Mundane Av.

Normal is according to the English dictionary “constituting or conforming to a type of standard”. But this standard is very contextually dependent; where you live, the type of upbringing you had, from global internet culture, national programming, office politics, down to interpersonal relations; normal is a set of expectations we have of our reality through the repetition of similar experiences. Anything repeated time and time again becomes normal or mundane eventually.

This goes for brushing your teeth, but also the normalisation of a desensitized and indifferent stance towards homelessness when we walk past. Or how “everything” can become political, but also its opposite; people who get completely allergic to anything relating to politics because of repeated bad encounters with it. How normal did it become to be constantly bombarded with advertisements? Or the perceived significance of having an online following right now, versus back in the day at the dawn of the internet.
Not to sound like a boomer but I think I wouldn’t be far from the truth when I say that the collective “Normal” changes quickly these days. But what about our personal sense of normal?

I feel like I need to embrace the normal / mundanity of life more, because a lot of transformation happens in the mundane moments in life, through consistency of action, through habitual and ritualistic means. Putting the 10.000 hours in to learn a new skill, to consistently go to the gym or practicing sport, to deepen a meditation practice; it all requires a level of plateau, mundane relation with time and effort. If we are constantly searching for the new, exciting and different, we will definitely see change occurring in our lives, but less so change that we ourselves seek out to establish. We will be tossed around more, which brings a completely different set of learning moments to the table.

Touring has removed me a bit from the ability to stay consistent with certain good habits. Maybe touring conditioned me in the opposite way; that I needed to be adaptable to new situations all the time, which has been a very valuable skill to learn, And I feel like I have learned it to an extent. However, for me personally, I feel like I have also deconditioned routines I was able to fall back on when I wasn’t touring.

I was diagnosed with ADD when I was five, and one of the main characteristics of my specific diagnosis was that I had trouble with executive function and with automating processes. So it has always been way harder for me to develop habits. My autopilot is never really on. It’s always a deliberate action, which makes it very tiresome, because I’m always thinking, and never really doing stuff on autopilot.

A while back I was reading this book; “Condensed Chaos”, by Phil Hine, and in there it talked about the acronym, or formula, if you will, of D.R.A.T.: Discipline, Relaxation, Attentiveness and Transformation.
Discipline because there is willpower needed to get to any point in life. But you can only be disciplined if you are also relaxed, because discipline, forcefully enforced on yourself, will either hurt you in the long run, or prevent you from applying it in an authentic and consistent way.

So in order to be disciplined, we need to be relaxed. In order to be relaxed, we need to be attentive, because we need to be able to look around us and know that we are safe, expanding our awareness to a degree that we trust in the awareness that we have, and that our safety is therefore inherent: we trust that we will be aware enough to spot dangerous situations, and if there are none, we can be completely relaxed. In the same way that confidence is a form of relaxation in the present moment; you are not really thinking about anxious ideas of other times in the future or in the past, you are relaxed.
Confidence is a relaxed, trusting state of mind. You trust yourself, you trust the safety around you, you trust that when an unsafe situation arises that you are able to diffuse or solve it. It’s a form of self-love in a way. So you need that trusting and attentive confidence in order to be relaxed, and you need relaxation in order to be authentically disciplined.

I feel like I need to embrace the mundanity of life more and apply the D.R.A.T. formula to my life in mundane isolated conditions. That’s something that I want to learn, that is what this track is about. I want to build more solid foundations to become better at being a Reality Architect. ;)

The ever reflecting light of a Strange Wave

“The ever reflecting light of a strange wave”

I Wrote down some thoughts to explore my own experience of time and the layers draped upon my perception of the “here and now”. It would be fun if you can relate and let me know if you do! But if not, just take it as just some lines on my map. Some thoughts you can dismiss as bullshit if you want, up to you.

What is “now” to me, other than the moment that just passed, when I put it into words? In the time it takes you to read this; this ‘now’ is, in the grand scheme of things, infinitely different from this ‘now’, so ‘now’ is never really approachable through language as every attempt to create a connection with a moment through language is moving you away from it further. The relationship language has with time is a whole fascinating exploration in itself (which I would love to dive into at some point) but for now I’ll try to stay concise and focus on the present and the idea behind my song Strange Wave: how do I experience the “here and now”?

If anything, I would like to approach it as a feeling, a “connectedness” with our direct environment through focus on our five-sensory input in “real-time”, which I guess in this context means, without linguistic interference. However, I wouldn’t have a clue what “real-time” means as I feel my perception of it constantly changing as I can imagine you do too. But we have ways to measure it, but those measurements can be divided up in fractions ad infinitum, if we use the right tools to do so. So we can infinitely define a specific moment, a specific “now”, with more numerical information.
But 5,99999999999999999999999999999etc seconds is still not 6 seconds even though it might feel like it.

Every specific moment can be translated / distilled into an infinite amount of information / linguistic patterns but none of that information can actually bring us any closer to the moment we collected it from. It is useful to collect as much information as possible however, because our semiotic structures work cumulatively over time. So more information means more data to extrapolate patterns from, to become more precise at predictions, but also more effective in technological progress, because we always build the next thing on top of the technology preceding it, in a linear / almost logarithmic manner.

In his philosophical theory of “the eight circuits of the brain”, Robert Anton Wilson calls our “mental circuitry that handles our rational and working with language or any type of symbol set” the “time-binding semantic circuit” (1983 “Prometheus Rising”). Time-binding because our linguistic systems create a multi-generational relationship between one moment and the next. Our brain is always looking for patterns / relations it can understand. Could those cumulative / linear developments of language and other technologies be definitive for the way that our brain processes information and therefore “creating” our “chronological” experience of time?

But ok, let’s take a step back and look at the bandwidth of the information we gather through our 5 senses from moment to moment. In a moving picture, it takes 10 frames a second for a human to perceive something being in motion and not just as separate pictures. And that same movement starts to become a blur if you speed it up further to around 50 to 60fps. Time references in sound are similar but instead of frames it is the amount of cycles a (sound) wave makes in a second, this amount is defined in Herz (Hz), high Herz = high frequency. The audible spectrum is from around 20 Hz (below that a sub bass will enter the “touch” spectrum as it will be felt as rhythmic pulses in air pressure) to around 20 kHz (20.000) (anything higher will again not be heard but (if particularly loud) felt as another form of pressure).
Our brain works in way more complex ways than I will ever be able to fully understand let alone factually relay, but I found an interesting article of which I would like to quote a passage:

“Processing:
Even though the brain can encode terabits of information, humans are in practice very limited in the amount of information we can process. In his classic article,3 Miller showed how our minds could only hold about 7 ± 2 concepts in our working memory.
More generally, three essential bottlenecks were shown to limit information processes in the brain: the Attentional Blink (AB) limits our ability to consciously perceive, the Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) our capacity to hold in mind, and the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) our ability to act upon the visual world.
In particular, the brain takes up to 100 ms to process complex images.4 Moreover, the processing time seems to take longer when the choice to make takes complex information as input. This is known as Hick’s Law:5 the time it takes to make a choice is linearly related to the entropy of the possible alternatives.”
Trazzi, M., & Yampolskiy, R. V. (2020). Artificial Stupidity: Data We Need to Make Machines Our Equals. Patterns (New York, N.Y.), 1(2), 100021. doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2020.100021

Apart from this being an interesting article in itself, this in particular I find interesting because it shows the hurdles in our “computational brain power”. These hurdles keep our computational and “inputational” bandwidth limited to a degree that we are only able to interact with a sliver or a crescent of the information present in the “now”, like trying to catch the moon’s reflection on a strange, ever continuing wave amidst inky black water; the present moment.
We illuminate our own version of the environment around that wave through the linguistic structures of past and future, memory and imagination; our individual reality maps from before, Our personal semiotic landscape.

I try to get more acquainted with that strange wave through a bunch of different exercises, like for instance calling out everything I receive through my senses; “I see a lamp, I see my knees, I see the floor, etc”. mindfulness, meditation and ritual are avenues of exercise I’m experimenting a lot with. I do this because I believe that it’s good (at least for me) to deepen my relationship with the present moment. Maybe such a relationship could even open up doors to different forms of perceiving time as a whole..

[SPARK] Talking with Intelligence; The Prompt

Let’s become redundantly obvious for a moment before we extrapolate to more complex situations:

If I want something,
I can only get closer to getting it if I know what it is.
And to know what it is I have to be able to express it in words.
I have to communicate those words to the powers that have influence over the “thing” that I want in order to get another step closer to it.
The first person who will take these words into consideration is myself, preferably before I vocalize them.

I’m looking at the menu while the waiter is standing next to our table, notepad in hand.
Easy enough, I’m thinking of getting a BLT Sandwich, but I had one already yesterday. They are just so damn good at this place.
I make up my mind, look at the waiter and speak the word “BLT Sandwich” out loud as the main subject of a sentence. The full sentence is composed of addressing my desire towards this “BLT Sandwich” combined with some social pleasantries in the form of “would like”, “please” and “thank you”. The waiter understands my syntax, and with this the process of “creating a BLT Sandwich for me to consume” is set in motion.

We do exactly the same when we “talk with” search engines or when we “communicate with” an AI in the form of a prompt input. we don’t have to type in “thank you, please”, but otherwise the function of the use of words to “get some thing” is indistinguishable. In fact, the more precise we are in defining and describing our wishes, the more satisfactory are the results in the realm of computational powers. Keep that in mind as we move forward.

It starts to get more interesting when we try to relate this to the more abstract things we want;
What do I need within my current experience of life? What are my goals for a future version of that experience? From the perspective of culturally defined morality, which moral compass fits me best and to what extent do I follow it? What do I want to believe in and most importantly, why? In what direction do I want to aim my personal growth?

To me, these abstract “forms of input I want to lead to results” are often more disguised than I realize, and in a multitude of ways;

Sometimes they are hidden in things I disagree with. sometimes in things I do agree with while staying hidden nonetheless. Negatives posing as positives and vice versa. Do I fight “for” something or fight “against” something and what does this “fight” look like? To what extent does my subconscious even make a distinction between “wanting something” and “not wanting something”? “Everything I pay attention to grows”; Inputting a prompt into an AI of something I don’t want seems counter-effective in getting a preferable result.

Sometimes it hides in my fears and the things I run away from. For instance,
“I want to have a healthy set of coping mechanisms in dealing with unpleasant emotions”
“I want to meet my mirror image with love, kindness and confidence”.

Sometimes they are guarded by (self)censorship and systemically / culturally moral expectations. Here are some examples of what that might look like after taking down those guards;
“I want to develop a lot of skills; my inabilities in the present will always precede my abilities in the future”
“I want to be able to explore my identities without interference from others or myself(ves)”
“I want to be able to live my life in an idiosyncratic way, I want to be free!”

Sometimes my desires can be deceptive and pose themselves as my own when they actually aren’t. However they still often have a desire that IS my own hidden underneath them, for example:
“I want to be famous” versus “I want to be loved and my existence validated by others”.
“I want to be rich” versus “I want to be able to provide for myself and people I love and feel powerful in doing so”
“I don’t want to go to hell” I’ll leave the other side of that coin up to the reader.

Cool beans, but what are we getting at?
I guess that it all starts with the language;
our definitions, aspirations in potentially changing those definitions, communication of those aspirations to who/whatever has influence over redefining them.
Ultimately, the act of shaping our reality and definition / perception thereof.

The analogy of a “computer language” in relation to our inner dialogue and mental capacities is therefore an obvious but nevertheless very powerful one:
Our “hardware” (e.g. mental capacities) becomes most useful if the right “software” (e.g. inner dialogue and set of skills) is installed to fulfill purposes we like to use our “computer” (organism as a whole) for.
But then still, an input needs to be “prompted” (E.g. our desires, aspirations, needs, requirements) in order to set the whole system in motion.

To me, that prompt serves as a spark, a life force, a seed, a starting point for a journey. And the more precise I am at defining that starting point through language, the better my sense of direction gets along the way.

Everything you pay attention to grows

“Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist” – Austin Osman Spare

When I was younger my mom often said “everything you pay attention to grows”. However, I didn’t really understand the meaning of that until later…

I’m writing this text in an effort to explore deeper into the subject of my last entry. This time I would like to zoom in on the relation between reality and language.
Again, add salt if necessary and without further ado, let’s talk about meaning.

Language alone can create meaning, but meaning can’t be distilled back into just language; it is more than the sum of its parts.
Meaningful language becomes a vessel for more information than the words alone because we are either recalling an experience or defining our relationship with the subject, both are experienced through more mental faculties than just through our neocortex (oversimplified: rational problem solving language skills) Smell, touch, visual cues, emotions etc.
The more vivid, the stronger the meaning we experience albeit potentially very biased seeing that the emotions are often the most vivid of them all.

When we engage often with an attached meaning, we build history with it, the connection becomes stronger and it starts to feel as part of the “thing” it is attached to, but also as part of ourselves, similar to the mechanism of any other type of relation(ship).
(time + attention = connection) If you extrapolate this perspective on meaning onto the similarities it has with belief, one could argue that; Language is a building block for Meaning, Meaning is a building block for Belief, Belief is a building block for Perceived Reality which feeds back into language in the form of our personal narrative, and the cycle continues.

Etymologically the word “meaning” comes from the German verb “meinen” which could be translated into “to intend / have in mind”. And even in english you could easily switch out “you didn’t mean that, did you?” with “you didn’t intend to say that, did you?”.
Interestingly enough, the translation of the the word “meaning” into Dutch is; “Betekenis” which has its etymological roots in “Teken”, which traditionally meant ”Divine Sign” but is also related to the verb; “tekenen” which means “to draw”. I thought that was interesting when compared to the drawings of the reality cartographers from my last entry.

This brings me to the Symbols (or Sigils if you Will) I created for TAOC. They represent the intentions, concepts and therefore my meaning behind the songs.
Language alone can create meaning, but like I was saying before; the more vivid the context, the stronger the meaning. That’s why I wanted to create more than just the words, I needed symbols that represented the words to create another layer of meaning, and then I asked Funilab to help me create an even more vivid context by adding symbolic visual places where these intentions / concepts / meanings “live”.
Actually, all the details, from the sounds / genre of the songs, lyrics, roll-out content, social media captions; everything was an attempt to enrich the context of the meanings / intentions I wanted to instill within myself. To the point that writing this text is also part of that process.

Language, meaning, and belief are to me very important tools, imperative to my goal of becoming a more active participant in my personal growth. We live in a relational universe and our engagement with the world around us, including ourselves, is determinative for the way we experience it.

When I was younger my mom often said “everything you pay attention to grows”. However, I didn’t really understand the meaning of that until later…

“Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist” — Austin Osman Spare

“The map is not the territory.” - Alfred Korzybski

Let me start off by saying that my writings should be served with a big fat grain of salt. I am definitely not a spokesperson for absolute truths and in no way an authority in the field of philosophy. These texts are merely a collection of ideas that I find interesting and draw strength and inspiration from. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about reality.

“Reality” is just the collection of denotations and connotations we ascribed to the result of our five-sensory input computing, molded into a model we can understand. Language is its vessel because we ourselves “tell the story” of what “reality is to us”, and we do so often subconsciously. Our Bio-computer has a coding-language and it is often our native tongue, “Reality” being our OS.

How would you know that a car is a car or a tree is a tree if you have never seen either before and never talked about its existence in the first place? They don’t exist, to you. Like so many things don’t exist, to us.

So “Reality” is just a personal map, with here and there some overlap with the map of your neighbor, friend, fam or foe, fellow citizen or exclusive digital echochamber. But In a multicultural society it doesn’t really matter what the map itself looks like, because we are learning to co-exist with more and more unique cartographers, but that’s just it;
What matters is how we read them, and especially the ones that are not ours.

If I just compare my reality map with someone else’s by holding them both over a bright light to find where they differ and overlap, I’m neither reading theirs nor my own. I’m just finding out if this person is like me (added to the “IN-group”) or unlike me (added to the OUT-group). “Oh we have so much in common, we must be friends” or “i’m not vibing with this person because we are just too different”. This categorization of people through “like and dislike / in- and out-group” is called othering which is the source mechanism of all prejudice. I personally believe that othering is a result of projecting one’s own map onto someone else’s which, funny enough, doesn’t give real insight in either one.

Instead, I like to put my own map completely aside when I try to engage with someone else’s experience of reality. Knowing how the lines ended up on someone’s map leads to a much deeper understanding of this person’s world, at which point relating the position of their lines back to your own line structure becomes irrelevant.

Ok but let’s explore our own reality map a bit more and its relation to language.

First of all;

The more you are able to read, the more you are probably able to understand as well. The more words you know, the more precise you can be at defining the nuances on your map.

High bit-rate = a high definition picture; you can see more. (“ah, I forgot I parked my olive-green rectangular shaped car next to that slightly slanted black birch tree.”)

Second of all;

There are a lot of languages and symbol systems out there to draw up a map with. Which one do you use? One thing is certain, We all drew the first lines with the closest symbol system we found in our direct environment and upbringing, and I consider a digital space on a screen a “direct environment” as well, because it makes no difference for the 5-sense input computing which we call “experience”, it enters the same processing algorithm, extra lines on the same map. What lines are created by an ipad with a kid-friendly casing, do the parents know?

Where is your coding-language rooted?

HOWEVER;

The fact that we all started with a blank piece of paper to draw our map on doesn’t mean that we can’t draft up new ones, or use an eraser (for the sake of the metaphor).

“Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.” - Robert Anton Wilson.

In his book Prometheus Rising, R.A.W. argues that, for instance, a Christian person will see a Christian world around them, following the rules set by that paradigm of thinking: everything within the borders of the map. But that doesn’t mean that there is no territory to be defined outside its borders, or even more nuance within.

Columbus Believed that he had reached India, so the fact that up until recently everyone referred to Native Americans as “Indians” without knowing any better, shows that belief is a powerful agent for the cartographer. For instance, someone has told you a very convincing lie for a long time; you didn’t question its validity because you didn’t know that there was something to be questioned. But when you found out, something you saw as an island on your map, suddenly completely vanished. Reality Changed.

Most of our beliefs are not even metaphysical, but merely the result of the most normal, mundane, matter of fact cumulative experiences we encounter; Why is that a car, and why is that a tree?

These things just are, or are they?

Quantum physics models of reality already give us a whole different vision on this particular question than its Newtonian and even Einsteinian predecessors. So collectively, the maps are changing too.

Most of us have experienced this first hand: “well, I hear you say that, but new research shows us that…”

There is a split second moment of choice that happens: do you allow this new information to reshape your reality map? A lot of factors come into play like testing the credibility of the information, the source, the social consequences if not subscribed to, etc. Depending on where you are on the cynical - gullible spectrum, it either happens easily or not. But the fact remains that we potentially could bring about such a change ourselves as well, if we allow ourselves to fully believe in it; it would be true to us, and we would most certainly see its consequences in the world around us, for better and for worse.

To give some extreme examples:

“ALL GOVERNMENTS ARE EVIL AND TRYING TO CONTROL US!! THE WORLD IS DYING, AND WE SEEM POWERLESS, HOWEVER, TOGETHER WE ARE STRONG. WE MUST FIGHT!!”

or

“WE ARE ENTERING THE REVOLUTION OF MIND, NOBODY CAN BIND US BECAUSE THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES TO OUR COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE, WE ARE MIND, JUST HEALING TOWARD ONENESS, AS ABOVE SO BELOW, GET WITH THE PROGRAM AND STOP FIGHTING!!”

or

I DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS MY LOVED ONES AND I ARE LOOKED AFTER, TOGETHER WE CAN TAKE ON ANYTHING!!

And these are just three very outspoken one sided examples of the many many many ways of thinking about “what is going on”; just a bunch of lines on the map.

Here follow two side notes, open to your interpretation:

“Brainwashing or subliminal programming is not just reserved for cult leaders, advertisers and governments, it’s just a tool they sometimes use. Are we brainwashing ourselves when we try to redefine our unwanted convictions? If I had referred to “drafting a new map” and “using an eraser” as brainwashing yourself, would you’ve felt less comfortable while reading this text? Why is that?”

and

“self confidence and ever expanding love in the form of contextual awareness and attentiveness towards the reality cartographers around us, are the two most revolutionary and promethean mentalities to develop within our consciousness. I personally like to believe that to be true”

So what if belief could be used as a tool to make edits on the map, or can belief only arise as the result of experience? Could I curate my experiences in such a way that it results in a belief I intended to gain? What would happen if I authentically pray to Christ every day for 6 months while not being a Christian? How would my perception of the universe respond?

Either way, I really hope we eventually evolve from bickering about our individual reality maps as Cartographers into a species of Architects and Landscapers with impeccable teamspirit and collective understanding.

Thank you for reading :)

Will it happen the way that you think, or will it happen to think in a way?