William Irwin Thompson on the Horizons of Planetary Culture: Cyborgs, Psychedelics, & Spiritual Evolution

“Were you to attempt to read all the books Thompson refers to before [absorbing his work], you would likely forget why you were reading them before you finished them. Thus unprepared one must ride the whirlwind with Thompson, holding on for dear life as he escorts us back and forth over ten millennia, integrating the warp and woof of myths into the tapestry of our flying-carpet time-machine as we go.”
– Bobby Matherne

One of the best conversations I've ever had: My second rap with poet-philosopher William Irwin Thompson, former MIT professor and founder of the legendary Lindisfarne Association, on the transformations of self and society in the collapse of civilization and the emergence of a planetary culture - cyborgs, surveillance, and psychedelics in an age of paranoid apocalypticism and inspired new visions for our species.

Get ready for a wild one, folks...comments welcome!

Perma-link to the video | Download the audio

More for the initiated:
My Bill Thompson on Burning Man video mashup
Our first conversation, "AI, Angels, & Mass Extinctions"

Some of the topics covered in this conversation:

• The disappointment of 2012 & each generation's coping with the disillusionment of epochalism/apocalypticism;
• Douglas Rushkoff's book Present Shock, "fractalnoia" & conspiracy theories, the Deep State, media warfare, paranoia as a necessary step along the path of spiritual evolution;
• The interplay between the growth of a global electronic economy and the awakening of the collective unconscious;
• Intelligence as a primary function of entropy to maximize freedom in chaos, fear & intelligence as two sides of the same phenomenon;
• Prokaryotic vs. eukaryotic strategies, the bacterial bioplasm vs. sexuality & individuality as complementary archetypes;
• The pop mythology of the lone genius vs. the reality of collective intelligence;
• Fractalnoia & Autistic Spectrum Disorders, possible relationship between "intense world syndrome" theory of Autism & the psychological impact of electronic communication media;
• Sloughing off the Surveillance State & making it an art object, Big Data/Quantified Self revolutions in the emergence of a new level of personal psychology, Buddhist Geeks & Mindful Cyborgs;
• Psychedelics and Yoga as alternative spiritual paths, LSD's legacy of both burnout and the inspiration of paradigm-changing scientific discoveries;
• Richard Doyle on the exegesis of Philip K. Dick, discussion of how revolutions are colonized by existing power structures, Jan Irvin's argument that the CIA created psychedelic counterculture;
• Isolation/solitude/privacy as prerequisite to the classical visionary/mystical experience, an opportunity eroded in the hyper-stimulation of electronic culture;
• The self as a collective, the "entelechy" as a colonial organism composed of elemental entities & of which the human as defined by modernity is only a part, wearable computers & medical nanobots as "machines in the ghost" with both light & shadow aspects;
• The perils of being an early adopter and the importance of maintaining a critical attitude toward new technologies;
• How Buckminster Fuller & Marshall McLuhan were destroyed by celebrity, the related genius and tragedy of Terence McKenna;
• The liminal spaces of festival culture as a social equivalent to the mystic isolation of individuals in classical wisdom traditions (e.g., Burning Man as an island population, rapidly evolving at a distance from the main population);
• Post-tribal/rule-based sports moving beyond "war in peacetime" toward the individualized rejection of corporate culture, improvisational solo extreme sports as a resurrection of mystical privacy;
• The etherealization of currency (e.g., Bitcoin, Dadara's art-as-money projects), of marriage (e.g., polyamory, nonlocal monogamy), & of other cultural institutions;
• "Wissenkunst" or "knowledge art" as a new art form emerging in post-academic remix culture, "standup philosophy" as an improvisatory approach to the university lecture in the same sense that post-religious spirituality evolves from religion and jazz evolves from classical music composition;
• The critical importance of failure to transformation & of stigma/social exclusion in the creation of revolutionary figures.

Some Bill Thompson quotes from our conversation:

"[The media ecology of exopolitics] is a great group mind, a coral reef dreaming while it is awake."

"I don't NEED to take acid...I got hypercalcemic once on just too much Tums."

"At a certain point, I became sensitive [to the fact] that I am a COLONY..."

"Generally, by the third generation, they've lost the vision."

"Before we rule with armies, we rule with explanations, and an army is really only the outermost external  structure of an explanation."

"Failure is very critical in the transformation."

For more, visit:
http://williamirwinthompson.org
http://michaelgarfield

Originally published at RealitySandwich.com

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb from Weirdo #17

“I saw God,” Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sherri state, “No, you just saw something like God, exactly like God.” And having spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jesting Pilate, upon his asking, “What is truth?”

–Philip K. Dick, VALIS

In the months of February and March, 1974, Philip K. Dick met God, or something like God, or what he thought was God, at least, in a hallucinatory experience he chronicled in several obsessively dense diaries that recently saw publication as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a work of deeply personal theo-philosophical reflection akin to Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Whatever it was he encountered—Dick was never too dogmatic about it—he ended up referring to it as Zebra, or by the acronym VALIS, Vast Active Living Intelligence System, also the title of a novel detailing the experiences of one very PKD-like character with the improbable name of “Horselover Fat.”

Article.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Are Schools Prisons?

Though potentially alarmist, this documentary points to a process that really started with the advent of the american education system as a part of the rise of industry. Our modern school system, though it has been vastly successful compared to many earlier systems as bad as it is, is indeed based on the whistle-blowing, mechanized and behaviorist perspective of humanity that was popular in the 1920s-50s.

Instead of changing with the times in terms of making kids into machines, and to produce "good workers," we might consider trying to help create human beings. Because of all the school shootings, in many ways now we are facing a PKD style "thought police," No Tolerance rule toward what someone might do. How does this lack of trust effect the people within the system?

I certainly wouldn't have made it through this system. Not at all. I barely slipped through in the 90s, until I became an undergrad at Bard and I found an environment that was better suited to my disposition overall (despite issues there as well.)

I imagine that there are more "freaks" like me. They are the ones with capacity for both a type of personal greatness and atrocity. Are those the people you really want to alienate? Bullying is a serious problem in schools.

It was when I was in 'the system,' and it certainly is today. But there are more than one approach. And school shootings as I mentioned have also terrified this nation, but our reaction to that fear has been as wrong-minded as the fear reaction that resulted from 9-11. We got so angry and afraid as a nation that we attacked a country that had nothing to do with the attack. We are producing terrorists in the middle east just as we are creating criminals and possibly even terrorists at home. As Aaron Sorkin pointed out in the West Wing episode "the War at Home," this also has resonance with the war on drugs. "The war is at home. It's in our classrooms."

Are our children the enemy? 

#Myth: But Why Do That Hoodoo That You Do?

By Mr. VI

At the risk of treating your like three-year-old children, let's answer the question posed by this subject title. After all, I'm certainly not picturing you whining plaintively as you ask why exactly is myth so important, am I?

Toasters, Bladerunner and Schizophrenia: PKD & Gnostic Agnosticism

By Mr. VI

Do you know who you are, and can you honestly say your awareness encompasses the whole of the biomechanical system which is you-as an organism? May you be aware of the functioning of each organ; the pulsing of the heart, the filtering of the liver and kidneys, or the electrical crackle in your own brain?

Do you sing the body electric?

They say it's bad to ask questions of your audience. It's disruptive; breaks the flow, tears at the weave and begins to fray the threads by which they draw themselves into your narrative. But what better way to examine, to dig underneath the skin?

We're all skin-jobs.

That's the derogatory term for Replicants in Ridley Scott's seminal film Bladerunner, just as 'Toaster' is used for Cylons in Battlestar:Galactica.

Actually, this whole post was inspired by Edward James Olmos live-tweeting Bladerunner the other Sunday:

@edwardjolmos: #movienighttweet it all came from this film... BSG skinjobs... replicants.... thus toasters...

Behind both epithets lies the notion of falsity, of facsimile. In both narratives, we are presented with the notion that there are those who look like us, but are not like us. In Bladerunner, we are left with Deckard's humanity as an ambiguous question, while in BS:G the hybridization and shift into flesh leaves us with the possibility that the markers of 'humanity' are perhaps not so clear-cut as we would like to believe.

Bladerunner uses a test known as the Voight-Kampff to test empathetic responses -and if those responses are off, 'retirement' is not far away. The film itself is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and it's no secret that I'm a total and utter Dick-head.

In fact, anyone with an interest in philosophy, storytelling, myth and SF should be one too. Just look at the following:

'I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation.

Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.' - Philip K. Dick

In 1974, Dick had a series of mystical experiences which influenced his writing from then on, exploring his own version of Gnosticism. For us, it's the Gnostic view combined with schizophrenia that's interesting.

In 'Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes' he writes:

What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame.

This, combined with the Gnostic idea that the world is a creation of the demiurge, which presupposes itself as sole Creator, can may be seen in a rather strange light: that 'reality' as we know it is defined by mediated perception.

It's our perception which ascribes the notion of 'real' or 'false' to a thing, and our perception is a direct, inextricable product of our sensory organs. The flesh, the body, is the only reality we know, and indeed can know.