Have you ever bought a new electronic device, or tried a new activity, and then dropped it because you were sure you couldn’t possibly master it? Well, don’t give up so quickly. [...]
Then, after trying, they were asked how quickly they’d become good at it. But this time they were pessimistic and thought it’d take them longer to learn than it actually did.
Fascinating article on the history of AA and some research on why, even though it doesn’t usually work, it does occasionally work.
Here’s an interesting social-cybernetic insight:
To begin with, there is evidence that a big part of AA’s effectiveness may have nothing to do with the actual steps. It may derive from something more fundamental: the power of the group. Psychologists have long known that one of the best ways to change human behavior is to gather people with similar problems into groups, rather than treat them individually. The first to note this phenomenon was Joseph Pratt, a Boston physician who started organizing weekly meetings of tubercular patients in 1905. These groups were intended to teach members better health habits, but Pratt quickly realized they were also effective at lifting emotional spirits, by giving patients the chance to share their tales of hardship. (“In a common disease, they have a bond,” he would later observe.) More than 70 years later, after a review of nearly 200 articles on group therapy, a pair of Stanford University researchers pinpointed why the approach works so well: “Members find the group to be a compelling emotional experience; they develop close bonds with the other members and are deeply influenced by their acceptance and feedback.”
The article covers AA’s effectiveness briefly, and finds that studies of its effectiveness are inconclusive. I’ve posted before about one study that found 12-step programs no more or less effective than other treatment programs.
I have absolutely zero problem with people using religion or whatever else works to improve their lives and get over the devastating effects of addiction, court mandated 12 step programs are clearly a breach of the seperation of church and state. (And There’s evidence to suggest that mandating treatment doesn’t work anyway.)
Have you used an online persona to accomplish self-transformation? I’m doing research for my hypersigil project (currently thinking it will take the form of a free e-book, and then be extended into something else from there), and I’m looking for personal stories from people who have attempted to use online personas to make changes in their lives. Whether that meant taking up another gender identity in IRC or Second Life before taking transgenderism in real life, or crafting a different professional identity to make a career change, or using social media to get out of a rut in life, I’m interested in talking to you.
I especially want to talk to you if you’ve tried and failed. I’m interested in finding out how to make this work for people, so failures are even more important to study than successes.
If anyone can recommend any books, papers, or studies on the subject, I’d be much appreciative.
I’ve been thinking recently about Grant Morrison‘s “hypersigil” concept, but considering as not an occult/magical practice, but as as a cybernetic phenomena.*
I’m missing David Mack at Floating World tonight for Bogville. Sometimes Portland is so awesome it sucks.
WHO: David Mack
WHAT: Art exhibit, slide show discussion, Q&A with the artist
WHEN: Thursday, April 2nd, 6-10pm
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave #101
JASON LEIVIAN: Kabuki: The Alchemy talks about a new beginning. Everything that came before (Volumes 1-6) was childhood. Maybe one way of putting it, when I was younger there was a developmental stage where I immersed myself in books and ideas that I was interested in. But then at some point there was a breakthrough and things got crazy. It’s like it all became real and my life became some science fiction novel. When I was younger read things in books, but now my life is these things. What was metaphor, now seems like platonic truth, even realer than this reality, which seems like maya by comparison. Let’s talk about the spiritual journey of David Mack as it’s expressed through your art. In Kabuki you see the work as a self fulfilling prophecy. Can you discuss that a bit?
DAVID MACK: I think I understand what you are describing. What you focus on has a tendency to change you, affect you. When you are passionate about something and active in working on it, it can seem like you hit a point when your real life seems to operate on dream-logic: You think it and then it materializes.
Creating on a regular basis is a great practice for that. It clues you in, trains you, to realize how malleable the material world is – that you can have an immediate effect on it based on your thoughts and actions. When you write or draw everyday, you start with a blank, and then you make something- an idea suddenly exists in the three dimensional material world. Just by writing it down, drawing it, you take this thing that only existed in your head, and then suddenly it exists in three dimensional physical reality. Practicing that everyday, starts to reveal to you that things work that way. You experience that transition everyday and it becomes larger than the page or the work you are doing. It has a ripple effect in people that experience your work and their response to it.
Suddenly you realize you have not just created one story, or one work, or a body of work, but you’ve created your own career, and your own life, as your self portrait, and your contexts for your life, and your work has become your passport to a variety of worlds. And there is a point when the dream you were dreaming, and then dared to enact in reality, has become completely real and you live it everyday. And other people can even share it with you.
That is a great lesson to learn. Because once you learn it, you can go about living it very consciously. As consciously as you would craft your work on the page, you realize you are crafting it off the page as well.
As Scott Atran points out, these kids dream of fighting for some meaningful cause that will make them heroes in their communities. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri-and Arab satellite television and in some cases their own experiences-have convinced them that fighting against the most powerful country in the world and its allies is the most heroic thing they can do.
No, “The 99″ comic books are not going to solve that problem. Their circulation is in the tens of thousands at this point, while bin Laden’s violent message gets out to billions. But comic books are “likely to be a lot more helpful than our bullets and bombs in attracting young people away from jihadi cool,” says Atran. They might even help convince Washington that “knowledge is the true base of power.” But maybe that’s hoping for too much.
(Update/clarification The image above is not from The 99, it’s from Chuck Dixon’s aborted American Power series. I presented it along with the question of what message it for sarcastic rather illustrative purposes.)
I came across this via Kottke. I’ve seen bits and pieces posted about Outside over the past couple months, but this is a good review of a game everyone should be dying to try:
In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.
The reviewer gives it a 7/10.
ADDITIONALLY, just reading this on the Telegraph website, which goes to show just how peculiar IRL and Outside can really be depending on what tribe you end up playing:
Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child’s play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England. […]
"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people — many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."
The Masai men — who become warriors after tracking, running down and killing a male lion — may struggle with Greenforce’s interpretation of how English law operates.
"For example, if someone was to see a thief and chase after him and, when they catch him they hurt him, then the person who hurt the thief would go to prison as well as the thief."
The Invisibles is a psychedelic sci-fi series about a team of anarchist freedom fighters who employ time travel, magic, martial arts, and drugs in their battle against the tyrannous Outer Church. King Mob, the group’s leader, explains: “We want to show people how to make their own exits, even if they have to use dynamite… We’re trying to pull off a track that’ll result in everyone getting exactly the kind of world they want. Everyone including the enemy.”
Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic book writer, is fond of explaining that he wrote the Invisibles in response to his alien abduction experience in Kathmandu in the 1994. He also calls it a “hypersigil,” a form of magical fiction. Morrison says that he strongly identified with the King Mob character and found that the by incorporating real aspects of his life in the series, he could make fictional aspects of the series bleed into his own life. When the series was almost canceled, he encouraged readers to use a chaos magic technique to save the series. Apparently, it worked and he was able to finish the series as planned.
The first volume begins in modern times, with the Invisibles recruiting Jack Frost – a teenage delinquent from Liverpoor who may be the next Buddha. Frost’s first mission involves accompanying the team back in time to rescue the Marquis de Sade from prison during the French revolution. Later volumes continue to sprawl backwards and forwards in time, with characters’ actions from different time periods reverberating throughout history.
Although the Invisibles begins as a romantic “good guys vs. bad guys” story, the lines begin to blur as Morrison deconstructs issues such as conformity, activism, and violence. Brilliantly complex and inherently mind altering, the Invisibles is a countercultural “must read.”
Taxidermia is a magic realist story spanning across three generations of a Hungarian family, focusing on the three male primal urges: sex, food and bodily prowess. It’s weird, off beat and you should definitely check it out if you’re into high weirdness .
Magic realism is a fusion of the external factors of human existence and the internal ones to more accurately depict human reality. Using obscurities, magick, symbolism and myths the fiction is able to incorporate aspects of human existence such as thoughts, emotions, dreams and imagination.
Now I know the concept of a hypersigil can be a bit clich?, but the idea’s and techniques used in magical realism could be very usefull if you were so inclined to create said device .
I’ve been really hard on Chris lately, over at Frequency 23 and his blog. He was nice enough to say a few nice words about me, so I think I should return the favor. He does a lot of really interesting work, including lots of work on the Key 23 Hyperwiki and the Borderland Science. I linked to this podcast when it first came out, but if you haven’t listened to it yet he’s got some great stuff to say on this podcast interview.
About a decade ago, Alvin Schwartz, who wrote Superman comic strips in the 1940s and ?50s, published one of the great Odd Books of our time. In An Unlikely Prophet, reissued in paperback this spring, Schwartz writes that Superman is real. He is a tulpa, a Tibetan word for a being brought to life through thought and willpower. Schwartz also says a Hawaiian kahuna told him that Superman once traveled 2,000 years back in time to keep the island chain from being destroyed by volcanic activity. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn?t, but it does sound like a job for Superman ? all in a day?s work for a guy who can squeeze coal into diamonds.
Wes Unruh delves into comic book universes and explores their egregore nature.
in part because it is published by an independant, the characters don’t become trully resonate as an egregore, but instead remain fictional devices.
More mainstream comics titles go through the hands of countless writers and artists during their run. Most of the most popular titles, The X-Men, The New Avengers, The JLA, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Amazing Spiderman and Superman, for starters, have been written and drawn by so many people that the characters themselves are now products of a vast network of minds. This seems to immdiately fulfill the requirements of at least one part of the egregore equation. My favorite DC character, John Constantine, no longer has anyone willing to take credit for his creation. In essence, at least as far as creator rights go, he has appeared of his own accord.
Reza was kind enough to send some more info about Ad’ieh, an ancient Arabic hypersigil system (most commonly practiced now in the form of chain letters, but also the key to the plot of the film Ringu).
Reza:
Hi Klintron,
I was skimming through technoccult archive and read your post on Ad ieh; here is the Farsi / Arabic word if you are interested:
In Farsi the practice is called Ad?ieh Nevisi (Nevisi: writing)
Sometimes, Ad?ieh is called Khabnameh.
I guess my English spelling of the word is not correct; but maybe you can find it in Arabic / Farsi sites if you have got Arabic font installed on your machine.
There is also another brief reference to Ad?ieh / Khabnameh on my friend?s blog (Esmail Yazdanpour) but the text is in Farsi … you can read his comment under my post at hyperstition; he thinks certain types of commercial spams follow the same hyperstitional pattern of Ad?ieh Nevisi (read the examples in English):
http://mahzood.org/?p=65
There is a chapter on Ad?ieh in Ibn Asir?s History of Islam.
Best,
reza
Me:
Thanks for the info. For the record, I wasn’t trying to call you a
liar or anything, but I try to take everything I read on Hyperstition
with some… unbelief.
Reza:
Thank you … lol … no, i just thought you might be interested in more info (in connection with Hypersigil); i’ll try to find if there is an english text out there on the subject because there should be some books. btw, the unbelief-based reading is the apex of hyperstition. Hope you are doing fine.
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