https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echopraxia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Frenchmen_of_Maine

“There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Preterite one . . .
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
All through our crippl'd Zone,
With a face in ev'ry Mountainside
And a Soul in ev'ry stone

Now Everybody -” 

 -Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

EDIT

1.Neon primaries. Ivory inlays. The mat, candles and objects are inarguably the jewelled axis of the universe. Centering. Thickening of the air as if we suddenly have audience expectation. Black-lodge grazing past. I've got idea, man. Why so voodoo? Faceless entities abound. Colour scheme illuminated.
2. Hello blues. Fools rush in, and I'd have been glad to be counted among them. Perhaps they're my transdimensional brethren. Perhaps they're the drawing I did of the world personified. No expression, calmness emanates, palms out hands up because nothing can be held.
3. Humming, such humming. BOC 5D, Twin Peaks antenna sound, Radigue, potentials of all possible noise. Sounds like DNA.
4. Ladies and gentlemen, gasp in wonder. Ontology never felt so far away. So lucid, so very very perplexed by the biblical torrent of hyperdimensional codices. Ladies and gentlemen, here comes everybody. Jesus fucking christ. Sat upright feeling my socks, mouth agape and smiling, head shaking in disbelief and rhythm.
5. Enter the semi-mythical significance of L as image-smith and quiet purveyor of symbol. Dose that man up. If Solaris has a TV channel this would be it.
6. Coming close to the sense of death, feeling myself disintegrate. Raised a few questions and a few hopes, one being that I could speak to R before leaving the coil. Why R? Because he's a gardener of mind and if that flower blooms it'd be good to give it back. A solace vault. True communication is a rarity, and that channel seems to be open, however garbled the content I send down it. Didn't want to die without telling him how far out and peaceful it seemed.
7. Ladies and gentlemen, the snake eateth his tail. There is a coming and there is a going. Oxygen up, water down. Thought down, feeling up. The turning of the hourglass. A midnight bargain on some quiet street corner. Who profits? Dealer, client or city? This is the one from Touba who came just to see you leave. I can't describe the node and the sense of translation that this feeling has. It is perhaps the 'religious' sense of life after death, or the idea that we leave through transposition, which is never really leaving. Euphoric and transient at the memory of it. Thumbs are a misleading adaptation, you can't grab anything for too long. Probably just made for hitching. Drifting the fuck out of that net. Sitting on the fulcrums all at once.

Will I die? Y/N
Do I believe I might? Y/N
Does that matter? Y/N
Is this a good story? Y/N
I felt myself being coaxed closer and closer to peace as if it were the olive-branched tongue of an angler fish, only to discover it was my own tail. Odd feeling.
8. Following on from the realisation that I wasn't dying came an hour of calm followed by 4 hours of sleep. I had a dream that broke my concept of dream. A memory so tangible I saw why people described them as time travel. Just standing in my parent's bedroom waiting to leave the house. Three years old, a domestic platitude, nothing much to it.
Blake saying 'Nothing is lost' is how I describe that one to myself.
9.Following sleep, awaking to a revived and fresh body, and a singular headspace. Rather than help me decide anything, all the experience had done was tattoo the fulcrum on my retinas like the viewfinder of a camera. Choice is always there, you can't avoid it, or at least not forever. Whack up an umbrella of tradition, belief, confidence, gnosis, but don't pretend the rain will never get you.
Choices, doubts and questions are all coming down, and if they didn't how would anything grow.

Once upon a mission

It's Mikey Dread's world and we just live in it.

Archive:The joy of hitching

Yakushima 2012.

Ming the merciless. And an eel.

Reading Ernest Becker's 'The Denial Of Death' at the moment and have become interested in life spans as a result.

Romantics write "as though they were ill, and the whole world were their hospital."- Goethe

"This is real life. Full of antinomies and bigger than logic."- E.F Schumacher

"Intellectual confusion exacts its price. We preach the virtues of hard work and restraint while painting utopian pictures of unlimited consumption without either work or restraint."

"Language is only necessary when communication is endangered."- Arthur Miller/Irwin Corey/Thomas Pynchon

"Nothing I do is ironic...irony is the last refuge of a scoundrel."-Julian Cope

"We're too busy to give a shit."-Boards of Canada

"My favourite definition of an intellectual: someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence."- Arthur C. Clarke

"Spoon-feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."-E.M Forster

"Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion."- Koestler

"Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity."- Koestler

Carl Rogers- 19 Propositions (1951)

His theory (as of 1951) was based on 19 propositions:^[12]

1. All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the center.
2. The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual.
3. The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.
4. A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self.
5. As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed - an organized, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts.
6. The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing organism.
7. The best vantage point for understanding behavior is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.
8. Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived.
9. Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behavior, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behavior for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism.
10. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.
11. As experiences occur in the life of the individual, they are either, a) symbolized, perceived and organized into some relation to the self, b) ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure, c) denied symbolization or given distorted symbolization because the experience is inconsistent with the structure of the self.
12. Most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the organism are those that are consistent with the concept of self.
13. In some instances, behavior may be brought about by organic experiences and needs which have not been symbolized. Such behavior may be inconsistent with the structure of the self but in such instances the behavior is not "owned" by the individual.
14. Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self.
15. Psychological maladjustment exists when the organism denies awareness of significant sensory and visceral experiences, which consequently are not symbolized and organized into the gestalt of the self structure. When this situation exists, there is a basic or potential psychological tension.
16. Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself.
17. Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences which are inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences.
18. When the individual perceives and accepts into one consistent and integrated system all his sensory and visceral experiences, then he is necessarily more understanding of others and is more accepting of others as separate individuals.
19. As the individual perceives and accepts into his self structure more of his organic experiences, he finds that he is replacing his present value system - based extensively on introjections which have been distortedly symbolized - with a continuing organismic valuing process.
    
    
    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers

Pantograph

The ever stalking pantograph. Somewhere these thoughts are being decided by the movement of an ant's jaws through a leaf edge.

Diagnosis by Marcia Lee Anderson

We multiply diseases for delight,
invent a shameful want, a horrid doubt,
luxuriate in license, feed on night,
make inward bedlam — and will not come out

Why should we? Stripped of subtle complication,
who could regard the sun except with fear?
This is our shelter against contemplation,
our only refuge from the plain and clear.

Who would crawl out from under the obscure
to stand defenseless in the sunny air?
No terror of obliquity so sure
as the most shining terror of despair
to know how simple is our deepest need,
how sharp, and how impossible to feed.

Ваше Благородие

"I am your original autodidact."

"Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!"

 

"What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better."

 

"God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't."

"It's very interesting what you don't care about."

"When there's a war, people get married."

"I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars." 

 

 

Doris Lessing

 

 

The Samian Letter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsilon

"For they say that the course of human life resembles the letter Y, because every one of men, when he has reached the threshold of early youth, and has arrived at the place "where the way divides itself into two parts," is in doubt, and hesitates, and does not know to which side he should rather turn himself."- Lactantius

"Life is fired upon us point-blank."

"When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?"

"The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second."

"Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist."

"An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."

"Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are."

"Law is born from despair of human nature."

"In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will."

"To live is to feel oneself lost."

"Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values."

"We cannot put off living until we are ready."

"The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities."

"Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt."

"The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent."

"Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified."

"Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do."

"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."

José Ortega y Gasset

"I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now."

"Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."

"It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive."

 

"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."

 

"Speech is civilisation itself."

"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."

"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."

"Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated."


Thomas Mann

 

Too Becker

"And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth..."

Disnial

Great article.

"First we feel. Then we fall."

“Over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow...”

Ayer Ask Her

Speared the rod and spoiled the lightning.

"Conceived by a fasting monk run delirious..."

Audio Trove

British Library sound archive. Beyond.

Ana Na Ming (Salif Keita)

Ewan MacColl

"My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable. To send them out of the place arguing and talking^."

"If one worried about backing a loser one would not take part in politics. Anybody who has ever been involved in political struggle, particularly in working class struggle, must accept the fact, for the major part of their life, they're going to be involved in losing battles, on the losing side in battles. If I'd have been afraid of that I'd have packed it up after I joined the YCL in 1929 and spent my time, with a lot of other people, trying to alert people to the dangers of Japanese imperialism when they entered Manchukuo, I'd have given up in 1932 when we were trying to alert people to the dangers of Hitler coming to power, I'd have given up during the Abyssinian War when Mussolini's bombers were bombing Ethiopians, I'd have given it up at every single stage of the struggle ever since. One goes on fighting because not to go on fighting is to prove that you're no longer alive. - "Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?" Granada TV Documentary 1985

A good teacher as a guide to ambiguity, not certainty.
"How to keep sane in spiral types of space."- Nabokov, Pale Fire

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” 

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”- Bertrand Russell

Dime Ethel

"The world has kept sentimentalities because they are the most practical things in the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly rational army would run away."-G.K. Chesterton

Do They Even Know How Far I Live

Affirmative Happenings

If that chord progression leaves you hoping for more...

Straight dope from the flamenco warriors.

The Act Of Creation

"Every face is a palimpsest."

Just finished reading this book by Koestler. It is an inspiring, fine toothed examination of a slippery subject, and humorous throughout. Strikes me as a forerunner of McKenna in terms of novelty/habit balance and idea of a historical attractor somewhere in time. Brilliant critique of dry academic writing (in all fields) and 'science as a bore' as inflating the artificial margins between science, art and religion.

Notes
"The mystic believes in an unknown God, the thinker and scientist in an unknown order; it is hard to say which surpasses the other in nonrational devotion."- L.L Whyte

“I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.”- Bertrand Russell

"The aesthetic satisfaction derived from an elegant mathematical demonstration, a cosmological theory, a map of the human brain, or an ingenious chess problem, may equal that of any artistic ex- perience — given a certain connoisseurship. But connoisseurship is equally required for the true appreciation of any but the most vulgar forms of art; and particularly for ancient, alien, and 'modern' art. 

However, the absurd division of our society into 'two cultures' pro- duced the paradoxical phenomenon that the average educated person will be reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond the level of his comprehension; but he will in the same breath and with a certain pride confess his complete ignorance of the principles which make his radio work, the forces which make the stars go round, the factors which determine the heredity of his children, and the location of his own viscera and glands."

"By being  entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian."


Levy Bruhl: "The need of participation remains something more imperious and intense, even among people like ourselves, than the thirst for knowledge and the desire for conformity with the claims of reason."

"Disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility."


(On Victorian novels..) "Here, as a pre-Raphaelite painting, we find emphasis sans economy at work- a safe criterion of bad art."

"Art originates in sympathetic magic."

"There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."- G.H. Hardy

"The artist values, or overvalues, the theoretical discipline which controls his intuition."
"The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation."

The blending of the tragic and trivial planes in art and religion. Jonah and the crisis/awakening model.

"If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber."- Albert Einstein

Just finished The Birth And Death Of Meaning by Ernest Becker. One of those manuals for de- and re- construction that is both liberating and damning. Reads like Joseph Campbell's comedown.

Notes
-"Mind culminates in the organism's ability to choose what it will react to."
-'Me' before 'I'. Kant, child development and identity as an object of others, before an executive subject. The child's first identity is a social product.
-"He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him."
-On the separating nature of inner worlds- "We have become victims of our own art."
-Adler and the need for affection as the lever of a child's education.
-From polymorphous perverse to polymorphous pervertible.
-A traffic in images of self worth.
- "The child's need to be somebody in the symbolic world, since physically, nature had put him into an impossible position."
-Idea of sibling rivalry like bored knights dueling for the best adventures/primacy of the stage
-"Culture is a structure of rules, customs and ideas, which serve as a vehicle for heroism." (Links a lot to Campbell's hero ideas.)
-'How are others supposed to feel about me?' As an insightful question, apparently.
-Reminded of this: Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.- Alfred North Whitehead.
- Goethe on social awareness as ' a courtesy of the heart akin to love'. The love is the control of one's self so that social life may go on. Also recommending acting as essential preparation for adult life.
-Idea of the need of autonomy in a world of manifold options.
- It matters not what you mean, but what you say. (Carnegie said something like this.)
-"Our alertness to the performance of others, therefore, is an expression of our concern over sustaining the underlying meaning of the plot." "Continual, keen scrutiny of the performance of others is the life preoccupation of an animal trained to be on stage."
- Illegitimacy implies above all that legitimacy exists.
-Forming of joking relationships at tension points in the social system (e.g. with in-laws). Carries the encounter along automatically and breaks tension.
-Paraphrased idea of marriage losing its stimulating colour as it becomes a refuge from the creative challenge of ego mastery.
-Silent musing as tacit communication of the idea that meaningful silence exists.
-On Goethe: "He provided that conviction of life's meaning that man needs."
- "A person's whole sustenance comes to be based in a power source unknown or unacknowledged to himself..."
-"..one's spouse, his Gurus or his guns."
-If one is a servant of divine powers everything one does is heroic. Religious unity as a powerful source of self esteem.
-"Our drop-out youths are the newly de-tribalised."

-"One of the most terrifying things about living in the late decades of the twentieth century is that the margin that nature has been giving to cultural fantasy is suddenly being narrowed down drastically. The consequence is that for the first time in history man, if he is to survive, has to bring down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-systems."-"With standardisation of industrial culture, and with standardisation of medical-psychiatric perceptions we are narrowing and bureaucratising the spectrum of normality."
-"An individual who fails to put forth a self that others can value, by an oversensitivity to the performance, testifies to a primary failure in socialisation." "He has nothing to give to society, because he has nothing to put forth." "There must be actors in our play if we are to feel its meaning and not simply a stage propped with non-entities.""We want others to claim a share so that we can feel there is something worth claiming."
-Depression as a massive threat to ceremony. All playthings tired players on the bench, and idea of a guide to occasionally sitting on the bench of the cultural fiction (if not leaving the ballpark once in a while).
-Erving Goffman's definition of the mentally ill as those "least ready to project a sustainable self."
-When man evolved into consciousness he could no longer take creation for granted. "We are just not constructed to function practically in the everyday world and at the same time to be overawed at the miraculous." Idea of shamans once being able to do this with the support of the community (and a bed of self-fictions too perhaps). 
-Children abdicate their ecstasy because they have to. Individuality within finitude.
-Fromm: "The real problem of mental life is not why some people become insane, but rather why most avoid insanity." The pathology of normalcy.
-"The neurotic bungles small quotas of reality, the psychotic, large quotas."
-"Anger for most people is an alternative to fading away."
-Notion of illness and disease breaking the aesthetic of our cultural play, and upsetting our sense of justice. Resulting marginalisation of the chronically ill.
- "The necrophile takes revenge on life for what it did to him. He allies with death over life."
-Man's fate "is to live in the teeth of paradoxes."
-"Power for man, as the genius Hegel saw, is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less."
- We can't know what is real but we can see what is false to our own lives (or at least what halts our forward momentum/unfolding).
- Frantic daily life as a defence against self-consciousness (see Jung: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”)
 - "...the undermining power of the miraculous." 
 

Groove on that.

EDIT:...Well inevitable as it was I slipped into Toubaka mode again. Breaks me every time.