Book Club: Angel Tech

[Kai]

The best I can do is say that there are times when your programming is thrown totally out of whack by some external shock, realization, situation, or revelation.  In that moment, absolutely nothing makes sense.  The robot has no idea of how to act.  The map has gone from a topological survey of detroit to a map of the London Subway system.  None of the previous rules apply.  You feel disoriented, alone, adrift, afraid.  Unsafe, unsure, unthinking, unattached.

I feel like that all the time. Not constantly, but daily.

[LMNO]

Considering what little I know about you, I find that completely understandable.  No worries.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I think I like RAW's discussion of Chapel Perilous in Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger much better. It tends to sit solidly with LMNO's commentary above and has a lot less fluff as AT seems to have. Although, in AA's defense, at the time I first read this book, I sucked that stuff up. I was right in the middle of CP at the time and it made a lot of sense then. Now it seems a bit off, but I wonder if it has more to do with my state of mind?

In PR RAW says that Chapel Perilous is the place you go when your map/model of reality is suddenly revealed to be incomplete/incompatible with reality:

http://dedroidify.blogspot.com/2008/10/robert-anton-wilson-on-chapel-perilous.html

"Chapel Perilous is a stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turn out to be totally inadequate for the territory and you're completely lost. And at that point you get an ally who helps you find your way back to something you can understand. And then after that for the rest of your life you've got this question: Was that ally a supernatural helper, or was it just part of my own mind trying to save me from going totally bonkers with this stuff? And the people I know who've had that kind of experience, very few of them have come to an absolutely certain conclusion about this."


Good Old Crazy Bob.

[LMNO]

What I have been running into is that his definition of "Confusion Alert" sounds very similar to this:

"Confusion Alert - The basic disorientation occurring when an idea of reality contradicts and/or resists the living experience of that reality itself."

[Jenne]

Reminds me of my piece on disreality.

[LMNO]

Cross-post?

[Jenne]

It's here somewhere.  *goes to search*

[Jenne]

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=12406.0

Just bumped it.

[Cain]

AA has written a sequel, btw

http://mutateweb.com/archives/2009/10/04/antero-allis-sequel-to-angel-tech-now-available/

An excerpt is available here http://www.realitysandwich.com/Eight_Circuit_Brain.  This is just a very small portion of it :

"We soared, we crashed, we burnt out, we're tuning back in."

We are all walking through the pages of our own stories every day, stories that intersect the stories of others, dead and alive, as chapters in the larger Book of Life. If you are friends with writers, your story will probably end up in their writings or in their books some day, whether you like it or not. Even if you have never met the author of a book or read the book itself, your story is probably already captured. This happens all the time. And no matter how much certain authors write from their own personal experience, they cannot help but also reveal the greater truths innate to the collective milieu we are all expressions of. Some of these writers seem to have built-in broadband antennae for picking up those signals and decoding them for the rest of us; Timothy Leary was one of these big antennae writers.

Large collective shifts have ways of grabbing our personal lives by the scruff of the neck and tossing us about as if we were plastic action figure replicas of ourselves. Sometimes these greater forces erupt from deep within our own genetic makeup and shock us with diseases unexpectedly inherited from our ancestors. Other times, we get lucky and the chaos gods of the zeitgeist decide it's our turn to win the lottery. Or when Aphrodite Love comes to town and turns our lives upside down in the name of Polymorphous Rapture.

These "outside shocks" can be humbling to any naive ego still in denial of the objective truths (and shocks) of Ecstasy, Uncertainty, Indivisibility and Impermanence. Thanks to Dr. Leary's Eight-Circuit Brain model, I learned to see these shocks as activation points for what he calls fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth circuits, respectively. As it turns out, we all have antennas to pick up the big signals. We only have to learn how to unwrap them from ourselves, our self-absorption, and point them outwards again.

In video-blogger Brian Shields' interview with Lisa Ferguson (2/8/2009 at the Timothy Leary reunion party, 111 Minna gallery in S.F.), she shares a startling message from Leary himself, spoken to her personally three days before his death. "We were right," he told her, "all the ideas and dreams we had back then, we were right. It's time to tune back in." Lisa took his message to heart as a boost to complete her documentary film, "Children of the Revolution." Inspired by her own Millbrook childhood stories where her baby sitters were none other than Tim Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), the film also features interviews with other sixties luminaries and what they are tuning into today. Watch for it!

Those who were not alive to witness or participate in the sixties cultural revolution first hand may feel a sense of having missed out on something important and/or harbor the more cynical belief that the world is worse off thanks to Baby Boomer's self-indulgent delusions of entitlement that got us into the mess we're in today. As with many polarized views, the truth often lies somewhere in between. It is now well documented that the American media and government created and maintained the illusion that the sixties were a failed experiment in drug abuse, sexual debauchery, and impossible utopian ideals. And in one sense they were right. Literally millions of participants in this cultural experiment soared, crashed, burnt out, and lost all perspective by pursuing overly inflated, narcissistic visions of changing the world with more peace, love, sex, and LSD.

I can only assume that most utopian visions fail from apathy due to a lack of the consistent self-discipline necessary to embody the vision and "become the change we want to see in the world." Any full-blown spiritual event, with or without LSD, can naturally expose the futility and the illusion of ego. In a naive attempt to preserve spiritual revelation, many ego-trashing dogmas have been created. Taken to heart, any anti-ego hippie belief can easily lead to a "why bother?" apathy masked by a "just mellow out and go with the flow" fatalism. As it turns out, a strong, flexible ego is necessary to manifest our innermost dreams in the external world at large. Any attempt to hold onto a dream, without the self-work to embody it, keeps that dream alive in the mind alone. And in the sixties, LSD opened up millions of minds and more specifically, millions of third eyes (sixth circuit). This powerful cultural and psychic event also catalyzed equally potent somatic, body-centered experiences through the sixties' sexual revolution. LSD can also make us very horny.

The sixties were not a failed experiment. The sixties wrote the first chapter in an ongoing book of how culture transforms itself starting at the level of the individual. In this chapter, an all-encompassing epiphany of self-awareness explodes in the brain and exposes the nature of reality itself. This event can easily overwhelm the existing means to contextualize and apply this knowledge, especially if we are spiritually starved and cannot stop eating fruit from the tree of cosmic knowledge. We eat, we rest, we talk and dream of future societies, and then we eat some more and talk some more. The more forbidden fruit we eat, the more our minds expand and enflame the search for what it all means, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

[LMNO]

You know what?  I'll probably give that one a pass.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I didn't realize that non-narrative nonfiction could have sequels. Usually, people just release a new edition, or another book on the same subject.

[Triple Zero]

It would be even more confusing if this were parts 4,5 and 6 and he'd release the prequels years later.

[LMNO]

Question: How many are interested in me going through Gears 5-8?

[Kai]

 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I am very interested in your thoughts on those gears... hell, I'm still considering them myself since I first read the book about 8 years ago.