In my own tradition(s), trickster is also a source of wisdom and healing, not just disruption. There is humor, foolishness, misguided action, accidental insight, retreat into selfishness, theft, bumbling and grace, craftiness and innocence. etc it’s a very rich spirit, a wind of many directions.
I don’t see (yet) how Jussie’s story fits this (at the news level). I just want to hold judgement, wait until more emerges. Because I feel that it wil. And most of all, I want to hear him talk about it, hear those close to him who still support him, talk about it.
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I am open to that, too. I am a big fan of Jussie! So, I have to put aside my own favoritism to admit that he may have taken advantage of his fan’s affection to promote his self interests. This is a wake up call to everyone! I am open to believe that Trickster energies can work with other energies, too. That he would use his mother’s name to defend his actions troubles me. I would not be my mother’s son if this were true.… If he is lying this is a a blasphemous thing to say. This is a very sad case, and it makes me worry about his mental health. It is not a good thing to see a talented man, driven by ego to betray his supporters. There are serious ethical dimensions being brought to our attention and the scandal is not over yet. I don’t think Jussie is the Trickster…but I believe the hoax he tried to pull turned on him with a vengeance. The Trickster is working through him and throwing the whole system into havoc. Oh the webs we weave…but I think the deeper layer that Barrett brought out is that technology has made this scandal possible…none of this could have happened without surveillance cameras, smart phones, email, etc. It is hard to cover your tracks. The same is true of the College Admissions scandal. There is a long trail of videos that capture the double messages of those self promoters. This is, I believe, a new kind of exposure to our collective shadow.
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Hi everyone ~ I really enjoyed this talk; I listened to it twice. I think you’re onto something with the idea of generating a movement in the direction of a plausible pleroma—one which has operational integrity (can be replicated by others, is unenclosed) and also which allures as so much better than what appears to be systemic reality.
The question of whether we need a planetary scale “maximal stress” event to catalyze the necessary re-organization of everything I think basically is already answered—just not evenly distributed. Whoever gets the message, “Evolve or die,” is in this camp.
But then there’s another message—which doesn’t come from the future, as much as from the distant past, and that’s that in order to evolve consciousness, a profound relaxation is necessary, an embrace of the non-linear. This is the meditative path to the pleroma, which doesn’t reveal itself at the end of history, but rather through the infinite within—the weird frontier.
So on the one hand, a generative agent finds oneself in virtual maximal-stress mode, hyperaware of the metaphorical comet streaking through spacetime on a collision course with the Earth: cause for urgency. On the other hand, the only way to develop the cooperative ethos called for in collectively facing our divine doom is to relax into a deeper/wider identity than the extant individual, nation, or tribe.
The relaxation part is key because the planetary that’s required can’t be forced by one small part of humanity on another. That’s “globalization.” Moreover, the planetary is not the opposite of the local, particular, or cultural—one’s identity is multidimensional, fractal. So we need to allow for myriad forms of self-expression, not all of which can be neatly integrated. Time is different as well, and I would submit that the future (in which linear time is recontextualized on the order of both vast and intimate quantum cyclical dynamics) will involve us in a “Cosmic time” regime, which (for us moderns and never-have-beens) represents a whole new horizon.
I think crafting actual alternative structures on small enough scales that we can get the logic right is really important—this is what I see us doing here. We can then experiment with generating realities at different scales. I have no deep desire to propagate dumb meme culture, but I agree there must be a way to create real functional alluring attractors for the kind of social, cultural, and ecological relations (or simply, world) we’d prefer to live in. I believe the way to do this is to systematically incarnate the pleroma that attracts; do your art and make social-economic choices from that place.
This is also like making music and learning to play a new tune. For what it’s worth, again, I really enjoyed your quartet and hope to hear the quintent next time, or whatever other ensembles these dialogues generate. Myself: I have been focused lately on generating poetry and money, in that order. I look forward to jamming with you when the timing is right. So far, I feel I probably have more to learn than to contribute in this context.
That said, as an editor for Metasychosis, I am quite interested in publishing some writing and artwork on the theme of generative realities and related topics. We could also come up with ways to more efficiently propagate whatever ‘outsights’ you can communicate from your research.
A follow-up talk where Davor gets to complete his overview sounds in order—and I would also be happy to work with Doug in getting a dedicated page up for the series, so that the talks get a nice archive that can be accessed more easily and distributed more widely.
I’ve trimmed and leveled the audio from the one above, so you can share the direct link with anyone who wants to listen to the converation: https://www.metapsychosis.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/04/Generations-1.m4a
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Yesterday was a cold, gray day and I felt melancholy. The last of winter, the anticipation of spring and the weariness that comes from a mixed day at the library. I had read Bateson for the study group, and related readings. My concentration is excellent but the feeling tone is of loss upon loss. Anthropocene blues.
At Tompkins Square I find a picnic table and sit with my cold hands in front of me on the table and a straight back. I do my breath work, in the cold air, for ten minutes. I relax and feel the pleasant prana flow through the subtle channels. The melancholy is shifting to a sense of a relational spaciousness, the beauty of the bare trees, the commotion of birds, a squirrel digging in the dirt. And then a robin appears. He looks like this
Notice the white that frames his eye, an hypnotic effect. Robin has his eye, that single black eye, framed in the white, fixed upon my human form. I feel my size and shape, a lonely man, next to his size and shape, in close proximity. We each have become to the other a boundary object. His intelligence is clear and sober, I am fragmented and sad. Robin gazed at me for a long time. I am not so lonely now. He moves, with sharp, staccato hops, boldly towards me. He is under the bench where I sit. I feel his presence under me, feel his awareness of my awareness and I wait. I wonder why he hops on the ground when he could so easily fly. Perhaps he is taking in some data that is beyond my perceptual range. After studying my presence, he hops back into the shrubs and out of sight. But I know he is watching, sensing, knowing something that I don’t.
Then from out of the shrubs appears a sparrow with a shelled peanut. Sparrow, unlike Crow, has a hard time cracking that shell open. It is pecking at it without much success. I signal to Sparrow that I am going to assist. He is okay with that but flutters into the shrubbery and gives me space. I peel the shell and lay the two nuts on the ground and return to my bench and wait. Sparrow returns to it’s meal, and eats with a good appetite. I walk home, grateful, for my bird community. I feel a shift in attitude.
Last night, I dreamed of Bear. I am in a performance space with a ferocious Bear. Standing, raised up to his full height, and there is a thick glass that stops the Bear attack. He shows his jaws, sharp teeth, a roar, and though the partition prevents contact, I feel a deep fear of Bear’s fury.
Then I feel the presence of another man. I discuss with him my disappointment in a previous performance. We are looking at maps and diagrams and we learn something. I tell him about the changes that are happening in the left side of my human body. I sense an energy on the left that centers around the left nipple and is felt along the spine and moves in a pleasant current of strong, but not overwhelming intensity. The sensation is mildly erotic and feels oddly like I am being suckled by a baby. I wonder if a male can have such a female feeling? Obviously, I do feel that. The man says that is okay and the process is working.
The man vanishes, I am alone with Bear,and to my surprise, the glass partition is removed. There is no physical boundary protecting me from Bear. I can easily become his prey. But he doesn’t attack, he is in a gentle mood. He is on all fours and walking towards me. I know I must not register fear of him, for he can smell fear and that may trigger his wrath. I stay centered and open to his presence. He nuzzles me, I stroke him and we feel a bond. He tells me in English something that I can’t remember but the feeling tone is one of approval.
So, this morning I record my memories of Robin, of Sparrow, of Bear, of Man. And what is the nature of the personal in network theory? No networks are stabilized and standardized for everyone, especially not for someone like myself, who feels more at home with birds of the air than I do with my own money worshiping species. Those on the inside can see things that those on the outside cannot see. Maybe that is a good thing. We cant see infinity but we can hear it. The voice is inside and outside at the same time.
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(image from google, not my backyard . . .)
I mentioned hugelkultur (“hill culture”) last year as a project practiced in my backyard and as a metaphor for the layerings and compostings of the thought and writings of thought we place upon this site and in our journals and notebooks.
With lolo (Filipino grandfather) as an extra hand now, we can now complete this project. It requires much sawing of decaying trees, dragging, tossing over a fence and lugging logs around and I could not do all of this alone. The topsoil is removed, logs and branches placed in the shallow hole, the top sod placed upsidedown atop the logs, and then layers of compost, dirt and other yard items, eventually creating a perfect hill for plants to grow for years. compost can be added at any time.
The Robin has been watching as we build. The earthworms stirred out of slumber and snatched as snack. In the mornings when I run outside barefoot to the compost pile, the brave robin flies in right next to me as I toss the scraps on the pile, getting its fill before the groundhog feasts.
The Language of the Birds: I am starting to think this is one of our hidden talents. an augur of sorts.
The earth is a living testament, like a book, who’s pages are the aeons of history. The organic pattern of history explicates from seed and nut into frond, bough, leaf, tree.
The tree takes different branches and pathways, and upon its branches fly the eagles and subtle birds of winged thought, angelic powers that belong to an immortal tradition – the language of the birds, the mysterious patterns of the hidden prime, the conveyors of the inspiration of gnosis. – quote taken from here
From Wikipedia:
There are also examples of contemporary bird-human communication and symbiosis. In North America, ravens have been known to lead wolves (and native hunters) to prey they otherwise would be unable to consume. In Africa, the greater honeyguide is known to guide humans to beehives in the hope that the hive will be incapacitated and opened for them.
I have mentioned to some of my recent collection of walks and wanderings at a favorite park, the same park in which the sparrow song was sung. March and April seem to have robins in full presence. They have guided me to certain trees in the forest as I trek off the park’s paths and follow them into the green wild. The wild child, climbing trees and leaping off rocks. Hermann Hesse would often mountaineer in the nude with friends and yodel.
There is construction occurring on all sides of the park. Earth dug up by construction crews coming in and out in droves. Houses built atop previously secluded coves. This is great for belting out a yodel atop the mountain without concern of others listening in, but this is not “perma-culture” or “hill culture” that preserves the land or listens to alternate languages. There is a grand difference between an augur and an auger. As we continue to explore this weird frontier, more voices like ours need to be heard, not for our words alone but as the conveyors of gnosis, before we get lodged beneath the wheel, the conveyor belts of a single, abusive language.
All the more reason to become an artist before it is too late!
and a note to @johnnydavis54 and fellow realm explorers: this thread doesn’t need to be about dreams/dreaming, but wanted to inform you that I had three ravens in my dream two nights ago. My son found an abandoned cabin and we noticed three ravens. Then came right up to a wooden table/platform with wash basins and we gave them bubble baths! I refrain from finding interpretation but savor that I have the language carrying over into weird spaces.
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Marco, what you are saying here is electrifying and I don’t know if I can express how much I resonate with everything you’ve written here, maybe especially this:
"there’s another message—which doesn’t come from the future, as much as from the distant past, and that’s that in order to evolve consciousness, a profound relaxation is necessary, an embrace of the non-linear. This is the meditative path to the pleroma, which doesn’t reveal itself at the end of history, but rather through the infinite within—the weird frontier.?
Haven’t listened yet to the talk, but definitely will.
Thank you so much for the palpable energy, devotion and wisdom in your words.
And how I love that you are working on poetry …and secondly! income.
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You are speaking my language here, all the way through, including the deep grey day sadness, anthropocene grief… how you are lifted by remembering to open to the “others” around you: the details of avian artistry and intelligence, the wonderful details of their being we are granted moments of presence to enter. Birds are my intimates, too, especially Crow and Sparrow (Principle Bird in Tsalagi culture, or as I “translate” that, First Bird). My first word was “bird”, not mama, not milk… and so somehow I do belong more to that clan than the human and have always known it. In fact, I would literally not be alive except for the mockingbird…that’s a story for another time.
I hear you, so clearly, right here, and feel you are speaking for me, too:
"*someone like myself, who feels more at home with birds of the air than I do with my own money worshiping species. Those on the inside can see things that those on the outside cannot see. Maybe that is a good thing. We cant see infinity but we can hear it. The voice is
inside and outside at the same time."
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Deep gratitude to you for sharing your dreams and perceptions with us “realm explorers”.
There was a magic moment the other day when a older crow brought a young one, and I was called out of my kitchen with a voice I’ve not heard before (they have so many! and they seem to “throw” their voices at times, too) I put down peanuts on the ground, and watched while the young one was tutored, the older one guarding over her/him on the fence boards above… the “lesson” went on from there… older Crow never partaking even a single peanut. Crows sometimes follow me for several blocks to my garden… or indicate that they want to be fed in the park, instead of near my door where many people come and go, not all enamored of their marvelous species, sadly.
I started out blue today, am so heartened by this thread !!
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I’m convinced birdsong is a manifestation of the archaic, part of a symphony of life forming the background - and often foreground - of our subsequent consciousness structures. I’ve nothing but conjecture and feeling to back up that statement, but I state so anyway.
Au contraire, mon frere it is certainly about dreaming! 
Dreaming is re-connection with the ‘weird frontier’, which is really only weird because we have striven to make it so. (It has become an outside, but not one that belongs with the four Davor identifies, because it shouldn’t be one.) It is just as well that we perhaps have not come as long a way as we think we have in 500 years of modernity and 5000 of ‘civilization’. Yet it will take true openness and vision to fruitfully integrate things now, among other things to bring on a planetary awareness that goes beyond the soulless conflict management of globalization. For that dreams will be essential…
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Erg. We should talk (again) i.e. poetry and money have not, as yet, “come together”. Then again, you might need someone more “qualified” than me to talk with?
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Charles Darwin proposed that the origin of human languages was birdsong. I feel (and wrote in a poem) that bird dances, beauty and and flight are the origin of human ornamentation, ceremony and traditonal music making. So, pretty much everything!
ALso, a new book and theory in biological sciences, specifically, evolutionary biology, is that the aesthetics of birds is virtually the same as that of humans. The idea is also in Darwin, along with natural selection, but was and has been ignored by contemporary science…until recently.
The Evolution of Beauty by Richard Prum, a ground-breaking ornithologist lays out how selection by aesthetics works in the species he studies. So you are in very good company!
Y claro que si! This thread, this (web)site is about dreaming! “Dreaming is re-connection with the ‘weird frontier’, which is really only weird because we have striven to make it so.” Could not agree more !
" it will take true openness and vision to fruitfully integrate things now, among other things to bring on a planetary awareness that goes beyond the soulless conflict management of globalization. For that dreams will be essential…"
Thank you for dreaming so well, TJ.
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There is a lot of compelling research on this topic.
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This reminds me of an observation I made from my birding book that species of starlings that nested among cliffs and had very strong family ties had black and red plumage while another starling that flocked together and was very social (exchanging information at the end of every day) were blue and green… kind of similar to conservative/liberal political party colour schemes in human parties. It made some sense to me at the time…
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