Reality Sandwich:
Notes on Universal Feedback
One of the best ways to see universal feedback at work is through the activity of self-organizing groups. A self-organizing group is one that comes together without the hierarchy of a top-down command. Its members are motivated by their own desire to gather—not by paycheck, leader or religion. It’s non-corporate—grassroots in the truest, organic sense. The group exists because of deep, hidden connections that go beyond the everyday. The sheer number of self-organizing groups around today are only possible because of the flourishing of the social web. Applications such as Twitter and Facebook allow people to gather virtually—as one would at a gigantic cocktail party—complete with overheard conversations and the big names that are crowded by admirers and social climbers. The self-organized groups that have resulted are like groups of friends—the connections are fluid—at time tempestuous and at other times rigid and stuck in old models.
Unlike its social media cousin, Evolver.net, which was built with the intention of fostering not one but several self-organizing groups, the group on Reality Sandwich sprung up unplanned like a rhizome—a philosophical concept by Deleuze and Guattari which likens de-centralized, non-hierarchical systems to opportunistic plants such as ginger that use a horizontal stem in order to grow in-between trees. The trees were the old model—the top-down world in which authority came on high. The rhizomes weren’t bent on taking and replacing the trees as plant kings of the forest—they revealed a way of existing not as an either/or of systems but of an either and or. The botanical and conceptual rhizomes were about an expansion of possibilities—it wasn’t about doing away with the old—it was about coming up with that which was the least expected, like living life as a gathering of decentralized multiplicities in a world of towering, top/down metaphysical ideals.
The RS rhizome sprung up in damp shadows of the comment boxes. The posts themselves were submission only—their closed system based on approval factors formed the forest of trees while the comments became the twisting brambles and moss below where anyone who registered for the site could join in.
An old cohort from back in the blog 1.0 days used to say—sometimes comments are the best part. I don’t know if this was often the case given the generally high quality of the writing on RS, but what I did find to be the case was that the RS comment boxes were ripe for synchronicity—there were always connections being made through links or obscure references that would be mind-blowing with epic levels of uncanniness. I’d think—isn’t it crazy, I was just thinking the same exact thing!…or, wow, that’s the same book I was drawn to on my friend’s bookshelf yesterday—a friend who has the same initials as this commenter, making it not only about the connection of the book but about the friend, and the timing of having been over their place when I was, with the spine of the book sticking out from the shelf, just as the light in the room turned into long strands—the afternoon undoing its golden locks and letting them fall over us…
My research has shown that the grounds for telepathy increase in proportion to the amount of recognition that self-organized group members have of their status as members. It wasn’t enough to all happen to fall into a certain category in which they shared certain things in common—it was the group’s awareness of being a group that made the self-organized group truly dynamic. Not only were the commenters on RS technically members of a group by virtue of having a log-in and password, they were also members by virtue of an assumed curiosity towards RS’s subject matter. That said the group had no real rules—no membership dues or meetings to attend.
What was real was that you had the feeling you were in the middle of something. A way of thinking and being that was happening NOW.
Magical things happen in places where people feel compelled to gather without being coerced into doing so. Wanting to do something makes a huge difference in the experience of doing it—whatever it is. The feedback loops created in the comment boxes effects the entire site—from the writing to the graphics and layout—everything feels like it’s coming together according to remote control powers—there is the nagging sensation of a larger significance, the sensation of being one part of a bigger story.
(via peachme)
Since the summer I’ve been getting deep in the philosophical mud trying to sculpt a theory of Universal Feedback and Flow. A combination of things—including a Nassim Haramein lecture I attended at Collective Hardware, my experiences DJing vinyl records, and a mystical vision I had on a Florida beach coalesced into the insight that everything that exists is a feedback loop both created by and creating an exchange of energy. What’s more this exchange is constantly happening—on the level of atoms all the way to galaxies and black holes, the universe IS a fractal flux falling apart at the same time that it comes together. It’s a snake eating it’s own tail. I’m learning how to see through the veil of the everyday and experience the constant back and forth just behind it. This exchange can take many different forms (perhaps an infinite number of them) but it is always a give and take of energy. By focusing on that which appears solid and true it is revealed to be mostly empty space with flashes of static appearing and disappearing according to a web of criss-crossed signals. Like the inhale and exhale that form a breath—or the hyper-awareness of one hand touching the other—or the journey inwards that is embarked upon by focusing on the myriad detail radiating in the single NOW of the present. It’s not a matter of cause and effect—that’s the tricky part, getting past the long held belief that one thing causes another. Everything that appears is the result of it being simultaneously discovered and created by our perception. The exchange happens all at once—it’s not that one part comes first and allows for the other, but that one part doesn’t exist without the other—like how the ying and yang is only a ying and yang. Similarly, the insight of universal feedback teaches us that we only exist as individuals because we exist as networks. You can’t have one without the other.
The illusion that one thing causes another has morphed into an entire metaphysics, in which meaning stands outside of a thing as an ideal that infuses it with its essence. We believe that things happen because of other things—taking it to the extreme of interpreting that which happens as being what we deserve, based on whether we are “good” or “bad” people.
Nothing is inherent good or bad. There is only the perception and misperception of individual events—and only from the vantage point of an all-seeing God could anyone know which was which.
It may be too early to tell, but it seems that what I’m creating is a philosophy of collective relativism by which instead of qualities what exists is the infinite quantity of possibilities present in each and every instant. In addition to facts and figures and all that is true and definite the masses learn to focus their attention upon that which overlaps and gets fuzzy, vacancies, null sets and static. These in-between places are where new myths and legends are born. We look for openings in time—wrinkles by which to stretch out an ordinary collection of charmed moments into an infinity of infinities—an epic tale like a necklace with a never-ending string of jeweled stones that forever cast their light in the darkest places.
A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs involving the Mona Lisa. It started when I was researching pix of stencil graffiti online. The objective was to find and save pix of anonymous hotness, blow them up and print them out so I could recreate the stencil with a piece of mylar and an exacto knife for my FTW T-Shirts project—thrift store t-shirts customized with graffiti style stencil sprays. FTW (Follow The World) T-shirts was an experiment with online telepathy—the goal was to “magically” select the perfect shirt from the ranks of second-hand goodness and to intuit the right stencil design to add to it. As I searched through various Euro picture galleries of stencil-based street art, I felt my mind drift with the beats emanating from my red Tivoli desktop speaker, dressed in the distinctive clitter clatter it gave them—like the hard wood Italian soles racing across cobblestones. I dreamily clicked on this and that before coming across a Romanian stencil spray of the Mona Lisa—complete with the perfect accident of a tear-drop shaped paint drip in the corner of her eye. This caught my interest—I sat up—ready and awake. When I hit the forward button at the bottom of the pic, the next stencil was the exact same image except that this Mona Lisa had its head half-transformed into Woody Woodpecker. Perfect, I thought to myself, as I right-clicked triumphantly. This must be the feeling a fisherman has when making a prize catch after hours of waiting knee deep in icy water. I started typing “Mona Woody” into the Save File box at the exact same moment Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” came on the magic shuffle—a song that I had thought, until that moment, had been accidentally purged from my iPod:
Well, it was one of those days — not much to do
I was chillin downtown, with my old school crew
I went into a store — to buy a slice of pizza
And bumped into a girl, her name was Mona — what?
Mona Lisa (what?) *singing* Mona Lisa, so men made you..
I felt the buzz of the synch course through me—mixing with my happiness at hearing the track again. I felt awake down deep, like I’d downed a cup of coffee for the spirit—setting me off to investigate further, casting the hungry hunting bird gaze of my third eye across the internets. The synch told me this image meant something—it let me know I was on the right path. My google research quickly revealed that Woody Woodpecker was one of the few American cartoons shown on Communist run Romanian TV—which meant that the stencil undoubtedly invoked childhood memories for many Romanians of a certain age. Pop culture meets the masterwork, revealing the nostalgia and trauma contained within both of them. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see the “real” Mona Lisa again—which is to say I wanted to see a picture file reproduction—the closest I’ve ever been to DaVinci’s work. As familiar as the image was, that post-synch google was the first time I could ever remember taking the time to really look at it. Other times I merely sucked in the familiar face vacuum cleaner style but this time I stopped and observed the sparkle in the eyes and the upward curl of the mouth—while all along I saw the reflection of my own face on the monitor screen, adding my own layer to the cultural assemblage that was the painting. I used what I had learned from my ongoing, virtual apprenticeship under Andy Warhol to recognize opportunities for art riffs in the exchange between the image and the culture within which it’s created. I’ve learned that the importance of a piece has to do with the expansiveness of its reach across the centuries. In the case of the Mona Lisa a core chunk of western culture’s expressive genius as well as its crippling repression is revealed in DaVinci’s masterpiece. He paints a deep humanity (light! Heat! Lust! Love!) glowing through a mask of culture and class.
I decided to make both stencils. They didn’t really fit with the ones I already had— the hip-hop head silhouettes and 60’s style psychedelic chicks with stenciled stars in their eyes, but the synch and the charge that being re-introduced to the painting had given me made it feel like a necessary part of my FTW line-up. The only way to really test the power of online telepathy was have lots of stencils to choose from so that I could intuitively choose one that was “right” for that particular shirt and person. I could put the two faces on the front and back of a single shirt—or just use one at a time or mix them up with other stencils. I chuckled as I imagined the possibilities of pairing ML with Eazy-E—or maybe Steven Colbert. I felt certain that no matter how I ended up using them it would be the right way— there was significance to them—something special, something with meaning.
As if in confirmation of this it seemed that as soon as I cut out the stencil I started seeing the Mona Lisa everywhere—on TV commercials and in print ads that appeared across the pages of magazines opened randomly. I saw her on display in the window of a poster store underneath the Port Authority. It seemed there was an especially large number of ML’s within a several block radius of Collective Hardware. A series of wheat pasted ML’s seemed an hommage to Andy on Elizabeth Street. It was a short stroll from the pizza slice bearing ML on the side of Lombardi’s Pizzeria to the Keith Haring mural of tripped-out orange and black faces on Bleeker and Houston—the eyes of which I’d considered making into a stencil for the purpose of giving the Twitter bird crazy staring eyes. I’d forgotten that this corner was it’s home. I wondered if seeing it again was a sign that I should cut out those crazy eye stencils—perhaps they were meant to go with the ML pix.
As I contemplated the green atomic symbol, dancing men and funhouse characters on the giant slab of concrete, a man stopped in front of me and took out his iPhone. I noticed that his screen background was a picture of the Mona Lisa.
Numbers Aren’t Really Real…
but the stories we tell about them are…
As I discussed in my previous post about orbs—just because something isn’t “real” doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In addition to “far-out” experiences such as UFO and orb sightings and paranormal events, good old-fashioned, everyday numbers also have a questionable reality. Jung likened numbers to archetypal images, explaining that they both have the quality of simultaneously pre-existing and being created by consciousness: “they are discovered inasmuch as one did not know of their unconscious autonomous existence, and invented inasmuch as their presence was inferred from analogous representational structures.” (Jung Synch 41) In other words, when we refer to the number of apples in a bowl, the number itself is not something that physically exists alongside the fruit, but is something that we at once create and discover in our mind. This half-real, half-unreal quality is something that has long confused and concerned philosophers. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes pointed out that numbers were not something to which he could apply his famous external validation of reality as the nature of their existence didn’t seem to be effected by whether they were experienced in a state of wakefulness or hallucination:
At this rate we might be justified in concluding that … arithmetic, geometry, and so on, which treat only of the simplest and most general subject matter, and are indifferent whether it exists in nature or not, have an element of indubitable certainty. Whether I am awake or asleep, two and three add up to five, and a square has only four sides, and it seems impossible for such obvious truths to fall under a suspicion of being false (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, First Meditation)
Hundreds of years later, the 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl returned to this issue and argued that while it was true that numbers were beyond the realm of empirical reality, there was still an “original history” behind ideal objects that made them real. He pointed out that we recognize lines drawn on a chalk board as a geometrical figure not because of the bare physicality of the chalk line itself or because of anything that is going on in the head of the person who is drawing it—since the act of recreating a geometrical figure, whether imagined or on paper, doesn’t require that the person actually rethink the original creation of the discipline of geometry from out of non-geometry—but simply because we share an understanding with the person drawing about its established rules and explanations. Geometry is real not because of something that can be directly perceived—but because it has a history.
We can see this historical reality of numbers playing itself out in numerology, astrology and synchronicity. For example the significance of an individual seeing the numbers 911 appear everywhere is attached to the historical story of the 9/11 terror attacks, which is itself tied to the historical situation whereby the numbers 911 are used for emergency calls in the U.S. This week the NYT ran a piece on the cultural significance of the number 40, and Reality Sandwich did a piece on the 7/22 lunar eclipse—the longest to occur this century. This once in a lifetime event was made all the more powerful because of the date on which it occurred—22/7 being “the authentic fractional number appointed to Pi - the Golden number of harmony”, and 7/22 being the ancient feast day of Mary Magdalens.
Instead of thinking of these numerical resonances as being merely made-up connections, I’m proposing that these connections are actually more real than the actual numbers themselves. In the same way that we’re not overly concerned with proving the existence of the number 22, we should realize that it’s not a radar blip or blurry photograph that proves or disproves the realness of a UFO but the fact that it has a history as a rumor—it exists in the form of all the stories, pictures, TV shows, movies, dreams and paintings about UFOs. Just as the orb phenomenon reveals the evolution of group-think, the fact that people believe strongly that UFOs are real makes the experience of sightings and rumors of sightings psychologically significant regardless of whether they had really happened.
(via foresting)
Like UFOs and paranormal events, the orb phenomena is an example of how we can get so hung-up debating the “realness” of something that we miss what its appearance reveals to us about the evolving nature of our collective unconscious. I include myself in this tendency towards dualistic, right/wrong, true/false distinctions—despite all the things I’ve experienced that prove otherwise, it’s still all too easy to fall back upon the conventions of language and society and think of things as either real and rational or unreal and “crazy”. As such I was sceptical when I first heard about orbs—the mysterious white, semi-transparent balls that unexpectedly appear on digital photos. The accepted photographic explanation is that the orbs are appearing because of the decreased distance between the lens and the built-in flash of new, smaller cameras, which are thereby able to pick up the light reflecting off of sub-visible particles. There are others, however, who discount this theory and believe instead that the orbs are aliens, extraterrestrial spacecraft, ghosts, or some type of elemental being. They argue that existing scientific theories fail to explain all such appearances, citing the prevalence of orbs in photographs from certain locations, such as the ECETI ranch in southern Washington state near Mt. Adams.
While I found such theories interesting to read, the hype over them seemed like just another attempt of the New Age industry to cash in on what was most likely a trick of light. It wasn’t until I read Daniel Pinchbeck’s report about his experience at an orb conference in England that a new way of thinking about the phenomenon opened up to me. Daniel was less concerned with questions regarding the realness of the orbs, and more interested in what they meant sociologically. He pointed to the fact that orbs often appear in pictures in which a group of people are gathered and argued that their appearance may be projections of group consciousness being aware of itself as a group:
The Orbs Conference offered an eccentric collection of testimonies, channeling, scientific research and slide shows. My favorite take on the orbs came from William Bloom, a local mystic, who claims he has telepathic chats with the spheres. The orbs told him they work like “a cloud or a flock,” and visit us to “support group consciousness.” According to the orbs, “As we touch your individual psyches you begin consciously to experience yourselves as intimately connected with all other life forms on this planet and throughout the cosmos.” A physicist who connected two cameras to take simultaneous photographs found that orbs would only appear on one or the other camera. While he took this as evidence of their quantum subtlety, it could suggest spoof rather than proof.
In my talk on the orbs, I downplayed the question of the orbs’ authenticity to take a sociological approach. A postmodern phenomenon, the orbs only appeared in our world due to new technology, digital media, and social networks like Flickr, or blogs where people share orb images. As our evolving social technologies keep bringing us together in unexpected ways, Bloom’s transmission about “group consciousness” is thought provoking.
Daniel analyzed what he identified as a post-modern phenomenon using post-modern analytical tools: he wasn’t searching for an external validation of its reality, but instead attempted to reveal the context through which the orbs appear. I realized that a similar approach could be taken with UFOs and other phenomena—my inquiry didn’t have to fall on the side of deciding for science OR magic—rather, it could ride the psychological boundary between them. The information about orbs comes in the form of stories—which is how all information is shared—whether it’s supposed “hard” data reported by a scientist in a respected journal or the “unfounded” mystical thoughts on the blog of a (r)evolutionary author. I’ve realized it’s not the story itself, but the manner in which it is told that is the real meat of the matter. In the case of orbs, it’s not the little white balls themselves that are my focus, but what they reveal about a new, seemingly spontaneous method of telling stories via group consciousness. This post-post modern story telling resonates with the rise of self-organizing groups that use new social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to coordinate the efforts of “the many” without the need of a leader.
It is my belief that it is the awareness of our new abilities to act as organic groups that forms the basis for our next evolutionary leap as a species. The more we understand ourselves as being intricately and irreparably connected with everyone and everything, the more we will realize the true nature of reality as being nothing more than a consensual illusion—thereby doing away with questions of what is real and unreal altogether.
Twitter Telepathy is in the Streams
Last week I posted an article on Reality Sandwich about an experiment by Richard Wiseman that tested Twitter out as a tool for remote viewing. I’m excited by new avenues of research such as this that examine the potential of open social media platforms for being possible tools for non-causal, ESP-like communication. Wiseman wrote an article for New Scientist magazine about the results of a four day trial in which he asked participants to pick the secret location that he spent 30 minutes at out of several randomly chosen alternatives:
In the judging phase, participants were presented with five photographs, one showing the location and four decoys, and asked to select the target. The photograph that received the most votes was taken as the group’s decision.
If the group were psychic, the majority would vote for the correct target. In the first trial I was looking up at a striking, modern-looking building. Unfortunately, the group voted for some woods.
On trial two I was sitting in the middle of a playground, but the group thought I was standing at the foot of a long stairway. The third trial found me under an unusual-looking canopy; the group voted for a graveyard.
On the final trial I stared intently at a red postbox. The group believed that I was standing at the side of a canal. In short, all four trials were misses.
When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups.
So what did we learn? Well, the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing and suggests that those who believe in the paranormal are simply good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target – which is, maybe, why they believe in the first place. No surprises there. So perhaps the most important outcome was to demonstrate that thousands of people are happy to take part in an instant Twitter study. Now it is up to scientists to find other interesting ways of harnessing this new research tool.
My own take on these results is that the participants were too random and unconnected to make the chances for Twitter telepathy likely. As I’ve written here on this blog, Twitter telepathy is more likely between people who are a part of the same stream, which is to say, people who found and followed each other through their mutual following of someone else and don’t know each other in real life or through other Twitter connections. It’s not magic but the adaptation of parallel association processes between these ostensible strangers (who have in common their shared following of someone else) that allows for uncanny occurrences such as tweeting the same thing at the same time, or reading a tweet that was nearly exactly the same to one you were about to write—or how it more than occasionally is the case that someone in one of your streams will tweet a link to an article or blog post that is exactly what you were looking for at that exact moment—moreover, the answer comes before you can even fully formulate the question or the search term to Google.
Whether these “coincidences” supply practical information or spiritual salvation, the connections that create them are so interwoven and invisible so as to make it seem like magic—or like the group think of a flock of birds, or the way it will happen that people from different parts of the world come up with the same idea at the same time—or how once one person breaks a world record in sports there are suddenly many people who are able to do it, one after another.
I think it would be interesting to do another version of this same remote viewing experiment within streams—for example, all of those who are members of the Scoblelizer stream, or the #P2 peeps. I predict that the results would be an above average number of correct responses in picking out the correct location.
Links found in this tweet:
http://bit.ly/Dy9ov
(posted with tweetshots.com)
Links found in this tweet:
http://tinyurl.com/o65mfs
(posted with tweetshots.com)
Radical Interdependence and Online Telepathy--How Twitter Helps Us Find One Another »
This is an article I wrote for Reality Sandwich that manages to weave together Twitter, online telepathy, New Orleans, Evelyn Rodriguez, and the book A Wrinkle in Time, among other things.
It is included in the collection, Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age, which is available on Amazon
