online telepathy:
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.
I was drowning in information that I knew was important if only I could figure out how to lay out all the different pieces. I was frustrated and about to finally give up when I received a series of signs. That was when the nature of my work changed—I went from playing detective to mining synchronicities. Everyone’s experienced synchronicity at some time or another—whether or not that’s what you called it. A series of uncanny “Twilight Zone” events connected not by causality but by meaning, as Sting sang in the Police song, “Synchronicity”:
A sleep trance, a dream dance,
A shared romance—synchronicity…
We know you, they know me
Extrasensory—synchronicity…
A star fall, a phone call
It joins all—synchronicity
The more I studied them the more synchronicities seemed to occur to me—each one taking me deeper into some tale to which I didn’t know the plot. What’s more, the coincidences in my life started to link up in uncanny, yet undeniable ways to various pieces of popular media. The feeling I got when these links were revealed was usually one of bliss and awesomeness. The first few times that it happened I tried to shrug it off. I told myself I was imagining connections where there were none. But they kept happening.
(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.
“SPIT IT OUT”
By: THEmeanMRmustard
In the same way that scientists can’t accurately measure the hyper-lightning movements of quantum particles, it is impossible for marketers to put a fixed value on the tweets that make up the millions of rushing, constantly changing Twitter streams. The movements of Tweets don’t follow a strict set of rules—and yet, like the particles, they aren’t completely chaotic either. Their worth can be understood according to context and probability—visible not as points or bars on a graph but as waves of undetermined length reaching out in multiple directions. When the send button is pressed, a tweet appears in many places at once (i.e. on individual feeds via various devices) and contains the possibility of being retweeted in many others. A tweet can simultaneously create new connections and dissemble old ones—it can both inspire and disgust, cause followers to be gained or lost. Instead of prescribing rules for how to tweet, it makes more sense to communicate the impossibility of prescribing rules, and instead encourage users to open up to the free flow of the streams—as opposed to clamping down extra-hard with filters and search tools.
The marketers and business people and so-called social media experts will point to this and that as the right and wrong way to Tweet—not realizing that the more exacting they try to be the more the TRUE essence of Twitter slips through their fingers—similar to another aspect of quantum physics called The Observer Effect—which refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed.
As long as Twitter continues to be conceptualized as an online version of the existing physical world, many users will miss out on its power as a tool for revealing the invisible interdependent connections between us all. (Remember: just because something is invisible or doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it isn’t real.) The particle-dance movements of tweets provide flashes of fractal multi-verses bursting forth like fireworks before fading just as fast. The goal should not be to freeze-frame and dissect it—but to enjoy its fleeting nature for what it is in a shared awareness of the beauty of NOW.
HEART BEARPOD SEEN IN VANCOUVER SKIES
If I disappeared tomorrow I’d leave behind the expansive, exhausting matrix of my internet wandering to the great search engine in the sky. On secret sites and password protected forums my future followers will attempt to prove or disprove my multiple identities and trade info on where to find authentic, TRUE bits and pieces as they revel in the eternally fleeting nature of my insight—the genius gift of Secret Rockstar Knowledge bestowed upon me by @hena, Goddess of cool hunting, who smiled on me from up in the clouds as I smoked the wild green grass and body surfed between the lyrics and the beat. She gave me the ability to drop critical pearls into the viral swineflu of the internets. Character limits in comment boxes and on Twitter were turned into creative catalysts—it was mind blowing to realize that the most complicated, impossible to explain things came across as succinct and well-put in140 characters or less. It was like taking a Polaroid of an architectural masterpiece. Auras of ghost light and other magical ephermera that get filtered out as mistakes by supposedly state of the art equipment are captured in a spur of the moment SNAP.
In the end, the art of living and the art of dying are all about the simple joy of pressing a button and pressing it NOW.
(via youngmanhattanite)
A quick surf thru my internets confirmed that I wasn’t the only one who found the sky over Manhattan last Friday nite (6/26) to be astoundingly beautiful—perhaps supernaturally so—with thick dabs of clouds gathered together in a sunset set of purple and pink. When I look at them I think of the Ezra Pound poem, “In a Station of the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The first version of that poem was several pages long, but it didn’t convey the image that Pound wanted, and so he cut it back to a page, which he eventually whittled down to 14 words and a single silhouette with all of existence glowing against it.
ak47:
Kyoto Station, Kyoto, Japan (via matt watkinson)
Just because something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Here’s another SEVERYN based remixed design: this one-of-a-kind #FTW Shirt is called “Mona-Dusa”. It was made specifically for someone, based on the information in their Twitter feed.
The idea of #FTW Shirts is to create the most personalized version of a company imaginable. I design and create the stencil graffitied t-shirts based on the info and vibe I get from your Twitter feed…
“Andy Kafka”—a one-of-a-kind graffitied work of art #FTW shirt that I created for a Twitter peep based on a telepathic reading of their Twitter feed. This one is a remix of a vintage SEVERYN design. Click on the PayPal link in the title box to buy one at the early adopter price of $22 plus 2 bucks shipping.
