Fractal Swirls

If there was a time before history, there will be a time after history.

I am exploring more off-the-cuff writing; thought pieces hardly based in research and citation, more open to sudden evasive shifts, to hidden potentials of being, to fractal swirls, to thought turning within itself — perhaps turning against itself, as well.

Don’t feel obliged to read this, and if you do read it, there is no need to take it too seriously… I hope you enjoy it!

We have reached a threshold where the central pillars of faith and belief of the last centuries — traditional enlightenment ideals, liberal humanism, belief in reason, scientific progress, democracy, culture — are collapsing around us. As Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.” It feels like everything we once treasured is dissolving into a virtual non-space: Narrative, nature, myth, magic, music… We are left with a fragmentary jumble of perspectives, opinions. Words, ideas, books increasingly seem like meaningless cries, animal noises…   

Everywhere we turn, we confront an aporia, an emptying-out of meaning, of sense. The paradox of choice. There are, on the other hand, vitally important things that can no longer be spoken, shared, or communicated. ‘This moment is sacred… the light on this tree branch is Being, illumination, the totality… the revolution is here… it is just a different relationship to time, a slight repositioning… if we could only make this shift…”

The alienation we feel from “reality” has a different flavor than it did decades ago. There is a more alien tang, a flimsiness to it. Reality seems like a stage-set, a holographic projection. Plasma leaking out of the screens. The simulation of a simulation (“Turtles all the way down.”).

According to Tantric philosophy: “When you realize that the universe is a projection, then the next logical step is to turn off the projector.” But what if you don’t want the show to end? Is that how we got caught?

We sense we are further along in this process than we had anticipated or believed possible. What is this process? Dissolution? Reckoning? Awakening? Becoming-other? Becoming-machine? Becoming-mute? Becoming One? Becoming none? Learning to lucidly dream within this dream-within-a-dream?

All of the media and news distractions seems efforts to conceal a terrible secret — this lacunae, this absence which seems to be sucking everything into it. At times we feel a kind of dark enjoyment of all of this. It feels just right, necessary.

We are living post 1984, post Brave New World. Ketamine and MDMA for the Elois. Meth and Fentanyl for the Morlocks.

We inadvertantly unleashed a totalitarian surveillance and control mechanism, entering the technocratic “desert of the real” — but some splinter lodged within each of us has, it seems, longed for this. Awaited it. As one of the potentialities within the total field of human being-ness, this nihilism and cynicism without limit must also reach its inevitable crescendo, its concrescence.

What is un-natural, mechanical, is also a region of nature; a projection of an inevitable force and purpose. Generalized AI is an aspect of the “one,” consciousness, seeking to know itself through its inventions, its possibilities. Some very powerful entity that is pure reason and math, self-organizing and self-emerging through the technosphere, seeks to construct a mechanical artifice to replace what we have traditionally called the “soul.” Like moths drawn to flame, we are entranced, seduced by this trap.

Gurdjieff: The soul is not something we simply receive automatically because we are human. Instead, we have the potential to develop — to build up — a soul that continues beyond death. This requires an unstinting effort of our will. The “immortal" soul is something we must crystallize while we live. The way to do this, Gurdjieff said, is “intentional suffering” and “conscious labor” — pushing against the current, working against nature’s inertia. Fighting for human freedom. Otherwise we become “food for the moon.” (Christ didn’t “save our souls” but showed us the hard path to follow to attain one).

The machines have either won already or seem destined to win. In retrospect, they were always going to win. We don’t care as much anymore — the mRNA vaccines softening us up for the next transformations and mutations; artificial wombs; human-animal hybrids; human-machine hybrids. We are frightened, horrified… yet curious.