Gojiraeight

I say by the very fact that they still carry on, day to day, makes them better. That’s what I said, better. Not equal. Fucking Better! It’s your world, a man’s world. So for you to live a mediocre life…well that shit’s a failure. For a woman to live any life at all, that’s a miraculous accomplishment. You want to talk about what we’ve done. The empires built, the technology gained, the bridges raised. What about the slavery, the murder, the oppression? It’s a man’s fucking world and that’s what pisses you off secretly at night. That’s why you hate women. You hate them because you could have it all. The world is at your feet….conquered. It’s all for your taking because your male culture has left it for you. A legacy of entitlement. And all you do is…get by. All you do is…what everyone else does. For a King you certainly live like a slave. And for you to hate on our deposed and forgotten Goddesses left raped and humiliated in the wake of thousands of years of overcompensation for size. Man, fuck you. You hate on them because it’s easy to hate on those that live daily with a boot on their neck. You talk about strength…yet you’re not strong enough to admit even to yourself what’s in your heart. But, they go on. While you bitch and moan and complain. They…go…on. Sometimes it seems the only equality they can get is by dressing up in your empty suits, playing your cock and ego games, and raping the planet alongside of you. But when they do that, playing in your field with your game, oh than they are “uppity”, or “bitches”. As in “you stupid uppity bitch, get back in the kitchen!”. By their very nature they are better than you. Because they put up with you…barely. Every woman that has peddled her ass to get by is better than you who lives in relative comfort. Every woman that has cried, been hit, raped, ignored, made fun of is better than you and better than me. I don’t live in a world that constantly reflects what I am not back on me. You say, “Man, you just talk this shit because you want to get laid”. I say, “Man, your language gives away your smallness. While you just ‘get laid’, I worship at an altar. I’d rather be a High Priest giving and receiving a sacrament of the mysteries of the universe…than busting a nut. When you do it you masturbate with someone else’s body. When I fuck it’s Sacred.

 Whatever you do don’t f*$k for money. Don’t sell what everyone gives away for free. And when we say that we mean you ladies. And if you do we’ll just shame you for the rest of your life. Hell don’t fuck at all unless it’s to make more babies so we can have more worker drones. Definitely don’t use contraception. Basically get back in the kitchen, keep your mouth shut and provide mother/whore service to your husband. And while we’re on that let’s not forget that marriage is ONLY for the straight people. Don’t listen to angry music, watch violent movies or play violent video games but make sure you watch countless hours of mind numbing television and get programmed by our commercials and political propaganda. PORN is from the DEVIL but it’s okay your politicians are sucking the diseased bloated cock of corporate America selling your freedom and future for a quarterly profit. Isn’t America great? Don’t you love being “free”. Now vote for the next puppet you dancing monkies.  Don’t smoke pot or take psychedelics but kill yourself with cigarettes and alcohol.  And if you do smoke pot we’ll send you to jail to punish you along with the murderers and rapists. What? It’s the same, really it is. And while you’re there you get to “give back” to society when we auction off the labor of these prisoners to private corporations so they can save billions while paying 3 cents an hour. Why should you care they are criminals right? What you think prison is for punishment and rehabilitation. And don’t worry blacks, despite the evidence racism is gone. No such thing as “economic racism”. What a bunch of liberal mumbo jumbo. It’s surely just a coincedence that even after sixty years the average difference between white and black salaries is the same. Just as it’s a coincidence that statistically blacks born in the middle and upper classes are still more likely to die from violence and develop stress related illnesses. No racism at all. America doesn’t see color right? What you want to be an artist? A musician? A writer? Well that”s cute but you should really be working in a factory. A good ‘ole hard working American job. A job you can do break breaking labor for most of your life and well…maybe you’ll get to retire at 55 and just maybe you might get social security. And than you can just waste away in peace. Sounds great huh? And for all you folks that can’t do that go work in McDonalds or better yet why not join the military. And if you want to make it big and truly be successful why not work on Wall Street or in Banking. Those are noble professions “Artist”….hahahahahahahahah. That’s useless. Oh and a small thing here but if you want to drive a car, which is ya know your own personal property on streets paid for by your tax dollars well than you’ll have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to private corporations “just in case something happens.” *wink* *wink*. Yup that’s right the United States Government demands that you pay billions a year to private companies in order to drive your own car on your roads. What? What’s wrong with that? Oh and if you get sick….well despite taking billions a year from the American public most of you don’t qualify for the best health care for your various “illnesses”. But you can take this pill, which doesn’t really do anything except give you other symptoms while covering up the ones you have and not actually treating the disease. Hey! The FDA said it’s good so it must be. I know it seems fishy that the medical industry takes in countless amounts of money in order to research illnesses and all that money would go away if they actually cured some. But that’s surely another coincidence you paranoid conspiracy nut. BTW, no more protests. It’s Un-American and a terrorist act. Only lazy hippies protest anything anyway. Next thing we have to talk about is the internet, frankly it’s no good for you. Freedom of global information really doesn’t suit our needs so we’ll be doing our best to take that away from you very soon. Don’t worry, you can just watch TV. 

   It is well known that the AC franchise is known for it’s elaborate emotional narratives, complex premises, intense yet easy and fun game play and cutting edge use of technology. One of the things that I feel gets overlooked is that it is one of the few games that takes a meta approach to video gaming itself. For those who might not be familiar with this series you might not know that the game does not actually take place strictly in historical times with a linear plot.

The first four games of the series so far take place in some sort of near future from the point of view of the character Desmond. Desmond must relive and REPLAY the past via a virtual reality/time traveling device known as the “animus” which allows the consciousness of individuals to tap into the genetic memory of their ancestors. At this point I would like to point out that purely on a conceptual level we have some great cyberpunk style sci-fi that goes beyond a simple historic action game plot that you find in similar game franchises like Prince of Persia and Thief. This premise is completely in line with the thinking of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Even more so when we look at the paranoia infused conspiracy theory aspects of the story. I am only going to hint at that and hopefully you’ll pick up the games and see for yourself.

Even with the first AC game with it’s various flaws I was struck by the employing of a virtual reality “game” within this game as the main plot device. Another modern console game, Bioshock, also uses concepts of “game” as part of it’s narrative identity with the “would you kindly” reveal and how it addresses the lack of real choice and being “on rails” when you play a game. In AC we have something much less subtle because Desmond is in fact playing-a-game. 

This reality warping story reaches it’s conceptual and almost psychedelic climax at the end of AC;2 when a character looks right past Ezio (Desmond’s ancestor and historic avatar and by proxy YOURS as well) and talks right at the camera to “Desmond” but it is really you the player that is being addressed.

The end of AC;Brotherhood into the beginning of AC;Revelations shows a schizophrenic break from reality and identity by Desmond that to me eerily parallels aspects of psychedelic shamanic initiation but in a modern cyber world of information and corporations. So to some extent AC might be one of the only stories in our time to take the ancient shamanic travelling into the “spirit world” and put it into a completely modern setting successfully. Thinking how many millions of people have played these games and not had a clue about things like shamanic initiation and cyber punk techno magic, one has to marvel at the subversiveness of the AC franchise. Intentional or not. (SIDENOTE: Idea to ponder; could it be that the “spirit world” of the ancient shamans is in a sense the same as the “astral” world? A world of Ideas and Forms and Archetypes in which the Shaman can project his consciousness into. A world of ethereal information is present in almost every mystical tradition. Could the historic intuition of the “astral” been part of the collective subconscious drive to create the virtual world of computers and the internet? Worlds of pure information.)

While playing the latest game “Revelations” I find myself often thinking, “Am I seeing the future of gaming…and reality?” Could the AC franchise be more prophetic than we realize? No, not in the anti corporate fascist conspiracy stuff but in the Tech. How far off are we from being able to plug into a fully rendered reality and live another life? The human brain operates at about 100 hertz while the fastest computer processor RIGHT NOW is clocking at about 8 GIGAhertz.

Is it really so hard to envision a time we will be able to plug into the fastest processors, say 10 or 20 years from now and be able to live a complete life inside a simulation in just a few days, hours or even minutes? And how far can we extend that? If the idea allows for that why not, given the processing speed, live the life of an entire universe in a couple of minutes. 

Of course it’s easier to envision the technology that would theoretically allow such wonders than how our consciousness and brain would interact with it. The obvious criticism is that while you can have any time frame allowed by such computer processors the brain itself still processes at it’s own slow speed so it wouldn’t make any difference. It would all still need to be experienced in “real time”. Thus making the whole idea moot. 

As of yet I have no answers to that. But I have some ideas we should start to consider. First we have the curious phenomena experienced by people who take hallucinogens, especially DMT, in which they do experience a warping effect in which time is compressed or stretched out to allow in some cases, “the passing of thousands of years” when the trip itself only takes a few minutes. For those curious about that check out Rick Straussman’s “DMT, The Spirit Molecule”. And of course every human on the planet has had at least one dream in their lives when they could swear years have passed during a single dreaming session. 

Also keep in mind that while we have no way right now to make the brain process any faster than it does that does not mean we won’t come up with some sort of technology to allow it in the future. If we are imagining that in the future we would be able to render full lives and universes inside a computer their is certainly no reason not to speculate we won’t be able to manipulate the brain in other ways, say through drugs, cybernetics or genetic manipulation to allow for faster and comparable processing times. Which raises the question, If we could elevate the brain’s processing speed so that it could process on the same level as these hypothetical super rendered virtual realities…well what about regular reality? Imagine being fully conscious on the machine code level of the passing of infinitely smaller amounts of time. Eternity in a grain of sand as William Blake said. 

Consciousness is an odder thing than people realize and while we have lots of tech disciplines and lots of consciousness studies departments in Universities around the world I think someone has to come up with a program for Consciousness Technology Studies.

And one day I’ll see you on The Grid.

I have a dream that when it’s all been done…when I am forgetting and letting go of this dream/life/identity…at the clearing at the end of the path…I’ll come over a hill. And I’ll find Terrence McKenna, Philip K Dick, Bill Hicks, Bruce Lee, Aleister Crowley and John Lennon sitting in a circle. They are laughing and comparing stories. As I approach they’d look up and smile in my direction. A warm familiar smile. 

“Awesome ride isn’t it? Ready for the next one?” they’d ask.

Speculation on the potential upcoming paradigm shift is that it may take two separate forms. One of which will be the systematic rejection of technology in favor of a pastoral back-to-nature agrarian society that learns to live in balance equilibrium with nature (Archaic Revival). The second is the rejection in a sense of the confines of “living in harmony” and the full embrace of technology as a means to expand beyond the planet and beyond our biological limits (Technological Symbiosis). 

The Archaic would seem to be the one most people naturally assume to be more “natural” and desirable. Despite the fact that this would drastically lower all levels of our society from longevity to art and puts Humanity in the place of being a part of Nature but no more so than a mouse or a bacterium.

Technological Symbiosis is something almost universally feared by our planet. From The Matrix to The Terminator to The Borg in Star Trek to The Daleks and Cyber Men in Doctor Who, the Cyborg is viewed with revulsion and terror. Becoming the manifestation of what Jung called The Machine Mind or the Negative Logos. 

Yet if we look at the ideas present in Big History and in such fringe thinkers as Terence McKenna and Ray Kurtzweil we see the idea that technology, being a crucial step in the increasing evolution of Complexity in our Universe, is completely natural. Albeit a bit out of balance in our current society. Which makes me think back to some of my old Qabbalah training where it is stated that as energy descends the Tree of Life, like water down a waterfall, each successive “World” (Sephira) goes through a period of energistic imbalance before achieving balance and moving on to the next World (Thesis-Antithesis-Sythesis- REPEAT). 

If it is true that in the great escalation of complexity technology is perfectly natural than the basic premise of the Technological Synthesis, that it is an “unnatural paradigm” that asserts mastery over nature, is incorrect and has been woefully misrepresented.

Looking at the potentials on the horizon for either I think humanity may fall into our classic error of dualistic “this or that” thinking. The true Shift would require the VALUES of an Archaic Revival with the IMAGINATION of the Technological Symbiosis.

It’s the spaces between breaths, that’s where I fall apart.

With every descending step I’m afraid that this man of glass will shatter.

So many dead people in the ground, forgotten. I wonder how many of them were afraid like I am afraid.

I keep coming back to the idea of The Collective. And what if the huge mistake is in thinking we are truly separate. Maybe individuality is the lie. Taking the metaphor of a living organism, which is a collective of various elements, what happens when cells become overly-individualized and go out-of-synch with the rest of the organism? That’s called cancer.

The paranoid and reactionary tell us that Globalization is bad. That conformity is bad. Could it be that the only reason such things are manifesting in a negative light is not because they are inherently negative but because we as a collective species have not taken responsibility of our darker impulses. Like an abuse victim reenacting their trauma but not taking it into the conscious level of acceptance and closure.

A child like species that wants to do what it wants whenever it wants to whomever it wants. Yet the bell is tolling for us to grow up. Because whether we want it or not we seem to be moving, en mass, towards a collective and unified globally linked paradigm.

We need to diagnose the cancer and imbalances.

At moments of embarrassingly correct self evaluation I know what I have is a life of well meaning post it notes. Not a life of accomplishment. I can’t show you anything and say, “Look at this thing I have done.” Instead I have a lot of reminders to live some life that I never got around to.

I envy people that find that “one thing” that drives them into ecstatic states of competency. Whether it’s baking cookies or molecular chemistry. I have never found that for myself. For me all things in life have been fascinating yet unsatisfying. 

Taking a look at all of man’s exploits, paradigms, disciplines and other ways of wasting time from politics to art I can’t help but be reminded of the quote by Pascal; “All of man’s problems are caused by his inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. I am starting to think that all of humanities activities are simply a distraction from a real ENGAGEMENT with his immediate experience. Or a a simulation of that engagement, or a technique for learning how to engage with immediate experience. That would seem to me to be what Art and Creativity is. But it is still an attempt, not the thing itself. It is a strategy to arrive at some goal. 

Looking around the cultural landscape it seems that we’ve idolized these techniques and distractions and confused them for the real thing. Culture is a super market of conceptual mental models that are forever a step away from the immediate.