ORGANELLE

“I remember the first time I realized that my favorite television show was effectively just being made up for the express purpose of manipulating my emotions. And was using trauma and extreme violence to accomplish this. I remember the first time that I withdrew in horror from the media and the effect. I remember reflecting upon that abuse, and writing the first essay I ever penned. It took me a while to recognize the confidence trick in every incarnation, but once I did, I was immune.

And this kind of immunity?

It’s unimaginably contagious.”

“I performed best when I was reading the textbook, while typing its text into a wordprocessor, while listening to music, and (peripherally) watching milkdrop on another monitor. This was creating other domains of memory, that were linked to the unique stimuli that were simultaneously associated with the material I was ‘reading’ – but I wasn’t merely reading, and I couldn’t remember the things I merely read — I needed the multiple inputs at the same time in order to anchor the otherwise boring texts in memory.

This allowed me to record the texts in my mind nearly photographically, which was what was required to pass the tests.

The authorities didn’t want a better answer; and I could almost always produce a better answer… they wanted you to re-iterate what was in the textbooks.

So that’s how I learned to do that. When they stopped me from using my own OS and listening to music at the same time, I was so bored I couldn‘t absorb the material.”

— an anonymous informant (WS)

“I only watch movies in languages I can’t understand. In fact, I kind of feel like other people don’t know how to watch movies… because language tells you what to imagine.

Tonight I was watching a movie, and as the man pulled out a gun and yelled at someone, I decided that he was saying “I am going to have sex with the moon!” The other man looked very disturbed, and yelled back, “Those fucking flowers were imitating Van Gough!”

And later, when the woman was digging around in her purse, I heard her say “Why did I put all the cats in the universe in here?” I suspected that the man was going to have a hard time, and the woman was looking for a very specific cat. But I don’t really know, because watching movies is like losing my mind.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Screening Room

“I once knew a high-level operative who was quite offended being called a ‘translator’. He scoffingly suggested that any idiot who could speak two languages was a translator, but he worked for the government as an Interpretor, a completely different species. This makes perfect sense as the great bulk of communication between humans is nonlinguistic and is difficult to read across cultures. Matter of fact, for some it is difficult to read the nonverbal cues of their own culture, so for them picking up the nonverbal cues of an alien culture would be nearly impossible.”

— an anonymous informant (JWR)

“I often learn about myself or humans from closely observing animals. Today, I was witness to a situation within a clade of around 23 Canada Geese. What I learned was simple: stress and aggression can easily become contagious in groups.

One gander usually begins the process. This one appears to have ‘taken offense’ at the proximity or behavior of another bird, often also a gander. So the offended party initiates a display of aggression/territoriality.

The results may differ according to the context and composition of the group. For example, sometimes, other birds, usually males, will make similar ‘display attacks’ on the first victim. More often, however, a complex process of contagion ensues where, over a brief period of time, the group experiences something analogous to lightning generation. The stress is communicated into ‘sub-pods’ within the group, with specific birds either stepping it down, or reiterating the aggression. So there is, for a time, a ‘little storm’ of aggressions and display-attacks, which travels through the subgroups.

It appears to me that the emotional and context status of the group greatly informs the situation. If all are relatively calm, the storm either never gets started or dies quickly. If there are nearby threats or … for example… food is being provided by visiting humans… this increases the general agitation of the group.

While watching this process this morning I realized that our clades are extremely similar, and that ‘news’ (something I consider extremely toxic) almost always feeds and even attempts to generate these processes… for the simple reason that the more storms there are, the more money and attention media companies (and their shareholders) can acquire rapidly. They can even ‘establish the pulse’ of fear, outrage and aggression in our cultures, and ‘quicken’ that pulse simply by ‘triggering’ the persons or clades most easily affected.”

— an intelligence agent

“I might suggest something like this:

That every instance of a unity and every (possible) constellation of them into relationships of any possible form… comprise what can be understood as Hypersystems. And every real and possible hypersystem has qualities that resemble those we find and expect… in what we refer to as ‘the universe’ as if we were speaking of a singular referent. Yet the referent can be neither singular »nor multiple… it is, instead, strangely »transcendental. And it is not the qualities of this universe(s) that we derive, but rather the results of our purposes and approaches to analyzing it(they).”

— an anonymous informant

“But there is a further puzzle here – something (as it were) more fine-grained, something that it has only fairly recently occurred to people to wonder about. All of the “interpretations” I mentioned above make crucial use of something called the quantum-mechanical wave-function. And there is a question – even once we have settled on one or another of those “interpretations” – about what sorts of things quantum-mechanical wave-functions are. And various possible answers to that question have been hotly debated for 15 or 20 years now. Everybody has always agreed that the simplest and most flat-footed and most obvious way to think about what wave-functions are is to think of them as concrete physical objects. But the space that wave-functions live in, the space (that is) that we would be obliged to think of as the fundamental physical space of the world- if we want to think of wave-functions as concrete physical objects – happens to have a gigantic number of dimensions. And this has always seemed to everybody to amount to a problem. And I have lately become convinced that it is nothing of the sort. I have lately become convinced that (as a matter of fact) it is the key to the whole business. It turns out that if you imagine that the fundamental physical space of the world is something other, and larger, and different than the three-dimensional space of our everyday experience, then everything that has always seemed uncanny about quantum mechanics suddenly becomes clear and straightforward and understandable and in some sense to have been expected. Anyway, that’s the work that I was thinking of in my response to your previous question.”

— David Albert

“I mean, you’d think that the 11th commandment was something like ‘Have many, many orgasms in my name’. And we pretty much got that one right.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Horizontal Room

“I mean, one fucking problem in this country is that there are large segments of the population who absolutely identify with racists and people who massacred others and really believe they deserve to be publicly glorified.

And it’s not merely in ‘the South’ — California, for example, is rife with ‘missions’ where indigenous people were tortured. And there are 12 other related problems that are simply too sophisticated to go into here. The stink is so thick and tangled that one needs some kind of ideological machete just to try to wade into it.”

— infraheard

”I mean, look, it’s called an en-VIRON-ment for a reason…“

— infraheard

“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.”

— J Krishnamurti