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We have just released two new apps for Iphone and Droid. Both are called “Zap Steamcast.”
The Iphone version is much more powerful and finished with lots of functions and cost $1.99.
The Droid is basic, is in beta and it’s free.
The most significant thing that both apps have is “Steamcast.” Here’s the description of Steamcast from the app store:
Zap Steamcast allows you to play 50+ “Steamcasts” (podcasts) by visionary philosopher and writer Jonathan Zap while doing other stuff on your device. A sophisticated player streams the audio content from a server so that the approximately 100 hours of content (with more coming) does not eat up your memory.
The full function Steamcast player gives you an expanding audio library of podcasts on an amazing diversity of subjects—the nature of psychopaths and their influence on the financial meltdown, a synthesis on the stance of the Warrior and how it is presented in various traditions, the historic roots of the modern myth of romantic love and how it often dominates our lives, practical strategies and psychological insights to help you manage your time, enrich your relationships, empower your life and otherwise navigate through the murky waters of human incarnation. Some podcasts have a serious tone, others present deep insights in a surreal way that draws you down various rabbit holes. All the podcasts are vividly performed by the author, Jonathan Zap.
“One of my favorite thinkers and writers is my friend Jonathan Zap. His insights are simultaneously cosmic and intimate, shocking and healing. Among visionary philosophers, he offers one of the smartest perspectives about the evolutionary changes we’re in the midst of. “—Rob Brezsny
The Iphone version provides many other functions including quick access to the Zap Oracle that has 660+ cards and allows you to do five types of readings on your device. With a free membership to the oracle, all your readings, plus any notes you add, are saved for you on our server indefinitely. Theme Tracker analyzes individual readings and all readings from a date interval you specify for archetypal themes.
Click here to go to the preview page on the Apple App store The quickest way to download though is just to search for “Zap Steamcast” in the app store on your Iphone.
Click here to go to the Google Play page for Zap Steamcast
The quickest way to download though is just to search for “Zap Steamcast” in the app store on your Droid.
If you like the apps, please write a positive review. Zap Oracle webmaster Tanner Dery has done amazing work putting these together.
We also just launched a totally revamped version of the Zap Oracle website. It will auto-resize for multiple platforms so that it is now much more tablet and smart phone friendly. Please check out the new design and give us feedback. Send to [email protected] and [email protected]. Feedback about the apps will also be greatly appreciated.
Do you need an Iphone or Droid App or a state-of-the-art website or some combo thereof? I highly, highly recommend the services of Tanner Dery —-workaholic webmaster extrordinaire, appsmith, 3D graphics master and publisher of Steam Press. Grab him while there is still a hole in his schedule: [email protected] and tell him you heard about him from this newsletter for a special discount.
Does anyone out there know anything about creating Wikipedia articles? I could use a Wikipedia page and one for the Zap Oracle. I would gladly trade any of my services for anyone who can help with this.
I will be at the Arise Festival August 14-18 in Loveland, Colorado teaching a workshop on the Singularity Archetype and doing free dream interpretation and oracle readings. Last time I checked they still have tickets.
The day after I come back to Boulder from Arise I will be flying to Burning Man and expect to be out on the playa helping to build Fractal Planet by the 20th. Fractal Planet is a 500 person Burning Man camp with the largest dome, the largest art gallery, the largest or some of the largest music venues and an amazing speaker series. I will be speaking there on Tuesday, August 27th from 7:30pm-8:30pm on the Singularity Archetype. Please come to my talk, I would like to meet you after.
There have been so many new writings, podcasts (“steamcasts”) youtube videos and interviews since the last newsletter, so I’m not sure where to begin. The best way to access my most recent thoughts, reviews, comments about current events, etc. is to join the Jonathan Zap and/or Zap Oracle Facebook pages. If you’re not into Facebook, but want to see my most interesting Status Updates go to: I Status Update, Therefore I Am I am also a featured correspondent for Reality Sandwich and they post reviews and other articles by me on a monthly basis: click here to see my blog on Reality Sandwich. Reality Sandwich is one of the great mutant nexuses on the web and worth checking out frequently for cutting edge stuff on a vast array of topics.
My most recent article for them Don’t Pray the Grey Away—Alex the Grey versus Alex the White is currently their top ranked article and includes responses from Alex Grey. It is part II of A Spiraling Eye Encrusted Overview of the Art of Alex Grey <<<use this link to read parts 1-3, download as MP3, stream as podcast or watch as YouTube.
Alex and Jonathan at COSM in NYC
If you like to get information via YouTube just do a search for my name and you’ll find I have about 40 videos up with many more in the works.
Here’s a recent sample of a status update of the sort you would get from the Facebook pages or I Status Update, Therefore I Am:
Breaking News Alert: Stop Telling Me About the Following Predictable Crap—
On a planet of 7 billion people, every few weeks a train derailment will kill a couple of dozen people, something will go wrong with a passenger jet, a bus with a high school sports team will crash, and somebody might fall into a sinkhole. Let’s just take that as a given so you can stop telling me about this shit. There are seven billion monkeys and sooner or later several monkeys will slip on the same banana peel and die. It’s predictable, unfortunate and not newsworthy. Newsworthy would be if one person in three fell into a sinkhole or if we went two weeks and there were no freak accidents anywhere on the planet. Also definitely not newsworthy are gruesome, outlier violent crimes involving hotties in a country of over three hundred million people. Every so often an attractive young mother with blonde hair will drown her child or a man will keep a woman or two captive in his house for ten years. Very newsworthy for their friends and family, but for the rest of us it’s just the same old, same old, blood stained carnival show you keep wheeling out to distract us from real news. Oh, and another thing that’s not news—celebrities, as well as ordinary mortals, will have breakups, sex scandals, substance abuse problems, and various other misadventures. If one of them gets bitten by a radioactive spider and develops super powers or emerges as an Antichrist and establishes a World Government Federation I’ll be glad to hear about it on the news. Otherwise, why don’t we just silently take for granted that celebrities have tawdry personal lives and let them sleep around, have break ups, takes drugs and go in out of rehabs in private. This will leave a lot more space for news that’s truly newsworthy which means that it’s NEW, and not the same old, same old blood and sex show. Save the news for the stuff that really matters—like rumors about new features on various smart phones which is something I happen to care about deeply.
And if you think this is just an ungrounded rant see this Daily Show segment that reports on CNN eliminating its entire investigative news department. They decided it would be cheaper and more popular to focus instead on celebrity court cases and doubled down on “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-14-2013/investigating-investigative-journalism
see also: http://zaporacle.com/corporate-controlled-media-continues-to-underplay-celebrity-pregnancies/
http://zaporacle.com/celebrities-are-hot-you-are-not/
THE INVISIBLES Omnibus open on my desk
A major new project which is also a podcast, a YouTube and which also contains it’s own oracle:
Are you an Invisible? There are many sorts of Invisibles—some are part of a hermetic circle of Invisibles, others seem to drift at the margins of social matrices, never fully bonding with fellow Invisibles. Some Invisibles fulfill their mission to shift the matrix in some essential way; others fade from Invisibility and become passively alienated or even merge with the opaque herd….
An Image from THE INVISIBLES
Some more news since the last newsletter in the form of Status Updates:
August 10th, 2013
“I’m losing.” —-Frank Sinatra, last words
This is a rough draft for Reality Sandwich which is running a top ten greatest last words article I was asked to contribute to. I welcome any editorial suggestions, typos noticed, but please, please do not forward this to any mob connections you may or may not have. Just in case you do, and my last words come sooner than expected, here’s the epitaph I always wanted: “On ______, Jonathan Zap won his long battle with corporeality by dying.”
http://zaporacle.com/egos-last-words
August 5th, 2013
People often ask me my impression of Ken WIlber—
I’ve read very little of Ken Wilber, but know some of his colleagues and have formed an impression of him. Giving a psychological impression of Wilber based on so little may be the height of arrogance, but my hope is that my arrogance gives me some sympathetic resonance with where he may have gone off the rails and is not merely shadow projection on another narcissistic personality type like myself.
In the last 24 hours I got a couple of emails from Frank Visser who wanted to publish my philosophy Dynamic Paradoxicalism on his Integral World site.
Frank Visser founded IntegralWorld.net in 1997 (back then under the name of “The World of Ken Wilber”). He is the author of the first monograph on Ken Wilber and his work: “Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion” (SUNY Press, 2003), which has been translated into 7 languages, and of many essays on this website.
Frank and I dialogued a bit about Wilber’s unfounded criticisms of Jung. I wrote,
My guess is that Jung is a kind of splinter in his mind he can’t get out. As Jung once pointed out, in most significant relationships, one person is the container and the other the contained. Wilber was determined to intellectually contain everyone else by categorizing them. Unconsciously, he realized that he could not contain Jung, but that if Jung were around, he could contain him and point out the archetypal possession and lack of shadow integration, etc. To his waking personality, Jung became an irritant and source of some cognitive dissonance that he couldn’t allow into full awareness. Wilber, therefore had to seek to contain Jung and diminish him any way he could to deal with his own anxiety about the distorted areas of his psyche. Wilber’s repressed and internalized Jung, like a spectral psychiatrist haunting the edges of his awareness, goaded him and was as unwelcome to his sense of grandiosity as the devil at prayers.
“A Jungian Response to Ken Wilber” (http://www.integralworld.net/erkelens1.html) also captures what I have always sensed about Wilber—the Luciferian presumption of the thinking function to rule over all else. Wilber became pridefully identified with his solar phallic aspect, and ever more divorced from the feminine. The repressed feminine aspect then overpowered him in the form of illness and the trickster. His mind overreached his grasp and other thinking types were able to trip him up by pointing out all the errors and inconsistencies.
For me, Wilber personifies the thinking function run amuck and the reason why I tend to avoid highly abstract thinking and stay closer to the psychological plane of inquiry. Wilber seems like a tragicomic to tragic figure, the naive hero who presumes upon his solar phallic power and inevitably gets castrated (the self-castration of a legacy of flawed work, and the diminished cognitive function at a relatively young age caused by his illness). As in the myth of Icarus, those who identify with the solar phallic power of the mind tend to be brought crashing back to earth by the repressed feminine. I wrote a paper related to this as a grad student in the 80s: http://zaporacle.com/the-psyche-as-an-oscillating-entity-in-thomas-hardys-jude-the-obscure/
July 29, 2013
George Zimmerman, Anthony Weiner,_________insert name of your least favorite public figure. It’s so easy to project our shadows onto these psychic scarecrows. When we project our shadow out into the world we become one of billions who enshadow the world with the personal darkness we outsource to the hollow, spotlighted folk. If you want to help the world, have the courage to face your own darkness instead of merely exporting onto “they.” If you can spare eight minutes toward the courageous path of shadow integration do please check out this youtube video of something I wrote recently about “they” (it also has some amazing steampunk graphics created by my amazingly talented webmaster, Tanner Dery.)
Excerpt from “They”:
Although it’s nothing new, something I keep noticing is how many people (including me) love to talk obsessively about how bad they are. Who are they? They are the folks wearing the black hats: the globalists, the banksters, the Illumanati, the Reptilians, etc. They are the bad folk, the ones that never include the speaker. To be fair, there are always bad theys out there casting their shadow over the world. And of course, the bad theys think they are needed to fight other theys. Read more: http://zaporacle.com/how-to-empower-evil-keep-talking-about-they/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33wxzpZwSKw
How to Empower Evil—Keep Talking about They
July 26th, 2013
Obama’s descent into doublespeak—-This is the kind of thing that’s really starting to piss me off about Obama (whom I have voted for twice). On June 27th he said (referring to NSA leaker Edward Snowden) that he’s, “not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker” Here we see rhetoric that is carefully designed to give a totally false impression. He’s saying, basically, “I’m not this mean guy that’s going to get all big government over a youngish computer geek.” Yeah, you’re not scrambling jets, but meanwhile you probably have hundreds of agents working every aspect of Edward Snowden and doing whatever you possibly can to capture him and lock him up in a sub-basement prison cell so inaccessible that you would probably have to pump oxygen into it. In other words, what you said was total bullshit craftily designed to give an impression that’s the exact opposite of the truth. Earlier in June, in another moment of total bullshit, Obama said he “welcomed the debate” about security concerns versus civil concerns. Total bullshit double speak. If he “welcomed” debate he wouldn’t have kept the existence of such a program tightly classified. If he welcomes debate and transparency he wouldn’t be so hard on whistle blowers. Obama has, in general, become more and more comfortable with being a duplicitous politician and lost even the vague impression of candor much of the time. As much as I despise Sarah Palin, I will admit that she did come up with one really great line: “So how’s that hopey, changey thing going for ya?” —-Not all that great at the moment.
July 25th, 2013
Pacific Rim as a 3D IMAX was a very entertaining thrill ride (special thanks to John Haeberlin and Panda Gordon for the old school automotive type ride) and although alien godzillas on steroids versus giant cyborgs in a rock em’ sock em’ robot scenario worked in this case (with some assist from 60,000 watt subwoofers and the awesomeness of the 3D IMAX format), and although I’ve always had a soft spot for the analog, old school Mark III cyborgs that keep on ticking even after EMP detonations (still wondering how analog technology does the 3D holographic heads up displays, but Mark IIIs are not to be underestimated), but nevertheless I really, really wish sci-fi and fantasy films would take a chill pill once in a while. I tried to explain this on the ride back from Pacific Rim as I struggled to adjust to the almost eerie lack of explosions, fire balls and particle beam weapon debris fields (calm before the storm?) on I 25. I refurbished a review I did of Oblivion to make the case of chill pill therapy for some of our big budget blockbusters. http://zaporacle.com/oblivion-and-the-need-for-sci-fi-and-fantasy-movies-to-chill-out-once-in-a-while/
July 21, 2013
If you want to hear the one hour interview I did with KTKK last night go here: http://www.k-talk.com/index.php/archive/ click on “Fringe Radio” then you’ll see last night’s show at the top of the list. I was the third guest so slide the player forward to 2hrs. 7 minutes
July 18, 2013
Are you an Invisible? There are many sorts of Invisibles—some are part of a hermetic circle of Invisibles, others seem to drift at the margins of social matrices, never fully bonding with fellow Invisibles. Some Invisibles fulfill their mission to shift the matrix in some essential way; others fade from Invisibility and become passively alienated or even merge with the opaque herd.
July 12, 2013
I awoke from uneasy dreams and posted the status update “facebook relationships are superficial.” Gregor, a facebook friend I don’t know outside of facebook, liked my comment so I, more or less automatically, liked his like. But then it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t have liked his liking of my statement because I wasn’t sure if he meant that he agreed with or liked the truth of my statement as a criticism of facebook or if he took it literally and actually liked that facebook relationships are superficial. I decided to edit my liking of his like and changed it to a leaning toward like. Then he liked the change in the status of my like. This made me distrustful and I wondered if he was liking the state of anxious ambiguity that caused me to change my full like of his like to merely a leaning toward like. I decided to do a leaning toward dislike of his liking of my altered like status and he responded with a full dislike of my leaning dislike. Now I wasn’t sure if I had hurt his feelings by leaning toward dislike of his like or if he originally meant that he liked the superficiality of facebook relations and by nuancing my dislike as a lean I was being annoying authentic from his point of view. To test this I did a full like of his dislike figuring that this should be readily discernable as an inauthentic move and if he liked it, it would suggest that he took my original statement literally rather than ironically. He caught me off guard by responding immediately with an emoticon of a beehive with a smiley face behind it. Was he saying that he approved of the hive mind or being ironic about it? Or maybe he as just using an ambiguous emoticon to create cognitive dissonance in me. I threw together an emoticon of a mouse standing triumphant on a mercator projection map of the world figuring that…. (more later)
July 11, 2013
These two articles by Paul Levy are not light reading, but could be two of the most important documents that you ever read, revealing crucial things about the nature of evil. I noticed many parallels to my work on “mind parasites” and when I ordered Paul’s book and left him a note he wrote back that he’s been reading my work for years. We have very parallel views on the nature of evil and I left comments at the end of both articles.
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/the-masters-of-deception/
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/dispelling-wetiko/
June 26th:
Recorded live at Sonic Bloom 2013 Mark Heley, Michael Garfield on festival culture, the science of transformation and man’s place in the cosmos
http://zaporacle.com/sonic-bloom-2013-trialogue-with-mark-heley-michael-garfield-and-jonathan-zap/
May 31, 2013
I know that Facebook experience tends to default into an arousal addiction for quick buzzes of info and social transaction that is not particularly friendly to a ten-twenty minute speed bump, but I just wrote a concise description of two Chaos Magic Practices I created that are working powerfully for me and that could greatly enhance your life if you have that will to invest 10-20 minutes to find out how they work. http://zaporacle.com/two-chaos-magic-practices-to-enhance-life/
April 29, 2013
As short as his writing career was, Jack Savage was one of the greatest poets of his generation, the millennial generation. His poems are the voice of the soul, sometimes celebratory, often struggling with the darkness of the world, always profound.http://zaporacle.com/savage-reflections-the-poems-of-jack-savage/
Excerpt from my introduction to Savage Reflections:
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Among other talents, Jack was a brilliant poet. After spending more time with the poems the last few days, I believe Jack was, and is, one of the greatest poetic voices of his generation. It’s not that I’ve read so many millennial generation poets, it’s a general feeling I have based on the power with which Jack’s poetic voice is the voice of the soul. Sometimes this poetic voice is celebratory, at other times it is struggling and even tormented. But it is always profound, authentic, accessible and deeply present with the reader. Jack’s voice has a presence, an emotional immediacy and intimacy with a sympathetic reader that is comparable to Walt Whitman, who was Jack’s greatest poetic inspiration. Jack’s poems, even the ones that he wrote when he was 19, do not seem like an awkward, adolescent attempt at being Whitmanesque. They are alike, because both poets are voices of the soul. To experience these poems is an opportunity to hear the voice of the soul, a voice that gets drowned out by the noisy bustle and haste of modern life. The voice of the soul is not always happy. It can experience glorious ecstasies and transcendence–Jack’s poems are filled with jeweled and glowing examples of this sort of divine exuberance. But the voice of the soul can also be the voice of the dark night of the soul, and Jack had his share of those to tell of too. As he puts it, “And I am divine in my worst hour as much as I am in my best.” When you read these poems, draw close to them, sit across from his voice with a glass of wine or tea, it will be a very deep and intimate conversation.
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A YouTube and podcast of his poems has been created and should be posted in the next few days.
April 24, 2013
In Memoriam John (Jack) Spenser Savage 1989-2013 —a very tough day for those of us close to himhttp://zaporacle.com/jack-savage-in-memorium/
April 21
Oblivion and the Need for Sci-Fi and Fantasy Movies to Chill Out Once in a While
© Jonathan Zap, 2013
(This was originally tossed off as a Facebook status update so expect it to seem a bit off the cuff.)
Oblivion was much better than what reviews and the Rotten Tomatoes 59% rating led me to believe. OK, some elements of the plot late in the movie might seem a bit convoluted or contrived. It’s no masterpiece. Some of the ideas may have been overambitious or lacking in emotional depth, but they weren’t cheesy, and there were intriguing twists that kept you thinking if perhaps not entirely satisfied at the end. It’s not in the top tier of science fiction films, but Oblivion has plenty of merits. If a sci-fi film has high production values and the plot, ideas and dialogue are not offensively bad it will often still work for me because I can get a lot out of a high-resolution trip into the future.
Prometheus did that, but I sometimes wished it would chill out for a few seconds from all the exploding, alien, parasitical life forms attacking so I could just take in what it would be like to be in some of the futuristic settings. The daughter of the tycoon had this amazing apartment with wraparound pixelated walls that appeared to be a panoramic window onto a beautiful aspen forest with falling snow, etc. I wanted to spend some time just checking out her really cool apartment without some species threatening catastrophe constantly intruding. Oblivion allows for this more relaxed way to check out the future, especially the first half of the movie that had an elegant sparseness. What was also a brilliant choice is that the futuristic hardware was kept to a relative minimum and what was there was really, really well done. Some of it looked like something a clone of Steve Jobs would design in a hundred years. The production design was exceptionally good and busyness and frenetic action weren’t constantly crowding it out.
I don’t know how many other people feel this, but I wish more sci-fi and fantasy films had an atmospheric quality, a chance to live in the setting without some frantic scenario where the whole galaxy is at stake and there are constant ray gun battles and what not. The remake of Solaris was really good at that elegant sparseness and a plot that was more intelligent than frenetic. There was a wonderful moment late in the series Lost (which had been losing value for me as the plot got more convoluted, contrived and frenetic). A bunch of the main characters were breathlessly racing to stop some cosmic doomsday device and in their frantic countdown chase across the island they run across this older couple whom we hadn’t seen for several episodes and who had set up a nice little camp for themselves and were just enjoying life and the lasting bond they had with each other. The characters run up to them breathless, sweating, in a state of frenzied panic and are like, “Blah, blah, blah!!!! We’ve only got 11 minutes till the blah, blah, blah goes off and the whole island is time displaced from the blah, blah, blah!!! We’ve got to blah, blah, blah right now!!!!“ The woman of the couple, a wise, well-grounded black woman in her sixties, just looks at them and says, “What is it with you people? It’s always something.” She just waves them off and goes back to working on dinner or whatever while they race off after the MacGuffin.
Yeah, if you can really pull off an-everything-in-the-galaxy-at-stake plot, go for it. And yeah, I realize that there’s a lot of pressure to pace things to appeal to the nervous system of an 11 year old on an ultra-sour-candy-and-ritalin-sugar/endorphin rush. Personally, I’m willing to pay for a movie ticket just to get a high-resolution, high-production quality trip to the future or another world and the people there could be having a human drama and that would be enough for me. The hardware could be incidental and atmospheric. I just want more chances to experience other worlds than these…
April 20, 2013
CREATIVITY AND PHYSICAL CONDITION
Something that’s not said often enough about relating to the creative muse (in fact, it’s rarely said at all) is the connection to physical condition. Obviously, we realize that athleticism depends on bodily condition, and athletes have relatively short careers compared to those pursuing creative arts (except ballet). Even though I’m emphatically not a neurological materialist, no one can deny that while we’re associated with a physical body our neurological condition is a huge factor. Like the rest of the body, the brain ages, and our neurological condition fluctuates during the course of a single day.
In my case, I’ve long been aware that a high level writing session is very dependent on my neurological condition (among other key factors). Predawn, upon awakening from quality sleep with lots of REM, is, for neurological and a number of other reasons, the golden zone for creative writing sessions. ( see: http://zaporacle.com/predawn-window-zone/) It is even more crucial for the highest-level creative writing sessions, which for me is fantasy fiction, or highly stylized nonfiction. A well thought out email is something I could write at almost any time of the day, but I can’t do the high level writing any time of the day.
To ground this in a practical example, if I were to stay up late drinking some night, the odds of a high level writing session the next morning are less than 5%. At this life phase, however, if I exercised the day before, ate really well and got to sleep early the odds of a high level writing session the next morning are closer to 95%.
The creative muse and physical condition are dependent variables so long as I am associated with a corporeal body. An athlete, early in life, finds that the muse of athleticism is in a war with the clock—their skill and experience is going up, but their peak bodily condition starts going down. If they’re lucky there is a golden zone between these two curves where they have enough skill and experience and their bodily condition is still close to peak.
The creative person is usually dealing with a gentler version of those two curves. Skill and experience have longer to accumulate and the downward curve of neurological condition is less steep, but still a major factor. Eventually, however, if the creative muse continues to demand big things of you late in life, you also experience the war with the clock. This can be a different struggle than the classic human struggle with mortality and corporeality, but it has its overlaps. I’m not at war with death, I’m excited about that event horizon, but I’d much rather cross the corporeal finish line after completing certain key life tasks rather than leaving them in an unfinished state. (why I’m enthusiastic about death: http://zaporacle.com/life-lessons-from-the-living-dead/) When it comes to stuff that often leads up to death, such as profound aging and ill health, I am much, much less accepting and, in general, my struggles with mortality have always been about the nonperfectable nature of the human body (at any age).
At the moment, I realize, I have few causes for complaint, only a very small percentage of all Homo sapiens have ever made it to age 55, and I am in much better shape than the average 55-year-old. I jumped off the death train of the standard American diet when I became a vegetarian at age 19. I have a long history of exercise, my dad made it to 93 and my mom is 89 and still able to live on her own, etc., etc. Nothing bodily has, so far, limited my relationship to the creative muse except that what I do today has powerful effects on tomorrow morning’s writing session.
This is fortunate, and although some of it is the result of my efforts toward nutrition and exercise, some of it is also the good luck of genetics, modern hygiene and medicine, not being desperately poor, etc. There are quite a number of writers who, in their fifties, were still being pulled by the creative muse, but whose bodies were totally spent and had to leave unfinished work. Dickens and Dostoevsky, for example, died just a couple of years older than I am right now and looked like extremely old men at my present age. More recently, Robert Jordan, author of the amazing fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, departed in his fifties leaving the last couple of books to be written by another author. Of course, he might have gotten sick anyway, but when I recently happened to see YouTube interviews of him and George R.R. Martins (author of The Game of Thrones series) I noticed by their fifties they both looked grossly out-of-shape like they hadn’t exercised in decades and were walking with canes, etc. Long writing sessions, and fantasy writers probably endure the longest of writing sessions, are really bad for physical condition. Robert Jordan would sometimes write from 8 in the morning to 11:30 at night which is enviable from the muse point of view, but horrible for his body. Just in the last year or so all this research has come out that sitting for an hour or more is really bad for your health even if you get in an hour of vigorous exercise later in the day. I didn’t realize this until recently and used to be one of those people who believed that my intense cardio workouts made up for long writing sessions (to some extent they do, but not entirely). Now I write at an adjustable height desk that allows me to pedal a short elliptical trainer as I sit. I also can work standing. There has been a movement toward more ergonomic work stations, sit-to-stand desks, treadmill desks, etc.
If the creative muse were to stop leading me constantly in new directions I could probably catch up with all unfinished nonfiction projects in a year or two. I never can get caught up, however, because new projects keep showing up. Additionally, there is a gigantic mountain before me, larger than anything I’ve done before, and that I have scarcely begun to climb—an unfinished, experimental fantasy epic called Parallel Journeys. Most fantasy writers who complete a major fantasy epic begin no later than their early forties. Parallel Journeys, in one form or another, has been haunting me since I was 20, but portals into it open rarely. When they do, it is dramatic and an overwhelming. A three-week period beginning in the middle of February saw a whole book’s worth of content play out and dominate my consciousness for three weeks. Then it quieted down again and new nonfiction projects pulled me into their vortex. Everything I’ve written so far seems highly experimental and in need of rewrite. Also, although I have way more than my 10,000 hours in with non-fiction writing, I don’t have 10,000 hours in with fantasy fiction writing. My nonfiction skills are still improving, and my fiction writing skills need much more development. This is especially the case because Parallel Journeys wants to be written a highly unconventional, experimental style that demands much more skill than a conventionally structured narrative with less stylized writing.
Of course, I’ve long realized that Parallel Journeys might never be finished. It might be my version of that thing that’s always just up ahead but ever recedes from your grasp like the green light blinking on the dock in the distance that Gatsby stares at every evening and relates to his unfulfillable romantic longings.
When I was twenty, and made my discoveries about the Singularity Archetype I had a strong, intuitive realization that even more important than writing about it and exploring it from a nonfiction perspective would be to create a fantasy portal into it. The latest download (the three week period) was the most intense one ever, so it still feels like momentum for it is still building in the unconscious. But I’m still waiting for the major opening into this work, the opening that will allow me to finish whole books, etc. In every other case where the muse has pulled me into something I’ve been able to produce finished work, so it’s not outside the range of probability that I will reach such a zone with Parallel Journeys.
And this brings us back to closure with the subject of bodily condition and the creative muse. To be able to pull off such a huge writing project, one that will probably require thousands of hours of high level writing, I need to continue to be in far better shape than average for my advancing age. Presently, I’m 33 days into smoothie regimen, which is definitely helping, but I need to do even more toward physical fitness and need to keep that up long term. So if any of you extreme health and fitness people out there have any suggestions for me. I’d love to get your input. Also, if you are driven by the creative muse, I hope what I’ve written about my case gets you thinking about your own relationship between creativity and physical condition.
More of my thoughts and history relating to the creative muse: The Path of the Numinous—Living and Working with the Creative Muse
Speaking of young artists from the millennial generation, Thijme Termaat is a young, visionary Dutch artist who spent three years meticulously crafting one three-minute video: I Paint . Thijme is a self-taught artist who lives in a very small, rural town in Northern Holland. The video was constructed using simple, stop-motion and time-lapse techniques and no digital effects. It could have been made, as Thijme points out, a century ago. It would sometimes take him several days to construct a single frame and his output averaged one minute per year. Once it was complete, he posted it on Youtube and within three days it was being seen in almost every country on earth and soon had over a million views.
I did an extensive interview with Thijme (also published in Reality Sandwich) http://zaporacle.com/an-interview-with-visionary-artist-thijme-termaat-3/
April 18. 2013
Someone just posted an absurd map with the title “Zionist Plan!” that purports to show how Israel would take over the Middle East. I left the comment:
Or the tortured mental projection shimmering anxiously in a paranoid’s mind who has forgotten that the cascade of inner maps is not the territory. Zionism (a linguistic Trojan Horse for conjuring fearful images of Jews like myself) is another of the long shadowed bogey men of history, a scarecrow to attract the shadow projection of fevered and ignorant minds. Oh, wait, hang on, my Iphone is lighting up with an incoming call—-it’s Henry Kissinger, my overlord in the World Jewish Conspiracy—what’s that Henry? You saw the facebook post and are calling in a drone strike? Henry, I really think you are overreacting! What do you man you can’t call it back?—Hey listen man, I think you better get away from your computer right now, the WJC takes these sorts of Facebook posts pretty seriously.
Slightly more serious perspective on projection, politics and the Middle East: Projection, the Enemy of Peace and Justice
April 18, 2013
Comment I just left for a young student I know who lives in Boston and has been feeling the tragic magic shockwave of the recent events (The Boston Bombing):
Must be weird to be so close to the eruption of an unexpected vortex of darkness and world scrutiny. Always a strange feeling to be so close to ground zero of a shockwave that vibrates the whole zeitgeist. Maybe as a musician you would envision it acoustically, cymbals crashing together in a darkened music hall or something like that, sounds waves that permeate the air but are loudest to those who stand closest to the pressure wave of colliding brass discs. I’ve experienced this a few times. Once when I was living just across Central Park from the Dakota where (and when) John Lennon was shot. I could feel the concentric ripples of disturbance in the force emanating from across the park as if someone had cast a pebble very to where I was standing in the collective pond. So besides all the other things—a cause for compassion, and prayer, etc.—see this as a chance to perceive a disturbance in the force, a rippling of zeitgeist effects emanating from a point in the matrix of history that is so close by.
April 18, 2012
The comment thread on this document, as of this morning only six comments long, is one of the best I’ve participated in:
http://zaporacle.com/on-the-seeming-impossibility-of-civil-dialogue-with-atheists/ (a week after I posted this status update a tragedy occurred that completely altered the story. I posted a brief epilogue explaining this.)
April 17, 2013
Materialist science, which is more properly called scientism, is a set of irrational biases that masquerades as science, but is actually more of an affectation, a pose, that the poser thinks defines the cosmos when actually it is more revealing of personal limitations and cultural prejudices. It is an intellectual version of tough guy affectation, a nerd’s version of machismo, and this is why so many committed materialists are so rude to discourse with, and sound like dogmatic religionists. This seems to be particularly the case when scientism overlaps with atheism, which it often does. We expect religious fundamentalists to be hostile to science, but it is also important to realize that scientism is anti-science. It discounts empirical findings and even replicable studies done with the highest scientific rigor that produce results that contradict its limited worldview. It is essentially a form of cognitive self-amputation pridefully posing as masterful objectivity. It neurotically pairs feelings of superiority to others, with an extremely degraded view of human experience and the cosmos. Larry Dossey, in a fascinating article just published on RS http://www.realitysandwich.com/human_interconnection , gives a couple of examples of the degraded view of scientism: .”..astrophysicist and author David Lindley: ‘We humans are just crumbs of organic matter clinging to the surface of one tiny rock. Cosmically, we are no more significant than mold on a shower curtain.’ Or as Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg famously said, ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’ ” Although many of the findings in this particular article are anecdotal, there are numerous findings produced with state-of-the-art scientific methodology that contradict the reductive, materialist view of scientism. Scientism’s greatest achievement may be its ability to give us one of the most classic examples of the absurd paradoxes of the neurotic mind: believing that human existence is as meaningless as mold on a shower curtain while simultaneously feeling pridefully superior to those who don’t share that belief.
Thomas Sheridan just posed an incisive essay on “Obsessive Debunking Disorder” and looks at the problem of militant atheist/pseudo-skeptical debunking types with their superficial rationalism and inquisitor like vindictiveness from the point of view of left hemisphere dominance. Highly recommended:http://thomassheridanarts.com/articles.php?article_id=82 I also provide a specimen of this type of closed and vindictive attitude here: http://zaporacle.com/on-the-seeming-impossibility-of-civil-dialogue-…
**********
worse than the TED problem is the domination of Wikipedia by scientism. My friend Rob Brezsny just sent me the following.
Check out these two essays on ” the concerted effort by upper-case Skeptics to keep Wikipedia a woo-free environment.”
http://dailygrail.com/Skepticism/2013/3/Guerilla-Skepticism-Wikipedia
and
http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/2013/03/guerrilla-skeptics.html
Finally, for those who really want to drill into the core of this whole problem, the book that must be read is the Trickster and the Paranormal by my friend George Hansen. Very briefly: the paranormal is anti-structural, it violates expected hierarchies, and various mental constructs and, therefore, the more organized a social structure is, the more likely it is to be anti-paranormal. A hunter-gatherer tribe has a low level of organization, and is friendlier to the paranormal, but a complex patriarchy is genuinely threatened by it. For example, in the 1990s the Catholic Church published a new catechism that said “interest in the paranormal is fundamentally anti-religious.” This from a religion in which there are talking snakes and seas being parted by intention and so forth. Essentially they are saying: “We’ll keep the paranormal safely contained in the distant past, but want no more of it now where it would be a wildcard and might corrode accepted dogma, hierarchy and cognitive structures. The highest level of organization right now is the whole military-industrial complex, academia and institutional science. The paranormal is fundamentally threatening to many of their structures. One example is that psi research shows that it is nearly impossible to quarantine experiments (even ones with just physical apparatus and no human or living subjects of any kind) from observer effects. This finding introduces a wildcard variable calling all sorts of experiments into question. The anti-structural aspects of the paranormal are fundamentally threatening to highly structured social and mental constructs and this is why you see this peculiar parallelism, a inquisitor like vindictiveness from the odd bedfellows—religious fundamentalists and the priests of scientism. A classic example, John Maddox, senior editor of the journal Nature published an editorial about Rupert Sheldrake entitled “A Book for Burning?” Quotes from the editorial are featured prominently in the wikipedia entry for Sheldrake to this day. The battlelines have been drawn at it is hard to deal with possessed true believers. What confuses the matter even more, though, is that irrationally motivated true believers can be found on both sides of the equation: http://zaporacle.com/reality-testing-is-politically-incorrect/
April 9, 2013
Just watched some pieces of video, cross-sections of the American psyche, and I feel some of the classic American types, in a slow motion cascade through my mind—the hottie, the loser/geek, the lonely old person, the caffeinated yuppie—and they are tumbling in my innermost imaginal space like a pack of playing cards falling in extreme slow motion. They are all picture cards, slightly yellowed, and they are all illustrated in the tawdry, garish colors of old comic books, but finely drawn, as if by Robert Crumb, with lots of detail, more than my eyes can quite resolve, as they tumble and fall.
Each of these types, so easy to flatten into caricatures, are played out by fellow hominids of flesh and blood, living and breathing creatures anxiously struggling to play out these tired roles. I’ve known some of these role-playing persons, and at times been aspects of them, felt myself played out like a card tossed onto green felt by the deft and indifferent hands of an old croupier. As I stare at the cards, and try to slow them down even more in my mind, they start to accordion out into long and blurry lines of people standing behind each face card, the cast of millions of living, breathing people who have played out the loser/nerd, the hottie, the tryin’ to be a gangsta’ type, and so forth…
As I look within, I see the faces of all these types falling slowly through the night of time…
Part of Reality Sandwich’s upcoming Reviews Section will be a list of the top ten favorite demigods. Here’s my entry:
March 27, 2013
For the last several days I’ve been working on an interview with a visionary, young Dutch Artist Thijme Termaat
http://zaporacle.com/i-paint-by-thijme-termaat-a-brief-review/ You could start with the review, which is shorter, watch his three minute video and then read the interview:
http://zaporacle.com/an-interview-with-visionary-artist-thijme-termaat-3/
March 25, 2013
So long as our global civilization is running on fossil fuels we’re like an obese, hard driving businessman in his fifties living on cigarettes, coffee and fast food. He’s still racing around doing stuff but that massive heart attack can bejust around the next corner. My faith is in human ingenuity, and if we could just get renewable energy sources going we might have more of a Star Trek future, but we need to make them happen really soon. I reflected briefly on the fossil fueled heart attack possibility vs. the Star Trek future we were promised in my youth early last Spring:http://zaporacle.com/timelines-trembling-before-the-collapse-of-the-wave-function/ Of course, from the point of view of my work on the Singularity Archetype, there are many other ways we might metamorphose and some may be too strange for us to anticipate.
In New York City, about ten days ago, I was walking around on a late night photo safari with my friend John who teaches English to Koreans. Knowing that I’m always fascinated by cultural differences John told me that, very appropriate for an American, when his students, who are often his age or older, would come in on Monday he would naturally ask them as part of a polite small talk, “So what happened with your weekend?” An American would respond with a story about what they did with their weekend. The Koreans, however, would look at him quizzically, and laugh, and say “Nothing happened, John.” What he came to realize is that Westerners, are narrative builders, we are filming a movie about our lives that has much more story structure. As a Jungian I encourage people to do this, to consciously mythologize their lives, and I apply story structure to everything. The Koreans, however, are no where near as much into this individual story or narrative mind set apparently. When they go somewhere it is not to have an individual event usually, but to be part of a social ambiance where nothing particular need happen. They don’t feel a need to construct a story about their weekend. So this is an example of a massively, massively different editing style of reality. I attached a photo I took of John during this very conversation while we were in a Korea town that has sprouted up in Flushing, Queens. The photo is in the basement food court of this Korean mall in Queens that is a place I found fascinating and surreal because it is as if someone airlifted a mall from Seoul and dropped it in the middle of Queens.
March 12, 2013
American Cyclopath —a brief article I wrote about Lance Armstrong now on Reality Sandwich:http://www.realitysandwich.com/reality_sandwich_reviews_march_5_2013
February 24, 2013
Is there a link between the Oscar Pistorius murder case and climate change? No. In fact there isn’t a link between whether a guy with carbon fiber legs accidentally or on purpose killed his blonde girlfriend and anything that has anything to do with any of our lives. Yeah, maybe if I were deeply involved in the South African carbon fiber leg running community I would care a little bit more, but even then I wouldn’t want it taking up half the news every night for the next six months. The media principle: if it bleeds, it leads, has a new corollary: if it bleeds, has carbon fiber legs and a dead, blonde haired hottie then we’ll follow it like a pack of starved subway rats chasing a two day old extra cheese pizza being pulled on a string. Just stop it. If thousands of fast running guys with carbon fiber legs start shooting say 35% of the world’s hot blonde women that would be newsworthy, but this one grotesque case is not. It has no relevance to anyone’s life. We need some sort of social movement to stop hottie/celebrity murder cases from dominating the news. Just say no to celebrity/hottie murder cases.
Back in Boulder from Tucson after a 48 hour bus ride which included getting abandoned by Greyhound in Las Cruces, NM at Chucky’s Food Mart, a little island of cellophane wrapped food-like substances on wire frame racks and sheet melt shelving that lived in perpetual florescent high noon, but which also closed at midnight. That was where I learned that the connecting bus to Denver was canceled “until further notice.” I had money for a motel room, but there was another stranded passenger, a somewhat pushy guy from Ethiopia who spoke almost no English and said he had no money. I didn’t feel like bringing him to a motel room because he was a bit sketchy and could have been a drug mule with a suitcase full of contraband for all I knew. I made a bunch of phone calls on his behalf, eventually getting to the Red Cross. They picked him up and got him a $74. hotel room and gave him a Red Cross Mastercard with $5. credit. When I showed up the next morning at Chucky’s Food Mart I was like his hero. I didn’t do much, just a couple of phone calls, but if I hadn’t they would have just put him out of the convenience store at midnight into 18 degree winter with 30 to 40 mph hour wind gusts and some blowing snow. The perfect conditions for a hypothermia death, in other words. Greyhound, of course, took absolutely no responsibility and a deceased Ethiopian was unlikely to sue them for criminal negligence.
The trip to Tucson was nominally about the gem and mineral show, but became an unintended but very fulfilling vision quest, with new parts of my fantasy epic, Parallel Journeys, unfolding themselves vividly and with great emotional poignancy within. I did meet some interesting and very worthwhile people staying at the excellent Road Runner Hostel, but these events were greatly overpowered by what was going on in Parallel Journeys. The unfolding of scenes and visions was almost continuous and has continued back on Planet Boulder where I am presently typing lots of voice notes I made on my IPhone—mostly character dialogue. The emergence of the fantasies seemed to be helped by my being in a state of travel, a state of liminality, and the warm daytime temperatures meant that I could walk out into the desert by myself at Sagaro National Park.
Parallel Journeys, is my longest standing creative project and the one that seems the most completely out of ego control. To really incorporate the new material I would probably have to start the whole work from scratch. With fantasy fiction my relationship to the muse is humbling because I can’t control it. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring this work to fruition as actual books to be read by others or if it will just continue to play out episodically within me or merge, as imaginal occurrences sometimes have, with the outer world.
The most crucial part of the trip was revisiting Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Biosphere 2 became the setting for much of what transpired in the story. I had an unexpectedly emotional response to the place when I first visited it about 14 years ago. Maybe that was a “future memory” that it would one day be a major setting for me in the imaginal world.
Parallel Journeys is more about the muse leading me down rabbit holes, fascinating ones, but it doesn’t necessarily cooperate with my wanting to emerge from the rabbit hole with an artifact of writing that I can share with others. Nevertheless, it feels more important and transformative than anything else I work on so I’m going to stay with it. Maybe Parallel Journeys, as a written work, will consist of a series of unfinished versions. It’s not up to me. E.L. Doctorow, the novelist, and my writing mentor at NYU in the 80s, described this type of writing as “Like driving fast at night with headlights.” If you’re lucky you can see what’s just up ahead.
February 16, 2013
Status Update:
Snickers is running a saturation ad campaign right now with the tagline: “You’re not you, when you’re hungry.” In other words, there is a catastrophic loss of self to an extent that your very identity is violated when you don’t have one of these chemical/high fructose corn syrup/ genetically engineered by Monsanto partially hydrogenated soybean oil poison loaves uneasily dissolving in your stomach and thereby spiking your blood sugar and throwing off your hormones. To Mars Incorporated and the copy writer who wrote this slogan: Contrary to your ontological assertion: You are you when you are hungry, and when you are being poisoned by junk food, and in your case being you means being a corporate whore/trickster using obvious mind control techniques to make people sick for profit.
Comment added later, partly in response to a couple of comments left by others:
I’m just tired of Mars, Inc telling me when I’m me and when I’m not me. That’s bullshit. Don’t fucking telling me when I’m me and when I’m not me. And especially don’t ever tell me I’m not me when I’m hungry. I am more me when I’m hungry than when I’m on junk food so that’s a straight up lie on multiple levels. Candy bar ads don’t get to tell mw who I am and who I’m not. On the other hand, based on their ad, I’m able to tell Mars, Inc. who they are and who they aren’t. And if they don’t like my being able to tell them who they are and who they aren’t, they should feel free to whine about it during the thousand year bardot of starvation in a bone dry desert they will have to endure when their well-dressed yuppie bodies fall away from them and they have to spend a millenium in a cindery, chemical fire desert with no food or drink except what look like swollen candy bars that are filled with a greasy sawdust paste that tastes like burning plastic.
February 9, 2013
I haven’t read this book (someone posted quotes from a book where the author claims that death and dying come from a state of mind that can be overcome) but there have been a series of New Age types who have made the claim, based on the faulty you-create-your-own-reality philosophy (I can provide a link to my critique of YCYOR) that death and all disease is a psychological product. Actually, this notion is a form of morbid materialism and is a thought form likely to make people ill on various levels. Tolkien called being in a single, unaging body “premature immortality” and it was the reason why the elves envied man. Tolkien derisively called the elves “embalmers” because they sought to stop development and preserve a stagnant equilibrium. Even the use of the common phrase “anti-aging” is deceptive because, like almost all animals, we are in pro-aging bodies. We also have an immortal spirit body already, so the identification with preserving the particular physical body is a type of perverse and morbid materialism, which turns up in a desperate neurotic like Ray Kurzweil. One of the best ways out of this neurotic suffering is to study NDE material (see Life Lessons…). Research shows that even the study of NDE produces parallel effects to having the experience where people typically lose all fear of death because they realize that their consciousness is not in their body. Neurological materialism, which is defeated by NDE research (see Pam Reynolds case in Lessons…), is what gives many people a fearful intention to cling to this one leaky life raft. Animals, who do not usually have beliefs about death, die anyway, so the author’s notion that death is a mental construct doesn’t meet the most obvious reality test. For those of us who have been out of our bodies and returned (I’ve had numerous OBEs) death is revealed as an emergence, not an emergency.
See: Life Lessons from the Living Dead
The Glorified Body-Metamorphosis of The Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution
You are Only as Old as you are-the Six Noble Truths of the Zap Philosophy of Aging
January 29, 2013
Why You Truly Never Leave Highschool
http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/√
The above link is the best article I’ve ever read on high school. It summarizes a number of scientific studies of high school and its lasting impact on people. I’ve often said that few people ever recover from high school. The statement, however, is based, oddly enough, on my experience of high school between the ages of 29 and 37.
The high school I graduated from at age 16, the Bronx High School of Science, was exotically different from the usual American high school experience. We had no prom, but many of the smartest kids in a city of 9 million who had taken a competitive test to get in. Bronx Science graduated 8 Nobel Prize winners, 7 in physics. We had no football team, but we did have the number one debate team in the entire country where I made most of my closest friendships. These were kids who self-identified with intellect and creativity rather than athletics and popularity games. There was also a lot of focus on political activism and the larger world, rather than the social world inside the building. Students and teachers related like colleagues.
Then I had six years of high school from ages 22-28 as teacher and dean/building security coordinator of a vocational high school in the South Bronx in the Eighties. This experience was more about the violent world of the crack epidemic and the burnt-out South Bronx as well as the birth of hip-hop. Grand Master Flash invented scratching and turntablism at shop class in this school. I knew a lot of the early graffiti writers, etc.
Then I got a job at a suburban high school in Long Island, New York and, for the first time, encountered the American High School. I thought I was on a movie set for a teen exploitation or spoof film like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. What I had assumed were comic movie stereotypes were the reality, and it was a massive culture shock for me. During my 8 years in that world I discovered what high school does to people, and it is not a pretty picture. If you look at artifacts from the supposedly adult culture, People magazine, for example—it’s high school gossip and popularity games on a national scale. The high school experience permanently imprints most people, and that’s why we have such an adolescent adult culture (which we also export to the world). This article backs up the idea of high school as a lifetime imprint with some solid data.
As a former school teacher, still licensed to teach English in the state of New York, I am legally empowered to give assignments, and my assignment to you is to contemplate the many ways you have been shaped by high school and think of some things you can do to finally graduate from its cruel social hierarchy.
Oh and one more word about the lingering effects of high school—Facebook. A recent study in Germany shows that Facebook tends to make people depressed. People always post photos of themselves at parties and social events looking like they are having a great time. It gives people the impression that everyone is more popular and having a better life than they are.
January 19, 2013
REVERSE ENGINEER AN IDEALIZING PROJECTION My suggestion for today (which worked well for me) is to reverse engineer at least one idealizing projection. Try the following experiment, at a coffee shop, restaurant, airport, etc. notice a stranger that invites very positive projections—someone you would look at admiringly. (It’s important that they be a stranger so there is no real life info to collapse the idealization.) This type of idealization will usually be onto someone of your gender. Quickly write down all the positive qualities you imagine that they have based on how they look. These qualities are the ones that you need to recognize and cultivate in yourself. The title of a book by Cheri Huber is “Be the Person you Want to Find” Tell yourself, “I have all these qualities or I would not be able to project them onto another. I just need to recognize and cultivate them.” Next, do what William James recommended: Act as if. Act as if you already embodied and personified these qualities. The slang version is “Fake it, till you make it.”
January 18, 2013
Zeitgeist Snapshot JFK 1/17/2013
My current scan of the zeitgeist, especially as concentrated in JFK’s Delta Airlines Terminal of 1/17/13, finds sad layers of disappointed potential. It feels like a time lapse portrait of a young man with great promise stepping into his mom’s house and lapsing into thirty-five years of processed food and cable television. The viewer witnesses his deterioration at a sluggish 6 frames per second, agonizingly dragged out for seventy seconds. Now it’s 35years/70seconds later, and he’s aged from a nineteen-year-old into a morbidly obese fifty-four-year-old diabetic, with hardened arteries and skinny legs, stumbling at the edge of that inevitable and final coronary. But at the same time that he shuffles about in his mom’s house in a thorazine haze, we see that he has also generated a doppelgänger, an Asian adolescent boy with spikey, jet black hair, and androgynous neo-Tokyo accoutrements. His intelligent, emotionally disassociated gaze is directed at high resolution images squirming beneath an elegant oblong of Gorilla Glass. These divergent doppelgängers exude the cognitively dissonant flavors of dissipated potential and digital intrigue. Sent from my iPhone
December 25, 2012
A White Magickal Christmas—I’ve been practicing some Chaos Magick this morning. I highly recommend this brief manifesto of Chaos Magick by my friend and colleague, the Australian Hermetic Philosopher and Magician, Harald Kleeman:http://home.exetel.com.au/sanctuary/magicknew.html
- Magickal Praxis”, part 3, is a dialogue between Harald and I. See also: But see also my Liber Conjura Lingua Gnostica
http://home.exetel.com.au/sanctuary/conjura.htm
SANCTUARY – Liber Conjura Lingua Gnostica
home.exetel.com.au
Zap Oracle R0b Brezsny just posted the following link to Phil Hine’s free book “Condensed Chaos”:http://tinyurl.com/cz624fa
December 22, 2012
Up until late last night I didn’t think there was going to be any news that would seem like a fulfillment of the end of the Mayan long count calendar. And then, late last night, the shocking news came like a punch in the stomach. Ashton Kutchner filed for divorce with Demi Moore. On the same day that we lined up with the dark rift in the Milky Way this huge rift opens up between two of our most important stars. Hard to escape the fulfillment of ancient prophecy….
I mean I knew they were on the rocks, but nothing prepared me for the finality of this, and for it to happen right on the end date. It’s just too much…
we all just need to keep breathing, we’re going to get through this and by the time the Mayan long count rolls over again the whole Moore/Kutchner split is going to seem like ancient history What’s getting to me though is all the sheeple I see walking around out there like nothing even happened
Your feedback always welcome—send to [email protected]
