“The forms of knowledge that technologies mediate is integral to both a society’s cultural information pool, and to the extramental reality in which they live. Technology itself constitutes an alteration of that relationship — especially as it intervenes in the experiential aspects of that relationship . . . Technologies are in a sense ‘artifacts of knowledge’ (Laughlin 1988b) — they are alterations in material reality that, accompanied by meaning in peoples’ minds, facilitate intentional acts. As such technologies become part of the extramental reality in which we are embedded and to which we must adapt.” (p. 158)

“We would suggest that a society’s technical knowledge is precisely that aspect of their information pool that facilitates an alteration of the relationship between experience and extramental reality through the mediation of techniques and artifacts. In other words, technologies combine information from the culture pool (as meaning) with material and energy in extramental reality that have been purposefully altered in order to afford novel intentional acts.” (p. 159)

I looked forward to hearing Andy Letcher speak at Horizons.  I hadn’t heard of his work or his book “Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom,” but the synopsis for his presentation sounded interesting:

For those who have encountered the sacred mushroom, the psilocybin experience is like an ancient codex whose glyphs are at once baffling and clear. To make sense of it, each must perform an act of translation or interpretation by which the strange is rendered familiar. But how should this be done? In the post-war period alone an original psychological framework has given way to mysticism, itself replaced in turn by the language of shamanism.

Here, I want to draw attention away from the mushroom experience itself – the usual province of trip-lit – to a consideration of the ways it has been interpreted throughout history. For, contrary to received wisdom, very few cultures have decoded the mushroom as we do. I shall ask a fundamental question: does the mushroom bring genuine transcendence, or are the experiences it occasions forever bound by culture?

(Horizons Conference Program, 2009)

Letcher began by situating himself in academia and describing how he arrived at religious studies.  He had started with an interest in ecology and direct action and was then invited to pursue a PhD in religion.  He explained that he was looking critically at the beliefs of the psychedelic community and we might not like his findings.  He discussed hermeneutics and told the audience that they to, even if they didn’t know what it meant, were hermeneuticists.

He made it clear that his is a scholarly approach, and he won’t give a pass to any of the myth making that is going on in the psychedelic community.  In fact, he wants to debunk those myths.  He expressed his intent to “debunk” the UFO cults, the 2012 movement, the valorization of R. Gordon Wasson, and other mythologies constructed within the psychedelic community.  He discussed the problem of ’seeing’ mushrooms in ancient art when they aren’t there – and suggested that this can be debunked because they are not in fact mushrooms.  Why?  Because they don’t look like mushrooms.

I agreed with his main point that our interpretations of experience are based (to some degree) in culture, and that we are always engaging in a process of meaning making when we interpret, describe, recount and mythologize experience.  But what wasn’t clear to me is why he seemed to be so hostile toward the mythologies that were being constructed within the psychedelic community. So I asked:

“I understand why you would like to see a more rigorous academic discourse on psychedelics, but aren’t the myths being constructed around Terence McKenna and the 2012 communities not something to be debunked, but something we should look at using that same academic rigor?”

He took this question (which I realize now I should have phrased more precisely) as an opportunity to discuss why he didn’t like the 2012 movement – an answer that boiled down to two things: because it’s millenarian, and that it doesn’t leave room for free will (this answer seemed to exclude the Daniel Pinchbeck brand of 2012ism/mayanism).  If I’d had a chance for a follow up, I would have been more specific and a little more forceful in my critique, asking:

“Why would a scholar of religion be interested in debunking ANY myths?  Isn’t myth the object of our study?  Are you also, for example, interested in debunking the myth systems of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam or is your interest in debunking restricted to these specific new religious movements and myths developing around the psychedelic community?”

Vincent Callebaut Architectures is designing entirely new spiritual spaces. Many of his recent designs are buildings that function as eco-technology. They integrate with the multiple environments that overlap in our cities: human, mechanical and Gaian.

OGMA releases his his first album. His ecstatic music can be heard on myspace.

Karla Tonella has constructed an online document where she is looking at Earth2, an NBC television series from the 1990s.

“Set 200 years in the future when the depleted Earth(1) is mostly uninhabitable, this series turns us back on ourselves to reconsider our relationship to our own planet, indigenous peoples and other species. While post-colonial and frontier metaphors abound, it is the metaphysical themes and the unique semi-sentient planet that set this program apart from other science fiction and adventure series. I will argue that the series uses archetypal figures and mythic themes to promote ideas of connectedness and wholeness as found in popular conceptions of the scientific theory known as the Gaia hypothesis.”

Continue reading…

This video, which was sent to me by Alberto Duarte of City College, CUNY – depicts the genesis of a new life form following the interaction of nature and a megalithic structure.

Venetian Snares – Szamar Madar from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Are there thoughts that are not permitted by the software of the brain?

Human rights depend on Animal rights. We can never have liberation of humankind without the same for all of animalkind. So long as we enslave, we will never be free.

If your browser isn’t functioning well, get an upgrade. New Version Culture.

A post on _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ titled “_Emily is Not Real_: Uncanny Valley vs The Digital Übermensch” refers to my paper “Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism” and uses the graphic I created to illustrate an expansion of Mori’s map of the uncanny valley. The post is a RICH mine of links – so check it out.

_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ is a blog seeking to “dissect post-geophysically defined notions of reality” and is sponsored by the Ars Virtua Foundation via the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

“Ars Virtua is a New Media Center and Gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life, World of Warcraft and the World Wide Web. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. The Ars Virtua Foundation is a locus of research around the issues of reality within simulated environments.”

Playing tonight, here:
The Wild Project, 195 East 3rd St., New York, NY
(Doors 7p, screening 8p sharp, $10)

The Temple of Awakening Divinity. There’s something to this, my friend and I in elementary school used to say while high-fiving: “we’re the TOADS, totally outrageously awesome dudes!”

Little did I know we were right, but it actually stood for Temple Of Awakening Divinity Supplicants.

Learn about the Temple of Awakening Divinity on The Entheogenic Evolution podcast.

It’s time to develop a reasoned argument for the rights of spirituality.

This is free-writing in this post, a list of ideas:

* Spirituality is a right.

* In the mode of historical pursuits of social justice struggle a new cafeteria-style liberation theology must be written.

* All states of consciousness, even those which do not directly obviously produce capital, must be allowed, protected and encouraged.

From an interview in Mother Jones:

“The New Age movement looks like a mixed bag. I see much in it that seems good: It’s optimistic; it’s enthusiastic; it has the capacity for belief. On the debit side, I think one needs to distinguish between belief and credulity. How deep does New Age go? Has it come to terms with radical evil? More, I am not sure how much social conscience there is in New Age thinking. If we think, for example, that we are drawing closer to transcendence or God but are not drawing closer in compassion and concern for our fellow human beings, we’re just fooling ourselves. Do New Age groups produce a Mother Teresa or a Dalai Lama? Not that I can see. So, at its worst, it can be a kind of private escapism to titillate oneself.”

This feels at first, in a speculative fiction sort-of-way, like one more step toward turning the planet into a large neural network… Building floating synapses for the network mind, out in the sea.

“In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center,” Google writes in the patent application.

Read More…

Reading Spiritual robots: Religion and our scientific view of the natural world by Robert M. Geraci

MOMA kills a sculpture.

Great way to phrase this, could be done without calling cuneiform chicken scratch, but…

“The chicken scratch of Sumerian bureaucrats had blossomed into an oracular delivery mechanism for the Word of God, one powerful enough to trigger the speck of essence within — and to prove that humble infotech may, in time, boot up the sacred self.” Pg 42

Related earlier section: “In Preface to Plato, the scholar Eric A. Havelock argues that the realm of the forms may also have revealed itself to Plato through the alphabet. Havelock points out that the etymological root of the term idea, which also gives us the word video, has a visual connotation.” Pg 34

Etymology of “idea” is idein, Greek: to see.
So, what if you can ’show’ more directly? Do video and image have a greater ability to “boot up the sacred self?”

Both quotes from TechGnosis.

Reading William Gibson’s blog and thinking about his discussion of ATMs as part of his extended nervous system, I decided to start mapping mine. I began with the interface I spend most of the day with, my Mac – then to the WiFi router, then the cable modem, then the cloud, then the servers and the ‘others’. There’s so much more to add… And strange that it really did come out looking so hierarchical – I was expecting it to be more rhizomatic. Perhaps I’m not representing it correctly – or maybe that which was born of ARPANET actually IS more hierarchical than it seems. After all, the military designed it…

(If you visit Gibson’s blog – take note of the strange structure of the interactivity – rather than allowing comments on the blog, there is a separate message board which he clearly reads and comments on in his blog. Any thoughts on this?)

How much storage do you have on you right now?

This is something I’ve always noticed with the change from a generation who couldn’t imagine how they would sound recorded or look on film to the current generation who live as though they are on television – the hyper-mediated state of mind.