"Hello. Epiphany is upon you.
Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits."
Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits."
A Game that's Not a Game;
A School that's Not a School
Mystery Becomes MyStory
A School that's Not a School
Mystery Becomes MyStory
https://www.academia.edu/38494671/GAMING_CULTURAL_ATONEMENT_final_.pdf?email_work_card=view-paper schaefer
“Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
"to those who can proceed despite the puzzles, a way opens. Submit to puzzles and what is absolutely incomprehensible. There are bridges, suspended on depths of perennial depth. But you follow the puzzles." C. G. Jung, Red Book, pg. 308
Modernity is based on a critique and abandonment of premodern forms of
metaphysics, while postmodernity has only deepened critiques of metaphysical truth claims further. This has created a novel historical situation in which a planetary society revolves around the absence of a shared metaphysics. The vacuum of meaning at the core of postmodern societies has resulted in a sense of exhaustion and alienation, a state uncomfortable enough to initiate a metamodern “return” to metaphysical speculation. ... the ideas and practices of metamodern metaphysics remain in flux and on the margins. To counter the regressive and dystopian possibilities entailed by a “return” to metaphysics, I propose a form of cosmo-erotic humanism and discuss its implications through an exploration of the newly released book, A Return to Eros (Gafni & Kincaid, 2017). The discipline of metaphysics is notoriously controversial and metaphysical claims are suspect in modern and postmodern discourse. Where modern scientists often critique the claims of metaphysics as unverifiable and thus untrue, postmodernists critique both science and metaphysics for making truth claims in the first place.
...metaphysics is what saves us from a descent into discourses that are merely about power and illusion. “Scientific metaphysics” is a “return” to metaphysics at a higher-level, a post-postmodern or “metamodern” revival of metaphysics is part of our historical moment. The term metamodern is used simply to describe the structure of what is emerging “after postmodernism.” --Zachary Stein
“The superior man (denoted beings of any gender) goes through life without any one preconceived course of action or any taboo. He merely decides for the moment what is the right thing to do...The goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue.” -- Alan Watts, TAO The Watercourse Way
POST-POMO DIGIOSOPHY
What Picture of the World do we need? How can we imagine it into existence, realizing there is no perfect world? Reality is the ultimate medium. To some extent we are all “reality-hackers” because we concoct unique worldviews about self, others and world. We learn ways to make the system work for us, but often fail to notice how it works on us, too. Metamodernism is particularly useful at helping us understand the internet because it’s the cultural philosophy of the digital age.
A “cultural philosophy” is a system for understanding the world that helps us better navigate the digital age and helps us understand our emotional reactions to things that are happening now -- a “structure of feeling.” Cultural philosophies help us make sense of our times by seeing patterns in how entire cultures (and individual subcultures within those cultures) operate. The vacuum created by the feeling of “what is real?” will be filled in one way or another; metaphysics is unavoidable.
Metamodern performance art is a belief that “the quest for transcendence is important even if there is, in fact, no transcendence to be found”—an incomplete but not unreasonable summary of how metamodernism manifests today, if we take “transcendence” to mean “transcending the conditions that postmodern culture artificially imposes upon us.” Internet changed that.
Metamodernism believes in reconstructing things that have been deconstructed with a view toward reestablishing hope and optimism in the midst of a period (the postmodern period) marked by irony, cynicism, and despair. Generally, metamodernism reconstructs things by joining their opposing elements in an entirely new configuration rather than seeing those elements as being in competition with one another, focused on dialogue, collaboration, simultaneity, and “generative paradox”.
Metamodernists will often say that they “oscillate” between extremes, which really just means that they move so quickly between two extremes that the way they act incorporates both these two extremes and everything between them. The result is something totally new, both/and thinking. Is remix artwork old or new? Well, both! And therefore, in a sense, neither.
In other words, when you’re simultaneously creating and scavenging you are doing something that is both of those things and also an entirely new thing. The film reboot is an earnest and dramatic re-imagining of a project that is nevertheless cynical because it fails to move on from that project entirely. The sense of pleasurable disorientation that can result from this ”dual vision” is quintessentially metamodern. Other movies become metamodern because they’re riding the line not between new and old but, say, “sincere” and “ironic” or “real” and “unreal.”
We sensed that we had to push past the irony, cynicism, and world-weariness of postmodernism and the nation’s post-sixties hangover, but was there really a coherent cultural philosophy or paradigm that could help us do this?
Returning to a state of naiveté—pretending the preceding quarter-century of postmodern (”deconstructive”) thinking hadn’t happened at all—wasn’t an option, but how could we ever carry forward the hard lessons of the postmodern period while regaining our faith in sincerity, hopefulness, and, indeed, our own future? We needed a technology that would help us live “as if” things untrue were actually true, that would allow us to think in five and six dimensions rather than just in over-literal, excessively reality-bound terms.
Modernity sought to rectify premodern metaphysics by turning to science alone, yet as the centuries unfolded the vacuum created by the
absence of metaphysics continued to expand, and today the absence of
metaphysics is creating new and more dangerous problems.
Belief Barriers & Healing Fictions
The cry of Post-Postmodern art is "NOMO POMO: Stop! We've had enough!" We're full of appropriations, sampling, graffiti, data glut, quick-cut image glut, new media and new protocols. We’ve seen so much cool it’s left us cold. We've Flashed into a collective spasm that verges on panic. We can't fight or flee the technological juggernaut, and why should we? The price of entry to this Brave New World is surrender of your belief barrier. We can use new media as our medium for self-expression, joyously making technological and experiential works, body-based works, and mythopoetic works. They aren't machine-made; they are informed, considered executions of our vision, not just mechanical programs or aesthetic accidents.
Art connected to Source and the zeitgeist of its times has a living taproot in the matrix of evolution. There is as much unlimited digital aesthetic content as there is in nature. Our works "work" when they work themselves through our culture, based on that culture's underlying psychological need. They become meaningful if perceived as carrying revelatory weight that somehow illuminates our collective lives. They may not be "true", but good things come of this generative vision, reaffirming and celebrating our humanity. To be art, it just has to be significant, reflecting or steering culture.
As artists, we use our own experiential vision to create perceptual embodiments in our medium of choice. We can still take a fresh look at the world, inspired by the entire spectrum of human artistic endeavor, without resurrecting or imitating the past, but taking it that strategic step further with contextualized elements. We have attained a degree of technological sophistication to open most, if not all, of the new realms to the creative process. Unexplored media in the quantum paintbox include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnotism, which assault as many of the senses and emotions as possible in order to break open the door of the five senses and drive our audience into the infinitude beyond, newer vistas of participatory experience and expression. Soon artists will be designing new bodies, new senses, and synthetic environments. The path of our unManifest Destiny clearly leads toward a transhuman biological imperative in the evolutionary eventstream.
STATE OF THE HEART: Higher art must be intensely personal while being universal and universally accessible. It must show refined knowledge, understanding and respect for the art that has come before to enrich those around us. Much the same can be said for an artfully and heartfully lived life. We can apply a similar strategy to our spirituality, drawing on the best of what the past offers while keeping our practice and service contemporary and relevant. Our lives become multidimensional artful expressions without frames, embodied in living Light.
Process-oriented spirituality is eclectic and intensely personal. The connection we have with the inspirational Source that nourishes creative life is the same source that sustains our spirits and funds our compassion. It is a deep well from which we can drink at will, the abundant lifesprings of our essential being. The Romantics, arguably beginning with Blake, turned art into a kind of substitute for religion. The East emphasizes a mystical-magical orientation, the West a humanist-rationalist POV.
Romanticism is an essentially gnostic spirituality, a Mystery religion. But now there is no intergenerational priesthood to have our visions for us; we have them for ourselves. Rather than anti-scientifically considering cognition and technofacility an anti-artistic dirty little secret, digital art and multimedia embrace the fusion. There is no Romantic terror of human cognition nor need for anti-technical transcendence with direct interface on the horizon. Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself with self-awareness and self-responsibility. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
Diagram 8 / Esoteric School, Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi
I-MAGICK: The Path to the Self: A work of art carries its proof in itself. Artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the image-test; all such concepts crumble, they are revealed as puny and colorless, they convince nobody. But works which have drawn on truth and presented it to us in live, concentrated form, grip us and communicate themselves to us compellingly - and nobody, even centuries later, will ever be able to refute them.
The same is true of the authentically lived spiritual life in any of its formats: One artist imagines himself to be the creator of an independent spiritual world, burdens himself with the act of creating and peopling this world, accepts complete responsibility for it but he breaks down, because no mortal genius is capable of withstanding such a burden; just as, in a more general sense, man, who has declared himself to be the center of existence, has been unable to create a balanced spiritual system. And if he is overwhelmed by failure, he lays the blame on the eternal disharmony of the world, on the complexity of the distraught contemporary soul, or on the lack of comprehension of the public.
Another artist knows there is a higher power over him and will work joyfully as a small apprentice under God's heaven, although his responsibility for everything he paints and draws, and for the souls who apprehend it, is even greater. But on the other hand this world was not created by him, is not ruled by him, there are no doubts about its fundamental principles; this artist has only the gift of perceiving more acutely than others the harmony of the world and the beauty and ugliness of man's contribution to it, and the gift of acutely conveying this to others. In failure and even in the lowest depths of existence - in destitution, in prison, in sickness, the consciousness of this steadfast harmony cannot forsake him.
However, the whole irrationality of Art, its dazzling convolutions, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on people are too magical to be plumbed by an artist's philosophy or scheme of things or by the labor of his unworthy hands. This is the way of no meta-narrative, standing in the Mystery of Naked Awareness.
The same is true of the authentically lived spiritual life in any of its formats: One artist imagines himself to be the creator of an independent spiritual world, burdens himself with the act of creating and peopling this world, accepts complete responsibility for it but he breaks down, because no mortal genius is capable of withstanding such a burden; just as, in a more general sense, man, who has declared himself to be the center of existence, has been unable to create a balanced spiritual system. And if he is overwhelmed by failure, he lays the blame on the eternal disharmony of the world, on the complexity of the distraught contemporary soul, or on the lack of comprehension of the public.
Another artist knows there is a higher power over him and will work joyfully as a small apprentice under God's heaven, although his responsibility for everything he paints and draws, and for the souls who apprehend it, is even greater. But on the other hand this world was not created by him, is not ruled by him, there are no doubts about its fundamental principles; this artist has only the gift of perceiving more acutely than others the harmony of the world and the beauty and ugliness of man's contribution to it, and the gift of acutely conveying this to others. In failure and even in the lowest depths of existence - in destitution, in prison, in sickness, the consciousness of this steadfast harmony cannot forsake him.
However, the whole irrationality of Art, its dazzling convolutions, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on people are too magical to be plumbed by an artist's philosophy or scheme of things or by the labor of his unworthy hands. This is the way of no meta-narrative, standing in the Mystery of Naked Awareness.
METAMODERN VIEW OF REALITY
To see the
fractal
nature of reality and of the development and applicability of ideas,
that all understanding consists of reused elements taken from other forms of
understanding.
To be
anti
-
essentialist
, not believing in “ultimate essences” such as matter,
consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like
–
but rather that all
these things are contextual and interpretations made from relations and comparisons.
Even the today so praised “relationality” is not an essence of the universe.
To no longer believe
in an atomistic, mechanical universe where the ultimate stuff is
matter, but rather to view the ultimate nature of reality as a great unknown that we must
metaphorically capture in our symbols, words and stories. To accept the view of a world
being newly b
orn again and again.
To see that the world is radically, unyieldingly and completely socially constructed,
always relative and context bound.
To see that the world emerges through complex interactions of its parts and that our
intuitive understandings tend
to be much too static and mono
-
causal. This is called
complexity
. It is the fundamental principle of not only meteorology but also of social
psychology, where patterns (such as the “self”) emerge through the interactions of
interrelated, interdependent
dividuals
.
To accept the necessity of
developmental hierarchies
–
but to be very critical and
careful with how they are described and used. Hierarchies are studied empirically, not
arbitrarily assumed.
To see that language and thereby our whole worldviews tr
avel through a much greater
space of possible, never
-
conceptualized worlds; that language is evolving.
To look at the world holistically, where things such as scientific facts, perspectives,
culture and emotions interact (this form of interactivity is call
ed hypercomplexity
,
because it involves not only many interacting units, but interacting perspectives and
qualitatively different dimensions of reality, such as subjective vs. objective reality).
To see that information and management of information is fun
damental to all aspects
of reality and society: from genes to memes to money and science and political
revolutions.
To accept an informational
-Darwinian view of both genes (organisms) and memes
(cultural patterns) competing to survive through a process of
developmental evolution
that involves negative selection (that disfavored genes and memes go extinct, but
continue to exist as potentials).
To see that Darwinian evolution depends equally on mutual cooperation and
competition; that competition and cooperation are always intertwined.
To see the dynamic interplay of the universal and the particular, where for instance
humans in more complex societies become more individualized, which in turn drives
the development of more complex societies where people are more interdependent and
more universal values are needed to avoid collapse.
To see that the world runs on
dialectic logic, where things are always broken, always
“stumbling backwards” as it were; that things are always striving for an impossible
balance and in that accidental movement create the whole dance that we experience as
reality. So the development of reality does have directionality, it’s just that we are
always blind to this direction; hence the metaphor of
“stumbling backwards”.
To see that reality is fundamentally open
-ended, broken, as it were, even in its
mathematical and physical structure, as shown in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and
in some of the core findings of modern physics.
To recognize that potentials and
potentiality, rather than facts and actualities, constitute
the most fundamental or “more real” reality. What we usually call reality is only
“actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie. Actuality is only a “case
of” a deeper reality, called “absolute totality”.
To explore visions of
panpsychism, i.e. that consciousness is everywhere in the
universe and “as real” as matter and space. But panpsychism should not be confused
with animistic visions of all things having “spirits
”.
https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0iNUVbwyoKs7rh-v4rKxPK9jVHG7xyS6sEliJZMXicdi5Dvo-vs6W2UJs
To see the
fractal
nature of reality and of the development and applicability of ideas,
that all understanding consists of reused elements taken from other forms of
understanding.
To be
anti
-
essentialist
, not believing in “ultimate essences” such as matter,
consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like
–
but rather that all
these things are contextual and interpretations made from relations and comparisons.
Even the today so praised “relationality” is not an essence of the universe.
To no longer believe
in an atomistic, mechanical universe where the ultimate stuff is
matter, but rather to view the ultimate nature of reality as a great unknown that we must
metaphorically capture in our symbols, words and stories. To accept the view of a world
being newly b
orn again and again.
To see that the world is radically, unyieldingly and completely socially constructed,
always relative and context bound.
To see that the world emerges through complex interactions of its parts and that our
intuitive understandings tend
to be much too static and mono
-
causal. This is called
complexity
. It is the fundamental principle of not only meteorology but also of social
psychology, where patterns (such as the “self”) emerge through the interactions of
interrelated, interdependent
dividuals
.
To accept the necessity of
developmental hierarchies
–
but to be very critical and
careful with how they are described and used. Hierarchies are studied empirically, not
arbitrarily assumed.
To see that language and thereby our whole worldviews tr
avel through a much greater
space of possible, never
-
conceptualized worlds; that language is evolving.
To look at the world holistically, where things such as scientific facts, perspectives,
culture and emotions interact (this form of interactivity is call
ed hypercomplexity
,
because it involves not only many interacting units, but interacting perspectives and
qualitatively different dimensions of reality, such as subjective vs. objective reality).
To see that information and management of information is fun
damental to all aspects
of reality and society: from genes to memes to money and science and political
revolutions.
To accept an informational
-Darwinian view of both genes (organisms) and memes
(cultural patterns) competing to survive through a process of
developmental evolution
that involves negative selection (that disfavored genes and memes go extinct, but
continue to exist as potentials).
To see that Darwinian evolution depends equally on mutual cooperation and
competition; that competition and cooperation are always intertwined.
To see the dynamic interplay of the universal and the particular, where for instance
humans in more complex societies become more individualized, which in turn drives
the development of more complex societies where people are more interdependent and
more universal values are needed to avoid collapse.
To see that the world runs on
dialectic logic, where things are always broken, always
“stumbling backwards” as it were; that things are always striving for an impossible
balance and in that accidental movement create the whole dance that we experience as
reality. So the development of reality does have directionality, it’s just that we are
always blind to this direction; hence the metaphor of
“stumbling backwards”.
To see that reality is fundamentally open
-ended, broken, as it were, even in its
mathematical and physical structure, as shown in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and
in some of the core findings of modern physics.
To recognize that potentials and
potentiality, rather than facts and actualities, constitute
the most fundamental or “more real” reality. What we usually call reality is only
“actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie. Actuality is only a “case
of” a deeper reality, called “absolute totality”.
To explore visions of
panpsychism, i.e. that consciousness is everywhere in the
universe and “as real” as matter and space. But panpsychism should not be confused
with animistic visions of all things having “spirits
”.
https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0iNUVbwyoKs7rh-v4rKxPK9jVHG7xyS6sEliJZMXicdi5Dvo-vs6W2UJs
GAMIFIED CRYPTO
Welcome to the ID of the deep Web. We are concerned with I.D., with anonymity and privacy, and promoting the writing of code for web privacy and identity security. But the game itself is an epic journey, "a wild ride spanning both the online world and the real one," with clues in physical locations, cryptomusic, and a massively complex array of elements and references. No one knows the precise intent behind this 'building a mystery.'
There is a mystique in managing to remain secret. In a world where nothing seems secure and everything is accessible, the cryptographic community remains enthralled. But the real mystique is that it is 'secret' like ordeals of initiation is because it is an experiential journey which can't be 'told' to another who would have to seek it for themselves, discerning the true esoteric challenges from false paths.
The puzzles created a kind of mania, somewhere between fandom and obsession. The scavenger hunt has led solvers across the web, down old manuscripts to several physical locations around the globe and into uncharted areas of the dark net. It even inspired several songs and a play about the human desire for purpose, community and the search for order in chaos.
It highlights how little most people know about the Internet and the concept of anonymity, and touches on growing fears that no personal information is safe from prying governments and corporations. Calls for widespread email encryption and increased electronic security are making cryptography a household topic. The game is centered around primes.
Theories about the Game’s raison d’être flourish, despite fake games and fake claims. "Whether this is a cult, a secret society, government agency, or just an elaborate ARG, the only way to have a chance of understanding their agenda, is by trying to solve their puzzles."
Unmonetized, it never advocates illegal activities or hacking in any way. Ultimately, it is “exclusively dedicated to researching and developing techniques and technology to aid in the ideas they advocate which are liberty, transparency, and security through technology.” The game remains the most mysterious and prophetic puzzle online.
The game is the center of the field of game play, essentially the center of the mandala: “My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day…I guarded them like precious pearls….It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections)
Transformative games are like magical practices: "the projections of psychic events which, in cases like these, exert a counter influence on the soul and act like a kind of enchantment of one's own personality. That is to say, by means of these concrete performances the attention, or better said, the interest, is brought back to an inner sacred domain which is the source and goal of the soul. This inner domain contains the unity of life and consciousness which, though once possessed, has been lost and must now be found again." (C.G. Jung; Secret of the Golden Flower.)
“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.” --Rainer Maria Rilke
The Great Game is written in Ring Style, or Onion structure of literature. Stories with a ring structure show us how to solve problems. Our brain evolved to learn from such structure. Chiastic structure, or chiastic pattern, is a literary technique in narrative motifs and other textual passages. Alternative names include ring structure, because the opening and closing 'A' can be viewed as completing a circle, palistrophe, or symmetric structure.
All start with a beginning that suggests a standard situation, a status quo, normality. Then, there’s a problem. Some things happen, which triggers action. After some events, there’s an important moment around the middle of the story, called the Midpoint. After that, things become more and more problematic, until a very bad situation happens. Finally, there’s a final effort that leads to the denouement — success or failure.
We evolved to love stories because we can learn from them how other humans solved problems. It means that they must have the structure of problem-solving. How do we reconcile problem-solving with traditional storytelling structures? With the Ring - one ring to rule them all. It has 4 rules for all stories:
- They are circular. At the end, the story goes back to where it began. These loops make it possible to circle forever in the network.
- They are symmetric. The first half mirrors the second half.
- They are loaded in the middle. The midpoint carries a key insight that will help the hero solve his problem.
- They are fractal (structure is followed not just for an entire story, but also by its parts: by every act, every scene). Rings can be seen at different sizes, spanning just acts of movies, or entire sagas.
In big sagas, the Initial Situation and Aftermath must meet each other, and mirror the second half. Why is that required? Because that’s the only way to highlight the role of the Midpoint, which is the key insight of the story.
At the end of the story, we go back to the Ordinary World of the protagonist. Nearly everything is the same, except for the changes that have happened throughout the story. Why is it important to revisit the beginning? Because that way, we can show the contrast between the beginning and the end.
We can highlight the evolution through the story. The Ring Structure does not require characters to be in a very good or very bad position at any point. It only requires them to be exploring the problem or exploring the insight to solve it.
"To our distant ancestors who worked in the silence of the caves some two hundred centuries ago in elated honor of genius never surpassed." It is significant, I think, that we begin to speak of centuries, as if welcoming these women and men at the boundary of the recent past. The fact that some of them could execute such paintings, engravings, and carvings is impressive enough in itself; but more impressive is the fact that the undoubted majority who could not, evidently could appreciate, even support, those who could. I can think of no more significant single advance in the whole course of human evolution; and I can think of no more convincing demonstration of the final, decisive emergence of the utterly distinctive human brain." --Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing
To the great King Ptolemy Philadelphus Augustus. Greeting to my lord Ptolemy from Manetho, high-priest and scribe of the sacred shrines of Egypt, born at Sebennytus and dwelling at Heliopolis. It is my duty, almighty king, to reflect upon all such matters as you may desire me to investigate. So, as you are making researches concerning the future of the universe, in obedience to your command I shall place before you the sacred books which I have studied, written by your forefather, Hermes Trismegistus. Farewell, I pray, my lord King. --Manetho, ancient forgery
From Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein 1973
METAMODERN AESTHETICS
Metamodern is is a category created to describe some recent developments in art, literature and cinema, a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture.
Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles". According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne." (Wikipedia)
The aesthetic is a departure and perpetuation of modern and post-modern aesthetics, a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. They defy well established schemes of modernist and post-modernist aesthetics, in search for a more sensible and, arguably, sustainable way to express the present.
Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate." Wiki
Authors claim that modernist and post-modernist aesthetics are no more able to interpret our present and that seemingly incompatible features of the two systems can coexist side-by-side in today's culture. The word "Metamodernism" features thenprefix "meta", "meaning-beyond", and relates with metaxis, used by Plato to describe the condition of in-betweenness. Metamodernist aesthetic is not a mere Hegelian synthesis of the two previous systems. Rather, it stands in between the two. In practice, metamodernist sensibility cuts through the post-modernist morass of contemporary culture by restoring some modernist tools.
Metamodernism is the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. Metamodernism is characterised by interest in the mythological and archetypal. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general Romantic response to our present, crisis-ridden moment.
That daimon is a voice of the anima mundi, and there is no division between the little inner voices and the total world of the soul. In other words, it is this soul that speaks through me and through all of us. “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.
Metamodern is is a category created to describe some recent developments in art, literature and cinema, a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture.
Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles". According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne." (Wikipedia)
The aesthetic is a departure and perpetuation of modern and post-modern aesthetics, a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. They defy well established schemes of modernist and post-modernist aesthetics, in search for a more sensible and, arguably, sustainable way to express the present.
Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate." Wiki
Authors claim that modernist and post-modernist aesthetics are no more able to interpret our present and that seemingly incompatible features of the two systems can coexist side-by-side in today's culture. The word "Metamodernism" features thenprefix "meta", "meaning-beyond", and relates with metaxis, used by Plato to describe the condition of in-betweenness. Metamodernist aesthetic is not a mere Hegelian synthesis of the two previous systems. Rather, it stands in between the two. In practice, metamodernist sensibility cuts through the post-modernist morass of contemporary culture by restoring some modernist tools.
Metamodernism is the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. Metamodernism is characterised by interest in the mythological and archetypal. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general Romantic response to our present, crisis-ridden moment.
That daimon is a voice of the anima mundi, and there is no division between the little inner voices and the total world of the soul. In other words, it is this soul that speaks through me and through all of us. “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.
The anima is a representative of the unconscious and hence a mediatrix. If our Mediatrix is not bringing spiritual meaning to us it is because our egos will not cooperate. A fearful ego cannot think freely or creatively. The more fragile and frightened it is, the more fiercely it clings to habit and tradition, for to a death-obsessed ego, stepping beyond the safety promised by orthodoxy feels like a death sentence; it is, in fact, the way to new spiritual life.
“Because the anima wants life, she wants both good and bad.” (Carl Jung, 9i, para. 59).
"As mediatrix to the eternally unknowable she is the bridge both over the river
and into the trees and into the sludge and quicksand, making the known ever more unknown."
(Hillman, Anima, p. 133)
"Sophia was the Mediatrix between the upper and lower spaces, and at the same time projected the Types or Ideas of the plērōma into the cosmos" (Mead, 2008, where he also equates Sophia with "Soul" in a general sense).
"She is life, life that moves apparently without plan from one point of concentration to another. Only when we entrust ourselves to her do we begin to sense her in-dwelling coherence.... The art in analysis for any individual is the optimal dissolving of resistance to the anima, in the sense of her original meaning as life-bringing energy. It has to do with admitting the anima in her meaninglessness (Jung 1954, par. 66): she doesn't offer any interpretations, but rather confuses and involves one in goalless being. Without breakdown, the breakthrough which belongs to any initiation cannot happen.... As long as there is in us the slightest secret motive regarding definite achievable progress, we are evading the anima." (Peter Schellenbaum. "The Role of the Anima in Analysis", Gender and Soul, p. 59)
“Because the anima wants life, she wants both good and bad.” (Carl Jung, 9i, para. 59).
"As mediatrix to the eternally unknowable she is the bridge both over the river
and into the trees and into the sludge and quicksand, making the known ever more unknown."
(Hillman, Anima, p. 133)
"Sophia was the Mediatrix between the upper and lower spaces, and at the same time projected the Types or Ideas of the plērōma into the cosmos" (Mead, 2008, where he also equates Sophia with "Soul" in a general sense).
"She is life, life that moves apparently without plan from one point of concentration to another. Only when we entrust ourselves to her do we begin to sense her in-dwelling coherence.... The art in analysis for any individual is the optimal dissolving of resistance to the anima, in the sense of her original meaning as life-bringing energy. It has to do with admitting the anima in her meaninglessness (Jung 1954, par. 66): she doesn't offer any interpretations, but rather confuses and involves one in goalless being. Without breakdown, the breakthrough which belongs to any initiation cannot happen.... As long as there is in us the slightest secret motive regarding definite achievable progress, we are evading the anima." (Peter Schellenbaum. "The Role of the Anima in Analysis", Gender and Soul, p. 59)
THE GAME OF GAMES
The Biggest Mystery in Internet History
FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY
“I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.” (Hesse, The Glass Bead Game)
WELCOME TO PABLO'S MAGIC THEATRE
Archetypal Storytelling
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).” James Hillman
"The wisest and noblest teacher is nature itself."
~ Leonardo da Vinci
In The Glass Bead Game, Harry encounters the man who gave him a mysterious book. He inquires about the magic theater, to which the man replies, "Not for everybody." Hermine introduces Harry to a mysterious saxophonist named Pablo, who appears to be the very opposite of what Harry considers a serious, thoughtful man.
After attending a lavish masquerade ball, Pablo brings Harry to his metaphorical "magic theatre", where the concerns and notions that plagued his soul disintegrate as he interacts with the ethereal and phantasmal.
In the 'Magic Theatre' Harry experiences the fantasies that exist in his mind. The Theater is described as a long horseshoe-shaped corridor with a mirror on one side and a great number of doors on the other, designed to disclose the illusions of our mental constructions and self-image.
The key to self-arising transformation, de-conditioning, and re-conditioning through digital game play is coherent game imagery that contributes to the reframing of archetypal patterns of the unconscious. This cracks the code on the codebreakers.
"The most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us." (Carl Jung, "The Structure of the Psyche" (1927), CW Vol. 8.)
Curiously, at the dawn of civilization, all the archetypes (self-activating impulses) were already present, emerging from sheer uncomprehended perception and generative vitality. Our instincts are infused with their multiple perspectives. Nature is an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.
Consciousness remains the great Mystery. Understanding time is an important ingredient to formulating a new paradigm that unites physics and self-awareness. It is a cosmological fallacy to apply our local physical equations to the universe at large. Nature remains unlabeled, unframed, uncategorized and non-conceptual, unaffected by our mental constructs.
We cannot observe the universe from the outside with misplaced concreteness. We suspect a higher dimension generates a global flow of time which we experience as the illusion of time and space.
Self-arising consciousness is fused with physically entangled particles. But it may be an illusion that relativity of simultaneity means that there is no passage of time and that any experience of time passing by is thus illusory. If entanglement doesn’t happen in spacetime, it is plausible that entanglement creates spacetime.
Everything is entangled in the mythic sense, if not not the quantum sense. Myth reveals the character of reality yet it is not of this realm. Myth must be uncovered. It is a primal active force in the world and the missing dimension in the dynamic interplay of politics. Myth is a common unifying principle. Myth permeates our understanding of our past, present and potential.
Myth is a conceptual schemata embodying core metaphysical concepts and moral wisdom. Myths do cultural work. In myth-building any words or symbols can be modified from their original meanings to suit their new roles in a matrix of varied forms. Claude Levi-Strauss observed, nothing in today's society is more mythical than political ideology.
Chaos serpent or dragon, dragon-slayer, pillar or mountain of the gods, dying god, ladder to heaven, angry goddess, plant of life, great wheel of heaven, ourobouros serpent of creation, and hundreds more spring from the prehistoric past.
These archaic images are potential forms like gravity wells, black holes, psychic vortices. Their collective character, unconditioned creative power, is revealed when the image strongly accords with familiar mythological motifs, from a blurry low-resolution fog of myths.
Total Spectator Participation
The non-rational mythic or myth-illogical is a "condensation of a living process." (Jung) 'Apocalyptic' revelations are narratives about visionary experience. Lots of people have visions, but they can't compress them into meaningful narratives, so they remain idiosyncratic and lost to history. Image (word pictures) is our native language and we can language those images, which go on to be influential. People try to map history over them in a temporalized way to map out time with images.
Thus, Hillman concedes, “It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.” (The Dream and the Underworld)
Perhaps we only have imagination in order to to express the myriad unlived lives within us. They are an innate part of our lives. Paracelsus suggests, "The imagination acts in a similar manner in the soul, and calls forms of life into existence. The spirit is the master, imagination the tool, and the body is the sculptural material." Such open-ended creative potential encodes an infinite variety of mythological interpretations, not just one.
"The primordial image is an inherited organization of psychic energy, an ingrained system, which not only gives expression to the energic process but facilitates its operation. It shows how the energic process has run its unvarying course from time immemorial, while simultaneously allowing a perpetual repetition of it by means of an apprehension or psychic grasp of situations so that life can continue into the future." CW6 ¶ 754
Once engaged, our maps of reality become filters which precondition every perception and experience of Reality. We must develop mental maps of reality that reflect the ongoing process revealed in each and every moment. Worldview coherence is reflected in the wisdom that self-arises in the presence of creativity, complexity, and play.
"The primordial images, in their totality, constitute a psychic mirror-world. It is a mirror with the peculiar faculty of reflecting the existing contents of consciousness not in their known and customary form but, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat as a million-year-old consciousness might see them. Such a consciousness would see the becoming and passing away of things simultaneously with their momentary existence in the present, and not only that, it would also see what was before their becoming and will be after their passing hence." CW6 ¶ 649
We philosophically neglect our perceptual faculties. We seldom recognize the structural effects of media consumption, such as illusory snapshots of idealized lives. Our perceptual faculties, rather than bending towards discovery of the truth, compulsively drive us to imagine a "better" life than we currently have.
In Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson said that "belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.” Once an idea becomes a belief there is no further thought given to that idea, now belief/dogma.
A loss of critical thinking is specifically a loss of questioning. And the nature of that questioning is ruthless self-examination. You cannot command a new idea to appear with will. The game forms the matrix for creative thinking, structuring your thinking for creative ideas and blended concepts.
Conceptual blending creates new ideas and insights by subconsciously combining two or more concepts in the same mental space. It's a natural tool of our everyday mind. The process of becoming is the essence of art and full spectrum consciousness.
Living Psyche
The new paradigm, hence metaphor, is 'cloud native' -- declarative programming, also called functional programming, a style of building that expresses logic without describing its control flow -- declarative pattern, pure function, immutability and side effects. Myth serves a function. Those functions are ‘events’ that orchestrate system behavior. The ‘system’ is destined to respond to synchronized triggers. Those triggering functions require an abstracted intent model. The god-image describes stages of human experience with the autonomous psyche.
Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme. Process philosophy seeks a return to a neo-classical realism that avoids subjectivism.
This reconciliation of the intuitions of objectivity and subjectivity, with a concern for scientific findings, produces the explicitly metaphysical speculation that the world, at its most fundamental level, is made up of momentary events of experience rather than enduring material substances. Process philosophy speculates that these momentary events, called “actual occasions” or “actual entities,” are essentially self-determining, experiential, and internally related to each other. https://www.iep.utm.edu/processp/
Know Thyself
The Socratic method is an art of self-education -- a way of living an open system of philosophical inquiry. It allows us to inquire from many vantage points, including "critical thinking”, “worldview”, “a Socratic perspective”, "wisdom”, “good life”, and “virtues.” Intellectual virtue has the ultimate goal of deepening intellectual courage and autonomy. To challenge our own premise requires us digging beneath our narcissism, persona, shadow, denial, self-delusions, and projections to the core of our issues.
Pierre Grimes describes how "practice is in realizing what triggers daydreams, what awakens us from the daydreams, patterns of occurrence, and the narrative/belief of the daydream itself in order to realize what it is that we've left unnoticed that we believe in that isn't True to our Self and Reality."
This is the domain of self-talk, false beliefs and cognitive distortions. False conceptions are unarticulated conclusions formed early in our lives. We can observe their effect on current problems. We identify with certain feelings, thoughts, memories, images of the self and through pulling the meaning from our own self.
Such interpretations can help or hinder our understanding. Concluding what something means stops the process cold at that point with a questionable a-ha moment, which may or may not be accurate, but can never contain the entire range of potentials. So, when we settle on a specific meaning to a dream or experience we paradoxically block the process.
We move through deconditioning, questioning our assumptions with frequent and honest scrutiny of our convictions. We reframe our view from several different angles and weigh them against one another in self-reflection. The “frameworks” of personal philosophy are linked to the meaning of life and life goals. Seeking coherence, compatibility, and meaning/goals are fundamental to achieving a “good life.”
This type of inquiry reveals us to ourselves, so we have insight what our opinions really amount to. Then we can confront and deconstruct our own dogmatism and articulate our own specific philosophical perspective. We can consider various ramifications and potential consequences, including those unforeseen. We learn to see how our conceptual metaphors shape our communication, thoughts, and actions. Our metaphors reveal subconscious or implicit habits of our minds.
The Game of Games is a blended space in which a physical environment and a virtual environment are deliberately integrated in a close knit way. The aim of blended space design is to provide the experience of feeling a sense of presence in the blended space, acting directly on the content of the blended space. There must be a physical space and a digital space. Clearly, the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.
In the context of blended space, new maps of meaning, the higher the communication between the physical and digital spaces, the richer the experience. Watch the way psyche produces what it produces and the imaginative figures. By virtue of the perfection of multiplicity everything turns whole and splendid. Stay in the imagination; stick with the image without interpretation.
In 'Mythic Figures', Hillman says, "A great question haunts me: If my mythical diagnosis is correct and Hermes is the god in the disease, then could Hermes be playing a computer/video game with the whole world? Is the future necessarily electronic, the New Age an information age of media, e-mails, spin, infotainment, virtual reality, cyberspace? Or could we be caught in a Hermes game … I do not mean the games the computer plays, but is Hermes, by means of the silicone chip, playing games with our human civilization? These suspicions come to mind. That they come to mind is further indication of the presence of Hermes/Mercurius, for deceit is as much his business as is business. We are suspicious not because we are Luddites and against technology, we are suspicious because part of hermetic awareness is to be awake to deception. Simul similibus curantur: Like cures like. To catch Hermes is to catch a thief and not only to catch a quick flash of inspiration."
Entering Through the Image
We enter the realm of psyche by 'becoming' images. James Hillman suggests more than making archetypes conscious. Imagination becomes a meeting place between the conscious and unconscious by entering the metaphor of the archetype, through which our soul is deepened by tending and attending to it. Soul operates through artistic being to overcome differences between the physical and symbolic. It potentiates the gamut of feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the physical.
Restoring image-sense helps rectify loss of soul. The metaphorical language of an image, its mythic and poetic basis, bridges the conscious and unconscious. This third world is the imaginal realm of archetypal figures and presence, our natural imaginative potentials, and visionary perception. It is incumbent on us to involve ourselves deeply and significantly in this abstract and representational realm, so the trans-rational can collapse the false distinction between self and Other.
Our minds are tuned to picturing -- both imaginatively and recollectively -- objects which derail us from the pursuits of truth and goodness, and instead encourage our searches for comfort and pleasure. We have to keep an open mind rather than making interpretations about the vastness emerging before us. Space is what connects everything and contains infinite information in high density. Blavatsky describes it:
“Those who "descend and ascend" — the incarnating Monads, and men striving towards purification and "ascending," but still not having quite reached the goal — may cross the "circle of the Pass-Not," only on the day "Be-With-Us"; that day when man, freeing himself from the trammels of ignorance, and recognizing fully the non-separateness of the Ego within his personality — erroneously regarded as his own — from the UNIVERSAL EGO (Anima Supra-Mundi), merges thereby into the One Essence to become not only one "with us" (the manifested universal lives which are "ONE" LIFE), but that very life itself.” (SD I, pp. 130-131)
If the power of a thing lies in its origin, the entire world's power lies in the cosmogony. If the Sacred established all valid patterns in the beginning, during the time recorded in myth, then the mythical age is sacred time — the only time that contains any value. Our lives only have value to the extent that they conform to the patterns of the mythical age. So, we express a "nostalgia for the origins", a yearning to return to the golden mythical age.
Life only has value in sacred time. If the sacred's essence lies only in its first appearance, then any later appearance must actually be the first appearance. Thus, an imitation of a mythical event is actually the mythical event itself, happening again — myths and rituals carry one back as vehicles of "eternal return" to the mythical age.
What is the origin myth of Crotona 2520? Plato’s Ideal City, in his Republic, had 2520 rings. What is the conscious experience of origins, including the sacred, the aesthetic, desire, and resentment? We must avoid unnecessary constructs, reifications, and assumptions about guiding and world-shaping models of Reality. Prof. Nixon notes, "The point of origin, however, remains the centripetal center of the present for the mythic mind, akin to the inspirations of poetry and the arts for us."
"Originary thinking draws the mind inexorably back toward its origin. It is memory as epistrophe. (Hillman, 1979; Nixon, 1995). In other words, thinking from or toward our origin is to legitimate our existence as thinking beings, as well as perhaps to guide us into the future."
Apocalypse or revealing is the flip side of creation myths. Do our reality maps help us penetrate the radiant matrix of present experience, arising spontaneously and revealing itself to us right now? Great art is transhistorical and touches imagination.
Art is a product of brain variability, subjective experiences, art creation, or variability in experience,, including juxtaposed oneiric images. The essence of a work of art is preserved while creating a work of art that forms through the state felt and perceived by the artist.
Disdaining any detached view of art, Antonin Artaud assimilates all art into a dramatic performance, an action, a surreal passion of the mind, authentic and brutal. The compendium of consciousness reflects and disgorges itself into the empty space of self-transcendence. Closing the gap between art and life destroys art while it universalizes it toward his ideal of the total art form.
Archetypal storytelling approaches deepen the structural elements of traditional storytelling. "The modern molecular biologist does not speak of religion but investigates the empirical basis of consciousness and the numinosum as states of psychobiological arousal that turn on gene expression and brain plasticity - the growth and transformations of neural networks throughout our lifetime (Cohen-Cory, 2002)."
Soul is our primary metaphor. Imagination is our organ of perception of soul. We see things through the perspective of soul, a world ensouled. This superhuman faculty forms images which go beyond reality. Plato stressed psychic forces as the source of creativity and ground of life and motion.
Land of the ancestors, psyche is a landscape of symbols providing insights and beliefs that later informed myth. Plural psyche is an imaginal network. Archetypal technique is a development tool, applied after laying the basic narrative down. We develop narrative elements that are symbolic vs. structural to satisfy our craving for meaning. We encounter the numinous in this creative, nonrational frame.
We displace our symbolic expressions into symbolic symptoms with symbolic psychophysical perceptions, emphasizing the perceptual nature of symbolic reasoning. We condense them with metaphors -- phenomenological themes and perceptions that introduce and introject symbolic finality into embedded tissue memory. The circuitry for gustatory and moral disgust is the same. A spiritual technology, or structure is a symbol that corresponds to the underlying reality of nature.
Jung said, “the daemonic is the not yet realized creative.” Perceptual diversity helps us access a variety of non-rational altered states of consciousness, including dreams, trance, imagination, divination, and meditation -- presentational illumination. Illumination is an experience, an opening of insight into your real nature. It is to be celebrated. Enlightenment is a pervasive stabilized "stateless state," an undifferentiated or deconditioned flow state.
Yet Hillman insists, "One cannot mirror if one too easily flows; and one cannot mirror everything, but only what one can receive and to which one is solidly present within the limits of one’s own borders. Mirroring is not blank receptivity; it requires focusing.” (Alchemical Psychology)
Transitional points express conflict between archetypal states of mind. They carry a high psychological charge. The transitional emotional situation between one archetypal state of mind and another is likely to be a prime location of the archetype, in cracks between the archetypal states of mind. The archetype is a liminal, boundary phenomenon, not teleological autonomisms but virtual forms of all potential knowledge and infinite learning.
Symbolic Revolution
Symbols and narrative are myth. We feel the symbol's most compelling meaning is just beyond reach like a parallel world. The symbol gathers the whole manifold of significances in one image that gives rise to thought and speech through concepts and syntax and the mystique of the nonrational -- a virtualization of experience to concepts.
Cosmology requires a context and a bridge to meaning. Images provide a semiotic context. The archetypal narrative structure is important to the meaning of the overall story, extending the functional into the symbolic. Narrative provides cohesion essential to existence. We became fully symbolic creatures with the first cave art. Jung viewed great art as an aperture to the incorporated unconscious mind -- an access state, frequency resonant and mimetically entrained.
The term "phenomenology" derives from the Greek words meaning phenomenon, logic, and heart. It is used to indicate the logic which is behind the phenomena of the heart. Recent research has shown that the heart reacts in advance to future stimuli and that a poor perception of feelings and emotions reduces the ability to decide advantageously and to finalize our behavior. In science the word phenomenology is often used to indicate mathematical theories that describe the logic that links observations and experiences.
"Interpretation inevitably brings in subjective factors and we necessarily find ourselves creating scenarios and looking inward into the contexts of the human heart to speculate on the prehistoric moment when imagination, conceptual thought, and abstract knowledge became possible. In other words, using the tools of our objective sciences, we create narratives of origin that attempt to exceed their own limitations by blending the objective with the subjective. Generative anthropology embraces such subjectivity and tends not to avail itself of such empirical data. It is instead an outstanding example of what might be seen as a more literary or even intuitional approach" (Greg Nixon, "Mortal Knowledge, the Originary Moment, and the Emergence of the Sacred").
We only perceive a tiny fraction of the information that is unconsciously available. Research suggests that all the information of the universe is holographically contained in each proton. If neural mass is equivalent to Planck mass there is strong connection of the structure of the Universe and the brain activity.
There are two kinds of geometry - physical geometry and field geometry which we cannot see directly, including temporal vectors. There is nothing there to physically quantify. Planck vibration, the smallest EMF oscillation, and the brain vibration can be described by the same second order Schrödinger equation and the synergetic geometry of the Vector Equilibrium Matrix (Fuller). We are connected to the universe at the Planck length.
We engage the other with art. Symbols and signs are not just a secret language; they are a new way of seeing things, not just with the eyes, but with the imagination -- not symbolic afterthoughts. When we know the symbol the way is easy. Our challenge is to synthesize powerful images and tropes arising from the unconscious and place them in a meaningful context.
Participatory hermeneutics is an act of play that is a powerful tool for individual and group transformation. Interpretive reflection is an innovative movement toward a more fluid, flexible and open being, where play become a practice. We lose our ordinary selves in the transport of play.
Play is a form of gnosis -- its own sphere of activity, absorption, devotion, and rapture. We are at the edge of the unknown, the precipice of social acceptability. Play is a participatory dialectic; the game is the 'other' with its own phenomenological structure, validity, and truth -- the liminal boundary of the imaginal domain. The body itself is the interface. Consciousness constitutes both the content and context of creative work.
In ancient times, games represented the materialization of the danger, drama and glory of war and death,” and could provide spiritual renewal. Estrangement arises when familiar ties are absent, detachment from comfortable assumptions. What is impossible to express drives us to attempt expressing what seems beyond us in art, thought, and noble living.
Imaginative Realist painters, sculptors, and gamers -- visionary inventors of new worlds -- use traditional realist techniques to create images of things that are not real but describe the unfamiliar, unreal and other-worldly -- fully conceived imaginative worlds.
The game challenges us to just hold the problem in the "mind's eye" and wait for interesting connections to bubble up from the unconscious. We have to hold the problems in mind -- while sleeping, walking in nature, in the shower, eating lunch, whatever.
Eventually the problem becomes our life. We may or may not solve them all, but will solve some of them. Much of the solution process is clearly unconscious, but every now and then a promising lead pops up out of the unconscious. We have to calculate to see if it really holds up or not.
We learn more effectively by doing, especially with contemporary digital media, in which participation is a type of cognitive investment. We engage differently when we are participants in the narrative, while it develops as part of our lived experience. Internet gaming shows the power of the co-created narrative where we not only become the subject matter, also become the gamed.
Its subject matter is sourced in imagery and literature including prehistory, Greek and Egyptian antiquity, and the recent past, using motifs that appear throughout the canon of art. Ancient mythology provides us with rich material that resonates with human experience. To cavalierly dismiss the stories of classical antiquity as a dead tradition is hubris.
In practice, games enter our reveries and dreams, both asleep and awake. In normal everyday life, nonconscious processes, intuition, metaphor, paradigmatic thinking and model-creation, as well as narrative thinking are used in an ordinary way. But ineffable 'not-knowing' lies beyond symbolization. Such objective uncertainty means there is no absolute truth. We learn to cultivate the ability to challenge everything we think we know. In “Night and The River;” Mary Oliver says, "Nothing’s important/except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,/of which this is a part,/not be denied."
What makes us re-conceive the way we see things? Only something radically different than our ordinary life does it. The solution to a riddle will not make sense if you haven't heard the riddle first. This model asks about the symbolic function of each act with the urge to create something incomprehensible. At the moment you do it, it brings some sort of relief, an exorcism, and that is why you do it. As we penetrate the magical world, it penetrates us.
Self-Taught Initiates
Our approach is Arts-based, grounded in our own way of being, emphasizing the importance of cosmological thinking and the need to ground in a metaphysical, philosophical framework. The arts express the scope of human experience around creativity, innovation, empathy, culture, and knowledge that is learned, expressed, and distributed for the collective and individual.
“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. Before this metaphysical reality we are all of us provincial....It's this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier-country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist." (Federico Fellini; quoted by John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous)
It treats the necessity for symbol and myth, the nature of the spirit, and language as a metaphorical vehicle of thought. The web is an instrument of mass communication. Our destination remains open-ended without fixating on anything. Images lead nowhere because they are always here and now.
The “language” of images includes visual images that we can see and touch. Music produces sounds that we hear and feel; poets use words to evoke imagined sensations, objects and emotions. Storytellers describe intangible and tangible realities such as people performing actions in physical and imaginal settings.
All narratives have intertextual elements by which we recognize story patterns and symbolic associations. Phenomenology refers to the world as perceived by the individual. We create our phenomenal world through the stories we tell, both to others about who we are, and for ourselves to learn who we are.
The narrative reality that we create is the construction of our reality. Storytelling is the most important activity in our lives -- how and why we tell ourselves stories, tell others stories about ourselves, and make up stories to make sense of the world around us.
As an organizing framework, artists perform three interrelated activities: (1) creation of aesthetic objects and artistic form (2) presentation of human experience for our contemplation; and (3) interpretation of the experiences they present. Perspective affects all three activities.
Form is secondary to the importance of the message of the universal themes about the internal struggle of individuals against themselves. What languages can we speak in order to make any useful content? The stagnant individual doesn't act as much as react against the environment encountered without convictions. It is escapist -- premature transcendental escape.
Awakening can happen to anyone, anywhere, at anytime, as a shift of consciousness, often accompanied by energy experiences -- all kinds of physical, emotional, mental and energetic phenomena–not all of which are pleasant.
Suddenly, all of the denied shadow aspects of psyche crush into awareness and consciousness. flooding us with too much energy, too much insight, and too much connection that can blow the mind out. Startling emotional and spiritual issues arise. The unprepared can become dissociated, fragmented, paranoid, delusional, schizophrenic, hyper-sensitive, or have serious so-called mental sicknesses.
We reinterpret archetypes like a musician or singer interprets musical works. There are endless possibilities of multiple interpretations and multiple stories from multiple viewpoints, each with their own tone, color, arc, and nuance. Magic is how to do thing with images that do things. "The way Magic works is to bring things together through their inherent similarity" (Marsilio Ficino, 1433–99).
As probability, interaction, and memory increase, unusual even improbable potentials arise in the interconnection and gaps between these states of stimulus and response. Where more than one reality exists, two conflicting realities could both be verifiably true at the quantum level.
Something similar occurs in altered states, including the transreality game world of other possibilities. But to be magic we have to bring back more than anecdotal or narrative stories that arise as choices for conducting our own observations from superpositions of states. Results can be correct and provable and still different from the observations of others.
"If he is to choose the path of magic then he must choose responsibly,
he must know enough about the labyrinth to walk a true path through it." -Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic: The Invisible Labyrinth (1990)
"I thought that I had found my way to the center of the Invisible Labyrinth; and I had — perhaps — discovered no more than the entrance. Watch my dust.... There is no walking backwards, and I am lost in the Labyrinth Invisible. I cannot retrace my steps. I wrote my name on the wall of the Invisible Labyrinth. I was so diligent in my studies; gave my whole time and heart to the pursuit. I wrote my name but I can find it no longer; My ashes blow like dust around the Invisible Labyrinth." -Neil Gaiman in The Books of Magic: The Invisible Labyrinth (1999)
"There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth."
Jorge Luis Borges, "Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth", in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Smart Play
Archetypal strategies develop the detail and illuminate the web-like pattern of connections between initiatory structural elements that go beyond mere metaphysics. Articulating these patterns, existential rhythms, the symbolic nature of structures, and the depth of the meaning of story becomes visible, beyond superficial articulations of a common deep structure. We comprehend the meaning of symbols that are new, as well as those that are known -- the context of encoding sequential structure and conceptual meaning.
The four elements of nature -- fire, earth, water and air, plus spirit-ether -- form the foundation that bridges our mundane existence to a bigger cosmological and universal reality. Nature (Isis), the mother of all things, is the mistress of the elements. To contemplate the Mystery is to participate in it -- the incomparable radiance of the soul's dawning.
Secret, secret; hidden, hidden,
That one does not know, that one does not know,
Never, never!
Who approaches this Soul? .. .
Whence does he come, the one
Who ascends toward this Soul
That a high knoll conceals?
—Secret thing That we know not!
Open to me!
Verily, I am someone worthy of esteem,
I am someone who knows how to keep a secret.
For me the gates of Heaven and Earth have opened wide.
Are you someone who knows how to keep a secret? To experience the creative power, the initiates go down inside Earth's body, to lose themselves in her darkness, to regain life. The long psychic night of the initiatory process is a return to the sources. It is there that we bathe ourselves and emerge with eyes opened to the Great Light, “awakened,” in illumination.
Evolutionary games have different rules, payoffs, and behaviors. Each "game" represents different problems that we have to deal with: social dilemmas, isolation, internal equilibrium, deviation, defection, frequency of strategy change, and the strategies we might adopt to survive.
Initiation means constantly renewing regeneration. The functional aspect of initiation is its ritualistic structure, as it is in game play: preparation, phases of existence, ethical philosophy, and dramatic form intended to play on the whole emotional gamut. Gods are functions. Transitional rites mimic initiatory death and resurrection. The Egyptians equated their concrete conception of the underworld with a psychic realm of mystery and death.
The independent path requires a conscious understanding of spiritual realities and understanding of the full context of spiritual practices. True esoteric initiation is an induction into gnosis, the innate knowledge of sacred nature, defining the origin of the universe; of humanity; of the nature of birth and death; of the manifestations of natural phenomena; and life after this one -- the Great Journey.
In “The Middle Way” by Radha Burnier: "Hearing the term “the razor-edged path,” one might think it is the most dangerous, but it is the safest of all paths because it is where a complete equilibrium is preserved and therefore there is complete security. It is a path where there is a profound peace, a path where there is absolute harmony. If you stray from that path, get lost in the surroundings, and find other paths, there maybe conflict, there may be hesitation, but when you tread the middle path, it is secure, because it is one-pointed and in it, harmony can be found from the beginning to the end."
Media Dreams
Prof. Stephen Schafer says the cognitive unconscious has "access to multidimensional cognitive fields [patterns of cognitive meaning]" providing "infinite potential for self-realization and the discovery of meaning." He implies archetypes are "super-human fields of sentience." He also suggests "sentient media," designing ethical structures for social influence, probing cognitive consciousness, and "correlating the dynamics of the Media-sphere with the dynamics of universal sentience."
"Perhaps the Soul may be viewed in terms of a benign coherent bandwidth of sentience within a hierarchy of frequencies. Maintenance of contact with this Hierarchy of evolved beings could provide guidance to the collective human “personality”. In the ancient mysteries these sentient states are considered “transcendent” which means they transcend the lower personality in terms of motive and method."
Schafer's Generating a Superconductive Culture of Conscience (2018) asks: "During the beginnings of an age of illusion, how is a conscientious soul to discern the truth? At a time when the infinite illusions of the collective unconscious are constantly projected into the superconductive Media-sphere and from there translated into perceived reality where they become cultural worldviews, how can the benign soul make authentic choices? With hindsight about the predictable fallibility of human perceptions, delinquencies, and self-serving choices and actions, how can righteous laws be designed? In an era of technologically amplified lies where a kleptocratic oligarchy of the moneyed elite understands the dynamic whereby lies become true, what are the potentials for realizing a global, superconductive culture of conscience? What are the chances for survival of life on Earth? What are the prospects for maintenance of the dignity of all life in a Psychecology? What generative powers within the psyche collude to create you and me? And what do these cryptic powers have to say about our humanity, our imagination or the emotional logic of the human heart?"
The Game, as a representational model, investigates the production of meaning through several themes. Art and games are ritual technologies, which elicit and support soul-tending. They are conveyed using works of art and artistic assertions, such as the intensity of contrast, expansion of the work, and inexhaustibility. Its coherence and sovereignty are not subordinate to external ends, maximizing relevant possibilities. Play takes less repetitions to create new neurons than work.
Artists are self-starters. A main assertion is the transformation of identity through artistic practice -- Self-initiation by self-transformation or self-aware rebirth. It is a long-standing tradition that philosophy is the art of self-initiation. Initiation stages the imagination and fuels inspiration.
A Hermetic initiatory hymn called "The Secret Sermon on the Mountain," has the sub-heading "Concerning Rebirth and the Promise of Silence." This Rebirth or Regeneration as a spiritual being is the mystery of Spiritual Birth or Birth from Above, following the material Birth from Below, the secret of genesis.
Hermes tells Tat, there is no one Song of the Powers, no written or oral secret; no manuscript, oral tradition, or physically uttered hymn: "full well did He know that I should of myself be able to learn all, and see all things. He left to me the making of fair things. Wherefore the Powers within me, e'en as they are in all, break into song."
"The Song can be sung in many modes and many tongues, according to the inspiration of the illumined singer. The man who is reborn becomes a psalmist and a poet, for now is he tuned in harmony with the Great Harmony, and cannot do otherwise than sing God's praises. He becomes a maker of hymns and is no longer a repeater of the hymns of others."
The process of Individuation is what Jung called initiation by the Self as the totality of psychic processes. The soul calls for expanded experiences and can function as guide without gurus, priests, or psychologists for support.
Works of art make implied assertions about reality, morality and values. What really exists, and what is its nature? What constitutes right and wrong behavior? What really matters, and what matters most and least? Art constructs realities that prevail in human life. We might wonder as games get closer to our perception of reality, does our perception of reality get closer to games?
Deep understanding facilitates re-write by adding the texture, detail, and richness of this development work onto the page, including predictive and worldview changing ability. It functions as an unseen scaffolding, focusing on questions of world, theme, motif, image, and symbol.
Archetypal storytelling kickstarts the process that drives storytelling strategy. The first storytellers, the Renaissance artists, Freud and Jung spoke of the sacred myths and old stories to renew their imagination.
Fearful Symmetry
"Symmetry also exists in number theory, which concerns itself with the properties of numbers. This symmetry is violated or hidden from us, by certain habits of thought; only a small number of people, whose minds work somewhat differently, can see this symmetry."
-Joe P. Buhler Science 85, Nov.
Why Crotona 2520? Pythagoras united arithmetic, geometry, and music with harmonic intervals. It is a Pythagorean triple: 71, 2520, 2521. We can understand numbers and the prime number enigma through geometry. The Seed of Life or Genesis Pattern = 7 circles at 360 = 2520 (2 + 5 + 2 = 9). 2520 / 4.8 Hz = 525 (12 or 3) and 2520 / 2.4 = 1050 (6) and 2520 / 1.2 = 2100 (3). It resonates with 12 Hz at its 210th harmonic (2 + 1 = 3).
The numbers 2520 and its half, 1260, permeated music theory long before Pythagoras. The reflective patterns of which these two numbers are a vital element, closely parallel the reflective patterns in J.S. Bach's Retrograde Fugue, Crab Canon. Musicians and musicologists may find these correlations worth investigating.
Plato knew about the number 2520 as 7 x 360 and 10 x 252, 360 x 7 = 2520. Plato populates his “Ideal City” with 5040 symbolic people, which is 2520 x 2. 2520 is related to John Dee’s Magistral Number 252. It reveals hidden symmetries in natural number dynamics, and is the first number divisible by all digits. “SABBATIZAT”, 7 years x 360 days = 2520 days, symbolizes a creative gestation period.
Blake asks the question implying the awesome and sublime, "What immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" We call this magic integer that synchronize all the base digits the Auric Key, of cycles reflecting other cycles. It models the dynamics of energetic inflow and outflow, or entrances and exits of energy in natural process. Starting at 12 and multiplying the primes in their natural order yields 2520. These finite circular unities reveal a rational distribution of prime numbers. 12 is also the base number of the dodecahedron, rhombic dodecahedron, and cuboctahedron.
This most economical number contains a spherical mandala -- the self-mirroring 2520 wheel. It reveals perfect symmetrical patterns over 7 cycles of 360 each in a spiral of numbers 1 - 2520 with primes on the 56 radial axes. The natural rhythm of numbers is symmetry and reflection, so 2520 reflected is 0252 or simply 252. The “sychrostats” are multiples of 210 and correspond to the 12 zodiacal signs: 12 x 210 = 2520.
The 56-radii spiral arrangement to 2520 matrix is the minimum necessary to disclose patterns of relationship in the qualitative field. Rational pi makes the perimeter of the circle an integral number of 56 times the length of the radii. Rational pi is involved in the essential structure of number. 3.1111111 divided by 2520 = 0.001234567. Adding the sum of the first nine multiples of 56 yields the first number divisible by all base digits: 2520.
The equation 7 x 360 = 2520, a complete number, shows an important relationship of seven to the circumference of a circle and to the inherent structure of number. There are numbers with interesting properties which may be found by adding columns from the table of sevens, multiples of 56. This reflection sequence is bounded by the number 2520.
Another Auric Key is the number 56. The architecture of Stonehenge is based on a circle divided into 56 sections. 56 x 45 = 2520, and 45 and 56 appear in the exact middle of a list of the factors of 2520. Perhaps, unknown architects who built Stonehenge used 56 as a practical reduction from an ideal circle of 2520 subsections. When numbers spiral along 56 radii, the coded pattern reverses itself at the midpoint, 1260, and forms its perfect reciprocal reflection.
In The Myth of Invariance, Ernest McClain states: 1260 = 2 x 3 x 5 x 7 shows a musical theorist how the sacred number 7 generates along with the ‘human’ 5 and the ‘divine’ 3; thus it reveals a basic lesson in mathematical harmonics suppressed in the Reg Veda except by allusion, yet essential to the understanding of ‘Tenness’ in all ancient cosmology.
The exemplary 2520, the “omnisychronistic module”, is the number that accommodates or synchronizes the maximum possible amount of consecutive numbers from 1 onwards. There are larger numbers, but none with as high degree a factor of divisibility.
The archetypal number, the Auric Key dovetails with Buckminster Fuller's geometric modelling of 252 closest-packed-spheres, a formation of cuboctahedral shells: 1 – 12 – 42 – 92 – 162 – 252 etc. of 2, 3, 4, and 5 frequency shells. 252 spheres in Layer 5 ... 4 pairs of tip-to-tip tetrahedra assemble into a cuboctahedron, truncated cube, or vector equilibrium matrix of shape-shifting Platonic solids.
This is the proper alchemical squaring of the circle, which is actually a cube. 5040 is applied to squares for The Star of the Magi. A circle with an area of 5040 has a diameter near 80, and a circumference of 252, theosophically reducible to 9. The quadrature of the circle discerns the polar axis of infinity.
This VEM geometry, a cuboctahedron with 12 vertices whose dual is the octahedron, was called, "Nature's operating system," by B. Fuller. Miller (1981) identified it also as the Diamond Body geometry in the Tree of Life. It is fundamentally related to the Seed of Life and Flower of Life of sacred geometry, the Fruit of Life (Metatron's Cube), and the Fibonacci Sequence. It is a vector map of how Nothing becomes Something by crossing the threshold of manifestation, the barrier of brightness between virtual and luminous photons, between the virtual vacuum and manifestation of form.
Joseph Campbell wrote about the universal journey pattern: "Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss." --2520
Gravitational Fields by Sam Farrand
Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism. Artist: Peter Paul Rubens. Belgium.
DIGITAL METAMORPHOSIS
Mystery, Memory, & Transformation
Mystery, Memory, & Transformation
Michael Durst art
MediaTrix
Metamorphosis of the Gods
"A mood of universal destruction and renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science… So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human." --Jung, 1957: 585
Jung's “metamorphosis of the gods" is "an expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing,” that helps us understand and come to terms with social change with its uncertainties, doubts, and stress. Yet we must embrace what we do not know. Metamorphosis is a change -- a transformation of psychophysical form.
Jung's view includes not only psychic multiplicity and psychological becoming, but in-depth personality transformation. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, certain gods and goddesses had the ability to change form, a mythological not psychological transformation. But metamorphosis is more than a psychological concept, more than metaphorical. Pythagoras knew change is inevitable.
Many myths feature characters who exhibit common symptoms of modern behavioral and mental disorders through their actions and choices. In fact, much of our society is pathological. Cure or change is not so much about illness but transformation of consciousness after undergoing a pathos or initiatory ordeal.
We are in a Renaissance of expression, metaphorical perspectives that revision world phenomena as images. It is a countermove to the sheer volume of collective image-glut that leads to the rapid evolution of collective consciousness. Our response is unprecedented creativity, a process of metamorphosis in the social fabric through images of transition. Our subjective imaginings and expressions ripple through the social fabric of all disciplines. This has been called the central planet-saving activity of our precarious but vital times. Metamorphosis of the mind is instantaneous.
MediaTrix
Metamorphosis of the Gods
"A mood of universal destruction and renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science… So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human." --Jung, 1957: 585
Jung's “metamorphosis of the gods" is "an expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing,” that helps us understand and come to terms with social change with its uncertainties, doubts, and stress. Yet we must embrace what we do not know. Metamorphosis is a change -- a transformation of psychophysical form.
Jung's view includes not only psychic multiplicity and psychological becoming, but in-depth personality transformation. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, certain gods and goddesses had the ability to change form, a mythological not psychological transformation. But metamorphosis is more than a psychological concept, more than metaphorical. Pythagoras knew change is inevitable.
Many myths feature characters who exhibit common symptoms of modern behavioral and mental disorders through their actions and choices. In fact, much of our society is pathological. Cure or change is not so much about illness but transformation of consciousness after undergoing a pathos or initiatory ordeal.
We are in a Renaissance of expression, metaphorical perspectives that revision world phenomena as images. It is a countermove to the sheer volume of collective image-glut that leads to the rapid evolution of collective consciousness. Our response is unprecedented creativity, a process of metamorphosis in the social fabric through images of transition. Our subjective imaginings and expressions ripple through the social fabric of all disciplines. This has been called the central planet-saving activity of our precarious but vital times. Metamorphosis of the mind is instantaneous.
"Divine sound is the cause of all manifestation. The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe.'
~Hazrat Inayat Khan
Keywords: Digital Games, Cryptology, Quest, Treasure Hunt, Cognitive Liberty, Media Studies, Consciousness Studies, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Esoterics, Paradigm Shift, Archaeology, Aesthetics, Musicology, Ethics, Dark Web
The cry of Post-Postmodern art is "NOMO POMO: Stop! We've had enough!" We're full of appropriations, sampling, graffiti, data glut, quick-cut image glut, new media and new protocols. We’ve seen so much cool it’s left us cold. We've Flashed into a collective spasm that verges on panic. We can't fight or flee the technological juggernaut, and why should we? The price of entry to this Brave New World is surrender of your belief barrier. We can use new media as our medium for self-expression, joyously making technological and experiential works, body-based works, and mythopoetic works. They aren't machine-made; they are informed, considered executions of our vision, not just mechanical programs or aesthetic accidents. Art connected to Source and the zeitgeist of its times has a living taproot in the matrix of evolution. There is as much unlimited digital aesthetic content as there is in nature. Our works "work" when they work themselves through our culture, based on that culture's underlying psychological need. They become meaningful if perceived as carrying revelatory weight that somehow illuminates our collective lives. They may not be "true", but good things come of this generative vision, reaffirming and celebrating our humanity. To be art, it just has to be significant, reflecting or steering culture. As artists, we use our own experiential vision to create perceptual embodiments in our medium of choice. We can still take a fresh look at the world, inspired by the entire spectrum of human artistic endeavor, without resurrecting or imitating the past, but taking it that strategic step further with contextualized elements. We have attained a degree of technological sophistication to open most, if not all, of the new realms to the creative process. Unexplored media in the quantum paintbox include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnotism, which assault as many of the senses and emotions as possible in order to break open the door of the five senses and drive our audience into the infinitude beyond, newer vistas of participatory experience and expression.
******
PREFACE
Future-Molding Game Aesthetic
"When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival . . . an escape from contemporary conflicts into mythologies and speculations of a fantasy world." (Hillman, 1975/1992, p. 27)
~Hazrat Inayat Khan
Keywords: Digital Games, Cryptology, Quest, Treasure Hunt, Cognitive Liberty, Media Studies, Consciousness Studies, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Esoterics, Paradigm Shift, Archaeology, Aesthetics, Musicology, Ethics, Dark Web
The cry of Post-Postmodern art is "NOMO POMO: Stop! We've had enough!" We're full of appropriations, sampling, graffiti, data glut, quick-cut image glut, new media and new protocols. We’ve seen so much cool it’s left us cold. We've Flashed into a collective spasm that verges on panic. We can't fight or flee the technological juggernaut, and why should we? The price of entry to this Brave New World is surrender of your belief barrier. We can use new media as our medium for self-expression, joyously making technological and experiential works, body-based works, and mythopoetic works. They aren't machine-made; they are informed, considered executions of our vision, not just mechanical programs or aesthetic accidents. Art connected to Source and the zeitgeist of its times has a living taproot in the matrix of evolution. There is as much unlimited digital aesthetic content as there is in nature. Our works "work" when they work themselves through our culture, based on that culture's underlying psychological need. They become meaningful if perceived as carrying revelatory weight that somehow illuminates our collective lives. They may not be "true", but good things come of this generative vision, reaffirming and celebrating our humanity. To be art, it just has to be significant, reflecting or steering culture. As artists, we use our own experiential vision to create perceptual embodiments in our medium of choice. We can still take a fresh look at the world, inspired by the entire spectrum of human artistic endeavor, without resurrecting or imitating the past, but taking it that strategic step further with contextualized elements. We have attained a degree of technological sophistication to open most, if not all, of the new realms to the creative process. Unexplored media in the quantum paintbox include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnotism, which assault as many of the senses and emotions as possible in order to break open the door of the five senses and drive our audience into the infinitude beyond, newer vistas of participatory experience and expression.
******
PREFACE
Future-Molding Game Aesthetic
"When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival . . . an escape from contemporary conflicts into mythologies and speculations of a fantasy world." (Hillman, 1975/1992, p. 27)
, --,
WHAT CONFUSES YOU IS JUST
THE NATURE OF MY GAME
CROTONA 2520, 2.0
(Based on an Almost True Story)
"You have all wondered who we are," it reads in part, "and so we shall now tell you. We are an international group. We have no name. We have no symbol. We have no membership rosters. We do not have a public website and we do not advertise ourselves. We are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves, much like you have, by completing this recruitment contest, and we are drawn together by common beliefs. A careful reading of the texts used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs: that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end, that censorship is wrong and that privacy is an inalienable right."
This essay unpacks the story behind the story of the world's biggest Mystery game. Mystery originally meant secret, but came to include puzzle or enigma. "One of the most mysterious puzzles in internet history", Crotona 2520 is an augmented reality game more grounded in real life than a mediated illusion, or the pervasive game genre. This is transreality gaming.
Radical Immersion
This magic circle is global, expanded beyond its usual boundaries, spatially, temporally, and socially. Transmodernism follows postmodernism with an optimistic universalism. It reclaims a firm foundation in esoterics from the past marrying it with activist visionary foresight and transformation through emergent works.
Like the medieval artistae whose medium was the sacred art of alchemy, we pursue the philosophical gold to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary -- emergent poetics. Alchemy combines Greek rational philosophy and Egyptian technology, including induction of altered states of consciousness that mimicked near-death experiences. Anguish helps us nourish the art to find the cutting edge.
Art needs the Abyss, the presence of death, for us to meet our own feelings, our depth. The personal epic, besides public and political, is a long poetic narrative of our interior life and actions, mental and emotional states, and access to non-ordinary realities.
As poets, we aren't heroic, but represent, comprehend, and illuminate the age with psychological narrative. Such adaptive systems help us navigate the chaos of our complex environment and clarify the contingencies of the present. We can imagine that what makes a mental state conscious is the fact that the subject is aware of being in that mental state.
Visionary alchemists might be aptly characterized as activists, "Free Radicals." This proto-science has no priesthood nor hierarchy, relying heavily on intuitive thinking and direct inspiration. They communicate as peers, fellow experimentalists, and colleagues in a non-hierarchical way through cryptic cipher texts with allegorical and analogical artwork.
Alchemists do bootstrap on one another's efforts in this ultimately individual pursuit, that is necessarily subjective yet universal. We intentionally engage the participatory field of consciousness to perform the Opus, or Great Work. The boundaries of the magic circle are blurred and made permeable.
Archetypes have a role in creating game processes and influence the game realms and archetypal narrative. Our nature is conditioned by archetypes, with their own autonomy and domains. Task-based learning develops our capacity to observe these universal forces interacting with our personality. 'I' is a construct of self-image we rarely match because of self-delusion; we remain unconscious of those personality distortion roots.
The game maps onto the real world and exists co-temporally with all the events of real life, unraveling the mystery. The game maps onto generic taxonomies of states of consciousness. There is a plethora of semantic constructs that lack a unified definition and taxonomy, but no consensual paradigm, no frame for all theoretical considerations.
Metacognitive Self-Regulatory Mental Capacity
New lexicons define and categorize extraordinary experiences and meditation methods, including the conceptual focus of attention, open presence, and the cognitive strategy employed. Method and state are separate stages in a dynamic process which unfolds over time.
Giftedness is the manifestation of performance that is clearly at the upper end of the distribution in a talent domain even relative to other high-functioning individuals in that domain. Further, giftedness can be viewed as developmental. In the beginning stages, potential is the key variable; in later stages, achievement is the measure of giftedness; and in fully developed talents, eminence is the basis on which this label is granted.
Giftedness (a) reflects the values of society; (b) is typically manifested in actual outcomes, especially in adulthood; (c) is specific to domains of endeavor; (d) is the result of the coalescing of biological, pedagogical, psychological, and psychosocial factors; and (e) is relative not just to the ordinary (e.g., a child with exceptional art ability compared to peers) but to the extraordinary (e.g., an artist who revolutionizes a field of art).
The arts of the self are self-awareness (meta-awareness), self-regulation and self-transcendence. We can modulate self-specifying and narrative self-networks. Neurobiological correlates are associated with most of these stages of existential awareness. The struggle is to formulate a universally acceptable taxonomy of enhanced cognition, affect, and numinous effects -- the phenomenal content of our functional essence.
The material world has a mythic nature with its dangers and ambiguous promise. There is a war between the old and the new. In a hidden world where magic is real, the Old Gods fear irrelevance amid the growing power of the New Gods, including Technology and Media.
We experience the muse, daemon, or 'angels' of creativity in their divine autonomy. Thus, the art of understanding nature and our own nature, is a way to mirror and care for the soul with chemical, psychophysical, mythical, and cosmological aspects. Soul as center of our inquiry and practice speaks to us meaningfully through imagery, the wisdom of the heart, through which we remember our naked connection to the cycles of nature and rhythms of the Earth.
The deeply and broadly technically skilled person is reflexively orientated. They ethically and participatively explore the big picture and prioritize, choose, design and enacts forward wisely by creatively developing world transforming prototypes. Myth creates the vision of a future perfect world. Why do we quest? As Hermann Hesse says in Siddhartha:
“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
“When someone seeks, then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
Multidimensional Realities
More than finding the tangible treasure, the hidden process of the game is about finding oneself. The way a player experiences and envisions this process may have similarities with the way they comprehend and enjoy music.
Mythic events burst through the status quo. Myth forces a certain "truth." We cannot escape myth. Myth reveals the character of reality yet it is not of this realm. Myth must be uncovered. It is a primal active force in the world and the missing dimension in the dynamic interplay of politics. Myth is a common unifying principle. Myth permeates our understanding of our past, present and potential.
The game space is the imaginal domain, symbolic representation of a player's inner concerns; the narrative itself represents the ways in which we deal these unconscious contents. Encrypted clues are embedded online and in global locales. Physical locations are included in game play. The material world has a mythic nature with its dangers and ambiguous promise. The puzzle captures the imagination long before the solver gets it.
The game and life bleed together so that game becomes heavy with the reality of life, and life becomes charged with the meaning of the game. The game pervades life and life becomes the game. It is a new imaginal arena, an imaginal way to evoke and drive mythic fantasy. We share symbols because our brains all function in a certain way, not because we are connected by some magical force.
Archetypal fantasy is an attunement, a psychic factor of insight. Without that no one levels up from their personal unconscious. These are the places where corrupt twisted desires are displayed in their most vulgar and unfiltered form, conjured by their own delusions and obsessions.
New tools mean new vision and new practices for collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Crotona 2520 was conceived and executed as an outlier -- completely removed from the Xbox commercialism of the gaming industry. It was not commodified, but something completely different. It is not a videogame culture. It is not an online universe but the real cosmos.
Crotona 2520 is a game of arcane secrets, metaphysical reference points and magical possibilities. Future-molding game play is a magic circle in which the archetypes arise, bidden or unbidden, unfolding the basic themes of our lives and conflicts of our culture. Choosing to participate in the game is choosing to participate in the eternity dimension of here and now that is the function of life.
The game vastly broadens the psychic field. It resonates with the players through their personal challenges. We partake of parallel story lines we identify with that are collective. Player experience moves through attention and absorption to immersion and flow, realizing a participation in both eternity and time.
Invisible forces of the psyche take on form. Ritual brings the game into enactments. The player enacts a dramatic performance through play that is soul enriching and enlivening. We play the game much like we navigate our dreams to other inaccessible realities unfolding in the metaverse.
We enact mythic scenarios embedded in the archaic unconscious. We are reminded of our mythical existence. Myths are fractal forms and efficient dynamics that repeat recursively in a self-similar way, economic at all scales to infinity. You create the forms as you zoom into it and focus attention.
Unlike theatre, there may be real life consequences for actions within the game space, which can amplify pathological behavior in deeply flawed characters or deviant community participants. Many are falling apart in the individual world, the culture, and the natural world.
The world is very different from what we thought it was. T.S. Elliot suggests, in Burnt Norton, "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable."
We live in a holographic universe where all things are connected with all other things, and where consciousness is nonlocal and ultimately one. Our life is part of an infinite cycle of existence in spacetime, as well as beyond spacetime.
If we succeed, we 'see through' like the Oracle or Priestess not only to the story behind the story, but divine its superpositions and unfolding future. McLuhan said, "The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only one living in the present. Ordinary people live thirty years back in a state of motivated somnambulism." If we don't level up, we can fragment into a split- off fantasy.
This mystery is rooted in a synthesis of philosophy and aesthetics in spoken and unspoken languages. It is the self-organizing creation and participatory engagement of a new myth -- a mythical domain, sharing symbolic meaning, fantasy, and rituals. Things are never literally what they seem in a world of wonders. This challenges our mundane positions, habits, and defenses. The archaic mind mirrors the modern, exposing the subtext if life.
Crotona 2520 is a game for soul. As enactments, games are the theatre of the soul. Virtual psyche comes into play, bringing individual and cultural unconscious impulses into consciousness through personification, regression, pathologizing, archetypal influence, and meaning-making within virtual play.
Psyche at play is a way of soul-tending while exploring the imaginal domain filled with pathos and unconscious content. Every line of code unfolds the environment. Psyche engineers, performs, and reflects the game play. Meaning resides in the interface.
Basically, there are three ways of encountering the inner world, reflecting the state of consciousness of the seeker: 1). prototaxic mode, a "possession" or trance state where the ego is absent through regression; 2). parataxic mode, which includes art, archetype, myth, dream, and ritual wherein the ego is enthralled; and 3). syntaxic mode, which includes creativity, gnosis, and higher mystical states, where the ego is enraptured and eventually transcended.
In play, we express the deep longings of the unconscious and the potential of soul-making. Such play consciously and unconsciously evokes archetypes and creates meaning. Learning arises in play. Play is an enactment of the irrational psyche, an imaginal transformation. Myth has an active period of psychic eruption and imaginative overflow, and a subsequent period of extinction and disintegration.
An archetype inevitably succumbs to metaphysical concretism, the tendency to view phenomena literally rather than metaphorically. The qualitative aspect it appears in clings to it, so that it cannot be described at all except as specific phenomenology. The archetypes determine which archetypal dramas will be played out for them to express their essence in game play.
Conscious and unconscious fantasies are braided into myth. Myth can seize and influence psychic life. They engage our psychological complexes. modes of perception, and transformative eperiences. Our archaic nature arises in digital play. Play creates a self-image different from our ordinary self in potentials and future possibilities.
Crotona 2520's raison d'etre is a frequency Renaissance. Its purpose is human survival. Its mission is a search for soul. The metaphorical view is Hermetic. The unspoken objective of Crotona 2520, a silicon Hermes, is to watch the psychological effects, including digital dependence, on our own consciousness. We now, accidentally or intentionally, help create a collective unconscious with a visible presence and massive direct and indirect effect on all culture.
The story world is an imaginal world. The procedural rhetoric is decryption, 'finding' what has been concealed. The game is a procedural understanding of reality, a navigable space. You create the form and that form is a statement. The transreality interaction platform enables the game, spanning physical and virtual realities.
The essence of the game bridges the outside and the inside. Game-worlds collide with the real world. Clues make the two worlds collide. We are immersed in interactive psyche, the interface of the merger between the player and the game. What happens when the magical circle is dissolved?
The Seeker is the archetypal Fool, the Wanderer in the domain of the deep psyche. When the seeker finds a key, they know that a door is hidden somewhere, and a closed door is “waiting” to be opened with the right key. The meta-programmer is an inter-disciplinary network. There is no Romantic terror of human cognition nor need for anti-technical transcendence. For good or ill, direct interface is on the horizon.
The magic circle that separates the fantasy world from the outside world dissolves: perceived space (how we interpret space), conceived space (space of science and rationality), and lived space (the space where we live), and digital space. Lived space is a by-product of digital space, a new world of experience.
The realtime of the game narration can be accelerated, collapsed, or compressed. The game can take seconds, weeks, or years to affect the seeker. You have to bring your own self as the center of the universe to the game. Who doesn't want to be the Reality-winner?
Robert Anton Wilson said, "Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don't even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is Reality."
Semiotics is an investigation into how meaning is created and how meaning is communicated, a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols, their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages. It includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.
Myths are a combination of paradigms and syntagms that make up an oft-told story with elaborate cultural associations. Codes are a combination of semiotic systems, a supersystem, that function as general maps of meaning, belief systems about oneself and others, which imply views and attitudes about how the world is and/or ought to be. Ideologies are codes that reinforce or are congruent with structures of power by creating forms of "common sense".
Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself with self-awareness and self-responsibility. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is beyond aesthetic because it is more than skin deep and touches something in us. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
The epic journey is a search for soul, a search for self, a challenge or mission to find what cannot be found in the ordinary world. When the soul becomes our central trope, we find our opus, the hidden agenda of being. Life itself is initiating us.
It is not a Role Play game, though some players mask themselves behind avatars for anonymity. Rather than anti-scientifically considering cognition and technofacility an anti-artistic dirty little secret, multimedia embraces the fusion. Visionary art is a process of Self-Actualization. Artists individuate in expressing their original statement that also speaks to the collective consciousness.
Art-Centered Approach
"There was a passionate craving among all ... [intelligentsia] ... for a means to express their new concepts. They longed for philosophy, for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar broke through the barriers of his specialty and tried to advance into the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences." ~Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop . Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species' of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.
Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown' has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, games, and even more arcane forms.
Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,' including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. As in chaos theory, all the creative action is at the boundary, the creative threshold.
Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.
The effect is moreso when a movement or school of artistic expression is involved (complex feedback loops) as the reality morphing effect increases exponentially. Artists reflect and influence one another. Arguably, artists demonstrate where society may be heading. They haunt the psychic and perceptual frontiers, drawing the future into the now. How many cultural revolutions have begun in artists’ communities?
Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.
Free style is an intuitive act that is at once intentionally connective with source and presence, thus freeing and directing that which is inside desiring to emerge: meta-creativity. Freestyle breaks free from the vault of derivative, corporate, or audience-driven formula production. After all, it takes risk to either succeed or fail.
This is the source of artistic and scientific freedom. We must trust the process; trust our own vision; the womb of our subconscious that gives birth to full-blown ideas and inspirations. Freedom of expression means each artist is free to create their own style, weaving into the existing genres of expression, combining, contrasting and injecting their own unique rhythms, modulations, and vision by working at their dynamic edge.
Free style results may be concrete or ephemeral, but the drive comes from a committed perspective on the fundamental nature of reality and our nature. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic. The art of survival equals the survival of art.
Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness, getting” the Big Picture, and perhaps doing something about it.
It is in finding meaning and expressing that meaning that we exalt our humanity in our individuation. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
WHAT CONFUSES YOU IS JUST
THE NATURE OF MY GAME
CROTONA 2520, 2.0
(Based on an Almost True Story)
"You have all wondered who we are," it reads in part, "and so we shall now tell you. We are an international group. We have no name. We have no symbol. We have no membership rosters. We do not have a public website and we do not advertise ourselves. We are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves, much like you have, by completing this recruitment contest, and we are drawn together by common beliefs. A careful reading of the texts used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs: that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end, that censorship is wrong and that privacy is an inalienable right."
This essay unpacks the story behind the story of the world's biggest Mystery game. Mystery originally meant secret, but came to include puzzle or enigma. "One of the most mysterious puzzles in internet history", Crotona 2520 is an augmented reality game more grounded in real life than a mediated illusion, or the pervasive game genre. This is transreality gaming.
Radical Immersion
This magic circle is global, expanded beyond its usual boundaries, spatially, temporally, and socially. Transmodernism follows postmodernism with an optimistic universalism. It reclaims a firm foundation in esoterics from the past marrying it with activist visionary foresight and transformation through emergent works.
Like the medieval artistae whose medium was the sacred art of alchemy, we pursue the philosophical gold to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary -- emergent poetics. Alchemy combines Greek rational philosophy and Egyptian technology, including induction of altered states of consciousness that mimicked near-death experiences. Anguish helps us nourish the art to find the cutting edge.
Art needs the Abyss, the presence of death, for us to meet our own feelings, our depth. The personal epic, besides public and political, is a long poetic narrative of our interior life and actions, mental and emotional states, and access to non-ordinary realities.
As poets, we aren't heroic, but represent, comprehend, and illuminate the age with psychological narrative. Such adaptive systems help us navigate the chaos of our complex environment and clarify the contingencies of the present. We can imagine that what makes a mental state conscious is the fact that the subject is aware of being in that mental state.
Visionary alchemists might be aptly characterized as activists, "Free Radicals." This proto-science has no priesthood nor hierarchy, relying heavily on intuitive thinking and direct inspiration. They communicate as peers, fellow experimentalists, and colleagues in a non-hierarchical way through cryptic cipher texts with allegorical and analogical artwork.
Alchemists do bootstrap on one another's efforts in this ultimately individual pursuit, that is necessarily subjective yet universal. We intentionally engage the participatory field of consciousness to perform the Opus, or Great Work. The boundaries of the magic circle are blurred and made permeable.
Archetypes have a role in creating game processes and influence the game realms and archetypal narrative. Our nature is conditioned by archetypes, with their own autonomy and domains. Task-based learning develops our capacity to observe these universal forces interacting with our personality. 'I' is a construct of self-image we rarely match because of self-delusion; we remain unconscious of those personality distortion roots.
The game maps onto the real world and exists co-temporally with all the events of real life, unraveling the mystery. The game maps onto generic taxonomies of states of consciousness. There is a plethora of semantic constructs that lack a unified definition and taxonomy, but no consensual paradigm, no frame for all theoretical considerations.
Metacognitive Self-Regulatory Mental Capacity
New lexicons define and categorize extraordinary experiences and meditation methods, including the conceptual focus of attention, open presence, and the cognitive strategy employed. Method and state are separate stages in a dynamic process which unfolds over time.
Giftedness is the manifestation of performance that is clearly at the upper end of the distribution in a talent domain even relative to other high-functioning individuals in that domain. Further, giftedness can be viewed as developmental. In the beginning stages, potential is the key variable; in later stages, achievement is the measure of giftedness; and in fully developed talents, eminence is the basis on which this label is granted.
Giftedness (a) reflects the values of society; (b) is typically manifested in actual outcomes, especially in adulthood; (c) is specific to domains of endeavor; (d) is the result of the coalescing of biological, pedagogical, psychological, and psychosocial factors; and (e) is relative not just to the ordinary (e.g., a child with exceptional art ability compared to peers) but to the extraordinary (e.g., an artist who revolutionizes a field of art).
The arts of the self are self-awareness (meta-awareness), self-regulation and self-transcendence. We can modulate self-specifying and narrative self-networks. Neurobiological correlates are associated with most of these stages of existential awareness. The struggle is to formulate a universally acceptable taxonomy of enhanced cognition, affect, and numinous effects -- the phenomenal content of our functional essence.
The material world has a mythic nature with its dangers and ambiguous promise. There is a war between the old and the new. In a hidden world where magic is real, the Old Gods fear irrelevance amid the growing power of the New Gods, including Technology and Media.
We experience the muse, daemon, or 'angels' of creativity in their divine autonomy. Thus, the art of understanding nature and our own nature, is a way to mirror and care for the soul with chemical, psychophysical, mythical, and cosmological aspects. Soul as center of our inquiry and practice speaks to us meaningfully through imagery, the wisdom of the heart, through which we remember our naked connection to the cycles of nature and rhythms of the Earth.
The deeply and broadly technically skilled person is reflexively orientated. They ethically and participatively explore the big picture and prioritize, choose, design and enacts forward wisely by creatively developing world transforming prototypes. Myth creates the vision of a future perfect world. Why do we quest? As Hermann Hesse says in Siddhartha:
“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
“When someone seeks, then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
Multidimensional Realities
More than finding the tangible treasure, the hidden process of the game is about finding oneself. The way a player experiences and envisions this process may have similarities with the way they comprehend and enjoy music.
Mythic events burst through the status quo. Myth forces a certain "truth." We cannot escape myth. Myth reveals the character of reality yet it is not of this realm. Myth must be uncovered. It is a primal active force in the world and the missing dimension in the dynamic interplay of politics. Myth is a common unifying principle. Myth permeates our understanding of our past, present and potential.
The game space is the imaginal domain, symbolic representation of a player's inner concerns; the narrative itself represents the ways in which we deal these unconscious contents. Encrypted clues are embedded online and in global locales. Physical locations are included in game play. The material world has a mythic nature with its dangers and ambiguous promise. The puzzle captures the imagination long before the solver gets it.
The game and life bleed together so that game becomes heavy with the reality of life, and life becomes charged with the meaning of the game. The game pervades life and life becomes the game. It is a new imaginal arena, an imaginal way to evoke and drive mythic fantasy. We share symbols because our brains all function in a certain way, not because we are connected by some magical force.
Archetypal fantasy is an attunement, a psychic factor of insight. Without that no one levels up from their personal unconscious. These are the places where corrupt twisted desires are displayed in their most vulgar and unfiltered form, conjured by their own delusions and obsessions.
New tools mean new vision and new practices for collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Crotona 2520 was conceived and executed as an outlier -- completely removed from the Xbox commercialism of the gaming industry. It was not commodified, but something completely different. It is not a videogame culture. It is not an online universe but the real cosmos.
Crotona 2520 is a game of arcane secrets, metaphysical reference points and magical possibilities. Future-molding game play is a magic circle in which the archetypes arise, bidden or unbidden, unfolding the basic themes of our lives and conflicts of our culture. Choosing to participate in the game is choosing to participate in the eternity dimension of here and now that is the function of life.
The game vastly broadens the psychic field. It resonates with the players through their personal challenges. We partake of parallel story lines we identify with that are collective. Player experience moves through attention and absorption to immersion and flow, realizing a participation in both eternity and time.
Invisible forces of the psyche take on form. Ritual brings the game into enactments. The player enacts a dramatic performance through play that is soul enriching and enlivening. We play the game much like we navigate our dreams to other inaccessible realities unfolding in the metaverse.
We enact mythic scenarios embedded in the archaic unconscious. We are reminded of our mythical existence. Myths are fractal forms and efficient dynamics that repeat recursively in a self-similar way, economic at all scales to infinity. You create the forms as you zoom into it and focus attention.
Unlike theatre, there may be real life consequences for actions within the game space, which can amplify pathological behavior in deeply flawed characters or deviant community participants. Many are falling apart in the individual world, the culture, and the natural world.
The world is very different from what we thought it was. T.S. Elliot suggests, in Burnt Norton, "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable."
We live in a holographic universe where all things are connected with all other things, and where consciousness is nonlocal and ultimately one. Our life is part of an infinite cycle of existence in spacetime, as well as beyond spacetime.
If we succeed, we 'see through' like the Oracle or Priestess not only to the story behind the story, but divine its superpositions and unfolding future. McLuhan said, "The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only one living in the present. Ordinary people live thirty years back in a state of motivated somnambulism." If we don't level up, we can fragment into a split- off fantasy.
This mystery is rooted in a synthesis of philosophy and aesthetics in spoken and unspoken languages. It is the self-organizing creation and participatory engagement of a new myth -- a mythical domain, sharing symbolic meaning, fantasy, and rituals. Things are never literally what they seem in a world of wonders. This challenges our mundane positions, habits, and defenses. The archaic mind mirrors the modern, exposing the subtext if life.
Crotona 2520 is a game for soul. As enactments, games are the theatre of the soul. Virtual psyche comes into play, bringing individual and cultural unconscious impulses into consciousness through personification, regression, pathologizing, archetypal influence, and meaning-making within virtual play.
Psyche at play is a way of soul-tending while exploring the imaginal domain filled with pathos and unconscious content. Every line of code unfolds the environment. Psyche engineers, performs, and reflects the game play. Meaning resides in the interface.
Basically, there are three ways of encountering the inner world, reflecting the state of consciousness of the seeker: 1). prototaxic mode, a "possession" or trance state where the ego is absent through regression; 2). parataxic mode, which includes art, archetype, myth, dream, and ritual wherein the ego is enthralled; and 3). syntaxic mode, which includes creativity, gnosis, and higher mystical states, where the ego is enraptured and eventually transcended.
In play, we express the deep longings of the unconscious and the potential of soul-making. Such play consciously and unconsciously evokes archetypes and creates meaning. Learning arises in play. Play is an enactment of the irrational psyche, an imaginal transformation. Myth has an active period of psychic eruption and imaginative overflow, and a subsequent period of extinction and disintegration.
An archetype inevitably succumbs to metaphysical concretism, the tendency to view phenomena literally rather than metaphorically. The qualitative aspect it appears in clings to it, so that it cannot be described at all except as specific phenomenology. The archetypes determine which archetypal dramas will be played out for them to express their essence in game play.
Conscious and unconscious fantasies are braided into myth. Myth can seize and influence psychic life. They engage our psychological complexes. modes of perception, and transformative eperiences. Our archaic nature arises in digital play. Play creates a self-image different from our ordinary self in potentials and future possibilities.
Crotona 2520's raison d'etre is a frequency Renaissance. Its purpose is human survival. Its mission is a search for soul. The metaphorical view is Hermetic. The unspoken objective of Crotona 2520, a silicon Hermes, is to watch the psychological effects, including digital dependence, on our own consciousness. We now, accidentally or intentionally, help create a collective unconscious with a visible presence and massive direct and indirect effect on all culture.
The story world is an imaginal world. The procedural rhetoric is decryption, 'finding' what has been concealed. The game is a procedural understanding of reality, a navigable space. You create the form and that form is a statement. The transreality interaction platform enables the game, spanning physical and virtual realities.
The essence of the game bridges the outside and the inside. Game-worlds collide with the real world. Clues make the two worlds collide. We are immersed in interactive psyche, the interface of the merger between the player and the game. What happens when the magical circle is dissolved?
The Seeker is the archetypal Fool, the Wanderer in the domain of the deep psyche. When the seeker finds a key, they know that a door is hidden somewhere, and a closed door is “waiting” to be opened with the right key. The meta-programmer is an inter-disciplinary network. There is no Romantic terror of human cognition nor need for anti-technical transcendence. For good or ill, direct interface is on the horizon.
The magic circle that separates the fantasy world from the outside world dissolves: perceived space (how we interpret space), conceived space (space of science and rationality), and lived space (the space where we live), and digital space. Lived space is a by-product of digital space, a new world of experience.
The realtime of the game narration can be accelerated, collapsed, or compressed. The game can take seconds, weeks, or years to affect the seeker. You have to bring your own self as the center of the universe to the game. Who doesn't want to be the Reality-winner?
Robert Anton Wilson said, "Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don't even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is Reality."
Semiotics is an investigation into how meaning is created and how meaning is communicated, a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols, their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages. It includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.
Myths are a combination of paradigms and syntagms that make up an oft-told story with elaborate cultural associations. Codes are a combination of semiotic systems, a supersystem, that function as general maps of meaning, belief systems about oneself and others, which imply views and attitudes about how the world is and/or ought to be. Ideologies are codes that reinforce or are congruent with structures of power by creating forms of "common sense".
Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself with self-awareness and self-responsibility. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is beyond aesthetic because it is more than skin deep and touches something in us. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
The epic journey is a search for soul, a search for self, a challenge or mission to find what cannot be found in the ordinary world. When the soul becomes our central trope, we find our opus, the hidden agenda of being. Life itself is initiating us.
It is not a Role Play game, though some players mask themselves behind avatars for anonymity. Rather than anti-scientifically considering cognition and technofacility an anti-artistic dirty little secret, multimedia embraces the fusion. Visionary art is a process of Self-Actualization. Artists individuate in expressing their original statement that also speaks to the collective consciousness.
Art-Centered Approach
"There was a passionate craving among all ... [intelligentsia] ... for a means to express their new concepts. They longed for philosophy, for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar broke through the barriers of his specialty and tried to advance into the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences." ~Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
- Crotona 2520 is an aesthetic paradigm, an art-centered approach, an art that is all about what is happening. Auguste Rodin said, "The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation." "In art, immortality cannot exist. Art is always sacred." We transform objects or forms into symbols and expresses them in both his religion and visual arts.
Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop . Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species' of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.
Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown' has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, games, and even more arcane forms.
Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,' including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. As in chaos theory, all the creative action is at the boundary, the creative threshold.
Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.
The effect is moreso when a movement or school of artistic expression is involved (complex feedback loops) as the reality morphing effect increases exponentially. Artists reflect and influence one another. Arguably, artists demonstrate where society may be heading. They haunt the psychic and perceptual frontiers, drawing the future into the now. How many cultural revolutions have begun in artists’ communities?
Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.
Free style is an intuitive act that is at once intentionally connective with source and presence, thus freeing and directing that which is inside desiring to emerge: meta-creativity. Freestyle breaks free from the vault of derivative, corporate, or audience-driven formula production. After all, it takes risk to either succeed or fail.
This is the source of artistic and scientific freedom. We must trust the process; trust our own vision; the womb of our subconscious that gives birth to full-blown ideas and inspirations. Freedom of expression means each artist is free to create their own style, weaving into the existing genres of expression, combining, contrasting and injecting their own unique rhythms, modulations, and vision by working at their dynamic edge.
Free style results may be concrete or ephemeral, but the drive comes from a committed perspective on the fundamental nature of reality and our nature. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic. The art of survival equals the survival of art.
Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness, getting” the Big Picture, and perhaps doing something about it.
It is in finding meaning and expressing that meaning that we exalt our humanity in our individuation. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
KNOW BROW ART
Neither High-brow nor Low-Brow, the Electronic Arts are "KNOW-Brow Art" born of our fusion with technology. In the middle of the forehead, neither high nor low brow, is the Third Eye of inner or visionary sight. It transcends the usual dichotomy by going hyperdimensional, hyperreal. TecGnosis is the antidote to TechNarcosis.
Electronic arts, by their very nature, require a great deal of technical knowledge to interface with computer-assisted media. Know Brow art respects and draws from both classical art and that of the underground or street. Digital Media include still frames, Flash, and desktop digital movies, often incorporated with other media, installation, and performance.
The artistic life is a chaotic arc of inspiration upon inspiration, following the Muse. Artists walk what for others is ‘the road not taken’ (chaos theory’s bifurcation or forking), sometimes going ‘where angels fear to tread.’ Their charismatic influence pulls others into their orbits, and the small effect of one personality potentially spreads its influence over the world (butterfly effect), sometimes over history. The history of art is one of the richest threads of our cultural heritage.
Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.
Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.
There are two kinds of freedom: ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. Once we are free of the shackles of limitation, the burden is on us to exercise that liberty in a creative way, recognizing our own limitations. There is no progress in mere boundary-breaking. We have to have somewhere to go. Purpose must underlie pain, or it is pointless. There is no creative spirit in complete anarchy, yet there is in Chaos.
The relationship of control and freedom is very much like that between order and chaos. Science has shown that order emerges from the creative edge of chaos. The creative process is similar in that one must use both reins of constraint and freedom: technical mastery and understanding of the medium and forces at work plus the counterpoint of imaginal freedom can produce something truly unique.
Processes that appear to be quite chaotic can actually produce their own optimal boundary conditions. The same is true in art, so rather than endless failed attempts to describe meaningful experience, the true artist can explore beyond limits to produce a flowing fount of fully rendered images that have maturity, clarity, radiance, luminescence or works that simply shine forth and will not be denied.
Similar dynamics apply to the place of the leading edge or extreme artist in society: as shaman, as pathfinder, as seer of the future, as one who dares to go where the timid but voyeuristic would love to peek. When our senses become overwhelmed by rhythm, flux, and color we can enter altered states that open us to new experiences, new ways of thinking, new ways of being, new ways of seeing. This fresh point of view reflects a fundamental psychic shift.
The artist’s actual medium is the psyches of the public, which are massaged, aroused to curiosity, piqued, fascinated, infatuated, and sometimes emotionally terrorized by this pseudo-intimacy. The artist mounts more than his image: the viewer is intellectually and emotionally ridden at his or her pleasure. Curiously, it is not a substitute for sex, but arguably its very creative evolution. Reflective observation is more than passive voyeurism. One is changed by the experience, seeded within the dark virtuality of the unseen dimension.
Our culture’s preoccupation with sex is undeniable as expressed in advertising media, so why shouldn’t it continue appearing in our galleries, museums, music venues, and screening rooms in ever-renewing forms? Surrealism bent and stretched our notions of physical embodiment with a bizarre, dreamlike qualities. Low brow art has proven that all that implies beauty and truth is not necessarily beautiful to look at in its stark reality, but worthwhile to consciously examine, nevertheless.
Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and in fact One World.
Campbell saw everything through a lens of myth, metaphor and the metaphysical. He saw "proper" artists as exalted mystics. "The way of the mystic and the way of the artist," he said, "are very much alike--except that the mystic does not have a craft." In admiration, he realized that through studio disciplines, artists deal with universals. He named a lot of these universals--from rhythmic patterns to a sense of wonder.
Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process.
It is in finding meaning and expressing that meaning that we exalt our humanity in our individuation. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
Crypto
Cryptography is the major feature of Crotona 2520; all the clues are encrypted and thereby 'occult'. Cryptograms are the new magical sigils. Manly Palmer Hall wrote about 'The Cryptogram as a factor in Symbolic Philosophy' for concealing sacred truth. Transgression taps into the ultimate source of magical power, abstract ideograms made up of letter combinations expressing a particular magical desire. That's a clue.
Encryption has a long checkered history in magic, religion, politics, metaphysics, intelligence, new media, computer science, and the arts. Such secret communication was used by kings and spies. Artifacts with occult or hidden meaning are called 'hypersigils.'
Cyphers are even mentioned as a tantric art in the Kama Sutra. Sir Isaac Newton declared that, "The Universe is a cryptogram set by the Almighty." Sigils can also be sonic. The quintessence of spoken desire expressed as music whittles down to a final single musical chord, a single tone, or frequency.
Crotona 2520 does integrate story construction with unscripted live action. The game has surprising power to prime social interactions, find significance, urge to enact, and understanding. Plots are myth, insistent presence, composite meaning self-propelled forward.
Myth and magic are collective pre-personal constructs about natural transpersonal forces. Such imaginative patterns are networks of powerful symbols with specific ways of interpreting the world. Myth resides in this multidimensional primordial unconscious of universal psychic history. It is a deeply rooted liminal world of fragmentation, dissociation, and monstrosities -- the hidden reality beneath all cultures.
Crotona 2520 is part of the paradigm that saw the rise of the fantastic and the birth of psychology to explore other dimensions and their influence on the human mind and the sacred heart of humanity. All great adventures begin in the heart and imagination.
Myths repeat and proceed through their main points. We can never get rid of the uncertainties which are necessary for exploration -- the sense we don't know.
Magic is the sympathetic entanglement of various scales of nested realities. It is a crucial part of being human, like religion and poetry. It breaks up the fabric of perception so it doesn't become too stable or concretized to allow non-ordinary states to self-arise.
Myth has the transformative power to seize and influence psychic life. Metanoia is a dramatic life change from spiritual experience. Myth straddles between false accounts of the world, and those that never took place as described but contain core truths about the universe, the sky of our ancestors. Myth continually reactualizes the Great Time. Like the ancients we appeal to the soul and to myth for coherence, for order. Myth provides a field of tropes, the attractors of the ancient mind, informing our lived experience relating us to reality.
It became an exercise in mythmaking, including reading world myths as a memory of cosmic catastrophes and near-extinction events witnessed by various human societies in the past, archaic consciousness in dialogue with nature.
Paradoxically, all approaches to myth are mythopoeic - mythmaking. They carry a sense of urgency. Creative poetizing like literature, myth is a conceptual framework to project meanings on the social, ideological, material, and political aspects of our everyday life. Myth is another mental space where it can come alive for us.
Of limited validity, myth is a type of story that expresses “the thought patterns by which a group formulates self-cognition and self-realization, attains self-knowledge and self-confidence, explains its own source and being and that of its surroundings, and sometimes tries to chart its destinies.”
Alternative Reality Games are cultural probes, highlighting the value of uncertainty. This is an enriching design-led approach to understanding users stressing empathy and engagement. Intuitive probes, a guided learning strategy, are collections of evocative tasks meant to elicit inspirational responses. McLuhan does not distinguish between art and science as such; the artist is a person 'in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time'.
Probes embody an approach to design that recognizes and embraces the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s an approach that values uncertainty, play, exploration, and subjective interpretation as ways of dealing with those limits.
Transreality Gaming
"...it was through games, play, techniques of surprise and methodologies of the fantastic that [the Surrealists] subverted academic modes of enquiry, and undermined the complacent certainties of the reasonable and respectable." (Mel Gooding)
Transreality gaming, or Real Life Gaming, describes a type or a mode of gameplay that combines playing a game in a virtual environment with game-related, physical experiences in the real world and vice versa. In this approach a player evolves and moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual stages, brought together in one unified game space. A transreality approach to gaming incorporates mechanics extends over time and space, effectively playing through a players day-to-day interactions The essential part of transreality gaming is considered to be the fluidity between physical and virtual stages of gameplay, making it more and more difficult to see the distinction between what is allegedly 'virtual' and what is allegedly 'real' while playing. Game space is meant to be played across different realities rather than across different media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transreality_gaming
ARGs blur the distinction between real and fictional, an important and blurred space between digital and physical gameplay, a virtual world. The game is whatever the seeker wants it to be and they choose how to enjoy it. Borders between reality and fictionality are permeable. Fusion comes through the player's experience which blurs the boundaries of our real lives and even become our lives.
In-game rivalries of factions have gone beyond the game world. Rather than playing the game, griefers enjoy disrupting the game itself and enjoyment of others. Immersion includes positioning oneself physically in specific locales to interact with game elements. The gamespace is the whole world.
This multimedia dreamscape is the deep unconscious of the interactive narrative and game matrix from which Crotona 2520 draws life -- its philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and transdisciplinary approach. The game functions as an Angel to push against that pushes back moving the initiatory story forward through three Acts.
Act I: The World or Universe
Act II: Art or Temperance
Act III: The High Priestess
The rise and fall and phoenix-like rebirth of the alt.reality game Crotona 2520 in the real world is a story in progress, and a cautionary tale to idealistic social engineers. It has been called the biggest and most Mysterious deeply encrypted puzzle ever raised on the global web in both digital and realtime.
Why Crotona 2520?
Number Harmonics, Resonance & Dynamics
The number 2520 is the Auric Key, the first number divisible by all nine base digits. It is double 1260, a number referred to cabalistically five times in the Book of Revelations (12:6 and 12:4). It is half of 5040, from Plato’s “Laws” for his ideal city-state. Starting with 6 (the first perfect number) and multiplying by the primes in their natural order, we get the sequence 12, 24, 72, 360, 2520, 27720, 360360, 6126120, etc. Each of these numbers forms a geometrical entity, a circular reflective mandala, (Holotome), showing the symmetrical distribution of primes. At the half way point, 2520 mirrors itself in frequency graphic display...maximal information is encoded in minimal graphic elements. Here, the enigma of prime number distribution has been solved. https://syndex.weebly.com/2520.html
The universal beauty of numbers reflect the order and beauty of nature, but also of psyche. According to Jung, number unifies the physical and psychic (as in "realm of the psyche", not fortunetelling) worlds through synchronicity. Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things."
This number 2520, more than 360, captures nature’s cyclic behaviors, including the seven circles of prophetic years, (7x360=2520), and Precession. More than prophetic chronology, it is a primitive Pythagorean triple, {71, 2520, 2521}, deeply rooted in the retrieval of the ancient Music of the Spheres, recursive enumeration, and the flower of Pythagorean tuning. It is primitive if the greatest common divisor of x, y, and z is 1.
"2520, the lower limit of the octave, must have the same ratio to the smaller number as the larger number has to 5040, the upper limit of the octave, for them to be Platonic twins:
2520:3200::3969:5040. Since the products of means and extremes are equal, we can multiply the octave limits — 2520×5040 = 12,700,800 — to find the product which can then be divided by any number within the octave to locate, as quotient, its reciprocal mean in such a proportion and its Platonic twin in the tone-circle. The products of each pair of reciprocals; 12,700,800, slightly less than Socrates' “sovereign” number of 604=12,960,000 in the marriage allegory of the Republic." https://ernestmcclain.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/plato_optimized.pdf
Crotona was the mystery school of the Pythagoreans. In the sixth century B.C.E. Pythagoras was already teaching proportions -- that “all things are numbers”, and that “the entire cosmos is harmony and number.”
Ethos
Crotona 2520 is dedicated to free-speech, personal privacy, and cognitive liberty. It has attempted to bring like-minded people (alpha nerds and creatives) together, with very mixed results, despite the best working intentions as a counterpoint to Entropia. As symbolists, we know one of the most striking things about a symbol is ambivalence. Like the serpent, images oscillate between beneficence and malevolence.
Let us tell you a mostly true story. Listen to the strangest happenings in the most transgressive and personally transformative genre of games to emerge in our connected age. Don't forget: In an alternate reality, anything and everything might be a clue to something bigger. The user’s interaction with the content determines the story that emerges.
We learn as children to construct meaning (or stories) from our environment, but now we must also learn to extract meaning from our digital environments. This won’t be easy as we are overwhelmed with lots of information and very little narrative to support decision-making.
The thin skin of history must be peeled back to reveal its sinews, the deeper truths masked by the ossified propaganda of political expediency and repression, some of which is literally carved in stone. Prof. Stephen Schafer describes how "a new paradigm shift has reframed the cognitive unconscious of individuals and collectives and generated a worldview in which mediated illusion prevails."
Crotona 2520 doesn't have a mystery school - the game process itself IS the mystery school; layer upon layer of mystification is coded into the process that includes challenges in the digital and real world. Whatever truth you come to is yours. More than one reality exists at a time. Once you enter the cosmic intelligence game, you can never really quit. The ending is in the journey.
The meta-games of the past were metaphysical: qabalah, alchemy, tarot, initiation. Mythology initiates us into the order of realities of our own psyche, guiding toward spiritual enrichment and realization. Their spirit underlies the current games and intuitively informs them at the deepest levels. No strategy can be executed without a common mythological framework, established via storytelling and ritual. The Crotona 2520 game is both story and ritual.
All games are the games of archetypes. They define the way we tell stories and the impact of all works of art. Myth and archetypes contribute to the universality of the stories we tell. They elicit a sense of awe before they mystery of being, the mystery of the presence and the presence of a mystery. Each life has a unique grandeur.
We develop our innate ability to feel imaginal experience in the body more deeply than usual. The body, in turn, tells us what's right. We become accustomed to the existing presence of psychic force in high tension and extend the conscience of the internal vehicles with greater ease. Those who emanate great force due to high internal loads need isolation for their work, and realize its influence produces a violent psychic reaction in the profane.
But first you may 'meet the monster,' in myriad forms as soul-violence, control, and power issues -- the dramatic tensions of a mind at war with itself, a battle of good and evil. Perhaps you even find it in yourself, the collective soul-sickness that sucks away autonomy and integrity, or tragic insight into the seemingly hopeless circumstances embedded in the culture of a flawed & broken humanity.
We depend on the sustaining rituals of Art for solace to endure the catastrophes around us and transform the damage within ourselves. Soul-making games are waking dreams, a way of affirming the significance of the unconscious, its symbols and archetypes and the reality of the psyche.
By “spirituality”, we mean only a view of the world that accepts the numinous at the foundation of the cosmic order. The antagonistic Angel, a treacherous opponent, is the catalyst that forces us to confront, adapt, and heal our own subconscious inferior side.
Soul is not a thing but a continuing Presence. We begin to recognize the approaching ordeal. We have symbolically died to the ordinary by crossing the threshold of liminality. The original personality or mindset must 'die' to transcend to the next level of existence.
We are forced to face just what we believe, to revive our repressed qualities, and recognize our own instincts and strengths. We have to struggle for progress. Then the plot shifts from struggle to exploration. Our negative ideas and drives are natural functions of life. Our doubt, reactive, uncertain self is reborn anew, breaking the consensus trance of the World.
We are driven past limbo into dark ambiguous places, into the lair of the elusive Angel who forces us to recognize this and cause us to face our fear and evolve into new individuals. The shapeshifting Angel becomes the mentor and guide. This death-rebirth ordeal is a theme permeates much of storytelling. Consciousness opens but to intense spiritual suffering.
Michael Meade suggests, "Something deep in the human soul awakens as things fall apart. Something in the soul knows that everything in this world can become lost. And something in the soul knows how to survive periods of devastation, disorientation and loss. Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We continue to descend in order to become ourselves more fully, in order to find our own inner depths and be born again from within. We must descend further, for our soul would have us understand who we already are at our core and in our depths." ("Why the World Doesn't End")
Jung says, "We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche” (Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, 75). Archetypal patterns are expressions of the process.
Psychological development, including rebirth, transformation and renewal occur through the stages of separation, differentiation, dissolution, and unification. Emotions, including fear and dread are integral to life and rebirth, part of searching inner reality of our experience in order to "forge a soul."
Crotona 2520 creates from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream. It reveals the hidden recesses of the psyche, not yet visible but valuable containers of personal, emotional, psychological, and physical issues, as well as those of the collective. Archetypal storytelling overlays depth and emotional resonance for characters and plots, revealing the “inside story”.
Whether we imagine the process as psychological Individuation or metaphysical Pathworking, we are on a Quest. Our innate capacity for self-awareness is a Path of Return to a greater consciousness, the hidden treasure. Mythological language allows us to swim in the sea of consciousness. We make a covenant with being. We recognize it will be tough on us, but educates us to face whatever challenges us.
The Greek word archetupos means first-molded, which primes our expectations and experiences about how to respond. Each one suggests certain ritual experiences such as the discovery of self (cave), spiritual quests (game, maze or mountain), or spiritual wastelands (desert). We meet mentors, shapeshifters, heralds, threshold guardians, tricksters, and the shadow.
The epic journey is a search for soul, a search for self, a challenge or mission to find what cannot be found in the ordinary world. Archetypes bring energy based on the story patterns we know from archaic stories. They are ritualistic and encourage us to infuse the narrative with our own emotions. Archetypes can arouse fears and anxieties or yearnings and desires.
When the soul becomes our central trope, we find our opus, the hidden agenda of being. Life itself is initiating us. We need to suffer consequences in order to change our internal and external behavior. We need ordeals and life for everyone is in the hard school of initiation. We use a mythos and symbols that are meaningful to the structures in the human psyche to align ourselves with the world around us in constructive ways.
Hillman says, “The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just ‘believe’ in it” (Hillman, cited in Russell, 2013, p. 497). When the future looks bleak, we look to the wisdom light of the deep past. Those who are ego-bound fail to turn from the shadowy darkness to light at the first level, and do not advance levels of game play. They do not level up. The game spits them out.
In the Big Picture of human existence there is no Ur-text for a deep history that keeps getting scientifically pushed back further and further into the mists of pre-historic times. Our universe is 13 billion years old, not the 13 centuries of medieval times.
For the first time, we know the laws and history of our universe and the genetic complexities of human migration and intermingling, even with other species. How can we digest this telescoping of our universal and temporal environment? Our apparent place in the universe shifted in one generation from minute to gargantuan, changing and dividing worldviews.
Deep Time
We forget our cosmic and cataclysmic disasters of the last 10,000 years at our own peril, yet such comprehension is 'burdensome information.' The descendants of our future call back to us to take action now on their behalf. This is a form of retrocognition.
Plotinus says, “All knowing comes by likeness,”…all things desire to return to their archetypal originals. Reversion “connects an event to its image, a psychic process to its myth, a suffering of the soul to the imaginal mystery expressed therein” (Hillman, Dream 4).
The future pulls the past into being. Wave functions are retarded (forward in time) and advanced (backward in time) waves. This advanced wave backtracks the retarded wave, traveling backwards in time. The transaction is completed with a "handshake" across spacetime -- a handshake bridging past and future.
Never has a group of generations had so much comprehensive knowledge to adjust to. We all try to understand what 'digital' technology has already done to us at a higher-level than typical academics. As humans, we are still tasked with dissolving our ego-mask, the immediacy of anomalous, initiatory, and religious experience, and facing death with heightened awareness. The Mystery confronts us all.
Though we may not understand how the pieces fit together for quite some time, we need to remain open to the inspiration of genius that has fed great art through millennia. We are facing unprecedented challenge as a species. We turn to film, games, and art to help us contextualize experience, personal and collective.
As Francis Bacon said, “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” In this way we deepen our relationship with Nature and Cosmos. To be art, it just has to be significant, reflecting or steering culture. As artists, we use our own experiential vision to create perceptual embodiments in our medium of choice. We can still take a fresh look at the world, inspired by the entire spectrum of human artistic endeavor.
Perhaps our single most pressing question is 'what sort of humans will we have in 10-20 years?' Our technologies have already made us into cyborgs, with enhanced memory and communications for which even our collective unconscious has no precedent. Kurzweil predicts "we will all be hybrids by 2030."
Mythopoesis means literally, "myth-making," the natural expression of the visionary wisdom inborn to the human species. It is a creative act of story-telling or narration, by which human beings "track" their experience and orient themselves to the cosmos at large.
Metahistory is a guiding narrative for human potential, rather than an interpretation of events. The cross-cultural metastory of the human species is an overarching view of past, present, and future, found in a reinterpretation of ancient texts, archaeological and geophysical evidence. It opens a path toward participation in a story that leads beyond history, a mythos to guide the species.
Imagery is the natural expression of the pregnant void urgently fleshing itself out to the fullest extent. These images are not ‘ours’, but arise from the primordial mindfield. This image stream, full of unborn information, is the subject of psychotherapy and the source of creativity and visionary art.
Imagery is an expression of unconscious processing and conversely helps us penetrate unconscious processes. The images metaphorically reflect the core of our being, the place we have made for ourselves in the world. They offer deeper insight into our truth, a way of exploring internal and external hindrances to flow and unbroken wholeness.
Creative genius can express a momentary or sustained connection with this unconscious fount of creativity that is then manifested in some form, dynamic or concrete. During flux, many futures exist. Images penetrate and permeate latent networks operating outside the bounds of awareness.
The probabilities of evolutionary transformation emerge from total potential as pluralistic chaos erupts into awareness as motivation. In the creative process, one path is amplified and chosen. Its essence is evolutionary, following nature’s lead, based on intensification of consciousness. It takes clarity in science and art to see what no one else has ever imagined.
Art
This enormous rapid change brings new meaning to the axiom to "Know Thyself" through self-awareness or traditional means. Meaning is about connectivity and interdependence with everything else out there: self, others, and cosmos. The player is welcomed into their own journey of self-discovery -- sometimes lost, sometimes validated, sometimes illuminated.
Each viewer can deploy their own narrative and approach to the material presented, blurring the logic of inside and outside, a tension between the universal and the particular, collective and individual. The paradox of our time remains progress or fall, and only some choices are ours to make, whereas cosmos imposes its own.
Critical thought does not rush to embody itself, but instead raises questions to unraveled over time. There are lots of great stories out there, but not always history. Things tend to look different from inside than outside. Self-realization is a solitary journey, described by Plotinus: "The way to truth was the journey of a lonely person to that which is eternally alone."
But an artist or philosopher can work purely symbolically. The creative impulse is brought to fruition in the world. Such secret forms grow into our life's work and purpose. By communing deeply with the outside world we find the familiar in the unfamiliar.
Works with a trans- quality go beyond mundane time, space, logic and personal taste or aesthetic preference. They connect with our essential Being at the core, reflected in nature and art, piercing time to find eternity. Transcending content, they open a new dimension...an invisible initiatory dimension. From here the artist gives birth to the secret space of the image itself which comes alive by giving shape to that secret.
The psyche of the visionary artist or seer follows unconscious intuitions about the present and the past, and unconscious impulses from both the past and the future. What we call visions are vast, nebulous intuitions. Meanings not consciously intended may emerge. In the absence of radically polarized notions secure beliefs and critical thinking are compliments to psychological perception. Inner vision opens the whole self to consciousness.
The game is a liminal space for self-transformation. The scavenger hunt of past annual games was designed not to find objects but to root out the social scavengers. Let them play with the rubble of civilization, materialism, and literalism. There is no poetry in it, hence, no authentic 'making,' no complex interactions, no nuanced layers, or novel properties. Some just miss the essential penetration, activation and transformation of human awareness and experience. So the game remains aspirational for most.
The scavenger hunt becomes the Treasure Hunt of the archetypal Quest. There are relics but the real treasure lies hidden within -- the ubiquitous Holy Grail. While the mystic seeks the frameless, non-conceptual, thoughtless experience of primordial awareness, the artist seeks every way to navigate mind, and explore its domains by reframing consciousness. Our framework is semiotic (image-as-sign) and phenomenological (image-in-consciousness).
Marshall McLuhan claimed electronic media retrieves the occult and hermetic philosophy. It reproduces the 'inner trip' and a return to the world of art and technology, overlaying the new myth by injections of earlier myth.
Joseph Campbell spoke of powers too vast for normal life: "Meanwhile, you’re climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime." Identification with the collective psyche is acceptance of inflation, but now exalted into a system of great truths.
Fiction gives way to an overriding interest in the occult, reviving tribal involvement. The occult is the new hidden ground. It takes our foolish ordinary selves into the wilderness of our intuition. Sometimes even a whole lifetime cannot reveal the whole truth. Secrets remain concealed because they are experiential -- initiatory.
Digitalization "brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the ideal that numbers are all." Occult qualities underlie all phenomena. "Old nature is transformed into new Nature, a prophet can now foretell that dogmatic faith in anti-magic will revive blind trust in magic; and that science will become occult, while occult becomes science."
Transformation is a qualitative change. The game led through a pathworking most were painfully unaware of. How else could it be, since such experiences are archetypal, and repeat over and over like strange attractors.
All art is process. All process is about morphology or process magic, translation from one state or another with or without some specific goal. Storytelling is the most powerful magic we have. The essence of psyche is myth and ritual, enactment of the stories of the soul, by which we differentiate the unconscious.
James Hillman said, “that the deepest suffering in the human psyche derives from exile from the world soul.” He goes on, to move our souls , “we must rediscover the love of the world ... to be drawn by its allures, to delight in it, wanting it to stay, like a lover, forever close.”
Myth itself is the human search for what is true, significant, and meaningful -- the rapture of being alive and full of life experiences. We can never achieve 100% knowledge and accuracy - this is the psychological Uncertainty Principle.
Process morphs are metaphors. Art describes without explaining. Art imitates life. In pathworking, life imitates Art. Processes connect disconnected forms. What is lost in form (crystallized) can be found in process. If you are magic, you don't have to do magic.
Metaphor is about experience, how we know what we know. We experience the environment through flowing exchanges of information, matter, and energy. Through metaphor we can relate what we know to what we don't know. Metaphor links us with an ocean of interrelated ideas about body-mind-self-universe.
All epistomological metaphors are couched in the language of the senses. They are drawn from the bottomless reservoir of the sensorium. On the Path of Return, the path "Art" supersedes "The Universe." Art represents the art of alchemy, the ability to solve and combine, to turn something plain into something precious.
Art symbolizes the right mixture, the perfect balance, standing for harmony, beauty and peace. But the card can also show that neglected and ignored should be lived out and opposites reconciled to enrich the inner spectrum with new perspectives. 'Solve et coagula' can indicate a need to leave a fixed position, to retire, watch and then go back again to combine on a new basis.
Pathworking is process magic. Each successive path doesn't transcend the prior path; it enfolds or includes it. In the same way, the universe imparts its creative process to us. Intersubjectivity is a relationship with our muse, angel, or genius as a guide to deeper realms, interaction with and expression of the numinous.
There are no gatekeepers; we're all in it together. First Crotona 2520 traversed the path of The World or Universe and found itself the tragic-comic wandering Fool. This is the level of the Persona and Shadow and many of the players displayed these shady collective features.
A world without soul lacks intimacy and leaves only acting-out, alienation, disregulated emotionality, misguided zeal, dissociation, and compulsions of the astral instead of creating a Stable Foundation. Many believed that through heightened perceptions and insights they could radically alter the direction of the human race by creating a golden pathway to the future or a cosmic intelligence agency.
We need bigger stories to inform our personal narrative and interrelationships: "And instead of imagining that I am dysfunctional, my family is dysfunctional, you realize what R. D. Laing said long ago and Freud, of course, too: it is the civilization which is dysfunctional. The society is dysfunctional. The political process is dysfunctional. And we have to work on cures that are beyond my cure. That's revolution." (Hillman, We've Had a Hundred Years.., pp. 218-219)
Now is the time for Art, for Temperance, the Middle Way. The psychological path is a middle way. Crotona 2520 underwent a radical change of perspective, a needed pruning and revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament of the disenchanted world we call modern consciousness. When perception changes, what we construe to be reality changes.
The game documents resistance that is more philosophical than political in its long-range view. Building a world, themes, tone, and mood with many layers is essential. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the powers, spring up everywhere. The truer currencies emerge among people in the perpetuation of movements.
Crotona 2520's science-artists are actually natural philosophers, symbolists. A symbol is a person, place, action, word, or thing that (by association, resemblance, or convention) represents something other than itself. Natural philosophy,the philosophy of nature, was the study of nature and the physical universe predominant before modern science. Precursors of natural sciences include physics, optics, music, and mathematics that developed out of natural philosophy.
Symbolism has always been a hermetic art. Yeats, in his 1901 essay on “Magic” describes how our minds and memories continually flow into each other as part of ‘the great memory of Nature herself’ (Anima Mundi). He suggested that artists and poets can access this memory through the use of symbols, plumbing the Mysteries of Nature, spirit, and consciousness.
Thus, we circulate among the aspects of our unfolding sacred and natural being as a single systemic reality. In Taoism, seeing and knowing are turned inward by reactivating the more primordial, pre-verbal, or intuitive, or tacit modes of knowledge. Empty knowing and doing resonate freely with the cosmic pulse of life and nature.
Our journey is one into the heart of primal myths, and that path is more art than theology, beyond paths of affirmation or negation. We can simply surrender into the heart of that being. Path-less, content-free, non-conceptual awareness, the ultimate ground state fosters new understandings of reality. Individuated Wholeness is Mature Freedom.
Our co-creative task is to bring to light the mythologems, the basic core elements, motifs or themes of myth, behind our individual and collective fate. Basic themes include recurrent patterns: survival, relationships, love and war, chaos and order, revenge, self-sacrifice, or betrayal, death and grief, rejuvenation and rebirth. Jung considered rebirth "an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind." (CW 9i, Para 207)
Our myths play out in internal and external history. The paradox of myth is that they are cultural creations that declare that the cultural order can never fully contain the meaning of creation in human life. Myths transcend linear time.
Art is phase 2 of the transformational process, which began in the collective trance-state of profane space as all seekers do. Crotona 2520 dissolved into chaos and came back at a new frequency, sacred space. A visionary mode is a grace conferred on the gifted artist.
The roots of poetry, music, and painting lie in prophecy, chanting, and sympathetic magic. The content expressed by the symbol is as-yet-unknown, or pre-cognitive. The artist receives inspiration through intuition and feeling, is motivated by the drive of the archetype and the will to create, and executes the process through sensory and motor functions.
Intellectual vision is never satisfied with the truth. Not intellect, but consciousness determines our existence and reality. We repeatedly circumambulate around primary unconscious data, soul-making with metaphors, ambiguities, and fictions. We can easily expose fantasies that are rooted in myths, including self-delusion about identity.
"Seeing through" intellect, our concern is essence, the essential not concrete nature of things. We are primarily image makers and our psychic substance consists of psychosensory images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. As in Egypt, art is the prophet.
Prophets are not inclined to wait for the right time. Their prophetic vision demands the action of a moral imperative that compels them to speak and act. But prophets need to do more than speaking, acting, or being apocalyptic. Something must be brought forward.
'Seeing through' apocalypse is revelation to be explored. Apocalyptic crisis is marked by disclosure. What is revealed is the experiential world of art as an altered state from ordinary awareness. In Thou Art That, Joseph Campbell tells us, "Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end…"
Transformation is a qualitative change. First Crotona 2520 traversed the path of The World and found itself the wandering Fool; now is the time for Art, for Temperance, the Middle Way. Crotona 2520 underwent a radical change of perspective, a needed revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament of the disenchanted and an-aesthetic trance or numbing world we call modern consciousness. The populace has been deformed by mass culture into non-people who forget they have skin in the game.
Art is Act 2 of the transformational process. Crotona 2520 dissolved into chaos and came back at a new frequency. A visionary mode is a grace conferred on the gifted artist. The roots of poetry and painting lie in prophecy, chanting, and sympathetic magic.
We still share much with the Symbolists. They emerged in the 1880s as a diverse group of artists often working independently with varying aesthetic goals. Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly.
Thus, they created in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, attributing symbolic meaning to particular images or objects. Rather than sharing a single artistic style, they were unified by a shared pessimism and weariness of the decadence they perceived in modern society.
The content expressed by the symbol is as-yet-unknown, or pre-cognitive. The artist receives inspiration through intuition and feeling, is motivated by the drive of the archetype and the will to create, and executes the process through sensory and motor functions.
Intellectual vision is never satisfied with the truth. Not intellect, but consciousness determines our existence and reality. We repeatedly circumambulate around primary unconscious data, soul-making with metaphors, ambiguities, and fictions. We can easily expose fantasies that are rooted in myths.
"Seeing through" intellect, our concern is essence, the essential not concrete nature of things. We are primarily image makers and our psychic substance consists of psychosensory images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. Thus, we can imagine that our sacred space covers not only the digital landscape, but bleeds into the mundane world, as well. Prophecy is divine speech and not always predictive of future events. As in Egypt, art is the prophet.
Prophets are not inclined to wait for the right time. Their prophetic vision demands action. Truth, for prophets, is not merely a belief but a moral imperative that compels them to speak and act though it is not enough to be apocalyptic. Something must be brought forward.
'How things are' breaks down 'life as we have known it' -- dramatic social and cultural disjunction. History is interrupted. It blasts the self-deception that an unimaginably immense universe is benign. The artist makes the invisible visible, shattering clichés and narratives used to mask reality.
But we must be speaking beyond our own words and images, transposing something greater. Not all artists are prophets. The question of the artist as prophet relates to the question of vocation; one is 'called' to the task. The visionary mode contains something of the Divine, and its subject matter is definitely out-of-the-ordinary.
The artistic senses stretch over millennia of time. The present is no more understandable or valuable than by-gone eras. All tyranny makes war on culture to manipulate or erase historical memory. Such “philosophical violence” leaves us with a sense of having no way to check where we come from because something has been cut and removed.
Such outlier artists must be on the outside of the community and must reject the community’s aversive values. David Cronenberg says: ‘At the time you’re being an artist, you’re not a citizen. You have, in fact, no social responsibility whatsoever.’ If your stories are not organically grown, but imposed on you by those who hate everything about you, then you’re virtually dead. Art and soul are lost.
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens... Any artist worth his salt is permanently separated from ordinary reality. No artist tolerates reality," said Friedrich Nietzsche.
The motivating force or drive behind the process of art is the unconscious animation of an archetype, seeking expression. The archetype seeks manifestation in some 'form,' and seemingly manipulates the artist into producing this form.
How often are artists surprised by their own creations. The artist receives the inspiration through intuition and feeling, is motivated by the drive of the archetype and the will to create, and executes the process through sensory and motor functions. Jung called art an innate drive that "seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. ...who allows art to realize its purposes through him."
Psyche creates reality every day. These things register on some subliminal level. Experiencing the inner and outer world occurs in images whose source transcends the conscious psyche. In our age of disintegration, psyche is not monist and hierarchichal but polysemous -- naturally dividing itself into many parts and images. Polytheism is also the fragmented consciousness of the Ancients who lived in a plurality of different or inconsistent images.
Archaic man adopted foreign gods and myth without any synthesis, without priests, dogma or categorical statements about gods, humans and the world. This tolerant philosophy of nature is Ionian. They developed their ideas in tandem with myth without trying to eliminate it. Faced with mystery, we tend to reach or overreach for answers to our existential dilemma, a translation of the nonlocal nature of reality itself.
“Reality” has a paradoxical quality of psyche’s capacity to produce images and originate meaning. We don’t know if our conscious perceptions accurately portray the external world, or if we all have similar pictures of what lies outside our conscious minds. The fundamental nature of reality remains mysterious. Things became unreal when Hume unmasked ancient and medieval philosophy, which understood universals as referring to ultimate transcendent reality, as epistemological solipsism.
Creative Activity
Crotona 2520 made a phase-shift, a metapmorphosis, and moved into its aesthetic phase, an ancient-future invocation of collective creativity. Like its namesake, it remains underground, in the duat of its own making, in the resonate catacombs of deep memory. It is a future-molding matrix of amplified thought (concept development), shared consciousness (collaborative processes), seeding structures (self-organizing systems), making metaphors (knowledge navigation) and constructing identities (self-creation).
Metaphysical ideas are by definition ‘beyond physics’, but not separate from their roots in mind-dependent ideas and philosophy. Essence, by its very nature, remains stubbornly intangible, unknown, and unseen.
Form, on the other hand, requires only ingenuity, engineering, and due diligence. It involves the science-art elements of radical game design and narrative, encryption, hermeneutics, situation analysis, codification of language, film, music, aesthetic philosophy, performance art, poetic language, archaeology, history, and others.
When a game works it has aesthetic coherence. Aesthetics includes exploring, enjoying, extending, and evaluating experience. The goal of art is to create conscience. How real is history? Like Magery, imagery plays a role not just in the subjective but also in the external world. Reality became the function of psychic imaging. Thus, human life consists of psychic images, and experience of reality results from the psyche’s capacity to produce images, whose source transcends conscious psyche.
The narrative continuum is the story continuum. Stories help us digest experience. We don't have another way of describing lived time and to represent the world including sequences of imaginal material and imaginary events. Joseph Campbell said that "mankind's one great story is to be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is."
It is full of imagination gathered from other times and places. For example, the Egyptians orchestrated their whole civilization around the cyclic Precession. The power of the story soaks through to the bones. Theatre, symbolism, history and facts are mythic elements.
There is an aesthetic dimension to communicating research discoveries or 'fighting ancient evil.' To stay human, to survive as a species, we have to wrest our communications out of the control of the lust for power, the avarice, larceny, hubris, deceit and self-delusion.
Marshall McLuhan in his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy said: “Instead of tending toward a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”
The Internet has failed. Even founders like Tim Berners-Lee, who drew the original diagram for the world wide web on a napkin, now have Dr. Frankenstein’s remorse.
“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places. [The Web] has ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform — a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”
As the Internet pioneer Ethan Zuckerman of MIT recently wrote, “It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.”
What they wanted to do was to create a communication system that was decentralized and cooperative. Their aspirations were utopian. But today there is a growing understanding that the internet has morphed into an insidious surveillance and propaganda machine that has devastated their dream.
Some suggest we would do well to scrap this first internet project and start from scratch to build an electronic communications system founded on hard and fast ethics rather than utopian fantasies.
By now, it is clear that what was begun as a mission to connect and unite mankind has mutated into a pernicious distortion machine that has disconnected mankind and put us at each other’s throats, and in doing so has destroyed and is destroying institutions and knowledge that have taken centuries to develop.
Identity, Mystique & Mystery
Gaming is a ritual, especially when the content is substantive, immersive, and multiplayer. Embedded in these rituals of play are distinct cultural events, rites of passage, purification, power, bounty, and commemoration.
Gaming changes the player's own self-creation story. Imagining our lives by making imagination into words is a poetic act. We go on living our lives the way we imagine them. We tell ourselves what is going on. Gaming is a genre through which events become experiences.
Thomas Aquinas described four internal 'senses,' called (1) common sense, (2) imagination, (3) the estimative power (or the cogitative or reasoning instinct), and (4) memory. They help us retain the concrete material reality of the present and sense what is beyond. 'Common sense' knows the world around us; it coordinates the five senses, the ability to know the sense qualities as common, to put together or separate multiple sense experiences into a single experience and 'internal awareness' of the current bodily state.
His 'imagination' is more like our memory, that retains what has been sensed with the five senses and doesn't need to be original imagery. His 'memory' is more like our 'instinct' for what is useful or harmful. 'Estimative power' knows what is present now, based on imaginative memory.
Our “creative imagination” means that we can put things together in new ways. The cultural shift to the Digital paradigm has a fundamentally different effects on us, heightening internal senses. Today we consider imagery equally important, or more important than the other fundamental human mental functions, as the basis of humannes and self-consciousness: speaking, memory, dreaming, and writing, and therefore art, science or culture.
If the unconscious is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols, our notion of the unconscious is also a symbol of the power of the primal field. Psyche, and therefore the image, creates reality. Fantasy rules the digital psyche through its essential sovereignty and the equality of all images. It attributes primary epistemological status to image and imagery at the disposal of the autonomous psyche and available to the archetypes.
An experience is aesthetically coherent. Sensory content merges in an aesthetic structure or story. Articulated images lodge in memory. Jung noted, "The unconscious is the matrix of all metaphysical statements, of all mythology, of all philosophy, and of all expressions of life that are based on psychological premises."
To which HIllman responds, "In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relations hip between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction. James Hillman [2]
Master narratives provide collectivities with coherent visions of their history and a sense of homogeneity. What we tell, even to ourselves, sticks in the mind better and helps us digest it.
Story, including our inside story, is central to self-definition. We fabricate them and bind them into one by creating our inside story from our outside story. This structure of reality is adult make-believe. Stories have a stubborn appeal.
The story of our life correlates with 'the art of living.' Life as a whole is an aesthetic enterprise -- a good, ethical, and spiritual life, lived to its fullest. Elaborating our lives is a personal work of art -- an aesthetic of existence. We can reclaim our self-identity. Our self-plotting intersects our self-characterization in the dimension of composing a life.
Structures of consciousness create an internal personal culture. We view ourselves and our raw world from within self-culture. Life is inseparable from a story. What makes a good story contributes to what makes a good life. Radical renewal resolves the tensions between determined and undetermined dimensions of existence, the unprecedented and preprogrammed.
Our perception of plot in our personal story leads to selection of events we transform into experience. Character is linked to point of view. We wrestle with these issues in the aesthetic dimension where we are what we imagine. Some people are more improvisational. Others remain stuck in the same old story.
We try to write one story but are stuck in another. But novelty is present at every stage, so improvisation is the name of the game. We never stop reworking the story of our lives at the levels of existence, experience, and expression (the inside-out story), and impression (the outside-in view of others).
We are collections of stories. All knowledge is encoded as stories. Intelligence is the ability to tell the right story of hundreds of thousands at the right time. Memory is memory of stories and their retrieval. This is the poetics of self-creation. Aesthetic opinions cannot be suppressed. We form judgements about the character, shape, form, and structure of our lives -- harmony, balance, and fulfillment or disorder and disregulation. Telling our stories builds our personal mythology.
When we attempt to create games (or play them) with any consciousness about the real person, any desire to experience deep and possibly lasting insight or effect, we are, to some degree, performing ritual. If we neglect a portion of the ritual process, we run the risk of actual emotional damage.
Clear steps and stages in ritual form a container for the events within. Given a container, amazing things and astonishing play can happen. If containment breaks down, the emotional content of the game spills over into regular life.
Some gaming creates well-integrated, lasting emotional effects without intentionality on the part of the designer or players. Gaming can bring people closer, and drive them deeper, just by giving them a place to explore.
Poetic leadership enhances aesthetic understanding by combining lyrical intellect with keenly felt emotion for the purpose of producing changes in the consciousness of self and others. The stories of our lives are of self-cultivation, self-creation, self-culture, self-invention, lifestyle, and 'the art of living.' We do it by weaving and reworking our personal stories.
Crotona 2520's primary content is the user, encountering philosophers who are also artists. The approach is aesthetic, imaginal, and archetypal -- an animated living art, a symphony of higher order functioning and anomalous cognition.
If the world is an aesthetic phenomenon, understanding it is an artistic experience. Lifestory is the most multimedia artform. A web of stories captures our past, sustains the present, and directs the future. They carry our beliefs about ourselves and world.
Popular art is free of perfection, objectification, and seclusion, despite its faults and accessibility. It needs freed of modernist ideals of socio-technological progress. Perhaps solvers want to be told into a soul story and given a plot to live by. It unfolds not by narrative but by dramatic incidents enabling the future. Who has more than a fantasy of such cultural responsibility, much less a means to achieve higher considerations of being?
Crotona 2520 is a broad stimulus field of fluctuating emotional potential whose intensity must be managed. Some become completely absorbed in the continuous play of feeling, overwhelmed by powerful cascades of emotion. When they are distilled, they become tools of self-expression and culture-making, blueprints of a lost art from a lost world. We have to admit certain problems may be unsolvable. But perhaps we can get through the noise to the music.
The New Mysterians
Players mold their own perception. We are in a situation beyond reality. The world soul is visible and audible from the aesthetic awareness of the human soul. Even recoil brings us to our senses so we can actually function in this universe. Catharsis purges ordinary thoughts so animated, transcendent life comes through. Plato understands art and beauty as mediums for divine expression.
Renaissance image-making theory considered distorted or frightening images more impactful on memory and soul transformation. As our cultural anesthesia wears off, aesthetic awareness awakens to purpose, significance, and the underlying forces that shape us. All events are sources of psychic and spiritual significance. Soul speaks through the aesthetic responses of the heart, our thrills, pain, and disgust.
All our creations are framed by fantasy. They have fantastic frameworks, even when cut away from their fantasy structures and formulated in the abstractions of philosophy in mythopoetic social ecology. Expressive arts is a practice and service whose purpose is to help us deal with ordinary life in multi-sensory paradoxical language. We can learn to awaken spirit and psyche.
Such imagination is the constructed results extrapolated from what seem most-likely happenings. It provides viewpoints (worldviews) according to which certain events and perspectives appear meaningful and are sufficiently muscular and intelligent to project future-possibles. There is no personal or collective unconscious, just unknown and unknowable information not available to experience, which is, by definition, "occult," hidden. How big is your Now?
“You surely don’t believe that you’re the only writer of stories in this world. Sooner or later, someone — a greater liar than Baudolino — will tell it.” — Umberto Eco, Baudolino
Rabelais may have written satirical allegories, esoteric novels, and fantasy worlds. Menippean satire is a form of storytelling that uses a narrative and dialogues showing different points of view.
Eco was ironic and mixed paranoid conspiracy theories with his Synarchy (mystical collectivism) and hermetic semiosis in the thriller Foucault's Pendulum. Think hard enough about it, and anything can be connected to anything else. Connect enough dots and you have a grid. Telluric currents, frequencies, or universal tides were their ultimate prize.
The mystic "Center of The Earth" is supposed to be a certain point from where a person could control the energies and shapes of the Earth, thus reforming it at will. Eco called the telluric navel of the world the most powerful valve. The characters fed all the hermetic plots that ever were into their computer, named Abulafia, which provided better interpretations than orthodox history ever did of certain past events.
But, Crotona 2520 invites you to step into them by playing the game, which is not a closed system but has feelers out in the world. For Hillman, aesthetic understanding is 'breathing in.' We gasp, our hearts beat faster, and tears often flow.
Our bodies tell us that the ordinary has given way to the extraordinary. All possibilities contain further, hidden delights for the cognoscenti beyond ideological flatulence. But how many fictional heroes know everything, although it does them no good?
It involves the science-art elements of game narrative, encryption, hermeneutics, situation analysis, codification of language, film, music, aesthetic philosophy, performance art, poetic language, archaeology, history, and others.
Games are stuffed with secret things, sometimes even consciously unknown to their creator. Finding the harmony within the plan one has concocted can be “beautiful” and “poetic”. We all can fall into a state of spiritual seduction by powers of unreason of our own devising. This variety of interdisciplinary creative work embraces new technology and mass culture.
Paradigms are dogma. Myths are strange attractors. Shared referents are social currency. What if the plan, or the language of signs, or memories of the future turn out to be a myth. You can get anywhere from anywhere with continuous shifting from meaning to meaning and signs. As a result, there can be no final Hermetic secret. Sacred texts generate complex esoteric exegesis.
When every connection become acceptable they become lies, falsehoods, or collapse of the historical timeline. Signs are the action of nature. "Every object…hides a secret… The ultimate secret of hermetic initiation is that everything is secret…Hermetic thought transforms the whole…"
Leave aside the assumption — itself very questionable — that a rational life must be one without myths. Rational or not, life without myth is like life without art or sex — insipid and inhuman.
— The Silence of Animals.
McLuhan identifies archetype as an expandable category which can be retrieved and modified by artists, which cliche is not. Perceptions are cliches but radical art stimulates new awareness emerging as new form. Entropy is just the information that is hidden from you. The Holy Grail of solution is a metaphor of unending desire.
Is consciousness secreted by the brain or is it a transcendental reality? Conversation as well as observation defines our reality. Dialogue of the self with its various conscious and unconscious forms creates a series of "virtual realities" which form the basis of self-simulation and world-simulation. These forms are limitless in number, far beyond the classic archetypes, suggesting the notion of "radical pluralism."
In terms of contextual purpose, these patterns appear to be self-organizing, self-generating, and self-iterating. We can relate such emergence and resonance to the Pythagorean comma, 1.036, which is a harmonic resonance, where one body can vibrate in such a way it changes the body of another.
As for puzzles: It’s easier to find what you’re looking for when it comes looking for you. Empedocles knew that we don’t use our senses but instead are used by them. So, the art is how to use the senses rather than be used by them. Stories of events that become culturally embedded or repeated are generalized into myths.
We actually must turn our attention back to face what is coming toward us -- the mythological, the elusive, the deceptive, the numinous -- nonlocal information architectures. Finally, myths are strange attractors, the set of values toward which a system tends to evolve possibility spaces, phase spaces. We all map our lives with metaphors in all phases, especially for the life we cannot live.
Artists are inherently mythically promiscuous. Imagination is stimulated by mythical fiction, which generates mythological imagination and speculative freedom of the soul. Nevertheless, the ideas that are most compelling to us, the art that attracts and changes us symbolize milestones. Psychic numbness leads to disenchantment, spiritual hunger and addictive, insatiable craving. Technological-electronic advances characterize the crisis of constant distraction and loss of sensation.
Ideas that arouse our Eros and attention seem to operate on the same principles that determine mating selection process. They put a spell on you. We have to allow what we seek to know and enter our own being. We become enlivened and increasingly passionate as we are seduced and merge with innovative artistic forms, a more participatory and responsive way of being with soul. Cosmos is inflected and acts through and enacted through us.
Soul demands we mobilize our capacity for self-transcendence to experience new dimensions of unfolding beauty and intelligence. Reconfiguring our lives is a critical personal and collective shift in perceptions and values, animating spiritual and psychological aesthetics. The way of art is the way of beauty and the sublime as epiphany. Even the ordinary, whether sacred or profane, is extraordinarily beautiful when embodied in an aesthetic context.
This is part of the central role aesthetics plays in our lives — in identity, politics, religion, and economies. Aesthetics orients us to beauty, performing arts, and inner and outer relationships. It is an antidote to the crisis of alienation, psychological and spiritual vanity. Art embodies thought and action and confronts well-established cultural criterion and complacent culture.
All our communications can be tracked, and therefore privacy is truly dead, so the secret environ needed to birth conspiracy is now rendered barren. Conspiracies are like mold. They need dark places to hatch. The modern age may have killed privacy, but in some ways, it has created a bacteria free environ deleterious to the secretive nature of conspiracy. Put away the tin foil hats.
Selection processes, sorting mechanisms, and other systemic relationships apply to the ways myths replicate, spread, feed, and die. All myths create a blindness about themselves. Universal forces affect, impel, structure, and permeate us. You never can see the actual myth you are in or only through a glass darkly. When you are in it, you can't see it. We can't make a story up about the ineffable.
"No psychological act can fully satisfy, no interpretation truly click like a key in a lock, no relationship of souls complete the lack and failure that reflects the essence of psyche. Imperfection is in its essence, and we are complete only by being in want. There will always be a mistake which is precisely what gives value to ... courage." --(James Hillman, Healing Fiction)
We hope this re-appraisal of Crotona 2520's myth leads us to new ideas and questions about the Future-Molding Game aesthetic as a communication platform and antidote to cultural corrosion, which none of us would have formulated on our own. It is a group endeavor and benefits the most from the interaction of minds in the commons toward a larger consciousness of purpose and meaning. What it becomes is in all of our hands.
"Whether intentionally or not, Milton was shouting out to Epictetus and Seneca (and Lao Tzu and Buddha). It is important to emphasize that Crotona-like organizations date back to the dawn of civilization. There have always been those who seek to control and those who resist. Resisters have often relied on coded information and cryptic exchanges to evade detection. Without the Crotonas of the past there would have been no ancient Greek scientific and philosophic revolution, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no constitutional democracy, and no civil liberties. We represent the philosophy of the Gandhis, MLKs, and Mandelas, not the Hitlers, Maos, and Stalins."
Crotona 2520
There may be a missing dimension in our worldview. All reality has rhythmic, musical, and artistic correspondences. Perceived through the heart, the beauty and ugliness of the world resets our moral compass.
--
"The mythological theory of foreknowledge also explains the view that all knowing is “memory.” Man’s task in the world is to remember with his conscious mind what was knowledge before the advent of consciousness." --Erich Neumann, Origins & History of Consciousness
“Hello,” the 4chan message read. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.” It was signed “Krotona.”
FOREWORD
The Gamma Zone
"Oh how much there still is that you do not know."
--Hermetic ABC of the Philosopher's Stone,
Berlin, 1779, Vol. III, pg. 6
Until now, no one has attempted to contextualize Crotona 2520, and unpack its genealogy, backstory, and scope. Any attempts that have been made are POV's by speculators, players, and wannabe stakeholders from severely limited points of view. Mostly, they parrot one another. Crotona 2520 may not only be deeper than they think, but deeper than they can think.
Crotona 2520 follows a long line of succession in Game Theory, including modeling of media environments and artistic anti-environments by Marshall McLuhan and others. He said in The Medium is the Massage that, "Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly."
McLuhan embraced this return to primeval spatial emanation wholeheartedly, but his understanding of the phenomenon morphed to an all-encompassing environment; environment as an ethereal but nonetheless graspable material, and totalizing extension of the entire perceiving apparatus of the human subject.
Environment is space itself as emanation. Qabala describes the cosmological sense of the Tree of Life as emanating cosmic forces filling the vacuum of space weaving disparate entities together into a sacred fabric of subject, object, and interval. The aesthetic appeal is this fluidity of cosmic forces, natural forms, and their interpenetration with humanity -- a completely different sensorium.
The unconscious media-environment pervades our personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences so that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. We cannot possibly understand any social and cultural change without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Media 'effects' are the dynamics between the 'unconscious' (environment) and 'consciousness'. The (unconscious) environment is the primary state of awareness, and the (conscious) 'anti-environment' is a privileged state of awareness. The artist 'makes new perception' (TT 94), McLuhan says. What we need is a frequency Renaissance.
We live in a highly fictionalized world, from the lies of our senses, our false self-image, projections, misperceptions, disinformation, beliefs, fantasy, misattribution, lies, false accusations, self-attribution, deception, competing narratives, and imagination, the poetic basis of mind. "As a poet,” Ferlinghettie says with a laugh, “I don’t deal in reality.”
Times 7-8 billion communal if not global delusions, the consensus trance is of constructed cultures and those collective unconscious tendencies. We attach ourselves to dreams we pursue compulsively. Many will do almost anything to keep such dreams or a false self-image alive. There is almost nothing we will defend more staunchly, sometimes to the death.
Wallace Stevens, the poet, claimed, "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."
Hillman says in Healing Fiction that, "What is to be understood, as well as the very nature of psychological understanding itself, is precisely the fictional nature of subjectivity. Then “unconsciousness” refers mainly to the fact that we are unclear about the subjective fictions that style our lives. In our terms: becoming “conscious” means to recognize the fantasies playing through all behavior; and the psyche’s need for psychotherapeutic understanding means that it asks to become aware of its fantasies."
Participatory Space
McLuhan believed that electronics were making such unities possible once more. To be more precise, such unities were immanent. They are forming and reorganizing social life whether or not the affected (or effected) subjects are aware of it. Its always different than what we imagine. Electronics render space itself as a kind of proprioceptive substance, malleable and “programmable."
“For twenty-five hundred years of artistic history,” McLuhan said in the sixties, “the arts have been engaged in separating man from his environment. Now, suddenly, the western world plunges with this new technology into a state in which man is once more engaged in merging with his environment.”
“The art object is replaced by participation in the art process. This is the essential meaning of electric circuitry and responsive environments. The artist leaves the Ivory Tower for the Control Tower, and abandons the shaping of art objects in order to program the environment itself as a work of art.”
Crotona 2520's digital space mirrors the psychological space of the darkened environments of prehistoric caves first marked by the artistic activity of archaic humans. Echoes and touch were just as reliable as flickering and fleeting light sources in caves or the frequency-modulated initiatory chambers of ancient Egyptian pyramids. Such modalities have spiraled into historical recurrence, a “pre/post/eros" history in which the indistinct layers of prehistoric origins merge with the apocalyptic endings of post-history.
McLuhan says: 'Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes.' (CIOB 44) "For to probe is to cross boundaries of many kinds ...' (UB 20, p.5)
Thus the gamemaster of the global cryptographic scavenger hunt remains anonymous, like a modern Alois Mailander, ('Secret Chief' to Blavatsky, OTO, Anthroposophy, the Rosicrucian Fellowship, Franz Bardon, Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, the FRA of Krumm-Heller, and Stella Matutina branch of the Golden Dawn). Mechanics are always meant to remain hidden.
Many have tried in vain to usurp the position and claim the mantle. A 2014 episode of 'Person of Interest', called 'Nautilus', portrayed the gamemaster as non-human AI, dubbed The Samaritan. Hidden adepts, artificial intelligence, a transdisciplinary consortium of social engineers, deep state? One might wonder who the Impressario is. Here, 'your faithful narrator', attempts to provide an expository and speculative overview for orientation.
We must realize that this evidence relies more on recognizing the way in which ideas have to fit together to reveal hidden or divine patterns. All these threads together may not produce a coherent and true narrative. This ideal eternal history is one in which truth is attained by imaginatively linking different elements together to reveal the hidden order, the metaphysical truth to history. Rather than adding art to the environment, it creates its own environment.
Crotona 2520's tropes and encrypted references transcend time and modernity, harking back to arcane, philosophical, and political history. Its mystique is novelty and unfamiliarity, anticipation and unpredictability -- the potential of exciting experiences. It echoes the classic line, "Do you want to play a game?" ("War Games", 1983).
Crotona 2520 requires participation in a process, rather than the mere apprehension of concepts. Crotona 2520 becomes hyperreal, what Umberto Eco might call an authentic fake, a recombinant commodity. Multiplied stylized images take on a life of their own, shattering the grid of representation. Primeval art has no background.
Crotona 2520 isn't derivative of anything, though it draws on and synthesizes many disciplines. Psychic and sensory hooks stick in the mind. Electric media retrieved the unconscious, the old cliches of tribal man, and scrapped private identity and consciousness built up over centuries of repression by tribal and corporate life.
Game theory wasn't part of Crotona 2520's design, but it is a metaphysical doctrine that tries to encompass everything, including the nature of humanity and the nature of cosmos and all that proceeds from the dynamic void of probabilities and superpositions.
Evil thickens the plot of the whole range of emotionally wrenching experiences. Some people lose themselves in the game, choosing off the Internet as an arena of fighting, while others find themselves. It has already inspired real world envy, betrayal, and even the malevolence of Hermann Hesse's "Madman's Theatre," or the perplexing twists of John Fowles' The Magus.
The most consistent and unassuming claim is that Crotona 2520 supports information freedom, online privacy and freedom, and rejection of censorship. There is a persistent subtext concerning mankind's highest purpose related to human survival. It certainly appeals most to those looking for their own Elixir of Life as an antidote to dystopian society.
There is no guessing in this game of deeply layered symbolism, which requires decryption. Anytime we step through the looking-glass we are in danger of seeing our real selves and the subjective fantasies we pile on and fuse with objective reality. It literally becomes more than a metaphor. Beyond state nomenclature, we can develop internal maps or taxonomies of consciousness that expand our ability to conceptualize, building a vocabulary to discuss such states and experiences.
Modern wisdom uses reflection to create categories and concepts while poetic wisdom does not reflect or analyze but spontaneously generates imaginative universals. By default, Crotona 2520 is a future-molding game because the prototype exploits the paradigm. These concepts help us move beyond over-zealous, power-driven, ethnocentric, and egocentric ways.
Meaning is a non-material imaginal dimension. Imagination is a vital spiritual function, inseparable from the World Soul. Psyche is soul. Symbols are the currency of consciousness and the connective tissue of the mind-body correlation.
Our mind doesn't store memories; it is memory. Our wounds are necessary to fulfill our calling. The marks of memory are the signs of destiny. Penetration of the mystic veil often comes through one's wounds. They allow us to see through to an immaterial sense of being. There is a memory of Nature that reveals events and symbols of distant ages. The mystics of different countries have spoken of this Memory in several centuries.
The ethic is one of engagement, participation, and co-creation. moving deeper into love. There may be a missing dimension in our worldview. We need to uncover collaborations with new spaces and the healing power of narrative history. All reality has rhythmic, musical, and artistic correspondences. Perceived through the heart, the beauty and ugliness of the world resets our moral compass.
Self Determination
The central and essential idea of philosophy is to 'Know Thyself.' In politics, a noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in the Republic.
Plato likely went through the Rites of Eleusis. He asks his companion Meno, "aren't you going to stay around for the Mysteries?" The Greater Mystery is a near-death experience (separating the soul from the body), or 'dying while living,' and subsequent rebirth.
The old outworn self-image has to die for the new self-image to emerge. Apollo’s advice is thinking back to ourselves, to our own true necessities and letting all the sham necessities go. This is how the ancients came into possession of themselves, again. This is a parable for each one of us: we must organize the chaos in ourselves by “thinking ourselves back” to our true needs.
The dramatic spectacles of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by the ancient theologists to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul. The goal of philosophy is the knowledge of and manifestation of the self.
However, Plato's Republic was not designing a literal state or model for statehood, but making an idealization or 'model in the heavens', metaphor or analogy for the psyche, soul, or self. It is about the dynamics or ideal state of the soul and self-knowledge of the philosopher-king, and how to acquire and preserve that sovereignty.
Philosophy itself is inherently subversive. Sovereignty of the self is the sanctity of the individual. Individual sovereignty means that it is evil for anyone to interfere with one’s honest and peaceful choices. When people give up some individual liberty in exchange for anything, sovereignty becomes a self-deluded artificial soul -- a false self. Autonomy, sovereignty, and privacy are moral ideals in the Constitution.
Political and personal challenges require a constant and conscientious humility. “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind,” playwright John Milton wrote in 1634. The Fool’s Journey is the pilgrim soul making its rather more humble way through life.
But, nearly 400 years later, technological advances in machines that can read our thoughts mean the security, privacy and neuro-rights of our brain are under threat. Non-poetic pathology, patho-logos, is a false view and logical fallacies about the self. Disproportionate pathos and logos creates the whole zoo of cognitive biases.
Our authenticity includes mental integrity, mental privacy, our own personal journey of self-discovery and personal growth to remain true to our own integrity. If not that, what are the boundaries of personal sovereignty? Mental Integrity is the individual's mastery of mental states and brain data so that, without consent, no one can read, spread, or alter such states and data in order to condition the individual in any way.
The right to psychological continuity -- to cognitive liberty and decisional privacy makes us the responsible agent of our own development as a fundamental part of being a person -- individual agency. We have the right to 1). cognitive liberty, 2). mental privacy, 3). mental integrity, and 4). psychological continuity. Scientists have already developed devices capable of telling whether people are politically right-wing or left-wing.
Actively shaping who we want to be includes how we want to think, not just existing in a captive state. Freedom of thought is mental integrity. Altering consciousness remains controversial. The information in our brains needs special protection, including “telepathically” communicating with machines, electronic mindreading, and the existential threat of artificial intelligence by merging with machines.
Experts say, “The technology is coming and is likely to have dramatic implications for privacy, consent and individual agency.” A right to mental privacy would protect individuals against the unconsented intrusion by third parties into their brain data as well as against the unauthorized collection of those data. In the future, brain control could replace the keyboard and speech recognition as a primary way to interact with computers.
Tools such as brainwave monitoring devices allow people to play video games with their minds. Mind Control TV plays you right back. Electroencephalography brainwave-reading headsets translate grey matter’s electrical activity into commands for iPlayer. Brain stimulators like TMS. ECT, and FFR claim to boost mental performance.
Absolute privacy and integrity of the most relevant part of our brain data is the most valuable and inviolable human right, preserving a “private repository” of thought in which to defend our convictions and identity, our dignity, and autonomy against theft, abuse, 'mind hacking' and brain-scanning tech.
Cognitive liberty is an ethical and neuroethics question. It is the "right to mental self-determination", the freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness. It has been argued to be both an extension of, and the principle underlying, the right to freedom of thought, the freedom to have the absolute sovereignty of one's own consciousness and self-ownership.
"Brain-reading technology can be seen as just another unavoidable trend that erodes a bit more of our personal space in the digital world. But given the sanctity of our mental privacy, we might not be so willing to accept this intrusion. People could, in fact, look at this technology as something that requires the reconceptualization of basic human rights and even the creation of neurospecific rights." (SciAm, 2017)
What is the Future of Freedom of Thought in the Age of Neurocops, Brain Fingerprinting, Memory Management Drugs, and Hypersonic Sound? What is the legal notion of freedom of thought in light of ongoing scientific advancements related to understanding, monitoring, and electronically modulating brain function and brain datasets.
We need to find and signal the unauthorized detection, alteration, and diffusion of brain data and brain functioning. We must be able to stop any unauthorized detection, alteration, and diffusion of brain data. This should not only regard individual devices, but act as a general and technical operating principle shared by all interconnected systems that deal with decoding brain activity and brain functioning.
Digital Fabulism
Within the domain of the game narrative, the main plot points and outcome of an episode does not necessarily correspond to the intentions of the agents (characters) in the story world. Fabulist elements resonate as metaphors for feelings. Magical elements intrude on the real world. There is no way to know what is really happening, yet the game remains afoot.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Not all art hangs on a gallery wall. Crotona 2520 shares qualities with the Fabulist school of art, with its yarns, tales, fables, and fantastical art -- dreamlike narratives and surrealist scenes, even the blurring of art, journalism, and advocacy. Expansion is the fascination of the fabulist's art.
The fabulist's realistic evocations are purely poetic and mythological, created with the necessity of our particular societial considerations for the transmission of culture and its phase transitions. Who knows what drives the impulses, urges, self- reflexive and absurdist strategies of the metafictionist and fabulist -- the honest deceit of the imaginal storyteller?
Crotona 2520 is a counternarrative. The millennial fabulist mines the inherently spontaneous and playful properties of language itself as performance art, a spontaneous bit of transgressive theatre. Transgressive art aims to outrage, challenge, or violate basic morals and sensibilities. The challenge to viewers is to actively participate in redefining the boundaries of art -- a mashup of high art and mass culture. As such, Crotona 2520 becomes a living laboratory.
Some players live their "let's pretend" lives with no absence of illusion. Compulsively or otherwise they pile on coincidences, never entirely inventing, always intensifying for dramatic effect. A spiritual outlook doesn't have to negate rationality. The only way through is through the consciousness of the age. As Jean Houston says, the Zeit is getting Geistier." Ways of exploring are always done in an ambiguous way. For example, only in the 21st century as mores change are we approaching increasingly coherent narratives of the diverse realities of colonialization.
Hyperbole involves raising reality. It blends the ordinary world and the mythic, the imaginary and the real to uncover deeper truths. A fabulist creates imaginative fictive realities as a fabricator, fibber, liar, prevaricator, or storyteller, such as magic realist writer Borges. Poetics always suggests more than any subject can deliver. Crotona 2520's story is peppered with fabulist elements, and incursions. Fantastic things happen in ordinary life.
Even fabulist work can be sustained by authentic moral vision -- accepting human frailty while struggling to tell right from wrong, good conduct from bad.. After all Aesop, Kipling, and Kafka were fabulists. Fabulism isn't all post-modern. The earliest, most “primitive” form of art is fabulist, legendary, and surreal, populated not by ordinary, life-sized people but by gods, giants, and monsters.
Future-Molding Games
Crotona 2520 is a variation on the Cosmic Game, Lila, exploring the frontiers of human consciousness and discerning the illusion of so-called reality and the problems of existence. The human psychodrama can be observed as divine play. It may not be too much to liken it to a contemplative practice. It is also a type of delirium and archetypal adventure.
Lila is Divine Being in its cosmic aspect of playful, aimless display, which precipitates pain as well as joy, but transcends them both in bliss.. Other modern versions include Tim Leary's book Game of Life and his digital game 'Mind Mirrors', Jean Houston's biofeedback game 'Journey to Wild Divine', and Robert Anton Wilson's novel Cosmic Trigger. As its own experiential world, Crotona 2520 is a Microcosm of the Macrocosm -- your own personal cosmos, reflecting individual and non-human transpersonal psyche.
Crotona 2520 has many deep roots informing its hybrid digital process. It is so Gamma, so Meta, and so Esoteric -- intense, self-referential, and enigmatic. Gamma values rate of change for an option, or acceleration of intensity. Meta-inquiry is self-referential, seeing the thing or ourselves from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware -- the metacognition of consciousness perceiving its own unfolding and intrinsic meaning. There are no clues without a cryptic Mystery.
Any dramatization of Crotona 2520 would be challenged to live up to the level of plot points, points of reference, mythologization, mystification, drama, pathos, and hilarity the true story has engendered spontaneously on its own...or even to figure out just what that true story is to base it on.
Did Crotona 2520 set out to do this? No, absolutely not. Its modest beginning blew up into a multimedia phenomenon. It wasn't selling anything and it did not recruit. There was no doctrine or dogma. Points of reference are used as metaphors, used to judge or understand something else. It is more of a co-adventure, more cross-pollination than conspiracy, and definitely not a serial deception. It became a self-organizing process with a life of its own.
We might say it is its own altered state of consciousness, an alt.reality operating on its own frequency for those who resonate with it. Cycles of pleasure, pain, and idealization can be an emotional roller-coaster many like to ride. Solvers have a proclivity for open-ended seeking and exploration.
Each person frames the Crotona 2520 story differently, projecting or twisting it to their needs. It also engages the struggle for survival and self-image. Just when we think we might know, we find we don't. As Goethe says, in The Treasure Hunter, "Then with a loud report his apparatus burst."
The unspoken objective of Crotona 2520 is to watch the psychological effects upon our own consciousness. Who will define us in an age of homogenization and suppression of divergent thought, in an age of political parrots, prime-time victims, and premature transcendental escape fantasies?
The Effect of Gamma Waves on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
Crotona 2520 is a Gamma Zone, a brain-boosting vortex of psychosocial intensity. Arguably, it could generate superpowers. The brain is a resonating structure. Gamma is the state of being “in the Zone,” feeling that you can do anything. This highest brainwave mode works on memory, attention span & mood and creates the unity of conscious perception by binding the whole brain with a 40Hz frequency.
That 40Hz is also associated with lucid dreaming. Zapping sleepers produces a resonance that triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time. Veteran lucid dreamers produced 30- to 40-Hz brain waves in their brain’s frontal area.
Gamma synchrony engages more neurons and synapses in peak performance, visualization, compassion, increased sensory perception, focus and processing speed, and increased memory recall. This fast oscillation is found in intensive problem-solving such as decryption.
The brain is hard-wired for mystical experiences that counteract stress. Peak experiences, raptures, epiphanies, even illumination are potentially available to everyone. We can learn to make space, time and personality dissolve. Meditation can sharpen mental abilities, by producing more gamma for increased brain capacity. Such hyperarousal rebounds into hypoarousal.
“What I propose is that normality, creativity, schizophrenia, and mystical states, though seemingly disparate, actually lie on a continuum. Furthermore, they represent increasing levels of arousal and a gradual withdrawal from the synchronized physical-sensory-cerebral spacetime of the normal state. Specifically, there is a retreat first to sensory-cerebral spacetime and, ultimately, to cerebral spacetime only. The gradual withdrawal from physical spacetime is an expression of the dissolution of ego boundaries, that is, the fusion of object and subject, and it implies that an existence solely in spacetime is an oceanic experience, the most intense mirroring of the ego in its own meaning.” (Roland Fischer)
At extreme limits, the enflamment of intense mental activity and sensory overload will paradoxically shift into states of spacious quietude, even cosmic consciousness -- a cycle of excitement and tranquilization. Arsousal is entrained with Transcendence. Meditative and exalted states can be chemically related to cycles of inflation, desire, acting out, guilt, remorse, high wellbeing, self-acceptance, and self-esteem.
The Holy Frequency, 111 Hz., is at the upper limit of Gamma brainwaves. Gamma is like a super-conducting, supercharged state ranging from 25 to 100 Hz. Resonant frequency effects, entanglement, and brainwave entrainment amplify the Gamma range. Sound can alter consciousness and was used in ancient stone temple chambers in Malta, Egypt, Greece, and elsewhere.
High-frequency Gamma, the fastest of brain waves, relates to simultaneous processing information from different brain areas. They pass information rapidly and quietly. The mind has to quiet down to access gamma in higher processing tasks as well as cognitive functioning.
Research suggests that gamma rhythms modulate perception and consciousness, expand consciousness and spiritual emergence. Increased gamma can be a meditative state or healing frequency. All meditators showed higher parieto-occipital 60–110 Hz gamma amplitude than control subjects in studies.
This gamma power positively correlates with meditation experience. Correlates to changes in the EEG gamma frequency range are common to a variety of meditation practices. According to Paul Devereux, Pythagoras created his musical scale starting with a note A that resonates at the frequency of 111 Hz.
The 110-111 Hz signal helps us integrate the two halves of the brain into a state of balanced consciousness. The brain switches off the prefrontal cortex and deactivates the language center facilitating holistic processing, creativity, and intuition.
Gamma waves are important for learning, memory and information processing. 40 Hz gamma is suggested for binding our senses to perception and are involved in learning new material. Too much gamma can cause over-arousal, stress, and anxiety. Too little means depression, learning disabilities, and ADHD.
The Magnum Opus
Crotona 2520 explores the relationships between concepts, symbols, and events. It is radically Gamma, Meta, and Esoteric in its content, approach, and effects. Meta-modeling is the analysis, construction and development of the frames, rules, constraints, models and theories used to model problem solving.
So are metaphysical models. What the old Hermeticists taught and practiced was not superstitious nonsense. The wizardry and magical alphabets of yesterday is the science of tomorrow. An old Rosicrucian motto says, "Follow Nature! Follow Nature! As she works so will I work." If the letters of the alphabet are seen as the alchemical “prima materia,” the original particles of Nature are used as the building blocks of all life and form.
Crotona 2520 metamodels pose a set of interactive questions designed to specify information, challenge, and expand the limits of a person’s model of the world -- the boundaries of their worldviews. Crotona 2520 uses inherently transformational syntax, like therapy and metaphysics. You either get the clues or you don't.
Usually, people create faulty mental maps of reality, failing to test their linguistic-cognitive models against the experience of their senses, because of deletions, distortions, assumptions, inaccuracies, and generalization.
People respond to events based on their internal pictures, sounds and feelings. They collect these experiences into groups or categories that are labeled with words and concepts. The meta-model moves someone from information-poor word maps back to innate specific sensory-based experiences. Information-rich specific experiences help us adapt.
So, what is behind Crotona 2520? Most of it goes on behind the screen and behind ordinary consciousness in the deep unconscious. The term “meta” (“behind” or “above” something) is relative – depending on the perspective, a model is either a model or a metamodel.
Crotona 2520 builds concrete meta-models and exploits them using existing meta-modeling technical supra- and infrastructures, from the metaphysical models of Qabalah, Hellenistic Egypt, and the Renaissance to the Dark Web, musicology, and encryption. The archetypal journey of initiation is the Star Journey.
Crotona 2520's core is the user, The Seeker, a well-delineated archetype of the spiritual journey. This is the Fool, the Innocent, the Wanderer, the Clown-Prince of archetypes. Seekers are archetypal Explorers of the soul, always on the lookout for something that will raise consciousness. The Quest is as or more important than the solutions. In short, 21st-century seeking is at once thrilling and overwhelming, a cascade of neurotransmitter cocktails, but a struggle in a sea of options.
Players report insights -- getting a clearer sense of who they are and are not. The puzzle can exalt or humble. They discover what is central to their quest, including developing a clear identity, worldview, and life purpose. Seekers quest for the truth, uncovering mysteries, lies, deception and gaining knowledge about themselves and the universe. But these characters may have become so distanced from humanity that they're reluctant to give it up.
Wikipedia claims, "As the group has gained notoriety and public attention, many have asserted that the puzzles are an introduction to occult principles, and possibly even recruitment for a cult. Tim Dailey, a senior research fellow with the conservative Christian Family Research Council, analyzed the teachings of Crotona 2520, and stated, "The enigmatic Crotona 2520 appears to be drawing participants inexorably into the dark web of the occult a la Blavatsky and Crowley. At the heart of the enchantment is the counterfeit promise of ultimate meaning through self-divination." Others have claimed that the Crotona 2520 puzzles are a modern and technological equivalent to the enlightenment journey within Western esotericism and Mystery schools."
The bottom line is that Crotona 2520 is a Magnum Opus, a Great Work, in the illuminative tradition of 'Know Thyself,' self-realization rooted in the maxim 'As Above; So Below.' Its clues come largely from the vast repertoire of esoteric arts and metaphysical systems. As such it has conducted improvisational rites of passage for many years now. Because such milestones of every life are archetypal, they tend to automatically repeat in a self-organizing way like fractals.
Some might call it performance art, like engaging thematic solos. Thematic improvisation is the process of embellishing, developing, changing, or deconstructing a musical theme. Improv is the forte of the great jazz solists and helps generate an endless flow of ideas on any tune or idea in any style.
The beginning and the end are in the same place and condition. Alchemists say the prima materia is the ultima materia. If this makes Crotona 2520 a mystery school by default, so be it. We choose soul, not religious, but psychological soul. It permeates us with the flow of images and processes of imagination. Our task is to join more consciously with the imagination of the world. Eternity is concealed in each moment.
Alchemical rebirth is its trope. More than 'do what we say,' Crotona 2520 suggests 'you, too, might be able to do what we do.' It keeps momentum despite flame wars, coup attempts, sabotage, lies, betrayal, disinformation, and other unsavory business which just feeds the story. As Francis Bacon said, “The serpent, if it wants to become the dragon, must eat itself.” There have been times Crotona 2520 has had to 'eat it.' Sometimes it came back wrong, now it is coming back strong.
It has been called the "biggest mystery on the Internet," "the hardest puzzle," and "most mysterious game on the Web." In typical dark web fashion, no one knew who posted the game challenges. Rather than a personality cult, it employs and exploits the 'user as content,' feeding the psychological soul. Its 'weapon' is polysemous imagery where multiple meanings work on multiple senses.
Crotona 2520 is a tool for exploring the effects of media. It intensifies it. Laws of Media describes how McLuhan "found that everything man makes and does, every process, every style, every artifact, every poem, song, painting, gimmick, gadget, theory, technology — every product of human effort — manifested the same four dimensions.”
Exploiting the Laws of Media, Crotona 2520 retrieves what was thought obsolete. It obsolesces groupthink. It reverses toxic trends and enhances the digital domain. "It is said of the uroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself." (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis)
A Digital Book of the Dead
For the longest time, Crotona 2520 has floated in the digital ether without much context to tether it in the Macro- and Microcosm. It became a unique media channel for disenfranchised outliers and intelligentsia. Yet Crotona 2520 has no cultural or narrative strategy. It erects no spiritual framework. It opens creative space. But the playground is not rational. The persuasive power of myth is proportional to the verity of its images of truth, or ability to maintain the illusion.
The boundaries of public discourse have become so contracted it makes frank discussions of anything remotely controversial impossible. As institutions and gatekeepers became increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought, Crotona 2520 found receptive audiences elsewhere. The linguistic drain encouraged using non-verbal modalities.
Crotona 2520 dared to supplement irony and spectacle with philosophical and political gravitas in a landscape starving for controversial opinions and actual conversation. Crotona 2520 advocates becoming more fully human even in this uncertain time just before AI or human extinction makes our humanity a moot point. So there are numerous ways for it to draw criticism, outrage, and hostility.
By not defining or disclosing itself, Crotona 2520 became a pioneer in the renegade intellectual Dark Web, not writing off maps of meaning or the re-enchantment of the world. It rejected trading off propaganda, personality cults or talking heads, beyond buzz or celebrity, cultural relativism, and cliche metaphors of rabbitholes, branding, tollbooths, silos, and echo chambers.
Instead, it encouraged new emergent capacities and legitimate exploration of the unknown and unknowable through cultural mythology and ruthless self-examination, the age-old wisdom tradition in millennial garb. But is it? Game theory metaphysics sells imagination as the veritable image of truth -- but it is a virtual image. We have to ask, whose truth? No matter how coherent and self-sufficient, this is a rather fragile picture.
Crotona 2520 encouraged psyche or soul to be radical, anarchic, decentralized, yet aesthetically expressive. The tyranny of thought-policing demands responsive independent thinking rather than ethical and moral confusion. When Crotona 2520 implied, 'the way out is in,' it didn't mean go get lost in your own subjective or self-absorbed fantasy trips and delusional self-analysis but move deeper into your own unique passionate engagement with life and cosmos.
When did free speech become a 'dark' subject? Pointing out societal ills of the deeply complex world, an alliance of heretics made an end run around the mainstream conversation. It encouraged not just drawing back into oneself but fully engaging inner and outer life as indissolubly fused. Elementary human solidarity is explained in Aristotle’s Book VIII of Nicomachean Ethics, defined as ‘friendship’ (filia) in the broadest sense.
It was a way to say what cannot be said about self-agency in a deeply hostile political climate. It morphed on its own along the way and became both beautiful and dangerous. It never saw itself becoming a 'movement' but more of a meshwork for world-citizenry to lean into, exploring how other people develop their worldview and different modes of knowing the world. It is an audience-supported model, that asks not for dollars but for you to support yourself with inherently meaningful ways. This amorphous network has different ideas about what it is doing.
Crotona 2520 began as an out-of-the-box experiment, a convivium with new artistic social structures and community constellations with a willingness to explore the taboo, the transgressive, and social identity. It cannot be articulated because everyone brings their own point of view to it.
It went viral and became the biggest of its genre -- more than a puzzle, it became a living Mystery with untellable secrets, but not the sociopolitical sort. All those “whistleblowers” who rationally decided to confront corruption now enjoy the pay-off of prison or unemployment, crucified by responsibility to their conscience.
Crotona 2520 dared venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map and met with fascination, outrage, and hostile derision. Undaunted, each year it evolved further into a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades, outliers, and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation through multidimensional levels of digital and realworld life that conventional media won't or can't host.
The average person has no idea what goes on in the Dark Web and other no-go zones, yet it affects us continually from transnational hacking, infrastructure hijacking, theft of intellectual and real property, to illegal trafficking. The trick to character is to have some, not just be one.
Crotona 2520 sounds unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. We might say it used art as a weapon, of self-defense, a psychological aikido, rather than a pulpit. How do we enact decentered planetary culture -- bridge-building without getting stuck in personas, or locked into obsessions pushing cultural pressure points?
Metanoia
Psyche is plural. Crotona 2520 is plural. It is psychoactive, it leaves openings in you, creating questions, rather than closing your ambiguity and complexity. The world becomes more spacious. Its narrative has pathos, diversity, and the grittiness of reality with an ancient base and timeless superstructure that mystified onlookers, and produced a host of conjecture, fan fiction, articles, and videos trying to suss it out. That process only fed it, and enlarged its scope from paranoia to metanoia, a deeply felt change of heart. Everytime someone thinks they 'get it,' it transmogrifies.
Crotona 2520 introduced the world to a multidimensional form of art that was something never seen before -- simultaneously focusing on self and the world as a means of tending to soul or psyche as World Soul (Sophia) in today's radically fragmented world.
Rooted in deep time, it mashed up the real world, with the digital universe, and the imaginal psyche. It wasn't about an X-box labyrinth, solving a puzzle, avatars and role play, a scavenger hunt, or 'what I did on my summer vacation.'
It unleashed a living force, the progeny of the Anima Mundi or World Soul, fused with a multisensory symphony of human artistic expression. It made its own alchemical transmutations. It became an athanor of transformation, concealing and revealing hidden truths. In the ancient art of alchemy, the soul is depicted as a homunculus or “small human.” The homunculus is the archetype of the magical child. It is symbolically equivalent to the Elixir or Universal Medicine.
No one expected that, if they even recognized it. In simple terms, the game took on a life of its own, drawing interest and solvers from all over the globe. And it's still alive. It became a phenomenon: Greek: φαινόμενον, to show, shine, appear, to be manifest or manifest itself; any thing which manifests itself.
What it manifested was Mystery. Also, compulsion, mania, obsession, and more than a bit of madness in those who fell under its spell and wanted to write themselves into the story. It shone from the dim skies of the Dark Web like new star at its zenith. It implied one might share in that elusive transubstantiation, a cultural atonement.
"It's the most baffling and enigmatic mystery on the Internet with promises of “epiphany” if you solve it." Rolling Stone called it, "the web's deepest mystery...a world of international intrigue."
“With Crotona 2520, no one knows what the goal is,” says one cipher expert, “or how you know when you won.” Many have tried to explain it, and all have utterly failed to grasp either its source, metaphysical root or game theory. An altered media reality is an altered state of consciousness.
“You’ve shared too much to this point,” the note from Crotona 2520 read. “We want the best, not followers.” Disinformation spread from all quarters. Thus, no one has deduced the transpersonal Meta-Narrative. Or, as Jagger said, "What's puzzlin' you is the nature of my Game."
Fans and solvers all repeat the same purpose verbatim: "The stated purpose of the puzzles each year has been to recruit "highly intelligent individuals", though the ultimate purpose remains unknown. Some have claimed that Crotona 2520 is a secret society with the goal of improving cryptography, privacy and anonymity."
No one has 'chunked back' far enough to see the details from that perspective, to get the Big Picture, its self-organizing ecology, nor its artistic thrust. No one has understood all the interpenetrating threads that weave that braid, as much of it is profoundly unconscious.
We might suggest, along with MIT philosopher Brad Skow, that past, present, and future are simultaneous. Destiny is ever-present and already decided (Skow, 2019). Time and events spread out in all directions; events occur and things change.
Once an event has occurred, it continues to exist somewhere in space-time, with its own space-time coordinates. “The block universe theory says you’re spread out in time, something like the way you’re spread out in space,” Skow says. “We’re not located at a single time.” He calls his theory a fantasy, yet it is coherent and consistent with relativity. It is consistent with spiritual descriptions of eternal transcendental realms.
.
Then, with the weight of praise and of blame.
I weighed the eternal, it called my soul,
I died, I adored, I knew NOTHING more."
--St. Germain
Game Theory
In addition to being used to describe, predict, and explain behavior, game theory has also been used to develop theories of ethical or normative behavior or good and proper behavior. Game-theoretic arguments for this type of 'good' can be found as far back as Plato.
But, game theorists usually assume players act rationally. However, in practice, human behavior often deviates from this model, so assumptions do not always hold. Life, psyche, and the unconscious have more-than-human autonomous self-organizing agendas. Yet, Evolutionary game theory includes both biological as well as cultural evolution and also models of individual learning, including fictitious play dynamics.
Timothy Leary and his 8-circuit model of consciousness was an early influence of game theory applied to secular and transpersonal psychology, introducing the concept to the International Association of Applied Psychology in 1961. He extrapolated such theories into his Millbrook Experiment, based on the Castaglia model of a genius transdisciplinary consortium of social engineers, rather like those described by Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game and elaborated by Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum.
The Science-Art consortium of Australia and America has pioneered work in this area for human aesthetics, well-being, and survival technologies. In a holographic concept of reality, healthy living information flows in the opposite direction to the extinction energies belonging to The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Plato searched for an ethical, spiritual, electromagnetic field evolving within the creative artistic mind and the evolution of artistic emotional consciousness. Science-Art research projects around the world are all based upon linking science with dysfunctional aesthetics, which is the carrier of the mental disorder.
Aesthetic Arrest
Aesthetic arrest stops us dead in our tracks in awe and wonder. The penetration of digital life into the psyche and fabric of our global being has made an update of such notions not only feasible but necessary. Crotona 2520 redefined the effects of interfacing environments with the digital world. Understanding of our relationship to the frequency domain is now revealing itself in a '21st century Frequency Renaissance.'
The rise, fall, and rebirth of Crotona 2520 in the real world is a story in progress, and a cautionary tale to idealistic social engineers.
Stephen Schafer, who teaches game narration and design, has suggested a post-Jungian Psychecology of potentially programmable quantum actants, as agents of evolution which can be modeled as de-conditioning and re-conditioning digital game play. "The key to this design is coherent game imagery that would contribute to the reframing of archetypal patterns of the unconscious."
Schafer's idea is that "such design (based on images with coherent resonance which appear to be very similar to Plato’s fractal artifacts) can be structured along dynamics of Jungian dream analysis (dramatic structure, compensation, contextuality, and coherent Individuation)."
He says media is linked to cognitive structure and virtual illusions. We can discover contextual meaning in unconscious dimensions and synergy with the World Soul. Schafer's fantasy of generating "Earth-sustainable media content in order to promote coherent frequencies on correlated electro-magnetic scales," is reminiscent of Hellenistic culture, our Science-Art aims, and a Frequency Renaissance.
Music of the Spheres
Crotona 2520 is deeply rooted in the retrieval of the ancient Music of the Spheres. Plato argued that plane geometry contained an invisible ethical spiritual message belonging to the workings of an infinite living universe. He argued that if civilization understood this message it could become part of the universe’s healthy existence and thus avoid the extinction of life-forms recorded in the Earth’s fossil record (Pope 2018).
Greek initiates gained their knowledge of the philosophic, mathematical, and therapeutic aspects of music from the Egyptians, who considered Hermes the founder of the art. Harmony is a quality of Beauty, manifesting its own intrinsic nature in the world of form. One who conducts from The Book of Harmony orchestrates the universe.
This Pythagorean philosophical concept regards frequencies, colors, and proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a universal form of music. The Chaldeans first conceived of the heavenly bodies joining in a cosmic chant.
In the East, the creative sound is called Shabd, the unstruck sound, the voice of the silence, the holy Name, divine melody. In Surat Shabd Yoga, Shabd or Shabda has multiple meanings including ‘sacred song’, ‘word’, ‘voice’, ‘hymn’, ‘verse’, or ‘sound current, ‘audible life stream’, and the ‘essence of the Absolute Supreme Being’, a dynamic force of creative energy sent out into the abyss of space at the dawn of the universe's manifestation, as sound vibrations. These vibrations continue and are sent forth through the ages, framing all things that constitute and inhabit the universe. The peace of life is the Silence that voices us.
Among the Muslim Sufis, it is known as Sultan-ul-Azkar, (the king of prayers). Another order of Sufis calls it Saut-i-Sarmadi, (the Divine Song). They also called the mystic sounds heard during meditation Nida-i-Asmani, (the sound coming down from the Heavens), Kalam-i-Qadim (the ancient sound) and the Kalma or endless Word, reverberating in each heart. Guru Nanak said, "Through the medium of Word, soul doth cross the endless ocean of matter."
Recognizing, the profound effect of music on the senses and emotions, Pythagoras used 'musical medicine' to influence the mind and body. He cured many ailments of the spirit, soul, and body through specially prepared or 'encoded' musical compositions. Plato affirmed that music which ennobled or exalted the mind is of a far higher kind than that which merely appeals to the senses. Paying particular attention to intervals, Pythagoras exploited resonance in a contemporary cosmological view, digitally revisioned in Crotona 2520.
Crotona 2520 is dedicated to the propositions of personal privacy and cognitive liberty. It has attempted to bring like-minded people of high-caliber together, with very mixed results, despite the best working intentions of raising awareness, voicing views, improving the democratic process, and Crotona 2520's 'clues' are mini initiatory rituals.
There may be a missing dimension in our worldview. All reality has rhythmic, musical, and artistic correspondences. Perceived through the heart, the beauty and ugliness of the world resets our moral compass.
--
"The mythological theory of foreknowledge also explains the view that all knowing is “memory.” Man’s task in the world is to remember with his conscious mind what was knowledge before the advent of consciousness." --Erich Neumann, Origins & History of Consciousness
“Hello,” the 4chan message read. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.” It was signed “Krotona.”
FOREWORD
The Gamma Zone
"Oh how much there still is that you do not know."
--Hermetic ABC of the Philosopher's Stone,
Berlin, 1779, Vol. III, pg. 6
Until now, no one has attempted to contextualize Crotona 2520, and unpack its genealogy, backstory, and scope. Any attempts that have been made are POV's by speculators, players, and wannabe stakeholders from severely limited points of view. Mostly, they parrot one another. Crotona 2520 may not only be deeper than they think, but deeper than they can think.
Crotona 2520 follows a long line of succession in Game Theory, including modeling of media environments and artistic anti-environments by Marshall McLuhan and others. He said in The Medium is the Massage that, "Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly."
McLuhan embraced this return to primeval spatial emanation wholeheartedly, but his understanding of the phenomenon morphed to an all-encompassing environment; environment as an ethereal but nonetheless graspable material, and totalizing extension of the entire perceiving apparatus of the human subject.
Environment is space itself as emanation. Qabala describes the cosmological sense of the Tree of Life as emanating cosmic forces filling the vacuum of space weaving disparate entities together into a sacred fabric of subject, object, and interval. The aesthetic appeal is this fluidity of cosmic forces, natural forms, and their interpenetration with humanity -- a completely different sensorium.
The unconscious media-environment pervades our personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences so that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. We cannot possibly understand any social and cultural change without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Media 'effects' are the dynamics between the 'unconscious' (environment) and 'consciousness'. The (unconscious) environment is the primary state of awareness, and the (conscious) 'anti-environment' is a privileged state of awareness. The artist 'makes new perception' (TT 94), McLuhan says. What we need is a frequency Renaissance.
We live in a highly fictionalized world, from the lies of our senses, our false self-image, projections, misperceptions, disinformation, beliefs, fantasy, misattribution, lies, false accusations, self-attribution, deception, competing narratives, and imagination, the poetic basis of mind. "As a poet,” Ferlinghettie says with a laugh, “I don’t deal in reality.”
Times 7-8 billion communal if not global delusions, the consensus trance is of constructed cultures and those collective unconscious tendencies. We attach ourselves to dreams we pursue compulsively. Many will do almost anything to keep such dreams or a false self-image alive. There is almost nothing we will defend more staunchly, sometimes to the death.
Wallace Stevens, the poet, claimed, "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."
Hillman says in Healing Fiction that, "What is to be understood, as well as the very nature of psychological understanding itself, is precisely the fictional nature of subjectivity. Then “unconsciousness” refers mainly to the fact that we are unclear about the subjective fictions that style our lives. In our terms: becoming “conscious” means to recognize the fantasies playing through all behavior; and the psyche’s need for psychotherapeutic understanding means that it asks to become aware of its fantasies."
Participatory Space
McLuhan believed that electronics were making such unities possible once more. To be more precise, such unities were immanent. They are forming and reorganizing social life whether or not the affected (or effected) subjects are aware of it. Its always different than what we imagine. Electronics render space itself as a kind of proprioceptive substance, malleable and “programmable."
“For twenty-five hundred years of artistic history,” McLuhan said in the sixties, “the arts have been engaged in separating man from his environment. Now, suddenly, the western world plunges with this new technology into a state in which man is once more engaged in merging with his environment.”
“The art object is replaced by participation in the art process. This is the essential meaning of electric circuitry and responsive environments. The artist leaves the Ivory Tower for the Control Tower, and abandons the shaping of art objects in order to program the environment itself as a work of art.”
Crotona 2520's digital space mirrors the psychological space of the darkened environments of prehistoric caves first marked by the artistic activity of archaic humans. Echoes and touch were just as reliable as flickering and fleeting light sources in caves or the frequency-modulated initiatory chambers of ancient Egyptian pyramids. Such modalities have spiraled into historical recurrence, a “pre/post/eros" history in which the indistinct layers of prehistoric origins merge with the apocalyptic endings of post-history.
McLuhan says: 'Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes.' (CIOB 44) "For to probe is to cross boundaries of many kinds ...' (UB 20, p.5)
Thus the gamemaster of the global cryptographic scavenger hunt remains anonymous, like a modern Alois Mailander, ('Secret Chief' to Blavatsky, OTO, Anthroposophy, the Rosicrucian Fellowship, Franz Bardon, Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, the FRA of Krumm-Heller, and Stella Matutina branch of the Golden Dawn). Mechanics are always meant to remain hidden.
Many have tried in vain to usurp the position and claim the mantle. A 2014 episode of 'Person of Interest', called 'Nautilus', portrayed the gamemaster as non-human AI, dubbed The Samaritan. Hidden adepts, artificial intelligence, a transdisciplinary consortium of social engineers, deep state? One might wonder who the Impressario is. Here, 'your faithful narrator', attempts to provide an expository and speculative overview for orientation.
We must realize that this evidence relies more on recognizing the way in which ideas have to fit together to reveal hidden or divine patterns. All these threads together may not produce a coherent and true narrative. This ideal eternal history is one in which truth is attained by imaginatively linking different elements together to reveal the hidden order, the metaphysical truth to history. Rather than adding art to the environment, it creates its own environment.
Crotona 2520's tropes and encrypted references transcend time and modernity, harking back to arcane, philosophical, and political history. Its mystique is novelty and unfamiliarity, anticipation and unpredictability -- the potential of exciting experiences. It echoes the classic line, "Do you want to play a game?" ("War Games", 1983).
Crotona 2520 requires participation in a process, rather than the mere apprehension of concepts. Crotona 2520 becomes hyperreal, what Umberto Eco might call an authentic fake, a recombinant commodity. Multiplied stylized images take on a life of their own, shattering the grid of representation. Primeval art has no background.
Crotona 2520 isn't derivative of anything, though it draws on and synthesizes many disciplines. Psychic and sensory hooks stick in the mind. Electric media retrieved the unconscious, the old cliches of tribal man, and scrapped private identity and consciousness built up over centuries of repression by tribal and corporate life.
Game theory wasn't part of Crotona 2520's design, but it is a metaphysical doctrine that tries to encompass everything, including the nature of humanity and the nature of cosmos and all that proceeds from the dynamic void of probabilities and superpositions.
Evil thickens the plot of the whole range of emotionally wrenching experiences. Some people lose themselves in the game, choosing off the Internet as an arena of fighting, while others find themselves. It has already inspired real world envy, betrayal, and even the malevolence of Hermann Hesse's "Madman's Theatre," or the perplexing twists of John Fowles' The Magus.
The most consistent and unassuming claim is that Crotona 2520 supports information freedom, online privacy and freedom, and rejection of censorship. There is a persistent subtext concerning mankind's highest purpose related to human survival. It certainly appeals most to those looking for their own Elixir of Life as an antidote to dystopian society.
There is no guessing in this game of deeply layered symbolism, which requires decryption. Anytime we step through the looking-glass we are in danger of seeing our real selves and the subjective fantasies we pile on and fuse with objective reality. It literally becomes more than a metaphor. Beyond state nomenclature, we can develop internal maps or taxonomies of consciousness that expand our ability to conceptualize, building a vocabulary to discuss such states and experiences.
Modern wisdom uses reflection to create categories and concepts while poetic wisdom does not reflect or analyze but spontaneously generates imaginative universals. By default, Crotona 2520 is a future-molding game because the prototype exploits the paradigm. These concepts help us move beyond over-zealous, power-driven, ethnocentric, and egocentric ways.
Meaning is a non-material imaginal dimension. Imagination is a vital spiritual function, inseparable from the World Soul. Psyche is soul. Symbols are the currency of consciousness and the connective tissue of the mind-body correlation.
Our mind doesn't store memories; it is memory. Our wounds are necessary to fulfill our calling. The marks of memory are the signs of destiny. Penetration of the mystic veil often comes through one's wounds. They allow us to see through to an immaterial sense of being. There is a memory of Nature that reveals events and symbols of distant ages. The mystics of different countries have spoken of this Memory in several centuries.
The ethic is one of engagement, participation, and co-creation. moving deeper into love. There may be a missing dimension in our worldview. We need to uncover collaborations with new spaces and the healing power of narrative history. All reality has rhythmic, musical, and artistic correspondences. Perceived through the heart, the beauty and ugliness of the world resets our moral compass.
Self Determination
The central and essential idea of philosophy is to 'Know Thyself.' In politics, a noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in the Republic.
Plato likely went through the Rites of Eleusis. He asks his companion Meno, "aren't you going to stay around for the Mysteries?" The Greater Mystery is a near-death experience (separating the soul from the body), or 'dying while living,' and subsequent rebirth.
The old outworn self-image has to die for the new self-image to emerge. Apollo’s advice is thinking back to ourselves, to our own true necessities and letting all the sham necessities go. This is how the ancients came into possession of themselves, again. This is a parable for each one of us: we must organize the chaos in ourselves by “thinking ourselves back” to our true needs.
The dramatic spectacles of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by the ancient theologists to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul. The goal of philosophy is the knowledge of and manifestation of the self.
However, Plato's Republic was not designing a literal state or model for statehood, but making an idealization or 'model in the heavens', metaphor or analogy for the psyche, soul, or self. It is about the dynamics or ideal state of the soul and self-knowledge of the philosopher-king, and how to acquire and preserve that sovereignty.
Philosophy itself is inherently subversive. Sovereignty of the self is the sanctity of the individual. Individual sovereignty means that it is evil for anyone to interfere with one’s honest and peaceful choices. When people give up some individual liberty in exchange for anything, sovereignty becomes a self-deluded artificial soul -- a false self. Autonomy, sovereignty, and privacy are moral ideals in the Constitution.
Political and personal challenges require a constant and conscientious humility. “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind,” playwright John Milton wrote in 1634. The Fool’s Journey is the pilgrim soul making its rather more humble way through life.
But, nearly 400 years later, technological advances in machines that can read our thoughts mean the security, privacy and neuro-rights of our brain are under threat. Non-poetic pathology, patho-logos, is a false view and logical fallacies about the self. Disproportionate pathos and logos creates the whole zoo of cognitive biases.
Our authenticity includes mental integrity, mental privacy, our own personal journey of self-discovery and personal growth to remain true to our own integrity. If not that, what are the boundaries of personal sovereignty? Mental Integrity is the individual's mastery of mental states and brain data so that, without consent, no one can read, spread, or alter such states and data in order to condition the individual in any way.
The right to psychological continuity -- to cognitive liberty and decisional privacy makes us the responsible agent of our own development as a fundamental part of being a person -- individual agency. We have the right to 1). cognitive liberty, 2). mental privacy, 3). mental integrity, and 4). psychological continuity. Scientists have already developed devices capable of telling whether people are politically right-wing or left-wing.
Actively shaping who we want to be includes how we want to think, not just existing in a captive state. Freedom of thought is mental integrity. Altering consciousness remains controversial. The information in our brains needs special protection, including “telepathically” communicating with machines, electronic mindreading, and the existential threat of artificial intelligence by merging with machines.
Experts say, “The technology is coming and is likely to have dramatic implications for privacy, consent and individual agency.” A right to mental privacy would protect individuals against the unconsented intrusion by third parties into their brain data as well as against the unauthorized collection of those data. In the future, brain control could replace the keyboard and speech recognition as a primary way to interact with computers.
Tools such as brainwave monitoring devices allow people to play video games with their minds. Mind Control TV plays you right back. Electroencephalography brainwave-reading headsets translate grey matter’s electrical activity into commands for iPlayer. Brain stimulators like TMS. ECT, and FFR claim to boost mental performance.
Absolute privacy and integrity of the most relevant part of our brain data is the most valuable and inviolable human right, preserving a “private repository” of thought in which to defend our convictions and identity, our dignity, and autonomy against theft, abuse, 'mind hacking' and brain-scanning tech.
Cognitive liberty is an ethical and neuroethics question. It is the "right to mental self-determination", the freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness. It has been argued to be both an extension of, and the principle underlying, the right to freedom of thought, the freedom to have the absolute sovereignty of one's own consciousness and self-ownership.
"Brain-reading technology can be seen as just another unavoidable trend that erodes a bit more of our personal space in the digital world. But given the sanctity of our mental privacy, we might not be so willing to accept this intrusion. People could, in fact, look at this technology as something that requires the reconceptualization of basic human rights and even the creation of neurospecific rights." (SciAm, 2017)
What is the Future of Freedom of Thought in the Age of Neurocops, Brain Fingerprinting, Memory Management Drugs, and Hypersonic Sound? What is the legal notion of freedom of thought in light of ongoing scientific advancements related to understanding, monitoring, and electronically modulating brain function and brain datasets.
We need to find and signal the unauthorized detection, alteration, and diffusion of brain data and brain functioning. We must be able to stop any unauthorized detection, alteration, and diffusion of brain data. This should not only regard individual devices, but act as a general and technical operating principle shared by all interconnected systems that deal with decoding brain activity and brain functioning.
Digital Fabulism
Within the domain of the game narrative, the main plot points and outcome of an episode does not necessarily correspond to the intentions of the agents (characters) in the story world. Fabulist elements resonate as metaphors for feelings. Magical elements intrude on the real world. There is no way to know what is really happening, yet the game remains afoot.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Not all art hangs on a gallery wall. Crotona 2520 shares qualities with the Fabulist school of art, with its yarns, tales, fables, and fantastical art -- dreamlike narratives and surrealist scenes, even the blurring of art, journalism, and advocacy. Expansion is the fascination of the fabulist's art.
The fabulist's realistic evocations are purely poetic and mythological, created with the necessity of our particular societial considerations for the transmission of culture and its phase transitions. Who knows what drives the impulses, urges, self- reflexive and absurdist strategies of the metafictionist and fabulist -- the honest deceit of the imaginal storyteller?
Crotona 2520 is a counternarrative. The millennial fabulist mines the inherently spontaneous and playful properties of language itself as performance art, a spontaneous bit of transgressive theatre. Transgressive art aims to outrage, challenge, or violate basic morals and sensibilities. The challenge to viewers is to actively participate in redefining the boundaries of art -- a mashup of high art and mass culture. As such, Crotona 2520 becomes a living laboratory.
Some players live their "let's pretend" lives with no absence of illusion. Compulsively or otherwise they pile on coincidences, never entirely inventing, always intensifying for dramatic effect. A spiritual outlook doesn't have to negate rationality. The only way through is through the consciousness of the age. As Jean Houston says, the Zeit is getting Geistier." Ways of exploring are always done in an ambiguous way. For example, only in the 21st century as mores change are we approaching increasingly coherent narratives of the diverse realities of colonialization.
Hyperbole involves raising reality. It blends the ordinary world and the mythic, the imaginary and the real to uncover deeper truths. A fabulist creates imaginative fictive realities as a fabricator, fibber, liar, prevaricator, or storyteller, such as magic realist writer Borges. Poetics always suggests more than any subject can deliver. Crotona 2520's story is peppered with fabulist elements, and incursions. Fantastic things happen in ordinary life.
Even fabulist work can be sustained by authentic moral vision -- accepting human frailty while struggling to tell right from wrong, good conduct from bad.. After all Aesop, Kipling, and Kafka were fabulists. Fabulism isn't all post-modern. The earliest, most “primitive” form of art is fabulist, legendary, and surreal, populated not by ordinary, life-sized people but by gods, giants, and monsters.
Future-Molding Games
Crotona 2520 is a variation on the Cosmic Game, Lila, exploring the frontiers of human consciousness and discerning the illusion of so-called reality and the problems of existence. The human psychodrama can be observed as divine play. It may not be too much to liken it to a contemplative practice. It is also a type of delirium and archetypal adventure.
Lila is Divine Being in its cosmic aspect of playful, aimless display, which precipitates pain as well as joy, but transcends them both in bliss.. Other modern versions include Tim Leary's book Game of Life and his digital game 'Mind Mirrors', Jean Houston's biofeedback game 'Journey to Wild Divine', and Robert Anton Wilson's novel Cosmic Trigger. As its own experiential world, Crotona 2520 is a Microcosm of the Macrocosm -- your own personal cosmos, reflecting individual and non-human transpersonal psyche.
Crotona 2520 has many deep roots informing its hybrid digital process. It is so Gamma, so Meta, and so Esoteric -- intense, self-referential, and enigmatic. Gamma values rate of change for an option, or acceleration of intensity. Meta-inquiry is self-referential, seeing the thing or ourselves from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware -- the metacognition of consciousness perceiving its own unfolding and intrinsic meaning. There are no clues without a cryptic Mystery.
Any dramatization of Crotona 2520 would be challenged to live up to the level of plot points, points of reference, mythologization, mystification, drama, pathos, and hilarity the true story has engendered spontaneously on its own...or even to figure out just what that true story is to base it on.
Did Crotona 2520 set out to do this? No, absolutely not. Its modest beginning blew up into a multimedia phenomenon. It wasn't selling anything and it did not recruit. There was no doctrine or dogma. Points of reference are used as metaphors, used to judge or understand something else. It is more of a co-adventure, more cross-pollination than conspiracy, and definitely not a serial deception. It became a self-organizing process with a life of its own.
We might say it is its own altered state of consciousness, an alt.reality operating on its own frequency for those who resonate with it. Cycles of pleasure, pain, and idealization can be an emotional roller-coaster many like to ride. Solvers have a proclivity for open-ended seeking and exploration.
Each person frames the Crotona 2520 story differently, projecting or twisting it to their needs. It also engages the struggle for survival and self-image. Just when we think we might know, we find we don't. As Goethe says, in The Treasure Hunter, "Then with a loud report his apparatus burst."
The unspoken objective of Crotona 2520 is to watch the psychological effects upon our own consciousness. Who will define us in an age of homogenization and suppression of divergent thought, in an age of political parrots, prime-time victims, and premature transcendental escape fantasies?
The Effect of Gamma Waves on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
Crotona 2520 is a Gamma Zone, a brain-boosting vortex of psychosocial intensity. Arguably, it could generate superpowers. The brain is a resonating structure. Gamma is the state of being “in the Zone,” feeling that you can do anything. This highest brainwave mode works on memory, attention span & mood and creates the unity of conscious perception by binding the whole brain with a 40Hz frequency.
That 40Hz is also associated with lucid dreaming. Zapping sleepers produces a resonance that triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time. Veteran lucid dreamers produced 30- to 40-Hz brain waves in their brain’s frontal area.
Gamma synchrony engages more neurons and synapses in peak performance, visualization, compassion, increased sensory perception, focus and processing speed, and increased memory recall. This fast oscillation is found in intensive problem-solving such as decryption.
The brain is hard-wired for mystical experiences that counteract stress. Peak experiences, raptures, epiphanies, even illumination are potentially available to everyone. We can learn to make space, time and personality dissolve. Meditation can sharpen mental abilities, by producing more gamma for increased brain capacity. Such hyperarousal rebounds into hypoarousal.
“What I propose is that normality, creativity, schizophrenia, and mystical states, though seemingly disparate, actually lie on a continuum. Furthermore, they represent increasing levels of arousal and a gradual withdrawal from the synchronized physical-sensory-cerebral spacetime of the normal state. Specifically, there is a retreat first to sensory-cerebral spacetime and, ultimately, to cerebral spacetime only. The gradual withdrawal from physical spacetime is an expression of the dissolution of ego boundaries, that is, the fusion of object and subject, and it implies that an existence solely in spacetime is an oceanic experience, the most intense mirroring of the ego in its own meaning.” (Roland Fischer)
At extreme limits, the enflamment of intense mental activity and sensory overload will paradoxically shift into states of spacious quietude, even cosmic consciousness -- a cycle of excitement and tranquilization. Arsousal is entrained with Transcendence. Meditative and exalted states can be chemically related to cycles of inflation, desire, acting out, guilt, remorse, high wellbeing, self-acceptance, and self-esteem.
The Holy Frequency, 111 Hz., is at the upper limit of Gamma brainwaves. Gamma is like a super-conducting, supercharged state ranging from 25 to 100 Hz. Resonant frequency effects, entanglement, and brainwave entrainment amplify the Gamma range. Sound can alter consciousness and was used in ancient stone temple chambers in Malta, Egypt, Greece, and elsewhere.
High-frequency Gamma, the fastest of brain waves, relates to simultaneous processing information from different brain areas. They pass information rapidly and quietly. The mind has to quiet down to access gamma in higher processing tasks as well as cognitive functioning.
Research suggests that gamma rhythms modulate perception and consciousness, expand consciousness and spiritual emergence. Increased gamma can be a meditative state or healing frequency. All meditators showed higher parieto-occipital 60–110 Hz gamma amplitude than control subjects in studies.
This gamma power positively correlates with meditation experience. Correlates to changes in the EEG gamma frequency range are common to a variety of meditation practices. According to Paul Devereux, Pythagoras created his musical scale starting with a note A that resonates at the frequency of 111 Hz.
The 110-111 Hz signal helps us integrate the two halves of the brain into a state of balanced consciousness. The brain switches off the prefrontal cortex and deactivates the language center facilitating holistic processing, creativity, and intuition.
Gamma waves are important for learning, memory and information processing. 40 Hz gamma is suggested for binding our senses to perception and are involved in learning new material. Too much gamma can cause over-arousal, stress, and anxiety. Too little means depression, learning disabilities, and ADHD.
The Magnum Opus
Crotona 2520 explores the relationships between concepts, symbols, and events. It is radically Gamma, Meta, and Esoteric in its content, approach, and effects. Meta-modeling is the analysis, construction and development of the frames, rules, constraints, models and theories used to model problem solving.
So are metaphysical models. What the old Hermeticists taught and practiced was not superstitious nonsense. The wizardry and magical alphabets of yesterday is the science of tomorrow. An old Rosicrucian motto says, "Follow Nature! Follow Nature! As she works so will I work." If the letters of the alphabet are seen as the alchemical “prima materia,” the original particles of Nature are used as the building blocks of all life and form.
Crotona 2520 metamodels pose a set of interactive questions designed to specify information, challenge, and expand the limits of a person’s model of the world -- the boundaries of their worldviews. Crotona 2520 uses inherently transformational syntax, like therapy and metaphysics. You either get the clues or you don't.
Usually, people create faulty mental maps of reality, failing to test their linguistic-cognitive models against the experience of their senses, because of deletions, distortions, assumptions, inaccuracies, and generalization.
People respond to events based on their internal pictures, sounds and feelings. They collect these experiences into groups or categories that are labeled with words and concepts. The meta-model moves someone from information-poor word maps back to innate specific sensory-based experiences. Information-rich specific experiences help us adapt.
So, what is behind Crotona 2520? Most of it goes on behind the screen and behind ordinary consciousness in the deep unconscious. The term “meta” (“behind” or “above” something) is relative – depending on the perspective, a model is either a model or a metamodel.
Crotona 2520 builds concrete meta-models and exploits them using existing meta-modeling technical supra- and infrastructures, from the metaphysical models of Qabalah, Hellenistic Egypt, and the Renaissance to the Dark Web, musicology, and encryption. The archetypal journey of initiation is the Star Journey.
Crotona 2520's core is the user, The Seeker, a well-delineated archetype of the spiritual journey. This is the Fool, the Innocent, the Wanderer, the Clown-Prince of archetypes. Seekers are archetypal Explorers of the soul, always on the lookout for something that will raise consciousness. The Quest is as or more important than the solutions. In short, 21st-century seeking is at once thrilling and overwhelming, a cascade of neurotransmitter cocktails, but a struggle in a sea of options.
Players report insights -- getting a clearer sense of who they are and are not. The puzzle can exalt or humble. They discover what is central to their quest, including developing a clear identity, worldview, and life purpose. Seekers quest for the truth, uncovering mysteries, lies, deception and gaining knowledge about themselves and the universe. But these characters may have become so distanced from humanity that they're reluctant to give it up.
Wikipedia claims, "As the group has gained notoriety and public attention, many have asserted that the puzzles are an introduction to occult principles, and possibly even recruitment for a cult. Tim Dailey, a senior research fellow with the conservative Christian Family Research Council, analyzed the teachings of Crotona 2520, and stated, "The enigmatic Crotona 2520 appears to be drawing participants inexorably into the dark web of the occult a la Blavatsky and Crowley. At the heart of the enchantment is the counterfeit promise of ultimate meaning through self-divination." Others have claimed that the Crotona 2520 puzzles are a modern and technological equivalent to the enlightenment journey within Western esotericism and Mystery schools."
The bottom line is that Crotona 2520 is a Magnum Opus, a Great Work, in the illuminative tradition of 'Know Thyself,' self-realization rooted in the maxim 'As Above; So Below.' Its clues come largely from the vast repertoire of esoteric arts and metaphysical systems. As such it has conducted improvisational rites of passage for many years now. Because such milestones of every life are archetypal, they tend to automatically repeat in a self-organizing way like fractals.
Some might call it performance art, like engaging thematic solos. Thematic improvisation is the process of embellishing, developing, changing, or deconstructing a musical theme. Improv is the forte of the great jazz solists and helps generate an endless flow of ideas on any tune or idea in any style.
The beginning and the end are in the same place and condition. Alchemists say the prima materia is the ultima materia. If this makes Crotona 2520 a mystery school by default, so be it. We choose soul, not religious, but psychological soul. It permeates us with the flow of images and processes of imagination. Our task is to join more consciously with the imagination of the world. Eternity is concealed in each moment.
Alchemical rebirth is its trope. More than 'do what we say,' Crotona 2520 suggests 'you, too, might be able to do what we do.' It keeps momentum despite flame wars, coup attempts, sabotage, lies, betrayal, disinformation, and other unsavory business which just feeds the story. As Francis Bacon said, “The serpent, if it wants to become the dragon, must eat itself.” There have been times Crotona 2520 has had to 'eat it.' Sometimes it came back wrong, now it is coming back strong.
It has been called the "biggest mystery on the Internet," "the hardest puzzle," and "most mysterious game on the Web." In typical dark web fashion, no one knew who posted the game challenges. Rather than a personality cult, it employs and exploits the 'user as content,' feeding the psychological soul. Its 'weapon' is polysemous imagery where multiple meanings work on multiple senses.
Crotona 2520 is a tool for exploring the effects of media. It intensifies it. Laws of Media describes how McLuhan "found that everything man makes and does, every process, every style, every artifact, every poem, song, painting, gimmick, gadget, theory, technology — every product of human effort — manifested the same four dimensions.”
Exploiting the Laws of Media, Crotona 2520 retrieves what was thought obsolete. It obsolesces groupthink. It reverses toxic trends and enhances the digital domain. "It is said of the uroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself." (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis)
A Digital Book of the Dead
For the longest time, Crotona 2520 has floated in the digital ether without much context to tether it in the Macro- and Microcosm. It became a unique media channel for disenfranchised outliers and intelligentsia. Yet Crotona 2520 has no cultural or narrative strategy. It erects no spiritual framework. It opens creative space. But the playground is not rational. The persuasive power of myth is proportional to the verity of its images of truth, or ability to maintain the illusion.
The boundaries of public discourse have become so contracted it makes frank discussions of anything remotely controversial impossible. As institutions and gatekeepers became increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought, Crotona 2520 found receptive audiences elsewhere. The linguistic drain encouraged using non-verbal modalities.
Crotona 2520 dared to supplement irony and spectacle with philosophical and political gravitas in a landscape starving for controversial opinions and actual conversation. Crotona 2520 advocates becoming more fully human even in this uncertain time just before AI or human extinction makes our humanity a moot point. So there are numerous ways for it to draw criticism, outrage, and hostility.
By not defining or disclosing itself, Crotona 2520 became a pioneer in the renegade intellectual Dark Web, not writing off maps of meaning or the re-enchantment of the world. It rejected trading off propaganda, personality cults or talking heads, beyond buzz or celebrity, cultural relativism, and cliche metaphors of rabbitholes, branding, tollbooths, silos, and echo chambers.
Instead, it encouraged new emergent capacities and legitimate exploration of the unknown and unknowable through cultural mythology and ruthless self-examination, the age-old wisdom tradition in millennial garb. But is it? Game theory metaphysics sells imagination as the veritable image of truth -- but it is a virtual image. We have to ask, whose truth? No matter how coherent and self-sufficient, this is a rather fragile picture.
Crotona 2520 encouraged psyche or soul to be radical, anarchic, decentralized, yet aesthetically expressive. The tyranny of thought-policing demands responsive independent thinking rather than ethical and moral confusion. When Crotona 2520 implied, 'the way out is in,' it didn't mean go get lost in your own subjective or self-absorbed fantasy trips and delusional self-analysis but move deeper into your own unique passionate engagement with life and cosmos.
When did free speech become a 'dark' subject? Pointing out societal ills of the deeply complex world, an alliance of heretics made an end run around the mainstream conversation. It encouraged not just drawing back into oneself but fully engaging inner and outer life as indissolubly fused. Elementary human solidarity is explained in Aristotle’s Book VIII of Nicomachean Ethics, defined as ‘friendship’ (filia) in the broadest sense.
It was a way to say what cannot be said about self-agency in a deeply hostile political climate. It morphed on its own along the way and became both beautiful and dangerous. It never saw itself becoming a 'movement' but more of a meshwork for world-citizenry to lean into, exploring how other people develop their worldview and different modes of knowing the world. It is an audience-supported model, that asks not for dollars but for you to support yourself with inherently meaningful ways. This amorphous network has different ideas about what it is doing.
Crotona 2520 began as an out-of-the-box experiment, a convivium with new artistic social structures and community constellations with a willingness to explore the taboo, the transgressive, and social identity. It cannot be articulated because everyone brings their own point of view to it.
It went viral and became the biggest of its genre -- more than a puzzle, it became a living Mystery with untellable secrets, but not the sociopolitical sort. All those “whistleblowers” who rationally decided to confront corruption now enjoy the pay-off of prison or unemployment, crucified by responsibility to their conscience.
Crotona 2520 dared venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map and met with fascination, outrage, and hostile derision. Undaunted, each year it evolved further into a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades, outliers, and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation through multidimensional levels of digital and realworld life that conventional media won't or can't host.
The average person has no idea what goes on in the Dark Web and other no-go zones, yet it affects us continually from transnational hacking, infrastructure hijacking, theft of intellectual and real property, to illegal trafficking. The trick to character is to have some, not just be one.
Crotona 2520 sounds unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. We might say it used art as a weapon, of self-defense, a psychological aikido, rather than a pulpit. How do we enact decentered planetary culture -- bridge-building without getting stuck in personas, or locked into obsessions pushing cultural pressure points?
Metanoia
Psyche is plural. Crotona 2520 is plural. It is psychoactive, it leaves openings in you, creating questions, rather than closing your ambiguity and complexity. The world becomes more spacious. Its narrative has pathos, diversity, and the grittiness of reality with an ancient base and timeless superstructure that mystified onlookers, and produced a host of conjecture, fan fiction, articles, and videos trying to suss it out. That process only fed it, and enlarged its scope from paranoia to metanoia, a deeply felt change of heart. Everytime someone thinks they 'get it,' it transmogrifies.
Crotona 2520 introduced the world to a multidimensional form of art that was something never seen before -- simultaneously focusing on self and the world as a means of tending to soul or psyche as World Soul (Sophia) in today's radically fragmented world.
Rooted in deep time, it mashed up the real world, with the digital universe, and the imaginal psyche. It wasn't about an X-box labyrinth, solving a puzzle, avatars and role play, a scavenger hunt, or 'what I did on my summer vacation.'
It unleashed a living force, the progeny of the Anima Mundi or World Soul, fused with a multisensory symphony of human artistic expression. It made its own alchemical transmutations. It became an athanor of transformation, concealing and revealing hidden truths. In the ancient art of alchemy, the soul is depicted as a homunculus or “small human.” The homunculus is the archetype of the magical child. It is symbolically equivalent to the Elixir or Universal Medicine.
No one expected that, if they even recognized it. In simple terms, the game took on a life of its own, drawing interest and solvers from all over the globe. And it's still alive. It became a phenomenon: Greek: φαινόμενον, to show, shine, appear, to be manifest or manifest itself; any thing which manifests itself.
What it manifested was Mystery. Also, compulsion, mania, obsession, and more than a bit of madness in those who fell under its spell and wanted to write themselves into the story. It shone from the dim skies of the Dark Web like new star at its zenith. It implied one might share in that elusive transubstantiation, a cultural atonement.
"It's the most baffling and enigmatic mystery on the Internet with promises of “epiphany” if you solve it." Rolling Stone called it, "the web's deepest mystery...a world of international intrigue."
“With Crotona 2520, no one knows what the goal is,” says one cipher expert, “or how you know when you won.” Many have tried to explain it, and all have utterly failed to grasp either its source, metaphysical root or game theory. An altered media reality is an altered state of consciousness.
“You’ve shared too much to this point,” the note from Crotona 2520 read. “We want the best, not followers.” Disinformation spread from all quarters. Thus, no one has deduced the transpersonal Meta-Narrative. Or, as Jagger said, "What's puzzlin' you is the nature of my Game."
Fans and solvers all repeat the same purpose verbatim: "The stated purpose of the puzzles each year has been to recruit "highly intelligent individuals", though the ultimate purpose remains unknown. Some have claimed that Crotona 2520 is a secret society with the goal of improving cryptography, privacy and anonymity."
No one has 'chunked back' far enough to see the details from that perspective, to get the Big Picture, its self-organizing ecology, nor its artistic thrust. No one has understood all the interpenetrating threads that weave that braid, as much of it is profoundly unconscious.
We might suggest, along with MIT philosopher Brad Skow, that past, present, and future are simultaneous. Destiny is ever-present and already decided (Skow, 2019). Time and events spread out in all directions; events occur and things change.
Once an event has occurred, it continues to exist somewhere in space-time, with its own space-time coordinates. “The block universe theory says you’re spread out in time, something like the way you’re spread out in space,” Skow says. “We’re not located at a single time.” He calls his theory a fantasy, yet it is coherent and consistent with relativity. It is consistent with spiritual descriptions of eternal transcendental realms.
.
Then, with the weight of praise and of blame.
I weighed the eternal, it called my soul,
I died, I adored, I knew NOTHING more."
--St. Germain
Game Theory
In addition to being used to describe, predict, and explain behavior, game theory has also been used to develop theories of ethical or normative behavior or good and proper behavior. Game-theoretic arguments for this type of 'good' can be found as far back as Plato.
But, game theorists usually assume players act rationally. However, in practice, human behavior often deviates from this model, so assumptions do not always hold. Life, psyche, and the unconscious have more-than-human autonomous self-organizing agendas. Yet, Evolutionary game theory includes both biological as well as cultural evolution and also models of individual learning, including fictitious play dynamics.
Timothy Leary and his 8-circuit model of consciousness was an early influence of game theory applied to secular and transpersonal psychology, introducing the concept to the International Association of Applied Psychology in 1961. He extrapolated such theories into his Millbrook Experiment, based on the Castaglia model of a genius transdisciplinary consortium of social engineers, rather like those described by Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game and elaborated by Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum.
The Science-Art consortium of Australia and America has pioneered work in this area for human aesthetics, well-being, and survival technologies. In a holographic concept of reality, healthy living information flows in the opposite direction to the extinction energies belonging to The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Plato searched for an ethical, spiritual, electromagnetic field evolving within the creative artistic mind and the evolution of artistic emotional consciousness. Science-Art research projects around the world are all based upon linking science with dysfunctional aesthetics, which is the carrier of the mental disorder.
Aesthetic Arrest
Aesthetic arrest stops us dead in our tracks in awe and wonder. The penetration of digital life into the psyche and fabric of our global being has made an update of such notions not only feasible but necessary. Crotona 2520 redefined the effects of interfacing environments with the digital world. Understanding of our relationship to the frequency domain is now revealing itself in a '21st century Frequency Renaissance.'
The rise, fall, and rebirth of Crotona 2520 in the real world is a story in progress, and a cautionary tale to idealistic social engineers.
Stephen Schafer, who teaches game narration and design, has suggested a post-Jungian Psychecology of potentially programmable quantum actants, as agents of evolution which can be modeled as de-conditioning and re-conditioning digital game play. "The key to this design is coherent game imagery that would contribute to the reframing of archetypal patterns of the unconscious."
Schafer's idea is that "such design (based on images with coherent resonance which appear to be very similar to Plato’s fractal artifacts) can be structured along dynamics of Jungian dream analysis (dramatic structure, compensation, contextuality, and coherent Individuation)."
He says media is linked to cognitive structure and virtual illusions. We can discover contextual meaning in unconscious dimensions and synergy with the World Soul. Schafer's fantasy of generating "Earth-sustainable media content in order to promote coherent frequencies on correlated electro-magnetic scales," is reminiscent of Hellenistic culture, our Science-Art aims, and a Frequency Renaissance.
Music of the Spheres
Crotona 2520 is deeply rooted in the retrieval of the ancient Music of the Spheres. Plato argued that plane geometry contained an invisible ethical spiritual message belonging to the workings of an infinite living universe. He argued that if civilization understood this message it could become part of the universe’s healthy existence and thus avoid the extinction of life-forms recorded in the Earth’s fossil record (Pope 2018).
Greek initiates gained their knowledge of the philosophic, mathematical, and therapeutic aspects of music from the Egyptians, who considered Hermes the founder of the art. Harmony is a quality of Beauty, manifesting its own intrinsic nature in the world of form. One who conducts from The Book of Harmony orchestrates the universe.
This Pythagorean philosophical concept regards frequencies, colors, and proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a universal form of music. The Chaldeans first conceived of the heavenly bodies joining in a cosmic chant.
In the East, the creative sound is called Shabd, the unstruck sound, the voice of the silence, the holy Name, divine melody. In Surat Shabd Yoga, Shabd or Shabda has multiple meanings including ‘sacred song’, ‘word’, ‘voice’, ‘hymn’, ‘verse’, or ‘sound current, ‘audible life stream’, and the ‘essence of the Absolute Supreme Being’, a dynamic force of creative energy sent out into the abyss of space at the dawn of the universe's manifestation, as sound vibrations. These vibrations continue and are sent forth through the ages, framing all things that constitute and inhabit the universe. The peace of life is the Silence that voices us.
Among the Muslim Sufis, it is known as Sultan-ul-Azkar, (the king of prayers). Another order of Sufis calls it Saut-i-Sarmadi, (the Divine Song). They also called the mystic sounds heard during meditation Nida-i-Asmani, (the sound coming down from the Heavens), Kalam-i-Qadim (the ancient sound) and the Kalma or endless Word, reverberating in each heart. Guru Nanak said, "Through the medium of Word, soul doth cross the endless ocean of matter."
Recognizing, the profound effect of music on the senses and emotions, Pythagoras used 'musical medicine' to influence the mind and body. He cured many ailments of the spirit, soul, and body through specially prepared or 'encoded' musical compositions. Plato affirmed that music which ennobled or exalted the mind is of a far higher kind than that which merely appeals to the senses. Paying particular attention to intervals, Pythagoras exploited resonance in a contemporary cosmological view, digitally revisioned in Crotona 2520.
Crotona 2520 is dedicated to the propositions of personal privacy and cognitive liberty. It has attempted to bring like-minded people of high-caliber together, with very mixed results, despite the best working intentions of raising awareness, voicing views, improving the democratic process, and Crotona 2520's 'clues' are mini initiatory rituals.
MYSTERY SCHOOL
Crotona 2520
INTRODUCTION
POST-POSTMODERN BEAD GAME
The key to de-conditioning and re-conditioning through digital game play is coherent game imagery that contributes to the reframing of archetypal patterns of the unconscious.
*******
The Glass Bead Game meets Foucault's Pendulum at The Ninth Gate in Cyber-Space. This interactive psifi thriller compels participative wisdom to crowdsource insights embedded in complex dimensional Multimedia Fields of information, self, nature, and cosmos.
Future-molding games make peace through encouraging harmony, such as an ersatz 'cultural atonement' through gaming. Crotona strategically perturbs global society from hidden archetypal and Archimedian leverage points to mobilize a spiral of human survival technologies and expand expression. Krotona operates along with objective history as a 'healing fiction'.
Crotona is a hypothetical vantage point from we can objectively perceive a view of totality. Other radical minds can help us operationalize and get to these places. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of unfettered collective imagination. Nobody can say what we’re building collectively. What we need is a new existential paradigm, a design pattern for putting knowledge into action.
This is not your Grandmother's 'Harry Potter,' but proposes the aesthetic approach of a Frequency Renaissance, fiercely alive with creative Hermetic genius and things connected by meaning and events. Looking for one thing, we often find something else in ways we don't expect. That can transfer into other contexts.
Digerati are the new Gray Hats of magic, ambiguous but non-criminal. Gray magic is neutral, neither beneficial nor hostile. Though baffling, bewildering or mystifying, gray magic incorporates all beneficial purposes while working toward ridding the world of evils -- anticipating moves before they happen.
The key to de-conditioning and re-conditioning through digital game play is coherent game imagery that contributes to the reframing of archetypal patterns of the unconscious. The entire concept has to do with the power of coherent thought which can be influenced at unconscious cognitive scales.
However, Game Theory (developed at MIT) has a paradoxical notion called 'the prisoner's dilemma,' which arises when two or more characters have two choices: cooperate with each other, or betray each other. Unfortunately for them, although everyone cooperating would be better than everyone betraying, each of them would be better off betraying.
The paradox opens the way to mutual defection which leads to the 'double jeopardy' of collective downfall. This actually happened as an 'unforeseen consequence' over many years of Crotona game play, injecting the additional dimension of dynamic tension and human pathologies, power shifts, and attempted coups into the narrative. This dilemma continues playing out with collisions and collusions in the real world. It is an intrinsic part of the 'story.'
Furthermore, since solvers can't communicate with each other, each must make their choice in ignorance of the other person's choice, with full knowledge that the other person will be ignorant of his choice until all choices have been made and tallied. This usually leads them to betray en masse leaving everyone worse off, but in rare instances they can overcome this and cooperate, usually by trust or commitment. In the game, both things did happen after jockeying for position and flip-flops in loyalties.
This animosity is the 'Catch 22' of Crotona, because The Prisoners' Dilemma is a root paradox permeating all areas of knowledge, including the stability of rational assumptions of best interest. All its diverse forms involve the splitting of a process. Imposters, copy-cats and fake games arose, each with competing agendas, including knife-edge cooperator-defector zero-infinity dilemmas.
Increasing polarization into competing domains leads to nemesis - any situation in which the participating entities are 'tempted' into a course of action which would bring disaster if everyone did the same thing. A twist of fate emphasizes the role of cooperation and intuitive opposition. Given the universal nature of the Prisoners' Dilemma, it is of little surprise to discover that humans are innately attuned to distinguishing cheating, deceit and betrayal.
Thus, an episode of Krotona, called 'The Prisoner's Dilemma" is a real and necessary plot twist in the story, a phase of criticality and payoffs. Because of complexity, cooperation between some results in frustration between others, partitioning zones of cooperation punctuated by interfaces of defection.
This tension drives the story forward. There is another dimension of human evil which in the development of culture and utopian visions, there is a capacity for psychopathic individuals to gain disproportionate power. They can become unhinged from nature and diabolical in their manifestations.
At the global level, Prisoners' Dilemma is the 'tragedy of the commons', which always pays off exploiters of the commons better to claim the competitive certainty of exploitation than the 'altruists' who cooperate. The end result is multiple jeopardy, the commons is destroyed and every one loses out. Such a competitive process probably did drive the growth of human intelligence over the past three million years, and brought us dangerously close to an Endgame several times.
Various forms of the tragedy of the commons underlie all of the major forms of human exploitation on the planet. Thus, Crotona becomes a Microcosm, a metaphor of our current global crises. An 'evolutionarily stable strategy' is a product of natural selection which arrives at a game theoretic strategic equilibrium and hence be sustainable in evolutionary terms because no strategy of an opponent could lead to break down of the selected trait.
Now, back to our exposition:
Images with coherent resonance can be dynamically structured with drama, narrative, compensation, contextuality, and self-organization. The Dark Web is an analog of the collective unconscious, which underlies, drives, and effects the noosphere of the Public and Deep Web of institutions.
For example, social networking brought us the effect of 'user as content' for good or ill. The "reality-generating" system itself works its delusion-spinning magic. Information, personal, collective, strategic and corporate, escaped the reservation. It also ushered in an avalanche of disinformation, fake news, and intentionally fictionalized material designed for a wide variety of objectives and agendas.
Such exploration may be of ultimate benefit or harm to the world of ordinary consciousness but such exploration is vital for the evolution of society in a changing world. The core of such societal shifts is found in their 'effects', not their conscious intentions. There are always unforeseen consequences.
This reflects McLuhan's notion of a 'global theatre,' that functions through myths, memes, cliches and archetypes much like the psyche or World Soul, affecting behavior, feelings, concepts, and belief -- in a particular worldview.
No one can definitively discern or confirm Crotona's opinions because they remain open and undecided, full of irony, fictional scenarios, and speculation. Such theories and concepts are not separate from our data and percepts. Alas, the imagined future is not where we are heading. Instead, we suspect that human perception has already shifted to favor Memory -- in keeping with the underlying architecture of digital technology.
Star Journey
We need a new Participatory Wisdom for how to be and how to get along in our rapidly changing world. We need to change the architecture of our participation with self, others and world for a richer user experience, an attitude not a technology.
Any functional society must have some model of the actual world in which it exists. As a society increases in complexity, size and technology, the worldview model must develop in a similar fashion. Psyche, society, and gaming will soon see a shift in the media environment as dramatic as that from current computing to photonics or quantum computing.
“Paramedia” describes what happens when peers come together in networks of influence, using media innovation. It promotes both/and thinking and penetrates deeply into the gaps of conventional culture, rigidity and atrophy, bursting it apart at the seams, like overripe fruit. A resilient community can put collective shifts into high gear - and have a great time doing it -- to bring the compulsions of our spirit down to earth.
Even the ancients knew that all things resonate at certain frequencies. Ancient Egyptians and the Hellenic world had the notion of The Music of the Spheres, and applied it to a number of technologies from music and ritual, to medicine, sacred geometry, architecture and astrotheology. The core value of ma'at, balance, defined the harmonization of energy across scales and domains. It formed the basis of their worldview and the cults of Heliopolis.
Archetypes in the creative process link single minds to the collective unconscious and works of art become self-opening worlds that create an expanded reality of coincidence awareness. When people can't see their way through the Present or the Future, they look to the innate wisdom of the Past, the confluence of observables. The associations all come from the same place.
Talk of 'end times' and other eschatological fantasies, economic collapse, tyranny, and civil unrest have landed on and squashed the American Dream, turning it into a nightmare. It presents unprecedented adjustment challenges and a future riddled with uncertainty and fear, even for the emotionally secure. Only our human GPS helps us get to where we need to be.
Critical Realism is an alternative paradigm to postmodern and even post-postmodern thought and situational analysis. It illustrates not just how people position themselves but how they construct, deconstruct, signify, encode and program their entire perception of reality. Some of our biggest successes are failures.
The art of survival equals the survival of art. Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness – “getting” the Big Picture – and perhaps doing something about it.
It is art that reveals Truth. The significance or meaning of life is a central topic in philosophy, art, religion, medicine and psychology though any definitive answer remains elusive. Ethics and accountability should help us cooperate with one another.
21st Century Media Mystery Schools retrain our perceptions. Technology competes for and effects human senses and perceptions. Art is inherently and seamlessly wed to media ecology. The question becomes not what do we believe and have faith in, but how can we live more artfully and heartfully, developing human survival technologies that feed our souls and spirits.
But there is no moral super-principle that undergirds us all besides humankind’s survival. It is clear, however, if humanity should cease to exist, it all becomes moot. We may be throwing away the entire arc of evolution through poor choices.
"Since we're talking social science, the big practical issue now is between mechanistic neo-positivists and creative design thinking -- it seems never the twain shall meet." --Iona Miller
C CROTONA 2520:
THE GAME OF GAMES
The Web’s Deepest Mystery
MISSION STATEMENT
Crotona is a Cyber-Mystery school rooted in a Frequency Renaissance, global architectronics, and guerrilla social action through the collective unconscious of The Dark Web. Rolling Stone called it, "the web's deepest mystery."
Informed by the spirit of Mercurious, our aesthetic approach prioritizes psyche, the language of symbols, cognitive liberty, and imaginal experience over heroic development or celebrity. We seek those with a passionate craving to express new concepts and philosophical synthesis. Each deploys their own disciplines in service toward emergent universals and human survival technology.
The luminous mind plays with the rhythms of history, concepts, and memes -- an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. Each develops a dialogue with their genius, their muse, their angel. In Sacred Science, a musical phrase can be a philosophical thought.
But the alchemical seed, the electrical message, the code, is in the core. The seed meaning is within, concealed behind the net of symbols. Ideally, it is an educative-spiritual force that maintains direct contact with regenerative and transformative forces. Truth is lived, not taught -- the mastery of Mystery -- the multimedia field of total works of art.
Each all-meaningful symbol leads into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge, a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation is a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery. In the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
There is no way to study 'symbolique'; it must be fully lived. We call this Intelligence. We perceive a philosophical world, a projection of our internally realized philosopher's stone. We now understand literally that space is within as well as without us and that the way out is in. Consciousness is our final frontier, the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality. Each of us is a star, reflecting every other star.
MANIFESTO 2020
"A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis." (Umberto Eco)
The cryptogram is a factor in symbolic philosophy. Crotona is an initiation into very deep secrets, but initiation just mean the beginning, to begin, an introduction. The secrets are experiential. Since they require direct experience to be known, they can never be told or conveyed in mere words. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of the unfettered collective imagination.
Crotona is a Cyber-Mystery school rooted in a Frequency Renaissance, global architectronics, and guerrilla social action through the collective unconscious of the Dark Web. Hence, Krotona is based on the true story of an international group of creatives and outliers, seeking to 'garden the cultural landscape.' Our paradigms are organic, not mechanistic; we prioritize compassion over materialism. Those feelings drive us.
Our lives are channeled by our way of anticipating events, looking for something of interest. Expectation influences experience. Our minds shape reality. We play the multimedia field like a great symphonic organ. It is 'connecting with coincidence,' an antidote to our cultural Dark Night of the Soul. Informed by the spirit of Mercurious, our aesthetic approach prioritizes psyche, the language of symbols, cognitive liberty, and imaginal experience over heroic development or celebrity.
We support the "right to mental self-determination", to the freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness -- both an extension of, and the principle underlying, the right to freedom of thought. We are vigilant in attending to what our accounts are claiming about the world, an alternative paradigm to negentropic models.
Krotona is the 21st-century Cosmic Scarab, working with the alchemical dross of the world. We seek those with a passionate craving to express new concepts and philosophical synthesis, each deploying their own disciplines toward emergent universals and human survival technology.
The illuminated mind plays with the rhythms of history, concepts, and memes -- an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. Each develops a dialogue with their genius, their muse, their angel. In Sacred Science, a musical phrase can be a philosophical thought. We are like Asklepian doctors of coincidence.
But the alchemical seed, the electrical message, the code, is in the core. The seed meaning is within, concealed behind the net of symbols. Ideally, it is an educative-spiritual force that maintains direct contact with regenerative and transformative forces. It's more about balance than growth.
Krotona is an alchemical descent into the catacombs of ancient wisdom for initiation. It is also a descend into the Dark Web, the shadowy underbelly of mankind's destructive culture. It emulates the life journey of The Fool in tarot, mining the gold of direct experience.
Truth is lived not taught -- the mastery of Mystery...the multimedia field of total works of art. Each all-meaningful symbol leads into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge, a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture.
Creative work steals distinction from the unconscious, overcomes the devouring force and brings it back to consciousness. Narcissism and creativity are closely related. To heal a narcissistic injury one often must develop creative expression. Crafting a distinctive work of art protects us from the compulsion to be a person of distinction, better than, or worse than, or more important than others.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation is a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.
Krotona is not derivative of nor intentionally patterned after any game, but has evolved through self-organization. Merit is assigned by collective representation and recognition of 'Being There,' either in the game or not in the game.
Hesse described his Bead Game as an 'eternal idea': "As the game progresses, associations between the themes become deeper and more varied. The game uses artistic forms, and eventually cultural symbols. Themes are developed almost as a poet would, and building variations as a composer. It was a way of symbolizing music and of building broad insights into the world."
When we do not look with the right imaginative and metaphorical perspective, however, most of the available insights remain hidden from view. We might understand living beings better if we imagine what is happening in the biosphere as, in a way, resembling artistic expression. Art no longer what separates humans from nature, but rather it is life’s voice fully in us. Its message is that beauty has no function, but is the pure essence of reality.
Krotona is is the artistic, philosophical or cosmological manipulation of the symbolic forms which express all systems of knowledge. Our tropes range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its variations are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the game the entire intellectual content of the universe.
Synoptic philosophy, helps us fit the pieces of life into the whole mental jigsaw puzzle. A love of wisdom emerges from a coherent understanding of everything together. There is no way to study 'symbolique'; it must be fully lived recognizing the primacy of creative imagination and fantasy. We call this Intelligence.
We perceive a philosophical world, a projection of our internally realized philosopher's stone. We now understand literally that space is within as well as without us. Absolute space (quantum vvacuum) is our interconnection, the creative source beyond space and time. Our world becomes philosophical, the fine line between what is and what must and ought to be. We harmonize immanence and transcendence.
The earth cult is absorption by the chthonian natural world of amoral necessity, while the sky cult is suppression of and spiritual flight from nature. Consciousness is our final frontier, the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality. Each of us is a star, reflecting every other star.
Today's Magister Ludi is engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Castalia is a parody of Paradise and the prototype of a super thinktank. The Bead Game is a thought enhancing, processing, and accelerating device. Thoughts have become enhanced digitized memories.
There is not one unitary framework, set of beliefs, methodology, or dogma that unites critical realists as a whole. Instead, we are much more like a series of family resemblances in which there are various commonalities that exist between the members of a family, but these commonalities overlap and crisscross in different ways. a heterogeneous assemblage of elements drawn from a relatively common “genetic” pool.
Plato argued that to discover the true nature of political and social justice it is necessary to ‘first look for its quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less’ (Plato, Republic).
"Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects." (James Hillman, "A Blue Fire")
"Here is the ancient tension. To be. To know. Well, the magician has a spell to weave here, too. The intellect divorced from old-fashioned neurosis, freed from egocentricity, from semantic reification. The mind illuminated by meditation ready to play with the lawful rhythm of concepts. The Bead Game." (Leary, Metzner)
"…one can speak about music only with a man
who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos."
(Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game)
THE GAME OF GAMES
The Web’s Deepest Mystery
MISSION STATEMENT
Crotona is a Cyber-Mystery school rooted in a Frequency Renaissance, global architectronics, and guerrilla social action through the collective unconscious of The Dark Web. Rolling Stone called it, "the web's deepest mystery."
Informed by the spirit of Mercurious, our aesthetic approach prioritizes psyche, the language of symbols, cognitive liberty, and imaginal experience over heroic development or celebrity. We seek those with a passionate craving to express new concepts and philosophical synthesis. Each deploys their own disciplines in service toward emergent universals and human survival technology.
The luminous mind plays with the rhythms of history, concepts, and memes -- an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. Each develops a dialogue with their genius, their muse, their angel. In Sacred Science, a musical phrase can be a philosophical thought.
But the alchemical seed, the electrical message, the code, is in the core. The seed meaning is within, concealed behind the net of symbols. Ideally, it is an educative-spiritual force that maintains direct contact with regenerative and transformative forces. Truth is lived, not taught -- the mastery of Mystery -- the multimedia field of total works of art.
Each all-meaningful symbol leads into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge, a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation is a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery. In the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
There is no way to study 'symbolique'; it must be fully lived. We call this Intelligence. We perceive a philosophical world, a projection of our internally realized philosopher's stone. We now understand literally that space is within as well as without us and that the way out is in. Consciousness is our final frontier, the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality. Each of us is a star, reflecting every other star.
MANIFESTO 2020
"A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis." (Umberto Eco)
The cryptogram is a factor in symbolic philosophy. Crotona is an initiation into very deep secrets, but initiation just mean the beginning, to begin, an introduction. The secrets are experiential. Since they require direct experience to be known, they can never be told or conveyed in mere words. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of the unfettered collective imagination.
Crotona is a Cyber-Mystery school rooted in a Frequency Renaissance, global architectronics, and guerrilla social action through the collective unconscious of the Dark Web. Hence, Krotona is based on the true story of an international group of creatives and outliers, seeking to 'garden the cultural landscape.' Our paradigms are organic, not mechanistic; we prioritize compassion over materialism. Those feelings drive us.
Our lives are channeled by our way of anticipating events, looking for something of interest. Expectation influences experience. Our minds shape reality. We play the multimedia field like a great symphonic organ. It is 'connecting with coincidence,' an antidote to our cultural Dark Night of the Soul. Informed by the spirit of Mercurious, our aesthetic approach prioritizes psyche, the language of symbols, cognitive liberty, and imaginal experience over heroic development or celebrity.
We support the "right to mental self-determination", to the freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness -- both an extension of, and the principle underlying, the right to freedom of thought. We are vigilant in attending to what our accounts are claiming about the world, an alternative paradigm to negentropic models.
Krotona is the 21st-century Cosmic Scarab, working with the alchemical dross of the world. We seek those with a passionate craving to express new concepts and philosophical synthesis, each deploying their own disciplines toward emergent universals and human survival technology.
The illuminated mind plays with the rhythms of history, concepts, and memes -- an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. Each develops a dialogue with their genius, their muse, their angel. In Sacred Science, a musical phrase can be a philosophical thought. We are like Asklepian doctors of coincidence.
But the alchemical seed, the electrical message, the code, is in the core. The seed meaning is within, concealed behind the net of symbols. Ideally, it is an educative-spiritual force that maintains direct contact with regenerative and transformative forces. It's more about balance than growth.
Krotona is an alchemical descent into the catacombs of ancient wisdom for initiation. It is also a descend into the Dark Web, the shadowy underbelly of mankind's destructive culture. It emulates the life journey of The Fool in tarot, mining the gold of direct experience.
Truth is lived not taught -- the mastery of Mystery...the multimedia field of total works of art. Each all-meaningful symbol leads into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge, a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture.
Creative work steals distinction from the unconscious, overcomes the devouring force and brings it back to consciousness. Narcissism and creativity are closely related. To heal a narcissistic injury one often must develop creative expression. Crafting a distinctive work of art protects us from the compulsion to be a person of distinction, better than, or worse than, or more important than others.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation is a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.
Krotona is not derivative of nor intentionally patterned after any game, but has evolved through self-organization. Merit is assigned by collective representation and recognition of 'Being There,' either in the game or not in the game.
Hesse described his Bead Game as an 'eternal idea': "As the game progresses, associations between the themes become deeper and more varied. The game uses artistic forms, and eventually cultural symbols. Themes are developed almost as a poet would, and building variations as a composer. It was a way of symbolizing music and of building broad insights into the world."
When we do not look with the right imaginative and metaphorical perspective, however, most of the available insights remain hidden from view. We might understand living beings better if we imagine what is happening in the biosphere as, in a way, resembling artistic expression. Art no longer what separates humans from nature, but rather it is life’s voice fully in us. Its message is that beauty has no function, but is the pure essence of reality.
Krotona is is the artistic, philosophical or cosmological manipulation of the symbolic forms which express all systems of knowledge. Our tropes range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its variations are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the game the entire intellectual content of the universe.
Synoptic philosophy, helps us fit the pieces of life into the whole mental jigsaw puzzle. A love of wisdom emerges from a coherent understanding of everything together. There is no way to study 'symbolique'; it must be fully lived recognizing the primacy of creative imagination and fantasy. We call this Intelligence.
We perceive a philosophical world, a projection of our internally realized philosopher's stone. We now understand literally that space is within as well as without us. Absolute space (quantum vvacuum) is our interconnection, the creative source beyond space and time. Our world becomes philosophical, the fine line between what is and what must and ought to be. We harmonize immanence and transcendence.
The earth cult is absorption by the chthonian natural world of amoral necessity, while the sky cult is suppression of and spiritual flight from nature. Consciousness is our final frontier, the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality. Each of us is a star, reflecting every other star.
Today's Magister Ludi is engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Castalia is a parody of Paradise and the prototype of a super thinktank. The Bead Game is a thought enhancing, processing, and accelerating device. Thoughts have become enhanced digitized memories.
There is not one unitary framework, set of beliefs, methodology, or dogma that unites critical realists as a whole. Instead, we are much more like a series of family resemblances in which there are various commonalities that exist between the members of a family, but these commonalities overlap and crisscross in different ways. a heterogeneous assemblage of elements drawn from a relatively common “genetic” pool.
Plato argued that to discover the true nature of political and social justice it is necessary to ‘first look for its quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less’ (Plato, Republic).
"Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects." (James Hillman, "A Blue Fire")
"Here is the ancient tension. To be. To know. Well, the magician has a spell to weave here, too. The intellect divorced from old-fashioned neurosis, freed from egocentricity, from semantic reification. The mind illuminated by meditation ready to play with the lawful rhythm of concepts. The Bead Game." (Leary, Metzner)
"…one can speak about music only with a man
who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos."
(Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game)
Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectonics, which in today's computer-assisted world reads Architectronics. Arguably, it makes us more out of touch with human realities, rather than closer to them.
Understandably, Hesse never gives a detailed description of this pre-electronic data-processing appliance called the Bead Game, but he does explain its function. Players learned how to digitize thought - convert decimal numbers, musical notes, words, thoughts, images into elements, glass beads which could be strung in endless abacus combinations and rhythmic fugue sequences to create a higher level language of clarity, purity and ultimate complexity.
Hesse described the Bead Game as “a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and interfacing of concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics."In time, wrote Hesse, “... the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another."
******
Ba is the “soul”, which is birthed with the individual, the “astral body”, which is the animating breath of all that lives, constituting the world and its final perfection. Ba is the natural soul in bodily form, subject to cyclic rebirth.
It is extraordinarily difficult for us to understand what is meant by the ka…the Egyptians conceived it as a man’s double, as his genius or guardian angel, as his name and as that which nourished him.
When the ka and the body are purified and united — the king — like Osiris before him and every individual after him — is a complete being who achieves perfection. Through this union of soul parts the king becomes a ba, a heart-soul who dwells with the gods and possesses the breath of life; he is now akhu, a perfect spiritual being.
The Ba represents paradoxically, both the unconscious personality complexes of an individual, but also the indwelling of the Self. On the other hand, the ka describes the pranas, or vitality of the life force, genetic heritage, and environmental effects on personality.
Ka represents the higher self and is one of the five subtle bodies. Ka is the connection to the higher subtle bodies. Its reflective essence in the khaibit causes initial connectivity to all the subtle bodies. The ka is the assemblage point in the physical body and mind and point of access to universal memory.
The Egyptian Ka represented the world-creating power of a god or king and the life force in every human being. The Ba is an aspect of the soul, connected to the uniqueness of the individual. The Ba is an immanent component of everyone, comparable to the concept Atman also representing the innermost center of the individual and as Atman Purusha — the all-embracing Deity.
In the Timaeus (90B-90C), Plato theorizes that every human being has a divine daimon that is the noblest component of the psyche. Whoever seeks wisdom and seriously concerns himself with divine and eternal things nourishes his daimon, whereas worldly trivialities abase and mortify him.
The daimon knows the future and is at all times in touch with the world-spirit, with the Logos or spermatic pneuma of the universe. Masculine and feminine merge in this androgynous symbol of wholeness. This archetypal image, like the lapis in alchemy, unites the opposites of masculine and feminine in one figure (Von Franz).
The Ba, or soul is a power to be reckoned with even during this life, a power that men cannot escape by any conscious act of will and cannot entirely grasp by conscious understanding. The Ba has something to do with the incarnation of a god — his individual forms of appearance on earth — or represents an immanent component of a human individual.
The task of the “ba” (true individuality) is to guide the person during life and to fly with the deceased to the sky, to the heaven of the stars. The “ba” dwelt in the heart, the receptacle of the higher components, but only in the heart of those who spoke and practiced Ma'at — balance.
Those established in their humanity see their heart as the permanent abode of the soul. They are “in their middle”, in their true nature and mastery of the passions. Those who have a sick heart carry their burden with them as a load of heavy stones. The words of their soul do not reach them. Hence, they lack rejuvenation and are stuck. However, the soul is a trustworthy guide who always remains, encouraging a return to the middle of life.
The unknown author of the Egyptian scroll 'Dialogue of World-Weary Man With His Soul', the Berlin hieratic papyrus 3024, lived more than 4,000 years ago when that ancient country was in an unsettled state, with erosion of ethical values and uncertainty for the future. From the papyrus, it seems the author faced a decision between two philosophies or paths: one involving the inner life of the individual and the other, contending with it, focused on the hedonist enjoyment of the present, with little thought of the future and immediate pursuit of pleasure.
This World Weary man engages in an internal discussion with his Ba, or soul on the relative merits of his life and his compulsions and yearning for death. Egyptologist Jacobsohn interprets this ancient man dealing with his Ba (soul) as the center of his individuality and inner power. He feels the tragedy of helplessness and wrestles with the problem of suicide.
Understandably, Hesse never gives a detailed description of this pre-electronic data-processing appliance called the Bead Game, but he does explain its function. Players learned how to digitize thought - convert decimal numbers, musical notes, words, thoughts, images into elements, glass beads which could be strung in endless abacus combinations and rhythmic fugue sequences to create a higher level language of clarity, purity and ultimate complexity.
Hesse described the Bead Game as “a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and interfacing of concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics."In time, wrote Hesse, “... the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another."
******
Ba is the “soul”, which is birthed with the individual, the “astral body”, which is the animating breath of all that lives, constituting the world and its final perfection. Ba is the natural soul in bodily form, subject to cyclic rebirth.
It is extraordinarily difficult for us to understand what is meant by the ka…the Egyptians conceived it as a man’s double, as his genius or guardian angel, as his name and as that which nourished him.
When the ka and the body are purified and united — the king — like Osiris before him and every individual after him — is a complete being who achieves perfection. Through this union of soul parts the king becomes a ba, a heart-soul who dwells with the gods and possesses the breath of life; he is now akhu, a perfect spiritual being.
The Ba represents paradoxically, both the unconscious personality complexes of an individual, but also the indwelling of the Self. On the other hand, the ka describes the pranas, or vitality of the life force, genetic heritage, and environmental effects on personality.
Ka represents the higher self and is one of the five subtle bodies. Ka is the connection to the higher subtle bodies. Its reflective essence in the khaibit causes initial connectivity to all the subtle bodies. The ka is the assemblage point in the physical body and mind and point of access to universal memory.
The Egyptian Ka represented the world-creating power of a god or king and the life force in every human being. The Ba is an aspect of the soul, connected to the uniqueness of the individual. The Ba is an immanent component of everyone, comparable to the concept Atman also representing the innermost center of the individual and as Atman Purusha — the all-embracing Deity.
In the Timaeus (90B-90C), Plato theorizes that every human being has a divine daimon that is the noblest component of the psyche. Whoever seeks wisdom and seriously concerns himself with divine and eternal things nourishes his daimon, whereas worldly trivialities abase and mortify him.
The daimon knows the future and is at all times in touch with the world-spirit, with the Logos or spermatic pneuma of the universe. Masculine and feminine merge in this androgynous symbol of wholeness. This archetypal image, like the lapis in alchemy, unites the opposites of masculine and feminine in one figure (Von Franz).
The Ba, or soul is a power to be reckoned with even during this life, a power that men cannot escape by any conscious act of will and cannot entirely grasp by conscious understanding. The Ba has something to do with the incarnation of a god — his individual forms of appearance on earth — or represents an immanent component of a human individual.
The task of the “ba” (true individuality) is to guide the person during life and to fly with the deceased to the sky, to the heaven of the stars. The “ba” dwelt in the heart, the receptacle of the higher components, but only in the heart of those who spoke and practiced Ma'at — balance.
Those established in their humanity see their heart as the permanent abode of the soul. They are “in their middle”, in their true nature and mastery of the passions. Those who have a sick heart carry their burden with them as a load of heavy stones. The words of their soul do not reach them. Hence, they lack rejuvenation and are stuck. However, the soul is a trustworthy guide who always remains, encouraging a return to the middle of life.
The unknown author of the Egyptian scroll 'Dialogue of World-Weary Man With His Soul', the Berlin hieratic papyrus 3024, lived more than 4,000 years ago when that ancient country was in an unsettled state, with erosion of ethical values and uncertainty for the future. From the papyrus, it seems the author faced a decision between two philosophies or paths: one involving the inner life of the individual and the other, contending with it, focused on the hedonist enjoyment of the present, with little thought of the future and immediate pursuit of pleasure.
This World Weary man engages in an internal discussion with his Ba, or soul on the relative merits of his life and his compulsions and yearning for death. Egyptologist Jacobsohn interprets this ancient man dealing with his Ba (soul) as the center of his individuality and inner power. He feels the tragedy of helplessness and wrestles with the problem of suicide.