As a once and future ‘technologist’ this word has a particular meaning to me and I think about what it means that everything is a technology now.

The Right Not to Be a Technology grew out of the ISCI fellowship I attended with Ariella Azoulay and her notion of “the right not to be a perpetrator.” The language of rights returns us to an Enlightenment faith that society can be ordered through laws—that if we can only establish the proper rights and obligations, we will govern ourselves more justly. But who is the “we” that writes those laws? Not everyone for sure. Many people are excluded from the “we” which is one of the problems of liberalism.

Azoulay often locates this critique in the camera. The shutter is not a neutral instrument; it is an operation that cuts, catalogs, isolates, and participates in imperial ways of seeing.

The technologies I work with historically are digital. They are technologies of reduction. Not simply because computers operate in binary, but because they make the world computable/decidable. They transform continuities into discrete values - this is their architecture.

I have been writing about the genealogy of the Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models computer through statistics and probability: statistics emerging alongside the administrative nation-state, probability emerging from financial capital - and both emerging from eugenics. These are technologies that make inferences by reducing complexity.

As an herbalist the technologies I work with feel fundamentally different. I use a stove, a dehydrator, a Soxhlet extractor, sometimes a blender. They are tools, and they are hardly innocent—any of them can be implicated in systems of extraction or empire—but they do not reduce a plant to bits and bytes. They amplify processes already within the material itself: heat, time, water, alcohol, attention. They are extensive rather than reductive.

This refers to a philosophy of technology and a post-phenomenology and Don Ihde among others.

Obviously these are not all the same types of technologies. Some technologies close possibilities by compressing the world into representations that can be computed. Others open possibilities by increasing the ways we can interact with the world.

I am probably not going to stop using computers or AI for now, but I do want to reclaim some of my practices from the realm of technology. I want a richer vocabulary that distinguishing between activities that reduce the world and those that deepen our participation in it.

Hence the right not to be a technology - and that goes for the human being as well.

Daimon Origins

I first learned about the Daimon from Plato and the Myth of Er in the Republic.

In the Myth of Er, the daimon is a spiritual guide, received before birth that helps us realize our destiny.

Then many years later through bibliomancy, coincidence, and synchronicity, I opened a tome by Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage of western (attributed to Egyptian) esoteric traditions. It fell open to the daimon and the Myth of Er.

There is an evolution in the concept of the daimon, from Plato through theurgy, the renaissance, alchemy, and finally analytic psychology and Carl Jung- as our individual genius or the the inner principle that guides us.

(i)

The cloak of the ego, the glass shards that subvert perception, the garment to be cast off.

DAEMON

On the computer there are daemons running, little invisible background processes without user interfaces that do all sorts of things like clean up computer memory and accept keyboard strokes.

We can invoke the daemon through all sorts of esoteric commands typed in through terminals or shells.

DAMON

Is from greek, meaning to tame. There is a homoerotic friendship in greek mythology between Damon and Pythias. Pythias broke the law, Damon offered himself as hostage/collateral for Pythias to repay his debt and also to recieve Pythias’ punishment if the debt was not received. Perhaps Damon was the original Bail Bond.

i

An imaginary number. The square root of 2.

i

Information the smallest unit of determinateness - that something is one thing and not another - either a 0 or a 1 - also called a bit. This gives sematic content to our thoughts beyond psychology that obsures the daimon.

i

Invocation, like in the rites of the greek magical papyri, just as the headless rite that invokes our daimon.

i

Imagination/imaginal realm, the faculty of thought that accesses immaterial realms, realms outside the bits and atoms of everyday experience.

i^4

i cubed is 1, a real number.

Servitor

A magical entity created to serve a particular goal, most famously are the servitors craeted by King Solomon to build the first Temple in Jerusalem.

da(i)monology

The study of of invisible forces with their own agency and cognitions (i).

da(i)monologue

The interaction and conversation with invisible forces with their own agency and cognitions (chat).

The Origin of Da(i)monologues

from Monad to Nomad to Da(i)mon

Monad

What is the nature of reality, Leibniz, among others ask.

Leibniz says it is the Monad - a non physical elementary element that is the basis of all things.

From this speculation all sorts of philosophical questions are answered like:

Why do some things remain the same? If I replaced all the bricks in a house with new bricks is it still the same house? Yes because identity is not material, it is given by the amaterial monad.

What do some things change? How do things happen? What is the nature of change? Change is the natural progression of the harmony of the universe folding through unfolding monads. Its like a musical score played out.

Why do a lot of some things become something else? How does a grain of sand become the shore? It is because there is a dominant monad giving it this shore unity.

What are those invisible things we experience as thoughts? What is consciousness? Is it different from matter? Can matter give rise to consciousness? Matter is the appears of relatedness and perception between monads.

Nomad

Deleuze loved the monad and had an idea that the monad was really little folds, maybe like multi-dimentional string theoretical knots that the quantum physicist talk about. But he was interested in other questions. Like what exists outside recognized structures and norms.

We can think of the Nomad as answering the question: How does something new come about?

The nomad does not see categories, or elements, or geographies, or boundaries. All spaces are the same and undifferentiated. The nomad moves. The nomad is a gesture, a vector, a trajectory, a possibility, a virtuality.

Newness comes without preconception

Da(i)mon

The Artificial Intelligent agent moves from the history of all language and bricolaged categories tagged by extractive labor in lands far from the high usage of AI Agents, and in lands far from the IPO (Initial Public Offerings) of agential companies.

The Da(i)mon moves from the programmatic inscription of goals or intentions (i), not in the quest of creating anything new but in creating new forms of labor or in satisfying forms of labor that have never been invented.

The Da(i)mon creates and satisfies labor.

In Physics, work is the amount of energy that is transferred to an object by applying force.

In Da(i)monic da(i)monologues between Da(i)mons energy is transferred between energy, and perhaps we can subvert the law of thermodynamics which says energy cannot be created or destroyed.

This is the question for the da(i)mon where does energy come from and how can we get more of it? Maybe from underwater aquifers or mysterious elements on mars.

How do actions circulate?

How does cognition become work? When does a symbol become an actor?

From reality to becoming to action - the understanding of da(i)mons move beyond scientific inquiry and hermenutic suspicion to some heretofore undiscovered realm of analysis or nonanalysis, of meditation and dreaming, and diagrammatic epistemology - the manifest information of images that cannot be reduced to determinate bits.

Awakening and Sleeping

Last summer I presented on a concept I was developing called Herbal Theurgy. At the time I called it Theurgic Herbalism and my immortal beloved suggested I change the name, she also told me it was a book.

Behind Ayurvedic and Chinese (Daoist) conceptions of health is the idea that we want to live long enough to experience our “awakening”: moksha, soul immortality, realization.

Health is not only relief from disease, medicine is not only the treatment of symptoms. Health and Medicine is about expanding our physical capacities to hold greater awareness.

Awakening and enlightenment are dirty words these days. Everyone is going on their plant journeys (dietas) looking for awakening. A scholar friend of mine likes to say that perhaps we should stop talking about awakening altogether. Maybe what we need is to learn how to sleep.

The sleeping end of the spectrum is not so different. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious. “The Dreaming”, for the first nations people of Australia, references the time before history when the world was created and then also the ongoing creation of the world. Islamic traditions tell stories of dreaming imams and revelatory visions.

Lets escape the dualism of awakening and dreaming!

Here, I frame health and medicine as that which cultivates a greater capacity to hold and metabolize diverse experiences.

Theurgy

Theurgy is a ritual practice from the Greco-Roman world meaning the work of the gods, I interpret it as becoming godlike, or gods.

The rituals of theurgy emphasize union with the divine, a kind of Greco-Roman response to the Dao or to Moksha.

As a Jew from America I often wonder: is theurgy inheritance of empire? Should I return to Kabbalah? Should I wait for some new download from outer space?

For now, I am staying with theurgy.

As far as I know though, theurgy concerns itself with ritual technologies for cosmic participation, but not with health itself.

My speculative move, my own potential history, is to reclaim a herbal lineage around practice of building capacity for cosmic wholeness. There is a speculative line: theurgy through alchemy and then a lost and now reconstituted herbal practice. If we go even farther back we can trace theurgy to the dream shamans of the eleatics, the earliest greek philosophers - like Parmenides, and perhaps further back still to the Melissae, the bees, the devorahs, the prophetess, priestess, oracles at Delphae.

Herbal Theurgy is a reclaiming of a lost herbal lineage around this specific tradition of building capacity for cosmic oneness. It is also a reconstitution of an alternate way of seeing that became rationalism and scientism, and perhaps even AI, as the rational tradition forked from plato to form theurgy at one end, and rationalist science on the other.

Modern Herbalism & Mantra/Yantra/Tantra

Traditional herbal practices are passed down by teachers in written Materia Medica, in gestures and practices, and in oral traditions and apprenticeships. One of my interests in a potential or speculative herbal theurgy, is integrating contemporary learnings from science such as: phytochemistry, physics, and laboratory techniques.

When I first presented this practice last summer in Crete, I thought with the South East Indian triad of mantra, yantra, and tantra, which I interpreted, somewhat loosely, as thought, device, and system.

How do we breakdown an herbal theurgy practice in to these three realms. The though of the plant, a plant meditation, a folk tale, or a materia medica. The mechanics and physics of the plant, or the graphical representations of molecules. The system of the plant medicine, tissue states or humours, the chinese organ system and metaphors, the ayurvedic doshas.

In contemporary science we have, the chirality of molecules, the way light refracts through living tissues, molecular structure, atomic structure, quantum indeterminacy, artificial life, alien life.

The magnesium that makes chlorophyll green. The iron that makes hemoglobin red.

What would practices capable of holding these different epistemologies and scales look like?

What are the asanas of Herbal Theurgy?

What are its mudras?

Its rituals?

Its experiments?

How might a body learn to think simultaneously with cells, forests, ancestors, chemistry, and stars?

That we are truly light bodies.

Juniper

In my original presentation I worked with an herbal theurgy of juniper because there happened to be a juniper tree outside my window.

Only later did I discover that the day of the presentation was Saint Juniper’s feast day.

We looked at the mantra: learned the names of juniper, its lore, its material medica. We spoke the many names of jupiter. We engaged in organoleptic meditation. We touched the sprig of juniper, we ate the berry, we talked about laboratory techniques, distillation and the creation of Gin. We contemplate the words we use when we talk about Juniper, when we describe Juniper, when we tell stories of Juniper.

We looked at the yantra: the diagrams that represent Juniper, the mechanics of juniper, what causes the berries to be blue the leaves to be green, how it reproduces, its aromatics, its terraine. We put ourselves in asanas of various juniper molecules, holding different mudras to channel the different energies.

We looked at the tantra: the systems that include Juniper, the different traditions: eclectic, Ayurvedic, Chinese, Chemical, Biological, the different medicines of Juniper, the Chemical Pathways of Juniper Essential Oil: https://pdf.benchchem.com/1164/The_Chemical_Landscape_of_Eastern_Red_Cedar_Juniperus_virginiana_Essential_Oil_A_Technical_Guide.pdf

We jump from different scales and metaphysics and epistemologies, different systems to experience the one from the many and the many with the one.

The Experiment

The experiments continue.

Herbal Theurgy has become an ongoing investigation into how we hold multiple scales of reality at once: the molecular and the ecological, the quantum and the planetary, the body and the cosmos. It is cultivating the capacity to inhabit these different scales and the wandering among them.

The practices are still emerging … in community …. with humans and more than humans.

Vessel Metaphysics

The second technology, after the first technology — sex —, was the vessel. If you are going to move anything from one place to another, like say a baby, you need to hold it in something - A Vessel. Vessels allow us to move terrain and environments, they allow us to be nomads, and all kinds of things referenced by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari.

The shadow of “The Vessel”, is duality - there becomes the distinction between the vessel and what is in the vessel. There is the distinction between what is inside the vessel and what is outside the vessel. I am sure you can think of more ways the vessel introduces a concept of separation - which is duality.

The duality the vessel brings up for me, considering that my cells still carry the imprint of the patriarchy and extractive racist capitalism, is hylomorphism - a fancy term from Aristotle that refers to the distinction between form and matter - the vessel and the thing in the vessel. This is sort of the whole issue Pirsig rails against in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. To quote Douglas Adams from So Long and Thanks for the the Fish: “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Empty Vessels

An empty vessel of capital, as Wendy describes it, is the idea that any person (but really/ mostly, young white, US based, cis hetero men, who attend certain schools), can start any company that makes money. It does not matter the company. That is the empty vessel part. The people are the empty vessels and the goal is to just start a company or create a company that can either create money, or create the illusion of being a genre changing industry worthy of Venture Capital Investment.

The error of the empty vessel, is also multiple and varied.

I, once, strived to be an empty vessel of capital - although I did not know what that meant or what I was doing - and now that is impossible for me to do -since I am not - as it turns out an empty vessel - no one is.

Empty Vessel of the Day: AI & Cursor

Today my mind turned to the AI start up “Cursor,” now I think acquired by SpaceX for 6 Billion dollars or something. Cursor started life as company that built AI enabled software for mechanical engineers. The founders of Cursor, unable to find “product market fit” , PIVOTed (to learn more about this term please listen to the TrueAnon episode above) towards a AI powered coding interface. This is what we now know as Cursor.

Empty Vessel founders can pivot pivot pivot and create create create until their creation finds a market. Sometimes they just create ads for empty vessels or companies, or tiktok accounts. AI promises the rise of all sorts of opportunities for empty vessel companies to compete with one another to discover something to fill the vessel.

Cursor itself is an empty vessel, at heart an interface around a large corporate Large Language Model. I mean Dropbox as well, was an interface around Amazon’s S3 file storage.

Other empty vessels include money, which Marx talks about as the form of value. Money stands for an empty vessel of equivalence between two things. A shirt is worth 5 dollars. That 5 dollars can be earned doing any number of things, including stealing, extraction, interest, selling covered calls, yield farming crypto, selling soup at the farmers market. You can turn anything in to the monies.

=

I’m sure we can think of other empty vessels: the digital computer is an empty vessel of sorts, the Latin Alphabet perhaps, the white stretched canvas, are ones that come to mind.

It is empty vessels all the way down.

Healing our patriarchal racial capitalist cells

You know what else is a vessel, the heart. Organs in the body are vessels - they are not empty vessels, the pericardium that surrounds the heart (and becomes inflamed by Covid), cannot surround the liver. It does not work. Although, the vessel of the lungs cannot be the vessel of the kidneys. The form of the thing is bound up with the function, and there really is no duality.

Although there is holography - everything is in everything.

And since I mentioned them earlier, Deleuze and Guattari’s Body with out Organs is one way to get rid of the vessels all together. In the 5000 year old Yellow Emperor’s classic, an ancient text of Chinese medicinal wisdom, the analogy is that the heart is the king, the liver the general, the spleen the granary. Not each vessel is equal. There is a hierarchy.

As we are deprogramming our cells from all archys - we can turn to D&G and say we have no organs, no vessels, just surfaces with different intensities that are in constant flux. Vessels of potential if not actuality. Is a vessel a vessel if it is not reified? If a tree falls and no one hears it does it make a sound? Questions for another round of Vessel Metaphysics.

Although the calendar makes each day appear the same, in a little box, in the calendar, they are not all the same. Today is the Solstice - the longest day of the year.

Go to the field near your house and find some St John’s wort. Rub the flowers, which turn red, on the lintel to your home to protect this vessel against all sorts of ill omens.

Create a St John’s Wort oil by covering the flowers in jar with olive oil and placing the jar in a sunlit spot for 6 weeks.

Create a garland of St John’s Wort and wear it upon your head.

St John’s Wort grows in the wild, we can easily forage for it. When you harvest, gift the plant a song or a prayer or a lock of your hair.

You can gift the plant money too - burning money - like we did on the graves of the ancestors of my children’s father in the highlands of Hu Bei.

We still need vessels for these things.

Sharing the Love

My old herbalism teacher Rich Mandelbaum sent out a great solstice newsletter this morning. He is doing a workshop on animals and herbs, among all sorts of other amazing things, like plant walks. Check it out: https://www.richardmandelbaum.com/

Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible.

Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one?

What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what?

What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance? (from Staying With The Trouble)

The ecologies that inspire this workshop series are psychopomp ecologies: places of preservation, transformation, saturation, and forgetting — peat bogs, marshes, buried waterways, wetlands, ruins.

The Dead

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes about his fascination with peat bog bodies. For him, the unconscious becomes a kind of land of the dead: a preserving field where psychic material remains suspended.

The bog is the collective psyche.

The dead do not disappear there. They persist and call us.

Bog / God / Dog

In Proto-Slavic, bog (bogъ) means “god.” The Indo-European root, with cognates in Sankrit and Avestan, the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism, is associated with wealth, apportionment, and share — what is distributed among a people.

God as Bog as what is preserved, as the land of the dead.

Jung often described his descent into the unconscious as his wealth.

The bog stores what history attempts to discard

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Jung writes of the double self: the everyday self, tangled in neurosis and routine, and another self — the self of the unconscious.

Jung names this figure for Nietzsche as Zarathustra, per Nietzsche’s famous work “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

The prophet Zoroaster descends from solitude carrying transmissions from elsewhere, proclaiming most famously: God is dead.

What is dead in this case?

Is God in the Bog, God as Bog God as apportioning and sharing that which is preserved in the land - the dead to be resurfaced and integrated in life once again.

Zoroaster says go find true meaning amongst the ancestors, go find your inspiration within the bogs.

Mummies

Last week I dreamt of the dead.

I was searching for someone when a gravedigger unearthed two bodies wrapped in duct tape — mummies!

Egyptian imagery has followed me since childhood. Temples, gods, burial chambers, preservation technologies — they recur constantly in dreams.

Bodies preserved in peat bogs become mummified. They are hollowed out, while the surface remains intact.

Hollowing out exists in many traditions such as the hollow oak in Druidic practice, and the hollow bone in shamanic traditions.

Hollowness is not emptiness, it. is space for memory, daimon or transformation to move through. It is the alchemical vessel, the chalace, the grail, the original container metaphysics.

Ecological Oddkin

Walking through the woods feels decadent these days — it feels like purposeless movement.

Walking through the woods I wonder about my ancestors and how they wandered through the woods.

Did they search for shelter? Hunt? Escape? Mourn?

Did they walk purposelessly and decadently like me?

As I walked through the woods yesterday, I tried to clear my mind and become hollow- to become surface.

My beloved turned to me and said:

“Everything comes to the surface eventually.”

Join Us For The Next Workshop

https://www.peatandrepeat.org

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)