What a Good Boy Am I

He put in his thumb,

And pulled out a plum,

And said 'What a good boy am I'!

Dream: I was at a small, somewhat remote high school doing research, I was a cultural anthropologist. I was researching the curious popularity of sign language at the school, and how the student body had formed a club and even spent time creating their own hand signals and signs for one another. I was very interested in this.

I'm nearly finished with my research, but then I'm in my car and I need to back it up to a building in the middle of the campus, right over a lawn where there were a bunch of students hanging out and studying, enjoying the spring time sun. I turned around and gave them their hand signal for "get out of the way" and to my amazement they all quickly got up and made enough room for me to pass! One of the students pantomimed giving me his business card, and he was smiling so I think he was showing me that sign language was like a membership card or something to them, so that they knew me, recognized me as one of their own.

I felt really good about understanding that, and I drove away from the school in a wonderful mood, as if I'd finally got what I came for.

For a very long time now, I've been interested in achieving a dialogue with my subconscious. I can receive via dreams and visions, but I've never really been able to send, and I think my subconscious finally told me why. It's because my dream self doesn't really understand English - "it has no British". The subconscious is the realm of symbolic meaning, so it's important to speak in symbols, the only language she understands. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and someone in the sync sphere (sorry, can't remember the source) said that a symbol was worth a thousand pics. Do the math, that means a symbol is worth 1,000,000 words. Words are cheap.

During our last sync skype, I remember talking about the written language and how I considered words to be an improvement on Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Alan broke in and said something like "Yeah, but they are so beautiful". I consider fonts and prose and such to be beautiful in their own way as well, but the difference is what we call an abstraction layer.

Computers run on multiple layers of language abstraction. The base layer is binary code, 1 or 0, yes or no, yin or yang. This is the basic duality engine of the universe. On top of that sits Machine Language, and on top of that, C++, which we might call the Latin or Romance language of computing, of which the various operating systems like Windows and Mac are equivalent to Italian or French.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are much closer to the Machine Elf language than our modern, font based languages, they are closer to pure symbol. And I think that's what the dream is trying to tell me. Don't talk in words, talk in symbols. And the next question is... how? And that was answered by the student body. Don't talk with words, talk with your hands.

OK, I wish he was speaking like that...

I was stopped at an intersection that was under construction last week, the lights were out, and a traffic cop stood in the center, directing traffic with only his hands. We all understood him perfectly, and we understood him whether we spoke English or Chinese. He was demonstrating the power of the Machine Language to me. A language of symbols, created before we even had the power of speech, and translated through the hand.

Perhaps this is also the lesson of Harpocrates. Speak not with your mouth, but with your hands.

In the immortal words of My Fair Lady, Don't talk of words, show me.

Rise of the Iron Moon

I'm reading The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt, which has seen some powerful personal syncs connected with the reading. It's an alien invasion story, where octopus-like creatures from Mars use a singularity time machine to invade the earth 5 million years in their future - our present. As far as books go, I'd rate it a 5 by the usual book rating criteria, but for me, it was a perfect 10.

"If you don't believe in something, you'll fall for anything." This week's sign on Rose Hill Presbyterian church (my childhood church).

The Rise of the Iron Moon:

"Pah, so much for the Circlist heresy and their half-witted humanist religion without gods. When the kingdom's people had stopped believing in the Druid's many deities they had not begun believing in nothing, they had started believing in anything."

I suppose we haven't really believed in the gods since Nietzsche let the cat out of the bag, but we keep going through the motions, as if the decaying rituals still had some power left in them. The fall of the Twin Towers was the straw that broke the belief system's back, the destruction of the third temple.

"they had not begun believing in nothing"

I suppose that's what we are: "belief machines". We cannot NOT believe, it's just that what we believe is always shifting. What we believe actually comes true, at least on a collective level. Of all the forces on the planet, it would seem that human belief is the most powerful, and a close second is the mass media. It shapes our ideas of what is true or not, and thus literally shapes the future. No wonder media control is so important to our modern Titans, everything is simply a matter of public relations.

I believe that what we call God is our collective subconscious. Sometimes that scares me because God is all powerful, and frankly, our subconscious is a dark and scary place. I wonder if this fear of the subconscious is what drives the formation of religions - a desire to control the subconscious by any means necessary. The Church knows that our reality is literally created by what we believe, and it desires to keep us away from the abyss. And yet, the abyss has swallowed even the Church, having lost every shred of legitimacy in the ongoing sexual abuse trials. It has been consumed by what it thought it could control. A good lesson, I think.

"they had started believing in anything".

So what DO we believe in, now? More or less everything and anything. It's the Dark Ages, all over again. The internet, far from being a tool of enlightenment, has been like the whisperer of rumors in the town square, and allowed our dark subconscious access to the security codes. The Forbidden Planet, consumed by subconscious forces beyond their control.

In Rise of the Iron Moon, the invaders are brutally efficient, carnivorous consumers of planetary life. Their bio-engineered servants are man eating apes, they treat human beings like humans treat cows and pigs. They have developed massive slug-like creatures that burrow into the earth, devouring mineral deposits while excreting useful mechanical components. They consume a planet like locusts consume a wheat field, caring not an iota about the pain and suffering, and then move on. In other words, they behave exactly like a corporate board of directors. They justify their actions like a farmer justifies his farming - a planet is a field to be harvested and then left for a few million years to lie fallow and regenerate.

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Stephen Hunt:

Shortly after winning the FT Award, he was hired by the Financial Times to be head of online development for their own magazine arm, where he introduced sites for their media, including Investors Chronicle, The Banker, as well as various channels of the newspaper's main FT.com site. In 2001, Hunt became research director of the investment bank Almeida Capital, where he founded AltAssets, an online service focused on the venture capital and private equity market.

Stephen Hunt works for the bankers (The Masters) and yet, he is somewhat like the runaway slave of his story, someone who realizes the end result of global corporate rule - and is sending an encoded message. Perhaps one that even our subconscious will hear.

"There is more power in the human heart and the imagination of a child than in any stone circle or blade."

The Madness Continues

In the Hugo Award winning graphic novel "Watchmen", Alan Moore uses an interesting dramatic device where a character in the novel is reading a pirate comic - "Tales of the Black Freighter" - that echoes events going on in the "real world" narrative of Watchmen. The lad who's reading the pirate story never notices that the story he's reading, and the larger story, the one he experiences as "real life", are more or less the same story, but told in different ways.

I had a remarkable experience a few days ago when I was reading my latest passion - a steampunk novel named "Rise of the Iron Moon", by Stephen Hunt, and the words the characters were saying were oddly echoing my personal situation. I won't bore you with details, but it was uncanny how the novelists words were synced with what I was doing, hearing, and seeing at that very moment. It was a "WTF?" thing.

The conceit of steampunk is to invent a world that uses alternate tech (computer = transaction machine), names (England = Kingdom of Jackels) and history (Ice Age = Cold Time) that are essentially congruent with this one. Much like Alan Moore did with Tales of the Black Freighter and Watchmen.

Watchmen was about a faked alien invasion, and Rise of the Iron Moon is about an alien invasion, though I didn't know that when I checked it out, I just liked the steampunky cover art. I've had a consistent fascination with the alien invasion myth, this blog is a testament to that, I think. I'm fascinated by films like Contact, Cocoon, and Independence Day. I wonder about the famous Orson Wells narrated fake Mars invasion. I consider the idea of a faked moon landing.

Caught between worlds, I am vulnerable to trans-myth interpolation. In Rise of the Iron Moon, the squabbling inhabitants of their fair, green planet are suddenly brought together by a greater threat, one so heinous that they are forced to put aside their differences. They build a mighty gun, shaped like a spiral, the projectile being spun around until at last it reaches a velocity capable of escaping earth's gravity. Into this gun they have poured all their resources and efforts, their one last hope of survival.

Obviously, this would be the Large Hadron Collider. It's a weapon. How else would it have been funded?

"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world" ~Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, 42nd General Assembly September 21, 1987

Born Again Phone

Why do you suppose Microsoft chose Easter Sunday, 4/8, Resurrection Day, for the launch of the new Windows Lumia 900 - a day when most malls and the AT&T stores were closed? This phone is a big deal to MS and Nokia and AT&T, and you'd think at least one of them would have thought that launching the phone on the day of one of the most recognized religious holidays on the planet might not be such a great idea. Nope, never occurred to them.

So this HUGE rant by Var ensued about how totally stupid MS was to launch their big, huge new phone on the day that all the stores were closed! I was wondering what the hell does that mean, on a metaphysical level?

"When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed, with a word she can get what she came for."

I actually suspect that the "transcontinental" phone line to the subconscious really WAS opened on 4/8/12. Stake your claim, the gold rush is on. One to a customer, please.

The Fabulous Riverboat

I was looking at this architectural drawing of the Etemenanki ziggurat - the biblical Tower of Babel - and it suddenly began to look like a ship to me - viewed from dead ahead. Blame the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, everything looks like a ship right now - heading for an iceberg on the event horizon. It's almost perfect, the stacking of the decks, the prow and cutwater, the columns representing the smoke stacks. A ship of the desert, plowing through time.

Time, flows like a river, to the sea. The Alan Parsons Project

Maybe that's why, when I visited the Great Architect's Taliesen West in Phoenix this winter, I felt compelled to do my Jack impersonation, perched on the "prow" of the monument.

The ziggurat as the riverboat of human consciousness, on the river of time. Samuel Clemens was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, This occupation gave him his pen name, Mark Twain, from "mark twain," the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms. I began looking at those twin columns, those twin towers, those twin smoke stacks.

Hit it, Tina:



Title inspiration from The Fabulous Riverboat, by Philip José Farmer, from the Riverworld series.