With the death of Japan’s violent student activism, the campaign to close the dormitory subsided for a time, but in the aftermath of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake there were new calls to replace the poorly aged building, which had already seen its maintenance neglected for decades by a university that had wanted to demolish it.
Another awesome article brought to our attention by the fine people at Technoccult
It is called trepanation, from the Greek trypanon (“a borer”), and it is one of the oldest forms of medical intervention known today. The trepanation is a classically simple operation— so simple, in fact, that you can perform it on yourself with some minor preparation (this is not advice): get a drill; press the drill into your skull until you’re through the bone (being careful not to press into the brain itself); and, supposing you survive the process, enjoy life as a newly minted member of Homo Sapiens Correctus.
Wait! wait! before you run off to your hardware store or garage, we at the Kook Science Resistance have compiled the following summary of the ancient (and modern) practice of trepanation for your further study. We again caution that this is not medical advice, but that, as always, we leave it to you to judge the truth for yourself . . .
From The Art of Memetics by Wes Unruh & Edward Wilson:
We’ve covered a good deal of ground now, from examining construction and distribution of memes to exploring how group minds come into being. We’ve examined how to distribute signals and discussed the power dynamics of information and the overlapping domain of marketing, magic, and masterminding. Now let’s backtrack a bit and examine how to program your preconscious mind intentionally. Your preconscious mind needs precise goals which it interprets literally, and those goals should be upgraded regularly. Your preconscious mind also retains memetic content indefinitely, and so once a meme is embedded it will continue influencing you until it is deliberately altered or removed. Likewise, once a meme is dissolved from your preconscious mind you will no longer have the result of that meme present in your life. By keeping a record (be it journal, collage, series of tattoos, etc.) you can track the directions of the preconscious motivators.
The preconscious mind is driven by emotional energy to move along specific pathways, acting on the dominant memetic structures. Those structures are put into place through repetition, which is a replication of action. What you believe determines how you imagine, and what symbolic structures you access while imagining. We’ve already discussed how the preconscious mind isn’t affected by the passage of time (when you picked up a meme), but rather by the intensity or resolution of a meme. As your beliefs are the very currency of a memetic economy, and belief constrains the patterns imagination can take, monitoring your imagination and critically thinking about why your imagination consistently follows specific vectors will help you identify the belief structures that limit your creativity.
Previous experiences will always be repeated unless the imagination is properly engaged, because those patterns are already in existence internally. Once the imagination is engaged without the constraints of belief, you can begin to be selective about adopting or generating new meme structures. Once engaged, new memes require an incubation period to properly unfold and become dominant, during which time problem solving and goal achievement is being pre-consciously calculated. This programming of the pre-conscious mind is very straightforward, and throughout this text we’ve been exploring the various methods that can be used, as well as the theory behind these practices.
The best results will come from clearly believable and attainable goals which elicit a strong emotional reaction. Begin by specifying all the details of the goal in clear and unambiguous language. The end results should be clearly visualized, and creating a tangible representation of this end result to be a focus for visualization is incredibly useful, and might as well be ESP in as much as psychic abilities and ESP develop directly from this flexing of the imagination’s muscle.
Daily visualization that resolves around having the goal (as opposed to needing the goal) creates a resonance with the subconscious mind and triggers events that will lead you to your desired result. Celebrating successes along the way is reinforcement even more powerful than using positive affirmations, as affirmations can trigger unconscious resistance to the statements98. Over time, the visualization should be made more and more immediate through sigilization techniques, the eventual outcome of this is an intuition as uncanny as any natural ESP or psychic gift.
Continued below…
From a recent interview with Phil Hine:
Christopher: I know that it was the magic part that attracted to me even into Wicca. Danger is one of the excuses used not to teach teenagers magic, because of their constant roller coaster emotional ride makes for poor choices and decisions. Then there is unexpected consequences. We get results but in some other way than we expected. In Wicca we have a few people afraid of using magic at all for fear it might even accidentally cause unexpected harm to someone.
How much of this fear is overblown from your experience? Have you run into any areas where you felt yourself to be in danger in your magical practice?
Phil: I think in part, it relates to control - and the inherent unpredictability of magic. As you say, results come “in some other way than we expected”. Despite much gassing about magic being a science it still doesn’t have that 1-to-1 repeatability - do ritual x and you will have result y - has it?
I actually think it’s okay to be have concerns about it. Many years ago, whilst I was training to be a therapist, I had an experience which comes to mind on this subject. I was working in a psychiatric dept and my boss and I were doing this “guided visualization” - walking a group of clients into a forest. Fairly innocuous stuff you might think. Suddenly there’s a bang and this old geezer is out of his chair, out of the room and down the corridor.
So I checked up on him and he said that last time he’d been in a forest (in similar circumstances to the journey scenario) was in 1940, listening to the rest of his platoon being machine-gunned by Germans. Neither me or my boss were expecting anyone to react in the way this guy did to what we thought was a “safe” exercise.
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Christopher: I know in my own magical experience, there comes a question of how much of what I am doing is necessary, and how much is merely decoration? Usually when we think of magic, we think of ceremony, tools, movement and chants and what have you? It is certainly good theater, but is all of it necessary? What about magic in day to day life, where it might not be possible to do full ceremony?
Phil: All you really need is to remember that you have a body. Yes, it’s nice to do “big ritual” occasionally in the way you describe, but I really think we need to break down this distinction between ritual space and day-to-day-life space.
Much of the tantra practice I do is oriented towards “day-to-day life” and “big ritual” doesn’t necessarily translate into heightened intensities. I’ve had some really intense experiences as by-products of really simple rituals, with not much in the way of props and limited space for flouncing around.
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Christopher: What was different about Chaos Magic from other systems of magic that drew you to it for awhile?
Phil: I first encountered what came later to be described as “Chaos Magic” through two texts - Peter J. Carroll’s “Liber Null” and Ray Sherwin’s “The Book of Results” - in the late 1970s, and engaged with the latter text first.
This was because I’d come Austin Osman Spare a few years earlier and found it quite easy to get into the practice of casting sigils. In fact it was Spare’s work which got me interested in magic in the first place. Between 1979-80 I was doing a correspondence course in Qabalah, and was getting ticked off by my mentor because I told him I was doing sigils.
I didn’t really start doing anything with Liber Null until 1981, by which time I was in a Wiccan coven and the High Priestess encouraged me to “find out more about this chaos stuff”. I think what initially attracted me to Liber Null was the idea that all magical “techniques” were essentially similar, regardless of the context they appeared in - and also the idea that you could take material from outside of what’s considered to be the “occult corpus” - such as fiction. I’d already made some moves in this direction - having done some rituals inspired by Lovecraft’s fiction between 1979-80.
I think Chaos Magic was, for me, an arena for experimentation, although it didn’t really become dominant in my strands of practices until the late 1980’s.
Just to give some more background - I first became interested in Tantra in 1982, following a series of recurring dreams in which the goddess Kali loomed large, but again, this didn’t become a dominant theme for me until the late 1980s.
I read Robert Anton Wilson’s & Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy in 1985, and began to work with the discordian goddess Eris around that time - but I was approaching Eris very much through a Wiccan framework, being still in contact with the coven I’d joined in 1981.
In fact I didn’t really begin to focus heavily on what was then becoming known as Chaos Magic until around 1986, after I’d left the coven and started to strike out on my own.
I’d moved to Leeds by then, which was a kind of melting pot for experimental magic, and got involved with the Chaos scene there - as well as hooking up with people who were experimenting with Lovecraftian magic, Tantra, and politically-oriented Pagan activism.
The “urban shamanism trilogy” of chapbooks (you can find them on www.philhine.org.uk as pdfs) were written in this period, and, together with a few friends, I started publishing a monthly pagan ‘zine - Pagan News (again, there’s some pdf-ed issues on the website).
This was a very vibrant time for me - I was doing a hell of a lot of magical experimentation in different directions - and involved with several groups simultaneously.
In 1991 I moved to London, and because a high proportion of the people I knew were involved in the chaos magic scene down there, Chaos Magic came to dominate my approach to magic. I’d already written two short chapbooks on Chaos Magic - “Condensed Chaos” and “Chaos Servitors” - both based on stuff I’d been doing in Leeds, but these didn’t get released until I hit London - to be followed (in
1993) by the first edition of Prime Chaos - which I’d been working on since 1988. I did quite a few workshops, lectures, etc., both in the UK and in Europe/America - latterly through being a member of the IOT.
It was through the American head of the IOT - the late Bob Williams, that I managed to get a deal with what was then New Falcon Publications, who went on to publish “Condensed Chaos,” a heavily revised “Prime Chaos,” and my little chapbook on Lovecraftian magic - “The Pseudonomicon,” which remains my favourite of the three.
All the way through this heavily chaos magic-oriented period, I was still pursuing my interests in tantra, and by 1995 was running, with my partner, a tantrically-oriented group - and were in contact with other tantrically-inclined folk in the UK (AMOOKOS). We were also regular participants in a kind of free-form, dance-oriented pagan group called “the Mad Shamans”
Christopher: At what point did you come to the conclusion it was time to move on to something else?
Phil: It wasn’t that simple. One of the reasons I’ve answered the previous question with so much “biographical” info is to highlight that I’ve always - until fairly recently - had several irons in the fire at once, and these irons were often related to the different networks of friends I was moving in.
I’ve friends for example, from my period of being Wiccan-dominant who still invite me to gatherings and I’m sometimes amazed how easily I can slide back into that framework for ritual work - it’s like “coming home” in a way.
But, to answer your question, I think I’d hit a point where I’d become dissatisfied with some of the patterns I’d let myself become habituated to. Firstly, I came to realise that a lot of my own practice had become workshop-orientated - by which I mean that I was doing stuff with a view to turning it into a workshop session, rather than for its own sake. So that had to stop.
Secondly, I left the IOT in 1996 (or thereabouts) and in so doing, lost contact with that particular network of chaos people. Thirdly, my tantric practice, which had become increasingly dominant for me, was what I wanted to concentrate on (don’t forget I’d been pursuing this on and off since 1982). This latter point might help understand one of my problems with Chaos Magic as an approach.
One of CM’s primary assertions is that magic can be formulated in terms of “techniques” and that the theoretical underpinnings or cultural-historical context in which those “techniques” appear isn’t really important. A good example would be the idea of “mantras”.
The term mantra is now used fairly widely in books on modern magic to denote any iterative repetition of a word or phrase - so something you’ll sometimes see advocates of CM asserting is that singing rune charms and repeating Hindu mantras are essentially the same procedure - the forcus being on the repetition of a word or phrase - in order to enter an altered state of consciousness. So mantras are something that gets chanted - and the chanting (i.e. the iteration) is what’s important - not the content or the context.
This, to me, is a kind of reductionism. It predicates a universal explanation - that the “technique” of iterative speech is enacted in order to establish an altered state of consciousness in the practitioner - and subordinates all instances which apparently look as though that’s what’s going on - to it. So for an advocate of CM, there would be little practical difference between, say, chanting a rune poem, repeating the Gayatri mantra, or singing a sea shanty.
Apparently Phil’s books are receiving a new printing and his new blog has a wealth of thought provoking ideas.
(Extra thanks to Plutonica.net for helping to keep us in the loop)
Archinode studio makes a very interesting suggestion concerning the use of 3D printers and industrial-scale recycling:
Thanks to Brainsturbator for bringing this article to our attention.
Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college.
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But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.
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Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.
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Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.
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The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”
Thanks to Klintron of Technoccult for bringing this article to our attention.
Nick Pell has been a professional writer for more than half his life. He has written about culture, arts, spirituality, and politics for “Maximumrocknroll,” “Just Out,” “The Hit List,” and “Key 64.” He has also been an editor for Immanion Press and London PA. He currently webmasters Black Sun Gazette and joins Joseph Mathney in this episode of the Gspot to discuss the political commentary he’s running there.
Nick Pell on the GSpot via Alterati
The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”
There’s even a $5 filing fee.”
This absurdity c/o Technoccult
Lunar Influence on the Electrochemical Production of Colloidal Silver
Article by Michael Theroux
Care of Journal of Borderland Research
Via Klintron
It is equally clear that we can never discount anything, no matter how ridiculous the theory or weird the theorist. It is as important to present alternative theories, to challenge them, as it is any conventional theory, because sometimes, just sometimes, the kooks have it right, and the world had it wrong all along.
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Snap on your ether goggles, adjust your psychotronic tuning, drink that magnetic water, crank the rheostats radionic, pull the lever, flick the switches, prepare to oscillate, and RED, GREEN, BLUE . . .
EYES OPEN: WE’RE GOING IN!
