ORGANELLE

“Don’t get stars in your eyes — they’ll burn your head off.”

— button wisdom

“Disenthrallment is underrated.”

— Dr. Kevin Boru

“Differentiation always occurs in the female direction, regardless of genetic programming, unless an adequate level of testosterone is present In other words, even if the genetic code is masculine, an inadequate amount of testosterone will result in the development of female sexual characteristics. The principle of feminization takes priority over masculinization. During normal female differentiation. the primitive Müllerian duct system develops Into the uterus, the fallopian tubes. and the inner third of the vagina. In males, the Müllerian duct system regresses, and the Wolffian duct system develops. becoming the vasa deferentia, seminal vesicles, and ejaculatory ducts.

Whereas the internal precursors of both male and female sexual organs are thus present for potential development, the precursors for the external genitals are unitypic, that is, the same precursors may develop into either masculine or feminine external sexual organs. Without the presence of adequate levels of androgens (testosterone and dehydrotestosterone) during the critical period of differentiation, beginning with the eight-week fetus. a clitoris, vulva, and vagina will develop. But with the presence of adequate levels of androgen stimulation, the penis, including its glands, and the scrotal sac will form, and the testes will develop as organs within the abdomen. They normally migrate into their scrotal position during the eighth or ninth month of gestation.

Under the influences of circulating fetal hormones, a dimorphic development of certain areas tithe brain takes place following the differentiation of internal and external genitals. The brain is ambitypic, and in it the development of female characteristics also prevails unless there is an adequate level of circulating androgens. Specific hypothalamic and pituitary functions that will be differentiated into the cyclic in women and noncyclic in men are determined by this differentiation. Male/female differentiation of the brain occurs only in the third trimester, after differentiation of external sex organs has taken place, and possibly continues during the first postnatal trimester. In nonprimate mammals, the prenatal hormonal differentiation of the brain preorders subsequent mating behavior. In primates, however, early social communication and learning are overridingly important in determining sexual behavior; the control of actual mating behavior is therefore determined largely by the earliest social interactions.”

— Love Relations: Normality and Pathology, Otto F. Kernberg, M.D

“Consumable pseudocyclical time is spectacular time, both in the narrow sense as time spent consuming images and in the broader sense as image of the consumption of time. The time spent consuming images (images which in turn serve to publicize all the other commodities) is both the particular terrain where the spectacle’s mechanisms are most fully implemented and the general goal that those mechanisms present, the focus and epitome of all particular consumptions. Thus, the time that modern society is constantly seeking to “save” by increasing transportation speeds or using packaged soups ends up being spent by the average American in watching television three to six hours a day. As for the social image of the consumption of time, it is exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations — moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance and as desirable by definition. These commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life.”

— Guy Debord — The Society of the Spectacle

“Consciousness is one of the fundamental questions; it is not so much an experience of the world or relationships “as they are”, rather, it is a bizarre affair in which the colloquia of our concerns and habits prefigure the experiences we derive »in relation» with people, timelines, situations and events.

Thus it is that consciousness organizes the world of our perceived values and identities according to the concerns we bring from within our minds. What is seen then, is always a reflection of these concerns.

Broadly, however, we can become aware that some species of concerns are liberating and jovial, intelligent and expansive. Rather than dictating an ever-narrowing path for awareness and attention, they introduce novel and useful alternatives for relation, thought and learning. We can easily develop the sense of whether the form of our concern, interest and awareness is »narrowing the field of consciousness (and dictating too few forms and relations) or expanding it (thus introducing unexpected alternatives).

There are situations in which narrowing pays off, as well. Some specific tasks require narrow focus and clear attention. But where these tool-like necessities bleed over into the formative ground of our lives and hearts, we may wish to introduce species whose natures are broad, inclusive, generous… and kind.

Both basic forms always work together in nearly all of our consciousness activity; the question at hand is whether stress, fear, pain or anxiety are copiously involved in selecting which aspect is predominant, and if they are, whether or not the world that emerges to our awareness and concern in any way exists. As we become aware of this question, we may start to recognize when we are being led into a circus whose costumed others and circumstances are primarily projections from our own concerns (and psyche). This is a startling moment in our development, in which we may recover aspects of our creativity, personality and nature that are otherwise buried beneath such projections and our fear of discovering this.

The simplest thing I wish to convey is that consciousness has endless forms, and many of the thought-like forms derive not so much from the world or experience as what concerns us; our concerns drive the derivation of categories for objects of experience, and this derivation is deeply informed by the purposes for which our concerns emerge, and find expression in thought, speech, judgement, description, evaluation and … love.”

— an anonymous informant

“Collectivization and mass-phenomena, for that matter, may well be nothing other than a reactivated magic clan-attunement in deficient form. Political parties are a compelling example, particularly the extreme ones dominated by the fanatically blind point-relatedness of the magical. And isolation or individuation may well be nothing more than the reactivated magic point-like unity become deficient.

While the beginnings of individuation and the clan formed a unity in the magic structure, they are today rationally torn asunder and, driven to extremes, have in their deficiency a destructive effect.

Or, stated differently, we might say that the hyperobjectification achieved by the »ratio» brings about isolation, whereas the hypersubjectivization—the over-emphasis of the Ego—leads to the limits of Ego-capacity where the ego, reverting to its psychic conditionality, rather than mastering the psyche, is itself ruled and condemned by it: it is absorbed by the unconscious, by immoderation, by the mass.

All remedies proposed to combat this danger turn out to be unsuitable. Political parties of “unity” or unified states attempt to regulate the problems of isolation or collectivization, although they reveal their own deficient character by their one-sided demands for power. The attempt is made to improve the circumstances of deficient magic by means of deficient magic, an attempt, as it were, to drive out the devil by invoking Beelzebub.

Let this one example suffice to show the basic point: wherever we encounter a predominance of insistent requests (and fanaticism is a request blindly elevated to a demand which not only petitions but compels); wherever we find a prevalence of the idea of unification in whatever form—a doctrine of unity, the establishment of an association, a huge organization, a one-party state and the like; wherever we encounter a stress on the concept of obedience, as in an overemphasis on the military, or belonging and belongings, as in the property claims of capitalistic trusts or family patriarchies; and in general wherever we meet up with overweening emotionalism as in mass assemblies, propaganda, slogans, and the like, we may conclude that we are dealing mainly with essentially »deficient manifestations of magic».

Their deficiency can be recognized by their very claim to »exclusivity, as if they alone had validity or worth in contrast to the validity of other structures and forms of manifestation. Yet one may well ask what is to be gained by our classification of these phenomena as being deficiently magical. The answer is that because we know how they come to be, and recognize their conditionality, we no longer have to face them unaided. Even though we may not be able to do anything against such phenomena, we can at least avoid becoming submissive to them. We can view them with a certain detachment, secure in the knowledge that a deficient acquisition of unity does not lead to strength but rather of necessity, and naturally, to brutal power and, ultimately, to impotence.”

— Jean Gebser, The Ever Present Origin, Mutations as an Integral Phenomenon, p. 153-154

“Climbing, dance, or t’ai chi… are three of the most intelligent things you can do with your body… but it is the spirit you bring to your own selection… that truly transforms you. And whose likeness you’ll acquire…”

— an anonymous informant

“Cities, for example, are absolutely unsustainable. A tiny crisis could obliterate the entire fucking culture because of this. Yet everyone has been wandering around thinking we’re living in safety… because they don’t look at the delicacy of our ‘infrastructure’, which is devastatingly dependent upon supply lines that are so easily disrupted they might as well be made of toilet paper.”

— an anonymous informant

“Chris’s recent work addresses the question of whether the joyous cosmology of psychedelic consciousness is simply foisting a comforting delusion on the sick and the dying. His central argument is that, while psychedelic therapy has epistemic flaws, it also has epistemic benefits. In experiencing phenomena that may not be ‘real’, one gains ‘real’ knowledge into one’s mind and its possibilities. Psychedelic subjects gain experiential knowledge of their own psychological potential, and of the constructed nature of their sense of self. In this interview he explains why psychedelic experiences are not delusions, neuroscience is essential to philosophy of mind, and philosophers should have more access to psychedelic experience, while questioning the notion of a ‘psychedelic worldview’.”

“Certain psychedelics… ayahuasca… it’s like annealing, which is a heat treatment in material science… whereby the introduction of entropy… when a substance cools, well, it acquires a new local minimum. So each time I did this psychedelic, I located a new local (minimum)! of »meaning.

And this changed how I made sense of things, and I’m not talking about structured sequences in my head; I am talking about the way in which I can sense whether things make sense, the backdrop which, ever-present while thinking, allows me to tell, intuitively, when I’m… when I have done something that doesn’t add up or make sense, or contradicts something else that I’ve said.

It’s… for me I had to reach a conclusion, at a certain point, ahh, that I »just wasn’t there at any level.

I talked about… there were parts of myself, parts of my soul… I was well-attuned to mindfulness meditation where I realized my thoughts don’t always make sense… but this is not … this is different than your thinking mind running amok or being pathological. Usually you can transit to a mindfulness state… because … the whole context you’re operating inside of, inside yourself, becomes uninterruptible, and you can’t tell anything at all…»you can no longer trust your evaluative capacities in any sense whatsoever».”

— an anonymous informant (js)