we are all in this together

Humanity is facing a vast problem the closer we draw to the looming technological singularity, namely that most of us are not prepared for it to happen, and are not even aware that it is. Most of the technological breakthroughs of recent history are in communications and interconnectivity, but most of the money and resources are channeled towards weapons systems and maintaining a technological civilization that hasn't moved much further than the industrial revolution. This culture consumes more and more energy, mostly from unrenewable resources, in order to maintain a manner of living that is increasingly ineffective and downright harmful to the majority of beings on our small planet, with hardly any thought to why or what we could be doing different.

When Darwin framed the evolutionary paradigm as "survival of the fittest" he gave voice to the prime drive for humanity's destructive capabilities. Since the beginning of recorded history it hsa been warfare and manifest destiny, one tribe conquering and pushing out another as long as there was room to grow and push. This drive has found its avatar in western civilization, in twentieth century capitalism, in which it is expressed as "the one on top wins." In this view man is nothing unless he is more fit than his neighbors, unless he has complete control over his servants and the environment, and any arguments that such a lifestyle is harmful or not sustainable is laughed at as a bunch of baloney.

But now things are changing, and fast. As telecommunications quickly connects the world's information flows, boundaries dissapear and the diverse tribes are seen to be part of the human tribe. As the globe warms and the rainforests are stripped bare and countless species are driven to the brink of extinction it becomes no longer possible to deny the adverse effects this technological paradigm are having on our world. There is nowhere left to explore, there is no one left to conquer, there are no dark corners left to push those who would not be part of the "civilized world". Space may be the final frontier, but we don't have ourt shit together enough to explore it, and if we did, how long before we conquer the neighboring star systems?

Those in power, those who have the energy and resources to direct the cultural matrix, are afraid. Their world view no longer works, but they have too much invested in it to change. The sun is powerful enough to power all the earth, if it was harnessed effectively, yet we rely on fossil fuels because that is the way it has been done. That is what pays the man. The only room left for us to grow is inward, exploring the reaches of art and mind, yet they instead spend more money on war than on anything else put together. Again, because it is the way it has been done, and it pays. It doesn't pay to accept change, but to freeze it, to hold back the waves and pretend this moment can be stretched on indefinitley.

The ones on top are afraid because if they didn't maintain this illusion they wouldn't be on top anymore. Because now there is no top. The earth is round, small, fragile, and floating in the middle of space. The earth is our mother, and all we've got, but we treat her like a whore, to be used and thrown away. The old evolutionary paradigm of survival of the fittest doesn't work anymore, yet we haven't yet accepted the new paradigm of interconnectivity. We are all in this together, let's stop acting like some of us are not.

plucking the strings of the soul

Yesterday I finally got around to watching "The Red Violin", which is an engaging tale of a 17th century master violin-maker who creates the perfect instrument for his soon to be born son. But his wife dies in labor, so instead he takes he takes all his love and anger and channels it into the instrument, varnishing it red with her blood. Just before she dies, their witch tells her fortune, and reads in the cards that she will go on a long strange and complicted journey, which turns out to be the journey the violin takes as it gets passed from hand to hand throughout history, up till the present day, and all the love and anger (and misfortune) that this magical instrument brings to those who play it. As a magician (and musician) the idea that an object can be imbued with such power, and its history told before hand, resonates with me, escpecially when the descendents of all those it touched converge in the present to try and buy it at an auction (which is played out again and again from their different points of view).

Afterwards I took out my viola, which I haven't touched since the circus ended in October, and let its song sweep me away. Now, my instrument is not nearly as magical (or old), but it still has great power, and playing it requires me to give myself over to the world in a way that nothing else can. I have been playing it since I was a child, and though I also have played guitar for the majority of my life, I play the guitar more intellectually, consciouss of scales and melodies, whereas the viola is a gate to my heart and to the universe. No wonder I haven't picked it up in a long time, it takes tremendous courage and strength of heart to remain on my feet with such ecstatic depths of emotion and soul coursing through my fingers, and for many months now I just haven't had that in me to give. But now things have changed again.

I decided the other day that it was time to regather and refocus my energies, in order to live more honestly and clearly, which has meant questioning a lot of my habitual behaviours and directing my will to those things that will only further my steps on my path. So for the past couple of nights, while relaxing my body and offering up prayers to the gods of sleep that I might better remember and control my dreams, I have started reviewing my days in light of the yamas (worldly restraints) and niyamas (personal observances), the first two paths of Patanjali's eightfold limbs of yoga (from his yoga sutra).

With my own understanding of them, the yamas are:
ahimsa- compassion for all living things (caring)
satya- commitment to the truth (honesty)
asteya- not-stealing (honoring or letting be)
brahmacharya- merging with the One (trusting or letting come) (also translated as commitment)
aparigraha- not-grasping (giving or letting go)

The niyamas are:
shaucha- purity
santosha- contentment
tapas- burning enthusiasm (focus or will)
swadhyaya- self-study
ishvarapranidhana- celebration of the spiritual

Now, I don't claim perfection in any of these things, far from it, but paying explicit attention to them has already broken me from several undesirable habits and has fostered a sense of lightness in my heart that has been mostly lacking since my samahdic experience of god (the axis of universal consciousness) over the summer. While that moment brought me back to the spiritual and magical path I had lost sight of over the years, it has been difficult to rekindle the clarity and intensity I found there without the aid of San Pedro to guide me back through the gates of heaven. But having that experience has shown me it is possible to be there at all, and is what keeps my feet sure, despite winter's interference and my previous lack of intentional energy.

I also watched the movie adaptation of Hesse's "Siddartha" yesterday, which was incredibly good and contained many wonderful ideas. I haven't read the book in a long time, and will have to (or watch the movie again) before I can make any comments on it. Further transmissions impending...

pictoral appendage

the net

So this drawing was supposed to accompany my last post (about da'ath and the tree of knowledge), but as is evidenced by the fact that it took me several days to draw it, it seems obvious that I'm much more willing to express myself verbally than graphicaly. Interestingly enough, when it comes to my own understanding of these concepts things are much more multisensory. A weave of words, lines, sounds, feelings, colors, tensions, etc. is conjured up by any thought, so expressing anything in just words or images falls far short of catching any intended meaning. And so of course, this picture is nothing like what I had intended it to be, but still manages to capture some of the nuances that have been bouncing around my head the past week. It also doesn't help that I'm not trying to represent any sort of "truth", but only shades of interpretation.

That being said, it should be obvious that the straight lines running towards the axis are supposed to represent the tree of life, or an ordered (linear) perspective of reality. I debated leaving a blank line between each of the trees around the circle, but once the pen's on the paper, that's that (and it amuses me to think of the trees as overlapping). The eye at the axis is kether, or non-local connection, or universal conscioussness (singularity). There would ideally be an infinite amount of tree of life lines connected here to show how everything is connected, but that would have been a bit messy. The radial lines are da'ath, the tree of knowledge, or the connections on which the various jewels (sephiroth) hang. They could also be seen as ripples emanating from the axis, like those caused by a stone dropped in water, and are thus also representative of the waves that are space-time and the primordial ocean of chaos on which an ordered perspective is placed to form the matrix/ net of reality.

The faint curving lines that look like lotus petals are an example of phyllotaxis, which is the method by which certain flower petals form along the golden spiral (taught to me by my good friend Alberto Almarza, one of the greatest living alchemical artists, but with absolutely no web presence of his work (yet)). I only penciled these lines in to see how they lined up with the paths of the tree of life, which they did remarkably well, except that they connect chokmah to geburah (15) and binah to chesed (17) through the abyss placement of da'ath and not to tipharet. Which would make sense if da'ath were actually a sphere and a higher harmonic of tipharet and not an infernal ghost in the machine.

The striated lines surrounding the spheres and the net itself indicate radiance, and are purely decorative. I also considered drawing an arrow to malkuth labled "you are here," but thought it wasn't all that necessary.


and here's a little something I wrote the other day while immersed in the wonderful illustrations of Roob's "Alchemy and Mysticism":

Drawn forth from the flood
all being resplendent
in a single shared cup.
Drink your fill
and dance on the waves.
The whole world falls
at your feet
ring after ring after ring.
Where is the kingdom
with a thousand centers
and none?

Drawn down from the stars
and traced in the dirt.
At crossed roads
and the shifting shore,
standing with one foot
in the the sea. The tides
stop for no man,
they wash up and you
are in,
they sway back and you
are naught.
Up and back, ceaseless
and serene at dawn
but so terrible
when they are gone.

So rise, plant both feet
in the air, the wind
waves as well; but across
no bounds
but your skin.
Strip it away and away.
What is left for the wind
to caress but your soul?

signal from noise: raising babel from the seas of the da'atha-sphere

Last night I was practicing my nightly asanas, leting myself disolve into breathing, when a startling noise like the end of the world erupted through the ordered peace of the room, piercing my conscioussness straight to the core. After a paniced moment when I felt all of reality had turned on its head I realizeed it was only the fire alarm, set off by the candles I was burning. My heart beating in my throat and sleep now an impossibility, I sat down and started reading Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" in order to calm down, but soon found myself drawn into his world of viral information and interconnected knoweldge. There amidst ninja hackers and religious franchsises I stumbled upon a chapter that detailed some things that have been creeping around my head, ideas of myth as tales of social organization and information processing. In particular, Stephenson talks about the Sumerian myths, interpreting the storys of Enkil fertilizing the river valleys as the creation of communication (as he is the water god, and Sumerian society wrote on clay from the river banks created from his heart-waters (sperm, as original information carrier). But then another sentence broke through, much closer to the research I have done, after Asherah, the Sumerian ophidian (snake) mother goddess is compared to Eve, "Eve, as I recall, is responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just a fruit- it's data."

In hebrew, Da'ath is knowledge, and is the "hidden" 11th sphere of the Tree of Life, the abyss seperating the lower spheres from the supernal triad and not located in any one place on the tree of life as it is the space between the spheres. A quick jaunt through the Net revealed that Da'ath is linked to the Tree of Knowledge, that when Adam and Eve ate the malus malum (bad apple) from the Tree their universal consciousness was reduced to the limited ego perspective of duality (good vs evil, light vs dark, self vs other). By sampling a specific bit of data their perspectives became limited from the whole of knowing to a simple binary mentality. This is represented in the tree of life as a fall from the non-local connection of Kether to the singular being of malkuth, and as googlism so aptly put it, da'ath is the hole left behind when malkuth fell out of the garden of eden. And so knowledge was reduced from the "appreciation for interconnected details" (wikipedia) of indra's net, in which all the hanging jewels (things, data, fruit, sephiroth) are reflection of all others, to a gaping abyss literally between oneself and the rest of the world. And so in one fell bite the order of the world is reduced to an incomprehensible chaos and a new order has to be formed (there are some interpretations of this myth that claim that God intended this in order to reorder his relationship to the world and be more intimately known in it).

Now, the idea of a choas that becomes ordered (or reordered) is rooted in many mythologies (the Sumerian again, with Enkil's slaying of Tiamat and reshaping the world from her body). Chaos is often represented by a serpent or ocean mother, who is the matrix, the prima materia from which all form arises. (see my article on the matrix for more information). According to information theory (and to paraphrase metachor), chaos is an increased state of entropy that allows messages to occur non-linearaly, in an ordered complexity that is essentially a measure of our inability to match signals we recieve from our experiences of the world with the frameworks we view it through, much like the choas I experienced before I realized the fire alarm was just that, and not a herald of armegedon. The form (signal) of fire alarm rose from the chaos of unprecedented noise. Or like this article, pasted together from the buzzing noise of opinions and subjective references that makes up our collective discourse.

Chaos is also considered as an abyss or void, and is akin to the space between things when the world is viewed as self and other. It is only by the distance between that one is able to interpret a relation to another object, and meaning (knowledge) is only the interpretation of that relation to one's self. In magical traditions, the adept has to across the abyss, or chapel perilous, in order to find understanding, a relationship to the jewel (data) hanging at the other side of the abyss. Picture yourself in a vast darkness with a thousand jewels hanging all around. You start walking to one, and as you move a colored trail is laid down in the dark to mark your path to whatever object you approach. You find a jewel, a book maybe, or a tree, and head towards another. At the same time others are moving through this abyss, making their own paths, so that soon there is a web of trails marked out between the jewels, establishing them in relation to each other. Not the infinitely reflecting web of indra's net, but a subjective web of referances ordering the objects, signals, in relation to the observer, much like the pheremone trails left by ants so others in their nest can find food (the idea of which is called stygmergy), but built from the chaos, the noise, itself (the medium is the message). So now we have replaced the complex chaos-matrix with a framework ordered to our own experiences, and constantly evolving as new knowledge is linked together. As knowledge expanded and the links were passed down from generation to generation, new technologies sprang up to represent this web of knowledge, culminating in what is now the internet, the datasphere or da'atha-sphere.

I propose that this da'atha-sphere is synonymous to the tree of knowledge, which runs perpindicular to the tree of life (line conscioussness vs. point conscioussness), and forms the web on which the spheres are hung in relation to each other. But it is also synonymous with the tower of babel (literally "gate to god) as an edifice to our push towards the godhead of interconnected conscioussness. In the myth, which also plays a large part in Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a tower is built with "the heavens in its roof," only to be abandoned when god causes its builders to speak in seperate tongues, so that they can not communicate where they all spoke the same language before and can not finish construction of the tower. No communion with the godhead, better luck next time. But next time is now, thanks to the translitartive powers of the internet, and a new tower is being built, this time spread out over the entire globe (knowledge stored serialy instead of hierarchichly). What does this mean? What strange and unexpected collective signal will emerge from the chaotic white noise of infinite bits of data swirling across the earth like a blizzard in some great infopocalyptic vision?

That remains to be seen. Any expectation of the singularity, like magical attention and quantum subjectivity, presupposes a result. What you look for you will find. If we look at this through the order of our established beliefs, we will only find them reflected back on us, though that might be what we are going for in the first place. If we want to see god in the collection of human knowledge, then we will see god.

Whether it is or not is an entriely different story.

e-motives and thinking machines: thoughts on feeling thoughts

The other day, Bastart wrote a really concise essay on tantra over at Key23, in which it was mentioned that it is important to sit with your emotions, to feel them and find their source so that they do not build up and become overwhelming. I found this to be really good and timely advice, for over the past few months I had been neglecting my emotions in favor of more intellectual pursuits such as this blog and the novel I'm almost finished writing (Granted, a rather strange and shortlived relationship had a large part to play in shutting out my emotions, but that's another story alltogether). But the issue of feeling emotions has always been a difficult one for me.

I am generally an intellectual person, and there was a point in time not so long ago when I thought that I didn't feel anything at all. I did, but I was numb to my emotions for the most part and tried to to analyze them away until I realized that that was a rather unfulfilling way to live. So I made a consciouss effort to put myself out into the world and feel it deeply, all the joy and all the pain, no holds barred. It's been difficult, and still is, but utterly worth it. The biggest problem I've found though is that I go through periods where I am so enrapt in the net of words and information that I forget to feel and be in the world and become in a sense a thinking machine. But these are balanced by periods when I shut off my brain almost completely and feel alive on a very visceral level, letting the world wash over me without any attempt at analyzing it.

Maybe its peculiar to my own situation, but this seems a very dichotomous way to live. Emotions and Intellect are two sides of the same coin (as represented in the juxtaposition of the left and right columns in the tree of life, or sides of the brain), but seem antithetical to each other. I can either rationalize something, or feel it, but not both at the same time. I can either break the world apart in my mind, or let it move through my body (which is what e-motion means). But not both. And that seems a bit ridiculous to me. As a magician and a yogi, I am concerned with integrating the dualities I find in my life, and this has been one of the longest standing and unquestioned dualities I've come across.

Is it possible to feel and think at the same time? Or is that state even desirable? For the most part, when I feel I experience the world as it is, but when I think I experience the world through the filter of my beliefs and preconceptions, which leads me to step away from and disregard the experience in itself. Thinking becomes a detachment form the world, and feeling, even the pains and angers, strikes so close to my heart that it is undeniably real, but does not allow for the reflections that enable us to act on the world in a critical and directed manner. Otherwise I would just give up on thinking all together, but I want to exert my will and intentions and not just react to external stimuli.

The question then is how to integrate these two poles of being, where is the middle path that feels full-heartedly, thinks criticaly, and acts from both these sources of input as one? There is a belief that there are three forces which make up our experiences of the world: thought, emotion, and action, situated in the mind, heart, and body respectively. And it is through the interplay of these forces that we live. The problem as I see it is one of definition. The heart and mind are not seperate from the body, nor are their functions. Emotions arise as physiological reactions, the tensions of stress and release in our muscular system and thus not seperate from the body. Thoughts likewise are physiological, being only electro-chemical interactions in the body, much like emotions, but on a different interpretive level. But on the grossest level it is all just body, acting and reacting as it sees fit.

So then, how to learn to interpret on both (and all) levels at the same time, or at least how to switch between them effectively? It seems endemic of the magical world view that world views (perspectives/ filters) can be juggled at will and as needed, and doing so is a necessary part of being able to act in the world in a willful and intentional manner. But what are the practical steps towards doing this, beyond taking each experience as it happens and filtering it through the different layers to gain clearer insight? If anyone has some opinions/ experiences of this, I'd love to hear them.

myths, maps, and sealing wax

(reposted from old journals)

As I’ve said many times before, the world is and has always been a rather mythological place for me. That is, I’ve always seen life, and my place in it, more in terms of how my/ our interactions continually play out these high level stories then as being the interactions in themselves.

Looking back at my childhood, this isn’t very surprising. I’ve always been fascinated by mythologies and their epic description of reality. If anything, that has been my own personal disconnect from the world and at times has kept me from being able to interact with the world "as it is." I think this approach was first fostered by being raised Christian, but not in being raised to believe that that view of the world was the correct or only view. As my Dad once said, he raised us that way to believe that there is something in the world to believe in, that we are part of something much bigger than this. With an active and critical imagination, it didn’t take me long to realize that this Christian story was only just another story. And being an avid reader as well I began pouring through the old stories of many different cultures and religions, the myths of Greece and Rome, the Norse, Assyrian, and Indian cultures. And beyond that I was attracted to other more fantastic stories that carried such mythic and epic perspectives, namely the Lord of the Rings, and movies like Tron (which paints a good picture for a late twentieth century take on these old myths) and Star Wars. Actually it didn’t really surprise me to discover that George Lucas had been good friends with Joseph Campbell, as Lucas’ epic deftly portrays a version of Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’. And as I’ve pointed out recently, that myth itself is nothing but a story for our own coming to terms with being individual humans in this wide and crazy world. And beyond these, my mythic approach was also highly informed by certain epic role-playing video games, namely the Ultima and Final Fantasy series. These last perhaps really set up my beliefs that I was indeed the hero of my own quest through the world or personal legend, and as the hero, was capable and responsible for trying to save or at least change the world in some meaningful and lasting way.

Myths of individual self-importance aside, all these stories also set up my belief that the world would "end" soon in some cataclysmic struggle between good and evil or magic and technology. Looking at this now, I could say that this almost worldwide myth of the apocalypse might just be a story for learning to accept our finitude as mortal beings, or for our personal struggles trying to yoke disjoint aspects of our personalities. What is right and wrong, and should we approach the world analytically, intuitively, or both? Not that the world still doesn’t appear that it might end soon, or at least that humanity might not be pushing it and ourselves to some vast breaking point; our myths and history (and discernable future) seem to point to some apocalyptic climax looming on the horizon. Of course, I still could be reading too much into this, but we’ll never know until it happens.

As they say as above, so below, our personal interactions serve as reflections of higher level cultural interactions and vice versa. If anything, that is how myth works, in finding correlations between our personal stories and that of the cosmos, creating maps for our journeys through the world in the spinning of stars and migrations of our ancestors. One could perhaps say then that our personal interactions are also being played out on collective levels, that each culture, and humanity as a whole, are going through their own hero’s journey of world-discovery and self-affirmation. Perhaps the Universe is going through this as well, as the myths of gods playing, and sciences of physical forces interacting all seem to point too.

In fact, I would argue that it is possibly this mapping between heavenly bodies and natural processes to our everyday experiences and interactions that has allowed us understand our place in the world (at least to a limited degree) and communicate this to each other. Over time we have created elaborate symbol systems that serve to represent ourselves as these higher levels of interaction, and become frameworks to relate to our own and other’s experiences; such as the Kabala’s mapping of the cosmos, or the I Ching’s mapping of organic change. Even our daily language itself has its roots in such symbolic forms of representation, if you look at the old runic alphabets in which each symbol is not only its letter but a communicable concept describing aspects and interactions that had been consistently noticed in the world. And today, even though each concept is not directly mapped from its individual symbols, these jumbles of letters still serve to spell out and represent actual things in the world. Of course, some languages, like Chinese, never forgot this representational quality of the characters used, in that each symbol still represents a concept in itself in the form of a stylized picture of it. Which leads me to say that art in itself can serve as another representative form for communicating our experiences, whether in visual forms, sonic feelings, etc… And in this sense, any action or interaction could be considered art in that it is interpretable of representative of both itself and higher level interactions of our experiences of the world. The act of going to work each day is reflective of our daily animal struggle of fending to survive, but it is also just going to work. The act of going to sleep is reflective of giving oneself up to death and of the fall of cultures and of the inevitable end of all things. But it is also just going to sleep.

Now, the question that is raised in my mind by all this, is if and when it is necessary to frame our experiences in terms of their higher level interpretations. It seems that we have to find some common ground in order to relate our experiences to each other, and myths can offer us a collective framework for our experiences. But if we are trying to communicate more day to day interactions, the mythic filter can possibly distract from or add too much meaning to what is relevant in each information exchange. If for example I want to suggest to someone a good place to eat, it is not necessary to tie in discussions of our struggles for bio-survival or the role that cave drawings once might have played in ancient cultures, but just to say such and such restaurant has tasty and affordable food. But if the discussion were to tend to topics of how we fit into the world, such higher level themes and stories might be necessary in order to paint a decent picture of our experiences of reality. It seems to come down to being aware of what information is practical in any given exchange, and excluding the levels of interpretation that are not. Just because my actions of informing you where to eat could be interpreted as acting out some archetypal role of teacher or guide, it is almost meaningless to point this out when you just want directions. Instead our interaction could suggest to you what you need to know, and just, that unless you aren’t too hungry that you could chat for a bit before you eat. And so, though the mythic interpretation of reality is a meaningful approach to our experiences , it is only really useful in dealing with high level interpretations of our experiences, and not in communicating the actual interactions we have on a more experiential level.

Old Turtle and the Broken Truth

There is a language older than words
spoken at night in he moon's reflection
on the river,
in a lover's caress before dawn,
and the beating of a crow's wings
across the sky.
Stars and dancers speak it in their spinning
and the wind whispers it across grass.
A mother's glance at her child
says more than a thousand jumbled words.

Do you hear all things
calling your name?
You lost it
when you opened your mouth.
Then an intimate gesture
or a dog's growl breaks through,
immediate andd suggestive
of some long lost connection
to infinity


Old Turtle and the Broken Truth
A story by Douglas Wood

'Once, in a beautiful, faraway land...
that was, somehow, not so very far...

a land where every stone was a teacher and every breeze a language,
where every lake was a mirror and every tree a ladder to the stars,

into this far and lovely land there fell... a truth.
It streaked down from the stars, trailing a tail as long as the sky.
But as it fell, it broke.

One of the pieces blazed off through the night sky, and the other fell to earth in the beautiful land.

In the morning, Crow found the fallen piece. It seemed to be a sort of stone, shiny and pleasing to the eye. He picked it up.
"This is a lovely truth," said Crow. "I will keep it." And he carried it away. But after he had held it for awhile, and examined it closely, Crow said, "This truth does not feel quite right. A part of it is missing. I will look for a whole one." He flew off and dropped it on the ground.

Other creatures who liked shiny things soon noticed the truth as well- Fox, Coyote, Racoon, each picked it up and carried it awhile. But they, too, found it had rough edges and was difficult to carry, and its sparkle soon lost its appeal. "We do not need this broken truth," they said. "We will find a whole one."
Butterfly and Bear also discovered the truth, drawn in by its sweetness. But each found that it left a bitter taste after all. "There is something missing in this truth," they thought. And they left it alone.
After awhile, none of the creatures even noticed the broken truth anymore, and it lay on the ground, forgotten.

Then a human being found it.
He was walking slowly, listening to breezes, gazing at beauties above and below and all around him, when he found the broken truth. On it was writing, and the writing said: "You Are Loved."
The man held it carefully, thinking it was the loveliest thing he had ever seen. He tucked the broken truth into a safe place and kept it. Sometimes he would take it out and admire it. And the truth sparkled just for him, and whispered its message to him alone. And the man thought he never felt so proud and happy.

The man took the wonderful truth to his people- those who lived with him, who spoke as he spoke adn dressed as he dressed and whose faces looked like his. And together they cherished their newfound truth and believed in it. They hugged it to themselves and it became their most important possession.

After awhile, the man and his people did not hear the language of breezes and stones anymore, but heard only their truth. They did not see the mirrored beauty in the lakes, or the ladders to the stars, but saw only their sparkling truth. And for them it was enough.

And they called it...
The Truth.

The Truth made people feel good and proud and strong. But soon they began to feel fear and even anger towards those who were not like themselves and did not share their truth. The other beings and other people of the lovely land seemed less and less important. And the language of the breezes was hardly ever heard anymore.

Time passed, and other people said, "We must have this Great Truth for ourselves, for with it comes happiness and power."
Many battles were fought, and the broken truth was won and lost, won and lost, over and over again. But such was its power and beauty that no one ever doubted it, and when they were without it, they felt a great emptiness where their truth had been.
The stones and trees suffered. The breezes and waters suffered, and the animals, and the earth... And most of all, the people suffered.

Finally, the animals went to Old Turtle- ancient and wise as the mountains and seas themselves. Crow and Fox went. Coyote went. Raccoon, Butterfly, Bear and many others. All went to see Old Turtle.
"This truth the people quarrel over," they said, "we have all held it ourselves. It is broken and does not work. Please tell the people."
"I am sorry," answered Old Turtle," but the people will not listen. They are not yet ready."
And the suffering continued.

Until one day... a Little Girl came to find Old Turtle. She had traveled very far, had crossed the Mountains of Imagining and the River of Wondering Why, had found her way through the Forest of Finding Out. And when she had grown tired, she had ridden on the backs of animals or the wings of birds, and they had helped her find her way.
Finally they came to a great hill in the very center of the world. From there, the Little Girl thought she had never seen so far, or seen so much beauty.

But when she saw Old Turtle she could hardly speak. She simply looked with eyes full of wonder.
"Why have you come so far to find me, Little One?" Asked Old Turtle. Her voice rumbled like far away thunder, but was soft as the breeze through a caterpillar's whiskers.
"I...I wanted to ask a question," andswered the Little Girl. "Where I live, the earth is sore, and people are suffering. Battles are fought, over and over again. People say it has always been this way and will never change. Can it change, Old Turtle? Can we make it change?"

Old Turtle spoke. "The world you describe is not the world that has always been, Little One."
Then Old Turtle told of how the people had found the broken truth, and the suffering it had caused.
"It is because it is so close to a great, whole truth that it has such beauty, and that the people love it so," said Old Turtle. "It is the lost portion of that broken truth that the people need, if the world is to be made whole again."
"But where is that missing piece?" asked the Little Girl. "Can we put the truth back together again?"

"First, my child," said Old Turtle, "remember that there are truths all around us, and within us. They twinkle in the night sky and bloom upon the earth. They fall upon us every day, silent as the snow and gentle as the rain. The people, clutching their own truth, forget that it is part of all the small and lovely truths of life. They no longer see these truths, no longer hear them.
"But... perhaps, Little One, you can..."
"I - I'll try," said the Little Girl.

And she thought once more of her long journey. She looked upon all the beauty that surrounded her, from the far hills to the flowers beneath her feet. She saw the movement of clouds and soaring birds and the dancing of light upon the green and living earth. She heard the whispering of a breeze.
And gradually... a feeling came over her, as though all the world were made of truths. As if the world had been made just for her and she had been made just for it. And she felt a secret smile somewhere deep inside... and thought that, perhaps, she understood.
She looked once again at Old Turtle, her eyes more filled with wonder than before.

Old Turtle spoke again.
"Remember this also, Little One," she said. "The Broken Truth, and life itself, will be mended only when one person meets another - someone from a different place or with a different face or different ways - and sees and hears... herself. Only then will people know that every person, every being, is important, and that the world is made for each of us."
For a long time the two friends were quiet, high on their hill in the very center of the world. And in her heart the Little Girl thought she could see other people in other beautiful lands, people with their own ways, their own truths... people different from her own, but still, somehow, The People.

Finally, the Little Girl asked one more question. "Old Turtle, how will the people learn these things?"
"By seeking out those small and simple truths all around them," said Old Turtle. "By listening once more to the language of breezes, by learning lessons form stones and animals and trees and stars. Even turtles," she chuckled, "and little girls.
"Now, Little One, it is time for you to go, to return to your people and tell them what you have seen adn learned, and to help them mend their Broken Truth.
"Take this with you," said Old Turtle, as she placed something into the Little Girl's hand. "I have saved it for a very long time, for someone just like you."
The Little Girl looked at what Old Turtle had given her. It was a kind of stone, a mysterious, beautiful stone. It wa lovely to touch, and it made her feel good to hold it.

She squeezed it tightly, then tucked it away for her journey.
"Thank you, Old Turtle," she said, and hugged her friend's great, leathery neck.
And then she started home.

Once more she traveled through the Forest of Finding Out, crossed the River of Wondering Why and the Mountain of Imagining. Crow led the way, and again when the Little Girl grew tired, all her animal friends helped. She sometimes touched the stone Old Turtle had given her to renew her strength. And it took a long time yet almost no time at all...

And she was home.
But it had been a very long journey, and those who take great journeys of the heart are changed.
The people did not recognize her. And when she spoke, they did not understand. She told them of her journey, but the people could not follow her words. She spoke of a world made of small and gentle truths, of all the peoples being one People. But they could not catch her meaning. She explained about the Broken Truth and the need to make it whole. But the people did not believe her, and could not understand.

Finally, Crow, seeing all that happened, flew to the place high above the village where the Great Truth was kept, in a place where all could see it. He cawed and cawed in his loudest voice. And suddenly the Little Girl knew what she had to do. She climbed to the high place herself. She took Old Turtle's stone from her pocket and... carefully... added the missing piece to the old, broken one.

The fit was perfect:
"You Are Loved... And So Are They."
The people looked.
And looked.
And looked.
Some frowned.
Some smiled.
Some even laughed.
And some cried.
And they began to understand.

Time passed and upon the beautiful land the trees climbed like ladders to the stars, the waters shone like mirrors, and the people saw their beauty. A breeze stirred and they heard its music. Tiny truths fell by day and night, gentle as the rain addn snow, and the people found them and kept them in their hearts.
And slowly, as the people met other people different from themselves, they began to see... themselves.

And far away, on a hill in the very center of the world...

Old Turtle Smiled.'

the fantastic culture

I haven't posted much in the last couple days, and the next month may be spotty as well, for an order was placed at my job for 700 pairs of faerie wings. Which is an outstanding number, considering they are needed by mid-February. Even stranger is that they were ordered by a company doing a promotion for the new Barbie:Fairytopia movie. Now I am a bit leery of large corporations and the insiduous image standards public icons like Barbie represent, but this excess of faerieness seems to mark another step on the growing trend in the cultural imagination (as well as allows me to eat next month and pursue my other job as a circus performer). She may have just gotten a bit funny since her divorce with Ken, but I believe Barbie (and the Mattel Corporation) are hopping on the increasing attention our culture is paying to tales of fantasy and magic these days.

The Harry Potter novels had been out for a while, but it wasn't until the new Lord of the Rings movies got hyped that I first noticed how much the fantastic is coming back into the popular imagination. The fact that J. K. Rowling managed to write such powerful and well recieved children's stories about magic and independence still shocks me, because I don't consider our culture of religious dogma and ideological control one so accepting of those themes. But maybe that's changing...

For my own part I am glad this is so, because stories of fantasy and magic encourage people to think outside their fostered conceptions of reality and act beyond their wildest dreams; and that idea seems just as likely to change the world as a revolution, if not more so. Which is one of the only ways that I can justify contributing to the amount of 'useless' stuff in the world by working this job. That and it gives me a lot of free time to pursue my own interests while paying the bills.

the alchemist's language

"The Alchemist," by Paulo Coelho, is the story of a young Andalusian sheppard who sets out on a journey to interpret his dreams of finding a treasure beneath the pyramids of Egypt. On the way to fulfilling this Personal Legend he is guided across the Sahara Desert by mystical characters and persistant omens that point out that the treasure may not be material at all. Reading like a fable from the Arabian NIghts, this somewhat simple tale is a brilliantly written carrier for several alchemical themes of self-transformation through reality's interpretations. Most of the characters operate under the assumption that all things are one thing and are thus expression and representations of it. Through intuition and a keen attention one is able to learn the Language of the World, which is an intimate knowlege of and communication with all things as aspects of the Soul of the World. I imagine it as a language of magical 'true names,' but also a recognition that all names are essentialy reflections of one name which is god or existence (or not. the tao that can be named is not the tao...) The alchemist's task then is to learn to recognize themselves as avatars of this metaconsciouss interpretation, and capable of whatever they want (assuming of course that's what existence wants too since everything is one thing). I'm fond of this interpretation of alchemy myself, and was glad Coelho suggested that its symbols and metalurgic processes are really just metchorical for the transmogrification of self into everything (though not in these words). I also found this passage discussing the emerald tablet particularly suggestive:
"Perhaps if you were in a laboratory of alchemy, this would be the right time to study the best way to understand the Emerald Tablet. But you are in the desert. So immerse yourself in it. The dessert will give you an understanding of the world; in fact, anything on the face of the earth will do that. You don't even have to understand the desert: all you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation."
"How do I immerse myself in the desert?"
"Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there."

caught in our own net

And some more relevent passages from Alan Watts's The Book (the key points are in bold):

"Apart from such human artifacts as buildings and roads, our universe, including ourselves, is thoroughly wiggly. It's features are wiggly in both shape and conduct. Clouds, mountains, plants, rivers, animals, coastlines- all wiggle. They wiggle so much and in so many different ways that no one can really make out where one eiggle begins and another ends, whether in space or in time. Some French classicist of the eighteenth century complained that the creator had seriously fallen down on he job by failing to arrange the stars wit hany elegent symmetry, for they seem to be sprayed through space like the droplets from a breaking wave... Millinnia ago, some genius discovered that such wiggles as rabits and fishes could be caught in nets. Much later, some other genius thought of catching the world in a net. The net has cut the big world into little wiggles, all contained in squares of the same size. Order has been imposed on chaos. We can now say that the wiggle goes so many squares to the left, so many to the right, so many up, or so many down, and at last we have its number. Centuries later, the same image of the net was imposed upon the world as the lines of both celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude, as graph paper for plotting mathematical wiggles, as pigeonholes for filing, and the ground plan for cities. The net has thus become one of the presiding images of human thought. But it is always an image, and just as no one can use the equator to tie up a package, the ral wiggly world slips like water throug hour imaginary nets. However much we divide, count, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided."

"We have quite forgotten that both "matter" and "meter" are alike derived from the Sanskrit root matr-, "to measure," and that the "material" world means no more than the world as measured or measurable- by such abstract images as nets or matrices, inches, seconds, grams, and decibles."

"Today, scientists are more and more aware of what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseperably that it is more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. This was the grain of truth in the primitave and unreliable scienceof astrology- as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's character or soul, he draws a hororscope- that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, bu the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and proccesses which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment- social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical- throughout every moment of his life. But as things are, we define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our narrowed "spotlight" conscioussness which largely ignores the field or environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the Greek "atom" - that which cannot be cut or divided any further into seperate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by seperating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe- that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be seperated from each other only in name... Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are seperate names but not seperate events... In precisely the same way the individual is seperate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a seperate name makes you a seperate being. This is -rather literally- to be spellbound."

Wired as Word as World

So all this buzz about hypertext and the noosphere over at Vortex Egg reminds me of the Myst video games. In its story, a race of people called the D'Ni had the power of writing worlds through an elaborate description of its every detail, even down to the workings of its physics; that could then be travelled to. This sounds an awfully lot like the internet, especially in light of how Metachor describes it as a self-organization towards collective consciousness. I imagine if we could write such a detailed world-book ourselves such a thing might be possible, and the net's stygmergic and collective nature lends itself to that purpose (interpretation). As more knowledge becomes linked through the web the limits of our collective understanding of existence expands. The biggest issue then would be providing greater access to it and a really damn effective organization for it. It's not the collective consciouss if we're not all conscious of it. I would kind of picture the inner workings of it like a vast multilayered correspondance chart, much like that found in magical texts (like Crowely's "777"), but each person would only see the nearer level links in their particular field of query.

The other interesting thing about the Myst games, was that though the linking world books were written in words, the games themselves were played out in a virtual world of symbols and sounds that had to be interpreted in order to procede. This is very similar to Vinge's portrayal of the Other Plane in "True Names," as well as many other sci-fi depictions of cyberspace, as a virtual space moved and manipulated within (assumably in a multi-dimensional way) by the user's avatar. As noted before, Vinge clothes this space in terms of elaborate and magical symbol-complexes that while appearing as actual rooms and objects also symbolic of the underlying processing of code that is their function. The article on transmogrification Metachor dug up points to this as well, saying that the Web weaves word and image together in such a dynamic way that "Cyberspace becomes visualized data, and meaning arrives in spatial as well as in verbal expressions." It then goes on to compare this to religious ritual and iconography: "While the sacred Word lives primarily in the hearts and mouths of believers, the transmission of the Word over generations takes place through the rituals and the artistic images adopted by the community of the faithful. Since the medieval period, for example, the Catholic Church surrounds its word-based rituals with music, paintings, architecture, gesture, and incense. Such communal art is deemed essential to the transmission of the Word as conceived primarily through spoken and written scriptures. The word on the page is passed along in a vessel of images, fragrances, songs, and kinesthetic pressed flesh. Elements like water, salt, and wine contribute to the communication. Truth is transmitted not only through spoken and written words but also through a participatory community that re-enacts its truths through ritual." In other words the knowledge is being passed along by an actual experiencing of the thing it is representative of. Word is transmitted (taught) by linking it to its phenomena. Prior to the advent of such common virtual reality necessary to implement a full scale symbolic search-space such a thing could appear in two dimensions as a collage of images that roll up behind the linked words, and offer a higher level interpretation to the word data being presented.

And since its computers, then the words are all just a higher level interpretation of numerical processes, and correspondances would have to be me made between the numbers and the words and the things as well, such as in numerological approaches to knowledge. Then with numbers for the lowest level agents instead of words we write worlds out of code, and find ourselves back in the matrix again.

To play the fool, I will point out that this whole process of words and symbols and representation in the net is remarkabley similair to being alive and interpreting and transmitting meaning from our everyday experiences. Until the net breaks through into some other world of omniscient existence it is only a mirror for the veil of our beliefs.

thank goodness it was all a dream

The dreamers are all waking up
and throwing down their nightclothes
in ecstasy.
It was a beautiful dream,
and then a beautiful world
to wake up to.

I wish the thousand eyes
that stare in horror at our laughter
would open
so we could kiss away the sleepdust
and relieve the nightmare
of its confused burdens


phyllotaxis


"God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. That is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange andd wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

"Now when Gos plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it - just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self."

-Alan Watts, from "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are"


ain


Sometimes I forget completely
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane, I spill sad
energy everywhere. My story
gets told in various ways: a romance,
a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.

Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,
it will go around.
These dark suggestions that I follow,
are they part of some plan?
Friends be careful. Don't come near me
out of curiosity, or sympathy.

-Rumi


*and a big thank you to Metachor over at Vortex Egg for the help getting this blog running.

football fervor in steel city

Today the Pittsburgh Steelers played the New York Jets for the division playoffs. Now, I don't usually pay attention to sports, but over the several years I've lived in this city I've noticed how the well-being of its people is very much intertwined with the success of its football team. I don't know about other city's but sometimes this seems the only thing Pittsburgh lives for. Well, that and drinking, but I think these two things are related. The Steelers name comes from the old steel industry that once was this city's lifeblood, but ended abruptly in the 70s when it was outsourced. This left the economy in ruins and many unemployed, disenchanted, and drunk, though steel city is beginning to pick itself back up again as a leader in 'high technology' (Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering and Robotics Institutes design weapons systems for the military). It was also the last time the Steelers had a winning year, until now. Despite the city's current financial crisis the team is 18-1 and the population is giddy with anticipation for another chance at the super bowl.

The people are so swayed by the game that a group of local anarchists calling themselves Steelers Fans Against the War showed up to show their football fervor. Dressed in the black and gold of the Steeler's colors, this marching band for peace serenaded the zealous fans with the team songs and ridiculous chants like "Endzones not warzones, quarterbacks not counterattacks, (etc...)," and Up with the Superbowl, down with the death toll." The crowd, many of whom were already quite drunk, responded with mixed singles; some raised fists and peace signs while others shouted that they were republicans (and for Bush), but most cheered along to the songs and then hurried away in confusion after reading the group's signs. One woman, whose brother just returned from a year in Iraq thanked the anarchists for being there.

After the game was over, and the Steeler's victorious, I heard people cheering in the streets.


(Pittsburgh is also for some reason called Iron City, pronounced 'a'hrn city,' which is also the name of one of its most drunk local beers.)

(The Steelers Fans Against the War were also asked (by a soldier) if they realized the contradiction in being against war but for football, as it is also a somewhat violent competitive sport. To which the group had no coherent reply.)

making waves with tsunami warning systems

U.S. Plans to Expand Tsunami Alert System, spending $37.5 million to add 32 deep-ocean monitoring bouys across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to the 6 we already have in the Pacific. And other countries follow suit in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. "What made this event even more tragic," states Bush's science advisor, John Marburger III, "is the fact that [many fatalities] might have been prevented if only a warning system had been in place to alert the communities that were in harm's way."

But, it looks like that system may have already been in place, for the US Military and State Department were given enough advance warning by the six buoys of their Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre to evacuate the Navy base on Diego Garcia prior to the tsunami's hit. Before fleeing they also alerted Australia and Indonesia to the disaster, but not Sri Lanka or any of the countries most directly damaged. As Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, said, "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world."

Incidentally, the $37.5 million spent on the U.S. tsunami warning system is still a couple million more than Bush originally planned on giving in aid to the tsunami-struck countries.


(Yes, I know this doesn't seem to follow from the last two posts, but it makes a pretty frightening story; and I can't resist an oppurtunity to point out the ridiculous inconsistencies of the government's words.)

matrix as story-complex

I posted this article a couple weeks ago on my livejournal, Through the Spaces Between, but thought it was pretty applicable to the topics I want to discuss in True Names, so I'm reposting it here.

While catching up on the Net, ever a source for unexpected connections, I stumbled upon an article posted on Posthuman Blues a most amusing article: "Why make a matrix? And why you might be in one". Like much talk of matrices following those unfortunate movies, this article only talks about matrices in the movies' technological terms of simulated realities, and neglects to mention the roots and use of the word and how that has played out in many cultures. Now, I don't claim to understand the finer points of the term matrix, especially as they are used in mathematics, but most obviously missing from all this buzz is the roots of the word matrix in the Latin mater, meaning mother. Merriam-Webster defines a matrix as essentially being something from which form emerges, the substrate or medium for information. In many cultures, the Earth is considered the Mother, in that we all are born from her and return to her and are essentially just rearrangements of her parts. We are embedded in the matrix of our planet. Another name for this mother figure is also Maya, illusion, the veil that creates our sense of reality. In my last entry I talked about 'the lines of the world,' how people and events cross over each other to bring meaning to our experience of reality and in a sense create the worlds we see. This is very akin to the idea of Indra's Net, that each thing is a jewel reflecting each other and all the other reflections. This net is woven of all the disparate elements and connects them together to become reality, in much the way that meaning is derived from a mathematical matrix by placing disparate numbers in line with each other. It is from their arrangement that sense is made, and it is from the net of the matrix placed over them, the network of connections between them, that they are arranged.

The author of the article states that we are most likely living in a matrix, in his terms, a simulated reality, but then goes on to say that we haven't yet created one due to a lack of the necessary technologies. I am inclined to agree that we are living in matrices, but that we have been ever since the earliest humans began trying to understand the world by looking at their experiences in relation to each other. I am of the opinion that every attempt at understanding and communicating our experiences is the telling of a story, the interpretation of events to fit a framework in which they make sense and that others might be able to understand. These stories are only maps and metaphors, they are descriptions created to help us fit reality into a comprehendable form and are created by tying together the disparate and sometimes seemingly unconnected events of our lives, the chaos (also a mother figure e.g:Tiamat) of impressions and feelings, into a personal(or localized) network of relations, a matrix. If the Earth (mother) is the medium of our world, and (as McLuhan propheticaly stated) the medium is the message, then the matrices we use to interpret our expereinces are in a sense giving birth to new realities: The medium is your mother (medium- something in between, means of conveying info, someone that channels information between worlds). And like mathematical matrices, these realities can be read in a multiple of ways depending on what lines you choose to interpret it; which is why we each seem to have our own set of understandings that oftentimes do not seem to correlate with each other. It all depends on which fliter you have placed over your perceptions.

Now, I would argue that in this sense we are indeed living in a collective matrix as well, in that there are a large set of beliefs societaly ingrained in our cultures that over time have come to form the framework through which as memebers of the society we are expected to see the world. Such as views on education, other countries, the necessity of money and war, etc... But as this matrix is collectively created individuals will often times find themselves at odd with it like round pegs in square holes, their own experiences of the world being rather different than what they have been told it should be. This creates conflict, either doubt on the individual of their expereinces or doubt of the societal framework as being a bit too unflexible in its perspectives, and can also result in the individual (and even the society) reevaluating their matrices in relation to conflicting information, broadening their view of the world. And when our experiences of the world do not fit our own matrices we can change either as well, looking at conflicting info only in light of our assumed views or allowing it to change those assumptions and show the world from a new angle. This strikes to the heart of Magick, that our worlds change by changing the ways we look at them; that if we try and understand things systematicaly the rules have to be flexible enough, anarchic enough, for our systems to actually work in a univese that is just too big and unknown to fit into any one particular theory or description or order (including this one).


No to go outside and do something visceral. I've been working on this blog all day, and the peculiar 60 degree weather we've been having is supposed to turn into snow at midnight.

true names and the opening of the collective conscious

Yesterday I read Vernor Vinge's "True Names," and was inspired into finally using this blog account. This short story is perhaps one of the the key science fiction tales in shaping the vision and direction technology has taken over the last several decades as the first accredited depiction of cyberspace. Though that term didn't come about until later, from another sci-fi author, William Gibson, Vinge's "the Other Plane" essentially sets the foundation for the technological interface of humanity's information flows that we know of as the internet. It was a pretty good prophecy, as far as that goes. The interesting thing though was Vinge's choice to encode the story in terms of magick, the technological processes spelled out in terms of interpreting symbols and its most knowledgable users as warlocks. Which in a sense they are, the times not yet gone when working the complex code capable to craft a program, or even use a computer, seems to some a magical act. I personally know next to nothing about programming languages, but then again, I've been known to believe in magick.

The term 'true name' comes from magical traditions where it is believed that knowledge is power, and one of the surest ways to get knowledge of something was to have a name for it. A name being not only a definition but a contagious and associative link with the thing. The common words we use to refer to things are nothing more than a rudimentary label, whereas the true name of that thing is akin to a complete understanding of its entire being. If such a thing were possible. In Vinge's story this amounted to knowing the users real name and thus where their body was jacked in; you could do anything in the Other Plane just as long as no one could actually kill you. Though you could say that about the real world too.

There is an oft-quoted zen saying that claims a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself, as words are not the things they name but only reference pointers to them. All the concepts we have for objects, processess, and beings are nothing more than pointers, convenient fictions created to allow us to be able to make reference of discrete parts of the vast and oftentimes incomprehesible world around us. And as language is a function of communication, these symbolic tags are used mainly to represent our own disjointed experiences of the world in terms that others might understand. Which is in its essence the heart of story telling, creating symbol-complexes in which others can recognize experiences in their own lives and of life in general. In this light, one could say that any belief, any understanding of the world based on words, is just a story and contains no more truth than the teller (and listener) is willing to interpret into it; meaning belonging solely in the mind of the beholder and being not so much truth as comprhension in the pattern of one's own story. That being said, the truths of every great religion, culture and science are not truths at all but really convincing fictions. Even the belief that we have individual bodies interacting with other discrete beings is only a story for the flow of subatomic wavicles, the current quantum tale on the subject.

We have been telling ourselves stories since the dawn of history, in an attempt to give explanation and meaning to a world that proffered neither. And now we have reached a point where we are so wrapped up in the stories that we have forgotten they are just that, and go about in our beliefs as if they are the worlds they represent. Which, as language based creatures, for most intents and purposes they are. Our realities are fostered by our descriptions of it, the magical act being to change your description changes your reality. Now more than ever though, we can see that our stories, like the lower level words, are not static things; and it is through the interaction of different stories inside the larger discoursive flow of information that has allowed for all the breakthroughs of understanding that gave rise to the technologies we have today. Call them memes, themes, or belief constructs, but when ideas cross they either agree or conflict. And if they conflict either a synthesis occurs and both stories are broadened, or one steam rolls the other into oblivion and becomes the predominant belief structure; such is the case with the major religions, whose stories seems hopelessly out of date yet retain some amount of staying power by virtue of being really big. Regardless, the really groundbreaking changes have occured in our society when the stories have been allowed to influence each other and adapt accordingly, thus broadening our collective understanding of existence. Which is where the internet comes back in as a continually evolving matrix of humanity's stories, and thus the roots of all knowledge. A virtual Indra's Net or Tower of Babel, if you will, comparable to current stories of the Noosphere or global brain in which each person is a neuron or symbol processor. Another fitting metaphor is Borges's Aleph, a point which contains all other points, delightfully illustrated in "True Names" when Erythrina and Mr. Slippery become privy to the total flow of information on the Other Plane and essentially learn humanity's true name by experiencing it all at once.

One of the more magical properties of storytelling, as is expemplified by Vinge's "True Names," is that of prophecy. Stories are not only metaphors for life as we experience it, but projections of what life might be like, as we have the ablity to project our patterns ahead of us to understand what is likely to happen. Such subjunctive imagination is responsible for everything from the flight of airplanes to moment to moment survival, and at best allows anything we can think of to become real. In the realm of stories the most portentious visions of the future open up whole realms of possibility not previously imagined, allowing the future of today to become the past of tomorrow. Once we have a description of what a desired world might look like it is that much easier to find the steps necessary to bring it into being.
Which is precisely the intention of this blog, the collection and connection of stories that point towards a broader understanding of our experience in and manipulation of the world on a collective level.

The use of the term 'true names' is meant to be somewhat ironic, for as the Hashhashin sage Hasan-I-Sabbah reputedly said, "Nothing is true, everything is permissable," though a perhaps more fitting quote is the magical axiom "Everything is true in one sense, false in one sense, and meaningless in a third." I do not claim that any of the stories here-after told, or any of the connections I'll draw between them contain any explicit element of truth outside the meaning I and the rest of humanity have given them. As this is the case I do not expect people to believe what I say, since I don't myself, and would rather encourage them to comment with their own interpretations as that will only further the collective understanding of these stories and hence ourselves.

All that being said, welcome to True Names.