BRANDTRUEBOY

Current flavors in the ever-morphing mix:

Online telepathy
Graffiti
Andy Warhol
Fiction
jung:
(via supersonicelectronic) The psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought that astrology was an intuitive projection of man’s collective unconscious—connecting his psychology to the stars at such a deep level that no causal link can be found: It is indeed very difficult to explain the astrological phenomenon. I am not in the least disposed to an either-or explanation. I always say that with a psychological explanation there is only the alternative: either and or! This seems to me to be the case with astrology too. - C.G. Jung in a letter to Hans Bender, April 10, 1958, C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 2, 1951-1961, p. 428. It was this analogous, acausal connection (“either and or”) that made Jung believe that societal changes could be influenced by astrology even in a world in which its study was marginalized. In the 1950s he predicted that humanity would begin a new era “when the spring-point enters Aquarius.”  Jung was not specific about the date, but according to astrologers the fabled Age of Aquarius began during the early morning hours of this past Valentine’s Day.   The fact that this major astrological event is occurring along with seismic shifts in the plate tectonics of world culture could be the meaningful coincidence—or synchronicity—that fuels a “magical” change in the world. This Age of Aquarius that we find ourselves in is a time of a major paradigm shift—not in the clean slate way that he thought it would be, but with the same dramatic implications for the collective psyche. The two pressing reasons for why we have to make a choice: we can either go with the ecstatic flow of extraordinary events or stubbornly hold on to the old reality and risk being pulled under by annihilating forces. The global financial meltdown and the environmental crisis are evidence of a paradigm shift.  We are living in a time in which new myths are being created.  The stories bubble up to the surface from in between the seismic collisions of world culture—ecstatic “mega-ritual” events that take us out of our everyday understanding of the world—defying the language and the logic of average existence.(via supersonicelectronic) The psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought that astrology was an intuitive projection of man’s collective unconscious—connecting his psychology to the stars at such a deep level that no causal link can be found: It is indeed very difficult to explain the astrological phenomenon. I am not in the least disposed to an either-or explanation. I always say that with a psychological explanation there is only the alternative: either and or! This seems to me to be the case with astrology too. - C.G. Jung in a letter to Hans Bender, April 10, 1958, C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 2, 1951-1961, p. 428. It was this analogous, acausal connection (“either and or”) that made Jung believe that societal changes could be influenced by astrology even in a world in which its study was marginalized. In the 1950s he predicted that humanity would begin a new era “when the spring-point enters Aquarius.”  Jung was not specific about the date, but according to astrologers the fabled Age of Aquarius began during the early morning hours of this past Valentine’s Day.   The fact that this major astrological event is occurring along with seismic shifts in the plate tectonics of world culture could be the meaningful coincidence—or synchronicity—that fuels a “magical” change in the world. This Age of Aquarius that we find ourselves in is a time of a major paradigm shift—not in the clean slate way that he thought it would be, but with the same dramatic implications for the collective psyche. The two pressing reasons for why we have to make a choice: we can either go with the ecstatic flow of extraordinary events or stubbornly hold on to the old reality and risk being pulled under by annihilating forces. The global financial meltdown and the environmental crisis are evidence of a paradigm shift.  We are living in a time in which new myths are being created.  The stories bubble up to the surface from in between the seismic collisions of world culture—ecstatic “mega-ritual” events that take us out of our everyday understanding of the world—defying the language and the logic of average existence.

(via supersonicelectronic)

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought that astrology was an intuitive projection of man’s collective unconscious—connecting his psychology to the stars at such a deep level that no causal link can be found:

It is indeed very difficult to explain the astrological phenomenon. I am not in the least disposed to an either-or explanation. I always say that with a psychological explanation there is only the alternative: either and or! This seems to me to be the case with astrology too. - C.G. Jung in a letter to Hans Bender, April 10, 1958, C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 2, 1951-1961, p. 428.

It was this analogous, acausal connection (“either and or”) that made Jung believe that societal changes could be influenced by astrology even in a world in which its study was marginalized. In the 1950s he predicted that humanity would begin a new era “when the spring-point enters Aquarius.”  Jung was not specific about the date, but according to astrologers the fabled Age of Aquarius began during the early morning hours of this past Valentine’s Day.   The fact that this major astrological event is occurring along with seismic shifts in the plate tectonics of world culture could be the meaningful coincidence—or synchronicity—that fuels a “magical” change in the world. This Age of Aquarius that we find ourselves in is a time of a major paradigm shift—not in the clean slate way that he thought it would be, but with the same dramatic implications for the collective psyche. The two pressing reasons for why we have to make a choice: we can either go with the ecstatic flow of extraordinary events or stubbornly hold on to the old reality and risk being pulled under by annihilating forces.

The global financial meltdown and the environmental crisis are evidence of a paradigm shift.  We are living in a time in which new myths are being created.  The stories bubble up to the surface from in between the seismic collisions of world culture—ecstatic “mega-ritual” events that take us out of our everyday understanding of the world—defying the language and the logic of average existence.

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Glitch Nation (Part Deux-Doo-Do-DaDa-Da)

Part 1

(nequest)

The idea of the glitch gets further turned inside out later on in the Matrix trilogy, when Neo meets The Architect who explains that although the prophecy is that The One will destroy the Matrix, what he or she will really do is reboot it—causing everything to be destroyed and then created anew in a slightly different variation.  Among all the things accounted for in this new matrix will be a group of people destined to be the next rebel uprising. The truth is that there is no singular “truth”: all that exists outside the Matrix is another Matrix—similarly, there is no such thing as being outside of reality—our efforts to deconstruct it are what build it back again, efforts that begin with our awareness of the system as a system that can never be fully eradicated.  Something always escapes—something unexpected—like an accident or another kind of surprise—a tiny bit of slippage that’s able to regenerate itself.

Is it possible that this understanding about the value of mistakes, glitches, accidents and our inability to make anything (or anyone) truly gone for good has effected our collective attitude to such a degree to have fundamentally changed the nature of that reality?

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(via voodoovoodoo) Is it possible that by becoming hyper aware of the way we experience reality we can change that reality? Perhaps a UFO sighting IS the experience of that change. The object in the sky is a blind spot in the context of our gaze—something that escapes our understanding and doesn’t make sense—a tear along the seams of reality that we immediately fill with unconscious fantasies. For the scientist Jacques Vallée, like Jung, the primary focus was not upon the “realness” of the craft but upon the psychological aspects to the event of seeing it. Vallée believed that, “…mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power….” He offers the following analogy by way of explaining what he called (back in 1978) the “open source” nature of reality: Suppose you’re walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you’re like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you’ve found a control system. My point is that you can’t be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that’s exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don’t mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers. Vallée’s words bear an uncanny resemblance to the following scene from The Matrix—a movie that became a metaphor (myth) for the nature of reality at the turn of the millennium: [Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one] Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu. [Everyone freezes right in their tracks] Trinity: What did you just say? Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu. Trinity: What did you see? Cypher: What happened? Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it. Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat? Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure. Morpheus: Switch! Apoc! Neo: What is it? Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.(via voodoovoodoo) Is it possible that by becoming hyper aware of the way we experience reality we can change that reality? Perhaps a UFO sighting IS the experience of that change. The object in the sky is a blind spot in the context of our gaze—something that escapes our understanding and doesn’t make sense—a tear along the seams of reality that we immediately fill with unconscious fantasies. For the scientist Jacques Vallée, like Jung, the primary focus was not upon the “realness” of the craft but upon the psychological aspects to the event of seeing it. Vallée believed that, “…mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power….” He offers the following analogy by way of explaining what he called (back in 1978) the “open source” nature of reality: Suppose you’re walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you’re like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you’ve found a control system. My point is that you can’t be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that’s exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don’t mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers. Vallée’s words bear an uncanny resemblance to the following scene from The Matrix—a movie that became a metaphor (myth) for the nature of reality at the turn of the millennium: [Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one] Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu. [Everyone freezes right in their tracks] Trinity: What did you just say? Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu. Trinity: What did you see? Cypher: What happened? Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it. Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat? Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure. Morpheus: Switch! Apoc! Neo: What is it? Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

(via voodoovoodoo)

Is it possible that by becoming hyper aware of the way we experience reality we can change that reality? Perhaps a UFO sighting IS the experience of that change. The object in the sky is a blind spot in the context of our gaze—something that escapes our understanding and doesn’t make sense—a tear along the seams of reality that we immediately fill with unconscious fantasies. For the scientist Jacques Vallée, like Jung, the primary focus was not upon the “realness” of the craft but upon the psychological aspects to the event of seeing it. Vallée believed that, “…mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power….” He offers the following analogy by way of explaining what he called (back in 1978) the “open source” nature of reality:

Suppose you’re walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you’re like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you’ve found a control system.

My point is that you can’t be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that’s exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don’t mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers.

Vallée’s words bear an uncanny resemblance to the following scene from The Matrix—a movie that became a metaphor (myth) for the nature of reality at the turn of the millennium:

[Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one]

Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.

[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]

Trinity: What did you just say?

Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you see?

Cypher: What happened?

Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.

Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?

Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure.

Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!

Neo: What is it?

Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

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(via supersonicelectronic) We tend to think of progress in terms of scientific inventions and improvements in medicine, travel and technology—but I believe that the advancement of the human spirit has more bearing on the quality of our lives.  The peaks and valleys of the story of our self-awareness are often visible only to an eye trained to read in between the lines of the facts and figures of history. They outline the true measure of  human evolution, which is in the amount of self-awareness attained by the general public. It might not be obvious but thanks to pop culture we recently advanced to a whole new level.  American inspired TV has taken over the world—and the internet has risen up alongside it primarily to give us a means to talk about our favorite shows and movies and stars who star in them. As a result we’ve reached a saturation point in which post-modern marketing is mass produced and served up in microwave-safe, pop art inspired everyman containers and packaging. Everyone knows what it is, even if they don’t know what it’s called. It’s a language filled with cues that run like a laugh track beneath and between our multi-media streams. It’s a brand new t-shirt with a retro slogan design. It’s the sample of a TV show in the middle of a hip-hop song, or a commercial about the making of a commercial that never actually shows the product its advertising. Marketers no longer expect people to buy into a straightforward message—instead they build a pre-fab ironic critique into their campaigns. I’m writing this in a way that makes it sound like a purely bad thing, but that’s not my intention:  post-post modernism is neither good nor bad, just like post-modernism wasn’t either extreme, nor modernism before it…they are merely stages of understanding in the evolution of the human spirit.  From the all-plastic center of post-modern meaningless gleams the 9/11 center—in which meaning was simultaneously destroyed and disseminated—the need to feel blew out across the country like the burning dust that blew across the city. In fact, everyday post-9/11, post-post modernism has become self-aware to the point of paranoia— it is our own gaze looking back at us—our own psychic projections that we see in the sky as well as on the TV screen. This is a moment of cultural confusion—of mashed-up disjointedness and TiVo’d happy moments. We’re at the moment in time when the DVD has ended and we can’t find the remote and we’re too lazy to get up…so the menu sequence plays over and over. There’s a handful of frames and a bit of a broken song followed by short pause before repeating—over and over, the way a CD used to skip. This is our reality—the next step is not to turn it off but to fall asleep with it on, and dream a new life based on it—a remix of a sequence from a TV season—a series of weekday evenings strung together in a beautiful silver disc—dangling like a large pendant from a necklace. The dream becomes reality. (no wonder we call the plastic boxes CDs and DVDs come in “jewel cases”) Writing this reminds me that Jung had a dream that he recounted in his autobiography of “lens shaped” flying saucer in the shape of a telescope—which led Jung to wonder whether he was dreaming the UFO, or whether it was dreaming him…(via supersonicelectronic) We tend to think of progress in terms of scientific inventions and improvements in medicine, travel and technology—but I believe that the advancement of the human spirit has more bearing on the quality of our lives.  The peaks and valleys of the story of our self-awareness are often visible only to an eye trained to read in between the lines of the facts and figures of history. They outline the true measure of  human evolution, which is in the amount of self-awareness attained by the general public. It might not be obvious but thanks to pop culture we recently advanced to a whole new level.  American inspired TV has taken over the world—and the internet has risen up alongside it primarily to give us a means to talk about our favorite shows and movies and stars who star in them. As a result we’ve reached a saturation point in which post-modern marketing is mass produced and served up in microwave-safe, pop art inspired everyman containers and packaging. Everyone knows what it is, even if they don’t know what it’s called. It’s a language filled with cues that run like a laugh track beneath and between our multi-media streams. It’s a brand new t-shirt with a retro slogan design. It’s the sample of a TV show in the middle of a hip-hop song, or a commercial about the making of a commercial that never actually shows the product its advertising. Marketers no longer expect people to buy into a straightforward message—instead they build a pre-fab ironic critique into their campaigns. I’m writing this in a way that makes it sound like a purely bad thing, but that’s not my intention:  post-post modernism is neither good nor bad, just like post-modernism wasn’t either extreme, nor modernism before it…they are merely stages of understanding in the evolution of the human spirit.  From the all-plastic center of post-modern meaningless gleams the 9/11 center—in which meaning was simultaneously destroyed and disseminated—the need to feel blew out across the country like the burning dust that blew across the city. In fact, everyday post-9/11, post-post modernism has become self-aware to the point of paranoia— it is our own gaze looking back at us—our own psychic projections that we see in the sky as well as on the TV screen. This is a moment of cultural confusion—of mashed-up disjointedness and TiVo’d happy moments. We’re at the moment in time when the DVD has ended and we can’t find the remote and we’re too lazy to get up…so the menu sequence plays over and over. There’s a handful of frames and a bit of a broken song followed by short pause before repeating—over and over, the way a CD used to skip. This is our reality—the next step is not to turn it off but to fall asleep with it on, and dream a new life based on it—a remix of a sequence from a TV season—a series of weekday evenings strung together in a beautiful silver disc—dangling like a large pendant from a necklace. The dream becomes reality. (no wonder we call the plastic boxes CDs and DVDs come in “jewel cases”) Writing this reminds me that Jung had a dream that he recounted in his autobiography of “lens shaped” flying saucer in the shape of a telescope—which led Jung to wonder whether he was dreaming the UFO, or whether it was dreaming him…

(via supersonicelectronic)

We tend to think of progress in terms of scientific inventions and improvements in medicine, travel and technology—but I believe that the advancement of the human spirit has more bearing on the quality of our lives.  The peaks and valleys of the story of our self-awareness are often visible only to an eye trained to read in between the lines of the facts and figures of history. They outline the true measure of  human evolution, which is in the amount of self-awareness attained by the general public. It might not be obvious but thanks to pop culture we recently advanced to a whole new level.  American inspired TV has taken over the world—and the internet has risen up alongside it primarily to give us a means to talk about our favorite shows and movies and stars who star in them. As a result we’ve reached a saturation point in which post-modern marketing is mass produced and served up in microwave-safe, pop art inspired everyman containers and packaging. Everyone knows what it is, even if they don’t know what it’s called. It’s a language filled with cues that run like a laugh track beneath and between our multi-media streams. It’s a brand new t-shirt with a retro slogan design. It’s the sample of a TV show in the middle of a hip-hop song, or a commercial about the making of a commercial that never actually shows the product its advertising. Marketers no longer expect people to buy into a straightforward message—instead they build a pre-fab ironic critique into their campaigns.

I’m writing this in a way that makes it sound like a purely bad thing, but that’s not my intention:  post-post modernism is neither good nor bad, just like post-modernism wasn’t either extreme, nor modernism before it…they are merely stages of understanding in the evolution of the human spirit.  From the all-plastic center of post-modern meaningless gleams the 9/11 center—in which meaning was simultaneously destroyed and disseminated—the need to feel blew out across the country like the burning dust that blew across the city.

In fact, everyday post-9/11, post-post modernism has become self-aware to the point of paranoia— it is our own gaze looking back at us—our own psychic projections that we see in the sky as well as on the TV screen.

This is a moment of cultural confusion—of mashed-up disjointedness and TiVo’d happy moments. We’re at the moment in time when the DVD has ended and we can’t find the remote and we’re too lazy to get up…so the menu sequence plays over and over. There’s a handful of frames and a bit of a broken song followed by short pause before repeating—over and over, the way a CD used to skip. This is our reality—the next step is not to turn it off but to fall asleep with it on, and dream a new life based on it—a remix of a sequence from a TV season—a series of weekday evenings strung together in a beautiful silver disc—dangling like a large pendant from a necklace.

The dream becomes reality.

(no wonder we call the plastic boxes CDs and DVDs come in “jewel cases”)

Writing this reminds me that Jung had a dream that he recounted in his autobiography of “lens shaped” flying saucer in the shape of a telescope—which led Jung to wonder whether he was dreaming the UFO, or whether it was dreaming him…

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Numbers Aren’t Really Real…

but the stories we tell about them are…

(Mighty Real)

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.

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“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to the flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

—CG Jung, On Synchronicity, pgs 109-110
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