MonthFebruary 2011

Psi-Fi: The Feedback Loop Between Pop Culture and Paranormal Experience

Matrix and Avatar painting from Wat Rong Khun Buddhist temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand
A painting from the Wat Rong Khun Buddhist temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand from FEEL

Interesting article by Professor in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and author of Authors of the Impossible Jeffrey J. Kripal on the feedback loops between paranormal experience (or what Susan Blackmore calls “exceptional human experiences”) and popular culture:

A Buddhist temple featuring Superman and a Marvel comic reproducing an actual UFO photo? A pulp fiction editor using his own precognitive dreams to write short stories and a sci-fi master getting zapped by an alien space machine? What is going on here? It would be easy to fall into an either-or mentality, as in “This happened, and that didn’t.” or “This is true, and that is false.” That, I want to suggest, is precisely what is wrong with much of our thinking about popular culture and the paranormal. Much better to pay attention to all the back-and-forth loops, that is, the incredibly messy, “loopy” ways in which popular culture informs paranormal events, which in turn informs popular culture, which in turn informs … well, you get my point. I mean, where exactly are we supposed to draw a line between the real and the unreal in, say, a graphic novel and an actual UFO sighting? It would be easy to suggest that the graphic novel is pure fiction and the UFO—whatever it was—non-fiction, except for the uncomfortable fact that the UFO encounters of the second half of the twentieth century often followed, down to precise details, the pulp fiction fantasies of the first half (for more on this, see my discussion of Bertrand Méheust in Authors of the Impossible). It would also be easy to call it all fiction, except for the uncomfortable fact that people really experience such things, all the time. There were F-16s chasing that floating Wal-Mart. Not your typical piece of fiction.

Boing Boing: Psi-Fi

This reminds me a lot of Erik Davis’s book TechGnosis. Erik, incidentally, is now a student at Rice.

Thomas Edison’s Predictions for the Year 2011, from 1911

Thomas Edison

In 1911 the Miami Metropolis printed an article of predictions from Thomas Edison. Here’s an excerpt:

Already, Mr. Edison tells us, the steam engine is emitting its last gasps. A century hence it will be as remote as antiquity as the lumbering coach of Tudor days, which took a week to travel from Yorkshire to London. In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world’s machinery), generated by “hydraulic” wheels.

But the traveler of the future, says a writer in Answers, will largely scorn such earth crawling. He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside.

The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost — of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradle; his father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother’s boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies.

Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound.

Paleofuture: Edison’s Predictions for the Year 2011 (1911)

Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption

sleeping woman

Replaying memories while people are awake leaves their memories subject to tinkering. But reactivating memories during sleep protects them from interference, researchers in Germany and Switzerland report online January 23 in Nature Neuroscience.

The finding shows that the brain handles memories differently during sleep than while awake, says Sara Mednick, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved in the research. Armed with this new knowledge, she says, therapists may be able to destabilize traumatic memories and overwrite the bad memories with good ones, then solidify the new memory with a nap.

Wired: Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption

(image by mollyollyoxenfree)

Image to Publish Ziggy Marley’s Marijuanaman Comic

Marijuana Man

The series, created by Ziggy Marley, will be written by Joe Casey with art by Jim Mahfood:

Reggae star Ziggy Marley announced Thursday that his creation will be the latest superhero introduced to the comic-book lexicon.

According to a release from Image Comics, the company that’s putting out the book, Marijuanaman is a “noble extraterrestrial champion, who has arrived on Earth to deliver an important message and at the same time save his own planet.”

Spinner: Ziggy Marley Saves the Planet With ‘Marijuanaman’ Comic Book

(Thanks Mark!)

Interview with Timothy Wyllie of The Process Church of The Final Judgement

Timothy Wyllie

WFMU recently interviewed Timothy Wyllie, who was a member of The Process Church of The Final Judgement and is the author of Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment:

During the Process salon at the Anthology Film Archives right around when Love Sex Fear Death came out you mentioned that cults could be a good thing, that there were many benefits to you spending time in one. Could you describe examples of what a good cult experience would be?

The biggest benefit is that one gets to experience a kind of life that isn’t available under normal circumstances. This especially applies to reincarnates, who require an accelerated learning curve. Most western societies these days are both risk and pain averse. Cults allow those who need to go through their own pain and anger to do it in a safe situation. Cults can become a microcosm of society, so people in cults can experience a far wider array of possibilities like service, obedience, leadership, as well as what it’s like to live without personal possessions, money, and personal freedom. Celibacy for a period is also a necessary psychic/emotional antidote in an over-sexed society. Possibly the greatest gift a cult bestows is when one leaves it. One emerges back into life with the opportunity to follow one’s own drummer–free of parental etc influences, and understanding the dire consequences of ever giving away one’s power again.

If you were involved in the start of a new cult now in 2011 what would change compared to the Process? What would you focus on?

I wouldn’t. I feel cults have had their day. At this point in time and in a spiritual sense, it’s every person for themselves. Cults in the sixties and seventies were a kind of clean-up contingency. The were so many reincarnates who needed to work on themselves (and be worked on). The kids these days are different–they don’t really need cults the way we did.

And here’s him talking about drugs:

In this way one makes some unlikely allies. I found, for example, PCP/Angel Dust, contrary to its bad rap, to be the Queen of the concocted Entheogens and an invaluable ally to bust open my head. I like DMT–and have probably done it at least 100 times–but I find I can’t work with it. It just moves too fast. I suspect, for me anyway, Salvia is probably somewhat the same. Thing about entheogens is just because they get you there, doesn’t mean they keep you there. They are one way of opening the door, but the most important aspect of them is in the assimilation of the information into one’s life so as to transform it.

WMFU: My Chat with Timothy Wyllie About Angels, Cults, the Multiverse, & the Entheogenic Impulse

There’s so much good stuff in this interview. Please read the whole thing.

(Thanks Trevor)

More posts about The Process

Here’s another interview with Wyllie, from Dangerous Minds:

Love Sex Fear Death: Inside The Process Church of the Final Judgment with Timothy Wyllie from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Klintron Talks Ad-Hoc Networking on Web TV Show

You’ll only hear my voice, though, we didn’t do live video in. I’m talking about the subjects raised in my government-less Internet series. I start about 11:57 minutes in, and I’m followed by Johnny Diggz of Tropo and Geeks Without Bounds who talks about some of the more practical, boots on the ground type stuff people are doing to keep communications networks working during emergencies.

RIP Kenneth Grant

Magical Revival

Michael Staley of Starfire Publishing, the most recent publisher of Grant’s work, wrote:

Kenneth Grant died on 15th January 2011 after a period of illness. Our condolences go first and foremost to his family, whose privacy is something which we all wish to respect at this difficult time.

Kenneth Grant had an extraordinary life, and his work has a remarkable depth and breadth of magical and mystical insight. In particular, his monumental series of Typhonian Trilogies is creative, innovatory and inspiring, extending across thirty years from the publication of the opening volume The Magical Revival in 1972, to the appearance of the final volume The Ninth Arch in 2002. This is a substantial body of work, constituting a solid foundation for further development, widening and deepening in the years to come; his work will continue.

Starfire Publishing: In Memoriam: Kenneth Grant

(via Wes)

4 More Projects to Create a Government-less Internet

I did a follow-up to my story last week about wireless mesh network projects, adding four more projects to the original list of three.

ReadWriteWeb: 4 More Projects to Create a Government-less Internet

Also, I’ll be on This Week in Cloud Computing tomorrow around 3:45 PST talking about wireless ad-hoc networks.

Elementary Study of Symmetry Online Workshop, No Math Background Needed

Symmetry workshop poster

If you don’t know who Fadereu is, I’m not sure I can explain him quickly or accurately. For simplicity sake, he’s an Indian artist and mathematician – and he’s running an online workshop of the study of symmetry:

he KNK101 workshop introduces the elementary study of symmetry ( known as ‘group theory’) to an audience with no background in mathematics. This field of mathematics has very little to do with numbers, instead – it studies transformation and movement of abstract structures. The applications of group theory range from simple permutation puzzles and military or monetary cryptography to particle physics and general relativity, making it the central conceptual framework of our age.

The workshop is spread over 6 weeks ( or three fortnights ) and the details for registration are here. [ tldr: just drop me a mail at fadebox/gmail. The fee is $50 (international) and the equivalent Rs 2400 for India. Please hurry!]

Fadereu: KNK101 Workshop (Feb15-Mar30, 2011): The Complete Syllabus

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