The Vacuum Metastability Event: New Evidence

"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Joseph Lykken said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Monday. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself."


The first thing I see on my facebook feed this morning: If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A Catastrophic 'Bubble' Could End Universe. Recent work in the world of physics provides new evidence that something far worse than "the nothing" ought elicit our cosmic angst, as I wrote in: Ex nihilo nihil fit: Heidegger's Vacuuity and False Vacuum Decay.

Reincarnation into Computers: Cylons?

six-three-eight who do
we appreciate

He doesn't outright say it, but it's an amusing thought that the Dalai Lama believes in the premise behind Cylon resurrection  In the 'new' Battlestar Galactica, humanoid cylons are immediately reincarnated in a new, identical body so long as they are within range of resurrection ships. This was one of the many conceits used by the writers of that show to introduce cosmological and theological concepts, along with other philosophical quandaries, into a "sci fi" setting so as to produce a truly Modern Mythology.

Of course there's a big difference between attributing such things to the theoretical consideration of Maybe, and thinking of them as material Necessity. A point made within the Immanence of Myth is that thinking of them as either is exactly the same, however much different a bash over the head and evil thoughts may be at the surface.

But of course there are less literal ways that we can interpret ressurection.
In the cosmological sense, it takes on a different meaning:

How do we make the leap from one to the other? I honestly have no answer there, though I'm curious to see what others think on that. 

There is a sneaky danger that lies between the two -- what happens when someone believes that thought and matter are identical twins -- ... 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Taoism and Chuang-Tzu

Many people think of Taoism as being restricted to Lao Tzu, the Tao Teh Ching, and possibly some hand-wavy interpretation of the yin-yang symbol. However, it is a very old shamanistic tradition that, in its explicit origins, came into being both to expound upon and also contradict the Confucian idea of order in celestial bureaucracy. Taoism confuses many Westerners as it is a religion that is not a religion, a philosophy that is not a philosophy, and the practices and beliefs that have followed from its sources are as divergent as Catholicism and Satanism. (Which is to say, opposed and yet tied -- much like Taoism and Confucianism.)

I'd like to provide some more resources on those interested on exploring Taoism beyond Lao Tzu, and even Chaung Tzu, though some of you might like to begin there.

• First, Sasha's blog "Shaman Science" has many ruminations on the 5 element system.
• My health video playlist contains many Taoist based practices and martial arts. I will continue adding to this -- it is already over 8 hours long! 
• Simple breakdown of the 5 elements.
• Motion sensors attached to a Baguazhang practicioner demonstrating one of the most common movements in the form. 
• Taiwan Bagua Documentary
• Internal alchemy. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Drunk for your Amusement Doug Stanhope

By James Curcio
(First run on Alterati.)

No Refunds.

Doug Stanhope Deadbeat Hero from a decade ago.

For years now, I’ve wondered who the next Bill Hicks was going to be. As things grew more and more grim I wondered if maybe we would have no more fool messiahs (Eulogy is the track I’m referring to…) because the meter was just fucking broke and we’ve all become too whitebread and insecure to recognize the rallying call if it comes. “COMEDY IS DEAD, GO HOME, GAME OVER.”

Comedy is a dicey topic these days. In fact, you can't go within a hundred yards of many topics without engaging a twitter boat load of hate your way--sometimes with good reason, and sometimes not. Consider this. The point is that comedy makes people engage with ideas, sometimes incredibly subtle or complex ones, without realizing that they are doing so. Comedy is, in other words, a means of making the public engage in philosophy. I realize that may seem absurd. Just as absurd as it is to suggest that Doug Stanhope is a philosopher? But even if the comedians themselves don't recognize it--and I think Doug does, actually--this is the real task of the comedian. To get people engaged with uncomfortable topics. Laughter is a defense mechanism. But it isn't just a method of diffusion.

Ripple is coming soon

We will be syndicating a podcast series that was first run on Alterati, featuring a number of established but still underground artists and acts such as Estradasphere, Lustmord, Pygmy Love Circus, and so on. 

General credits: This show was narrated by Ray Carney, and the interviews performed either by Ray Carney himself or Rusty Shackleford. They were produced by myself (James Curcio) and occasionally co-produced by Wes Unruh.

Expect the first episode in a few days.

 [Where's the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Utopian For Beginners

Check out this article from incunabula:

There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look, spy, or ogle. Stare, gawk, or gape. Peek, watch, or scrutinize. Each word suggests some subtly different quality: looking implies volition; spying suggests furtiveness; gawking carries an element of social judgment and a sense of surprise. When we try to describe an act of vision, we consider a constellation of available meanings. But if thoughts and words exist on different planes, then expression must always be an act of compromise.
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.
“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.
In his preface, Quijada wrote that his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”

This feeds directly into past (and future planned) articles on linguistics and meaning.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Ad Space For Sale

We are now offering ad space here, in targeted posts or in the sidebar that appears on every page. Rates forthcoming, or contact me if you want to get positioning immediately. ~1000 visits / day plus RSS, niche readers of above average intellect. Such as yourself.

The skinny... This decision comes after several internet marketing companies approached us asking for rates or just making an offer out of the blue, and the decision to start focusing on this site and the content that we run again in a more concerted manner moving into 2013. It got me thinking - regular cash flow would allow us to easily double or even triple traffic rates. I know this from past experience. (For reference, the last funded group blog / web mag project I managed got up to about 10k visits/day.)

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors Deep Puddle Dynamics

By James Curcio
(first run on Alterati, 2007)

I'm lying on my back on the floor, on a mat in the middle of a long hall surrounded at both ends by singing bowls and enormous gongs. To my left is a girl, curled in a ball, who has been rocking back and forth for five minutes, sobbing, repeating the mantra, "I want my mommy, I want my mommy." To my right is another girl, lying in corpse pose as I am, who merely periodically sighs, "this is amazing." And here I am in the middle, eyes closed, clear-headed, and more or less invisible.

Though it would strike me as no surprise if hallucinogenic drugs were involved, there is no doubt in my mind that some of this reaction is the result of amplification. The Greys have really built a sacred space here. I first noticed it during my initial visit to the space-- I was one of the speakers for the Generation Hex launch party November 2005. About halfway through the presentation it struck me that many people were behaving as if they were on LSD, and they were people who, I knew for a fact, had taken none. This was later confirmed by comments from a number of the people in the audience later. As with a church when it is really serving its cultural function, the Chapel is a space which, if you're open to it, unhinges you from your everyday experience and expectations, and allows you to percieve everything, including yourself, from a new vantage point. (Also, like a church, you only get out of it what you bring to it.)

Words of Traitors (trailer 1)

ORDER THE BOOK NOW

A full color illustrated book available now from http://www.mythosmedia.net -

Hope and faith, sex and death, excess and deprivation, loss. An illustrated collection of treacherous memories. These dark modern fairy tales will stick with you long after you've put the book down.

"Beautiful!" -David Mack, (Kabuki, Daredevil, Dexter.) Full color art by an international collection of artists.

Trailer 1:
Editorial: James Curcio.
Art: James Curcio. Alexey Andreev.
Music: Scott Landes.

Eccentric Promotional Assistant(s) Wanted

THE A.D.D. VERSION: We are looking for a promotional assistant (or several, if there are several incredible prospects) for our network of indie / counterculture art sites. This is an opportunity to learn about web and media promotions and get personally involved in the process on a daily basis. 

INTERESTED? Read on.

Fiction and NonFiction: The Failure of Labels

By James Curcio

Anyone that knows me knows that, to begin with, I hate labels. So I'm going to be upfront with my bias. I think it's only fair that people are upfront about things like that, and I think that we would all be better off if we were more honest with ourselves and each other about things like that -- but that's what the next post is about, not today's.

I also am not going to provide any psychological commentary on the fact that I feel this way about categorization, and my wife is a librarian.

No, today's post is about labels. And a particular kind of labeling at that. It is about the distinction that we draw between fiction and non-fiction. It is a big red line drawn between two "types" of writing, and two intentions. It is, fundamentally, about the fact that we, the collective we, actually have no idea what we are talking about most of the time, but we simply don't look at anything close enough, so everything seems alright.

Most people just take these sort of things as a given, accept that we must label things "fiction" and "non-fiction" to get on with life and one another, and leave it at that. This strikes me as impossibly dangerous and even verging on insane. That is something else about me.

Of course, many people will be quite pleased to argue to no end about sub-categories of fiction and non-fiction writing, and what constitutes which, and they are even more pleased to argue about genre, a topic I have touched on in the past myself. (Here is an interview with a fellow author Elizabeth Spann Craig where we discuss this topic, among others.)

blending genres or lost in the fade?
art by jouram roukas

But as you may have noticed, my er "touching" was of quite a different sort than is normal. Because I am not concerned with what books should fall into which category. I don't give a damn. I'm concerned instead with what labeling actually does to us. I'm concerned with how the categories that we draw affect our thinking, even affects who we are as people, how we are as people. This is, fundamentally, the underlying topic of this website, in fact--not fiction or non-fiction, but rather how the often rote or automatic narratives that we create and live by create our world. I'm pleased to talk also about the intentional narratives as well, but it is often the unintentional ones, the unconscious ones, that bite deepest because of their nature as invisible.

Like many of the ways that we carve, chop, and delineate our lives, more is revealed in what is assumed than what is considered. As such, I feel that there is really no topic that should be left untouched in our exploration.

So before we can even talk about our assumptions, let's consider delineation. It is important not so much for the purposes of accurate or inaccurate categorization as the reality that the very process of doing so creates. Is this clear? It is of no concern to me if Star Wars is or is not Science Fiction, but it is of great concern what Science Fiction means, and why we should feel compelled to put it in that box in the first place.

RAW Artist Lineup: Exciting Upcoming Talent Features James Curcio

From the Words of Traitors site:

Please purchase your ticket through this page. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Review of "At the Crossroads; An Astrologer Looks at these Turbulent Times"

By Brian George

“The first man must have seen auguries everywhere, he must have trembled at each step that he took.”—Giorgio de Chirico, 1913

__

I was a great admirer of Jessica Murray’s book “Soul-Sick Nation; An Astrologer Looks at America,” which I regard as one of the most incisive, intuitive, and provocative analyses of the escalating crises faced by the US in the first decade of the 21st Century. I eagerly awaited her next book, “At the Crossroads; An Astrologer Looks at these Turbulent Times,” which was published in June of 2012. In the months that I have been savoring this work, again and again I have found myself—quietly—exclaiming, “Of course, of course, that’s it!” When an author is able to enter into the secret chambers of the Zeitgeist, it is as though she is also reading your own deepest fears and dreams and thoughts.

Murray refers to herself as an “archetypal astrologer”: Astrological transits are analyzed less in terms of their purely personal and predictive aspects and more in terms of the alchemical challenges that they pose. She writes, for example, ““As the transit of Neptune (spiritual yearning) to the US Moon suggests, beneath America’s panic about the economy is a malaise that has nothing to do with the material world. Clients who visit an astrologer these days and insist that all they want to talk about are ‘practical’ issues like their 401Ks are missing the point. As distressing as the financial facts are, the deeper issue is of psycho-spiritual health.” Astrology is predictive, yes, but this has to do with the arrangement and rearrangement of archetypal scenery on the stage. Every stage-set is provisional, and we act within a tiny cone of light, beyond which we must learn to see.

At each moment, a particular thing is waiting to occur—like a half-formed sentence in the unconscious of a writer—yet it is we who must translate impulse into action, and, by pulling a focused image from the Rorschach blot of forces, determine what this moment means. “Astrological archetypes work as an interpretive schema because ‘real life,’ just like dream life, is a flow of symbols. An angry dog barking at you on the day of a Mars transit is a symbol. So are big collective happenings like political movements, oil spills, and tsunamis.” As in a dream, each image has both an inner life and a certain open-endedness: The dream comes fully into existence only as we tell the story of it, which we are simultaneously in the process of enacting in our lives. I would refer to this as the primordial mode of vision: No event is so trivial that it cannot be seen within the context of an archetype. Conversely, no archetype is so great that it has ceased to have a moment by moment involvement—and even, perhaps, interest—in our actions.

Get Creative: The Liminal State

By James Curcio

Although we need to make many assumptions - as we often do in life, let alone death - there is often a connection drawn between life and waking, and death and dreaming.

This connection is specious, but not because it is shallow. It is rather wrong, and yet strikes very near to a profound truth about consciousness, if not the nature of reality itself. (How can we draw a distinction between the two when we are ourselves housed within a bio-mechanical walker? That is a subject for another book to be sure, much as we tried to touch on it in The Immanence of Myth and Apocalyptic Imaginary.) These epistemological uncertainties aside, death itself is the void of the great unknown. Whatever our conjecture is of that nether region, it is the point beyond the point of no return - the dark side of the moon - a place that is no place, and certainly no story exists there. The world is full of damn near verifiable near-death experiences, but no verifiable death experiences. There is a reason for that.

The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is also, more accurately, called the Bardo Thodal. This translates loosely as the "intermediary space." And Bardos are spaces we are actually quite familiar with. When you are falling asleep, but have not yet hit the bottom of the well - that is a Bardo. When we are coming awake, but the curve of your lovers neck is still at one and the same time the scroll upon which the history of another world is writ in blood - a Bardo. I intend to extend from this idea and the general concepts therein, without making any claims as the following being textually relevant to Tibetan Buddhist practices.

It is in these spaces that all mythic artists carve out their homes. We may not even know it, making that rote flow a part of an unknown process. Or, like me, you might instead be very conscious of the process, intentionally allowing yourself to almost fall asleep, time and again, with notebook and pen in hand, dredging up symbols and the threads that connect plot, character, and something deeper than that - some archetypical knowledge that does not come from pat books on Jungian symbolism.

This reminds me a bit of the plot to the movie "Flatliners," where med students kill themselves time and again, and then bring themselves back, all so they can unravel some mystery that perches at the brink between life and death, like a gargoyle, part stone and part something else though not quite flesh. This theme returns again in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where one cylon kills herself again and again so that she can look upon the face of their archetypal parents, the faces of God.

This too is an archetype. To see the face of God is to not only court death: it is to die. This premise exists in Greek myth, where Dionysus' mother is consumed in a pillar of fire when she discovers the true nature of her paramour - Zeus. It exists equally in Jewish mysticism. The Zohar is laden with this idea, though like a bad scholar I'll not look up all the references. The reason is not so much laziness as that it is actually not particularly important to our point, so much as you recognize the general ubiquity of this idea.

And as in "Flatliners," there is indeed a price to be paid for this knowledge. I myself paid for it rather harshly, as my experiments with creative liminal spaces led me to rather extreme lucid dreaming experiments that I explained by tying it into my creative work. Eventually some sort of threshold was overcome, and this passage that I put in my first novel "Join My Cult!" is actually entirely truthful, as is a surprising amount of the material that finds its way into my 'fiction' (that is a topic for a later article, I'm sure.)

   A burst of pleasure runs through me, unbearable ache. There is a
yanking, rending, of my insides and the room around me. I am reaching
out to her, I so desperately want to stay here… To get close enough to
allow her to become first person and myself third, let myself go to let her
in… I can’t even remember what she was saying, now.

Words of Traitors art show release

From the Gold Standard mail list:

"Come out and join us for our first art gallery opening of 2013! This exciting exhibit will run from Monday, January 14th throughout the month of February with the opening night also being the release party for the beautiful book The Words of Traitors: 7 Lives in Transition. Transmedia artist and Author James Curcio put together a creatively diverse, international team of artists, and collaborated with them in illustrating a collection of short stories with a common theme and singular vision that is hauntingly beautiful. 

Each story was written as part of the overall creative process with visual pieces inspiring the narrative. Many of these pieces are dioramas constructed from a wide array of material enveloping one in a visually stimulating journey into the subconscious. 

Complimentary cheese and wine available at the opening which runs from 5 PM until 8 PM. Copies of books will be on sale with the opportunity to have your booked signed and listen to some excerpts read by James. This work features many other innovative artists including Philadelphia-based painter and muralist James Dupree, Bethany Shorb, Laurie Lipton, S. Jenx, Alexey Andreev, and many more.  

We hope to see you there!"

Not in Philadelphia? Pick up a copy of the book here. (Available in full color hardcopy or digitally.)

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]