druids do not have special powers against undead and cannot use metal armor. Druids have a unique ability that allows them to change into various animal forms. Druids work very well with animals, and can try to improve a wild creature’s attitude the same way they would improve an NPC with diplomacy. Druids gain a greater control of their body, they leave no trace. At higher levels they can change appearance at will, and don’t age.

Another of them today was in the not-too-distant future, I was watching television with a woman who seemed familiar and another person I can’t place. On the television a computer-revived Benjamin Franklin was hawking the release of a new unit of United States currency called the Liberty. It was longer and flatter of a rectangle than our current bills, and it featured - you guessed it - a holographic image of the Statue of Liberty on it.

Just another in my long line of near-futuristic dystopian dreams. I wonder how many thousands of people out there are tapping into that current.

Oh, and the dinosaur/dragon thing lead me to a nice place… I think we spend most of our time and energy today as “spiritual seekers” (oh how I hate both of those words - but there’s no point in hating words, it’s like hating yellow triangles [triforce?]) trying to pooh-pooh scientific materialism as having missed the boat on higher orders of spiritual reality. But we (and by that I mean mostly me) rarely consider that science and materialism are not refutations of spiritual truths and esoteric teachings, but they are actually modern manifestations of metaphors to describe these things. It’s incredibly easy to forget.

Sylvester Stallone has been charged with trying to bring vials of a muscle-building hormone into Australia, where it is restricted.

Lawyers for Stallone, the 60-year-old star of the “Rocky” and “Rambo” movie franchises, represented him in a Sydney court on Tuesday where he faces a charge of importing a banned substance.

In fact, in my more generous moments I am able to vividly remember (and sometimes even read) that all things everywhere at all times contain vigorously encoded messages about the Secrets of the Universe. There is nothing that exists that isn’t a reflection of that, because nothing else can exist, because existence itself flows from that Fount of Truth…

Haha. I’m sure this all sounds very pompous to the casual reader. “Fount of Truth,” shit about me not telling you secret things I’ve experienced, comparing myself to famous artists, etc. Well, be that as it may. There’s a point when you have to give up trying to control other people’s perceptions of you and just put out there what it feels right for you to put out there. So be it…

Seagate Technology LLC, the world’s largest hard drive maker, announced Monday the first manufacturer to sell laptop PCs with its new built-in encryption technology.

The hard drives, to be available in laptops made by ASI Computer Technologies, will include a chip that makes it impossible for anyone to read data off the disk, or even boot up a PC, without some form of authentication.

I was looking at something about suicide bombers the other day in a news article and it suddenly meshed in with thoughts about uploaded consciousness, biometric identity tracking and omniscient surveillance, etc. The idea - half-formed, unfortunately - was something like: in the future, if you kill yourself or others it won’t matter so much (I think Cory Doctorow has written about this in his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - which I haven’t read) because you will either be re-enthickened/enfleshed or whatever. That is, if you have the money and status to do so. Most of us will probably just be patterns locked in a big computer vault churning out intelligently-matched data sets for a higher-order algorithm we call “society” - which is probably all we really are now anyway. But in the future, instead of trying to build the mythical diamond or resurrection body, we will have to build an actual physical one - probably out of whatever is laying around.

I once made a drawing of these demons I was going to make a children’s book about (yeah, that’s the kind of shit I think about telling kids) where the demons can’t go onto the above-ground parts of Earth unless they make for themselves a body. So they harvest body parts out of tombs and whatnot and then stitch the pieces all together into these crazy Frankenstein monsters so they can walk around on the surface. The funny part of the story would be seeing them walk around in ordinary human society with like three goat heads, elephant ears, a duck butt and ten human arms sticking out of their chest, going through the checkout line at the grocery store and not understanding why everyone is so freaked out by them. Hilarious. Crazy demon bastards. They don’t even know… That’s the funny part. I’ll probably still write and illustrate that at some point.

Israel has recalled its ambassador in El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked with sex toys lying nearby in the yard of his official residence, Israeli media reports said on Monday.

A foreign ministry spokeswoman confirmed that the ambassador, Tsuriel Raphael, was recalled but offered no details. “The ministry sees his behavior as unbecoming of a diplomat,” the spokeswoman said.

But yeah, the original seed of that thing about suicide bombers was that I imagined there would be some kind of like “virus vault” which would quarantine the uploaded spirits of suicide bombers. They would probably be isolated before they ever committed a crime: pre-crime, a la Minority Report, except based solely on pattern matching by an intelligent algorithm, as opposed to the prophetic visions of three loons in a tank of saline.

Shit, there’s always so much to talk about, isn’t there? I can never understand when people say that they are bored. Ever. What the hell is there to be bored about?

Following that thread for a moment. Well not really - that’s not much of a segue. But I have been wanting to talk about something I call mirror-marketing. Basically it is the trend announced by Time Magazine choosing “YOU!” as Person of the Year last year. What it is is hyper-individualized marketing. Some people call it narrowcasting, but even that is too broad. In the future, everything will be personally perfectly tailored to you specifically and you alone. I will have all my own different shit tailored to me. Everything will be based on a vast collection of patterns and data that has been collected on me over the course of my whole life and correlated into a perfectly completely individualized intelligent system which markets everything to you in such a perfect and compatible and exciting and fun way that you no longer realize you’re being marketed to at all (assuming you ever were in the first place).

“From your father, the king of kings,
and your mother, the governor of the East,
and from your brother, our second in command,
to you, our son, who is in Egypt, peace.
Awake and arise from your sleep,
and hear the words of our letter.
Remember that you are a son of kings,
consider the slavery you are serving.
Remember the pearl,
on account of which you were sent to Egypt.
Think of your glorious garment,
remember your splendid toga,
which you will put on and wear
when your name is called out from the book of the combatants (athletes).
And with your brother, our viceroy,
With him, you will be in our kingdom.”

But how will that look? It’s funny, because this thing - this thing that will be used to “market” reality to you will look just like you. In fact, what or who would know you better than you yourself? But imagine you could ask yourself questions - and get answers. Self, where did I leave my keys? Self, can we remember what it felt like the first time we had sex? And then you’d be able to call those things up.

Once I started thinking down this road though, a bunch of reference points and symbol systems suddenly collapsed together on me (this is what the Singularity will really mean - massive implosion of reference points). This mirror marketing system that looks like you (data body? avatar?) - well, um, I don’t know how to say this, but uh… this already is you. This is what we mean when we use words like “ego” and “body” and for the most part “mind” (reactive mind maybe would be more precise here? not sure…). Those things already are a completely customized vehicle through which reality is marketed to you in such a way as ONLY YOU will appreciate it, and only you will experience it and those patterns of usage will never be replicated, at least not completely.

At a laboratory in Germany, volunteers slide into a doughnut-shaped MRI machine and perform simple tasks, such as deciding whether to add or subtract two numbers, or choosing which of two buttons to press.

They have no inkling that scientists in the next room are trying to read their minds — using a brain scan to figure out their intention before it is turned into action.

And this is part of what makes reference points so important and why I keep harping on them. Because reference points are the bridges between each of our individualized mirror-marketed ego-body constructs. They take us out of our micro-marketed-realities into shared spaces, playgrounds, temporary autonomous zones (see: Hakim Bey & TAZ). But the problem is they are also capable of being used to mash us all into a humaniculture livestock common crop shape. So we must actively create and implode our reference point ark sets as we go along, leaving minefields in our wakes, always seeking out the new language, the new clothing for the old techniques.

And that’s about it. That’s where I run out of steam for today. I have in about an hour and a half a meeting to possibly get a part time position doing dog daycare, which could be pretty damned fun. Speaking of reference points, dogs are great for that because they don’t care about any of this shit, and increasingly neither do I. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, it simply means I need to create and destroy as I go along and leave a Trail of Death where I pass through, so that reference points collapse, mini-singularities happen, and people start tuning the dials better on their RealiTVity sets…

• Notes: Chariots and Horses of Israel
• The Perfect Wolves
• Nietzsche & Religion
• This guy just don’t stop
• What’s With Burning Man?