MonthJuly 2006

Good news: Doomsday has been postponed

This is actually another oldie from archives:

THE end is not as nigh as we thought. Scientists have found a mistake in the standard account of the future fate of the solar system and now believe that the Earth will not be destroyed when the Sun runs out of fuel.

For decades, astronomy textbooks have insisted that the Earth will be engulfed in an inferno billions of years from now as the Sun burns up its nuclear fuel and swells to become a gigantic red star.

[…]

Calculations based on this standard theory suggested that it would balloon out and engulf the Earth about 7.5 billion years from now.

According to the team from Sussex University, however, these calculations missed out a crucial effect: the loss of mass by the ageing Sun as it expands and its gravity weakens.

Taking this effect into account, the team found that the Earth would manage to dodge a fiery fate, its orbit expanding away from the swelling Sun.

Full Story: The Telegraph.

Now that’s what I call EsoTech…

ekg fire machine

I’ve posted this before, but it’s another one of those things that’s so cool it deserves re-posting.

Above is a hacked EKG unit that pulses the fire ring with the users heart beat. I want one.

Monkeyview: Biomorphic Input Machines

(via LVX23)

NLP demonology

Everyone’s favorite heretical Scientologist Channel Null drops some knowledge about NLP demonology:

Having generated some buzz with the previous piece on employing NLP demonology to get wealthy, I figure it’s time to revisit the process a little. In the initial installment, we focused almost entirely on the disciplining of those untoward thought-forms that redirect our mental processing power away from a more united, substantial goals. Browbeating and asserting authority over the rogue memeplexes inside your skull most certainly will accomplish that; the act, however, of entering an environment just to torture a poor, misguided neurosis into submission won’t happen without leaving some scars. Not only is smacking these things around all the time just ugly, it forces the practitioner into a dominator top-space that, while interesting to explore, can generate a sort of obsession that might take weeks to work out and will undoubtedly cause some trouble; never mind the extent to which the male dominator role gets overplayed in our society.

Full Story: Dark Science and Infernal Art.

And speaking of Scientology, Fenris 23 muses on the vitalist aspect of dianetics.

Update: Fenris muses furthur.

Magick for Materialists: The Basic Pattern

John Henderson makes the case for magick:

Humans are soft, weak creatures with mediocre hearing and eyesight. We’re clever, but in terms of raw problem-solving power, we’re not exceptionally so. Yet we have something, some characteristic, some edge… some mojo. A magick so tremendous that it more than makes up for all of our myriad weaknesses and inabilities and allows us not just to survive, but to thrive in even the most godawful conditions.

I offer that the difference is our ability to match patterns. More accurately, it’s our ability to abstract patterns – to see the patterns of the patterns. We can metathink. It is this facility that underlies every other mental ability we have, especially language. Perhaps it even leads inescapably to consciousness.

Full Story: Discordian Research Technology.

Occult Priestcraft

The first place I ever saw the phrase Occult Priestcraft was in Liber Null and Psychonaut, by Peter Carroll. Since all anyone seems to remember of Carroll is pieces of Liber MMM and a misunderstanding of his opposition to mysticism, and considering the recent debates here and the general clamoring for something new I thought now would be an especially auspicious to visit this portion of Carrolls work. Hopefully this will give people a wider and more accurate view of the chaos current, as well as provide some food for thought in relation to role of communities like key23.

Full Story: Key 23.

Update: The second part is here.

Invisible Social Revolution: part one

Fenris 23:

There is a recurring trope among social circles that I drift though to want to refer to themselves as a tribe. Someone who sees things in terms of a developmental levels theory such as the Spiral Dynamics theory popularized by Ken Wilber might be tempted to classify this as an indicator of a lower level behaviour or social structure.

However, the behaviour being labeled tribal is not identical to the older forms under that name. Older tribe forms were based around interrelated extended family groups whereas these new “tribes” are generally assumed to be constructed of non-related individuals, exceptions of course exist.

Full Story: Isle of Lyngvi.

A change in the winds

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably sensed this coming. Expect a slight change in direction here, nothing radical. I’m just going with the flow. Where am I going with all this knowledge and experience I’ve been acquiring? Here is an idea:

Fell says:

Because, really, all the counterculture and occultism is, is simply another approach to trying to understand the world. Whether it’s the best one is very much debateable in my opinion, but at the end of the day there are a lot of people that want to be successful, make enough to get by, and help others. While occultists may be focusing on problems too deep to be adequately acted upon by their current capacity for social interaction, many brilliant thinkers out there are innovating new ways (thinking magically and manifesting intent) and aiding their communities.

Manuel De Landa says:

Today I see art students trained by guilt-driven semioticians or post-modern theorists, afraid of the materiality of their medium, whether painting, music, poetry or virtual reality (since, given the framework dogma, every culture creates its own reality). The key to break away from this is to cut language down to size, to give it the importance it deserves as a communications medium, but to stop worshipping it as the ultimate reality. Equally important is to adopt a hacker attitude towards all forms of knowledge: not only to learn UNIX or Windows NT to hack this or that computer system, but to learn economics, sociology, physics, biology to hack reality itself. It is precisely the ‘can do’ mentality of the hacker, naive as it may sometimes be, that we need to nurture everywhere.

Calligraphy

calligraphy

(found on A Day in the Life).

(update: Brenden tells me this is from Sinfest).

Urban magic on the Barbelith Wiki

Various threads and links related to urban magic.

Barbelith: Urban Mage.

Systems, ciphers, and the dirty little secret of self-improvement

I was looking for something else in the 43 Folders archives, and came across this gem of an article:

My theory is that the secret code for most self-improvement systems-from Getting Things Done through Biofeedback and the Atkins diet-is not hard to break; any idea that helps you to become more self-aware can usually help you to reach a goal or affect a favorable solution. That’s pretty much the entire bag of doughnuts right there.

Self-improvement juju works not because of magic beans or the stones in your soup pot; it works because a smart ‘system’ can become a satisfying cipher for framing a problem and making yourself think about solutions in an ordered way. Systems help you minimize certain kinds of feedback while amplifying others.

In the comments, ex-psyop Adam Greenfield says:

In my experience, the most elegant statement of this insight is something I’ve heard floating around the Special Ops community, and nowhere else: ‘Control follows awareness.’

Full Story: 43 Folders.

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