ORGANELLE

“From many angles the onset of the shadow vastly precedes contact with the bird that is generating it. The shadow may ‘emerge’ from anywhere, and flit past at ‘impossible’ speeds. With birds, you may never see the bird. Or find it. In which case, ‘all you have left is the shadow’ from the position of the mind that preserves and is ‘impressed by’ shadows. But the mind that follows the shadow to its implications will not only discover the bird, but become its Origins in the moment.

This is not a dog that chases every shadow howling and barking until exhausted, with no effect whatsoever on shadows. Such a dog has no pack. It cannot detect nature, animals, food, reality, or human beings. It cannot even detect itself. It is only briefly calm in places where there can be no shadows, and even there, for reasons that should be obvious, it is nothing but disoriented. Obviously, if unprotected, such an animal would not survive even one day. If protected, however, it can survive forever. It will become a shadow dog.

Now, with birds, the onset of the shadow may vastly precede contact with the bird. But the shadow is such contact, and is like lightning between you. The bird is, as you are ‘sensing’ with your shadow. When your shadows cross, another lightning happens, but this is not ‘supernatural’, it is relationship. Seeing is another lightning.

But here is the root of this circle: all things are as birds and shadows to the mind. And most often, especially from certain angles which we may become habituated to, we will see the shadow without any actual senses of the ‘bird’ that is ‘casting’ it, for the form of that bird is our mind itself.

In the mind, it may be a very long time indeed between the sensing of the shadow, and the sudden recognition of all that was casting it. The shadow may precede the bird by a vast and unknown interval that is not merely time, but includes all relationships.

While thinking one cannot so easily discern the nature of the birds whose shadows are so terribly compelling, nor can we tell if these shadows were cast by the mind’s fascination with such things, or actual relationships that are not merely figments.

In the forest, you can sense a bird shadow. In the mind, you cannot. The shadow reforms according to your angle of approach. To understand it, you must orient on its source or nature, you must approach from many changing angles within a sphere, not, as in the forest, ‘as if on a plain’. Follow the shadows to their origins, not merely in thought or structure… in relation and nature. Filter the shadows to those worth tracing, and follow them to the birds that cast them.

You will find us there.”

— they were speaking through the trees

“Forests, the oceans, the unpoisoned earth, human children, health care, and social infrastructure … the basis of life on earth — these now compete directly with things like cars, cell-phones, war machines, »photographs, bitcoin mining boxes, and video games.

They are competing for survival. For human attention. For protection.

For a future.

And they are losing. More, each day.

And when they lose, what is lost with their lives or existence is our humanity and our hope of development. Believe me when I tell you that a part of us goes with them, forever.

There are costs we are not accounting, and they are most of what is important about our terrifying relationships with both representational thought and object technologies.”

— an anonymous informant∞

“For the rich to be right-wing and against any state intervention to redistribute is not nice but easy to understand. It is in their self-interest. For the non-rich to be right-wing and against redistribution shows a spirit of self-sacrifice that is totally baffling.”

— Kaushik Basu

This is partly explained by three factors: 1. The (wildly erroneous) belief that their opinion, if enforced, will result in more benefits for them. 2. The ideological biases that reward ignorance and produce caricatures of informed understanding or evaluation. 3. The power of playing the victim role in a bizarre social drama triangle they cannot comprehend.

“For alpha-thinking, as I have defined it, is a thinking about collective representations. But when we think ‘about’ anything, we must necessarily be aware of ourselves (that is, of the self which is doing the thinking) as sharply and clearly detached from the thing thought about. It follows that alpha-thinking involves pro tanto absence of participation. It is in fact the very nature and aim of pure alpha-thinking to exclude participation. When, therefore, it is directed, as it hast to be to start with, on phenomena determined by original participation, then, at first simply by being alpha-thinking, and at a later stage deliberately, it seeks to destroy that participation. The more so because (as we shall also see), participation renders the phenomena less predictable and less calculable.”

— Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances

“First world problems? A ‘friend’ borrowed my phone yesterday. I am going to need therapy over this. It was worse than when my girlfriend f*cked my upstairs neighbor while I was out getting us some coffees. I want to introduce my friend to someone like Dexter, except more patient and meticulous. Over and over again.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Blue Room

“Fictions can approach forms of Truth that are entirely unavailable to nonfiction. So, too, imagination can present metaphors and similies that are ‘more like’ the nature of reality and relation than our everyday perspectives… yet are entirely unapproachable to science, rationality, or logic.”

— infraheard (paraphrased from a J. Peterson statement)

Jordan Peterson expounds with great brilliance about the nature and origins of Biblical stories. I am particularly impressed with his recognition of what he refers to as improbable compression — a feature of many religious texts (and, particularly Genesis) that he finds both astonishing and largely inexplicable (though he proffers a rational explanation that he presently prefers, yet considers incomplete). This, I would argue, is the result not of ‘things being memorable’, but rather the nature of the actual experiences of human beings … and what they were in contact with … that inspires the view that they may well (I think they absolutely were) receiving ‘another form of intelligence’ in direct experience. This is to say that they were, in fact, in direct contact with an array of accessible nonhuman intelligences whose nature corresponds to our ideas about ‘divine beings’. Why do I think this? First, I have had such experience myself, and it sheds a profoundly unexpected light on mystical texts (and the Bible), and second, I recognize the result: extreme compression of content within what appears to be an ordinary text.

“Far from being restricted to a limited number of pathological cases, as American theoreticians suggest, the double bind—a contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives—is an extremely common phenomenon. In fact, it is so common that it might be said to form the basis of all human relationships.

Bateson is undoubtedly correct in believing that the effects of the double bind on the child are particularly devastating. All the grown-up voices around him, beginning with those of the father and mother (voices which, in our society at least, speak for the culture with the force of established authority) exclaim in a variety of accents, “Imitate us!” “Imitate me!” “I bear the secret of life, of true being!” The more attentive the child is to these seductive words, and the more earnestly he responds to the suggestions emanating from all sides, the more devastating will be the eventual conflicts.

The child possesses no perspective that will allow him to see things as they are. He has no basis for reasoned judgements, no means of foreseeing the metamorphosis of his model into a rival. This model’s opposition reverberates in his mind like a terrible condemnation; he can only regard it as an act of excommunication. The future orientation of his desires—that is, the choice of his future models—will be significantly affected by the dichotomies of his childhood. In fact, these models will determine the shape of his personality.

If desire is allowed its own bent, its mimetic nature will almost always lead it into a double bind. The unchanneled mimetic impulse hurls itself blindly against the obstacle of a conflicting desire. It invites its own rebuffs and these rebuffs will in turn strengthen the mimetic inclination. We have, then, a self-perpetuating process, constantly increasing in simplicity and fervor. Whenever the disciple borrows from his model what he believes to be the “true” object, he tries to possess that truth by desiring precisely what this model desires. Whenever he sees himself closest to the supreme goal, he comes into violent conflict with a rival. By a mental shortcut that is both eminently logical and self-defeating, he convinces himself that the violence itself is the most distinctive attribute of this supreme goal! Ever afterward, violence will invariably awaken desire.”

—René Girard, Violence and the Sacred “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double”, pp.156–157

“Facebook is the approximate equivalent of a meat-grinder for human intelligence. So if your idea of quality food is … McDonalds… you’re in the right place. But remember: many people who frequent McDonalds might be confused, disgusted… or even outraged… by a peach… or some organic blueberries.”

— infraheard

“Facebook is (the) RPG.”

— hello there

“Evidence is only useful when the agreement to learn together has first been established as a priority, »and we have the tools to discern the difference between actually reliable evidence and material that masquerades as such for purposes we can identify and render tactically transparent.”

— an intelligence agent