Personal Introductions (2016–2019)

Hi to all. I’m Bill Eichman, based in State College Pennsylvania. Here’s my facebook profile, which isn’t a bad way to get a sense of my public character and nature. Bill Eichman

It tells only a portion of my story however. At the age of 11 I encountered books about occultism, common and popular at that time. Star Trek was popularizing the idea of mental powers, as was pop culture. I was a very bright kid, growing up on an isolated Pennsylvania farm. I decided that studying occultism had the best chance of allowing me to develop mental powers. So I studied and practiced it. By the time I left the farm for college I was a quite experienced expert in the western esoteric tradition, which had been heavily suppressed until it started up again in the late 1800s.

In college I taught free university classes on the topics that interested me, studied anthropology, and took up the study and practice of the eastern esoteric traditions, the training and meditative and philosophical disciplines that existed alongside the mainstream religions.

I now consider myself a world-class expert on the esoteric systems of this planet as a whole, in theory, and more significantly in practice. I have been profoundly affected and changed by my practice with the esoteric development toolsets. I’ve been quietly developing new systems of language, models, frames, and ideas, with demonstrations and the means to replicate and test the new systems.

The above topic, which I will call “disciplines for becoming conscious and managing one’s body.brains.minds”, is my special interest. I think it has the potential to amplify everything else we want to do, because it appears to increase intelligences of many kinds, and result in enhanced people that can learn faster, think and feel better, make optimum use of whatever resources they have, and do creative problem solving and other higher order activities more consistently and successfully than those without that training.

But along the way I have become expert or highly skilled and experiemced in a host of other fields. I was an early user of the internet, starting with listservs and usenet in the text based internet of the late 80’s to early 90s. In 1998 I started my second business attempt at making my living online as a web developer. It was fairly successful, and I have supported myself with internet business since that time as an independent developer with a one-man shop.

I became interested early on in the problems of sustainability, social and economic justice, and the great problem of our time, which is the coming transformation of our civilization from the use of fossil carbon to some other energy source.

That means studying our civilization itself. That’s an ugly study. Our civilization is rooted in the ancient greek and roman slave economies, which treated humans as livestock to be exploited and expended.It is that root pattern in our cvilization which makes the task of adapting to a post-fossil-carbon economy seem impossible. Why? Because we are slaves. We act as if we do not own ourselves, therefore, we can’t plan for the future, or take responsibility for it.

At my age, I would like to be able to spend as much time as possible using my skills for projects that intend to produce better human beings that are more free, and are therefore actively involved in working to develop the next civilization.

Which brings me here.

Bill

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Thank you, Bill. I’m very interested to see your mental powers at work! I’m curious, too, about your “disciplines for becoming conscious and managing one’s body.brains.minds.” I think each person developing such a discipline (that works for them) is of utmost importance, and is really what “education” should be about…or at least part of a core curriculum.

Your assertion that we are slaves, while harsh, strikes me as essentially true—insofar as we don’t own our own time, but owe it in various ways (or believe and act as if we do) to the “powers that be.” The hardest thing for me (a “growth edge”) has to do with reclaiming time, or perhaps, letting time be. Yet to accomplish this, in addition to managing one’s body.brain.mind, one must negotiate the social structures (or cultural illusions) that would keep us enslaved.

Obviously, I would like to replace those structures (and illusions, or stories) with more favorable ones. Which of course is a big and ongoing…process.


PS. Nice to see you again, @achronon. And welcome, @Jonathan_Cobb!

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Hi everyone! Deep resonance with the list of values. Let’s happen this.

I started something called Conversation in Nov 2012, in Google+, migrated to FB, still called Conversation, in Feb 2015.

Cards catalyzing conversations cocreating stories. Tension turned creative tension turned generativity. Generativity co-evolving in a context of nature, connectivity, mutuality and learning.

Crafting pattern languages and developing decks of cards and infinite play guidelines, to be used to build things we need. Things can be things and they can also be gatherings, as in eg the Icelandic AllThing.

My mother was a clothes and interior designer and my father was a craftsman, silversmith. In Sweden, where I still live, in Norrkoping, five minutes away from almost pristine forest. Married to Susan since 1990, three grown kids, cat, Missan and dog, Molly. Play the violin, but not as good as when I was young. Was a professional astrologer in the nineties. At around twelve years of age, was gone for a while - light in the tunnel, meeting the council, asked if I wanted to go back - I did.

I go to “night-school”. Right before going to sleep, I focus on a complex issue, and in the morning I jot stuff down. There’s more than a hundred notebooks; I really like pen and paper.

Current reading:

  • Small Arcs of Larger Circles, Nora Bateson
  • The Triumph of Emptiness, Mats Alvesson
  • Tackling Wicked Problems, Valerie Brown
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This will be quick as it’s 1.23am. I’m a writer and thinker and an unironical hugger of trees. I live on the edge of Melbourne in the Dandenong Ranges. My life is hermitic because I have ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis or the stupidly-named chronic fatigue syndrome - someone once likened the stupidity of thst name to Alzheimer’s being called chronic memory syndrome, but I digress).

Some people who inspire me: Charles Eisenstein, Iain Macgilchrist and his The Master and His Emissary; Mr Jung; David Graeber. I’ve read references to this Gebser fella and like what I’ve read so far. I’m tickledby the phenomenologists and I fear I’m unfashionably Lamarckian.Oh, and Henri Bortoft. This list is all men! Horrors! [And insert here all the other beautiful minds who escape me now and whose names will continue to pop up through my mush mind. All are sanity-providers and remindvvers in the midst of the current mindfuckery we find ourselves swirling in].

More later when the hour is more becoming :relaxed: Just wanted to say a quick hi for now. I love the idea of this space.

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Recently, I published a story in the Metapsychosis Journal and I have other projects that are starting to take shape and that I hope to share soon.I find the psyche is less like a private theater for our personal pleasure and more like a public experiment that requires us to use all of our knowledge and to use all of it well. The past/ present/ future of our species on this planet ( and other realms) are being tossed around like garments in a dryer at the laundry mat. Then we take them out and fold the garments neatly. It is interesting to watch the neatness emerge out of the randomness. I tend to like earth tones, browns, olive, blues, blacks and subtle shades of gray. Each of us needs different colors at different seasons.

We are each of us a mapmaker, as well as a performance by the territories we are engaged with. And a map, according to Oscar Wilde, without Utopia on it, is not worth looking at. I consider myself to be a radical Utopian and draw much inspiration from the abolitionists and social emancipators of the New England Transcendalists tradition

Activists and thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller amaze me, as do poets like Whitman and Dickinson. Out of the sprit of those wild Utopians a new heaven and earth were imagined. And as a gay man who lived through many upheavals I can claim that a capacity for using our imaginations in healthier ways is crucial for the next phase of our collective development as we transition out of the Pyramid top down structure into a more fluid anarchic networked social world. This transition requires study and good fellowship. I have found that good fellowship here.

Withdrawing from Facebook has been a challenge, as I search for something different. I trust that others here on this forum are demonstrating how to bring forth a way of using the technology that doesn’t use our best efforts for nefarious purposes. So far I have been impressed by the quality of the leadership of Marco and Jeremy as they are sponsoring a user friendly social space for experiment and skill building.Gebser calls the Integral the Higher Octave of the magical, mythical and rational stages.It is, I imagine. a lot like lifting weights, the muscles get stronger with applied concentration and attention to process and what we pay attention to. We can enjoy a private workout at home but we can always go to the gyn and be inspired by the efforts of other body workers, whether they are doing yoga or weights or some new combination. I am now doing a practice called Animal Flow and it is a weird kind of movement exercise that I have been doing for over a year with great results. I find the explosion of ways of working with the body mind as evidence that we are moving towards the Integral Age. It is an intensification of consciousness and multiple kinds of practices and each of us serves as best as we can.

A deep and humble bow to all of the practitioners and theorists who are bringing forward their best efforts here. I look forward to finding the next wave and riding it for as long as it lasts.

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Hi all!

Caroline here. Hope you won’t mind that I’m going to save 5 minutes by copying & editing my bio straight from my website

I am a multimedia artist and consultant-designer-facilitator-trainer-dynamicgapfiller who fosters democratic & sustainable organizations (such as cooperatives and collectives). Apart from my profound fascination with organizations, my main creative modes are writing, music and video production (somedays I dance too!) I am shaped by my diverse life experiences and my deep inquiries into narratives, meanings of sustainability, and the teachings + practices of Buddhism.

One of my grandest initiatives is a visionary cinema piece called The Sust Enable Project, which I invested four years into and was forced to abandon due to lack of resources, although its insights continue to live on in my design & thinking work.

Right now my primary work is performing various tasks for a variety of clients related to the co-op development field in Denver. I am still in the process of returning to being in business for myself and have an exceptional amount of client work already on deck, which means I am even more scattered than average right now. (Hoping the impending holidays will relieve some of that overload!)

With respect to COSMOS, I am involved as the co-op developer support, and I also aspire to take advantage of COSMOS’ many creative & community platforms to promote my writing & thinking professionally.

Bill, I am especially interested in your work, and hope to engage more with it. I look forward to connecting with all of you, sincerely.

Cheers,
Caroline

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Good afternoon!

I’m an internet-based author of short, fragmented fiction with a central base of operations at my website North of Reality, though most of my audience is for very tiny things on Twitter. I typically post short fiction there several times a week, inspired by the style of writers like Borges or Calvino, though I’m pulling back on quantity a bit to focus on other projects. I like to write pieces that reconcile incongruous cosmologies from across time and culture, as well as to explore the permeability between fiction and reality. In addition to online work, I run a subscription service where I mail secret works of fiction to readers around the world once per month.

I try to use RAW’s multi-model approach to understanding the world. Lately, I find myself being torn between Hermetic and Gnostic visions of reality, unable to decide if this universe and its inhabitants are sacred or profane, yet also trying to keep pessimism from sinking in too deeply. I’ve recently moved to New York, and I’m hoping to learn as many of the city’s secrets as I can manage while here.

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Welcome, Uel! It’s nice to meet you and begin to get acquainted with your work. I’ve peeked at some of your fragments at North of Reality—I like your compactness and sense of the absurd. “[Reconciling] incongruous cosmologies” is a good way to put it. I also like the way you hyperlink the pieces. It all flows and works really well, from what I can see.

The permeability between reality and fiction is an underlying theme here, the sacred and profane never quite resolved, so hopefully you’ll find yourself somewhat at home.

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Hello!

I’m a historian and museum curator. I’m particularly interested in history of technology, critical theory, and how understanding the past can help open up new imaginative futures. I also love weird, forgotten technologies. I’ve been working on a podcast called Restless Device that’s about exactly those topics.

I actually stumbled on to platform cooperativism and Cosmos looking for alternative visions of the social web for a series of Restless Device episodes on the deeper history of the social web. I’ve been increasingly frustrated by the commodification of relationships and ideas of the corporate web and underwhelmed by some of the more technical-fix focused indie web developments. Meanwhile I’ve been getting interested in co-ops and alternative economies as a way to break down racial and economic inequalities. So: I’m very excited that this exists.

I’ll +1 to @uel’s love of Calvino and Borges. Along a similar vein, I’ve also been more than a little bit obsessed with Walter Benjamin. Fascinating and tragic life, insightful and puzzling essays, but it’s Arcades Project that really gets me. Amazing, strange, experimental scholarship (or half finished trainwreck, or published research notes). I have a secret para-fiction / speculative history / para-history(?) project of fragments of non-existent histories of imagined technologies that’s directly inspired by all three writers.

Anyway, I feel like I’m in good company here!

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Hi everyone,

Inspired by reading the other introductions here!

I consider myself a “Creative Generalist”, or to be slightly more specific, a Creative Technologist Design-Thinker. I have fairly ‘promiscuous’ intellectual interests, but my core focus is at the intersection of Communication and Technology and Design and Participatory (Stakeholder) Governance. Namely, I’m interested in how to improve the prospects for “doing democracy” (participatory stakeholder governance) by applying contemporary and deep understandings of communication and technology to re-imagine the design of communication technology. If that sounds a bit messy/confusing, it’s partly because there’s a lot of reflexive relationships between all of those terms, and the messiness is part of the problem domain! Also, it’s probably because I’m not great at being succinct. :slight_smile:

I have two projects that are both active, yet under-resourced (i.e. I’m seeking more co-creators and collaborators for both). First, I’m in the process of designing (for a number of years) and prototyping (only within the last year or so, as I’ve built my skillset to include web development and programming) new online communication technologies and methodologies, with a strong focus on ‘relationship-modeling’ and ‘attention-coordination’ that can be performed by end-users. While the specific things I’m coding right now are a bit more low-level than the big goal, I am very much interested in the big goal of creating (and advocating for, beyond my own work) a re-imagined ‘communication design’ infrastructure for online interaction, that I believe will eventually serve to make our current online social infrastructure (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) fundamentally irrelevant, replacing them with something that creates democratic and social resilience, rather than accelerating the isolation/separation/fakenews/reductionism problems that we have today (problems which I argue are partially the outcome of the constraints on relationships/conversations/consciousness that derive from the communication assumptions embodied in Facebook/Twitter/et al).

My other project is much ‘younger’ (in development for about 4 months now), but it feels very timely to me and I intend to pursue it as aggressively as is feasible. It is a comedic science-fiction series (with the goal of producing it as a low-budget youtube series of short episodes) that, in addition to being generally funny and thought-provoking, aims to provide a ongoing platform for introducing our audience to a wide variety of ideas, from a variety of fields, that can help us “see the possibilities” of our moment in history, and provide a hopeful reminder that ‘things can be different, if we choose to see the possibilities’. The premise of the series is intentionally a twist on the Star Trek premise, namely: a group of contemporary (2017) humans are brought aboard a ‘starship’ (roughly analogous to the Star Trek level of technology) which is operated under the auspices of an existing “federation of planets”. The humans are brought on as ‘interns’, learning the culture of the multi-species federation, which is most saliently characterized by a high-level of ‘mindfulness’ and robust social/interpersonal technologies that lead to a general state of peace rather than constant battles. Subverting the audience’s expectations of television sci-fi (e.g. as a human-centric, confrontation-centric, high-technology-centric pursuit), our human travelers humble themselves as they come to see that the alien civilization is so successful largely because they value ideas and practices to maintain a healthy and open orientation to reality, having overcome much of the deep resistance (e.g. of fear-based thinking, of ego, of cultural baggage, etc.) that blocks such ‘healthy behavior’ back on Earth. Without being preachy, the series will use comedic devices of absurdity, surprise, and inverting-expectations to portray a process of outward ‘traveling’ that mirrors an internal growth as our human characters grow and adapt to meet the ‘expectations’ of their new reality. I am of the hope that this series can provide an ongoing platform to propose alternative ways of thinking/envisioning that are highly relevant to our current techno-socio-political reality, without being overtly political, and in doing so, offer a vision of a way forward that eschews many traditional categories and causes the audience to view their current reality through a novel lens. Also, and equally importantly, it’s going to be damn funny!

I apologize for putting such sprawling project descriptions here, but neither of the aforementioned projects is yet published elsewhere on the web (otherwise I’d just include a link). A reason for this is that I personally struggle to ‘wear every hat’, and in particular, I’m not great at creating the public-facing facade to support my own creative vision and projects. I hope that one or both of these projects will find support and kindred spirits within the Cosmos cooperative, and I can already tell from browsing a bit that there are a number of other projects that I am interested to support and provide kindred-ness to! UPDATE: Browsed some more, and my goodness, yes, I see that you all are already envisioning and vibrating on the (post-Hero’s) journey for our human (selves and societies, as) “interns to the future”.

It is a privilege to be among such a community of amazing folks working hard and struggling on behalf of hope and human possibility. I look forward to sharing in this journey with you, and to doing the stuff!

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Hi everyone, reintroducing myself. Have been busy creating a deck of cards, Participatory Inquiry. Most of the work has gone into developing the underlying pattern language and some select field-testing in the Conversation Community in Facebook.

I remain grateful for having found you here and look forward to what next steps might unfold.

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My name is Durwin Foster. I sometimes introduce myself as a juggler of roles. I am a father of three, partner of one. I have a strength in networking, and am working on an integral ethics project witb a fellow named Jeff Quintero.

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Hi folks,

I am an academic researcher as well as an as yet little published science fiction writer and fashion designer. I work with people with disability, developing smart garments and smart environments, as well as developing co-creation tools for installation and performance art. I have broad but eclectic interests. I came to this site because of the Sloterdijk reading group, but I’m sure I will participate in other initiatives as well.

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Hi Everyone,

Kara here. I am a student of Comparative Literature at Univ. of Alberta, presently busy writing my dissertation.
I consider myself very lucky to have found this community. Looking forward to making friends with all of you and hopefully writing for Metapsychosis. I also have an obscure personal blog

Cheers,
K

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Howdy everyone,

I’m the musician behind Goatcraft (US). I’m mainly here to learn more about different philosophical interpretations to help refine and reinforce my outlook on life. So, I look forward to listening to the conversations. The content I saw regarding Bubbles seemed interesting.

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Hello Marco and friends of spirited communion and collective genius,

These words and works below were put together to give you a sense of my devotion to our love.

One-on-one, co-evolving as a team, or as a group facilitator, I love re-imagining who and what we are experientially and insightfully. With a background in physics, neuroscience, (para)psychology, philosophy, art and art history, healing, mysticism, and filmmaking, I adore re-discovering our ‘selves,’ sharing our collective Self and (anatta) non-Self. As an experiential scientist since 1983, founder/co-director of the Human Connection Institute, advisory board member of the Lifeboat Foundation, and director of group intelligence on the faculty of the Vetha Center for Transdisciplinary Studies, I have pioneered both objective and experiential research into our ability to share a commonly-sensed consciousness, facilitating hundreds of groups internationally to heightened levels of compassionate insight and two-way telepathic awareness, contributed to original laboratory research in the field of Distant Mental Influence on Living Systems (DMILS), and served as an adjunct research associate at the Mind Science Foundation (MSF) utilizing a multidisciplinary approach to the scientific study of the human mind and its potential. I have published in multiple journals and given invited presentations on human interconnectedness and the Human Connection Project (HCP) at both public and professional organizations, including the United Nations. I currently orchestrate a multinational, scientifically based, media project to produce, direct, and televise documentaries and dramatic films to further the evolution of a global telesomatic intelligence for humanity. I offer direct conversationally based experiences that can be scheduled in-person and/or online via webcam.

Ever Gratefully for this Communion and Community,

Sperry

====================

Sperry Andrews,
Director of Group Intelligence
Vetha Center for Transdisciplinary Studies, Inc.
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Enterprise Development Center
211 Warren Street
Newark, NJ 07103
Tel: 501-984-0215
www.vetha.org

=====================

Sperry Andrews, co-director
Human Connection Institute
www.connectioninstitute.org
Tel: # 505-629-0700 (USA)

=====================

Lifeboat Foundation
Advisory Board Member
Philosophy and Media-Arts

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Well, this is turning into quite a meeting of the mind(s)…

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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