Gaia is the word for "unity-of-life-processes". The experiment here is to unify the various threads of voice and sense of self together into an undivided unity. Spirituality, economics, politics, science and ordinary life interleaved.

Monday, February 28, 2005

Simulated "first drafts" and Nancy Kress

I found and read Nancy Kress' "Beginnings, Middles and Endings." It was marvellous.

Now my unconscious mind, given a formal structure decades more experienced than what I have used, is working to build stories like mad! As Shakti woke me today, stories were churning over in my mind like a turbulent river after snow has melted.

Kress, interestingly, recommends that makebelieve that you write a "simulation" instead of a "great story" because that simulation, when and if finished, will look like a first draft.

The rest of the book is such marvellous detailed work that it would take much time to detail, as much time as could be spent applying it. I made copious notes, anyway.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

A request for assistance with The History of Excellence

I just sent the following email to the spiritual group I belong to online:

'At present I am working on a nonfiction book entitled:
"The History of Excellence: Twenty Three Tales About
What's Wonderfully Right About Human Nature".

'Much of this project involves recontextualising the
central institutions and traditions of human societies
in the context of unconditional love, acknowledging
them as complete and perfect expressions of Divine
Grace.

'In many ways it is a popularisation, in the useful
sense of bringing abstract teachings to a wider
audience, of the spiritual principles I have learnt
through Dr Hawkins' writing.

'So I'm wondering how I might be able to get advice or
feedback from other spiritual students on the work.
None of the 23 stories are relevant enough to post on
the Group, obviously.

But perhaps you can recommend a course of action?'

It's basically a request for dedicated readers. I'll keep you posted on what unfolds.

On widgets, marketing matters, and title changes for the Gaia project

I have had a bit of a rush of ideas for widgets. I thought I would put them up here for a bit of an idea of how my dreambuilding's going. These are all possible widgets for The Biotech Age, formerly known as Return To Gaia before I cut the idea in half.

1. For purchases of the book, give access to three related short stories online for free.

2. Donate ten percent of the purchase of each book to a relevant NGO campaigning for responsible biotech.

3. The records here of writing the book can be condensed into an online record and used to market the book, and accessed for free.

4. "The Science Behind The Book", free online extra when you buy the book.

5. Publish an article on biotech in a Science magazine such as Scientific American.

6. Do an interview with Lynne Margulis, the microbiologist whose work inspired the book, and publish that free online.

7. Create an email list of visitors to the website for marketing future books of the series, in return for several of these free gifts.

8. Write a reader's discussion guide to the issues behind the book.

9. Write a short pitch for anyone interested in purchasing movie rights to the books - known as 'the elevator pitch', and put that on the site.

10. Make the titles of the books sound like blockbuster movie titles!

Now I took the original titles and fiddled them around to this:

Book One - The Biotech Age.
Book Two - The Gaian Age.
Book Three - The Space Age.
Book Four - The Solar Age.

Then I thought: they don't sound like blockbusters at all. So I came up with this

Blockbuster #1. "Life INC."

This neatly encapsulates the infringement of corporations and governments into a struggle for ownership of genetic code in the Biotech Age.

Blockbuster #2. "Earth (TM)"

The trademark symbol after Earth signifies the Gaian Age, where Gaia is a supercomputer with ownership of the planet to do as she wishes. It tells the story of the evacuation of Earth.

Blockbuster #3. "Spa(C)e" - where the (C) would be the copywrite symbol.

The copywrite symbol in space: this book is about struggles to copywrite, thieve, and protect software, genetic code, and neural and hormonal imprints of humans helplessly trapped orbiting an uninhabitable Gaian Earth with no other planet to go to.


and finally:

Blockbuster #4. "Soul OS."

This is a play on the Sol System, and the computer term OS, Operating System. The tale here of course is the Gaiaforming and colonisation by humans and biocomputers of the outermost regions of the Solar System. But it is also about the commodification of the human soul under interplanetary capitalism, and the twists in the fates of the downtrodden and losers in the deadly game of Space Capitalism.

LOLOLOL... what do you think?

A very special treat, blog readers, for you

May I proudly introduce to your the Locus-Award-winning, calibrating at a strong, hopeful and excellent 350 on the Hawkins scale

Goddesses, by Linda Nagata!

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/nagata/

ta-dah!

PS - This is a bloody marvellous story in a very rare subgenre of 'near-future Utopia'.

Forums for everything you could possibly want to know about SF writing and publishing

Asimovs discussion forum:

http://www.asimovs.com/discuss

Analog discussion forum:

http://www.analogsf.com/discus/

Magazines of Fantasy and Science Fiction discussion forum:

http://www.nightshadebooks.com/discus/messages/378/378.html?1109521568

Okay, for the writers: nightshadebooks has a HELL of a discussion list outside SF&F. But these are the three Pro Markets for Science Fiction.

The most urbane of the three is Asimovs, which covers the range of Science Fiction, whilst Analog is more reductive hard SF, and SF&F (obviously) includes fantasy.

Another market which appears to be Pro is www.SciFi.com/scifiction. I see on the site that they pay twenty cents a word up to thirty-five hundred dollars. Gaw-lee! :-)

Wishlist writing books for helping me finish my SF stories:

1. Beginnings, Middles, and End, by Nancy Kress
2. Revising Fiction, by David Madden

Friday, February 25, 2005

A Dream about thte History project

I woke up today after a fairly dramatic dream. A dark haired wrecked man was wandering around lamely with a certain magical tarot park. I stole the tarot pack from him, and then fell into this beachside park and tried to find a space to deal the cards but there wasn't enough space, because each card would fill the park up and ruin everyone's holiday, so I slunk down a street and into a dark house seeking a place to deal the cards, and couldn't find them.

Then I understood from the cards that the wreck had borrowed them from the library and I was therefore to return them if I didn't want to get in trouble. I looked and I saw I had them for a month, and I felt bad that I had taken them from the wreck, who had no use for them anyway.

The Shakti my cat woke me up and I was aware that the book project I mentioned earlier (the History of Excellence) is loosely based around the 23 major arcana, in just the sense that it forms an interlocking matrix of ideas and concepts and imagery, not in the traditional sense.

This maybe signifies that I have a month to write it in, and then I must effectively return the idea to the library from whence it came. It has to be wondered how effective the unconscious is in turning out work... since I consciously don't think this enough time given what's on my plate.

The way I visualise it is as 23 reports which I can sell separately. Each report makes several main points and tells a story around that point, and then gives a section of 'Ways to apply this idea'. I'll start now and see how I go!

The History of Excellence: Twenty-Three Tales of What's Wonderfully Right About Human Nature.

A Mob of Titles and Hawkinsian calibrations.


1. The History of Excellence: Twenty-Three Tales of What's Wonderfully Right About Human Nature. 520.

2. Reforming the West: Twenty Three True Tales of Transformation and What Parts You Can Play. 510.

3. The Best of The West:Why A Healthy Prosperous Future Has Its Roots In The Past. 500.

4. Supporting the Solution: How The Wisdom of the Past Automatically Supports Prosperity and Joy. 470.

5. Supporting Excellence: What We Must Relearn To Survive the Next Century. 300.

6. Systems of Excellence: How Integrity Safeguards Communal Prosperity. This tests weak, below 200.

7. The Good News Is, Everythings Perfect: the Bad News Is, Fixing Problems Won't Work. This test just over 200.


I think it's a case of "First thought best thought" here.

A night of the amazon dotcom carousel of crap

The link of tonight's blog entry is not recommended.

It is amazon's list of top hundred bestsellers. This is what middle america is buying, folks, and it ain't pretty.

Shallow materialism vies with...uh, weight loss books and, um, self-help from the latest televangelist.

Here is the cream of the crop of titles I found compelling. Note the similar syntactical structure.

- Good to Great: why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
- He’s just not that into you: the no-excuses truth to understanding guys.
- Guns, Germs and Steel: the fates of human societies.
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money--That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference.
- The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
- The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.
- Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives

These are the BEST of the crop, I mean to say! A few points are in order:

1. The Concept goes into ideally three words.
2. Then the Hook follows by delivering a specifc promise in accordance with a basic root instinct, or the setup for the first question.
3. The books are caturing to specific reader benefit, situated carefully within a sculpted context.
4. But here's the clincher: each of these books arises directly out of the personal life context of the author. If you test out this theory, you'll find that EVERY BOOK HERE is totally embedded in the life and personality of the writer. The importance of personal clarity in this process of product developement and marketing precision is key: these bestsellers are "high-touch" products, selling the intimacy with the author.

I emphasise these are the BEST. The rest, well, it's the regular carousel of crap you find on bestselling online lists. What a disappointment.

For myself, my book is tentatively entitled A History of Excellence. The focus is on what's right about history. So a possible title might be:

The History of Excellence: Twenty-Three Tales of What's Wonderfully Right About Human Nature.

This is good. But, to repeat one of the titles above, I need good to go GREAT. LOL! ;-)

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Friday. Return To Gaia/Biotech Age writing contemplations

I woke up with my friend Grayowl ringing from the Sunshine Coast. Turns out we have a second degree contact: Wayne, who visited my friends on Kangaroo Island, is partnered with Grayowl's mate Kai. Small world!

I then stumbled around talking to cats until the kettle had boiled a coffee. I sat down and reread my scribblings last night without enough savvy to even be bewildered. What was I writing? Huh?

Then coffee and ginseng kicked in and I felt a sudden savage surge of inspiration. I opened by my novel and began to write.

By the time the unconscious mind (thanking you!) had finished its marvellous work, I had written two thousand words. Lynette had finished her visit with Gurnanji, a scene which had stumped me for it's unexpected plot implications for two weeks or more. And Gurnanji had discussed and set up the subplot with the Tibetan rebels, aka the "Shambalists" lol, in reference to the myth of Shambala, the totalitarian new age paradise proposed by barbaric Tibetans. So the unconscious mind has rather marvellously set up the first and second Gaian experiments, up til the midpoint of the book, and I am greatly relieved.

So now it's out of the yak soup pan and into the Beijing political scene of 2050....aaargh! It's true, I admit: I have not got a very clear intent yet about what to do here, because the part played by the Chinese elite families is so radical and far-reaching in implications that I guess I can't quite trace it back through the plot to the present moment yet. I'm not quite sure what to set up here.

Anyways, I submitted the second chunk of chapters to www.critters.org with a second request for regular readers and accompanying sales pitch. The piece I am writing, when I compare it to the relatively few critters pieces I have reviewed, is fairly challenging text, so I reckon I will get an interested response from the right people sooner or later. Or I may have to simply track down and invite a microbiologist to read my novel, LOL.

Anyway, what follows here is an indepth contemplation of the setup and payoff in the coming chapters of the The Biotech Age. If writerly machinations don't interest you, STOP READING. :-))

So...

I know Valery defects to the Chinese after the first Gaian experiment, and flees to Australia to be with his father after the catastrophic second Gaian experiment. But how he exactly fits in with the Chinese... nope. No idea.

I HAD held the vague sense that the Chinese would somehow be aware of the first Gaian experiement a-brewing in the United States, but this is not carried out by the facts. The US itself only recently innovated this technology. It is available nowhere else. So the Chinese are blind in the biotech-political sphere...

...But not in the sphere of money and power itself! And that is where the relationship with Lynette will unfold!

So...

In the coming chapters we finally get to the Lynette the Political Animal and Aristotelian elitist, the public feminist who advocates sustainable business structures to liberate women from nature and not just from men, and the shrewd business woman who introduced solar desalination to the middle east and brought peace to the Afghan, Persian, and Iraqi peoples through the marketplace. Her manipulations of the markets in southern Middle East will be known to the Chinese, so it is a matter (o unconscious mind!) of projecting how elite Chinese plutocrats would respond to her presence in 2050 China.

So the plot then rests mainly on what I think China will be like in 2050! LOLOLOL (thankyou for your help, unconscious mind!)

Well, that's all from me today, Friday. I'm off to pay stuff and do other adult stuff. It's Friidayyyy!

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Oh man... my week so far from Thursday

Oh man. It's such a beautiful day today, and I have CONCERNS.

This week I helped Kate move from next door to here to Ascot Park three suburbs up. From my neighbour Steven I borrowed a trolley to lug furniture, and then left it locked into the Ascot Park house until Friday.

Poor Steven! He's no intellectual giant, and he behaved exactly as I expected him to: he got angry. I took the blame and now there's tension between us. He feels ripped of because I can't return what I borrowed.

So immediately I asked one of the girls to ring the landlord and he agreed to put it out for me last night "after work". At ten thirty last night I went to Ascot Park and... no trolley. So I walked home and was really tired when I got here and slept til eleven.

Then I realised I had missed an interview at ten. Oh man. I wasn't prepared so it's not like it could possibly have gone WELL.

So let me enumerate a few of the marvellous things that HAVE gone well this week:

Yesterday I wrote a SF story, which I think is pretty damn good. It's called Gaiaforming Mars, and it's about high frontier capitalism and post-singularity biology. The plot: two kids get called out from the biodomes on earth by Gaia and into orbit where colonies of humans live, and told they are going to help Gaiaform Mars. Their exploration of their different cultural backgrounds - one a mystical gene-engineered half-human Dreamer, the other a practical elite altruocrat - soon reveal their purpose in space, and aid in the opening of a new market and ecology on and around Mars. I calibrate the story's level of power on the Hawkins scale at 360, which is excellent news, since most SF test weak (below 200), and only one SF story tests above 500 (Kim Stanley Robinson's remarkable "Short History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations.")

At ten thousand words it is actually classes as a longer story, I believe. I spellchecked the tale and immediately lined it up on the queue for crits at www.critters.org. Seven thousand words in a day is GOOD.

I have written a sent three crits, which I recognise are one of the best things I can give to ensure a regular flow of ideas.

The challenge today is to clear out the mounds of paper in my life, to make way for the new and get rid of the old.

In the last few weeks I have learnt some REALLY interesting things about goals.

- Desire, it turns out, doesn't come from you. It comes from agreement between the various aspects of you as to what is desireable. In other words, by writing down a desire and the contemplating the various "uh-ohs", you can forge an incredibly powerful force for good and source of power.

As a result, I have experienced desire without the normal restraints of fear and sadness and other negative emotions. This is pretty exciting for me, because it signals that I'm mastering the anxiety problems I have suffered, and finding a new way to general will and willingness. It is a sign of recovery.

- The way to act: the way to act, I have learnt, is to do EVERYTHING YOU CAN, with the sense as you do it that it is all that needs to be done for the attainment of long term goals. This is not an injunction to overwork but rather to appropriately do what can be done in a day, today, and to leave tomorrow's work alone. Also a major lesson for me.

- Working on goals. The proof that goals are well done is DESIRE. A feeling of wanting to act. If the goals are personalised enough, then you want to act, not just on them, but on all of life, more and more. A good goal brings you into engagement with life in the now, presenting immediate ways to contribute and things to do. Or so I have learnt.

That's my news at the moment.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Historical Source of Capitalism, Part Three:

Today I read Woods "The Origin of Capitalism" and dicovered her thesis is remarkably pedestrian. She says there was a mainstream theory that capitalism arose from the merchant classes in the big cities around the edges of Europe in the thirteenth century, which she contradicts with an equally Eurocentric and uninteresting view. For Woods, the origin of capitalism is in "agrarian capitalism", which she then does not define, so I had to deduce it from the discussion. No wonder people call this stuff imperialistic: it's so dull it almost begs to be disputed. How could anyone confuse this verbiage with the most exciting and successful form of organisation that is specific to humans?

Anyway, with a grudging spirit here is Wood's guess at How Capitalism Came About:

Agrarian capitalism is simply when landlords over farmers charged rent taking the market for the farming products derived from that land into account. It was, she contends, an unnatural and disruptive matter of landlords taking the market into account that triggered the fullest closure of the Commons, the ensuing wave of emigrations to the swollen cities, and the wage-labor that occured.

All this is merely an elaboration of basic instincts. The abstractional awareness of "the market" may have been part of the landlord's minds, but it is hardly a definitive quality of their innovation.

The real source of capitalism, I believe, must be Sumer or Babylon. But why has this story not been told? When I did searches for information on this, there is only the popular book, The Richest Man In Babylon, by Richard Clason.

This should be an exciting first-time-told story when I uncover the details!

As I write this I am browsing the book reviews on Sagg's Babylonians, Roux's Ancient Iraq, Kramer's History Begins at Sumer, and Oppenheim's Ancient Mesopotamia. These all hold forth exciting promise of yielding answers.

It has been amusing trying to track down a history of capitalism without political bias. It would seem that people prefer to locate the context anywhere but at its source. Even the two books I read titled ORIGIN of capitalism are distinctly polemic in nature.

By contrast, I just want to see the thing clearly, as it is. And that's both my bias and my bliss.

The way I understand it capitalism is an essentially human pattern of applying the ecological instinct to human relations. The reference to forms of capitalism is as limiting as comparing an insect's predation style to a mammals: worse, it is useless. Capitalism is formless by definition because it is a process of intuiting the market, which is an abstract mental model of real people's responses in real or digital time.

Likewise, the simplistic ecological intuitions of economists reflect the "hall of mirrors" approach where those economics who are taught to be proudly ignorant of ecology and systems theory, apply their odd individual sensibilities to the idea of capitalism. Worse, when political groupthinkers idealise the notion of capitalism (either as "imperialistic enemy" or "source of human prosperity", one becomes blinded to its essential shortcomings and difficulties, since it is merely a well-trained instinct for the abstract market by my estimation. But that is another story.

To end up, then, I understand capitalism to be merely ecological intuition applied to the human sphere. These intuitions, once business enacts them, are elaborated by evolutionary feedback (Darwinian to begin, and now increasingly Lamarckian). It is no more and no less a special human gift.

It would be interesting if the Sumerian age of confusion, the Dark Ages of the Near East, lasting from 1300 to 900 B.C.E could be the time when that abstract ability first developed as a consequence?!!

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Historical Source of Capitalism, Part Two:

I could not disagree with Weber's hypothesis more. Protestant is a hyperstable distortion of earlier forms of capitalism; rigid denial of spontaneous behaviour is only good for creating large breeding pools to spend on warfare or migration, which is historically exactly what occured from Protestant Capitalism: mass migration to the US and mass death of the Great War.

The vigor of American protestantism is due to their having migrated, not to their frugality. They have lebensraum (living room) and hence room to think, dream and innovate all the way to the moon.

The notion of good works seems to have been lifted from Judaism and Islam. A university lecturer I worked for once told me that Protestantism was Christianity's assimilation of Muslim ways, which fits well with this notion. Until Islam threatened Europe, it did not develop Capitalism beyond the rigid fuedal form, and even then historical inertia won out with a hyper-rigid Protestant working class ethos.

Here is the hypothesis, then:


"WEBER’S HYPOTHESIS
Weber’s analysis of the relationship between religion and economic development
placed more emphasis on broad religious imperatives than on the specific injunctions that
each particular religion might impose on economic behavior (Eisenstadt 1968). Hence he
wrote of a “Protestant ethic,” even though Protestantism is a fractured and fragmented set
of religions, each with its own code of beliefs, doctrines and practices. His project aimed
at establishing a link between this Protestant ethic and the “spirit” of capitalism, but it
also sought an explanation for why Western civilization proved to be such fertile ground
for the Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern capitalism. As such, Weber’s
study did not confine itself to religious factors, although he was convinced that such
factors were of greatest importance in the long run (Kaufmann 1997). Although the
Protestant ethic is derived from fundamental religious principles, it is both “secular” and
“worldly”. It includes, or perhaps produces, an economic ethic: “…the summum bonum
of this ethic [is] the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance
of all spontaneous enjoyment of life” (Weber 1930, 53).

For Weber, the spirit of capitalism is antecedent to the emergence of capitalism,
and it is derived from the Protestant ethic. Nowhere in his study does Weber define “the
spirit of capitalism,” but he conveys its meaning in terms of Benjamin Franklin’s
homespun philosophy concerning the utility of virtue: “Honesty is useful because it
assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are
virtues….According to Franklin, those virtues, like all others, are only in so far virtues as
they are actually useful to the individual, and the surrogate of mere appearance is always
sufficient when it accomplishes the end in view” (Weber 1930, 52).

Within this ethic, making money is not only the highest good, it is a duty, one
which is closely connected with the religious idea of a calling: “The earning of money
within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the
expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling” (Weber 1930, 53-54). In other words,
economic success is a measure of individual virtue. It is this idea which sets Weber’s
analysis apart—he limits its acceptance to Western Europe and America, for he was well
aware that: “Capitalism existed in China, India, Babylon, in the Classic World and in the
Middle Ages. But in all these cases…this particular ethos was lacking” (Weber 1930,
52).

Despite popular and naïve perversions of Weber’s thesis, it is important to note
that he did not claim that the Protestant ethic alone was sufficient to bring about the
capitalist system—in other words, religion did not cause capitalism. Nor did he
champion the extreme position that modern capitalism would not have come into being
without the Protestant ethic. Rather, Weber maintained the intermediate position that the
Protestant ethic significantly fostered and accelerated the development of Western
capitalism. As noted above, he was well aware that forms of capitalism existed prior to
the Reformation. But he was equally aware that only in Western Europe and America did
capitalism “develop in a way and on a scale sufficient to bring about an Industrial
Revolution and an industrial civilisation” (Lessnoff 1994). For Weber, therefore, there
was something special about Western capitalism after the Reformation. He found that
special factor in the Protestant work ethic and its strong element of asceticism.
The most basic aspect of Protestantism is its doctrine of salvation. Salvation is
attained by faith alone, but Protestantism advocates forms of human behavior that are
pleasing to God, such as good works. Luther, in particular, decisively altered the (pre-
Reformation) Christian conception of good works by prescribing the fulfillment of duties
in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume (Weber 1930).

Calvin complicated matters by adding the doctrine of
predestination. Under Calvin’s influence, good works became an objective and reliable
sign of grace, so that those who practiced them could thereby assuage their doubts and
allay their fears. Hence, good works became not so much a toll on the highway to heaven
but rather “the means of getting rid of the fear of damnation” (Lessnoff 1994). It is easy
to see how the combination of Lutheran virtue and Calvinist asceticism yielded an ethos
that stimulated entrepreneurs and artisans alike to achieve economic success in their
respective spheres. This ethic was a dramatic shift from the Christian ethic of pre-
Reformatory times. But being preference-based in origin, it postulated a demand-driven
course of action: the advent of Protestantism and its precepts changed tastes in favor of
saving versus consumption. To this demand-side theory we offer a complementary
theory that stresses the supply side of economic behavior and brings more balance to the
historical connection between religion and economic growth."

Historical Source of Capitalism, Part One

This is the first of several posts on the sources of capitalism in late Babylonian civilisation. I encourage disinterested readers to skip past these posts for more personal matters.

For interested readers, on the other hand (!), I will try to trace the source of Babylonian land laws to inter-Aryan conflicts. My intuition is that Argan vigor coming down from the icy North may be the common factor for Mediterranean innovations for the millenium before the Common Era. In terms of Learyan neurogeography the interactions between the cold North and warm South is a dynamic common to many innovations from Europe. By contrast, China's metaphor was cultural interaction between the Centre and the Provinces, with cosmopolitan clusters around the three river, one that well fits the modern situation with the Centralised West and the Provincial Developing World, but bodes ill for innovation between the two. In China the Mongols were the closest to the role of the Aryan Barbarians, and it will be interesting to compare the rule of the Ming Chinese innovation to the Ayran conquest of Assyria.

Anyway, Mongol and Aryan barbarians aside, here is the basis of modern Capitalism in Babylonian land rights:

"Ancient Mesopotamia and the Emergence of Private Property.
Economists have long tended to take private property as an elemental and original institution in human experience. Man is indeed a territorial animal. While some species have evolved a deafening howl, or special glands to mark territory modern man uses Trespass Laws, Rights of Way and Immigration Controls, backed by armed force, prisons and refugee camps. In the beginning however, most land was held communally as tribal territory or allocated to citizens as subsistence lands for their self-support. Archaeological evidence also shows that while the agricultural revolution began more than ten thousand years ago private property is a more recent innovation.
'Private' property (ie; alienable property, subject to market sale without being subject to repurchase rights by the sellers, their relatives or neighbours) first emerged in Bronze Age Mesopotamia between the 3rd and 4th millennium BC. Archaeologists translating cuneiform records (i.e.; clay tablets) from that period have found that private property first emerged in the palace sector before proliferating through the public bureaucracy and the 'damgar' or merchants of Babylon. As Mesopotamia's towns grew with their high walls and irrigated fields a landlord class had begun to emerge. But land transactions still retained non-commercial characteristics the evidence suggests, until the 1st millennium BC, when the first real estate market emerged. The abundant records of the Egebi family who lived in Babylon in the sixth century BC show that they derived their income from land rent and the attachment of interest bearing debt claims to their land/property portfolio.
Privatisation of land led to absentee ownership and monopolisation according to Dr. Michael Hudson of New York University and these in turn led to fiscal (budget) crises as wealthy landholders avoided taxes by shifting them unto the rest of the population. This economic and social polarisation (and the likelihood of a revolt) was staved off by the tradition of royal 'Clean Slates'. This latter tradition, which extended back thousands of years according to Prof. Baruch Levine, was the basis of the Biblical Jubilee Year (Leviticus25 etc). Widely acknowledged as the centrepiece of Judaic religion, the Jubilee restored the status quo ante by wiping out the overgrowth of agrarian debt, freeing the debt slaves and restoring to the landless their rightful inheritance in land. The Jubilee may thus be seen as a key to social, political and economic harmony and sustainability. The fundamental point of Jubilee Law is that the Earth is the Lord's, to be fairly shared and stewarded by all. This reassertion of the land rights of the poor and displaced, the Promised Land and Kingdom of God on earth were likewise a crucial if not central to Christ's mission.
Having strayed far from it's core truths by turning the radical social justice of Biblical law on debt and land tenure into a utopian and other-worldly ideal, the Catholic Church today may well have undermined it's own relevance and potential. Acquiescing to a conservative orthodoxy the Christian churches and their faithful have neglected the Jubilee imperatives of land redistribution and debt-relief, now so appropriate at both the national and global levels. Thus they themselves may lend weight to the view that their church lacks social and moral courage. Piety, rituals and ceremonies are a weak substitute for the social, economic and environmental justice. The Jubilee remains a key so to the social and economic reinvigoration both Ireland and the world now need.

Friday, February 11, 2005

Plato's Cave: a modernisation

This links to a modern version of Plato's cave. It goes without saying that this depiction of a collective impasse is about as useful for enlightening folk as teachings of enlightenment - ie, there's no way of evaluating the merit of these ideas except submitting to kinesiology testing and the Hawkins map. However, they do serve their place in instilling questionable values, a much-beloved pastime of Socrates and Plato.

I have a mind to install this in my vision of post-Gaian Australia. A network of folk living under the ground feeding off Manner (manna from the Old Testament) and indulging in courteous Good Manners as a way of surviving. It might bear fruit.

Brain stuff, feminism and DNA

Spent the early arvo online and the morning asleep.

I have had an interesting arvo though.

I opened a new group on yahoo called Maps of Consciousness, to put the new stuff I'm learning into.

I searched through some of the Maps of the last three decades and put em in the group site.

I looked through a lovely site called http://divinexpressions.com.au/ at feminist-based maps of consciousness. A noble quote: "Until "Goddess" can be spoken with the same dignity and comprehensiveness as "God", partnership is not possible."

Then I entered www.deoxy.org for the first time in several years, finding it now somewhat gloomy and bleak in it's cyberpunk retro-80s orientation. Got the links there and got out without too much distraction.

Then, triggered by the I went to wikipedia to look into Hofstadter's recursive USE-MENTION artificial intelligence structure, the nam-shub of Mesopotamia (lethal memes), and the use of recursive ideas in Science Fiction (Snow Crash, 2001: A Space Odyysey; and Piers Anthony's Marcoscope).

Then I wandered into the DNA-as-intelligent-designer world and glanced about at the various mythopoetic schools. Interesting how Zeus at one stage was a serpent, at a latter stage a serpent killer, and at a still latter stage reliant on his samboghakaya emanation Athena (Reason) to kill the damn thing. It is instructive also to look at the next stage of the myth, which is not mentioned:

The Athena-Reason emanation, emanating from the Dharmakaya body of Zeus, emanates in turn the nirmanakya body of feminist geneticists and feminist scientists, who then bite men under the influence of Zeus and allow them to die unless they suckle from the breast of Athena.

Now the interesting theme here for the Gaia Project relates to the role of females in Chinese village life. If everyone must suckle from the head woman of the village, the central patriarchy can no longer survive, and the Chinese must subordinate to the larval hive queen of the village and her curative powers of the breast.

In terms of the Persian, Sikh and Indian mythos, the dominance of women can take variations on a theme to express different aspects of the Dakini Diamond-Vajra awareness marketed with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. The Persians swerve from the Goddess worship into homosexual warrior cults a la Alexander of Macedonia and the Spartans; hence the cross-infection of Greek and Persian ways becomes complete. The Sikh approach of sacrificing outcastes on the obisidian block of Gaian recorders is a atrapopaion, a warding-off Gorgon mask of horror to get rid of Mother Nature. The Indian approach is the careful geneticist approach of the Indian peasant creating basmati rice, applied to people. The women carefully select their partners from a massive available pool of competing men based on discernable traits of improvement, and the breeding cycle is hastened accordingly.

Finally, in the second book of Gaia, the Thai and Balinese projects must have their own discernable traits. Possibly the Chinese culture cross-infects the Thai, but I think it more likely the Thai genepool breeds in reaction against rather than assimilates the Chinese, who represent a threat to Thai solidarity.

At present I am listening to Jeremy Narby's mpeg of how knowledge of the plants comes from the plants themselves, the "tv of the jungle". Jungle rhythms underlie the speech enchantingly and a laughing audience fill it with joy. This is truly the Gaian tone of speech I seek for the second book of Gaia. Marvellous stuff!

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Learyan Caste System

THIS is the concept that is so irritating me to comprehend it!

Leary proposes that our genes, combined with our evolutionary past, inclines us to choose for ourselves the caste to which we belong, and then find our niche in society accordingly. His evidence is E. O. Wilson's studies of social insects. No doubt we could now add the studies on primate society as well. He says that to each human caste there are specific physical markers.

Further, he posits that a set of future evolutionary castes exist, and that a crucial historical moments humans are born with these evolutionary caste features, in order to hasten growth of humanity.

Further STILL he posits that the old visions of how humans worked in the past (the I Ching, astrology, the Tarot, and Chess) are early attempts to encapsulate the truth of human castes that are evolving forewards; so, he says, by studying earlier visions such as astrology, which he calls "neuro-genetic maps", one can discern future directions of human evolution.

So, then, the Learyan caste system (which is a self-selection system, rather than a political one such as the Indian Caste system) consists of twelve everyday Castes and twelve extraordinary Castes, in accordance with the astrological map.

Is the Caste system, there is Alpha Reality, also known as Structural Caste, indicating basic life-orientation and similar to the Sun Sign in astrology. Then there is Beta Reality, aka Temporal Caste, which indicates the temporary and momentary expression of self, and is analogous to the Sun-In-House system in astrology.

Now it gets REALLY complicated:

Each individual is born into a Structural Caste, and there they remain. However each individual strives to recapitulate every Temporal Caste within their lifetime.

Some individuals, however, are born Out-Caste and thus they slip in and out of various Structural Castes without really ever fitting in. And these individuals belong to the twelve extraordinary Castes which are not yet in existence.

Now, add to this picture the concept of 'neurogeography' and it starts to get complicated:

The farther West you go, to higher the Dominant Caste is. On the West Coast of the US, the dominant caste is Caste 13 and 14, through Hollywood.

"The independent Western pioneer is easily ridiculed. But the fact remains--freedom to experiment, courage to change, energy to re-create is always a Westward High." Leary.

According then to this scheme, Australian city-societies would belong to the 11th caste domesticity, which revolves around the seven day week with proscribed alcohol induction and sexual low-jinks on the Saturday and contrite consolation from the domestic God-form on Sunday morning to lock back down the animalistic tendencies.

In Sydney and inner Melbourne this scene has evolved under pressure in 12th caste insect-hive social dynammics, where higly organised ritualistic behavior dominates and orders all, and within the incredibly narrow constraints of high-earning insects allows brief-lived hedonistic 13th caste behaviour. Such is the environment that drove me to panic and despair throughout Asia and the East Coast of Australia for several years.

By coming West I actually escape the insect-hive, and if I were to go farther West to Perth I would return to the rebellious Barbarian outpost, the modern version of Ceasar's Spanish outpost during the Roman Empire; Perth is thus the fartherest point of the West AWAY from the Center in Los Angeles/Hollywood.

Why did I come to Adelaide? To escape, if I am honest, from the East Coast of Australia, and from the cosy domesticity of my Home Hive-Town. To go North would be to partake of the lazy sprawl of civilisation from Sydney.

If I really wanted to take the radical route, here is what I would do:

I would study biology here, and seek a scholarship in microbiology and genetics at the best Californian Universities. I would then travel to China and work in microbiology there, and stand a MUCH better chance of accessing the kind of hedonistic lifestyle I would enjoy from that vantage point

In California I would network, simply network my way into various niches and then in China I would be in a privileged position of freedom, as an Australian born, American trained biologist-geneticist.

What a lovely fantasy! and how could I make it come true?

Here are the links that I have been trying to assimilate. In another post I will describe the experience which gave rise to this thoughts in the first place.

http://www.american-buddha.com/intell.structural.htm
http://www.american-buddha.com/leary.ex-citing.htm
http://www.american-buddha.com/pathology.potential.htm

One good reason to visit China

Here is one good reason to visit, but not stay, in China:

"The Chou dynasty (1122-249 B.C.) produced the affluence, security and self-confidence necessary for a philosophic blossoming:  Confucius, Laotze and Mencius.  Here we note the characteristic of Oriental thought.  It is terminal, soothing, quiescent.  Confucius outlines the rules of insectoid-caste conduct which can keep the hive-game going harmoniously.  Laotze sings his rhythmic song of cycles, easy-come, easy-go, cool-out, be-here-now passivity.  You can understand why.  There was no place to go!

Stand on the China coast in the 6th Century B.C.  You've got the wasteland of the Pacific Ocean at your back.  And, with no compass or marine technology, that's a dead end.  In front of you there's 6000 miles of mammalian territory that's all signed, sealed, and mortgaged, locked up by kingdoms, empires, duchies, brigand-tribes.  Each suspiciously confronting neighboring units.

So by 1000 B.C., all the gene-pools ready to move up into the future are collecting in the Middle-East waiting for the marine-technology and navigational skill to sail up the great inter-cerebral fissure called the Middle-Earth Sea."

From the intelligence agents.

Three Parties, a writing project from 2004

Back in the dark mid-months of last year I wrote a 20 thousand word novella about a Neanderthal-Sapiens cross-breed in the hills of Jericho, wandering back into his homeland through the Sapiens of the Middle East, among whom he learns the sacred Hunt, back into the Kung Bushmen from whome he learns the Sacred dance, then up to Egypt where he meets a exiled Spaceman living in solitude, the last of his kind, from whom he learns to read and write.

He returns to the Neanderthals and teaches them the Hunt and the Dance, but they die out, so he takes the Sapiens south to the Atlantean and they learn to read and write from the half-breed. The tale ends with the inception of Egyptian civilisation and with the half-Neanderthal hero as high priest of the pharaoh Sapiens.

The next story in the series of three, Vincent Throws A Party, was set in 1995 at the end of University for five friends. They each overcome their fears and gather themselves up for the work of making a living with the same joy and pleasure that carried them through university with spirits intact. It is a tale of survival as well, but of survival of spiritus sanctus, the spirit of youth, into the late nineties era.

The third proposed story, unwritten, a kind of SF joke, was of a part in an orbital station in which evolutionary microbiology is inadvertently discovered when a biocomputer is invited to the party...

The concept was to have Three Parties, one prehistoric, one historic, and the third trans-historic, each giving a distinct slant on human nature at moments of transition.

Let's have some personal talk on habits.

Let's have some personal talk. I have heard from the 12-step groups how having a sponsor helps one grow and have appropriate expectations, because of the rigorous self-honesty practiced in that relationship. I would like to salt this blog with a little such rigor.

I am living these recent weeks in a kind of strange limbo.

I read somewhere that Angels are our good habits, and God is a urge to grow. In that case my God has not deserted me, but certainly my Angels seem to have.

How can I feel sad for something which comes and goes so strangely that it seems not to be me or mine even, but which simply visits? Habits are like that.

(When Isaac dreamt of a ladder of Angels, ascending to and descending from and heaven, it is instructive that in his dream he did not climb. He was an earthy kind of man, and was content to see the ladder of his own virtue manifest in his dream. But when I heard that fairy tale as a child I wanted nothing more than to leap up those angels heads and see what lay beyond. It was, I thought, a reasonable expectation.)

Two weeks ago, I was regularly waking early, doing yoga, writing a thousand words of my Gaia project and three hundred of my Excellence nonfiction project. Two weeks ago I was reading a chapter a day of 7 books, over half an hour or so, and simply enjoying life enormously.

Today I am writing only a few dozen words. The reading lies untouched. I feel desperate and annoyed with myself and afraid. I feel like a caged animal in this society, when in my conscious self I know it serves as best if not better than any world in history could have, whilst the worlds in science fiction do not exist for me to compare. I am deeply unhappy here and dissatisfied with philosophy and action both. And yet the source of my irritation cannot be identified. I simply don't want to be here. I don't hate it; I'm indifferent to it; I would prefer it all go away and leave me alone. I do not find the world is made of pliant stuff to build from, nor do I wish to build what it would reward, nor do I find the effort to be expended on plying a trade to force it to reward me worthwhile. It is all rather depressing and unpleasant to consider.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Brief Review of Linda Nagata's novella, Goddesses

Goddesses calibrates at 300 on the Hawkins scale according to my self-calibration. This puts it in the high four to five percent of science fiction with genuine inspirational power, which is remarkable.

The tale of Rajban, an abused woman whose gardening creates the solution to a toxic waste problem; the story of Cody, the brilliant microbiologist whose company Green Stomp degrates unbiodegradeable toxins for a living; and the story of Muthaye, whose story of rags-to-riches inspires a man, Michael, to courage and greatness. And finally, it is also the story of Karen, the corporate CEO whose attempts to revive an Indian economy result in unintended consequences...

These are not spoilers, but hints that there's richness here.

I particularly liked the bit where Cody folds the laptop up in three and chucks it in her briefcase...

This rates at the level of 'Stranger In A Strange Land', Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, and not much else. Excellent stuff in a genre bereft of high calibrating works! I shall definitely be borrowing from this book in my ideas on central asia in the Gaia project.

A masterful piece of writing! Read it here:

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/nagata/nagata1.html

Tolstoy and the anxiety of influence

I can't see humans going well in the future, and it's because of Tolstoy.

I now re-read Tolstoy because I grapple with the record of his full and unique consciousness that by contact enlarges mine.

How often I deeply, honestly see into the life of a thing then find that I am seeing with his eyes!

I cannot say the same for any other great writer. Shakespeare spoke to my late teenage worldview, and the violent ferment of history he partook in now seem to be elsewhere, in California or China or perhaps Sydney. But not here in Adelaide, and not here with me.

Dante goes inwards and backwards gathering up his former selves and his European history, enfolding history into himself the better to grow as a person. This is still a viable course of growth for me, through the nonfiction project I am working on.

Milton attracts me simply as the first great Sci-Fi writer and Protestant poet. It is almost redundant to say "Sci-Fi Writer" and Prostestant poet, because Sci-Fi is such an immediately obvious Protestant venture to me.

But through Tolstoy's eyes, monolithic Sci-Fi unfolding at a stately pace is the thing. And this is the deck I deal at present.

How NOT to take a story to the next level.

Oh man. Just finished watching a truly awful movie, Star Trek First Contact, about the frontier of space. The upside is, you can deduce from this movie how NOT to be creative. Here are my pointers.

1. Use a truly absurd time-travel device.

2. Use only tropes that are hackneyed at every point. Awards for most notable cliché is the Borg Queen as a glaze-eyed, campy version of the Mama Alien in Aliens. Her motives - like, she wants a boyfriend to co-rule humanity, are inelegantly trite and totally inadequate to the supposedly ancient and wise character she is said to be. But of course she acts like a teenage girl because this movie is truly stupid and she must fit in. Which is point three.

3. Don't do anything new. The 2061 S-Trek Earth is tragically dull. The only glimpse of reality we get is through the script thrice using the word 'factions'. Oops, there's rule four.

4. Ignore social, political, and moral reality. Instead, focus on image and superficial references to moral granduer from past seasons of the TV Show your story is based on. The brief reference to having no money in the 24th century from Captain Picard is not what he would be saying whilst defending a ship to the death, and does not constitute a reference to social reality because it is not a TELLING DETAIL, but rather a VAPID GENERALISATION.

As a consequence, the only serious sense of moral engagement is second-hand through the past associations to magnificent earlier achievements of Star Trek. Oh, and through characters raising their voices a bit. Truly a movie for die-hard fans alone, this is cheap trash which plays on the inspirational values of Star Trek for money.

5. Ignore and misuse cool ideas.

All the good ideas from earlier Star Trek stories are wasted here. The Doctor, a truly cool character, is wasted on an bad joke. The Holodeck, another cool idea, is wasted on wasting Borg; the only good aspect of the Holodeck scene is that it clumsily illustrates the Captain's desire for vengeance, but it follows the movie's pattern of evoking profound ideas (you can fabricate play-realities in the holodeck) in order to make a cheap shot, literally in this case, because Captain Picard guns the Borg down.

Another creative idea turned into an absurd point for the fans: if the Borg can tune out their phasers, why not use spears and bullets instead? Duh, because it might actually risk showing some originality to have tribal-style conflict on the Enterprise.

My conclusion: everyone in Star Trek has toilet paper permanently wedged deep in their anal crevices as far as I am concerned and it is not coming out soon. In other words, it might be actually sad and even bad if it were not already full of shit. Which is point number six:

6. If you're gonna do something mediocre do it sincerely and honestly.

The only good fresh bit was the five second vision of 24th century Earth turned into a Borg hive. That was cool and fresh. What to do next? The answer to that question would mostly likely have forced Star Trek to the next level. That is, the next level above “sellout”.

7. To summarise, in order to not take a work of art to the next level, you must ignore the really exciting leads off the beaten track, and not explore scenarios.

Here then are a few thoughts on taking a story to the next level:
1. Avoid time-travel or jumping about in time. Stay linear. Stories are best linear.
2. Avoid cliché and cleverness. Stay simple and fresh.
3. Deepen the moral drama and spirit of a story. Delve into your motives and intention more fully.
4. Catch cool ideas and use them more fully than your market could.
5. Do your best. Don't try to be better than you really are. Know how good you really are.
6. Explore radical trails of character and plot.

All pretty basic storytelling unless you're a Paramount executive or Jonathon Frakes.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Researching Tibet for Gaia Project/Space elevator story 3/Nazism

Last night, my head full of concepts, I wandered over to my neighbour's house where she was playfighting her lover Willie. I talked a little about what I'd been learning, and related it back to the Gaia Project thus:

Statement: My main character is on a drug to increase his intelligence.

Question: Where did he get the drug?

A: From his father, who is also on it but not since early childhood.

Q: Where did his father get it?

A: From his employer, who got it from his wife.

Q: Where did his wife get it?

A: From her female teachers in a private government school.

Q: And where did these teachers get it?

A: From experimental combinations of Tibetan-Chinese herbs and certain practices, then followed up by the students who did these practices and pinpointed the exact chemistry behind it with their increased intelligence and created the drug.

Q: Cool, everything's nice and EXPLAINED now. But I just have one problem.

A: What is it?

Q: What the hell am I going to do with all this backstory. I mean, it goes back to the friggin present day! How am I gonna explain all this stuff to the reader somehow!?

A: Change the plot to include a Tibetan episode.

Q: Then I clearly have to read up on Tibetan culture, geography, politics, society, religion and medicine.

AARRRGGH!

So that perhaps explains what I have been reading for the past week. Tibet Tibet Tibet.

Thismorning I began one of the 'Space Elevator' stories, the third listed in the blog entry yesterday, "The First 12-Step Recovery Group In Space." I opened with insensate violence and the main characters, um, death and vision of an ancient god in the afterlife.

Anyway. Moving right along now.

The kids were drinking rum and coke. I had a coffee. Each of them declared that I intelligence and had a good heart, but that I had 'blockages'. This was because I explained Leary's neuro-genetic method of detailing caste and temporal caste to them.

Earlier that night I had detailed the links between Nazism and radical Tibetan Buddhism to Craig on msn, and I find myself going, like, NOW who's the bad guy? China or Tibet???!!!

So these are the thoughts of my day.

A marvellous discovery of a new paradigm

Reading Chris Lofting's "Integration, Differentiation and Meaning" I have made an absolutely thrilling discovery. Lofting uses material explanation in an entirely new and significant fashion, exploring the problem of human consciousness as an embedded phenomena in a larger nonlinear physical field of light, and, it seems, beneath that the combinative nonlinear processes of life themselves.

I am frankly a little stunned and wary. Here is a use of words in an entirely new way to me, and it will require a lot more study and careful attention. But I can smell the sophisticated brilliance of this man's thinking, and it is very exciting to encounter it.

The biggest problem in life is that it ends. With that in mind, things must be relegated to a cursory examination given the probable existence of countless treasures elsewhere. But with this kind of work as Lofting's I have the good sense at least to STOP and LOOk and LEARN. And it is marvellously exciting.

http://members.austarmetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/idm001.html

"Comparing contexts" as the basis of spiritual evolution.

Here is a long quote from a still longer web page on a type of randomness called Markov Processes. It delicate assembles the key ideas on the emergent foundations of memory.

The really significant sentence in the long quote for me is almost majestic in wisdom: It is this:

"The moment you start to use memory what you are doing is comparing contexts, 'this' with 'that' and the more you do this the more you approach a level where 'emergence' can happen and so the development of a memory system followed by the emergence of concepts of 'self', 'others' and consciousness in general, and all from 'basic' feedback processes."

What a magical sentence! Comparing Contexts!

Here, then, is the slightly larger context of the idea:


"The Emergence of Meaning from Feedback Processes

Reflecting on the requirement that Markov chains have no memory, it become apparent that any form of consciousness would be at best 'fleeting'; perhaps a sort of 'awareness' that cannot go past the moment. If you try to put this in the form of a context series using discrete time concepts so a Markov chain is expressable as a sequence of 1s:

1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1

where each moment, regardless of scale, is always 'new', always 'now'. (Interestingly, many religions try to achieve this state -- Taoism, Zen etc)

If you now add the ability to distinguish one moment from the previous we see the emergence of a primitive mind-set in the form of remembering sequence. Thus our 1,1,1,1,1 becomes:

1,2,3,4,5,6

Where each moment is added to the previous. We see a form of this in territorial mappings where the sequence method is used in the form of waypoint mapping to mark-out territory (A to B to C ...) and this sequence, when brought around back to the beginning creates a sense of 'ownership', of 'mineness'.

Now let us consider what happens when we consider the previous TWO contexts, whenever we do this, where we add the previous two contexts together to give us the current, we find ourselves dealing with one of the most basic manifestions of feedback processes used for development. This is in the form of a Fibonacci sequence:

1,2,3,5,8,13,....

This pattern is extremely common in life and seems to manifest the basic minimum required for development with a minimum use of energy.

As we increase the number of contexts to add together to give us 'meaning' we find that when we go back to the beginning of anything, to the FIRST instance and then sum ALL contexts from that point, we end up with an emerging binary sequence:


1,2,4,8,16,32,.....

At this point something 'interesting' happens in that to go beyond this level we enter the realm of complexity/chaos and the concept of emergence. But how? The answer is to add more feedback than is already there. A classic example of this is in the human mind where, seeing someone walking down a street our memories map that person to someone we know and immediately a flood of feelings can emerge that will influence us if we meet that person, we put more into the meeting than is actually there and so lead to an 'emergence' that is a direct result of the addition of feedback beyond just 'the moment'.

Verhulst showed that going beyond 2 leads into these unstable areas (using a number line. Mandelbrot does the same thing using the imaginary number plane giving us the Mandelbrot Set).

What we are seeing in these sequences are the basic building blocks of developing a memory and so the patterns that come with these processes. In a pure object oriented frame of reference, the one favoured by mathematicians, there is NO link AT ALL from one moment to the next other than in time. Thus there is no way that last week's lotto draw can affect this week's draw. Every draw is a unique moment, a '1' as we find in Markov Chains; there is no memory. The moment you start to use memory what you are doing is comparing contexts, 'this' with 'that' and the more you do this the more you approach a level where 'emergence' can happen and so the development of a memory system followed by the emergence of concepts of 'self', 'others' and consciousnessin general, and all from 'basic' feedback processes."

End of quote.

Americans love kinky sex

Good news from the big wet messy ol' heart of America. Something to warm the heart and make the hands all rough and moist. Yep, it's sex folks. Anyways, here's an article that replies to conservatism on a more hopeful note:

"Call it the slingshot effect: the harder they try to pull us all back into this tight little box of sameness and fear and the more they try to yank us all into their morally shrill worldview, the greater the distance we will catapult forward when their tenuous and panicky grip finally gives."

Or:

"Here's my suggestion: let them have it.

Just do it. Let the sexually bitter and morally frantic conservative groups now dictating governmental policy and FCC agendas and paranoid media attitudes have their time, their brief cultural burp, their little speed bump on the great and beckoning highway that will still lead us all, inexorably, irreversibly, though often agonizingly, toward grinning open-thighed progress.

Because here's the fabulous thing: no matter what these faux-Christian groups do, no matter how hard they oppress and protest and clamp down, this is a road that leads, despite all dour headlines and sour prognostications otherwise, toward spiritual illumination, toward awareness, toward sexual openness and same-sex marriage and revelatory sodomy and free vibrators for teenage girls and lesbians kissing open mouthed in the streets. In Kentucky. In the daytime. On Sunday.

It's true. All this and more, is gonna happen. This is my belief. Superlative homemade pornography and fetish dungeons and happy dildo supermarkets and the utter brilliance of the Suicide Girls and regular people having juicy consensual reasonably kinky respectful sex like it's no big deal, and it's all a matter of time, isn't it, before it will all erupt back to the surface of the culture and spread like hot karmic butter across the land. Maybe? You think?"

The First 12 Step Recovery Group in Space

Had some cool ideas today. On the brink of despair I lay down and listened to soothing celtic music and in seconds I found myself writing the outline for a triology of longish stories (ten thousand words each)

The first, "May You Live In Interesting Times" is about a American Military Commander walking through a ruined Shanghai wondering how to begin the Chinese reconstruction in the late 21st century when the Chinese will fight whatever he suggests.

The wise solution he arrives at is to put not one but TWO confucian bureaucracies in place, each in competition with one another and each competing to get the brightest minds. Then he brutally gives the Communist Party loyals two choices: either go to New Australia and build in the desert the New Water Cities based around the giant desalination plants, or work in minimum labor jobs in the slums of Shanghai.

The second, "Oxymandias" features the same commander who is informed of a space elevator being built in Western China secretly. The commander decides to occupy the space elevator from space downwards so that the Russians, Kazakhstani and Tibetans will not grab it in the meantime. However he underestimates the brutality of Central Asia.

The Tibetans seize the ground complex. The Russians destroy the Tibetans, and then the Kazahkstani, damned if they'll let anyone benefit, cut the space elevator free and the American military force in space is set adrift. Human stupidity wins out, so they believe, except the Americans ingeniously manage to anchor the space elevator in Florida keys, sacrificing their greatest heros in the process, and so they gain the benefit of the first space elevator themselves.

The third story in the series, "The First 12 Step Recovery Group In Space," shows a world addicted to biotechnological drugs on earth, drugs in the water and soil which make people content with simple, desireless, buddhist-style lifestyles. Only madman desire to leave the planet for the dangers beyond.

But after yet another accident in space puts the dozy, addicted world below in jeopardy, a group of addicts decides to go into Recovery together and become the first permanent and sane settlers in space. Their democratic, constructive, supportive spirit triggers a mass migration of recovering addicts into space, who are happy to be discontented and discomfited so long as they are free of addiction. Simultaneously on earth a death-cult emerges which wipes out millions of addicts who partake in it.

So I sketched these ideas down while I lay on the bed. I reread the poem Ozymandias by Shelley, and re-read the Serenity Prayer, which I have posted in my Crowbah blog, and laughed at my own conceit of 12-Steppers in space.

Friday, February 04, 2005

Stayed at Marc's place last night, which effectively disrupted my sleep, writing, exercise and eating patterns unpleasantly. I gave up on sleep and stayed away all night after reading the Leary book online (see the previous entries).

In the morning I meditated in the front yard and slid straight into blissful sleep for an hour. It was very lovely and still when I woke and crept into bed with Marc.

I am just a lonely blogger in the South Australia culture-desert

I lie in bed with a lover in my arms.

I am listening to Hildeberg von Bingen's miraculously beautiful "Voice of the Blood".

I read, aloud, to my mind, to alert it to the possibilities, that:

"Mutation does not happen by accident, it happens to those who put themselves in the position and place where maximum possibilities for change can occur, after that it's just a matter of Bonne Chance."

What mutation is possible in South Australia? NONE. But here is instead the kind of recapitulation of the past, through the English-stable domesticity of the Place, which I am experiencing with my dual-book project.

For I am writing two books at once. The nonfiction "History of Excellence" and the fictional affirmation of the Gaia concept, now titled "The Biotech Age." I am making gradual progress in the work, seminal as I have faith it may be.

But a time will come when it is up and onwards. And where will I go then?

It depends, is the simple answer. Can I master survival here? Can I play that role to perfection, and then transcend it? I heartily wish so, for otherwise a trip to Shanghai would be a living hell on earth, and a long migratory entrapment in Perth would be a sleep away from the sense of history's violent forward passage...


Short Sonet 2 The Veild Lady of Truth:
I must not sleep,
I must not wake,
I must not pretend,
I must not be present.

I must not pray for mercy;
I must not be saved.
I must not become enlightened,
I must not stay and help others be enlightened.

I must not vanish nor appear.
I must not acknowledge,
Nor resign, nor reckon,
Guage, measure, or ration out, myself.

I must not intuit, above all,
I must not intuit the truth.

What Empiricum looks like in Gaia III:

In Twitchingland/Switzerland:

"It's called 'Devil's Bridge," said Sergius.  "The Bishop who controlled the town was in charge of all road construction.  Now and then dissatisfied farmers would build bridges themselves.  When the agents of the Bishop would come around asking who built the unauthorized bridge, they would say, "The devil built it.'"

My house on Zug Lake, where from the balcony I watched seven swans swim stately to be fed, was just below the hill where William Tell hid in wait for the tyrant Gessler, slew him with the extra arrow, and thus began the Swiss War for Independence.  Twelve twenty-one was my phone number in the Villars Chalet.  And the house on Zug Lake was in the exact center of Swiss space and time.  When one moves free, Sci-Fi high above gravity pull, it's all mystic, mythic, connected overground comics.

From The Intelligence Agent.

"MYSTIC, MYTHIC, CONNECTED OVERGROUND COMICS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Omigod!

The Future of Australia Belongs To China.

The Future of Australia Belongs To China. But there is a price to pay for yielding up this continent to the Middle Kingdom. In turn, China then falls due to the West.

The incentive for Australians to take the radical step and become Chinese, is what will allow China to become the greatest and freest Western nation on Earth. It is normal to distrust the West in China.

But if an entire continent becomes Chinese suddenly, if there is a place for all their mistrust and unease and controlling instinct to flow into, a place large enough that it can contain another three billion Chinese in orderly, strict, water-rationed desert cities - if Australia can be open to the wisdom that there is nowhere else to go for Australia historically speaking except to absorb the orderly and disciplined peoples of the far East into itself and be transformed by them, then China itself will become Western finally.

There is no other way historically out of the geographic clincher. The pioneering Western spirit that went into building the Australian federal infrastructure exists only to give way to the collective and stable Chinese spirit. The only Republic Australia will manifest is the Chinese People's.

In turn, however, in the place of those who come here from China, what will remain? Only the wildest, the most adventurous, the most fervent-spirited men and women of China will remain in China, and they in turn will welcome investment from the West and wild innovation from Western scientific elements.

This is the geographic destiny of Australia and China, I perceive.

Selling Realities: The Secret Essence of All Blockbuster Movies.

Another early "synergy pioneer" was George Lucas who used a half-billion-dollar movie (Star Wars) as advertising trailer for his souvenir marketing business.  Another early medi-alchemist was Henry Edwards, who used a 110-million-dollar movie and a 150-million-dollar album as promotion for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band).
The secret of blockbusters is the shift in emphasis from the past to the future in storytelling. Now the orienting context of the story is a future-pull, whereas in the past tradition supplied the gravity-center that story, as you placed the hardback on your evening stand to fall asleep, fell backwards into. Now, stories strive upwards to a new sense of the sublime.

Read on:

"Legend has it that Ron Bernstein, upon observing how movies, T.V. shows, albums, novelizations were all used as hype for each other, came to the startling conclusion which totally changed Human Ontology.  "Why not use all forms of media, working together synergistically, to hype a Future Reality?"

Bernstein thus became the first Reality Movie Maker.  If movies could get people to buy albums -- why then movies could get people to buy realities.  Reality became a spin-off of show biz.

Starting in 1979 every sentient being on the planet was systematically exposed to Bernstein Futures.  Blacks walked out of Bernstein movies excited by the blueprints -- colorfully, romantically, precisely detailed -- for building exactly the kinds of futures they wished.  By 1983 the Bernstein Empire was making Future Reality Movies for every gene-colony in the Western World.

Before Bernstein movies relived the past.  After Bernstein movies created futures."

End quote.

 
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