BRANDTRUEBOY

Current flavors in the ever-morphing mix:

Online telepathy
Graffiti
Andy Warhol
Fiction

supernatural research center:

(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.

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.

Comments (View)

trixietreats:

seditionsgraphiques:

are2:

Screw Loose

Today’s perfect blue September sky drenched the city in crystal splashes of light reflected off of windows and glass building facades—cool dark shadows gathered at the edges of fountains and subway entrances, where office workers enjoyed abbreviated cigarettes and attenuated cell phone conversations…

If I squint my eyes the picture blurs and it’s 8 years ago…the see-saw of nostalgia goes up and down and I’m happy then sad then happy again…my love of life and this city rising high like smoke before falling back to Earth with a stomach clenching THUD…

Everything seems the same but I know it’s not. What happened to us on that day? What happened to me?

What have I become?

[9/11 opened a door to another universe—hence the plethora of doubles (especially double “ones”—which signify a gate) surrounding the event itself and appearing throughout popular culture in the months preceding it. A cursory glance reveals there are the two ones in the date of 9/11 and two planes that struck The Twin Towers, phallic skyscraper symbols of a capitalist power so great that it precluded all critique by already including its own opposition and meta-discourse, while at the same time resonating with the power of the greater two pyramids of Giza. There’s the phantasmal appearance of Frank and his twin rabbit ears in Donnie Darko (U.S. release date=1/19/01, an inversion of 9/11/01). The ears resonate with the idea of the rabbit hole as a doorway to a magical dimension in Alice in Wonderland. This other world exists within a surprisingly close proximity to our own reality, like Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings—a place described by Tolkien as being on our own Earth but “at a different stage of imagination”. The cinematic adaptation of this epic was shot between the twin doublings of October 11, 1999 and December 22, 2000, the second installment (entitled, The Two Towers) was released in 2002 (a year of two twos) and includes a character called Gollum—a creation consisting of half real actor and half CGI. Each of his scenes had to be filmed twice, the end result being a doubling of frames, a doubling of technology and humanity, and a doubling of fact and fiction.]

∞ permalink
posted 1 Sep 2009
tags:
- fiction
- supernatural research center
via trixietreats

Comments (View)

I AM BRIDGE. …a reply in the form of a digression to @seallion

The Bridge

by Franz Kafka

I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I lay over a ravine. My toes on one side, my fingers clutching the other, I had clamped myself fast into the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Far below brawled the icy trout stream. No tourist strayed to this impassable height, the bridge was not yet traced on any map. So I lay and waited; I could only wait. Without falling, no bridge, once spanned, can cease to be a bridge.

It was toward evening one day- was it the first, was it the thousandth? I cannot tell- my thoughts were always in confusion and perpetually moving in a circle. It was toward evening in summer, the roar of the stream had grown deeper, when I heard the sound of a human step! To me, to me. Straighten yourself, bridge, make ready, railless beams, to hold up the passenger entrusted to you. If his steps are uncertain, steady them unobtrusively, but if he stumbles show what you are made of and like a mountain god hurl him across to land.

He came, he tapped me with the iron point of his stick, then he lifted my coattails with it and put them in order upon me. He plunged the point of his stick into my bushy hair and let it lie there for a long time, forgetting me no doubt while he wildly gazed around him. But then – I was just following him in thought over mountain and valley – he jumped with both feet on the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, not knowing what was happening. Who was it? A child? A dream? A wayfarer? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer? And I turned so as to see him. A bridge to turn around! I had not yet turned quiet around when I already began to fall, I fell and in a moment I was torn and transpierced by the sharp rocks which had always gazed up at me so peacefully from the rushing water.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

∞ permalink
posted 25 Aug 2009
tags:
- awareness
- supernatural research center

Comments (View)

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 20^th 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.

Comments (View)

(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.

Comments (View)

richndelicious:

dutchwideweb:

via images.magicseaweed.com

How we look at something effects the nature of what we look at.

Each one of us is the Event Horizon—

The Door that seperates the infinitely big from the infinitely small.

“You are the center of your universe, but so is everyone else.” —Nassim Haramein

Comments (View)

$eatsleepdraw: “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.$ $eatsleepdraw: “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.$

eatsleepdraw:

“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.

Comments (View)

(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.

Comments (View)

The Online Mega-Ritual of Michael Jackson’s Death

@pareidoliac we have to respect MJ, a world monarch, bigger of course than Iran, America even…

“Mediocrity was not a concept that would even for a second enter Michael Jackson’s being or actions…..

“I became very ill and emotionally/spiritually exhausted in my quest to save him from certain self-destructive behavior and from the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him. ….

—Lisa Marie Presley

Its close to midnight and something evils lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight you see a sight that almost stops your heart
You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes,
Youre paralyzed
Chorus
cause this is thriller, thriller night
And no ones gonna save you from the beast about strike
You know its thriller, thriller night
Youre fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller tonight…

For over a month now I keep coming back to this post about mega-rituals, for some reason unable to wrap it up, but now it seems I was unconsciously waiting for the sad occasion of Michael Jackson’s death to deepen the grounds of understanding. I learned about the concept of a “mega-ritual” from the writings of synchromystic blogger Jake Kotze—although he eventually swapped out the term for the more optimistic sounding “Starg8”. As he writes on his blog, “The Blob”:

The Mega Rituals mentioned in this post; JFK, Watergate and 911, massively challenged and changed collective perception about the tenacious whorl called America. By implication and extension challenging the very foundation of consensus reality.
What ever isn’t in alignment with the Gr8 WaterG8 mentioned above will be swept away or swallowed by StarG8 Mega Rituals.

I believe WE will all be massively surprised in the ‘near future’ by what structures survive as things align and which dissolve under the pressure of change.

In keeping with the spirit of this change The Blob NOW distances its mercurial form from the term Mega Ritual.
Its essence will remain in the blanket and flexible term StarG8.

A mega-ritual (a term which I will stick with for the time being) is an event in which people from all around the world pay attention to the same thing as it happens in real time, which is to say, “live and without commercial interruption”. This group experience of universal nowness only became possible with the advent of cable news and the internet. The mediated reality of Michael Jackson’s death is similar in scale and scope to the attention focused upon Obama’s Election, the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe and 9/11. The difference was that 9/11, Obama’s election, and Hurricane Katrina were each an even mix of live television broadcast and internet feedback. In contrast, Michael Jackson’s death is an almost entirely internet based mega-ritual, similar to Sully Sullenberger’s “miracle” landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River: while there was no direct footage of the event as it was unfolding, there was a nearly immediate creation of a feedback loop on the internet, primarily on social media outlets such as Twitter.

Evan Gruzis

An internet based mega-ritual is different from those based on TV. The specificity of the image that television provides allows for the worldwide attention to be very finely focused, which has a more concentrated psychic effect—perhaps to the point of overwhelming those who experience it. On 9/11, millions of people watched as the second plane struck the South tower—literally scorching the footage into the collective psyche so that it would exist forever like a burn scar. On the internet the information “hits” in a more diffused, disseminated way—like a virus or a weed—it insinuates itself into our psyche in a rhizomatic way—growing offshoots that operate via a decentralized. self-organizing system. There is no iconic image that represents the event—it happens in the form of many-to-many in doses of one-to-one: via conversation, e-mail, the sharing of youtube videos, and a flurry of short, deeply felt blog posts as well as Twitter and Twitter-esque status updates. There were no live shots of Jackson’s ambulance or press conference updates from his team of doctors—but we did get a few shots of the press itself gathered outside the hospital. This kind of self-reference is a sign that a mass catharsis is brewing. The story was still breaking when it was confirmed that Jackson had in fact, died. Many felt the need to wait for Big Media news outlet such as CNN to confirm the news before they believed it. The mega-ritual was experienced as the internet reaction to his death—in which millions of people got online at the same time to communicate about the same thing. It is this togetherness that makes up the core of a mega-ritual. It is not the event as a whole but the part that is experienced by large groups of people as it unfolds in real time. The mega-ritual part of the Kennedy Assassination, for example, didn’t begin at the moment the gunshots rang out in Texas, but rather shortly after, when the nation gathered together around their radio and TV sets in the interim between the shooting and Kennedy’s death. During that in-between time there was a mass focusing of awareness as everyone paid attention to the same thing at the same time. For many, this had the effect of providing a realization of oneness with everyone and everything, while at the same time throwing each and every person back upon themselves so that they confronted/celebrated/condemned their own unique individuality. This is why everyone who was alive in the 60s remembers where they were when they heard about JFK—just as a couple of generations earlier everyone would forever remember where they were and what they were doing on 9/11.

Mega-ritual events teach us that we are a part of something much bigger than just our own lives. Michael Jackson appealed to such a broad demographic that EVERYONE knew who he was, regardless of skin color or nationality. He was a true international star, as well as a true enigma—two aspects that will help propel his legend further, for it is the darkness of many buried things that seemed to haunt Michael Jackson. In these days after his death all you hear is his music—wherever you go. Michael is in the clubs and the bodegas, the bars and the baby stores, the Gap and the Highline, Chelsea and the street. Similar to 9/11 the feeling of togetherness lingers on, but unlike 9/11 we have a ready made background soundtrack as we exchange stories of when we first heard Michael, or where we were when the Thriller album blew up. The music increases the vibe as you exchange winks with shopkeepers and dance in the sidewalk outside a bar blasting “Billy Jean” with its doors wide open.

Music goes beyond images, to open up pathways of being long covered up in our brains. Music connects us to that primitive part of ourselves—the raging, dancing animal enigma. Perhaps the reactivation of those channels is Michael’s gift to us now.

Don’t stop till u get enough (cuz this is Thriller nite)…