internet

August 30, 2013

Act Locally

Grow things in the garden of your mind. . .

 

Across The Universe no.49Let us talk a bit about Locality. There exists now a famous slogan making its rounds around the earth: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” But what does that mean? Local? Is that your household, your street, your neighborhood, your township or borough, your city, your state (or province as the case may be), your country, your continent, your planet, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Universe, the 3rd dimension? Which of these is local?

What the internet has done is to reinvent AT&T’s wheel. Despite distance, the internet suddenly tears through the limits of distance and someone in the US can talk to another one in the UK through Skype in what is called “Real Time”. A bored mother, while her husband may be at work and the kids at school (or a bored father) can sit and talk to her BFF on the other side of the planet through instant messaging. A teenager curious about the how the latest video games work (or perhaps the day it will be released) summons the great oracle Google and knows 1 million anwers from all over the globe in Other Worlds (NASA, Sailing With NASA, 10/24/09)nine-tenths of a second.  So, what do you think when you think local? When you think of your friends, are they all offline? When you think of your aquaintances, do they all live in the same town as you?

If we cannot truly define “local”, then how is it possible to truly define right or wrong? What is against or for law? Or how do we define law?

Mom’s gonna fix it all soon.
Mom’s comin’ round to put it back the way it ought to be. ~”Aenima” by Tool

FantasiaUnfortunately, such philosophical wanderings belong to the future of humanity, where (perhaps through or with the help of advancements in technology and perhaps because through the internet one mind can read another) boundaries (which are not unlike prisons in some way, are they not? Imprisoned by one’s definition or opinion of locality?) are not prisons, but recognized as illusions, nothing more than shadows on Platos’ wall.

What of humans who realize without indoctrination or neuromarketing or teaching or conditioning that locality does not mean a space where one shares likeness of nationality, ideology, color, mentality, or philosophy?

What does that future hold?

Ours is a journey toward simplicity, toward quietness, toward a kind of joy that is not in time. In this journey out of time to “NowHere,” we are leaving behind every model we have had of who we thought we were. This journey involves a transformation of our being so that our thinking mind becomes our servant rather than our master. It’s a journey that takes us from primary identification with our psyche to identification with our souls, then to identification with God, and ultimately beyond any identification at all. ~Ram Dass

*Image Credits (all work used with permission through CC license)–
“Across The Universe no.49” by Derek Davalos
“Other Worlds (NASA, Sailing With NASA, 10/24/09) by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
“Fantasia” by spitfirelas
“the guardian” by Chris Tarnawski

July 25, 2013 Quote

QOTD Eustace Conway

The ancient people understood that  our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost site of that. I don’t live inside buildings because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in a real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have stepped outside the natural circle of life.

Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes.  They wake up every morning in a box of their bedrooms because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box.  Then they leave the box where they live and get into another box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken into little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to the house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box.

Break out of the box! This not the way humanity lived for thousands of years. ~Eustace Conway from the book The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

Chicago suburbs from the air

*Image Credits  (all artwork used with permission through CC license)
“Tijuana Suburbs” by Nathan Gibbs
“Chicago suburbs from the air” by Scorpions and Centaurs

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December 11, 2012

HyperReality: The I In Me

“Why do my eyes hurt?”
“You’ve never used them before.”

The I In MeLest you question the possible existence of hyperreality, look then to the reappearance of Tupac Shakur.

Tupac Shakur the human being died in 1996; however, Tupac Shakur the Living Memory, the Rapper Simulacra appeared on stage April 16, 2012. . . as a hologram. The cut of his muscular body was evident in the hologram. More real than real itself. No one or thing need never die or disappear. The CGI and hyperreal Pixar animation so prevalent in films today, the seamlessness between actor and environment or actor and screen. In other words, an actor need not be physically present in his environment that can be inserted later with no visible lines. And an entire film (or video game to be even more precise) can be created without live actors, i.e. avatars, video games have already begun to employ this and getting more advanced and are advancing rapidly. With the progressive technology of resolution and frame rate (high definition and high speed filming), your household television, computer monitor, digital camera and video camera can deliver a picture more crisp than any digital photograph and possibly more than your own retinal signal processing, that is your sense of sight and its subsequent process in the brain for identification. Would you believe hyperreality over reality itself, as how could you really (that is sensationally) distinguish any difference between the virtual and the nonvirtual? You may even prefer hyperreality to reality as it is more improved now with more reality!

What of a generation raised on the Simulacra? Fed by inception and familiar with the supernatural as your current environment? Would such a child ever believe what its eyes saw? Suddenly, the dialogue in the Matrix uttered by a newly unplugged and awakened Neo has a whole new connotation. It seems the line between that reality and the literal reality is not far off.

Metaphorically speaking, we do not use our senses as they are becoming obsolete in the world of the hyped reality. What use is taste when flavor is synthesized and lab-created or added to an otherwise tasteless and bland chemical concoction? What use is hearing when surrounded by constant noise and frequent stimulation to the extent that the brain filters only that which is relevant and the rest to a comfortable static. So much so that this noise is preferred over a crushing, unstimulating silence. Or if brand jingles and ideological slogans are “heard” in the brain like a multimedia center? What use is touch/feel when feel and touch are blocked by screens and devices and personal space an engagement with gadgetry mostly? Or when feel has become synonymous as a concept with think, so that it is an intangible, not an action performed with the body. As unobtrusive as a physics abstraction. What good is smell when pheromones are lab-created and sprayed, rolled, or inked on? Cleanliness is meant to be after one bathes in a series of chemical containing unpronounceable ingredients. In effect, the sense is fooled; hyperreality creates these senses, creation ex nihilio. What use is sight when what is seen is only that which matches what one believes or has been told or when augmented reality streams through data directly to the brain? What does the machine look like now to you? Like a pod perhaps, as in Matrix? Or a 15 square foot space in the cubicle of the machine?

The machine has the face of Man.

 

*Image credit (all stock used with permission)–
“I, Internet” is a photomanipulation created by NIKOtheOrb using stock produced by:
Chris Moody, “Macro Iris”
Nick Fedele, “Alex’s Eye Macro”
Serial Killer Stock, “Circuit Board”

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