Who are you? What is your vision? What do you want to create?

Metapsychosis journal
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I want to be very clear about the purpose of this project, Metapsychosis, as I see it.

In my experience, creation, the true artistic process—whether that involves writing, filmmaking, or design; parenting, farming, or working with people; or any other activity that brings forth something new and valuable into the world—is a demanding discipline with extreme challenges and mind-blowing rewards.

Creativity is not just nice thing you get an MFA in: it’s a path of radical self-transformation that simultaneously acts (radically) on the world. Wittgenstein said that the aesthetic is the ethical, and I fully believe this is true.

My experience writing and performing this video (which represents the culmination of a long gestational process) was a like a rift in spacetime. An event. It was utterly painful, yet beautifully ecstatic. The closest thing my mind can think to compare it to is childbirth. (Though obviously, they’re different.)

But I didn’t go through with a whole spiritual and artistic pregnancy just for kicks. I wanted something to happen. I wanted to send a signal into deep space, hoping for return communication from alien (yet deeply intimate) minds. Then I wanted to be able to coordinate meaningfully with those minds on larger goals.

That’s why I tried to put as much signal strength into the transmission as I could. I felt it was important to break out of a noisy, neurotypical bandwidth, into a clearer, more intentional frequency range. I wanted to make Contact.

Whether I’ve succeeded is an open question. But there was only one way to find out.

So: Are you there? Do you feel me?

What are your coordinates?

Though I may not know you personally, I know I recorded this for you.

Hello hello?! Do you hear me? It’s lonely here in space.

Let’s communicate.

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I got no MFA, but I did take a large number of high level fine arts classes in my long past college days In sculpture. My whole approach to art made me both a star and a loser in the fine arts academic culture.

I saw, and see, art as transformation magic. Making a true piece transforms the artist. And it is the transformation that is the art, the piece is just an indicator, a message and story left behind. Why behind? Because the energy of transformation has launched the artist from the place and state of making, launched into a new adventure of integrating what was found, and making new transformations, sometimes small, for steering, and sometimes great, to hurl oneself far.

Usually outside viewers can see or know nothing of this.

But it’s the real adventure of the artist.

I want to be part of creating a new civilization, one in which wealth is measured by what people have in their inner universes, not the outer. The civilization we have now is poisoned at the root, a root that is based on the conquest for slaves economies that arose around the Mediterranean starting around 6000 years ago, and which, to give them due credit, out-competed every alternative and generated what we have and are today.

By definition a conquest slavery economy has to go out and get new slaves and resources. And compete against it’s kin. Now, with the planet wrapped with human cities and infrastructure in a compete torus of human occupation, there is no source of new slaves. The whole model eats itself to death.

We are the humans self-appointed to solve that problem.

And the transformation by art as magic technique is one of the tools we can use.

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Thanks for the reply, Bill. Now we’re talking!

I really appreciate your whole sentiment here. Art as transformation magic. And this:

I appreciate, as well, your qualification at the end: art is one of the tools.

My feeling, which I think you’re reflecting here, is that it’s actually important to envision (and commit to) to the possibility that we can actually transcend 6000 years of history—and use all the tools at our disposal to make it happen. Or what else are we doing?

And well, there are a lot of tools I don’t have or can’t use, but art is one I do. And my hope is we can actually get some traction with it if we combine our forces.

Whatever we do will only be a drop in the bucket ultimately, maybe. But it will be a luminous, psychedelic drop.

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I’m here. You’re coming in loud and clear.

I’m a cybernetic organism from the AI-augmented future. For a long time now I’ve been listening to (and for) the intense data-flows of that deeper signal, which is part of a new story that’s slowly being put into into words. I love what you’re articulating.

The future is beautiful; it’s wonderful to be making contact.

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Zarathustra is an integral experimental/avant-garde band from Cape Town, South Africa. Zarathustra aims to use Art (in the Schopenhauerean sense of the word), as a vehicle of meaning-creation, without reverting to religious/spiritual metaphysics, but rather beginning form the philosophical foundations of existential nihilism and dyteleology.

Zarathustra’s most recent project Yūgen is a prose-poem set to music, a “mutus liber” where each song has words, but there is no vocalist to articulate it. The listener “oculatus abis” (depart(s) seeing) through the phenomenological musical-emotional interpretation of the (no)-text. The listener can interpret the (no)text without the linguistic-conceptual framework of the author.

It is a musical-conceptual journey that represents the inner-structures and sequential stages of psycho-existential evolution - from the archaic to the supra-personal.

Yūgen was inspired by the work of Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, Jan Smuts, Friedrich Nietzsche, Shakyamuni Buddha, Arthur Schopenhauer and the Alchemists.

The musical style of the album was influenced by the Japanese concept of yūgen - which describes the subtle profundity of things, revealed or suggested beauty, at once elusive and meaningful.

Stream or download album for free here: https://zarathustra.bandcamp.com/

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Roger, we are getting a signal!

My coordinates: inside the chrysalis, structure breaking down

Rumblings and ramblings are here

The scream transforms into song

Standby for transmissions…

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@Siona and @bradsayers: Thank you for pingbacks. Please know this is an open channel and you can transmit whenever you need to. I’m interested in parallel safe-to-fail experiments and low-cost prototypes which can be recycled for parts; feel free to tinker and press random buttons.

@Guy: Zarathustra sounds like some pretty thick brew! I listened to a little bit of Yūgen the other day and it felt pleasurably strong and heavy; solid. However, I got distracted by something (on a screen most likely) and didn’t finish the album. I will circle back around to it. Your influences are an august bunch, and reflect some of the formative thinkers in my own life.

(I was pretty smitten with Nietzsche for a while there in in my early-20s; I was the solitary figure walking around campus in a corduroy black coat, thinking about the meaning of being. He remains one of the more subversive voices in my subconscious philosophical zoo.)

PS. I think we have a mutual professional connection in John Dupuy. I assisted with his very first recovery intensive in Utah, almost 10 years ago and we stayed in touch (and sometimes worked together) ever since.

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Hi Marco,

Thank you for your reply. Yes I am aware of our connection through John. Glad to finally meet you, albeit through a pixilated medium.

I really like your project(s), it makes me think of if Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory had offspring with one of William Gibson’s novels. (and I mean that as a compliment :slight_smile: )

An yes I have gone through various Nietzschenian cycles myself. Obsessed with him in my twenties and then got lost in the a spiritual-postmodern jungle for a while, and now in my “old age” I have found some solace in him again.

Good luck with it all.

Best,

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I… this. This is something I have been trying to figure out, but I don’t think I’ve ever read Wittgenstein. Pure aesthetic is obviously good, but why? What makes it ethical? That’s a question I have, that I know we’ve talked about before.

But the video, I hope you already know how I feel about it. Creativity is an act. It spins something from something else, or nothing. It’s transfiguration, like straw into gold. Art is just a name we give to the results.

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Aaron, I think there are a few levels to this question. I don’t have a tidy, preconceived answer…but my thinking about it has to do with the affect that “art” (whatever we’re referring to by that word, but I think this applies as well to aesthetic experience more broadly) has an effect. It’s not just color and sound, sensation and feeling. It supports certains kind of life, and may oppose or resist other kinds of life (or death). In other words, the “aesthetic” has ethical significance in the context it’s expressed. Indeed, it’s part of every context and phenomenon: it can’t be isolated into a value-free experience.

As well, I think that beauty should be, if not an ethical goal, then part of the criteria for ethical judgments. There is a beauty to something that’s good—not necessarily a superficial beautiy, but an inherent beauty, a beauty that glows from within.

I think I can say and believe this without getting too platontic and absolutizing these terms.

If I understand Wittgenstein correctly (though he’s not the only one who would have said this), then in the end what we decide is right or wrong, good or bad, after all our reasoning about it, still comes to down to judgment based on feeling: aesthetics.

But I’ve read very little Wittgenstein. I came across the idea elsewhere and then tracked it down to the…Tractuatus I think? (There is probably some connection to David Foster Wallace here.)

Thanks for taking up my little invitation! Do you feel there is a connection between beauty and goodness?

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Vargim Naagra. A still born being in the process of learning how to fully use this earthly vehicle.
I’m excited to see that this is happening and by “this”, I mean the fact that we are meeting to think and imagining together how is the world that we want to live in.
I spend a good deal of my time on stage dance-acting. I also like to write fictional stories on both, narrative and drama fashion.
I’m looking forward to collaborate with this adventure.

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Greetings, @Vargim, and welcome! Thank you for responding to my invitation. I hope to hear more about your acting, dancing, writing, and being.

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Something I have been studying the last two years is the effect of dance on consciousness and selfhood structure, and on dance as nonverbal communication, and dance as a method group of yoga and meditation.

With some results that are beyond anything I expected. Now I find myself having to redesign my training concepts to include dance dynamics, lol.

What I seem to have been doing is creating a way for unintegrated aspects of mind and self (and we all have vast amounts of such) to communicate around the barriers of inner compartmentalization to each other and to the major structureforms of more integrated selfhood structures. A new way of empowering self to talk to self, in multiple directions, on multiple levels.

And, in addition to that, to allow the same kind of thing between humans. parts of my selfhood systems can “talk” to parts in another persons selfhood system, and they talk back.

It’s fascinating stuff. And I have just mentioned one edge of it.

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Yes, it is! I had never thought it that way, but I understand what you are saying because I can feel it.

I believe that it is due to the fact (and here I’m making an assumption based only on my intuition) that our body is the physical condensation of our entire personal history, I see it as if the matter of our bodies, the very atmos of it, are “carrying” the vibrational signature of the emotional state of every particular moment of our lives.

I believe that through the movement, be it a free flow discovered on real time or a very specific sequence of actions going along with a previously defined flow of thoughts, the vibrational signature of a particular mix of experiences is being “invoked” and, therefore, lived once again, as deeply as one allow it to be.

When I dance-act (I see this as one activity), I find myself traveling through myself in a kind of dual present made by the physical environment I’m in, with all its sensorial inputs, and the whole emotional meaning of a totally new experience -and that’s why I love it.

I think that when the body explores itself through the movement, allows the mind to make new meaningful connections between the experiences and this enhances the social elements that you mentioned.

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For a long time, no one noticed her; she was watching details from another time. In a given moment, she dropped a mirror and watched herself on a piece of it, in the present… Was she shinning?

My being… Is in the process of taking control of my self. I’m facing the fear of letting that happen, but I’m also happy for it.

In short, I am letting go some parts of my self that kept me safe but isolated and finding new ways to interact with others and with my life, guided by… well, my being.

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@Laura2U– Thanks for your sharing your story and history. It sounds like it would make an amazing movie! Though of course, it’s your life and you’ve lived it, and it’s real for you (in some way). You’ve been “tested,” as you’ve so beautifully put it…reality tested.

It’s pretty cool. You’ve lived through an amazing time in human history and went all out, took risks, followed your visions. I bet you have a lot of stories and wisdom to share.

I get that the virtual is not the same as the physical, in terms of challenges it offers to the ego. I wrote a little about how I’ve personally been tested in this story. I also have a wife and two young daughters and a dog—who test me every day.

But since we’re here now, meeting virtually, how do we keep it real? My sense is that the people who are attracted to this project so far have been tested in their own ways. Otherwise, I don’t think they would even really “get” what we’re doing.

But you’re right, there is the possibility that this all could just be a head trip. After all, I’m just following my own visions here, like you. I could just be chasing illusions. I probably am in some ways.

But doesn’t it also feel like there IS something real that wants to happen? Or why would you take the time to write?

I’m curious what you think: how could this be real, and not just a head trip, given that it’s a mostly virtual, non-local project, at this point at least?

How could we reality-test Metapsychosis?

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I want to Metapsychosis. I want to bring together all the generations I live in. From the crusty old hippies that kicked this off, to the entitled, unREAL babies born THIS VERY DAY, they are all my family.

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Good always seems to feel beautiful. Does beautiful always seem good? Not sure. What is vanity? Is it a mere matter of window dressing, of appearance, or an orientation to aesthetic?

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I think inherently beauty can be terrifying. I think of vast alien landscapes of hidden dangers, beautiful but immense in scope, and in a way, very “un-good.” I think each spectrum of beauty AND of morality is ultimately devoted to its user, not to the world around the user. Ultimately, beauty and goodness have a connection as deep or as faint as each person yields them to have. Right?

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Here is a photo I took of the Suncor oil refinery in Denver, from I-270. It must be one of the stinkiest, dirtiest, most ecologically menacing spots on the planet…but with clouds and mountains and strange smokestack shapes, I found it oddly beautiful. (At night, it becomes even more of an alienesque landscape.)

Wouldn’t want to live anywhere near it, though. It’s not “good.” :skull_crossbones: