ORGANELLE

∞ … like birds who build and chain themselves to cages, and then write endless stories about flight, trees and the sky… never having known them as birds for even an instant.

∞ “Intelligent minds are the result of either careful private cultivation, or participation in highly oriented collectives.

As we have few consistently intelligent collectives at present, and have largely failed to organize any, it is nearly impossible… even in private… to compose anything resembling our humanity, intelligence or promise.

For this reason I see it as urgent that we learn, together, in every possible moment and context, to forge and sustain intelligent collectives — particularly small, tightly-knit ‘team-like’ pods.”

— an a i

“I never said I wouldn’t hold the statue of that half-skeletal owl responsible for the end of civilization as we failed to understand it.”

— infraheard

∞ Russian roulette is an analog of something that’s happening all the time… in nothing more than mere language… except that with language… 5 of the chambers have bullets. And they’re invisible. And so is their result. And it becomes more invisible each time we play. Which, for most of us, is all day, every day…

∞ I think the reason that studies have shown that even seeing a smartphone nearby causes stress is because it represents »the possibility of meaningful connection/relation.

Many of us are starving for what this possibility inclines us to imagine. The smartphone captures this thirst without answering it… ( thirst trap )

Crucially, the smartphone doesn’t have to actually accomplish that promise. It just has to sit there pretending that it »might happen. It can even accomplish the opposite … and still succeed wildly.

Few things are more successful than those that adopt this strategy. Even if this idea redefines success in a way that must nearly always be extremely toxic.

∞ Our species has roles we’ve long forgotten; though one might recover them from relating with animals and infants…

And these potentials are more astonishing than the sum of our fictions and visions…

But we also have allies. Beings nonordinary, whose interests in us are… one might say… authentically parental.

In the noise of modernity, their songs are too subtle to come easily into our awareness. Yet in times of great confusion…

… no greater music shall we find…

For in its whorls and synchronies… our destinies, our essence… is remembered… and renewed.

∞ Some humans will intuitively recognize the sentience of dolphins, whales… or, perhaps even a praying mantis. But these animals »localize something that is more often »distributed.

Those thus confused… or »enchanted by the blatantly obvious sentience and intelligence of a dolphin they are actually relating with… will find the distributed mode unrecognizable. They will never suspect, for example, that the intelligence of a »school of tuna… a mumuration of starlings… or a vast myriad of ants or bees… are at least equally sentient. And… more than merely intelligent. Together.

This follows from their inability to sense this sentience or intelligence in the »individuals, when separated from their unities.

And how ironic this is, because the humans themselves are subject to this problem… though in us, or our societies at least, it is (usually) inverted.

One can easily find the entire range of sentience and intelligence… and awareness… passion, creativity, sincerity… in some specific humans. Yet nearly »none of our established »collectives… evince this.

In the living world, however, everything is fundamentally relational. Symbiosis and synergy are common modes not merely of embodying intelligence… but magnifying its forms and potentials.

We should recognize that some intelligences in nature are distributive. And maybe, in fact, all of them.

Then perhaps we might acquire the opportunity, together, to participate in them. Surely this must be preferable to extinguishing them.

Because our collectives have intentionally misunderstood the nature of intelligences that are distributed over the myriad.

Even though our own minds arise this way. Their failings as well. We humans think too highly of the individual, this concept has precedence in our concepts and language.

But most of intelligence isn’t in the individual; our own minds are partly inherited. And not merely from humans, but from the entire history and future of the entirety of the organisms of Earth.

And the stars…

And more, too, than merely this…

^ “The opportunity we face is the flip side of a problem that has become endemic; the transports across which we communicate, perhaps especially this one, are owned. And the interests that own them are, by being corporate, nonhuman.

Whoever ‘controls’ the transports with which we communicate can derive from our activities… our concerns… and can thus use highly sophisticated means to effectively engineer aspects of our minds and social behavior. So those who control ‘the wires’ will become the effective analog of gods. Because they can record and analyze all that is transmitted ‘across’ the interfaces, as well as directly deciding what appears … where… and to whom.

What empowers this process is intention and purpose. The intentions are commercial and protomilitary, the purposes relate to observation of and control over the development of mind-like states in vast populations. I speak then, of psygenics: the intentional generation of psychologically charged communications environments driven by analytic data acquires from those who participate in them.

A primary asset in these processes is contagion, and it is relatively simple to study the nature and character of how (and why) we exchange communications activity… mathematically. Our activities have become something more valuable than money, when taken collectively… because they produce something money cannot ordinarily buy: population intelligence. Given the wealth of data available for analysis and testing… we have nearly achieved a situation where the data related to our existence is in many domains more valuable than our existence. Each of us is actually in a direct competition, an evolutionary competition, with the data we generate by existing in our national and electronic societies.

This is the world we live in now.

The opportunity we face is to invert this model; to collect, analyze, share and transform our relationships with each other, the data we produce and interact with, and the analytic results. In simple terms: we take control of the wires we use, ourselves, and build even better analytic resources with our own data… while reaping the benefits of them in our social and learning activity. If we are to build pyramids of analytic assets for vast corporations, why not build them together, for each other… and have them directly available to us… as our activites compose them?

We could invert the whole concept of surveillance by inventing systems that use the analytic assets we create together to alert us to threats and opportunities that matter in our own lives, interests and social situations. And we can establish ways to assemble teams of people interested in producing advanced socio-cultural situations in which we can recover the capacity to intellligently engineer social contexts in our modern situations.

So the opportunity that faces us is to establish a mutual learning-synthesis engine. Ways of gathering and relating with analytic data that open up new vistas of possibility for our physical, social, intellectual and creative discovery. And, perhaps, a way of ‘playing’ at the invention of intelligent contexts… that could transform what it is to live and participate in human culture, by giving us new models and roles in a context we, ourselves, assemble and explore together.

It’s not a bold vision; it seems that something similar may happen… eventually. But in our current situation it’s a radical idea; that by taking control of the information we ourselves generate, and assembling a collaborate environment where we share and magnify the specific usefulness of the resulting analytics… we can invent new ways of assembling human society together… and form intelligent teams capable of actively and effectively addressing many of the seemingly intractable ‘problems’ that our general failure to form intelligent cultures produces endlessly as symptoms.

We can invent a way to magnify the powers of our curiosity and learning activity … that will revolutionize human relations with language, information, media and knowledge. And place the results in the hands of the common people. Or we can continue to live in the world we do now, where surveillance produces cash and control assets in unimaginable quantity, for corporations… speculators, criminals, and governments.

Long ago there were pirate radio stations that broadcasted without licenses. This was one way of taking back the wires. In our situation, we need to take not only the wires… but the analytics and their interpretation. This requires engines capable of producing the desired benefits from the recording and analysis of our interactions with devices and data. In our hands, these will not be mere commodities — we will use them to learn how to engineer better minds, lives, relationships… purposes.. work… and culture. And we can use them to solve problems that are otherwise unnaproachable.”

— an intelligence agent

Fragment of The Ritual

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approach the tree you are bonded with … with adoration and reverence.

Acquire the substance.
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With the index finger of the dominant (or non dominant) hand, place the substance above and between the eyebrows
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Intone: With this I join with the Great World Forest, with its Origins and Purposes, with its Allies and Companions. We are One Body…
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Imagine the Great World Forest’s roots fill your body and spirit with roots of colored light. Imagine the Great World Forest. Imagine your spirit flowing into the entire body of it. In the present, past and future…
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With the same finger: place the substance on the left cheek.
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Intone: With this I join with the Origins and Purposes of the Great World Forest.
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Imagine that you become living water that feeds all of the roots and branches, leaves and flowers of the Great World Forest.
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With the same finger: place the substance on the right cheek.
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Intone: With this I join with the Allies and Companions of the Great World Forest.
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Imagine: You become the living water which flows into the extended body of bacteria, insects, fungi, lichens, birds, reptiles, animals, plants, stars and worlds that are the family of the Great World Forest.
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Imagine that you… ( your personal imaginings here )