more mythic remediation

I suppose that the prerogative I'm imagining for my generation in their particular task of problem-solving can be divided into two components. One component is the actual endeavor of healing and rebuilding social and ecological systems. The other, which is more of a personal mission that I don't really expect everyone to take up, is the re-appropriation of mythic thought into our vernacular language. I want to make the distinction of spoken language because I think that mythic thought is well-handled by visionary art, science fiction and (most) music. But it is in our common parlance that I have found a lack.

As readily as humans form groups, humans make myths - we are storytellers to the core. Buckminster Fuller would probably point out that we are physiologically predisposed to storytelling, and many other abstract activities besides, since if you compare the way we are shaped to any other animal, we're pretty much brains on a stick. Form follows function. Anteaters have straws as noses, giraffes have long necks, and humans have huge brains and opposable thumbs. And I have no idea why platypi look like that. So then if we can read a function from our form, We are designers and builders - and we will design invisible structures as well as visible ones. These invisible structures are our world-views, our world-maps, our myths. Our language is full of fiction and metaphor, even at the sentence level... as agency is what holds grammar together. (Agency holds...) With simple sentences we tell little stories all the time. It is a myth for me to say that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, as we all know it is really the earth that moves, but according to my perceptual experience, the sun appears to rise. Tailoring speech to our perceptual experience rather than tailoring it to "scientific truth" has obvious advantages - it allows us to succinctly transmit strategically valuable information. In studying the larger mythic structures we've built and the people whom they have served, it's clear that truth and facticity do not coincide at that scale either - nor do they have to. Something can be true without being factual. Culturally significant myths arose from unique dialectics between a people and their ecological niche... and there are tons and tons of those on this earth. That's a lotta truths.

The value of mythic thought has fallen through the cracks in the course of the development of our economic infrastructure, and has often been displaced by an obsession with reductionist science, which really only serves industry, and not the advancement of holistic knowlegde. We've been experiencing increasing loss of participation with our natural environment on individual and collective levels, and the experiences of these two spheres - the individual and the collective - feed and reinforce each other. Collective disconnection with animate forces of nature has consequently shaped our ways of speaking - literally our figures of speech - and this naturally creates a winnowing of our perception. Since language is something we can all consensually agree upon - and perception is not - language often succeeds in modulating perceptual experience to a certain degree. The linguist Edward Sapir said "We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation." And indeed, the non-human animate aspects of nature are not as present in our language because they are not as present to our senses. And when they are not well-represented in our language, we lose to opportunity to believe in them - we are not re-minded. We are, however, well equipped to be reminded - we have all the gear necessary - all it takes is some fearless immersion in the woods, or an evening stargazing when there's no moon...

David Abram writes "The perceptual reciprocity between our sensing bodies and the animate, expressive landscape both engenders and supports our more conscious, linguistic reciprocity with others. The complex interchange we call "language" is rooted in the non-verbal exchange always already going on between our own flesh and the flesh of the world. Human languages, then, are informed not only by the structures of the human body and the human community, but by the evocative shapes and patterns of the more-than-human terrain."

Loss of participation with our natural environment - whether it's gardening, hunting, animal husbandry, building with natural materials, or just sleeping outside - is correlated to loss of mythic language. How then do we communicate with each other in the vernacular about our perceptual orientation in the world? I know I would be hard pressed to explain the magical experience of drumming around a fire with scientific language.

Academic papers about quantum mechanics written in English are still incomprehensible to me, because I haven't learned the language that you learn when you study physics at that high of a level. In that same way, the great myths and oracles passed on by bards and shamans are similarly notated - they are condensations of information that go beyond the semantic "carrying capacity" of our everyday speech. A creation myth and paper written by someone with two PhDs both represent instances of using words as meta-symbols - symbols of symbols. But essentially what it means is that their meaning is not apparent to just anyone, but perhaps only apparent to a few people, and then all the rest have to work for it.

Animistic world-views and myths, where forces of nature are embodied and given agency, are ways of mapping the world. Myth-making and world-building are ways of translating the chaotic 'foreign language' of the environment into symbolic schema that can inform human action and orientation in social, natural and indeed super-natural environments. Mapping is a tactical endeavor, enabling a certain kind of navigation through the world, whether through landscape or 'mindscape'. This "mapmaking", whether through invisible or visible mediums, is arguably a universal among humans possessing language. Science is also a way of mapping - the mapmakers simply follow a different set of rules. A professor of mine put it this way: the epistemological function of science is "to make the unknown known" through a process that is characterized by falsification, and religion's function is "to preserve an autonomy for the unknown." I believe that we don't have to choose between the two... and why not plant these two trees next to each other, and see what grows in their collective shade?

The World Bank: Employing the most deranged specimens of homo economicus

As if we all need any more fuel for the fire, lol.

From an internal memo written by the Vice President of the World Bank, 1991

Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank
be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries
to the LDCs? [least developed countries] I can think of three reasons:

  (1) The measurement of the costs of health
impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings
from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point
of view a given amount of health impairing pollution
should be done in the country with the lowest cost,
which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think
the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic
waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we
should face up to that.

- Lawrence Summers, World Bank Vice
President and Chief Economist

parenthetical link added

Post-Mythology & Re-Sorcery

There are two distinct themes in the following diatribe that I want to work to connect. One is magic[k]. The other is conscious ecological design/build. I am going to attempt to provide a working definition of magick to make for better grokking. Hey, my spellchecker knows the word "grok", but not the archaic spelling of magic (with a K). Kurious.

This is by no means a comprehensive definition, and please feel free to contribute thoughts of your own... I'm going to be purposefully general because of the concepts we'll work with later on. My definition will probably most reflect a familiarity with the concept of Magick with a K as articulated by Aleister Crowley, and the school of Chaos Magic, which is a syncretistic "post-modern" incarnation and open-reconciliation of various historical occult philosophies. I can't go into the relative depth of my affinity with either of those paradigms, but let me simply say that I see magick as an interface, and a relative perceptual waveform, not something that explains cause and mechanics in the classical scientific sense. As a self-conscious practice, "magick" is superficially the manipulation (and often creation) of symbols. Incipiently - and ideally - this "casting" and placement of symbols in both visible and invisible landscapes represents the deliberate allocation of individual will and attention as well as possibly the manipulation of the attentions of others. Lastly, mobilizing will and focusing attention in magical practice is something that is often honed through meditative and yogic techniques. Perhaps one could call magick the active integration of an ecology of perception with an economy of attention. One can see this cartoonishly crystallized in sleight-of-hand magic, the success of which relies on the magician's understanding and trust of the perceptual tendencies and cognitive apparatus of his audience. In our society sleight-of-hand is streamlined for the goal of entertainment, but similar performative techniques have existed in indigenous shamanic traditions that are geared toward very different goals, like healing. For more on this idea, please refer to David Abram's work.

In regards to the popular term " the dark arts"; dark should not connote malice - it simply connotes the risk to self and others that comes naturally when we learn new things about cause and effect in our environment. Manipulation - and for that matter, deception - are not intrinsically "bad". (In fact, optimal social friction among human and animal groups alike depends on fundamental forms of deception... but that's beyond the scope of this post). Toddlers go through destructively manipulative phases when they figure out certain social "rules"... but hopefully they grow out of it. See what I mean?

Conscious design/build, or ecological design, or geomantic design, or permaculture (etc. etc. etc.) is, for the purposes of juxtaposing our definitions, the manipulation and placement of materials that depends on attention to natural (ecological and social) patterns. Consequently, placement of structures and orientation of built space is intended to steward or optimize such patterns in various ways. Like practical magick, it is a engagement of principles and practices. Magick and Design-Build are both strategic processes. They both involve successive steps; the preliminary mapping of an environment, the installing of infrastructure, and with the addition of the ingredient of consciousness as a critical currency, producing some desired effect.

We have come to rely on professionals to "do magic" and to "design and build" for us. The services of enchanting (corporate media and "entertainment") and building (which we rather unconsciously refer to as "construction") are unsurprisingly commodified. The sort of intention that goes into the built environments we inhabit or the products we find ourselves buying does not address our local conditions, so we forget what locality even is.
We need to go freelance. These crafts really only work through freelance practice and concomitant guild systems that allow practitioners an interface for sharing information and a means for organizing forums.

We must make the incentives to practice these crafts responsibly and holistically more attractive than the incentives to practice them irresponsibly and destructively. The latter incentives abound as we navigate the Capitalist-Protestant game board.

My standpoint probably isn't too hard to guess. Both the creation and placement of symbols, and the creation and placement of structures must be grassroots and ground-up - but don't have to be antagonistic to modes of 'global thinking' and information society. In fact, I dare say that localization, import substitution and bioregional autonomy is a pretty fucking good global ethic. Physical reality: human settlements are located in different bioregions all over the earth. Different societies have produced vastly different ways of both worldview-building and structure-building that are critical to an ongoing dialectic with their local environment. The preservation (and re-creation) of these dialectics provide a way to index and articulate available natural (and social) resource pools. It's prty simple, rly.

The recent emergence and diverse applications of systems theory testifies to our ability on a species-level to just BEGIN to comprehend complex systems and the cause and effect therein. I can't emphasize enough how incredibly novel and powerful this is. It's no less than the fulcrum for the next (post-normal) scientific revolution. The implicit re-infrastructuring potential is comparable to that of the discovery of electricity. Seriously. We find ourselves participating in economic and social systems that were never really planned for implication on such large a scale (not like they could have been sufficiently planned anyway). It's a principle of textbook economics that our economy is a self-regulating, emergent system of allocation. No one designed it. People designed institutions that are now veritable organs of it, yes, but the flux of price value is pretty much an emergent beast. It does it's own thang. The mechanism of the market is interesting for like a few minutes, before you realize how much it just sucks. Anyway, point being: The fact that we can Name these various systems and world-views that have metastasized (and used us as unwitting agents in the process) as undesigned or badly designed is critical to the re-design process. Your brain is what designs things, not God, or similarly, the Dollar. Kevin Kelly has talked about this over at the Technium, and I agree with his idea that the future of efficient systems-design lies in optimally harnessing the creative power of open-access, ground-up action with minimal top-down selection for maximum innovation. (I count two holistic design principles in there...) The million dollar question of course is, who's going to be doing the modulation, and to what end. We can only hope that freedom of information and the health of the earth and its people are high on the list of priorities. We can also hope that the systems we design will adhere to the appropriate scale - that of the municipality. No, I don't think libertarian socialism will solve everything, but I do think it's a Good Place to Start.

The pseudo-twofold theme of this post is consistent with two of our birthrights: geomancy and myth-making. I'm claiming these two birthrights with some newfangled wordicles: re-so(u)rcery and post-mythology, respectively. Brielfly: Re-Sorcery is the practice of creating bioregional autonomy and natural-resource based economy - and implies things like natural building and anti-establishment methods of "sourcing" things in a post-industrial society like DIY and gleaning. Post-mythology is live-action-storytelling: the active process of re-appropriation of the function of myths and locally significant stories: the seamless blending of life and art, the virtual with the tangible. I'm interested in the value of mythic thought in human culture. It's really my number one Muse. If I could locate the arena where most of my activism goes on, it's in the area of story-telling, techno-bardic synthesizing and re-presenting of Highly Relevant Information. I don't want to go into terrible detail here, but simply put: we are physiologically designed for myth-making. I hate it when grammar fucks up my ability to articulate - obviously we aren't designed FOR anything, other than maybe to reproduce. But something sort of big popped up on the way... surprise! It's the neocortex. As Terence said, we are brains on a stick. Ever read the Ender's Game series? (It's scripture to me. Sheepish grin.) There's a superintelligent being named Jane who's "brain" is an emergent property of the interconnection of a future galactic internet that links a federation of human colonies on different planets. Jane can monitor like billions of data streams at once, and hold several hundred of them on levels of conscious attention. The bad guys (government) find out Jane exists and want to try and kill her by shutting down the entire galactic interwebs. Since she exists through the relational order of computers, the possibility that it will for all purposes "kill" her is high, so the Good Guys figure out a way to download Jane's "soul particle" into a human body. [Orson Scott Card articulates this whole system of metaphysics that is like a gnostic Christian remix of quantum physics]. So the point is, when Jane's sentience is transferred to a human body, she gets all antsy and pent up because she can't satisfy her massive ADD, which is actually just her now-restrained ability to hold like a gajillion levels of attention. So periodically she goes into some A.I. version of samadhi and like inhabits the "hive mind" of say an entire forest, or sometimes she even goes back into the internet and races around intergalactic cyberspace at faster-than-light-speed. Us humans go for these "fixes" as well. Y'know -- sensorial overloads. 300? Hazing? Mosh pit? Sugar? We need practical fiction and myth, or else we'll go stir crazy like Jane. Although to her credit, she did eventually pipe down and get married. LoL.

All I'm saying is that once we start to see the grand human legacy of myth-plexes as unimportant or worse the product of 'delusion', then we're really in a sorry state... was it von Goethe who said that there ain't no sorrier bastard than the one who falsely believes he is free? God is laughing. Even if he doesn't exist. He's LOLing with the power of all the LOLCATS in the universe.

We need to reclaim our cognitive and etheric inheritance and assemble as re-sourcerors, an army of white magic wielders. This war will be fought by many allied regiments - which is necessary, for we are dealing with complexity and uncertainty beyond measure. If there is any uniting principle, any mission statement of this un-army, it is healing. Liberation ecology, liberation theology, poetic terrorism, guerrilla energy therapy, gender-recreation, sexual liberation, brave college professors, midwifery, reclaiming our ethnobotanical birthright, seed & logic bombing, having the courage to ask ourselves what local, practical anarchism looks like, and for ___'s sake, teaching our children! Teaching our children without projecting our ego onto them! Co-teaching them with Nature! Having the goal of kneeling prostrate beside them in front of Earth's altar; HAVING THE FUCKING GUTS TO DO THAT! dare to be awed, and odd (reclaim the arcane power of odd numbers: 3:7:9:11:13) This means following the principle of "mystery-design", whether we are stewarding the learning of a three year old or a twenty year old! Mystery design is didactic craft driven by different questions than before - new questions - facilitating a dialectic-dance around common mysteries. Approaching those mysteries with love, /moth to the flame/, not cowering from Mystery in fear - never using Mystery as a mechanism for subordination. Knowing that there is no "the" in front of Mystery, and that it is an edge constantly moving - a wriggling plumed serpent at the periphery of our vision, whose feathers graze our fingertips when we smell the warm earth. Fauns declare it a human right to share a personal Secret with Nature. (In case you're skeptical of anthroposophy, this i[could be]s what Christ Consciousness Is. Not so bad, see?) This secret is a fire. We must not let it die (though it won't really ever die, but it will become invisible. The waveform biorhythm of magical consciousness that twines through us all will wane in its frequency - the crests and troughs of the waveform will become farther and farther apart until it seems to be a flatline. It is then hardest to revive, especially because we have been stamped with the seal of individualism in our society, so many will fail to see this flatline, much less be able to gather mana to remediate it). Empowering and cultivating awareness in our children is vastly more important - and difficult - than starting with answers. That's what doctrine does. It starts with answers. Using Doctrine as a rubric for Action is doing it backwards. It is the effect of someone else's inflorescence, in an ancient time, another place. It is Not Bad, but Not For Us!!! Indeed, there are squadrons emerging in this self-organizing army. They are each comprised of people who have found themselves waking up to an ongoing disaster. They can perhaps be loosely categorized by what they choose to Name this disaster (Naming is a form of Mapping, and also the operative act in a post-modern Magick). There are those who have woken up to the ongoing disaster of the economy. Those of us who have woken to the ongoing ecological disasters. Those facing disasters in the social and the spiritual realms. Then there is the squadron whose mission has perhaps inspired my ranting - and they are the possessors of the Hermetic prerogative of enchanting and healing. We must all Know that it is simply artificial channels which separate us, while still Knowing that Channeling is an extremely important tool. The Hermetic squadron should indeed not stay together, exclusively, and decay, as has happened history over, but meet in spirit and seed every other squadron in body. All systems "decay", so we must design decay into systems. Intelligent decay. That's what cells do. Decay can also be progress. It would behoove us to see them as fundamentally the same phenomenon. (N.B. This is figurative, spirit and body are separate in word, but not in being). Apprentices of Hermes may have already been touched by the feeling that Tricksters Cannot Stay Together In One Place For Too Long. This must be taken as a community design principle, and deserves to be well-accounted for. A fierce love of mine has just pointed me to the delightful website of The Institute for Applied Piracy, a collective of friends who deeply felt the need for a terrestrial base, a place to belong to the land and build ships and hold DIY gatherings. They've done a find job on the mythical remediation I've been taking about, too, playfully and passionately re-appropriating the pirate identity. I also am deeply interested in community farm models where there is rotational control of operations so those of us chronically wanderlusted can go on periodic and necessary walkabouts, sailing the seas whether proverbially or actually. But I digress... to return to the prerogative of the Hermetic sector of our un-army: The other squadrons and platoons of activists and paradigm-fighters each must have a mana pool - a regenerative flow of spiritual capital - and they must all learn to be stewards of this spiritual regeneration. In English: We don't want our activists to burn out, and often they are unfortunately put in danger of doing so. They must be given "spiritual knowledge of how to fish" instead of being given paltry communion wafers by some strange man in a dress. Hopefully we can thus calibrate our local social gyroscopes; do the group organism thing right (Not Like the Borg, obvs.); Open Society To Invisible Circuitry. Let weeds grow/expose our skin to the solar touch/maybe not censor scientific research on the power of the heart. This is how we will accommodate a tribal species that is facing globalization and information overload. Memo: Our identities as a tribal species are not going to change any time soon. Tribes need articulation of magic & mystery through myth. And we need to re-appropriate myth - take mythic thought back from the Advertisers and Popes and Money Machines who have stolen it from us and boiled it down into something unrecognizable as magick. It is vestigal magic that has forgotten itself - sterilized, dead, much like flash-pasteurized milk or the Flavr Savr tomato; cancer causing. The corporate media and the advertising that flows between us and the "free" market achieve their spell-casting power in part because of a very important act: the act of re-naming or un-naming. This is one of the most powerful hexes that exists - just refer to modern re-incarnations of this ancient myth, like The Neverending Story or A Wind in the Door. In communicating to you, product-propaganda objectifies and contextualizes you in a mythic world that does not exist. But alas, they create this mythic infrastructure by feeding your senses with designed input, and a collective illusion is erected by the local phenomena of millions of people being fed copies of the same symbolic/sensory experience. This creates an invisible consensus, a homogenization of perception; a prison! Unfortunately corporate advertising has become bloated with some of the most specialized psychologists on God's green earth. Notice I didn't say "smartest" or "most intelligent". In harmony with Bucky's story of how Kings and Kingdoms and the Power Structures behind them formed, specialization has historically reflected optimization of the populace by the powerful. Consistent with complex adaptive systems theory, optimization of sub-groups in a larger group allows for a wider repertoire of group-level actions. If there are a handful of guys at the top who have access to the yields of many specialized sub-groups, they can manipulate a plurality of abstractions that each represent an incredible amount of human capital, and could only be compiled by extreme individual specialization and focus. These beings of flesh who figure out how to live in a world of nearly 100% abstraction and excel in moving information around for selfish reasons are, upon examination, found to be impromptu arch-sorcerers of a type of magic Blacker than the blood from your liver.
Thus the need for the onslaught of white-magic swarms. At this point we are still very much concerned with protecting ourselves from the black-magic-barrage, and empowering others to do the same. Indeed, protective magic will pave the way for creative magic; the creation of new in/visible structures and machines. For this, we need to cease in the protectionism of the occult, and step to the challenge of actively integrating it. Look what is happening - people are writing books using magical principles about how to seduce women, even using the word "victim" to refer to human beings - and aiming for a consumer market that would have not the faintest interest in the Great Work otherwise! This is a tragedy of consciousness. There are many agendas that use intellectual or magical terrorism. We need inoculation of Liberation Freemasonry and Green Hermeticism - and WE NEED THEM NOW! Fortunately, we do not have to search for 'them' - as one does not search for Elemental Fire - but tends the coals and coaxes the flame out of the aether. Social and spiritual fire, isomorphic in function to its role in the natural world, is coming. God I sound apocalyptic. I encourage you to not take me too seriously.

Geomancy, Phenomenology, and EMF fields

If Reformation theology was summed up by the claim that everyone can minister, then the warcry of the liberation ecologists and freelance gnostics is this: everyone is an ecological participant; a witch doctor of their local environment in amnesia.

This post is kind of priming the system for the next one, which is a huge-ass explosion of brainstuff that came out of me after reading Wood, Metal and the Story of the World by Charles Eisenstein.It was no less than a cosmic reminder for me and a very effective creative trigger. Thank you to Charles through many interconnected series of tubes.

Pretty high on the didactic agenda right now: our birthright as geomancers: speakers of a native eco-etheric language of place.

In his psychedelicious post on Reality Sandwich, builder Charles Eisenstein writes of his journey from being a Math and Philosophy graduate from Yale toward a space of deep appreciation and practice of the material crafts. He currently works with a design/build company called the Earth Alchemists, who are actively informed by the pattern language-based building articulated by Christopher Alexander. A property that drives and informs their craft is the ability a particular architectural realm has to Make You Feel Alive. This is, in turn, a characteristic of Sacredness. This quality of presence is something medicine masons (or scientist-artists as Bucky calls them) try to materially articulate; in essence to 'enchant out of design space'. This is obviously something that Nature excels in through open-design/build... or undesign/unbuild... whatever you'd like to call it. Christopher Alexander calls this quality "the quality without a name". He's right, it is near unspeakable - or at least untranslatable - because it only truly exists in the Green Language - the language that our flesh translates into electrical brain-noise (and those in turn might band together and find their way into what Terence McKenna calls "small mouth noises") This Green Language is all process - it can never be digitalized and abstracted. David Abram calls this the "reciprocity of the perceptual experience." Everyone speaks it, but no one can speak it to anyone else - it can only be spoken between You and Your Environment. This dimension of experience MUST be protected from the festering, colonizing host of abstractions - because language is a virus, you know. Language is technology - and technology is not helpful or harmful until it is used for a Purpose. I'm sad to say that the Green Language has become a foreign language to us. To say that we should protect this mode of communication and co-creation is perhaps rather theological sounding. Let me rephrase it - we should be conscious stewards of the reciprocal regeneration of the sensuous sacred.  Greatly influenced by the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (three cheers for phenomenology: kissing philosophy to death) David Abram writes:

"Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his classic work, Phenomenology of Perception, suggests that the primordial event of perception is always experienced as a reciprocal encounter between the perceiver and the perceived, a open dialectic wherein my sensing body continually responds and adjusts itself to the things it senses, and wherein the perceived phenomenon responds in turn, disclosing its nuances to me only as I allow myself to be affected by its unique style, its particular dynamism or active agency."

Truly, significant "conversations" experienced in the Green Language can only sufficiently be communicated to other human beings through geomantically-informed design/build. And that, my friends, is part of the collective Great Work of this generation.

One of the currently-needed Assertions of Quality (lest I say "Truths") - a keystone in the paradigm shift - is that WE ARE NOT CLOSED SYSTEMS. No man is an island. Actually, islands aren't even proverbial islands, making that maxim delightfully discordian. We are, to paraphrase Abram, open circuits that are only completed by the encompassing earth. We are touching the earth; the earth is touching us. We are continuously meeting. This simple fact has deep evolutionary implications. These bodies are little ships designed to sail through the unfolding environment on this Particular Planet. Earth is special. It has an aura; its electromagnetic field. Earth's EMF field is created by the orgiastic brouhaha going on in the molten core, and notably is in constant flux (as NASA points out, the North Pole is ditching North America and moving to Russia) Just as our bodies have been whittled by evolution in response to the parameters of our physical environments, our etheric bodies have also been 'programmed' by constant relation with Earth's EMF field. This may sound New Agey, and I sincerely apologize if you get "squicked out" by that stuff. But unfortunately, this Information is too important for me to care about modulating my language any more than I already do, goshdarnit! NASA figured this out when they started sending humans into orbit. Perfectly healthy astronauts would be mysteriously puking. The problem? The body being out of communication with the subsonic frequency generated by Earth's EMF field. The EMF field extends rather far out there, but indeed its frequency on the surface of the Earth (where people do that thing called Being) is unique. After a device was installed onboard space shuttles that emulated this particular subsonic frequency, All was Well. There is circuitry everywhere, and to put it simply, we don't have a fucking clue. As has been pointed out by a sizable handful of cyberpunk visionaries, the world is made of language (Terence said something approximating that cluster of words). To put my own spin on that, the world is in fact comprised of an unknowable plurality of circuitry - which is the prerequisite for language. It is the infrastructure - natural or built, evolved or intelligently designed - that gives language conduits; direction, interrelationship, sometimes even purpose. Indeed, there are many linguistic valence levels online that power the cybernetic gyroscope of being - many currencies through which things communicate, but the fundamental one that continuously sings the bubbling, orgiastic world into being seems to be the Green Language - the language of light and vibration. Matter and energy.

Some brave souls at the Heart Math Institute have wrangled some Ph.D's and having a go at articulating an etheric cybernetics. In particular they attempt to discover the role of biologically-generated EMF fields in social interaction. 

Some excerpts from one of their press releases:

"The heart generates the strongest rhythmic electromagnetic field generated in the body. Measured with modern magnetic field meters, the heart's electromagnetic field is approximately five thousand times greater in strength than the field produced by the brain. The heart's field permeates every cell in the body and radiates up to eight feet outside the body, but theoretically it travels even further, although its field strength is too low to measure.

Previous studies at IHM's Research Center have found that our emotions are reflected in the patterns of our heart rhythms. These changing rhythms appear to be modulating the field produced by the heart, similar to how a radio wave is modulated so that the music we hear can be broadcast. This led IHM researchers to look at the possibility that people may be exchanging electromagnetic energy that is carrying emotional information like radio transmitters and receivers carry music."

full article

To be continued, sort of.

Rendition of the earth's magnetosphere. You have one too, kinda. Oh, also, can someone take some comparative kirlian photography of industrially grown produce versus home-grown organic? I predict scary.

The Schrödinger Paradox

I've been thinking lots 'bout entropy & non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Found an excellent description of Schrödinger's paradox. Central to the paradox is the question of how biological life - on a cellular & indeed biophysical level - cultivates 'syntropy', or order in the face of increasing entropy (as stated by the second law of thermodynamics).

Part of the first Chapter of Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life is available online here.

Schrödinger freakin' predicted the existence of DNA as what he called an "aperiodic crystal" that he guessed chromosomes were made of. What a wizard. Crystals as the infrastructure for the transmission of biological machine code.... mmmyes indeed! Other types of crystals are also what enables us to have cellphones and computers and the internet. Those wily ancient ones! They also are some of the only natural substances to make straight lines (or surfaces) on a level tangible to humans. The rest of nature seems to shun straightness.

Anyway, here's the brain candy at hand:

Schrödinger's focus on what makes progeny from parent, on an as yet unknown crystalline molecule within the chromosome, amounted to a scientific prediction of the nature of the gene. It would take James Watson and Francis Crick ten years to unravel the workings of this "aperiodic crystal"—and identify the hereditary, helical molecule as deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA. …

Schrödinger's third and final lecture introduced a thermodynamic consideration that led in time to what is now known as nonequilibrium thermodynamics. If before he had been talking about order from order—if before he had intimated that mutations had a stochastic component that was in keeping with the second law—he now turned to the question of order from disorder: how does the cell manage to escape the randomizing effects of the second law? After all, it is this escape that makes living forms startling replicants, almost magical three-dimensional copies of themselves.

Reminding his audience of the chemical means by which a small number of atoms control the cell, he asked, "How does an organism concentrate a stream of order on itself and thus escape the decay of atomic chaos mandated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics?"

Now Schrödinger would try to link life with the underlying theorems of thermodynamics. How is order ensured, given that systems of microparticles tend toward disorder? Schrödinger caught sight of the problem. Consider a copy machine: if you copy a copy, it gets dimmer; if you copy that copy, it gets dimmer and duller still. While organisms do lose features of their parents, their copying fidelity is astonishing; and they sometimes progress or improve, evolving complex refinements, sometimes whole new features. How do organisms perpetuate (and even increase) their organization in a universe governed by the second law? We call this "the Schrödinger paradox."

The basic resolution of the Schrödinger paradox is simple: Organisms continue to exist and grow by importing high-quality energy from outside their bodies. They feed on what Schrödinger termed "negative entropy"—the higher organization of light quanta from the sun. Because they are not isolated, or even closed systems, organisms—like sugar crystals forming in a supersaturated solution—increase their organization at the expense of the rise in entropy around them. The basic answer to the paradox has to do with context and hierarchy. Material and energy are transferred from one hierarchical level to another. To understand the growth of natural complex systems such as life, we have to look at what they are part of—the energy and environment around them. In the case of ecosystems and the biosphere, increasing organization and evolution on Earth requires disorganization and degradation elsewhere. You don't get something from nothing.

The spectacular rise of one side of Schrödinger's program—the genetic and informational—has been made at the expense of the other—the energetic and thermodynamic. We do not wish to take anything away from the tremendous success of inquiries into the genetic, languagelike aspect of life. But we do wish to advocate flipping over Schrödinger's record and listening to its other side. In the daring of his vision, what is important is not that Schrödinger made mistakes but that he called attention to the dual information- and energy-handling abilities of living beings—the organization they derived from their parents, on the one hand, and, on the other, the organization they maintain in spite of (and, as we will increasingly see, because of) the second law's mandate for systems to head toward equilibrium.

When we follow Schrödinger we find ways of looking through life to the energetic processes governing not only life but inanimate systems as well. Life's complexity is due not just to its chemical data processing, but to its function as an energy transformer. Indeed, life's DNA replication and RNA protein-building duties may have ridden into existence on a thermodynamic horse. Their roles make sense in the context of an earlier gradient-reducing function. Life is not just a genetic entity. Genes by themselves do nothing more than salt crystals. Life is an open, cycling system organized by the laws of thermodynamics. And it is not the only one.

That last paragraph hints at the sort of molecular organization that I was speculating about in my post on 'evolution as a cosmic algorithm'. Also, I wonder if the sun's role in the 'flux of order' on Earth is fully understood. I mean, duh, we're all running on stardrive, yes, but this sentence in particular made my brain reach a little further:"In the case of ecosystems and the biosphere, increasing organization and evolution on Earth requires disorganization and degradation elsewhere."

Ecological economists are conceptualizing Earth as a minimally, or mostly closed system, sunlight and radiation of course being the inputs & outputs to and from our big blue-green spaceship. The rate at which solar energy reaches the earth is fixed, and moreover lots of it is reflected back by the ozone layer. What boggles my mind is this: imagine how much freakin' degradation is going on in the fucking sun. It's burning up like way more shit in an hour than we've burned here in our entire residency on this planet...

And the earthside answer to all of that orgiastic outpouring is, fundamentally, green things. Algae, grass (terrestrial algae), leaves...These things are nature's solar panels, in an ongoing conversation with sun-love. I know, this is none other than the Gospel, but I'm feeling rather moved to reiterate it. The success and complexity of terrestrial life depends on the ability of organisms to variably mitigate or maximize solar energy absorption - this rule applies to animals as well as plants...we've got melanin in our skin and they've got chlorophyll. And moreover, it applies on all scales - in that respect entire ecosystems function as organisms or cells. And then Mama Earth has the ozone going on. O3. You go girl.

I drank like a quart of raw sap last night, so the trees take credit for this post. If you've never had sap tea or a lumberjack, or just sipped the stuff cold during the course of an evening, try it - do you realize how many minerals from deep underground are in this stuff (which is cleverly disguised as a clear liquid)? Do you realize how much stuff is destroyed in the sugaring process? I love maple syrup as much as the next Vamontah - and so does the rest of the world, which is why every last drop of sap gets turned into the stuff - but the raw or barely-boiled tree blood... mmm, that's the closest thing to mana potion we've got. I know I said that about coffee the other day - I think coffee is like lesser mana potion and sap is greater MP. For the higher level druids.

Mmm. maybe more sap, less whiskey. Whiskey just gets in the way. lol

The Power of Coffee: An Anecdote by Subcomandante Marcos

In brief, Marcos is the spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which, in active opposition to "the wealthy and the State" (locally, the Mexican government), maintains the autonomy of municipalities in the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico. Zapatista communities function politically through an application of libertarian socialism. According to the circus that is my imagination, the Zapatistas are the Mayan consciousness returning to us from a long hibernation deep underground - the wisdom of the pre-Colombian star-sky cultures, formatted to fit our internets, digitalized, logic-bombed... and currently dispersing spores of unknown numbers {{grin}}. Hokay, so, a discussion of Zapatismo is FAR beyond the intention of this post. But I came across a delightful little anecdote that is simply further proof that if life is an RPG, coffee is Magic Mana Potion, as well as being a general Clue that you're On the Right Track. As well as also being Earth's melange (the psychotropic spice in the Dune universe that turns its users into X-men - the harvesting and distribution of which essentially control the interplanetary economy).

Errr. Yeah. Below is a quote from Subcomandante Marcos, telling about a talk had by a group of Zapatistas over the Mexican government's 'peace' proposal back in 1994...

"They advised us to be prudent and to sign the peace [agreement]. They said the government would finish us off in hours or days, at the latest, if we didn't sign for peace... They asked us to prudently surrender and live... Who could live with that shame? Who trades life for dignity? Such sensible advice was useless... All afternoon we talked in the Committee. We tried to find the word 'surrender' in some language but we couldn't. It doesn't translate into Tzotzil nor into Tzeltal and no one remembers that word in Tojolabal or in Chol. We spend hours trying to find an equivalent... Someone arrives with rain pouring off the cap and the rifle, 'Coffee's ready', they tell us. The Committee, as is customary in these parts, takes a vote to see if they'll have coffee or continue trying to find the equivalent of 'SURRENDER' in the language of truth. Coffee wins unanimously. NO ONE SURRENDERS. Will we be alone?"

lol. F'ing Rad.

If you're interested, also see the Wikipedia article on the History of the EZLN.

Breaking the Galilean Spell

Some excerpts from "Breaking the Galiliean Spell" By Stuart A. Kauffman

"Stuart A. Kauffman is a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy. He is also the leader of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) which conducts leading-edge interdisciplinary research in systems biology."

"Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives."

"One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.

Because of this ceasless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives." (the Faun is faun-dancing in response to this)

"Science cannot foretell the evolution of the biosphere, of human technologies, or of human culture of history. A central implication of this new worldview is that we are co-creators of a universe, biosphere, and culture of endlessly novel creativity." (hello, permaculture! = participatory ecology)

"We often turn to a Creator God to explain the existence of life. But rapid progress is being made in current work on the natural origin of life. Self-reproducing molecules have already been demonstrated in experiments. A Creator God is not needed for the origin of life. More, you and I are agents; we act on our own behalf; we do things. In physics, there are only happenings, no doings. Agency has emerged in evolution and cannot be deduced by physics. With agency come meaning and value. We are beyond reductionist nihilism with respect to values in a world of fact. Values exist for organisms, certainly for human organisms and higher animals, and perhaps far lower on the evolutionary scale. So the scientific view of emergence brings with it a place for meaning, doing and value.

Further, the biosphere is a co-constructing emergent whole that evolves persistently. Organisms and the abiotic world create niches for new organisms, in an ongoing open textured exploration of possible organisms. There is a physical basis of this "open texture" in the non-ergodic universe."

I'll work on getting the full PDF up.