My Mind To Your Mind.
Nov. 2nd, 2010 02:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7I'm thinking a lot, today, about how the collective unconscious ("ideaspace," "superflow," "4th dimensional bodymind," whatever) actually works.
The construct of the zeitgeist is often construed as the sum total of the inputs of the whole of the connected world, and is thus literally translated as "Time Spirit." The spirit of the times is that Current which animates the milieu, the concerns of the world which pull it into the processes by which it comes to know itself, and to find and harness a particular direction. (Flogging Molly - [Tomorrow Comes a Day Too Soon]). It's my contention that the zeitgeist is a partitioning of the whole of the collective unconscious. Expressing as the "Currents" of which Aleister Crowley spoke, the zeitgeist is the roadmap to what the CU looks like, right now. It is the world as it is seen, and as it is being processed, but that isn't all it does.
Crüxshadows - [Spiral (Don't Fall)]--- The collective unconscious, and thus necessarily the zeitgeist, is not merely passively comprised of the thoughts, actions, and expressions of the people living at a certain place and time. It is, once comprised, a force in and of itself, an animating and acting sense, energy, feeling, component, which seeps into dreams, into thoughts, in to space, into us, thought the angle of a haircut, the cast of a bracelet, the weft of a skirt, the taste of a cocktail, the components available in our local electronics store. Even if we, ourselves, never actively consume these things, by being engaged with them, by the mere fact that they exist, they leak, almost imperceptibly into the world around us, and they inform us, they teach us what is flowing through the collective consciousness, and informing the groupmind of which we're all a part.
KMFDM - [Glory]--- That seems simple, right? That seems like subconscious integration and association, doesn't it? Like, we half-see a bunch of images of wheels and cows, and fire, and then someone asks us what we want for lunch and suddenly, for no conscious reason, we want a hamburger. Nothing magical about that, at all, right? Well the fucked up part of the CU and the zeitgeist is that we can participate in it, both taking from and adding to it, without any direct physical input. The means by which we link in may be so far removed and so tenuous that, if they were physical associations, people would be decrying it as homeopathic nonsense. (Tool - [Undertow]). And yet, when it comes to ideas, we're okay with this. When it's thoughts, suddenly distance and intricacy of process don't really matter. We can say that the whole world was working on the solution to that math problem, or that chemistry problem, or radio, or whatever, so of course the same answer would be reached by two people with no direct connection to each other around the world from each other, one of whom was in a university, the other of whom was self-taught from out-of-date sources. Sure.
Just as an example.
The thing is, the synchronicity of the events begins to play a role. Synchronicity is, I think, a localised version of the C.U./Zeitgeist expression, in that a closely connected group of two or more people tap into precisely what each other are doing, right then, via a shared resonance, across their neighbourhood of the C.U. (Warren Zevon - [Basket Case]). Sounds crazy, right? But listen: Synchronicity is the individual's mechanism through which to tap into their zeitgeist, and thus into the C.U. It becomes about perspective, and about paying attention. It all comes back around to paying attention.
Carmina Burana - [In Trutina]--- When you can begin to read the world around you, to parse what it is that is coinciding, daily, you can begin to map, more clearly, the roads and worlds around you. You can see where you're heading and what it is you might want to seriously consider attempting.
Mediaeval Baebes - [When Thy Turuf is Thy Tour]--- I've been having various conversations, various places, about polyamoury, these past few weeks, and the more I talk about things, the more the world throws nuances of these topics of conversation toward me. (Covenant - [Go Film]). Now you can take this as "Thinking about a Thing Causes You To BE More Aware of a Thing," and dismiss it, or you can think about the mechanics of what I just said.
The more we think about a thing, the more we are able to see that thing. The more often we will encounter it. Often, it already exists in the world, and what we have done is align our perspective to bring it into focus. But by doing that, we also cause more of that kind of thing to be able to come into being. Attention, belief, thought, and action are all inextricably linked, in this way, and they serve to generate themselves, propagate and mutate each other...
VNV Nation - [Pro Victoria]--- This is the universe of thought, and of action. It is, on one level, simple sociological theory. Nothing you haven't heard in a 1000-level course on group behaviour. On another reading, however, I hope you'll see that it is deeply interwoven into the nature of our non-verbal communications, our thoughts and dreams, and that we have more than simple socio-psychological theory to contend with, when we try to parse this.
Tool - [Pushit]--- Yeah, it's convoluted, but the model works. The fact is, the collective unconscious exists in echoes that the mind makes. That minds make. We leave imprints on places and people and things, as we pass, and those imprints can be read by other minds, and sometimes it's like clearly etched monolithic markers, and sometimes it's like braille and we have to learn, again, how to read, and sometimes it just hums so loudly that we know we feel something even if we have no idea what it means, and it makes us break down and cry, but we know that today, tomorrow, on this spot, or that one, because we carried it with us, and we did something or thought something, because of that other thing, because of who we were, then, someone else will feel it too, and that someone, somewhere, is feeling it right now.
That is what the collective unconscious is and does, and being in the spirit of your times is nothing more or less than being able to read those marks, in the order that they are connected such that they resonate with the most people in the world around you, right now.
DethKlok - [Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle (Demo)]--- That's all
[Edit: A Minute Later: And then this came on: Don Davis - [Spirit of the Universe]. Night.]
The construct of the zeitgeist is often construed as the sum total of the inputs of the whole of the connected world, and is thus literally translated as "Time Spirit." The spirit of the times is that Current which animates the milieu, the concerns of the world which pull it into the processes by which it comes to know itself, and to find and harness a particular direction. (Flogging Molly - [Tomorrow Comes a Day Too Soon]). It's my contention that the zeitgeist is a partitioning of the whole of the collective unconscious. Expressing as the "Currents" of which Aleister Crowley spoke, the zeitgeist is the roadmap to what the CU looks like, right now. It is the world as it is seen, and as it is being processed, but that isn't all it does.
Crüxshadows - [Spiral (Don't Fall)]--- The collective unconscious, and thus necessarily the zeitgeist, is not merely passively comprised of the thoughts, actions, and expressions of the people living at a certain place and time. It is, once comprised, a force in and of itself, an animating and acting sense, energy, feeling, component, which seeps into dreams, into thoughts, in to space, into us, thought the angle of a haircut, the cast of a bracelet, the weft of a skirt, the taste of a cocktail, the components available in our local electronics store. Even if we, ourselves, never actively consume these things, by being engaged with them, by the mere fact that they exist, they leak, almost imperceptibly into the world around us, and they inform us, they teach us what is flowing through the collective consciousness, and informing the groupmind of which we're all a part.
KMFDM - [Glory]--- That seems simple, right? That seems like subconscious integration and association, doesn't it? Like, we half-see a bunch of images of wheels and cows, and fire, and then someone asks us what we want for lunch and suddenly, for no conscious reason, we want a hamburger. Nothing magical about that, at all, right? Well the fucked up part of the CU and the zeitgeist is that we can participate in it, both taking from and adding to it, without any direct physical input. The means by which we link in may be so far removed and so tenuous that, if they were physical associations, people would be decrying it as homeopathic nonsense. (Tool - [Undertow]). And yet, when it comes to ideas, we're okay with this. When it's thoughts, suddenly distance and intricacy of process don't really matter. We can say that the whole world was working on the solution to that math problem, or that chemistry problem, or radio, or whatever, so of course the same answer would be reached by two people with no direct connection to each other around the world from each other, one of whom was in a university, the other of whom was self-taught from out-of-date sources. Sure.
Just as an example.
The thing is, the synchronicity of the events begins to play a role. Synchronicity is, I think, a localised version of the C.U./Zeitgeist expression, in that a closely connected group of two or more people tap into precisely what each other are doing, right then, via a shared resonance, across their neighbourhood of the C.U. (Warren Zevon - [Basket Case]). Sounds crazy, right? But listen: Synchronicity is the individual's mechanism through which to tap into their zeitgeist, and thus into the C.U. It becomes about perspective, and about paying attention. It all comes back around to paying attention.
Carmina Burana - [In Trutina]--- When you can begin to read the world around you, to parse what it is that is coinciding, daily, you can begin to map, more clearly, the roads and worlds around you. You can see where you're heading and what it is you might want to seriously consider attempting.
Mediaeval Baebes - [When Thy Turuf is Thy Tour]--- I've been having various conversations, various places, about polyamoury, these past few weeks, and the more I talk about things, the more the world throws nuances of these topics of conversation toward me. (Covenant - [Go Film]). Now you can take this as "Thinking about a Thing Causes You To BE More Aware of a Thing," and dismiss it, or you can think about the mechanics of what I just said.
The more we think about a thing, the more we are able to see that thing. The more often we will encounter it. Often, it already exists in the world, and what we have done is align our perspective to bring it into focus. But by doing that, we also cause more of that kind of thing to be able to come into being. Attention, belief, thought, and action are all inextricably linked, in this way, and they serve to generate themselves, propagate and mutate each other...
VNV Nation - [Pro Victoria]--- This is the universe of thought, and of action. It is, on one level, simple sociological theory. Nothing you haven't heard in a 1000-level course on group behaviour. On another reading, however, I hope you'll see that it is deeply interwoven into the nature of our non-verbal communications, our thoughts and dreams, and that we have more than simple socio-psychological theory to contend with, when we try to parse this.
Tool - [Pushit]--- Yeah, it's convoluted, but the model works. The fact is, the collective unconscious exists in echoes that the mind makes. That minds make. We leave imprints on places and people and things, as we pass, and those imprints can be read by other minds, and sometimes it's like clearly etched monolithic markers, and sometimes it's like braille and we have to learn, again, how to read, and sometimes it just hums so loudly that we know we feel something even if we have no idea what it means, and it makes us break down and cry, but we know that today, tomorrow, on this spot, or that one, because we carried it with us, and we did something or thought something, because of that other thing, because of who we were, then, someone else will feel it too, and that someone, somewhere, is feeling it right now.
That is what the collective unconscious is and does, and being in the spirit of your times is nothing more or less than being able to read those marks, in the order that they are connected such that they resonate with the most people in the world around you, right now.
DethKlok - [Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle (Demo)]--- That's all
[Edit: A Minute Later: And then this came on: Don Davis - [Spirit of the Universe]. Night.]
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 02:59 pm (UTC)I use the awareness as my rationalization for metaphysical critics; even if it doesn't work in a woo-woo sense, the psych end of it still works, measurably.
In that end, think about synchronizing the whole watch such that all the parts work together and everyone wins.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 04:51 pm (UTC)Yes, but then many "hard" scientists will just dismiss it by saying that psychology isn't really science. It's all very "la-la-la I'm not listening."
It's very true. Everything has to work in concert, if we want more than just a passing function, but even then, things wear down and bits break.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 03:47 pm (UTC)So, when Albert Einstein was trying to find a model to describe 4-dimensional space-time and gravity, he came up with this - the Rubber Sheet model.
Short version - pull out the middle of a pool table, replace the playing surface with an evenly stretched rubber sheet. This represents space-time.
Drop a bowling ball onto the sheet. It dents, pulls down. Makes a kind of crater. That's what gravity does. Roll a ball across the sheet, it'll tend to fall towards the centre of the crater. That's gravitational pull.
Take that idea and change the terms. The rubber sheet now represents 'reality'. The bowling ball represents (there isn't quite a word for this but...) a combination of belief and attention. The 'weight' of myth, maybe. The stuff that falls towards the centre is what we mean by synchronicity - ideas and events caught in a gravitational pull towards key foci.
What a mage (or anyone involved in/observant of what I usually just call Weird Shit) does is either use that gravitational pull for their own ends (by hooking into existing mythos) or does the equivalent of jumping up and down, causing the rubber sheet to temporarily ripple. And the more of a dent you personally make... the more stuff rolls towards you.
Some people are just heavier than others... dent the sheet more just by passing. Others have to jump up and down real hard to make a ripple. Others just fall into existing gravity-wells of belief.
Any help?
Oh - and as an illustration, I note that I came up with this idea (nicked somewhat from RA Wilson) before meeting my-wife-the-shaman aka malabar- who is a 2nd cousin of Einstein on her mother's side...
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 04:47 pm (UTC)2) HAH! Nice.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 04:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 04:49 pm (UTC)Or maybe that's just what Nirvana/Kensho/Satori are. Continually coming to the complete understanding of Right Here And Right Now.