And a few more of my Genre class posts for ya

 Jan 20th

Newton’s theories of motion and gravity were inspired by the Corpus Hermeticum, the core root of the Hermetic tradition and thus European and Islamic alchemy. There’s an infectious and living wisdom in that series of dialogues between Hermes Trismegistus - a fictional fully enlightened being - and his closest students. They’re similar to, and as good as the Socratic dialogues in my opinion, if not a billion times more interesting. As long as you can use your imagination it’s like reading a fairy tale. It’s pure joy to play with the ideas, too, it’s no wonder they inspired so much gibberish. Sage texts are all about using your imagination to that end, not so much about taking them literally. I’m not at all religious but it’s an amazingly special thing that exists.

In fact here’s a link: http://gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm

And here’s the necessary and mind-altering commentary by the original translator: http://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v2/th203.html

The overarching goal of alchemy was to find the philosopher’s stone that could turn anything into gold. A lot of bullshit alchemy was like a combination of pre-chemistry and snake oil sales: just doing random things or imagining elaborate nonsensical rituals and processes until one looked or did something novel/magical enough - then trying to sell it for money or fame. Taken as a cheesy metaphor for transforming the mind, however, perhaps alchemy was really a hapless search for mending practitioners’ souls, thus transmuting their hearts and lives to solid “gold” - taking advantage of or experiencing any and all mediums of life and the imaginary as necessary for the transformation (see: 1985’s Weird Science). The Corpus Hermeticum taught that idea and oh so much more as evidenced by Newton’s viable, practical reading of it. That fact makes my spine tingle.

    Bringing that back to genre, above all the weighty abstractions: genre is, like any alchemical procedure, the form of delivery. It’s the type of communication used to deliver a world of thought into your mind just as any piece of art worth its salt. That can involve as many or as few senses and scales as possible, whether the genre is extremely specific like Vocaloid, or extremely abstract like Architecture or even the Set of All Sets. I’m rapidly improving my understanding and I’ll surely be able to cast some new spells on my readers after this class. Double, double toil and trouble! Fire burn and cauldron bubble! And now that I’m a bit over the word count I must stop here, so I’ll say one thing about myself: I’m going to be a real wizard.

March 13

Here’s another popcorn source: School of Life: How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things

These guys are so style:

Hurray for the Riff Raff - Be My Baby cover

This conversation, too, is pretty neato The first meeting between Arthur Janov and Raphael Montañez Ortiz. 

March 14

Mythology and the Spiritual Journey with Richard Naegle, PhD

Another profound addition, this podcast keeps on giving. The Best Of page is a gold mine.

And here’s another awesome piece of wisdom literally everyone needs to understand. Simon Sinek is becoming a very powerful speaker, too: Simon Sinek: Understanding The Game We're Playing

March 15

Here’s another couple neat nugs of wisdom, yo.

Ask why recursively until you can’t go backwards. - Simon Sinek

Also. Here’s the heart of humanism in a nice little ancient phrase:

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

"I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me."

• Greek Playwright Terence

Now go back up to the top of this weekly and read the commentary on the Corpus Hermeticum. The Corpus itself I recommend reading at least the first few dialogues to get the feel of it. You really gotta let your imagination run wild, this stuff plays on your intuition and bodily feelings more than your rational mind, which is the source of your imagination. Yes, you can write like that. Yes, it’s awesomely powerful. Yes, you need to be careful how you use it. 
 
Words are a technology that affect our brains and bodies via the relationship between transmitter and receiver. That’s a fancier way to say words are for communication, but writing it that way makes it easier to get a deeper and more rationally-usable intuition about it. See what I’m getting at? Should be basic shit but it’s so lost on so many writers these days. There is a word for this somewhere… 
 

Let me explain myself further, consciousness is currently best understood as the flow of energy through your upper (the cerebrum) and lower brain organs (the Limbic system and peripherals) as informed by your body and environment. Your lower brain, the oldest part with the brain-stem, surrounding brain organs (like the hippocampus and amygdala) and the rest of your body, is what’s actually conscious and is informed by your cerebrum, the big pink wrinkly part that fills most of your skull. That means your social, cognitive, and motor information are actually all unconscious, not the emotional information.

 
           The wisest most effective people are those who have understood that flow between their rational and emotional mind, or their thinking versus intuition and body, and learned to manage it themselves. Thinking itself is unconscious in the sense that we don’t know where the thoughts are coming from, unless we make those sources conscious (as in we have to get real familiar with the emotions associated and build proper abstractions for them internal or external). So, some people have such a mastery of themselves that they can master any medium (with the prerequisite physical training of course).  
 

Trauma and that stuff are hard because the emotions (energies-in-motion) are painful and distressing and can flood entire subsystems that we then disconnect from the rest to stop the pain, rather than process it in a healthy way. This is a very physical process. It gives the pain a life of its own in a sense, internal and external, it doesn’t just go away and we try everything to plug it - thus why people can have such odd or destructive behaviors afterward. Seizures can even happen just from these disconnections colliding with each other, like a short. Epilepsy can sometimes be a stress conditionsince stress literally causes brain damage. I have watched this happen to someone. Depression can be the result of a long-term stress condition in the same way. I’ve been down that road. Conditions can be changed.
 

Buddhism is literally about all this that I’m writing, at least if you go read the Buddha’s actual stuff. I’m not Buddhist but I had a good laugh when I realized that in my own reading, considering all the silly traditions and violence that have stemmed from its organized forms. Some ancient wisdom traditions are as human as humanly possible, just distorted over time.
 

The thing with inventions is we don’t have to know how they work for them to work on us. Words are so powerful in this sense, because who knows what internal abstractions and homunculi and intuitive motives people have in their heads to put forward their ideas. 

Those with a good enough set of those particular things that are informed by how the world actually works (even if they’re still delusional), they can often times do whatever the hell they want. It just doesn’t look or actually work how you’d think, the reality is completely unintuitive and upside-down we just navigate intuitively and with a top-down ego (which is modified by culture/context). We’re still stuck where we are as biological, physical, time-bound critters, we can just learn to move in any direction we want mentally and physically with a lot of hard work and finesse. 
 

The fringes of this type of thinking gets into remote viewing and astral projection and the like, which I don’t really believe in (partly because this is what Scientology sells and they have too much money to invent bullshit). However I have had experiences where I know a dynamic so well I can make accurate predictions far into an uncertain and turbulent future - that’s part of the point of learning. I’ve also had experiences with people I know super well where we can feel something’s up across time and space with no obvious indicators, or conversate without ever opening our mouths or looking directly at each other. That’s one of the wonders of having strongly connected friendships, by the way. That’s also why we need them in our lives.
 

Magic is just playing the mental flow dynamics management game. Magicians with their sleights of hand and misdirections and mirrors, it’s all timing and empathy, not much else really besides props. Both of those things are muscles that we ought to be training constantly.
 

    The only problem with talking about all this is I don’t have all my sources lined up, and people generally roll their eyes otherwise. I got hundreds I could/should reference, yo. I write for my own enlightenment and healing, or whatever I wanna call it, it’s just my process. Science itself is converging around the ideas I’ve painted for you because our minds work how the universe works, there was never a distinction. I keep up with the state-of-the-art and it’s a real trip. It also teaches me the vocabulary for our times that y’all should know too.