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Metapsychosis

Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art

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Taking the Waters

October 24, 2016 By Jeremy Leave a Comment

The hills are cut open
and out pours orange dirt
yellow machines, like bugs,
crawl over the flesh of the land.

But here once was the land of our grandfathers,
slow men with weary eyes, and hearts heavy
with northern smoke, planting rows of orange
trees in heat so thick it blurs minds.
So they grew, and kept growing,
bellies fruit full, they multiplied,
tending their vast gardens,
while the dazed animals of the marshes
shuddered and fell away,
dissolving into the fever dreams
of those that came to take the waters.

The citrus trees are torn away now too,
cancers we grew and then excised,
their fruits fall swollen and bleeding,
useless, onto the scraped and shredded earth.
Now aqua and coral
colored stucco houses sprout instead,
groves and groves of them,
grinding their foundations deep
into the unsteady ground.

We are lost and strangers to this place,
this mother of terrors and wonders.
We are not wanted here:
the venom of that
unheeded knowledge
rises up and twists in our veins.
Every creature here
avenges the lands
we have enslaved,
tooth and claw,
ray by ray,
we whither in a world
that was never for us.

There is a rising in the springs
where shade gathers.
There is a snake sleeping
under the steps.
there are things watching
the cars that
flow like eluvium
between billboards
of half formed fetuses
with eyes like reptiles.
They are asking
whether it is better
to grow or
be destroyed.

Filed Under: Microdoses, Poetics (Originary Powers), Poetry Tagged With: florida, florida literature, poetry

A Mind Altogether Stranger

September 2, 2016 By Jeremy Leave a Comment

Can we be certain that mind, or consciousness, is just an epiphenomenon of neurophysiological activity, that it is little more than a byproduct of brain function? How do we know that our current models are accurate explanations, even descriptions, of what consciousness is? The computer model of the mind and brain, with consciousness as software, is clearly outdated and oversimplified. The behaviorist assertion that consciousness does not exist is inaccurate. The history of science reveals a continuous succession of models and theories repeatedly replacing one another in light of new observations, discoveries, realizations and eventual paradigms of understanding.

My contribution to this debate, drawing from my own ethnographic observations, is to ask a simple question: what if consciousness actually is something akin to the way it is experienced? That is to say, perhaps taking heed of experience itself might tell us something about the nature of consciousness.

I am not simply referring to our everyday waking consciousness here, but am striving to be inclusive of the broadest range of conscious experiences—from the mundane to the sublime. Yes, for most of us, most of the time, consciousness is experienced as something that is fairly stable and continuous—a stream of uninterrupted experience, usually characterized by intentional purpose. When we go to work, for example, we are usually clear and deliberate in our actions and experiences, we feel in control. But this narrow form of consciousness is not the only way we experience our minds.

What about dreams, for example? In dreams consciousness is let loose. We can create whole worlds in our minds. Then there are mystical experiences, where consciousness is experienced as expansive and connected to all else in the universe (unity), and maybe even to God.

What about astral travel and shamanic soul-journeys? Here consciousness is not confined to the physical body, but is something much more mobile, something capable of traveling through space and time to distant locales.

Then there is spirit possession, and mediumship. Here consciousness is experienced not so much as a single bounded ‘thing,’ but rather as a conglomeration of minds, as made up of many different porous, interconnected, parts that coexist to form a whole.

There are many more examples we could draw on to illustrate the fact that consciousness is often experienced in ways that are at odds with the dominant explanatory models of mind—time-slips, past-life experiences, precognition, psychedelic experiences, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, and so on.

Are we to assume, then, that such experiences tell us nothing at all about the nature of consciousness? Must we conclude that these experiences are purely illusory? I don’t think that we do. Indeed, it seems, to my mind at least, that these experiences point towards an understanding of consciousness as something that is profoundly complex, deeply mysterious and altogether much stranger than the dominant reductionist accounts seem to want to admit. We like things to be easily classifiable. We like simple explanations. But nature doesn’t have to play by our rules—why would it?

Filed Under: Culture (Transformation), Microdoses, Philosophy (Eteolegeme)

Notes on Wallace Stevens and Animism

August 15, 2016 By Jeremy 5 Comments

Wallace Stevens’ poem “A Postcard from the Volcano” is a beautiful meditation on matter and memory. It brings to mind the philosophy of Henri Bergson. The poem suggests the existence of memory in inanimate objects. Or more precisely, it proposes a conception of memory that has nothing to do with “information” contained in the mind. Memory must rather be imagined as expansive, extended, material, atmospheric. It is memory that contains us, not we who contain memories. The past is a presence.

The poem’s narrator is reflecting on the mansion in which he lives and plans to die:

We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is …

In the future, the narrator muses, the house as an entity will include all he has said and thought about it. Which is to say that the experiences through which an object manifests to us are constitutive of the object itself as an autonomous entity. Objects take shape in experience (human experience being just one variety), but they do not exist “within” our experience, “within” us as subjects; rather, each experience of an object expands that object, allows it to express its being, objectively.

All of the elements that make up the mansion exist on their own, experienced or not: Stevens is no idealist. But the elements can only constellate as a mansion — a homely one for the narrator, a haunted one for the children of the future — through encounters with human beings who are themselves similarly constituted.

In other words, all things substantiate themselves in encounters, in meetings, as Martin Buber wrote. It is through human experience that a house learns to be a house, that it learns to be homely or haunted as the case may be, just as it is through the strange sentience of the house that we become home-dwellers, which is to say human beings. A person coming upon a house is an encounter, but it is an encounter between equals at the primal level.

A new house feels cold and dead because, as an object, it hasn’t yet learned to be a house. It is a house in form only, which is to say a design, an intellectual ideal, the concept of a house given material consistency. When we say that a house feels lived-in or homely, we are saying something about the house itself, not just about our impression of it. The house has come to life as a house; it knows itself as a house. It has a genius loci, a spirit of place, indistinguishable from it.

Later, having been abandoned and then occupied anew, the mansion in the poem will hold as part of its being all of the memories formed in conjunction with it. My guess is that nine times out of ten, this is what we mean when we speak of ghosts. “Children,” Stevens writes, “[will] speak our speech and never know,”

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls …

The mansion confronts the children with all of its past that is real and, in a sense, ever-present. Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining reveals this with a force equal to Stevens’ poem in the form of the Overlook Hotel.

the-shining-the-shining-16869394-700-530

“Orders from the House, Mr. Torrence.”

Upshot: there is no interiority. Belief in interiority, in private unextended subjectivity, is a modern conceit. It is a human attempt to reclaim the centre that humanity once imagine it occupied. In fact every private feeling, every “mental impression,” is an objective material event. Matter is spiritual. Matter is a thinking substance through and through. Everything is alive. “All things shining.”

∞

This was originally published on J.F. Martel’s blog, Reclaiming Art.

Filed Under: Microdoses, Philosophy (Eteolegeme) Tagged With: animism, Henri Bergson, the shining, Wallace Stevens

Chaos, Crisis, and Creativity. A live hangout with the editors of Metapsychosis

August 1, 2016 By Marco V Morelli

“An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.”
—Nina Simone

Dear friends:

What do you think is actually going on in the world?

What’s all the apparent chaos really about, if anything?

What’s the story beneath the story—and what’s beneath that?

And how can we know? And what can we do about it? (If we even know what’s real for sure….)

I’ve been reading a number of Facebook debates and related articles in the wake of recent developments, and like many of my friends, feeling deeply disturbed.

I have to admit, I can relate to what Conner Habib says in his recent interview with Jeremy Johnson.

“A kind of downward spiral can happen when you approach the state of the world: The disastrous US election! Mass shootings! Police Brutality! Taken alone, they’re bad enough, but they can build and build until you feel utterly overwhelmed and helpless.”

Yet at the same time, I feel a profound creativity, compassion, sense of justice, and intensified awareness percolating vigorously in so many people.

What could we do with that energy?

These questions matter to all of us who feel the impulse to put something more into the world than a comment on a Facebook post—to all of us revving in neutral with a full tank of gas, desperately seeking to blaze a new path to something better than what’s being served.

Easy to say! Right?

But how could we live the questions—in our creative work, our communities, our actual lives?

I don’t pretend to have the answers, and I don’t expect us to figure it all out…but I think if we put our minds together it could be quite interesting to see what might want to emerge.

And you’re invited to participate in the experiment….

The Details

Join us this Thursday, August 4th, at 8 p.m. EDT (time zone conversion) for a live Zoom hangout with the editors of Metapsychosis, as we close out our Inception cycle (0.6)—and look ahead to our next phase.

Metapsychosis intends to provide a signal boost to passionate creative impulses wanting to be born, written, seen, and heard. We’re intensely curious about what energies and intelligences will be magnetized to this swirling vortex.

Part creative group meditation, part call-and-response (mind-jazz style), part closing ceremony with seed-planting for our upcoming Cycle 1—we want this event to be an experiment of intention, leaning into what magic is invoked when we invite each other to connect in Artistic Communion.

So come join us this Thursday. We’ll be using the Zoom video conferencing app.

Here is the link you’ll need to register and join us live:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/d5f9c3971731858f34538d7d4481ef37

(Use this link to test your connection prior to our call: https://zoom.us/test)

If you have questions or feedback:

Leave a comment on our Infinite Conversations forum topic here:

https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/chaos-crisis-and-creativity-living-the-questions-a-live-hangout-with-the-editors-of-metapsychosis/594

Thank you—

Marco V Morelli
aka Shadow Government (aka Deep State)
@madrush on InfiniteConversations.com
Editor @ Metapsychosis.com

PS. If you can’t make the hangout, we’ll be posting a recording.

PPS. We also invite you to submit your work for consideration in our next publishing cycle, which begins August 15th and is tentatively titled Proof of Concept (Infinite Possibilities).

PPPS. This is free, btw.

Filed Under: Culture (Transformation), Event, Microdoses

Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Cooperative, a creative co-op for people with "visionary tendencies." Learn more at Cosmos.coop »

Unless otherwise noted, all rights are reserved by the individual authors. Other website content is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

  • Podcasts
    • Chthonia – Worlds of the Dark Feminine
    • Writing Off the Deep End
  • Events
  • Groups
    • Visionary Voices: Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri
    • Synthesis of Yoga Practicum
  • Meta
    • About
    • Authors
    • Submissions
    • Contact
    • Donate

Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Cooperative, a creative co-op for people with "visionary tendencies." Learn more at Cosmos.coop »

  • Cosmos Cooperative
  • Earth
  • Journal
  • Conversations
  • Join the Co-op

Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Cooperative, a creative co-op for people with "visionary tendencies." Learn more at Cosmos.coop »

Unless otherwise noted, all rights are reserved by the individual authors. Other website content is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)