This is great!
(via Xiombarg)
MonthJanuary 2005
Watched some of the Disinfo DVD with Aaron again the other night and got curious about who Brother Theodore actually is. Here’s a couple of informative links:
Semi-Official Brother Theodore web site
I also looked into the “Sex Life of Robots” which isn’t available on DVD yet but is making rounds at some festivals it seems, and Rocket Boy, who I couldn’t find any information on.
Great to keep in mind:
Consider, if you will, the Hindu and Buddhist populations of the world: reincarnation is a standard belief, ?prana? is a standard concept, god is viewed as present in all physical matter, miracles are still widely believed in (and performed!) and Avatars – Christ-like or better beings in bodies – are still roaming around.
Now, do you want to talk about MAD? Do you seriously want to discuss at what point people have ?stepped over the edge??
That?s the basic belief system of a third of the world?s population right there. If you?re moving a little closer to it by deconditioning yourself from the veil left over your eyes by the death of god in the western tradition, don?t worry about going mad. Worry about what the rest of the world things of these crazy scientific rationalists who?ve closed their eyes to so much that is completely obvious if you look at what happens in life, not some textbook.
Via a Key 23 post I’ve found an old article on Transhumanism by Sauceruney I forgot to read. Sauceruney connects the dots between AI, immortality, and your blogging and Amazon purchasing habits:
Immortality. It?s a key element in the periodic table of Transhumanism. The Internet can be seen as a limited means of reaching this goal, yet the alchemy required to turn it into virtual gold lies in the occulted regions of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Dumping your brain onto the Internet in textual form, you?re fashioning a crude personality construct. How accurate or tailored this online persona is to that which exists as flesh and bone, is up to you, the creator. Long after you?re dead and gone, if not sooner, your LiveJournal emoting, political screeds, MeFi and /. posts? even your drunken party pictures may lie dormant in a digital archive, awaiting the day it?s ultimately devoured by a growing AI that?s coming to grips with its own existence. The world?s leading governments and corporations may already have virtual personality constructs for some of you, awaiting the day when computers are inexpensive and powerful enough to model each and every person from birth to death, in an attempt to simulate reality in the achievement of elusive (inter)National Security objectives. In the charge to preserve the perceived systems of existence, our random and unpredictable humanity may be destroyed. This form of Transhumanism is an inevitable conclusion of sufficiently funded bureaucratic paranoia. It?s up to free-thinking individuals to ensure the system remains full of exploitable holes. What fun is immortality if you?re stuck in someone else?s idea of Heaven?
I’ve been hoping to come across something like this for a while, but never put any effort into looking for it:
This site is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy.
(via William Gibson)
I suppose it’s worth noting that the Times has an article about Byron Gysin’s Dream Machine:
Ms. Chapman thought it might be helpful if my body were more relaxed, so I lay down on a sofa, and she put on soothing music. She flicked the machine back on as I shut my eyes. A moment later there they were, the same flashing patterns as before. After a while I became bored and my mind began to drift.
That’s when it happened. I didn’t “see” as much as I strongly imagined a campfire in a clearing in a dense forest at night. My boyfriend Jim was sitting to my left, laughing. Later I seemed to find myself in a large empty auditorium, walking toward some chairs arranged in the middle of the room. In one creepy moment I was in a basement hallway, following closely behind someone walking ahead of me, whose face I couldn’t see.
Full Story: NEw York Times: Décor by Timothy Leary
(via Post Atomic and Last Word Blog).
Anyone had any experiences with a Dream Machine?
Old but previously unpublished interview:
John Dee, for example, was one of the leading scientific lights of his age. Without John Dee, there wouldn’t have been an Isaac Newton. The science of navigation was practically invented by John Dee. He was a classic Renaissance man, and yet he seemed to spend the latter half of his life working upon this incomprehensible series of squiggles that he referred to as being Enochian language, which he seemed to believe literally was a form of language with which you could communicate with angels. Now, you look at this table of tiny squares full of little symbols, numbers, letters, and it looks like complete lunacy – and, indeed, most people have dismissed it as such, but given Dee’s undisputed, original intellect, I found it more difficult to dismiss it.
I also started looking at people like Jack Whiteside Parsons. There’s a crater on the moon named after him – the Parsons Crater. That’s because Jack Parsons invented solid rocket fuel, without which it would have been impossible to reach the moon. He was a distinguished scientist. He was also a member of the Golden Dawn – the Caliphate OTO; the Ordo Templi Orientist (OTO). Crowley had been the head of the order at one point. The more I started to look at it, the more it seemed that . . . most of the leading scientists, artists, musicians – most of the key thinkers in human cultural history, seemed to be blatantly and overtly involved in magical thinking of some sort. I mean nearly every artist that you would care to name … You’d think there’d be nothing more formal and scientific than those sort of divided rectangles and squares of Mondrian’s, but no, that was all based upon theosophy. Even baseball was created by a theosophist.
(via New World Disorder)
Old news, but I’ve never linked to this before:
Nice simple explanation:
In Summation
Seen in this sense (and “spoken” in second-person, with a little application of poetic license), the phrase is intended as a sort of a “wish” or a “spell,” (cast by the writer upon the reader):
“May you die and be reborn, In the limitless extending Light of Godhead.”
Methaphorical Meaning For Non-Sectarians:
“May you change, and keep changing unto perfection.”
Full Story: As If Productions: What does LVX mean?
(via Zetetic23 )
© 2024 Technoccult
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑