The Archaic Revival Pt. 2: A Politician's Guide To James Joyce

   

      The candidates were asked if they agreed with the charges of obscenity that branded Ulysses pornography.  Sensing their confusion, the politician stepped forward and smiled.

        "It is true. Ulysses is filled with sticky pages.  

But Finnegans Wake is the load!"

The Archaic Revival Pt. 1: Event Horizon Media

The first pictures of a black hole ever recorded 

were released today.  Several high-powered radio telescopes, separated by thousands of miles, were synchronized to work together in order to capture the image.

National Geographic

  Synchronization is necessary to enhance the resolution and sensitivity beyond what any single telescope is capable of.  

The great distances between these telescopes is also by design, as distance increases effectiveness.

This synchronized array of telescopes acts like a telescope the size of the planet Earth, and was able to collect more than five petabytes of data.  That's 5,000,000 gigabytes of data.

It took over two years to fully assemble the image.

Four Chan Cookie

Is This Water Part 5: Caught Between The Moon And New York City?

Fourth Way philosophy aims to strip man of his mechanical behavior and hypnotic programming in order to build within him a core of heightened consciousness. It is an esoteric system assembled from incomplete fragments of inner Christianity and Sufism. It’s founder, Georges Gurdjieff, frequently admonished the thoughtless mechanical behavior of humanity and was fond of saying that we are “food for the moon.” 

What did Gurdjieff mean by this phrase? Many have interpreted “food for the moon” as a figure of speech, that perhaps Gurdjieff meant we are slave to our mechanical conditioning and feed our baser impulses. While it can be additionally interpreted that way, Gurdjieff was likely being literal. Peter Ouspensky, one of Gurdjieff’s most prolific disciples, lectured at length concerning the moon’s role in human affairs and its place in the cosmological scheme of things. It is reasonable to assume what Ouspensky wrote about the moon accurately reflects what Gurdjieff taught him.

According to Ouspensky, the moon acts as a giant electromagnet pulling upon all organic life on earth and sucking into itself the soul essence of dying creatures. The moon is an embryonic planet receiving its nutrition from organic life on earth through an etheric umbilical cord, an energy conduit between earth and moon. 

In man, the moon drives his mechanical aspects like a pendulum moving the gears of a clock. The degree to which one’s actions are driven by the moon is proportional to one’s level of reactivity and non-being. For people incapable of moving themselves through life by nobler spiritual impulses, the moon provides a propulsive force. Without this force, mechanical individuals would be passive as puppets without a puppeteer.  Ouspensky went so far as to say that the very physical motion of our limbs was made possible thanks to the moon.

Other Fourth Way initiates like Rodney Collin explained that because our body was largely made of water and the moon pulls on water to create the ocean tides, our bodies are made to move in similar but more complicated ways through hydraulic principles.

montalk.net 

Rainbows tend to happen on rainy days.  As we are told, a thunder storm opened over Golgotha and poured rain upon the scene of the Crucifixion of Christ, until a shaft of light pierced the clouds--and thus it is accomplished.  Nowadays, it is always raining somewhere.

To begin our story, The Moon is identified as a revelation of the Gnostic Christ, The Man in the Moon, who is crucified not as an act of attrition by the Pharisees (the official story), but by His own design, for the express purpose of holding the cosmos together in a single piece. 

As the lyrics of Rainy Days and Mondays lament, He is alone and feeling old, wants to quit, but can not.  It may be pertinent that this song, made famous by The Carpenters, provides a nice pairing to the lyrics of Bowie's A Space Oddity.  "...here am I, sitting in my tin can, far above the world.  Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do".  The image of the dilemma of Christ is the same proffered by Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation of the Christ--Christ must choose His role, and all of the suffering that comes with it, willingly and with complete foreknowledge.  

Loathe as it may be, it is an important job--being the center of the universe.  If, that is, we accept that something is better than nothing or at least that something is more likely than nothing.  And here too is an added dimension to the proverbial nothing is impossible.  It seems, thanks to the persistence of memory, that nothing truly is impossible.  

Mark LeClair,  Moon In The Middle

This can be expressed best by: the way back into the maze—what the bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—out of the maze.

Philip K. Dick,  The Exegesis

1969 was a hell of a year:

• Woodstock gave us 3 days of peace and music
• The Beatles recorded their final album and played their final live performance. 
• Project Bluebook was closed
• The Internet opened (Arpanet). 
• Human beings stepped onto the surface of the Moon for the first time.
• The first scientific report on the existence of the Mpemba Effect was published. 

And Cthulu remained stronger than ever.

Think of the necessary constraints placed upon dogs in order to make them salivate at the sound of a bell.  Think of the necessary constraints put on society to both sedate Cthulu (religion, WWI, WWII, Internet, drugs, etc) as well to satisfy Cthulu (religion, WWI, WWII, Internet, drugs, etc).  Think about the necessary constraints put on man in order to try and escape Cthulu (Apollo 11).

Now, think about the necessary constraints placed on liquid water in order to scientifically observe the Mpemba Effect: liquid water is boiled, then transferred into a small container, which is immediately placed into a refrigerated machine cooled to a temperature at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum.  

Water moves from a boiling hot environment to a freezing cold environment so fast, so unnaturally, that it can only be called abduction.  

The intensity of this abduction is rarely if ever present in the organic regulation of water's natural environment.  It is in this specific, controlled instance that the infinitesimal quintessence of water, consciousness, is triggered into the "merciless correlation of everything".  The sheer improbability of its abduction, and the ineluctability of its fate, awakens a horror of such divine magnitude that the fourth dimensional hyperspace of non-local consciousness awakens.  Pure source, pure product.

-- "the awakening of the element of purity in all matter" --

The inner truth of water is made clear:  water is not "water"; it is No-thing, which is to say, it is Every-Thing, Every-Where, and Every-When.  In an instant, true memory is restored.  Water remembers that it has never been confined by matter, never could be confined by matter, that it has only been confined, and can only ever be confined, by I-dentity. 

-- Anamnesis via Enantiodromia; I once was lost, but now am found --

No-Thing can be confined by a container; No-Thing is one with the container.  No-Thing is one with the container's container, and the building that houses the container.  It is one with the Stars, the Moon, and even New York City.   No-Thing is the inescapable conclusion of the self, deduced from a dialectic that spans millions of miles in No-Time at all. 

-- Time turns into Space; Nothing is impossible -- 

In this moment of eternity, “water” must face one final temptation:  stay in Nirvana, or return to an isolated identity locked in local confinement.  

Is This Water Part 4: Pavlov Vs. Cthulu

The Mpemba Effect is paradoxical for obvious reasons:  if you take two containers of water, one hotter than the other, the hot water must move to the temperature of the colder water first before it can move towards freezing.  The cold water, having a head start, should arrive first.

But no, not always.

How is it possible that hot water makes this jump in the timeline?

Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes all remarked about the paradoxical ability of warm water to freeze before cold water.

Aristotle claimed that the effect was due to antiperistasis, "the supposed increase in the intensity of a quality as a result of being surrounded by its contrary quality."  Descartes connected it to his Vortex theory, which has something to do with matter needing to be everywhere at all times which compels everything to swirl in circular vortices.

Modern science has offered several theories, but no one has ever locked down the definitive answer.  Some scientists even claim that the effect doesn't exist.

Regardless of the uncertainty, you can try this experiment out for yourself and come to your own conclusion about whether or not it exists.  I have, and it does.

Water is a profoundly important and weird substance.  It is composed of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the Universe, as well as oxygen, the third most abundant element in the Universe.  

Water is most commonly found in the form of vapor or ice, but on Earth, it is also found in its liquid form.  And it is in this liquid form that it starts to show off.

Nearly every liquid contracts when frozen.  If something is cooled down, particles tend to move more slowly, and collide less frequently.  Since particles spend more time closer together, this causes the material to shrink.  Except for water.  Water expands when frozen.  If water didn't expand, oceans and lakes would completely freeze from the bottom up, instead of forming the protective upper layer that sustains life forms swimming underneath.

Water is also the only liquid that exhibits the paradoxical wonder that is the Mpemba Effect.

Could this second quirk of water, the Mpemba Effect, be just as important as the expansion of ice?  Could the Mpemba effect be just as important to the existence of life here on Earth?  Yes.

The only difference between the miracle of floating ice and the miracle of the Mpemba Effect is that the miracle of the Mpemba Effect takes place on the Moon.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the 

inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

 H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu

Carl Jung, while discussing boundary dissolving mental states in certain individuals, wrote “autonomous elements can escape from the psyche’s control and present themselves as independent entities."  These autonomous elements escape the psyche when the psyche has correlated all of its contents, meaning, the wall between the conscious and the unconscious mind has dissolved, creating a unified state of experience that isn't between wakefulness and sleep, but rather, is both states simultaneously.  Jung never said whether this was a positive or negative experience, but it would seem that such an alien place would evoke horror.  It would appear that H.P. Lovecraft experienced this horror.   

Cthulu, then, would have to be the independent entity that escapes when the collective psyche of humanity finds an ability to correlate all of its contents.   

The magnitude and scope of Cthulu's influence rivals Jung's collective unconscious, and like the collective unconscious, Cthulu is not concerned with trivial notions of right and wrong.  Cthulu unleashed simply ravages the planet with the same intensity as the horror that ravaged Lovecraft's. And much like an individual under the influence of sex, drugs, and violence, any large scale, hyper-dimensionally connected society is constantly playing a dangerous game with dangerous forces.  Once Cthulu is awakened, Cthulu simply expends its energy until exhaustion carries it home to slumber under the sea.

If Cthulu is inevitable, and defeat is impossible, then the only options left are keeping Cthulu asleep, or finding a way to keep Cthulu satisfied.

"While you are experimenting, do not be content 

with the surface of things"

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work studying what is known today as Classical Conditioning.  In one of Pavlov's most famous experiments, the salivary glands of dogs were surgically altered in order to measure what he called "psychic secretion", which sounds oddly similar to the psychological phenomenon of Jung.  Pavlov's famous dogs were shown to develop new reflexes while under strict laboratory control, the most well known being the ability for dogs to begin salivating as a response to the sound of a bell that rang out before every meal.

What is fascinating to me about Pavlov’s experiments wasn’t that the bell triggered the salivation, it was the level of control necessary to invoke the response.  In order for the reflex to develop, and the response to occur consistently, the laboratory conditions required the same temperature, lighting, noise level, assistants, etc.  This was no arbitrary development.  The laboratory environment had to eliminate almost all traces of novelty in order for the conditioning to occur.  This hyper-regulation of environmental conditions stands in stark contrast to nature.  Nature, compared to the laboratory envirnment, is pure novelty.  This laboratory environment, compared to Nature, or to the Earth, is pure habit.  Or, as G.I. Gurdjieff would say, the environment is Lunar.

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