Personal Introductions (2016–2019)

Hello cruel world,

I’m a fiction writer and journalist from Caracas, Venezuela.
I recently started producing content in English, over at this blog and this struggling Twitter page. If anyone is interested in my work in Spanish just DM me.

I recently consulted the I Ching about my current situation and the oracle answered: Hexagram 2, Kūn, “The Receptive”. Very appropriate, since I’ve been researching like crazy without a clear objective in mind.

The research lead to the Metapsychosis website and then to you all. I just read your personal introductions and you all seem very interesting. Looking forward to discussions and collaborations.

Oh, I also make the weirdest music.

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Hi Eduardo,

Fellow fiction writer and I Ching consultant here :slight_smile:

Hex 2 is so boundless. I feel like I have the hang of it, and then I sort of lose it again. It feels so obvious and so ethereal at the same time to me, at least today. Other days it’s as clear as a bell. But I do love the idea that it is creative movement before it’s born. Hex 1 couldn’t come into being without it.

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Sperry, wow… very excited to have you aboard our fledgling collective ship!

Can’t wait to learn more about your background and hope to have (if you are willing to offer it) your input on our burgeoning organizational design and development.

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Dear Caroline, cc: Marcp,

I am thrilled to be meeting you.

It’s so truly ‘onederfull’ to collectively :wink:

Marco has asked to meet this Monday,
and I suggested that perhaps all three of
us connect on Zoom, Vsee, Skype or phone.

Thank You so much for the invitation to contribute
to a shared vision for our never-ending re-creation.

All Love and Many Thanks,

Sperry

Sperry, wow… very excited to have you aboard our fledgling collective
ship!

Can’t wait to learn more about your background and hope to have (if you are
willing to offer it) your input on our burgeoning organizational design and
development.

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Hell o Sue (Or In A Season of Crime),

I haven’t had a chance to read your fiction, but I visited your website the other day and your “About Me” is hilarious. I will definitely check out your writings. Maybe it’s common, but it’s the first time I read of Hexagrams referred as Hex and I love it, will start using it.

Great interpretation and beautiful words about Hex 2, I feel like I’m in that undefined state, as I’m between projects and trying a few hats to see which one fits. I spent seven years writing a novel (my first), so I’m not in a rush to start anything big yet. I’m the earth, soaking everything in.

I feel really lucky to have found this community, I feel great things are brewing here. I like being early to the party, so many possibilities. Thanks for writing, I’m at your disposal over here.

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Unlike most of the introductions here, in which intentions and new initiatives for better lives to forge a different world are uppermost, mine are now much more modest. They weren’t always so. I approach the tail end of a life in which past experiences have forged a vision of reality that created a work (self published and virtually ignored) I knew to be an important contribution- and I still do believe that.

Rather than lay claim to academic influences that shaped my thinking, I can identify contributions to my vocabulary in which to express those experiences. An analogy might be that I was building a new monastery from what lay about. The building already existed in my mind and almost any stone would suffice. So rather than collecting the stones (other ideas, theories and formulations) and then shaping a structure of modification or adherence, I simply used what lay to hand. Accused of erudition, the truth was closer to a carpet bag lady. My experiences had catapulted me out of any orthodoxy, but the mystics came closest to corroborating. Teihard de Chardin, Meher Baba, Rumi et al, and now the New Age Scientists of the Akasha like Laszlo.)

To back-track a little: My whole life, and its vicissitudes, contributed to the shaping of a vocabulary. I grew up as an only child shuttled between the wildest parts of South Africa (on safari with my grandfather, a fluent Zulu and Swahili linguist, inspecting rural African schools) and the privations of a repressive boarding school (with Classics, Theology and Literature capitalised) Everything in my life has offered such extremes, and such polarity, both Boer and British family, a white and a black mother, a liberal African environment as an enclave in the furious era of the white oppressive Apartheid. Nothing fitted. So isolation has been endemic: Isolation and the need to reconcile the irreconcilable, racially, politically, intellectually, spiritually.

I looked everywhere for a ‘home’ and never found it. Everything was always better than ‘something’.

I came to see that in every life there is the daimon destiny; for me it was to make art from the skill of ‘not fitting’. So I sought companions in the ‘not fitting’; the mavericks, the geniuses of science to re-trace an alternative vision of reality, and an alternative history of Western thought, dominantly science. One I believe fits the evidence rather better than Darwin and his contemporary followers like Dawkins.

If I have a dominant ‘place to stand’ it lies between the intellectual theorizing of Wilber and Sheldrake and the academic reductionism that still seems content with ever tighter formulations appreciated by the intellect alone, and the equally loose hugs-and-kisses spiritual journeys of the individual seeker that probably work for them but impart little to others. Although experiential knowledge is, for me, the bedrock of understanding, I am driven to make it relevant to others. I wrote Involution as a scientific monograph 45 years ago ( I hoped for work and access to a library), and setting aside its prescience and ill timing, the responses of academia were so savage, and intemperate that I lost regard for the wages of the intellect, and recently wrote it poetically.

I did let off steam in a series of blogs which put the book on trial for its heartless persecution of its author. The first is here: The Trial of Involution-An Odyssey. Opening Day – INVOLUTION: Science and God: Reality Redefined

I now write fiction, probably shelved as magical realism, in which I seek to weave the field of influences (the nexus of causative consciousness with its sparking synchronicities) as intrinsic to the magic of ordinary life and perceptible to the observant, rather than some desirable imaginative alternative, or future destiny.

My spasmodically visited websites are here https://involution-odyssey.com/ and here https://philipparees.me/

I am far from sure what I can contribute to this group of seekers. I lack technical know-how but my belief that nothing is ever incidental, and the pleasures of not being entirely alone ( even when my participation suffers the time lag of being in the UK) gives great reward already for which Marco ( and his silent cohorts) deserve thanks. So Ciao.

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Quite an introduction to pull out of the old squeaky, wobbling shopping cart, @Philippa! You are certainly a one of a kind bag lady. Well, I’m glad you’re huddling around the hobo bonfire with us. And would you like some baked beans and a swig to warm the belly? The wasteland grows, but also, these communal flickers of hope…

Thank you Marco. Time I remembered baked beans, and a swig would do nicely!

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Hi eduardo. Congrats on writing a novel. I don’t know if I if I will ever be capable of doing so. :slight_smile: I look forward to talking more with you here. I agree, it’s good to get in at the beginning of a space which promises to be a good one.

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Hi everyone,

It is really interesting to read all your introductions! How rich - and different - our individual paths are!
As to me: I am German and I live in Italy for 30 years now. I came here because I couldn’t imagine the headiness of an academic career. I already sang semi-professionally and Italy and its emotionality expression in operas like “La Traviata” or “La Boheme” seemed to me a way out to liberate myself from the overly valued intellectual claims.

After years of studying Italian Opera, I settled as an organic farmer in Umbria and explored Nature in truly experimental ways. Getting to know Integral Theory about 20 years ago brought me back to my inclination to intellectual explorations and I had huge insights by studying Ken Wilber’s work. At the same time, I did Jungian psychotherapy, I took courses in NLP, transpersonal Psychology and later in Gestalt counseling, Enneagram and Feminine Power Coaching and more.

Psychology was my main interest for a long time, then Spirituality and Philosophy, although I am not in reading the original texts, but I enjoy if someone explains to me what it is about. Presently I am excited by the teachings of Jordan B.Peterson which open my mind in a similar way as Wilber 20 years ago.

I worked as a singing teacher and voice therapist for more than 20 years integrating all approaches I had adopted - until I had understood how the voice works, as an integral part of body mind and spirit and my interests went elsewhere.

Presently I am “retired” and curious about communication technology. I am eager learning how to create websites myself and to create personal connections online via video.

With my husband Mark, I am doing weekly live broadcasts under the name “The Wisdom Factory” (www.thewisdomfactory.net) where we invite people to talk about what is important to them. We have more than 300 videos on the Wisdom Factory Youtube Channel. Our vision is to connect with people, give them a platform to present themselves via video and to enter into group conversations with other interesting people, live on video in real conversations. The intention behind all that is to inspire people in the audience to come out of their hiding places and present publicly what they believe and what they do.

Here in Cosmos Coop, I could imagine having talks with all of you within our Wisdom Factory to present and promote via Youtube what you want to bring out into the world.

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Hello everyone. So many fascinating life paths and interests here!

I realize I never formally entered through this ‘front door’…

I’m just a bookworm at heart - as much as my current 9 to 5, married-with-children schedule allows anyway (LOL). I am in pursuit of the emerging metanarrative of world history, the necessarily multi-perspectival approach to the human past that would be meaningful for the 21st century. My reading is dominated by studies in comparative civilizations, globalization, and the old tradition of philosophy of history (e.g., Spengler, Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber, Carroll Quigley, Roland Robertson, etc.) as well as world historians (William H McNeill, Patrick Manning, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto,…) The important questions remain relevant, in my humble opinion: what is society? what is culture? how do cultural elements take root and fit together (if they do so)? how does culture fall apart? - and also what is our role as citizens and people in embodying the best of our collective past wisdom?

Curiosity about what people were making of Spengler brought me across John David Ebert’s excellent on-line video lectures. Ebert introduced me to Jean Gebser, among other thinkers. I am glad that curiosity about what people were making of Gebser led me here. In short, I love what @madrush and @care_save et al have done/are doing with the place and look forward to further interaction with the creative vibe I’m definitely picking up here,
…even as I give a +1 to this:

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As my partner says, I am a “barbarian with overgrown brains”. Coming from Easter European intelligentsia background, after trying almost everything else, few years ago I decided to become an anarchist of sorts. My main area of interest is liberatory technology, both in practical and theoretical sense.

I live and work in the belly of the beast, as a member of squatted neighborhood in Athens, Greece. I am co-responsible for the shared technical infrastructure here, especially in the area of electrical and computer networks. In direct contact with reality, I keep instilling some broader reflection and put together some prefigurative vernacular realm, not waiting for capitalism to collapse, nor for revolution to prevail. It is surely a sado-maso experience at times.

Here I hope I can contribute a bit to the conversation, providing news from the bottom of the world. I also hope to draw some inspirations from your discussions here (although I prefer reading than watching videos).

My other plans/hopes, that may be interesting for some, include:

  • creation of a liberatory technology R&D hub, preferably in Greece or Portugal.
  • multidisciplinary research trip to Greenland, to investigate future political, social and technological effects of climate change there.
  • a socio-psychological experiment in a form of MMORPG related to the problem of global migrations.

I am also looking forward to join the coop and the marketplace, as being an urban poor seriously hampers my work.

I am a certified ENTJ, with some tendencies towards intellectual violence, but I work hard on it.

I love answering questions, so go ahead.

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Hi @Petros, welcome. I’ve looked at your site and read some of your Milestone Writings, and am really glad you showed up here. I have a feeling this community could learn a lot from your experience and way of thinking. I’m quite sure I will learn something, at a minimum. I hope we can help you too, in your situation. You may very well be on the cutting edge of what many more of us will experience over the coming years: a little collapse, a little revolution, and a whole lot of sado-masochism in between.

The middle, indeterminate part of things is not a bad place to be, though, if we’re in good company and doing what we can to keep the fire of human intelligence alive. The ‘prefigurative vernacular realm’ you refer to reminds me of Cornel West’s ‘Chekovian Christianity,’ which he describes as living on the 2nd day between the crucifixion and the resurrection.

I’m obvioiusly interested in your ideas about liberatory technology as well, and hope we can get some resources to you as we develop the co-op and marketplace features. Let’s talk sometime. Maybe you could give us a report from the rotting bottom of the neoliberal rubbish can; and we can talk practically about how to make some form of digital solidarity work.

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@madrush

Thank you for your friendly welcome. I am now starting a new project, which may be even more interesting. I just received a preliminary invitation from a solidarity group working in Rojava. The scope is more or less to help building a hacklab there, contributing to the needs of war-devastated region in the process.
I am now working on checking the credibility of the invitation and as soon as I have a go, I will publish more about it.
I imagine that first-hand reports, written by someone of my background, may be interesting for you folks.
Planned departure is January 2018 and the timespan is 6 months. So, we have enough time to make it interesting and useful.
Will be back soon with this topic.

Meanwhile, if anyone is interested, here is a compilation I co-edited some time ago. I think it can be a good primer on Rojava ideological roots.
Towards Stateless Democracy

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Yopladoow !

I prefer to be constrained by my own chains than by the chains of others.

This sentence guides my life today. I left on a world tour of humor, play, playfulness with the intentions of reinventing myself.

I’d like play, humor to be my basis in this reinvention. I’m in this process of deconstructing narratives ruling my life, and letting go of the emotions tied to them. I’m ingesting the 2017 video courses of Maps of Meaning (Jordan B Peterson) to give me an intellectual background in this adventure.

For the moment, I’m traveling with my bike. I’m in Budapest right now. In two days, I’ll go help a Hungarian with his starting edible forests. I love edible forests.

Then I’ll go pass the winter in Greece and surely Sicily, I’ll write an essay on transformative play and an essay on share (I left France on this journey with 20€). Yes I’m ambitious. Surely, life will make great jokes about this two-essays plan ^^

My journey deeply started when I embrace spontaneity. I had no money in Italy. But still I decided to go to this Gibberish course ran by Alex Sternick.

It changed my life. It was the perfect tool to change narratives and purge deep emotions. At some point, we did a therapeutic exercise. One person will take a role I decided. It was the role how my grand father who is dead. The goal was to talk to my grand father through this person in gibberish and say what I had to say in gibberish.

I did. Still words, even non sense gibberish, were not enough to express what I felt. I had the choice to hug this person. I did. Tears starting gently flowing on my cheeks. The person could not see if I was crying or not. He described this hug as a rock slowly melting until the rock disappeared.

I usually don’t cry in public. Last time I did was 2 years ago while reading Finite and Infinite games by James P. Carse.

I hesitated a lot to present myself here. Most of intellectual discussions seems like gibberish to me, and it’s not fun anymore for me to talk gibberish and pretending it’s serious.

I need clarify. Because I find great content on the blog. I think I already loose myself in all the content because I find it great (discussions on FB, on future and divine feminism). If there is face to face discussions I’ll be glad to participate if I have the internet connection. I prefer talking that writing.

I post notes of my journey on Facebook : Redirecting.... Maybe I’ll try Steemit. I still don’t know what to do with money. I need to experiment more with gift economy. I don’t want to do a travel blog. There are many.

Still I want to explore deep narratives with people. I’m incubating a game including gibberish. I have great ideas to make it work virtually. But it is not my focus.

I want to do spontaneous events in the public physical space. It’s a challenge for me. I’ll be patient and see where life gets me :smile:

If you are on my way from Balaton Lake in Hungary to Greece, I’ll be glad to meet :slight_smile:

Petros shared his MBTI. Seems like I’m a mix of ENFP, ENTP and ENTJ.

Thank you for this space Mesdames et Messieurs !

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Hello all. I’m Jim Trattner. I’ve been flirting with this site for over a year but had not yet introduced myself. Who am I? This is such an advanced philosophical question that I’ve hesitated to take a stab since my mid-2016 arrival at this site. Today, it occurred that I might take a stab and worry about the accuracy at a later time, or not.

Tell us a little about yourself…: 8/5/2017
I’m curious to see what evolves here on this site and (big HERE), on our planet. Honestly I’m somewhat intimidated by the level of intectuality found here, I am mostly interested to see if there is a place/space for me to meaningfully contribute.

I’m a retired Clinical Psychologist, Executive Search Headhunter in the Computer Software and bio-technology/ medical clinical trials industries. I was an early student (1964-65) of Richard Alpert (Ram Das), and Timothy Leary(Tim) who were my Professors at Harvard University Dept of Social Relations. I also played Jazz Vibraphones during the 50s and 60s in Lower East Side NY and South Central Los Angeles as well as various UCLA frat parties to help pay my way through college. Grew exceptional Weed in the early 70s on Maui, matriculated through several well known Cults including Scientology, The Source Family, LifeSpring, Gurdjieff/Ouspensky inspired Fellowship of Friends and Advaita (non-dual) teachings as introduced by Wayne Liquorman.

Currently reside in Venice, CA while fortunately sharing my life with my 5th wife, 4 children and 8 grandchildren. Very lucky man, indeed. Terminally curious about what’s next.

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wrote this to a dear friend a minute ago:
i am planning on sending them some images of the ‘holomind perceiver’, the 6 spheres of consciousness* that sit in your head like an internalized crown … or like that rainbow thorn crown i got coloured with by Greg the tobacco shaman in the mid eighties, somewhere in Aspen Colorado … i might even have that piece of art somewhere still …

actually, … the first thing i wanted to tell them is that i feel (over the years and with multiple reconfirmations) PS ventriloquizes me (my body of thought/ethics rather) so often it seems like a staple to him. He points towards me with very ‘circumvoluntarizing’ … ‘circonvolute’ gossamer, threading it thru the whole weave of that literate history portion/sliver accesible to him … yet seems to enjoy keeping it all cloaked with riddle filters, piles of swaddle … which … given the taboo drenched being i am is understandable; you’d jeopardize jobsecurity and standing when looking straight at what i try to stand for (tree-crops, it’s not a secret)

would they be impressed if i tell them i spent 2 weeks with rashneesh in poonah and PS xx?? prolly long before me?
that i met him a few times for a few hours near his house and once in america, working where he turned up as guest?

i have no regrets about joining though … this was worth the price of entry:
eine ruhige Kugel schieben (literally, “to push a quiet ball”) which more or less means “to have it pretty cushy”
in light of what you’ll see i mean here:
plus.google.com/collection/w0uox
yeah, i’m the ultra me[n]tal/ffyzical aanzwengelaar (cranker), root me.

PS: fresh new and all for U:
johannes 7
voorwaar, voorwaar, wie mijn WOORD BEWAARD, zal de dood niet zien tot in de eeuwigheid
CORE ACTION CORRECTION:
= voor aar voor aar … oord beaard, …
oord is location … aard = earth
which brings me to an explanation for my moniker (an ‘acrynome’ really)
Rocks Rolled and spun to earth

i saved the bad news for last:
my friend quotes a line from Gibran and i go:
i did not slog thru all of the new to me WIT i found today (which brought me here… i ‘aud’ it with robotsoftware, having lost patience with literacy [off- and onscreens] a long time ago) but did note his recent jibe at Gibran in ‘deadwood’
… found it off the wall disconcerting he scolds Assad and blames him for stuff the deep state [zog] which Trump shills for, pins on him succesfully thru their mega ‘roeptoeters’ … becoming a scary globalist was always a threatening ‘avenue’ towards his ethical downfall … in the end he avoided it as little as the pharmaffiya he seems to have surrendered to and does equally cynical poems on …

he’s always been a puffy guy and prolly hid a fondness of / dependency on alcohol pretty well all this ‘while’ … i could quote Morelli calling PS a farmintbrewskier or some such around heah and perhaps that IS what prevents clarity … who knows how deep that robotwhole goes down his genetree?
I usually see and call it when/soon as i feel folks deliberately distract & steal from, blaspheme, taunt and subvert mindbody nexus care; this is where i’ll heavaleave it for now:
my failing is forcing the hour, his is hanging back … ??

Hello everyone!

My name is Jamie, I’m a postgraduate student from the UK. I graduated from the University of Sheffield with a BA in Politics and Philosophy in 2014, and then from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with a Msc. in Political Theory in 2015. I spent a year as a teaching assistant in a primary school and working in a secondhand bookshop before moving to the University of Oxford, where I’m currently an MPhil student in Politics, with a concentration in Political Theory. Plan A is to transition onto the DPhil programme (what they call a PhD here for some historical reason) and become an academic in a Politics department somewhere. Plan B (should my proposal be rejected) would be to take a year out and have a think about whether I want to pursue my other interests full-time.

I found myself drawn to this community for a multitude of reasons; firstly, I’ve been watching the Sloterdijk discussions, which I found fascinating, as I am alone in my department for even knowing who Sloterdijk is (aside from German students who perceive him as an irritant from public TV!), and I am probably the only person in the department who has ever attempted to read the Spheres trilogy. I have read both Bubbles and Globes, and I’m currently halfway through Foams, and I’d love to bounce some ideas off fellow readers on this bizarre sojourn into his mind.

The second reason I was drawn to the community was due to its anarchistic setup (a political ideology for which I have much sympathy) and its unashamed belief in the creative potential of human beings. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel (I’ve been writing short stories since I was a child), and I’ve written several television pilot scripts (mainly hitherto-rejected comedies), and I’m looking forward to seeing if, with group support, I may return to my proverbial side cabinet full of half-baked ideas, and eventually conjure something remotely presentable.

I’ll try to be as active as possible as a member of the community, but keep in mind the time difference (I’ll be up at 1am my time if I am to contribute to Sloterdijk discussions!) and my hectic MPhil schedule (I’ve got a 25,000-word thesis due in two months!), so if I suddenly disappear, I apologise in advance!

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I can commiserate, Jamie. I was in Australia for several of the Bubbles conversations and I had to get up at 4 a.m. to be present! I also encourage you on the novel writing business. I am a senior academic, and for the past 6 years I have been writing a science-fiction opus (currently 2400 pages) as a side-line. So it is possible. I joined up with a group this last November called NaNoWrMo - they are writers who support each other, ostensibly over the month of November but to a lesser extent all year round, to motivate writing. I currently write 1000 words per day on average, in addition to my academic career (and the Sloterdijk reading!).

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Hello. I’m Eduardo Rocha from Brazil. I began to read about Sloterdijk in 2016 and let some things back in 2017. But I returned recently in my studies. I hope to help in some way.

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