(Part 3) Top products from r/sorceryofthespectacle

This has been my curse since college. In college I truly blossomed, it was a community college and the profs truly cared and were passionate about teaching. I was fascinated by every course I took, I read books related to the course material because I couldn't get enough. I was blessed by having not grown up religious, and I easily shed the sort of pseudo therapeutic deism I had in favor of physicalism, lifism, and humanism. Humans beings and life on Earth are the things of the most value we have ever experienced. However with the knowledge I gained, I realized the nature of social reality that we all do here: we live in a humanity-destroying doomsday device called capitalism, politics was utter bullshit, and nothing was there to prevent the apocalypse. My greatest fear was and is humanity destroying itself via its own stupidity. This became my Focus, my core query, and the essential dilemma between what I valued most and its utter negation destroyed me. And so I went under, and how I went under. Imagine everyone you love dying at the same time, over and over, with you helpless to stop it; I felt this for years. I tried distractions, to "simply be happy" and seek escapism in video games and the internet (which led me to Second Life and my business there which made me $9000 a month at my peak) and to hide myself from the world. I became a hermit in my own apartment, (later a room in my Mother's house) and have been ever since, until now.

It was also during college (2001-2004, broken up due to life circumstances) that I discovered Richard Dawkins' phenomenal work, along with many others in philosophy and science. I envisioned a science of creativity, of a way to augment people's innate creativity instead of the shitty definition of "memetic engineering" which is essentially engineering propaganda. I imagined an explosion of human creative experience known as the Memetic Singularity. I didn't realize it, but after making this my Focus I subconsciously sought it, and to the solution of my core query of how to prevent the death of humanity. Eventually, this led me here. And so here I am.

There are many that share my core queries of an expanding fractal of human experience / life-as-art and art-as life, and to prevent the destruction of humanity. Our synchronicity is us working along separate lines of inquiry that converge in very precise ways, the precision having increased until the memetic singularity was realized sometime in the last few months. The War on Nihilism, the War on Zero is over, we are in a post-war period of reconstruction. A really awesome Christmas (metaphorically) is coming where many gifts will be revealed that will allow humanity to reach its true potential that we all know deep down is our birthright.

I like your diagram and it is a good way to visualize and organize your mental schema on these topics. I'm not sure what sort of diagram I would make, but it would probably involve bubbles with topics with sub-bubbles branching off with sub-topics and a whole lot of cross-crossing lines of relations between them.

If you haven't already, I strongly recommend watching my special blends in order, without skipping anything (the whole is other than the sum of their parts.) The true message is in the interrelationships of the media used, both between blends and within them.

Carl Sagan is also one of my biggest role models, in the midst of the total chaos (parents, family, high school) of my teenage years I discovered amateur astronomy. I learned to love the cosmos, I built my own 10" Dobsonian Newtonian reflector, the night sky became a home to me. I had previously had a deep fear of the dark which vanished from this, which is why this book is so meaningful to me. What initiated my interest in astronomy was the movie Contact based on his book I had previously read. This scene in the movie describes the holy experience of astronomy that I felt many times just as strongly as the movie depicts. The scene isn't about aliens, it's about humanity and the universe, which has a sort of intrinsic quality of love to it, which it must to have created something as wonderful as life, love, and consciousness. We truly are the means by which the universe experiences itself.

Materialism isn't the problem, it's incomplete materialism that is Cartesian Dualism in disguise. The perception and not mere belief of holistic physicalism gives a sense of interconnectedness and wonder to all existence.

OP, have you read "Operator's and Thing's" ? It's an account of a woman who develops schizophrenia but eventually cures herself. (Her schizophrenia helps cure her, its remarkable) It's a fascinating little book, reads like some sort of 50s sci fi but really gives you insight into the workings of a schizophrenic mind.

It seems schizophrenic patients going back hundreds of years describe this machine, just using technology of the time to describe it. Truthfully, the book I mentioned made me feel like schizophrenia isn't just a mental illness, even though the author is going for that approach.. I really feel like they were getting a glimpse into the underlying mechanisms of reality or our mind but filtering it through their cultural lens.

Here is an Amazon link but there are .pdf's easily findable.

yeah, but even metrics like that can be shifted for numerological purposes

you could measure the monetary wealth of, say, the world's 95 richest people, to covertly reference martin luther's 95 theses, and still achieve the same analogical purpose generally while making a more subtle reference to specific power dynamics of theologically oriented material privileges and broader coalescing of ontic trends interpolating intermittently between essential materiality and immateriality, a self-fulfillment of natural law intracohesion perhaps, reawakening ad infinitum to unending recognition cycles of the self and the other

power measures should not necessarily be seen as statically correlative with material, symbolic material, or even capital, of course +

I hear ya... I have been doing a bit of digging lately so its hard to avoid. I like to be conscious of the distinction that I am reading information about things (news opinion etc), which is often political, divisive, and perceived as negative. I try to take the info strictly as what is possible, while trying not to invest emotionally.

I know he has probably seen some wicked shit. and that's gotta get out somehow. He just needs to make peace after.

I don't read books that much, but the only other book I have that might be of any interest at all to this sub is Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs 230 pgs Apr 21 2005

Chapter list

• The Hazard (basically cultural amnesia)
  
• Families Rigged to Fail
  
• Credentialing Versus Educating
  
• Science Abandoned
  
• Dumbed-Down Taxes
  
• Self-Policing Subverted
  
• Unwinding Viscious Spirals
  
• Dark Age Patterns
  
  Here is the chapter list on empire of illusion
  
  
• Illusion of Literacy
  
• Illusion of Love
  
• Illusion of Wisdom
  
• Illusion of Happiness
  
• Illusion of America
  
  and a quick random quote from open page why not?
  > In the Middle Ages, writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, stained glass windows and vivid paintings of religious torment and salvation controlled and influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from television, cinema, and computer screens. People knelt before God and the church in the Middle Ages. We flock hungrily to the glamorous crumbs that fall to us from glossy magazines, talk and entertainment shows, and reality television. We fashion our lives as closely to these lives of gratuitous consumption as we can. Only a life with status, physical attributes, and affluence is worth pursuing.
  
  And here is a cool TED talk that I feel is related to all this: James Howard Kunstler: The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs
  
  

I'd like to say something good about it, but I can't, it's pure crackpottery, "meme magic" is the cultural analogue of creationism. Memetic Magic doesn't even respect the subject matter of memetics honestly: no outside sources are given, Richard Dawkins isn't even mentioned despite having coined the word "meme." There is next to no critical thought applied in the examination of claims given wholesale as unqualified, unexamined Truth.

If you're interested in memetics, start with Dawkins: at least The Selfish Gene, and preferably The Extended Phenotype, and The Blind Watchmaker. to get more of a perspective to his evolutionary point of view. I think that Dawkins' genetic reductionism is a valuable perspective, but a vastly incomplete account in itself.

Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine is another good source.

Media Virus: Hidden Agendas In Popular Culture by Douglas Rushkoff is essential. Here is a section describing experimental and very weird memetic engineering that occurred in the early 90's on the internet.

Memetics is the extension of the paradigm of biological evolution to that of some aspects of conscious experience (interaction of ideas between minds,) an idea that goes back to Darwin. The concept of extension is essential to memetics, and is part of the reason why "The Extended Phenotype" is such a valuable read. An extension of evolutionary theory into the fields of epistemology and metaphysics is process philosophy, which is my current obsession.

Here's some of my own meme magic in the form of video clips that came together out of living conversations out of long periods of time until they felt "right." The goal is to convey feeling, and inspire the sense of unexplored connections.

>Spectacle is real and in everyone's life. I am typing on a phone. I watch Netflix, I use the Internet. That hardly means I engage in virtue signaling even if you are quick to identify coherent propositions as somehow necessarily political.
Why would I care about a leftist goalkeeper or a Rightwing signal recipient? This is ridiculous. Because you are submerged in political inertia therefore everyone is?

i'm not saying you should care. i was just curious as to how you would react to that criticism. I don't care for the established rules myself.

> What are your thoughts?

I am a visual artist. I am interested in the spectacle. I find Marxism interesting but I find it repulsive as a belief system. In my own work I am interested in the possibility of meaning in illegibility, and find it fulfilling to excavate new meaning in the way the (especially global) spectacle corrupts language (of all kinds). My interest in magic mostly goes as far as its relation to art, and how art can be a form of magic.

left field question- Have you ever read The King and the Corpse?

I read a lot of campbell and some jung and kerenyi around ten years ago but abandoned that field of study as I found it too oppressively comprehensive in scope, in a way that felt disingenuous.

reading the review it seems like it might connect too many dots for my taste, but perhaps it's interesting

https://www.amazon.com/King-Corpse-Tales-Souls-Conquest/dp/069101776X

If you look at Sorceress Cagliastro's book The Blood Sorcery Bible Volume 2, she calls this the Static Practice. I tend to think of it as the Ninth Gate on the numogram, Gate 45, and the 9 which is its beginning and terminus.

This is exactly the key to higher magics. "The Great Loneliness" is a good term for it because

> When you are there, you are circling the beginning

> When you are there, nothing else is

> When you are there, you've got to see what it's all about

> When you are there, you are the only-- one

Also, I strongly reccomend everyone read this Havelock book as well: Preface To Plato

> The World Beyond Your Head

Thanks for the recommendation! Just checked it out and it seems very intriguing (from what I've scoped out based on the description and reviews).

Here is the desktop version of OP's link

He's just a giant buffoon. I mean just look at the asshole. He reminds me of a caricature of a Dennis Hopper role.

Does this guy even have that big of a following, or does he mostly exploit ignorance like all other such #newgurus?

>Bald Ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber's Theory of Everything

Holy shit I want to buy this book just for the title alone.

Edit: I'm definitely going to buy this book at the beginning of the month when my gov'ment cheese rolls in, and read it.

>Spirituality, Archetypes and Trauma

'strange attractors' immediately resonant

>Levine mentions that kundalini is largely available in the west due to trauma.

Interesting. I've also started to understand that trauma has much to do with, or, at the very least intersects, what we call spirituality or experiences that characterise this, varyingly described and named, not necessarily only Kundalini experiences I would contend. Makes sense, if, for those living predominantly through and in relation to modernity (multiple, plural, spectacularised), ones sense of self and trajectory of experience is shaped and mediated through fragmenting effects/affect and tenuous regions of cohesion pertaining to trauma states and self-organisation, defences and so on ('here be dragons'/here be the unconscious, or 'modernity is a mental illness'). Has this always been the case? (pre-modern, antiquity), I don't know. But it coalesces with a now (a couple of books from psychoanalytical/depth psychological circles come to mind that discuss this further with insight, Trauma and the Soul, and Who is the Dreamer? Who Dreams the Dream?).

> Science had hitherto been excluded from study of the soul itself.

That is what Kant was trying to protect, I believe, although from a transcendent point of view, which obviously is an error in judgement.

Anyway, is it really the soul science is studying here? (NO). 1860 was the second industrial revolution... what they were feeling the effects of was the beginning of the final act, the-fall-into-total-madness-itself -- the cranking of the wheels of mechanised soul being leached into the decomposing spiritual void. And that artistic masterpiece fulfilled its telos with the brillo boxes, with the final wisps of soul vanishing forever into nothingness (the mental ward of contemporary theory). Apparently as the curtain fell onto the stage for the final time the faint burping echo of Derrida declaring we have lost our ontological centre could be heard all around the auditorium.

In any case the individual soul is a fiction in the first place, in exactly the same sense Western metaphysics was one great fiction too. The question then remains if we have disappeared into a fiction, where exactly are we now?

THE SPECTACLE WOOHOO

edit: I'm just reading past the bit I quoted and it seems I was right about our descent into madness. The whole world has literally lost the plot...

> AS LONG AGO as 1982 psychiatrists were talking about “the multiple personality epidemic.”

I downloaded a book a few months ago about Modernism and madness. I might see if I can find it -

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Madness-Modernism-Insanity-Literature-Thought/dp/0674541375

edit:

> It is unclear whether schizophrenia is one disease or several.

|

> So that’s the answer? There really is such a thing as multiple personal-
ity, because this or that book of rules lists some symptoms, and some
patients have those symptoms? We should be more fastidious than that.
To begin with, the question “Is it real?” is not of itself a clear one. The
classic examination of the word “real” is due to the doyen of ordinary
language philosophers, J. L. Austin. As he insisted, you have to ask, “A
real what?” Moreover, “a definite sense attaches to the assertion that
something is real, a real such-and-such, only in the light of a specific way
in which it might be, or might have beennot
real.”
12
Something may fail
to be real cream because the butterfat content is too low, or because it
is synthetic creamer. A man may not be a real constable because he is
impersonating a police officer, or because he has not yet been sworn in,
or because he is a military policeman, not a civil one. A painting may fail
to be a real Constable because it is a forgery, or because it is a copy, or
because it is an honest work by one of John Constable’s students, or
simply because it is an inferior work of the master. The moral is, if you
ask, “Is it real?” you must supply a noun. You have to ask, “Is it a real
N
?” (or, “Is it real
N
?”). Then you have to indicate how it might fail to
be a real
N
,“areal
N
as opposed to what?” Even that is no guarantee
that a question about what’s real will make sense. Even with a noun and
an alternative, we may not have a real anything: there is no such thing as
the “real” color of a deep-sea fish.

You always know someone is a madman when they start trying to nail jelly (jello) to the wall. The guy who wrote this is from the university of Toronto too, McLuhan would have a field day with this guy lol.