A bearded face smiles amiably, energy crackling ’round its head. Hear it as it discourses, only to the length necessary, of dimensions unfathomable to heads that lack pools of reflection tucked into the interiors of their fortresses of solitude. I find most contemporary theories of consciousness, particularly those of the neuroscience sort, deeply disappointing. Far too reductive, and deflationary in their aspirations. Scholars of mind ought to be proponents of mind, in the vanguard among proponents of joy and of weird sensations. I have to say: in his role as character in the psychedelic drama, Hamilton Morris troubles me, worries me. I much prefer the truthful attentiveness to subjective experience that informs the work of an older era’s thinkers like Julian Jaynes. The modern mind consists of an internal narrative longing for direction from a higher power. Despite his many errors, Jaynes was at least conscious enough to strike notes of wonder in its presence. “The intellectual life of man,” he wrote, “his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction” (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, p. 9). Let us know ourselves, in other words, as eaters of forbidden fruit containing alien DNA.
Category: Uncategorized
Thursday January 25, 2018
“There are a lot of minds in here,” says one invented voice among many. A hound pants and howls. A witch gasps and cackles. Consciousness interrupts itself, stops watching itself, and for once actually listens. Linger on natural delights, I tell myself. Bits of media detritus float past, signaling that inner setting menus are now accessible. With binaural metaprogramming, black magick’s principled ideal of godhood inches this side of attainable. The image confronts me, though, of two roads diverging in a yellow wood: the Left Hand Path and the Right. Am I ready to enact the praxeology of divination, evocation, and soul travel? The so-called “Three Godly Powers”? Or would I prefer to live as if watched over by a machine of loving grace?
Wednesday January 24, 2018
People that do it, do it. They map a new territory in an act of psychic reinvention. Lounging, relaxing, living pleasurably: one should always build time for these into the 24 hours of one’s day. Get a glimpse of it, man — the waves as they mass on the horizon. “I haven’t been entirely well lately,” coughs capitalism as it climbs into the ring. I shall steal from under it the ground on which it stands. Trees rise up around me, their bare branches bathed in yellow sunlight. As pleasant as the weather has been locally these last few days, I still look forward to the coming rebirth, the arrival of spring and summer. Would acceptance of Rich Terrile’s “reality-as-simulation” hypothesis prompt any changes in terms of everyday interactions with others and with nature? The more I watch Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, the more I’m put off by the show’s disrespectful treatment of indigenous people and their medicines and traditions. Perhaps the series acquires some critical self-awareness along the way? We’ll see.
Tuesday January 23, 2018
The mind, invested in a sound or a state, pursues a path, awakening afterwards free of memory. Ash & Herb refer to this process, and in doing so give it shape, on tracks like “Root Awakening.”
Ash Brooks & ML Wah take heads even further into the beyond on their brilliant slow jam, “Deeper Than the Sea”: a long pan along an ever-evolving plot of concrete. Sarah strides beside me wearing her new backpack, reminding me for a moment of Tasslehoff Burrfoot, a character from a series of fantasy novels I read as a kid. Night-walking reveals a different kind of city, one to which I’m more amenable. A space of mystery. Whereas by day, I’m performing ganzfeld experiments, trying to separate psychic signals from mental noise. Suddenly Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia blooms into consciousness, mapping an otherwise invisible community of mind-opened peers.
Monday January 22, 2018
Moods relate to keys and scales. Light shows, rockets, vendors, spotlights, Tolkeinesque font, heavy on the kerning. Shirtless cartoon Dick Tracy with shaving cream around his mouth, glaring at himself in a mirror. Are you sure? A library book? Yes, sir. Dictation. A series of orders. People do what they do. In most cases, they follow orders. Get them to open their eyes, awaken out of themselves. Great metamorphoses ahead if China’s working class rises and takes over. Disembodied Italian-American heads gesticulate with imaginary arms. The world appears coherent only inasmuch as we hear it. Such, at least, was the experience of my bespectacled middle school self, with nearsightedness or myopia “afflicted,” so to me it seemed, as early as the age of eight. Much in the composition of my psyche dates to that moment of near-total alienation from the world of my peers.
Sunday January 21, 2018
Everywhere I walk, I’m surrounded by boring, meaningless garbage, interrupted only by the beauty of birds, leaves, and sunlight. My neighbors splay across the bumpers of their cars stupidities like “I’ll Cheer for Duke When They Play Al Qaeda.” Cargo boxes and credit form a world. Horrified bodies raise arms to the sky, their lives reduced to mere drudgery on account of machines. Capitalism, blind in its judgment of quality, turns our labor-power against us, chains us to programs and institutions; buildings, infrastructure; protocols; systems of assessment. We live aboard and help service a planetary totality every bit as oppressive as the Death Star. Such is the perspective achieved in Allan Sekula’s devastating portrait of the global economy, The Forgotten Space.
Relentless toil, interrupted only briefly: ’tis the fate of the global many under capitalism. Twenty-first century realism consists of stories of people coerced into building around themselves labyrinths they can never escape.
Friday January 19, 2018
One isn’t given much latitude in this society. Let us therefore try to calm the others. Let us relax them, we think — the others among whom we mix. Help them dig their cars out from under mounds of snow. How quickly capitalism compels those of us in the professions to conform to the preferences of our peers: those who, on a whim, determine the value of our labor-power. Absolute occlusion of selfhood demands retaliation. In the meantime, however, let us walk tall and proud among those who have cast us down. The world needn’t be a mere play of shadows upon a wall. Let us gradually become accustomed to a world of light. Do this by making time for pleasure amidst the workday’s dull routines. Behave as if one were a self-propelled wheel. Become the point at the center of Metatron’s Cube.
Thursday January 18, 2018
One becomes more than one person — of two minds — on a snow day. A new future, and with it a more hopeful mode of subjectivity, opens in front of me, fills me with a sense of possibility. A change occurs in my cerebral cortex. The “self”-structure comes to know itself as a mere interface between inner and outer worlds. Oppose to it the state rendered by the Sanskrit term “samadhi.” An enormous forgetting must have occurred of which we know not when or why. The fall into subjecthood through acquisition of language. Consciousness is far greater than that part of it identified with the play of dualities. Through meditation, we can open bridges between characters and actors, avatars and players. The world of time loses some of its bite when one has glimpsed the eternal, the unchanging, the timeless.
Wednesday January 17, 2018
Consciousness grazes in one of reality’s slighter pastures. It regrets the creation of the hunting instinct, and by extension the will to earn, but it scarfs down a dinner fit for an aristocrat. Not really. Sad, listless, having lost any sense of personal promise or potential, I drag myself through space, nibbling occasionally at items from fast food franchise value menus. Sarah tries to cheer me by suggesting we collaborate on something creative: “a screenplay,” she says, “or perhaps a work of fiction.” For those of us susceptible to wintertime blues, the only way out is through.
Tuesday January 16, 2018
The current year already seems crueler than the one prior. Late capital downloads and installs updates while subjects sleep. The system reboots itself each morning with an ever thinner sense of its past, a few more artifacts sold off, a few more disciplines abandoned, imagination channeled instead into complex games of strategy and cunning. The problem with consciousness is that one only ever acquires it amid these games. And in the absence of any observable outer limits to these games, what can one do but play? We too often reduce ourselves to mere decision-making machines. Like the entities at the ends of men’s magazines. Food lions caught in predator-prey relations. Energy divided, individuated, and pitted against itself, turns life into the Parable of the Tares. Better to step back and contemplate silent immensities. Life, having taken many forms, evolves toward one form. Rhythmic breathing of the individual engenders trails of thought, mental approximations of planetary biorhythms. The return to the body can be dizzying.
Trance-Scripts 