Visible Schools

“The symbol that gives our Order its name, the Rose Cross, represents a fully developed human being, a Master of Existence. It represents someone who, by their wisdom and command of circumstances is not enslaved by destiny, but rather is the author of their own destiny and manifests, in the material world, the highest potentialities and ideals of the spirit. We can say that the Rose Cross symbolizes the inner state of perfection and power that we should reach through our study and practice, as our reward. One way in which the Rose Cross Order is defined is to say that it is a Visible School that transmits the secrets and knowledge of the Spiritual Fraternity that its symbol represents.”

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The Inauguration, The Digital Transition & Mass Perceptual Re-Arrangement in the USA

Table of Contents

  1. We Are All Obama
  2. In-”Augur”-ation
  3. Augurs In the Classical World
  4. The Digital Switch-Over
  5. Public Access To Frequency Bands
  6. “New Broadband Wireless Services” = New Computing Paradigm
  7. PSYOPS & Social Engineering
  8. I, Sovereign Exile
  9. American Catharsis

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We Are All Obama

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You may have recently noticed that I changed my online “callsign” for this domain to “Timothy Obama.” Not only is it a shameless attempt to cash in on Obamania (which is especially fervent in Baltimore - thanks to its geographic proximity to Washington, DC - about an hour’s drive), but it has also been a shamanic exercise in invoking the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the spirit of the times.

Yesterday, a regular came into the store with some home-printed Obama t-shirts for sale at fifteen bucks each. Ten dollars would have been a more compelling price-point, in my opinion, but that’s just the retailer/cheapskate in me talking. Apparently a friend or family member of his had driven all the way from Michigan to turn a quick buck at the inauguration. Carnival culture in action - I’ve been meaning to do an installation on “the merchant” as an iconic social role…

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It’s interesting to note that certain of the shirts featured quotations from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, and that the inauguration proceedings are occurring the day after the American holiday commemorating this slain black civil rights leader. There are actually a lot of interesting things clustered around the inauguration/coronation proceedings which I’d like to weave a little bit of an associative web around and see if we can’t get somewhere semiotically with all of it.

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In-”Augur”-ation

I’m a big fan of etymology as a means to gain an associative understanding of the sort of encoded essence of things. Inauguration actually has - if you look at it - the word “augur” in the middle, which if you’re up on your Roman history, you’ll know is a method of divination centered around birds.

1569, from Fr. inauguration “installation, consecration,” from L. inaugurationem (nom. inauguratio) “consecration, installment under good omens,” from inaugurare “take omens from the flight of birds, consecrate or install when such omens are favorable,” from in- “on, in” + augurare “to act as an augur, predict” (see augur).

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Augurs In The Classical World

The augur was a priest and official in the classical world, especially ancient Rome and Etruria. His main role was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of the birds (whether they are flying in groups/alone, what noises they make as they fly, direction of flight and what kind of birds they are), known as “taking the auspices.” The ceremony and function of the augur was central to any major undertaking in Roman society–public or private–including matters of war, commerce, and religion.

Consider the words of the Roman historian Livy, who writes (VI.41): auspiciis hanc urbem conditam esse, auspiciis bello ac pace domi militiaeque omnia geri, quis est qui ignoret? (”Who does not know that this city was founded only after taking the divinations, that everything in war and in peace, at home and abroad, was done only after taking the divinations?”)

And like I said, America’s first black president taking the Oath of Office the day after MLK day is very auspicious. It doesn’t necessarily “mean” anything on its own: a co-incidence of two events in time, but the human perceptual system is associative if nothing else. Events clustered together in time have a way of forming perceptual filters, which tend to channel people down certain decision-making pathways and paradigms.

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The Digital Switch-Over

Also clustered at this auspicious moment in American history is a change in governance which while less flashy may directly impact most Americans in a much more direct and immediately perceiveable way than the first African-American assuming the office of president, however symbolic and hopeful you may take that to be. The transition event in question is the HD-TV switchover which is scheduled (as far as I know) for February 17th of 2009, a month from yesterday. Five days after Valentine’s Day, you’ll be able to hold your sweetheart tight on the couch as the analog television set which you paid good money for suddenly goes dark because manufacturers and marketers have found more efficient means of driving and tracking consumer behavior patterns. It’s called digital, and its etymology relates to counting and humans. You count digits on your digits, your fingers. You count number of people watching such and such broadcast and provide your metrics to your advertisers and you make deals.

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The USA digital switchover, unlike the presidential election, is one of those backroom media deals with which the USA consumer was not privy to at its inception and had no real recognizable voice or presence to prevent its passage. And most members of USA consumer demographic groups wouldn’t see the what use retaining old “antiquated” alternative technologies would ever even provide. They’re too glued to cable TV already and to the endless stream of DVD’s and shitty music coming out of NewNYHollywood’s™ megamedia trough to notice that individual broadcast and frequency access rights are being downsized step by step in favor of more restrictive and more easily trackable communications technologies.

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Public Access To Frequency Bands

It has been a real trip lately reading through the Radio Shack/FCC team-up textbook I was given for the formal examination which anyone who wants to access the radio frequency bands open to communication by ordinary people like you and I. Most people don’t even know these things exist in the first place, let alone that you have to memorize technical information and detailed protocol and procedure in order to be issues a call sign and license by the FCC. Part of those restrictions come from the simple fact that much emergency and disaster related communications occur on those frequency bands. But it’s interesting to note how detailed the test questions are, making quit certain you know that you’re not allowed to do nasty-bads terrorist things like sending encoded messages, etc. Amateur radio is highly regulated by international bodies governing treaties which apply slightly differently all around the world.

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“New Broadband Wireless Services” = New Computing Paradigm

Interestingly, I read in some throwaway news magazine at my shop that a Boucher has been nominated to some position dealing with the FCC and the public administration of frequencies by the Obama administration. Not sure if this is Rick Boucher or not, but this is from his site and is relevant to the discussion at hand:

On February 17, 2009, the nation will undergo a change in the way television broadcasting is transmitted over the air. On that date, full-power television stations will terminate broadcasting analog signals, which are the current predominant method of transmitting television signals throughout the United States. Thereafter, the new method of television broadcasting signals will be digital. The DTV Transition will provide television viewers with clearer pictures and more program choices and will free up major portions of the airwaves for public safety communications such as police, fire and rescue, and for new broadband wireless services.

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Those “new broadband wireless services” they’re talking about are almost certainly going to fit perfectly into the whole ubicomp, ubiquitous/pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, augmented reality, etc which is currently being unrolled in the US-media amongst the early-adopter/tech entrepeneur circuit. The image of it opens up vistas of possibility in the minds of young imaginative Americans looking to gain a foothold in the world of business - an excellent technological message of Hope, another facade of the public image around all the good things Obama is going to do for us. A carrot on a stick and maybe a good one if you’re positioned strategically to take advantage of it.

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PSYOPS & Social Engineering

The social engineering around this moment in history is well-staged, if not necessarily air-tight. Here we stand as a nation and as a planet, teetering on the brink of ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE. Or so the media seems to want us to think. What’s really happening out there though? Are we unable to grow enough food to supply everyone in the world? Hardly. Are we running out of raw materials? Some would say yes, with Peak Oil. Others claim that even Gaia, even the very planet herself is poised at this moment in history at a state of uncertainty, with Global Warming seeming to signal that we all must put our heads down and endure the undoing of an environmental burden which we never created. You and I didn’t decide to build factories and start churning out automobiles. You and I didn’t create the aesthetics of consumer lifestyle marketing, telling us that we couldn’t ever *be* anybody unless we bought the right objects to craft our social identity (how others view us) out of.

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I, Sovereign Exile

At least I don’t think you did, and I know for damn sure I didn’t. This is the way I found the world, and I’ve done my best to live in it without making any waves. At one time bohemians expatriated to Paris or Berlin to live some semblance of the “good life” philosophers have always lusted over. Me, I’ve lived more as an exile in my own land, than anything else. A man outside of time, operating by my own rules and ethics which don’t necessarily match the dictates of what Terence McKenna called the Dominator System, and relentlessly searching for some semblance of something authentic, something that came before all these impossible-to-be-real structures which I see set up all around us.

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American Catharsis

So maybe you and I really aren’t at risk of anything collapsing economonically. Maybe its just the opulent men living in the proverbial ivory towers and palaces growing fat off the sufferings of the underclasses (but something tells me those guys will be fine). Maybe the New King really will renew the wasteland, bring something green and sustainable out of a soil which has become dead and barren as the tumbleweed ranches which birthed-but-not-really our Old King. I certainly hope so, but I also know better than to peg a divine notion, Hope, to a human being subject to real pressures - each of which seems to be converging to point us all towards some, as yet, mysterious unnamed direction. 2012? Operation Bluebeam? New World Order? Green Sustainable Technocracy? Heaven only knows what they’ll call it or how they’ll market the paradigm-shift through the distributed memetic strands interpenetrating the media like some kind of darkly hidden yet readily palpable bot-net:

What if security researchers were able to disrupt the leftovers of the Storm Worm botnet thanks to a flaw in its communication model allowing them to redirect infected hosts and eventually disinfect them, but fearing legal action have their hands tied?

At the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, which took place in December, 2008, German researchers Georg Wicherski, Tillmann Werner, Felix Leder and Mark Schlösser, held a presentation (Stormfucker: Owning the Storm Botnet) demonstration their idea. The apparently working concept has a single flaw by itself - it operates in exactly the same fashion that a botnet master does when issuing updated malware binaries to the infected hosts, thereby violating computer abuse laws internationally.

Welcome to the American Catharsis. The dramatic tension is too high to point to any other part of the story arc we’re now collectively experiencing. Its effects will be sudden and highly unpredictable. This is the New New. The augurs are ready, standing by. Are you?

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A Semiotic Guide To Drug Use

Table of contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Drug use provides
  3. Fairly reliable and consistent access to perceptual field states
  4. Ritual, habit
  5. Social aspects
  6. Contextual meaning
  7. Valuation system
  8. Summation

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Introduction

The subject of being able to achieve and maintain perceptual states or states of consciousness at will through technology is, like it or not, inherently tied to drug use - at least in the Western world. In traditional societies, religious ritual and social functions of music also provide strong models for these subjects. But for most people today, those traditional elements have dropped off altogether - or else been replaced maybe by media and even shopping. Drug use, however, is alive and well and has become a cultural carrier for a lot of the “wisdom” which was once stored and transmitted in more overtly sacred practices.

With that in mind, I brainstormed five essential social functions of drug use from which we may be able to extract more general-purpose information about how to design technologies which satisfy essential human needs. The items which follow are necessarily intertwined, and I’m sure we could come up with additional points if pressed, but this feels like a good starting point.

Drug use provides:

  1. Fairly reliable and consistent access to perceptual field states
  2. Ritual, habit
  3. Social aspects
  4. Contextual meaning
  5. Valuation system

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Breaking these down into individual points:

Fairly reliable and consistent access to perceptual field states

Probably the main reason why other people take drugs (because I’ve never taken any!) has to do with their usefulness as tools to trigger or access particular perceptual states: feelings, emotions, bodily sensations, cognitive patterns, etc.

Of course, any state you can access with drugs is a perceptual state which is actually inherent in your own perceptual/nervous system. Andrew Weil argues this eloquently in his book, “The Natural Mind”, so I won’t belabor the point here. Techniques other than drug use exist which allow people to access these states, meditation, lucid dreaming, dance, trance, etc. But most of those require practice. Drugs, however, don’t really demand any preparation. You can essentially push a button and feel a certain way - until the buzz wears off.

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Ritual, habit

Of course, pushing a button over and over again in a Pavlovian sense becomes a habit, a ritual. Built around the activation and maintenance of any perceptual state which a particular drug allows is the ritual of how one achieves that state, and what one does once one is in that state.

Drug paraphernalia, the actual tools, implements and drug itself become essentially fetish objects: items you ritually invest power and life into through repeated use. Functionally, this works through repeated association of these objects with the field state you’re attempting to tune into. The smell of a particular drug, or the sight of your ritual implements may trigger recollections of that state and a desire to return to it.

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Social aspects

Individual rituals and habits, of course, are made stronger through sharing with others. This is the essence of religious ritual: that people are bound together under the same set of symbols, stories and values. While not quite universal, many religions throughout world history have made use of drugs and consciousness altering substances as part of their group rituals: a way for a community of believers to mutually enter into a collective mindspace or dreamscape (Terence McKenna has written extensively on this subject with regards to psychedelic mushrooms and early religious rites). In that way, drugs can provide a sense of collective identity - though they may not be the best or most reliable means of doing so.

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Contextual meaning

Parallel to the social structures surrounding drug use are the contextual or semiotic meanings associated with drug use. High Times magazine, though it’s fairly cheesy and not highly regarded anymore amongst the community, is an easy example to use here, since it perpetuates a certain cultural image or set of associated meanings about what it means to be a marijuana-user or a “stoner.” Another good example is the classic “head shop” which sells drug-related paraphernalia, alongside rock & roll artifacts, Bob Marley & Pink Floyd posters, black lights etc. Drug use becomes a sub-culture, like any other sub-culture: with music, clothing, and consumer products to serve a market which is not even legal. And yet people do it anyway, pumping tons of money into a market which is rarely if ever even addressed, even though stores like Hot Topic appear at local malls across the USA.

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Valuation System

Piggybacking on social, context and market meanings of drug use is the practical observation that drugs give you something to spend your money on. That is, the experience of drug use (and I include alcohol in this discussion - since it’s the most widely abused and accepted of all consumer recreational substances), social practices associated with it, etc, give you a paradigm under which you spend your money as a force in the consumer economy. You buy x instead of y. You follow a news source instead of b news source, because their worldview more closely parallels your own.

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Summation

The most interesting part of this five point list (which is probably incomplete) is that with maybe the exception of number 1, access to perceptual field states, all of these items could be applied semiotically to the domain of just about any consumer goods or product category. If we bring the sheer consumerist thrill of shopping and the notion that buying a product could be considered a method of achieving perceptual states (probably through the modulation of self-identity which new possessions bring: we invest a sense of self in the objects around us), then we’ve come full circle.

Hopefully, this new understanding leaves us with some possible avenues of exploration and discussion when it comes to other methods of achieving, maintaining and transmitting perceptual states and their importance within culture and human behavioral patterns.

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New Tumblr Account #5, I think

[digitalswitch] A theme I intend to cover in greater detail semiotically. Didn’t realize Hawaii already did its digital switch and it, well, it went off without a hitch.

Hawaii’s first-in-the-nation switch to all-digital TV went smoothly, with volunteers handling about a call a minute to a special hotline and only minor technical glitches reported. [...]

Hawaii went to all-digital TV signals on Thursday so that broadcasters and park rangers could take down analog transmission towers on the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano before the nesting season of the endangered Hawaii petrel.

In Washington Friday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to delay the Feb. 17 nationwide shutdown of analog TV signals until June 12, but Democrats said they would bring the measure back next week.

President-elect Barack Obama urged Congress to postpone the Feb. 17 transition amid mounting concerns that too many Americans who rely on analog TV sets to pick up broadcast channels won’t be ready. The federal program that subsidizes converter boxes for such viewers ran out of money this month.

I know there’s a Sophia Stewart reference we could make somewhere in here if we wanted to… Curious that this all happens not long after the XM/Sirius merger: effectively meaning there’s no competition in satellite-to-earth digital radio transmissions.

Compass Rose, Possible Mandala OS Symbol/Logo

Went to an art show by a friend of mine tonight at Baltimore’s Metro gallery. Many of the paintings featured the stylized image of a compass rose. Apparently, the artist’s father is or was involved in cartography.

Sitting there, it occurred to me that the compass rose is a classic Western mandala image: and it has a most appropriate meaning for our purposes: pointing towards something. Allowing you to figure out where you are, and help point you in the direction of where you want to be. Imagine if your computer could sense what you were going to do next, what you would be interested in, what pages you’d want to visit. What friends it was time to call. A computer that was one step ahead of you, could you trust it? I bet I would constantly try to outwit it, to throw it off the True Course….

Makes me think this could be a most useful sigil for our project.


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Software You Memorize

Boontdustie, a core member of the OmnivateLLC Mandala OS planning & development team, writes:

“…perhaps we too should stray from from our design patterns and algorithms and allow the bulk of the core application to actually rest within the hearts and minds of our users.”

Along that same line of thought: what if the core functionality of the operating system actually consisted of code which the user had to memorize? That way, Mandala OS would always operate within a living human context first and foremost (human wisdom systems) and the information could be transmitted from person to person, improving the life of each by the interactions it inspired.

Part of my inspiration for that methodology comes from the Five Percent Nation of Islam, or the Nation of Gods and Earths, the social movement which spawned tons of popular hip hop artists, like Wu Tang, for example.

The teachings of the 5% Nation are passed on through oral tradition, much like the griots of west Africa. The advancement of a Five Percenter is based on his or her memorization, recitation, comprehension, and practical application of the Supreme Mathematics and the Supreme Alphabetlessons written by Clarence 13X and also the 120 Lessons, sometimes referred to as degrees, a revised version of the Supreme Wisdom lessons of the NOI, originally written by Wallace Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad.”

I guess this also dovetails nicely into the studying I’ve been doing to pass the FCC examination to get an amateur radio license. It also has thrown me back on the notion that ANY operating system has certain elements of its functionality which by necessity *must* live within the person: the person’s emotional and intellectual responses to tasks carried out, their expectations and reactions, etc.

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Public Domain Where Applicable, Copy Left Where Not, Universal Free Realms Everyware Else for 2009 and for forever.the timboucher experience. No rights reserved.