What Am I Doing?

As I am practicing with my modular synth setup, I wonder: what exactly am I doing? This is not music in the classical sense, of having an aesthetic structure. I am not even sure it is music in the musique concrète sense of found sound, since it is sound that I am not finding in nature but generating in ways that are impossible to reproduce.

I am working on this performance now for the Peat and Repeat launch of the Bog book series, and in particular, the book Mole Mansion by Caterina Verde.

I said recently that I was fishing for sound.

The Bog

The bog is where life goes to decompose and sometimes be preserved in altered forms. With the generated sound, I feel like it is decomposing into its structural essence. Waveforms with certain shapes — the deconstructed shapes overlap and cycle over each other, preserving sounds, creating sounds, or transforming them.

Working this way feels like virtual archaeology: uncovering something hidden, examining it, reconstructing it, and imagining a life for it.

It also reminds me of foraging for herbs, particularly roots. Who knows how far down that sassafras root goes? To get it out, you need to connect with the plant, ask if it wants to come with you, and leave something behind for it — a song, or a prayer.

Generating Possibilities

In A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno writes:

“I tend to set up systems which generate possibilities and then I select from those possibilities.”

In the pieces I am working on now, I imagine walking in the bog — the bog of sound.

In general, it is murky, filled with decomposed sounds: sine waves and sawtooth waves. But every so often, I see something — a will-o’-the-wisp, the phosphorescent light in the bog coming from decaying organic matter.

The origin story of the jack-o’-lantern.

But it feels like something else is happening too. Not just selecting possibilities, but constructing small virtual worlds around them.

A sound appears. Then we build a house for it.

Fire and Transformation

Phosphorus represents the element of fire. If we harken back to the four-element world of Empedocles or the five-element world of Chinese medicine, I struggle to make a similar analogy to Vedic cosmology. Everything is agni, fire, in a sort of fractal, holographic universe kind of way.

In the body, phosphorus acts as a bridge between the nucleotides of DNA. The “acid” in DNA and RNA comes from the phosphoric acid in the phosphate groups. It is connected with the processes that give us energy.

All the elements transform in their own way, and give life in their own way, but electricity and these electric instruments feel like instruments of fire.

Fire flickers. It appears suddenly and then disappears.

Most of the time, the modular system produces murk — layers of sine and sawtooth waves drifting through one another. But occasionally something appears, like a will-o’-the-wisp rising out of the bog.

We build a structure around it, and that structure eventually sinks back into the bog, becoming material for the next emergence.

Some Bog Computer Experiments for you all to play with.

At first I approached them like any other instrument:
What gesture makes what sound?
What movement produces what result?

But one night, I left the system running while cooking dinner and listened as the music composed itself. That was when I became hooked. I loved witnessing the music and catching a moment, like listening to birdsong outside my window or seeing an eagle pass over the treeline.

Against Mastery

My teenage son is learning guitar. He’s in the phase where mastery is immediate and physical: he plucks a string and hears a sound, he repeats, he practices, and the sounds change, become clearer more complex.

There is such joy in developing skill, and in developing mastery.

I asked him to listen to Silver Apples of the Moon, Morton Subotnick’s 1967 piece for the Buchla synthesizer.

He lasted less than a minute.

“It’s unlistenable,” he said.

I told him: listen for the moments of beauty or surprise. This instrument doesn’t respond in a predictable way. It produces events you don’t fully control.

He listened a little longer.

Then he asked again, more seriously this time: Why would anyone want that?

It’s hard to argue when confronted with virtuosity.

The Black Box

Last week, I heard Ted Gordon perform at Roulette with my dear friend Aya. Gordon describes the Buchla Easel as a “black box.” In engineering, a black box is a system whose internal workings aren’t fully visible. You can adjust inputs and observe outputs, but you don’t get a simple causal map between them.

This is what it is like to play music with modular synths. You change a patch and something happens, but not in a linear or reversible way. It’s closer to baking than assembling. Once the ingredients combine, you can’t separate them again.

With acoustic instruments, you can often reverse-engineer what you hear. Musicians learn by listening and reproducing. With modular systems, the sound often exceeds what you plan. You set conditions and then listen for what emerges.

There is still mastery involved. You learn the system, its tendencies, its thresholds. But mastery here doesn’t mean total control. It means developing sensitivity.

My son is learning how to produce sound.
I am learning how to relate to sound.

The Oracle

Another word for the black box is the oracle.

In mythology, the oracle is consulted when cause and effect are unclear. In computer science, an oracle is a function whose internal process isn’t available but whose outputs can be queried.

I recently saw Oedipus Rex with my beloved. At the center of the play is the Delphic oracle’s prediction: Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. The drama unfolds as the slow reconstruction of how that prediction came to be true. We the attempt to trace the causal chain backward.

To unbake the cake.

The oracle gives the prediction without a visible cause. Nothing in the present moment makes it legible. Only the unfolding of life reveals how the oracle’s statement maps onto reality.

Modular synthesizers feel similar. We set conditions and something emerges. Over time we recognize tendencies, but the output isn’t fully deducible in advance.

Listening comes first, comprehension, if it comes, comes later.

Non-Doership

Music-making as experience, not authorship, reminds me of spiritual awakening.

In many traditions of awakening, we talk about non-doership. We are not the source of the doing; life is moving through us, acting. A tree does not cause itself to grow, a bird does not cause itself to chirp. Like modular synth music, action moves through something or someone rather than moving from someone.

Working with modular synths expresses this sentiment.

The Ego wants to say: I made this. ” Look what I can do.

But as we let go of the ego and participate in the wider system, we witness, respond, listen, and discern.

More participation, less authorship.

Chamber Music

Sarah turned me on to philosopher Vilém Flusser’s concept of Chamber Music. Flusser images a future in which artists sit in separate rooms, each working with technical black boxes that transform information into sound or image. He called this Chamber Music. These systems interact. No conductor. No fixed score. Creation is distributed and emergent.

My son is learning the joy of control. I am learning the joy of experiencing.

Awakening is the gradual recognition that what we participate in does not originate from us, and that our experience is the only thing we can call our own.

From Laws to Policing

I have a theory. As technology saturates every aspect of everyday life—what Jacques Ellul famously called la société technicienne, or the technological society—we are no longer ruled by law in the classical sense. The laws are a given; they are the algorithm. And instead, the focus is on enforcing the law—i.e., on policing.

The bulk of our energy is now spent enforcing rules (often opaque, automated, or baked into design patterns), rather than deciding what those rules are in the first place.

Metrics-as-Reality

This shift feels entangled with what I can only describe as the Business Intelligencification of the world—the transformation of everything into metrics. Clicks per minute. Completion rates. Disparity indices. ROI matrices.

We’ve entered a strange, recursive terrain where:

1. We collect massive datasets (”the more the merrier”),

2. Those datasets generate a model of the world—a second-order reality,

3. Then we govern that model rather than the world.

In other words: first you build a giant simulacrum out of numbers. Then you police it.

Humans, for now, are still asked to “sign off”—to rubber-stamp decisions made by algorithms.

What we originally called politics, “the affairs of the city,” has become a virtual politics, “the affairs of a model of the city.”

From Politics to Biopolitics to Necropolitics

As I sit with all this, I can’t help but draw connections to the texts I’m reading. First amongst them: Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics.

Michel Foucault taught us that modern power governs through the regulation of bodies (biopolitics). Mbembe expands to say that modern power governs not how we live, but who is allowed to live. Necropolitics is governance through the power of death (necro), not life.

In this frame, political critique shifts:

• From class and labor distribution,

• To the fundamental divide between the living and the disposable.

Technology and Politics

It is through architecture that biopolitics became possible: the factory, the school, the camp, the prison, the gym. However, it is only through technology that a necropolitics is possible.

• Surveillance systems that identify,

• Drones and weapons that nullify borders

• Algorithmic classifications that identify which bodies are allowed to live and which are not

The Animist Twist

However, technology also reintroduces animism into the neoliberal order. “Inanimate” objects—algorithms, sensors, dashboards—are imbued with agency. They act. They decide.

Technology becomes the organ of a new metaphysics: remaking the line between who counts as animate and who is rendered inert.

In the ongoing effort to re-enchant the world and listen to nature —to return to this form of animism —there is also the temptation to believe that our technology speaks to us more than nature does.

Toward a Living Governance

For larger organizations built on distributed decision-making, the task is to understand how governance cultivates life rather than death, and

an appreciation of what is rather than a simulacrum.

Governance doesn’t have to be the architecture of necropolitics. It can be the choreography of care.

Code Experiments

There is a governance code simulation over at

https://thewitchofendor.com/

and https://eon-meridian.github.io/eon.github.io.

Yesterday, as I wandered around my partner’s apartment, I reflected on a project my brother and I had many years ago called the Commodity Project. This was after I ranted against art as commodity in a phone conversation and, admittedly, felt a little sheepish afterward, reflecting on this Commodity Project project.

I remembered that I used to have all of these ideas. And really now, I don’t have a lot of ideas. And there was a certain sadness about this.

Recently, I went to a TrueAnon live show. I love TrueAnon, and there was a brilliant interpretive performance of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails—not what you would think it would be, as we all come to know more and more about Epstein, but sort of about his ideas. I wonder if there’s a YouTube clip I can find and post. It was sort of like he was sending an email full of all these brilliant ideas that he had—and they were all pretty ridiculous.

I was going through some old journals as I’m moving into a new place with my kids, cohabitating with my new partner. I started reading through them, and then reading aloud to my partner. I said something like, “category theory, ecstatic metaphysics,” and she turned around to me and said, “You know what that sounds like?”

And I said, “The Epstein emails.”

Which, even now, is sort of horrifying.

And this brings me back to this no-idea moment.

I’ve said before—I often say—we don’t have ideas; ideas have us. My friend Stefanie says this too, I think, quoting Nisargadatta Maharaj, or maybe somebody else. The idea that everything is ours except for our emotions and our thoughts.

In a lot of esoteric literature, there is this concept of an egregore. An egregore is a thought. I sort of imagine it as a virus, maybe a meme. Maybe egregores are memes. Annie Besant, the theosophist, has this great book on egregore images with Charles Webster Leadbeater.

So perhaps egregores are also like sigils, right? They’re little machines, or like yantras. You could have the egregore of capitalism, of communism. Ideologies are egregores. Or family. We go through our life—I have this experience of being with my children, and we decorate. We make paper ornaments for a Christmas tree, the first Christmas tree I’ve ever had.

But I don’t sit and think, this is family. I’m just having an experience.

So bringing me back to my no-idea moment: this is very hard for me. And I feel like it’s very hard in our society, where everyone’s having ideas all the time, and what’s the next big idea.

But I really am in a moment of having no ideas, or no idea.

And this is also perhaps something that allows for an ecstatic experience of life, unmediated by the conscious mind.

Above is an ancient Egyptian Tyet or Knot of Isis. Some consider this a representation of a tampon, see Judy Grahn’s Metaformic Theory.

What if sex were the first technology? Not the act, but the technique, the knowledge that we can do things differently, in different ways to produce different results.

In Hebrew, to know is to enter. In Greek, epistēmē (ἐπιστήμη) means to understand. Somewhere between these two—between flesh and concept—science was born: the dream of separating objective knowledge from subjective belief. Technology has always promised to take the side of the objective, to build machines that know better than we do.

But the first tools were not circuits or gears—they were vessels and pigments, cosmetics and combs, medicines and weapons. Tools of transformation, tools of care, tools of harm. The Bronze Age brought metallurgy, and with it, the revelation of process: a sequence of acts that could be repeated, perfected, scaled. Jacques Ellul called this the birth of the technological society—a civilization of chained techniques, feeding on their own momentum, until technique itself becomes sovereign.

Sovereign over what? Over the spontaneous arising of action—over the way things simply are.
Heidegger saw it too: “Enframing blocks the shining-forth of truth.” Technology, for him, is not a tool but a lens, a grid, a command. It orders the world before the world has even had a chance to appear.

Follow the thread forward: the wheel, the chariot, concrete, roads, money, laws, empires, priesthoods—all architectures of ordering. Organization itself is a kind of machine, a choreography of obedience.
Then come the masons and the clockmakers. Masonry—the secret art of structure. The clock—the secret art of time. The world reimagined as mechanism, God as its engineer.

And then: printing presses, cameras, phonographs, telephones, steam engines, atomic bombs, penicillin, anesthesia, mRNA, CRISPR, computers, cars, planes.
Each invention a collapse of distance, a rearrangement of what can be touched, known, or broken apart. The world dissolves into models—mathematical, chemical, digital—and is rebuilt from invisible fragments.

Philosophers tell this story in binaries: subject and object, operator and operated.
Heidegger calls it standing reserve—the world as inventory, as potential resource awaiting activation. Everything, even a forest or a thought, becomes pre-processed for use.

But maybe that’s not the whole story.
If sex is the first technology, then technology is not just external—it is intimacy with how we do anything at all. Ellul’s “string of techniques” might just as well describe our own nervous systems, our rituals, our habits of thought.

Modern optimization adds a new clause: not only how do we do something, but how do we do it better? Faster? Measurably? To measure anything is to create a boundary—to make an inside and an outside. This, quantum mechanics reminds us, is the moment of rupture: when the act of measurement changes the thing measured.

Maybe the first duality wasn’t between human and machine.
Maybe it was between being and being measured.

So what would technology look like without measurement?
What would invention feel like if it didn’t need to be improved?

Jung suggests that as we individuate, we begin to live symbolically—that a symbolic life is inseparable from a meaningful one. For a long time, I imagined this as a different mode of living, almost fantastical. As if, instead of walking on the ground, we suddenly learned how to fly.

Recently, while giving away most of my library, I found myself leafing through old books. One of them was Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language by Russell Lockhart, and it brought the question of the symbolic life back into focus.

The symbolic life isn’t an alternate reality; it’s an orientation.

To live symbolically is about a different experience; it is to be guided through life differently, by the symbols of one’s unconscious.

In Jungian terms, living a symbolic life means recognizing which symbols resonate with us—and following them as if they were markers on a private treasure map. These symbols appear in dreams and in synchronicities, in moments when inner life and outer world suddenly align.

Jung’s own work offers a famous example. While treating a patient whose rationalism had reached a dead end, she recounted a dream of a golden scarab. At that exact moment, Jung heard a tapping at the window. He opened it and caught a scarab-like beetle. The event broke the patient’s psychic impasse. But the power of the moment was not that a beetle appeared. It was that the image mattered—that it completed something already alive in the psyche.

The scarab was not an explanation; it was a breadcrumb on the treasure map.

Symbols work this way. They are not ideas we think about, but they are images that present themselves to us, in our dreams (our inner life) and in what we notice in the world (our outer life). We are drawn to certain symbols without knowing why. Exploring them—following their lead—is how the symbolic life unfolds.

This way of living isn’t opposed to an ethical life, a just life, or a spiritual life. It’s adjacent—orthogonal. The wager is that by attending to the symbols of the unconscious, we slowly bring what is hidden into awareness, and in doing so, we arrive at a life that actually belongs to us.

So what does this look like, concretely?

I had a dream the other night that I was in my parents’ house. Off one of the bedrooms was a hidden room. Inside it stood a slim rattan cabinet. I knew immediately that I didn’t want anything else in the house—but this cabinet, unmistakably, was the one thing I desired.

When I opened it, I found jewelry arranged with great care: rings on mounts, necklaces on holders, as if lit from within, as if already waiting to be chosen.

Some symbols announce themselves clearly. Others take time to unpack and interpret.

In this dream, I noticed possible symbols of adornment, natural fiber, something handmade and lightweight, kin, inherentance, and value. To live symbolically here might mean learning about ratan or working with natural materials. It might mean paying attention to adornment—not as decoration, but as delight. It might mean asking: What is my relationship to family and kinship? What am I willing to inherit, and what do I refuse?

It might also mean creating, in waking life, a private cabinet of my own—a way of honoring and organizing the things that matter to me, beautifully, without explanation, without public display.

The word symbol comes from the ancient Greek sumbolon (σῠμβάλλω), meaning “to join.” A sumbolon was originally a broken object—often a token or piece of bone—split between two people. Each kept one half. When reunited, the pieces confirmed identity, relationship, and belonging.

I find this deeply moving.

The symbol is the missing piece; in reuniting our symbols, we live a whole and integrated life. Weaving the inner, unconscious symbol with the outer, conscious action through symbolic resonance leads us towards this integrated, and symbolic life.

I could talk here about yoga (as that which joins), about decision-making (and human design), and about how Jung and the symbolic life are part of a long lineage of awakening and human potential. If this sounds interesting to you, we are hosting our first Human Design meetup in Brooklyn on January 7th. Zoom is also available. Sign up here.

You can read the full piece and subscribe here.

This Autumn, the Wind Feels Like an Omen

The wind this season has been uncanny.

Not merely cold or strong, but sentient — the kind of wind that gathers in the hollows of trees and waits. A wind that opens thresholds.

In Chinese medicine, such a wind is not just meteorology. And in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, there is an entire chapter devoted to it:
“The Pathologies of Wind.”

The ancients understood that the weather has a personality, a will, and sometimes instructions.

Wind Outside Becomes Wind Within

In herbalism, “wind” is not a metaphor. It moves through the interior world:

– the unsettled thoughts,
– the digestive churning,
– the sudden dizziness,
– the sense of being displaced from one’s own center.

Wind perturbs. Wind reorganizes. Wind transforms.
It is the original disruptor of the Five Elements.

The Neijing Suwen tells us:

“In the spring the wind comes from the east… Illness occurs in the liver channel and rises to the head.”

This is not superstition — it is cosmology.
Spring wind awakens liver wind - spring is an excellent time for liver detox and eating bitter green vegetables that tonify the liver.

Wind is the hinge between what was and what will be.

Whenever you feel “scattered,” remember:
Somewhere in your system, a new season is coming.

Many Cultures Knew the Wind as a Spirit Being

Long before weather was reduced to numbers and forecasts, it was understood as a spirit with moods.

– The Greeks feared and revered Boreas, bringer of rapture and devastation.
– The Aztecs honored Ehecatl, whose breath set creation into motion.
– The Tibetans tie prayers to the wind-horse, Lungta, because wind is what carries fate.
– In the Levant, the wind has dispositions; the Arabic word nasīm means the breath-wind, the tenderness-wind, and is the wind of love poetry, mystical Sufi writings, and Bedouin weather lore.

Reading the Old Texts

When I turn to the early medical texts, I often think of Kenneth Rexroth, the anarchist poet who walked among classics, another version of our ancestors. He communicated the aliveness of these works.

The Neijing is not only a medical manual.
It is a cultural text of the body-as-cosmos.

We read:

“In ancient times, the sages observed the signs and adapted themselves, so they were unaffected by the ‘evil wind’ and lived long lives.”

“Evil wind” does not mean demonic.
It means a wind arriving before one is ready — a misalignment between inner weather and outer world - a wind that causes disturbance.

And this line echoes something from the Essene Gospel of Peace:

“In everything that is life is the law written…
You find it in the grass, the tree, the river, the mountain.”

If the law of life is written everywhere, then the wind is not simply air in motion.
It is a law of life, a literal page in the book of nature.

What the Wind Asks of Us Now

This time of year, the wind becomes a threshold guardian.
It ushers us out of one energetic world and into another.

When the wind is erratic, and our own spirits are stirring.

The sages did not fight the wind.
They adjusted themselves to it — breath, posture, rhythm, heart.

Wind asks us to be permeable yet anchored,
to let movement enter without losing form,
to let change arrive without losing soul.

It is the first teacher of transformation.

If you feel called to work with the wind in your own body — through herbs, breath, or attunement — you are welcome to book a free intake at the Mugworts Clinic.

The Rise of Governance

The word governance sounds bureaucratic, even anesthetic—but it’s suddenly everywhere: AI governance, software governance, data governance, DAO governance, platform governance.

Politics hasn’t disappeared. It’s just migrated—from the _polis_ to the organization.

Community gardens, corporations, blockchains, and Discord servers: each now has its own political reality.

All Science Fiction Films Are Dystopian Because…

In so many sci-fi worlds, we see spectacular displays of political force—
but rarely the act of making laws.

Consider the archive:

• Minority Report → predictive policing, pre-crime enforcement

• RoboCop → corporate capture and automated force

• Gattaca → genetic stratification and bureaucratic gatekeeping

• Blade Runner → age enforcement and policing of rebel replicants

These worlds are drenched in surveillance, enforcement, and optimized violence.

In technological societies, science fiction shows that power is expressed through enforcement rather than deliberation.

From Lawmaking to Policing

Here’s my working theory:

As technology saturates everyday life—as Jacques Ellul observed in The Technological Society—techniques control other techniques; we no longer live within laws in the classical sense.

The law is now the algorithm.
Politics has shifted from writing rules → to enforcing them.

We spend our days policing rules we didn’t write, can’t read, and often don’t realize we agreed to—
hidden in UI defaults, smart contracts, settings menus, compliance frameworks, and machine-readable policies.

Governance has become a massive, distributed enforcement engine.

Metrics-as-Reality

This transformation is entangled with what I can only call the Business-Intelligencification of the world—the reduction of life to metrics:

Clicks per minute.
Completion rates.
Disparity indices.
ROI matrices.

We now inhabit a recursive loop:

1 → We gather enormous datasets (“the more the merrier”).
2 → Those datasets generate a model of the world—a second-order reality.
3 → Then we govern the model, not the world itself.

First, we build a numerical simulacrum.
Then we police the simulacrum.

Humans still “sign off,” but we’re mostly rubber-stamping decisions that algorithms have already made.

Governance, Politics, and Optimization

Operations Research is the science of optimal decision-making in complex systems.
And whenever we talk about “optimization,” we talk about numbers—
because optimizing qualitative human experience is too messy to automate.

Classical political theory asked who rules:

• the people → democracy

• the elite → aristocracy

• the wealthy → oligarchy

• the one → monarchy

But contemporary politics is defined by what we optimize:

• biopolitics → optimizing populations

• necropolitics → optimizing exclusion and disposability

• ecopolitics → optimizing ecological survivability

• capitalism → optimizing profit

Every governance system chooses a variable, builds an optimization function,
and shapes collective life through its logic.

Show me what you optimize, and I’ll show you the politics you produce.

The Necromantic Roots of Lawmaking

At the end of Plato’s Laws, the legislators are told to enter the cemetery before dawn
to receive the new statutes— a ritual of political necromancy, a communion with the dead, the ancestors, the city’s silent memory.

Lawmaking was never just rational design. It includes forces we inherit but do not choose.

And our modern systems are no different.

We still consult the dead— but the “ancestors” are now datasets, archives, logs,
residues of past behavior. Algorithms commune not with spirits but with statistical ghosts.

The necromancy never stopped.
It simply became automated.

Down at the crossroads

If governance is no longer about legislating for democratic subjects—
But about optimizing computational districts, policing dataset proxies,
and sorting life from non-life, then we need entirely new frameworks for ethics, embodiment, refusal, and survival.

Next AI Satsang

Tuesday, Nov 25
Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/0_QIM_HiShKbX3To2JnVCQ

Mamdani’s Speech

When Mamdani gave his acceptance speech after winning the New York City mayoral election, I felt a few things at once: the force of his voice, his clean delivery, and his unwavering return to one theme—affordability.
So I was genuinely surprised when I looked at his chart and saw no defined throat channels (which usually give reliable vocal power) and no defined ajna channels (which often anchor consistent thought patterns).

This told me something different was happening.

The Wa and the Penta

What I see is someone plugged into a larger field—either a Penta (3–15 people) or a Wa (15+). His voice is not “just his voice.” He is speaking with the group and for the group, almost as if he channels the collective organism he is embedded within.

This also aligns with what people say about his stellium (three planets) in the 4th house—ancestors, home, lineage. He draws strength from elders, family, lineage memory, and the long arc of where he comes from. That ancestral current becomes part of how he expresses himself, even if he doesn’t consciously register it.

He also has Jupiter—the planet of expansion—in Gate 7, the gate of planning within the Penta. It’s a 6th-line Jupiter, meaning its expression is elevated, future-facing, transformative.
And he has Pluto in Gate 1, also a line 6. Gate 1 is implementation. Deep, slow, unstoppable implementation.

So for anyone questioning whether Mamdani can actually execute:
He can—but it may not look like traditional “execution.” It’s deeper, slower, and driven by Pluto’s truth-tunneling, root-level force.

Both of these gates—7 and 1—are part of his design (his unconscious). He embodies them naturally.

The Basics

Mamdani is a pure Generator. He can outlast almost anyone. His aura is large, enveloping, and always responding to life.
His profile is 4/6: the Opportunist / Role Model.

The 4/6 life process is:

• build yourself through relationships (4)

• spend the first half of life experimenting (the 6 behaves like a 3)

• then step into the true 6th-line “role model” phase after the Chiron return

We are seeing him mid-experiment right now. He’ll try many things, test ideas, learn through mistakes. That’s the design.

His Incarnation Cross is the Right Angle Cross of Maya 3.
Maya refers to the illusion of reality, and a Right Angle Cross means this is a personal destiny, not a transpersonal one. He transforms the world through transforming himself.

The “3” indicates that experimentation is his way through the illusion.
His destiny is to personally break through what appears to be real, and through his own transformation, inspire others to do the same.

The Channels

He has three channels connected to the Root Center. The Root is pressure, ambition, and grounded drive. It’s the engine that makes us get up and do things—and Mamdani is clearly doing things.

The three channels are:

• 54–32

• 28–38

• 42–53

The 28–38 channel is defined in both his design (unconscious) and personality (conscious). Gate 38 is also activated by two planets—Uranus and Neptune—which is significant.

Gate 38 — The Fighter

Gate 38 in the Root is the Gate of the Fighter, the “I’m here to fight for what matters” signature.
Uranus gives it a radical, Promethean edge.
Neptune gives it a dream, a vision.

Radical utopianism with purpose: that’s the frequency.

Gate 28 — Excess of the Great

Gate 28 in the Spleen connects to 38.
Hexagram 28 in the I Ching is “Excess of the Great.” It is the existential pressure to live a meaningful life.
People with Gate 28 take big risks—not for ego, but for humanity.

This creates the Channel of Struggle, whose gift is knowing which struggle is worth it.

54–32 — The Channel of Transformation

Gate 54 in the Root is ambition elevated: not hustle, but initiation.
The “marrying maiden” hexagram, in Human Design terms, is the drive to rise—materially or spiritually.

Gate 32 in the Spleen is intuition about what will survive. What will last.
Together, 54–32 is the transformation channel. He knows what to invest in—whether resources, policies, people, or ideas—and which moves will endure.

42–53 — The Format Channel of Cycles

This channel defines his Sacral, making him a Generator.

Gate 53 (Root) is beginnings. Its highest expression is super-abundance.
Gate 42 (Sacral) is growth, ripening, and closure. Daoist readings link it to transformation, decay, and the quiet fruiting at season’s end.

Together they form the pulse of time.
I think of Ecclesiastes 3:2—“a time to plant and a time to uproot.”
Capitalism tries to flatten time into productivity.
Gate 42 restores qualitative time, seasonal time, I-Ching time.

Mamdani carries that pulse.

The Gate of Good Hugs

He also has Gate 40 defined in the Heart.
Gate 40 is the Gate of Aloneness—not loneliness, but a refusal to work on anything that doesn’t come from his inner authority. No false obligation.

It’s also the gate of touch. Of connecting the tribe to the world.
People with Gate 40 often give excellent hugs—because touch comes from sincerity.

Bringing It All Together

In the end, Mamdani’s chart paints a picture of a leader whose power doesn’t come from the expected places. He has no defined throat to guarantee vocal force and no defined ajna to anchor fixed thinking—yet he speaks clearly and consistently because he draws from something larger: his community, his lineage, and the ancestral field of the 4th house.

His design is built around the Root center: three pressure channels driving him toward meaningful struggle, intuitive transformation, and cyclical growth. He fights for what matters (38), seeks purpose and depth (28), knows what will endure (32), and initiates new cycles with a Generator’s stamina (53–42). As a 4/6 profile, he is still in his experimenter phase; what we are witnessing is a leader learning publicly, building relationships, and preparing to step into the true role-model phase in the next chapter of his life.

His Incarnation Cross of Maya 3 signals someone whose personal transformation disrupts illusions and helps others see differently. And Gate 40 in his heart reminds us that his willpower is sincere—he acts only from what feels true.

Taken together, Mamdani’s design is communal, ancestral, experimental, and durable.
He is here to fight for what matters, reshape systems at their roots, and guide New York through a new cycle grounded not in urgency, but in meaning, timing, and integrity.

The Political Occult

If you read his chart through the witch’s lens, the picture sharpens: Mamdani isn’t just a politician—he’s a conduit. His speech landed because he wasn’t speaking alone. He was speaking with the power of a group, an ancestral chorus moving through his open centers. His Root channels make him a pressure engine: struggle with purpose, transformation that lasts, and a relationship to time that isn’t capitalist but seasonal.

The Cross of Maya 3 marks him as someone who breaks illusions by living through them. His path is personal transformation that becomes public weather. And Gate 40—the gate of true will—ensures that whatever he commits to will be real.

In the occult view, Mamdani isn’t moving toward power; power is reorganizing itself through him. His task is to fight the right fight, change the soil, and reintroduce the city to the natural rhythm of time.

Shavasana

Shavasana is corpse pose in yoga. It is when you lie down, relax, and breathe.

Whenever I settle into shavasana, I feel connected to all the other times I’ve done this —on yoga mats, in studios, in quiet living rooms. Each moment connects across my lifetime. I imagine that when I come to the end of my life, this will be the feeling that I experience.

I imagine Shavasana as the rest in a musical composition, and as the hole in a number line.

The landscape of the real line

Maybe you remember the number line from grade school.

The set of real numbers include:

• Rational numbers (fractions, countable)

• Irrational numbers (uncountable)

Countable

We can define ½ or ¾ easily, but we cannot define √2 — its decimal expansion never ends. If we think about discrete mathematics, which is the foundation of the digital computer, the number line is disrupted by these numbers that never end, we cannot smoothly move from an irrational number to the number immediately after or before it.

Rational numbers are countable; we could theoretically list all of them.

Irrational numbers are uncountable; we cannot list them since each irrational number itself is infinite.

(w)holes

When we use calculus to graph a curved line, sometimes we encounter a hole, a point in the line that expands to infinity.

We see these holes in the line that graphs √2x.

The Rest

It feels there is something here that connects the holes and shavasana. Shavasana is itself is a hole in experience, a moment of rest amongst all the doing, all the countable things. There are a limited number of activities in modern society that feel like holes -moments apart from everyday life: psychoanalysis comes to mind. These are uncountable, infinite spaces. Spaces that cannot compute, where you cannot deduce the outputs from the inputs, the results cannot even be calculated - they are infinite.

Perhaps the thing that really connects our experience is the moments of incomprehensible infinity - the holes and the rests.

Trying something new: AI Satsang – A Meditative Inquiry Into the Future of Intelligence Nov 18 9PM Eastern.

Thinking about

- What is consciousness?

- Can intelligence exist without awareness?

- Is AI just code—or an emergent extension of the Self?

- How do meditation, metaphysics, and machine learning connect?

What is a Satsang

Satsang is a practice I encountered in the Advaita Vedanta or Non-Duality community. It comes from the Sanskrit “Sat”, true essence, and “Sang”, assembly or gathering – an assembly of true essence. It is a gathering of people investigating the truth of our reality.

I have been holding Satsang’s for a while and am curious to engage with this practice as we increasingly interact with AI and computation.

What is our lived experience with these devices and what sorts of insights will they give us as to their place in the world and our lives?

The Details

We will meditate, have a short teaching on consciousness and AI and Satsang-style dialogue and live inquiry.

Sign Up Here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/0_QIM_HiShKbX3To2JnVCQ

Or join at: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88450422797

Who (or what) is waking up in the age of artificial minds?

Terence McKenna was an ethnobotanist, mystic, and author, best known for his theories about consciousness and psychedelics - that humans evolved those qualities we associate with being human, like language, from eating psychedelic mushrooms on the African Savannah.

I randomly started listening to a lecture he recorded on alchemy, and just dove in. This is what I found.

1. Episode 154 - The Philosopher’s Stone: Terence McKenna on Hermeticism, Renaissance Magic, the Hidden History of Alchemy, the Catharites, Giordano Bruno, Rosicrucians, and the Rise of the Invisible College

I listened to this episode first. McKenna ranges widely across subjects and reframes alchemy as a spiritual technology of human transformation, connecting it to Jungian psychology and to heretical Christian sects like the Cathars. The highlight was his digression on the Voynich Manuscript: a mysterious, undeciphered text that may encode a Cathar herbal sacrament. McKenna suggests it’s a lost ritual manual—but the real story is even stranger. As an herbalist, this digression integrated my experience with plants as material healers and as spiritual healers, and really, the entire episode felt like it was dissolving the division between matter and spirit.

2. Surfing Finnegan’s Wake

   I hadn’t meant to listen to this episode; it autoplayed while I slept on the train. McKenna’s voice reading Finnegans Wake felt like a spell. I woke up with a new sense of how art transforms consciousness—and how language can build entire cities of meaning.

3. Episode 706 Terence McKenna One Last Timewave Rap

   So here we are, talking about the Eschaton—the end of the world. In Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a shadowy cabal wants to “Immanentize the Eschaton,” a phrase I’d long associated with a countercultural, free-love rebellion. But I recently learned the term originated with conservative William F. Buckley, who used it to critique utopian impulses—suggesting the phrase itself holds a dual edge: destruction or radical transformation.

   I reference all this because this McKenna episode is about the Eschaton—in 2012. It didn’t happen, I don’t think, which raises the question: what does a failed prophecy mean for the prophet?

   In this episode, McKenna offers the I Ching as a temporal instrument—as if time has qualitative contours we’ve never learned to read. He suggests we lack tools to measure the texture of a moment in time, as physicists do with space-time curvature.

   He loops in the Stoned Ape theory, wondering if mushrooms are accelerating consciousness in anticipation of a cosmic event—like a quasar ready to drench us in radiation. I found myself fixated on the I Ching—what would it mean to design a sensor for time’s qualities, not just its quantity?

I’ve listened to more than three of McKenna’s talks now, but these stand out as my favorites—and I’m pretty sure they were all recorded at Esalen. It feels fitting. Esalen is where so many experiments in human potential began or found a home. Really, all these concepts are just models, or containers, for our own embodied awakening.

Faceticity

So I actually thought/think this is a term. I used to teach a class called Computers, Robots, and Film and often times one of the first exercises would be too look at all the close up of faces. The face is one core difference between film and theater (and I would add TV). You know who does not have faces - a robot. They have commodity faces - all faces are the same. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has theories about the face, and ethics and how ethics stems from a face-to-face with the other which introduces both difference but also a connection with the other. What does that leave open for AI ethics, with technologies that have no face. I still would like to write this essay. Maybe I will.

Hauntology

I was talking with a developer recently and he said it was so hard to maintain code because the older developers that had contributed to the code base were no longer around. I called this haunted code. This comes from Derrida’s notion of Hauntology, which is a play on ontology (the theory of being), and also the idea of traces, that what is absent or unsaid also leaves a mark. Mark Fisher, a theorist and blogger who died too soon, engaged with the haunted, he wrote a book called Ghosts of My Life, and explored unrealized futures. We could say we are haunted by futures that never came to be. Hauntology in Derrida comes from his analysis of Marx, who asserted that Europe was haunted, by the spectre of communism, and my children also are obessed with the TV show Ghost, in which a house is haunted. As you can see I dont really have a point of view with respect to hauntology, only that it is this concept that appears to be haunting us right now. Maybe that is why I never wrote anything.

The Artemisian

Years ago I did not write an essay for which I was commissioned, on solar punk and lunar punk. I was attempting to connect this with Nietzsche and his conception of Apollonian and Dionysian cultures in his essay The Birth of Tragedy. He explores why is it that only Greek culture developed Tragedy. We could say why did Greek culture develop Greek Tragedy and then we could have a tautology. Anyway, there is a notion of a rational culture, with perfectly crafted plays and then an ecstatic culture of rapture - we can call this perhaps rave culture. Nietzsche’s analysis depressed me. Although there were some beautiful images and metaphors the whole concept was deeply fascistic as is any concept that involves art based on indoctrinating people towards a cultural mythos. I was sort of interested though in a third way, and began to think about an artemisan culture. Artemis, Apollo’s twin lesbian sister, goddess of the moon, is also the goddess of trivia, where three roads meet. This is very famous in psychoanalysis, and is also the place where the Sphinx met Oedipus. The idea that there is a third culture, a culture that exists in the light of the moon, a metaformic culture - to invoke the brilliant Judy Grahn. I still think there is something here but I probably wont develop.

Technics and Awakening

I am very inspired by Jaques Elluls’ The Technological Society in which he distinguishes between material techniques, like cement, and spiritual techniques, like meditation. I am giving a lot of talks these days on what I am calling herbal theurgy, the use of herbs to make us “godlike” or to awaken, and I am interested in those techniques material and immaterial that help us experience more consciousness. I think of the microcosmic orbit, playing music, meditation, singing, chanting, dancing, writing, even math (think pythagoras), as practices leading to awakening and always wanted to explore these different paths and their history. Alas, even writing this little blurb makes the endeavor feel exhausting. Perhaps I should stick with chanting.

A 33rd degree Mason

As I said I have a list of at least 33 essays Many of which I will never write. But at least I can blurb them here. I do want to write about how magic squares provide a framework for thinking about determinism, free will, time, and cellular automatons. So maybe that will be a full length essay.

Rainbow Timeline

Today I got an email that my domain - rainbowtimeline.com - has not been renewed. I bought this domain years ago when I met up with a friend from the Family Constellation world at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We came up with the name because of all the conversations in new age circles around time lines, for example: people are on different timelines, someone once told me he updates his timeline very quickly, timelines may diverge. My friend said she was on the rainbow timeline - I really dont know what this means - but I sort of wanted to live there too. I imagined the rainbowtimeline.org as perhaps a nexus of spiritual traditions, techniques, metaphysics, with lectures, classes and discussions on awakening and human development.

The Outsider Herbalist

This is another domain that recently expired. A few years ago I was trying to "craft" my herbal practice. I came up with the idea of outsider herbalist - because of the word "outside" but also because of my background in technology. I have rigorous clinical training in herbalism from the 3 year program at Arbor Vitae. But I dont have a traditional background, which would be something like family tradition, or growing up in nature, foraging, and so forth.

Conscious Coding

In the course of my life I became very interested in enlightenment and awakening. I consider this my purpose - and all our purposes - to awaken. And I believe that it is only through mass awakening that we can successfully address the crises of our time. In the course of this journey I have use many practices to liberate my consciouness.

Today, as I am writing this, I am reminded of my engagement in depth psychology - the psychoanalytic tradition pioneered by Freud and expanded by Jung, Lacan, and others. Freud says that one way the unconscious reveals itself in our idiosyncratic gestures and rituals, Jung says that the unconscious speaks in the images. and Lacan says that the unconscious speaks in language (he also uses terms from mathematics to systematized his theory of the unconscious.

Anyway I though- what if we thought of consciousness or human development as computation. What happens if the consciousness speaks in the language of computation.

HVonBing

I bought this site thinking of the great polymath and mystic Hildegard of Bingen. I was on a flight home to New York from LA, my first flight since the COVID pandemic began in 2019. I was looking at an astrology chart and the woman next to me asked her for me to read her chart. I do love reading a chart, so I did and then she asked my rates and if I could give her son a reading. I gave her the hvonbing email address.

Quality Containers

I started this site a few years ago. I was considering starting a consulting business around software modernization, docker, that sort of thing. Also I was taken with the idea of containers in general as in the concept of holding space. I have a piece on medium, and probably here about that https://medium.com/@hackerm0m. I was taken with the idea of a container metaphysics. As I became an herbalist this took on new meanings as I needed a container for my creams and tinctures and so forth - which birthed a short dalliance into pottery. Anway I ended up having a youtube channel with a bunch of ChatGPT experiments in symbolic langauge. Sadly I canceled the domain and lost the vidoes- they are still on git https://github.com/msrobot0.

AI SADHANA / SANGHA

I recently bought two domains that feel destined to end up in the expiration lane.

AI-sadhana and AI-sangha - This sort of is related to the conscious coding and some how integrating AI into a spiritual practice - but I am not sure what this would look like - and the avenues I was persuing for creating events around this are not grabbing me.

There are more, but these are a few that came to me tonight…

the domain is expired long live the domain

Cemeteries are called charnel grounds in Buddhism and Hinduism, where people engage in ritual and meditation.

A charnel ground is also any place that feels deadening, like a space of putrification.

How can we make those spaces feel alive again?

There is a tradition of dancing in a charnel ground, moving energy, and echoing all the cycles we find in nature.

Cycles & Technology

I am finishing Blood, Bread, and Roses by Judy Grahn. In January, I did a deep dive into Grahn’s work, which marks the start of an effort to read only women and trans writers.

Blood, Bread, and Roses presents a provocative history of tools and technology rooted in the theory that the synchronicity between human menstruation and the lunar cycle gave rise to mental models—what Grahn terms metaforms—that fostered the development of tool-making and abstract thought. 

AI Sadhana

Sadhana is a discipline or practice. During the pandemic, I practiced early morning sadhana yoga and chanting, but it can be anything that aims for spiritual awareness.

I consider my reading a sadhana.

Right now, I am thinking about my work with tools and technologies: my early work with performance robots, invisible fields like Wi-Fi and RF ID, experiments with exchange like prayer coins and unpaid labor coins, cryptography as a personal practice, and Turing Oracle and AI—and how this is a spiritual practice.

Jaque Ellul writes in The Technological Society that material techniques (like making cement) and spiritual techniques (like meditation) exist. A sadhana uses both technologies and techniques. What is the role of technology here? I call it the AI Sadhana, and I have no answers, only questions.

Herbalism

Medicine is a technology. We can prepare herbs in different ways, such as oil, alcohol, and honey, for application on the body or internally. One of my kids makes bath balms with calendula, lavender, and pine essential oils, which we use all winter.

I consider the different phytochemicals (chemical compounds) in plants, which can help us understand how a plant works on the body and what techniques and technologies can help us make better medicine. I also consider the energetic properties of plants, which are common in flower essence practices and in-plant meditations, and ways to bridge the material and the non-material, spiritual technology, and material technology.

Consider this my dance!

If these ideas resonate with you, please leave a note or join the Quality Containers discord at https://discord.gg/mDffZqAU.

** Calendula contains Saponins, which are long chains of water-soluble sugar attached to compounds that love fat (lipophilic) - and this creates a slippery foamy action and detergent (disinfectant quality)

What is the Great Work? I first thought about the great American novel or some great invention, and I was not so far off. The Great Work is some hugely ambitious project that inspires people to come from far and wide and lend their expertise to realizing it. The great Cathedrals of the Middle Ages are an example.

The Great Work of Computation

The mathematician and author Rudy Rucker connects the Great Work with Silicon Valley. He likens Silicon Valley to a grand medieval center where we are building a cathedral — the Great Work. Craftspeople of all types descend upon the center to contribute to this "Great Work." But what is the Great Work? Maybe AI, Rucker posits. I call this great work "Computation."

The Great Work in History

The Great Work is also an ancient alchemical term that refers to the creation of the Philosopher's Stone. Alchemists spent their lives attempting to create this Great Work — which turns lead into gold or grants eternal life. Psychologist Carl Jung interprets alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone as self-transformation. The Philosopher's Stone does not turn actual lead into gold but turns a person's consciousness from the lead to the gold.

Awake!

Jung calls this process individuation. Just as a seed creates a flower in the right conditions, a human may transform and express her uniqueness. We may break out of our societal conditioning and act freely. Nietzsche called this the transvaluation of values — to be modern is to decide for ourselves what is right rather than mindlessly following family, tradition, or custom. Individuation is the Great Work of the Alchemists, and it is alive in many traditions such as Moksha, interbeing, merging with the godhead, awakening, and self-actualization: the inner work.

The Cathedral as the Great Work

Rucker uses the Cathedral as an example of the "Great Work," and expert craftspeople come from all around to participate in creating this work. Craft work and inner work go together in many traditions; many contemporary books, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Shopcraft as Soulcraft, also point to this. As we sharpen our craft, we also sharpen something profound inside ourselves.

As a software developer, I have always felt like a craftsperson—and that this feeling is unique in 21st-century Western society. I have always felt that software development is soul development, especially as my colleagues and I, during the first dot-com boom, traded recordings on Alan Watts, the Firesign Theater, and Robert Anton Wilson.

Above is a beautiful medieval stained glass window, but we lost this knowledge over time. Schwaller de Lubicz, a 19th-century Egyptologist, chemist, and mystic, was able to recreate this glass by using chemistry and alchemy, or so the story goes. Alchemy, craft, inner work, and outer work materially combine to create the Great Work.

Even Rucker points to this feeling of self-determination as a part of the "Great Work" of computation.

The reality is that there is no unifying Great Work, there are just a lot of people here in the pit together, slamming and hacking. Our Great Work is to stay in the pit, to control our own destinies, and to hack what we can of the world.

"Control our destinies" sounds like self-actualization. But Rucker also says there is no Great Work, so what is everyone working on?

The Minor Work

Deleuze and Guattari (D&G), the 20th-century philosophers/psychoanalysts, introduced the concept of the machine to the realm of desires and drives — and from there to social and political relations and the formation of the individual. Two of their ideas stand out in our discussion of the "Great Work" of computation:Minor Literature and Deterritorialization.

D&G introduces minor literature in analyzing Kafka's writing, which has been adopted by other creative modes—like cinema. Originally defined as "A minor literature is not the literature of a minor language, but the literature a minority makes in a major language" (Deleuze), minor literature has expanded to include any literature produced outside the hegemonic structure of its culture. From this location, minor literature can be radical, challenging established norms of culture, politics, and language.

The people slamming and hacking, the proliferation of APIs, UNIX tools, apps, and frameworks are all minor tools. They are all produced in a foreign language — most programming languages may use English words, but they are not in the English language. I want to acknowledge the corpus of esoteric languages and languages written with words in other vernaculars. But no one's first language is a computer language. All software is, by definition, a minor literature.

Can minor literature be a Great Work — a hegemonic structure? If it can, it will undoubtedly look different than the Cathedral.

The Detertorrialized Work

The second concept, deterritorialization, was initially used to describe how we can separate social relations from their original context and move them into various new contexts to create new meanings. I think of the same social relations on LinkedIn vs. Match vs. Facebook vs. Signal and how these different contexts change my deterritorialized relations. In a larger perspective, deterritorialization lets us strip away words, signs, and symbols from their original context, make them all ontological equals, and then recombine them in new ways — like a database or a graph.

Computation is what makes deterroritalization possible on a grand scale. The Great Work of Computation is deterritorialization.

Seek Ye the Gnarl

This piece began with the idea that Silicon Valley was the location of the Great Work, but deterritorialization is about moving beyond physical boundaries. Have we just yet to find the boundary, or does the Great Deterritorialized Minor Work not exist in a physical location?

In Seek Ye the Gnarl, Rudy Rucker talks about how the edges are where exciting things happen — he calls this the Gnarl. In his Medium article, he writes about co-editing "MONDO 2000 USER'S GUIDE TO THE NEW EDGE."

Now what exactly IS this Great Work which is taking place on the New Edge? The Great Work is like a Mandelbrot Set of which we are the pixels, or even the steps of the computation. The Great Work is like a living body in which you and I are like a cell, or even like a specific chemical process, like an enzyme which copies ten thousand rungs of DNA. The Great Work is so big that nobody alive can even put a name on it…

The Great Work is so large that we cannot perceive it—it is a hyperobject, a living object, or a dynamic object. It is itself deterritorialization, constantly stripping itself away from the meanings it is embedded within.

The Great Work on the Edge

How can we think about spaces and edges, and how is this related to treating a Great Work that has both a space and an edge? ThCathedralal, after all, is the creation of a space.

In Folds, another book by Deleuze, he links Leibnitz, his invention of calculus, and his metaphysical notion of monads to the aesthetics of Baroque art and architecture- i.e., the Baroque Cathedral.

Deleuze analyzes the folds of Baroque churches as both solid and immaterial; they are dark yet illuminated. Deleuze posits that calculus made these structures possible by measuring curves and the spaces of curved objects.

The approach of post-phenomenologists is that tools create worlds that allow the creation of Great Works. With a new world comes a new edge. The edge that Rucker talks about is another new world brought into being by new computational tools.

Fractal Spaces

Deleuze’s fold reminds me of the plant St John's Wort, Hypericum perforatum. St John's Wort petals appear solid but consist of tiny pinholes—hence the name perforatum. It's hard to find a photo of these pinholes, and the plants no longer flower this late in the season where I live. They flower in midsummer, near the feast of St John the Baptist—hence the name St John.

Minor Works are like the folds or holes of St. John's Wort, a fractal, a Mandelbrot set: a space with infinite circumference but finite area or a space that is infinitely empty with a finite circumference.

Tools and Worlding

Calculus was not the Great Work; thCathedralal was. But it was a tool that created the space, or the world, where a Baroque Cathedral could be built. It was a psychotechnlogy.

John Vervaeke defines psychotechnologies as "a socially-generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating, and enhancing information processing that's readily internalizable into human cognition." (Ep 42 from the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom [56:53]

— 42, if you remember, is also the answer to life the universe and everything.)

Pyschotechnologies provide a cognitive leap that makes a Great Work possible. What is a Great Work? It is the pinnacle of a cognitive leap, where craftspeople sharing the same epistemological perspective come together to create.

What is the psychotechnology of computation? I have a few ideas, but we are not all clear yet. Getting clear on this is the work of the edges. At some point, the space will fill out, concepts will be reterritorialized, and we will build a Great Minor Deterritorialized-Reterritorialized Work.

For me, the more important question is whether or not this outer work of crafting the Computational Great Work will also lead to the inner transformation of turning lead into gold. What is the point of having a Great Work if we are not free to enjoy it?

I first heard the term while binge-listening to Sophie Lewis’ books on family abolition and surrogacy this past summer (the summer of 2023).

To quote Sophie Lewis, the creator of amniotechnics, “[it] is the art of holding and caring even while being ripped into, at the same time as being held.” (New Inquiry) Amniotechnics refers to amniotic fluid and the dangerous labor of birthing human life. It also refers to all liquids, rivers, oceans, precariously divided or broached by physical and political boundaries and to the care and danger involved in all these relationships.

socratic.org

Speculative thought expands the boundaries of rational thought and creates space for new forms of public action. Amniotechnics is a speculative theory. What actions do amniotechnics liberate?

Vessel Metaphysics

For years, I have considered a speculative theory of containers: skeuostechnics. This is from the Greek word for vessel, σκεῦος. Vessels are one of the the first tools; pottery is one of the first technics (i.e., crafts).

20,000-year-old jar from China

But lately, I feel exhausted by the binary of skeuostechnics. A container has to hold something; a container is to be filled. There is an archetypal imagery of polarity at work here that is no longer relevant. Traditionally, the feminine relates to containing, and the masculine relates to filling: yin/yang, passive/active.

Perhaps an anmnotechnic would fluidly avoid these polarities.

Sensitive Chaos

Theodor Schwenk, a 20th-century scientist, speculated that organisms grow around liquid flows. In a river where water moves in a particular way, differentiated by temperature perhaps, physical bodies are just boundaries around these water flows.

Climate Catastrophe

Last Friday, New York City received the equivalent of 3 months of rainfall in 1 day. Many parts of the city flooded; transportation was severely disrupted. I could not leave Brooklyn and return to my home in upstate New York.

This is the water we must care for, as it is polluted, warmed, rising, and ripping through barriers and arteries of our society’s infrastructure. Often, we care for things that hurt us.

brooklyneagle.com

Liminal

Water, in dreams, refers to the unconscious. Our myths and legends about floods and sea monsters express a fear of something irrational and uncontrollable that threatens to overwhelm our ego, which is the core of our individuality. In many philosophies, we strive for ego death, to understand that the boundaries of our ego are only an illusion. The flood is the eternal Self - The Real.

Technics

Instead of a vessel metaphysics about boundaries and edges, perhaps we want tools and techniques to care for liquid.

This is my favorite quote from Sophie Lewis’ New Inquiry Article:

“Midwives to the front! By midwives I mean all those comradely interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction: crossing borders; blockading lake-threatening pipelines; miscarrying”

I am preparing to teach Jacque Ellul’s The Technological Society, and we live in a technological society. The way to change a technological society is not to invent but to intervene.

Vanaheimr

I am in the shower. 
I reach out  to do something and  
I accidentally touch a piece of wood peeling off the wall. 
I pull it out. 

“Oh that's not too bad,”  I think.
A wooden veener maybe, not real wood.  
But, there is still a  piece stuck. 
And, when I pull that one out, it hurts!

Blood gushes out of the wound.
This is worse than I thought.

The Raft of the Medusa by Gericault

Gay Greek Water Jar

Containers

What is a container? This is a metaphysical question. What does a container do? This is a political question. How can we make a more quality container? This is an aesthetic question. I bought a domain in June called qualitycontainers.io (ig:qualitycontainersio). I did not plan this flow of sentences - to start with Zoe and end with this random website I bought. The words just flowed; they came out like images in a dream.

Gifts

Zoe’s class was a gift, a birthday gift, from someone dear to my heart. What can gifts do? That is my political self speaking. Gifts are political and transformative. The subversive in me almost put a photo of the Trojan horse. Inspired by David Graeber and others, I imagine a gift economy of mutual ‘indebtedness.’ But in such a society, we do not think in terms of ledgers, of owed and being owed, in the language of debt - of constant justification. Instead, we have a new language, a language of care. I imagine an economy of mutual generosity. That is sort of like a dream; I describe it in sentences.

Sentences

I started this piece with Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences on my mind. I reread this a few times in a weightless state without orientation. Then, I began to find gravity. I began experiencing how the words were generated from other words and images and how they all grew together. I felt an x-ray vision of how the piece was constructed and how sentences are like buildings.

Almost every line starts with ‘These,’ mostly ‘These sentences.’ On the opposite pages of the text, there are drawings. The sentences anticipate a future state - these are “Plans” after all. There is something of La Monte Young here, “Draw a straight line and follow it.” Does the drawing come first or the sentence? Wrong Question? They are in a dance, a co-creation, a dialectic, a garden - these are all different paradigms/epistemes/metaphysics that make different politics possible. Can politics change metaphysics and erase metaphysics? Can we live between the reality tunnels? That is the system poetics.

Dreams

Only four people come to class. The classroom is filled with paper. I look for a paper to grade - Jordana’s - but cannot find it. I am at 10 Corso Corso in Milan. I see a hungry caterpillar. It is enormous, as big as my fist. I do not kill it. I am in my childhood bedroom. It looks different. There is a bunk bed, my bunk bed, and we are in the little bed, cuddling and talking with our clothing on and our legs intertwined. We are both wearing blue jeans.

All dreams are in the present. They all use gerunds. They all happen suddenly or strangely or differently or only. They do not happen - the adverb lays our expectations bare. They are not grand visions, but shock at how things are. We expect something different, but what is is glorious.

In waking life, the particulars appear unreal. Lets call this the dream qualia. Do I really see a blue jean in my dream? Do I see blue and consider it to be jeans? Tomorrow, I will record a blue jay, bluebell, the sky, or the ocean. From this perspective, it is all a dream; the blue is the metaphysics and the blue jean is the politics.

The person who dreams they are a butterfly and the butterfly who dreams they are a person.

Endnote

“Hands prepare the fire, they flounder in paste and pigment, distribute all but blindly the drops, the clusters, the spots, the fields.” Jean-Francoise Lyotard on Sam Francis 2 Sulfers 1979.

Continuations & Computation

To go on — to not stop! I am in a group art show on April 20 in Ridgewood called “Press On.” Yes! Press on! Keep going, and don't stop. Stop some things, and continue others. The act of discernment is between the caesuras and the continuations.

In Computer Science, a continuation is the execution state of a computation. For example, we have some pseudocode:

line = new Line([[w,x],[y,z])

line.draw()

line.curve([a,b])

Every line in this program represents a state in the program - a state of the world. Each line of the program is a possible world.

Sometimes the state is not yet defined, if, for example, a variable waits for definition. If this happens, the program cannot execute. We do not want the program to halt but to go on! So, the program sets aside this code in memory and continues. When the variable is ready, the program will pick up and execute this code.

Some events in life are not ready for you. Sometimes events are exceptions or errors, and we throw them away - with try…catch… syntax. Other times we store these events, these continuations, in our pocket. We assemble the rest of the computation, and one day return to the continuation in our pocket to complete the event. In this way, cause and effect do not exist — since they do not — only sequences exist — as they do.

Chronotopes?

Some moments of time feel different than others — this is not a new thought - but a medium thought - a Bergsonian/Proustian thought. Factory time, the clock time of the computer, and the execution of the steps of a computation obfuscate and erase the qualities of moments.

“Temporality is an ordering of experience,” a quote from the text but not my notes. Is a temporality an ordering experience? I attended many seders recently — or tried to. Seder means “order.” How peculiar!

Some seders are longer than others — am I right? Temporality is the imposition of duration on the orders of experience — it is not the ordering — there is an original MF analysis.

Truly, all my notes on this page seem banal. Not all notes are equally profound. But my final note seems worthy — “Nature escapes {} by creating a CNS (central nervous system).” I call this worldbuilding. Now I call this set building, the building of mathematical sets — the great mathematical innovation of the 20th century. A set is a world. I had a typo — a set is a word — maybe that too.

The central nervous system (CNS) is the engine of action. In Advaita Vedanta, we talk about non-doership. We are always doing, but who is doing the doing? What is animating the CNS? Only with a CNS do we have the ability to contemplate non-doership through doership — the dialectic!

“Orientation has a prehistory.”

In Plato’s Timeus, there is no straight or queer — because there is no differentiation — the prehistory to orientation is a boulder.

A friend just finished this book, and I told him I would type my notes, and maybe something interesting would arise.

Structure and Reason

What is the relationship between structure and reason? Does geology make us reason differently? We cannot use a syllogism to understand how the Scottish Highlands and the Appalachian mountains are connected, but we can use the Caledonian Orogeny.

Is this a genealogy? In my first page of notes, we might call this a hyper genealogy - the genealogy of structure.

Hyper Genealogical A.I.

Right now, there is a lot of talk about A.I. The A.I. tools are built using logical systems and neural network feedback systems. They are forward-looking from data to one final answer. Genealogy looks backward through data to provide interpretations. Hypergeneaology looks back through structure and creates possibilities.

Hypergenealogy is the structure of the neural network.

We are beyond reason.

S.C.N.E. 1 is on medium and my blog.

You may have noticed I have a new handle - aleatoric_ops. Forget psy_ops or dev_ops, or operations research. We are in the field of chance - to live without laws only to sense make at the moment.

Thank you for reading. See you in 2023.