TechGnosis maillist website
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-Philip K. Dick-
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SUBSCRIBE to TechGnosis List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TechGnosis/join

http://www.maybelogic.org
http://www.maybelogic.net

http://edge.org/

http://www.techgnosis.com - Erik Davis' site

http://www.undergrowth.org

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org

http://www.entheo.net/ - entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference

http://www.docquan.com/lib_dead.html - an online collection / library of interesting books

This weekend I've been trying to catch up on some of the MLA courses. the PKD course has finished. Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion finishes this weekend. I've enrolled in another self-study class called Tales of the Tribe - by Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) who has since passed away.

there was a class chat for Persuasion last night. I spoke to a fellow classmate earlier and they mentioned irc. I've been slack and hadn't used irc for ages - maybe over a year, and he mentioned chatzilla for firefox which comes with firefox. so I tried it out and went back to irc.deoxy.org. the channels have shifted slightly, but I found people I know in #gii, #bom, #chat has replaced #deoxy, GM made a new one #maybe for MLA (hopefully). so I spent the night chatting to otter, brains and glandmaster - hadn't spoken to the former for ages!

Psymbiensis is still running - though I had problems connecting last night. maybe this port is blocked by the isp I'm using atm. GM sent me a few links to things to read on deoxy - some are related to the courses, others things we were talking about.

on deoxy I also came across some lost PKD audio interviews : play them as an mp3 playlist in itunes or similar

new terms
a member of the Johnson family
-- from The Adding Machine - Collected Essays by William S Burroughs
-- http://deoxy.org/wiki/The_Johnson_Family

"the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct. To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He's a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble making person."

"A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn't stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car."

"The Johnson family formulates a Manichean position when good and evil are in conflict. It is not an eternal conflict since one or the other must win a final victory."

[Burroughs :] "I recollect Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and your reporter were drinking an espresso on the terrace of a little cafe on the Calle de Vigne in Tangier... after lunch a dead empty space... Then this Spaniard walks by. He is about 50 or older, shabby, obviously very poor carrying something wrapped in brown paper. And our mouths fell open as we exclaimed in unison

'My God that's a harmless looking person!'

He passed and I never saw him again, his passing portentous as a comet reminding us how rare it is to see a harmless looking person, a man who minds his own business and gets along as best he can in a world largely populated by people of a very different persuasion, kept alive by the hope of harming someone, on the way to the Commissaria to denounce a neighbor or a business rival leaving squiggles and mutterings of malevolence in their wake like ugly little spirits.

New Aeon Magic
http://deoxy.org/wiki/New_Aeon_Magic

I don't know much about magic or magick, so GM sent me this link. he'd done one of the MLA courses on it. the RAW course mentions it a bit but I'm a little behind in my reading assignments. below is an extract of a book called Liber Null and Pyschonaut by Peter J Carroll - there's a preview of this book on google books.

"The beginnings of the new psychic awareness have acquired a definitive subversive flavor. Magic is aligning itself against oppressive forms of order in many fields. magic is opposed to a psychiatry and medicine designed to patch up the damaged automaton and plug him back into the system. Instead it would rather that individuals learn to handle their own mental self-defense and treat their bodies with gentler remedies such as herbs. Magic rejects politics as no more than some peoples perverse desire to dominate others. It does well to dissociate itself from this monkey squabble and advocates instead personal enlightenment and emancipation which are the only real safeguards to freedom. Magic is anti-ideological because the main products of ideological solutions are repression and corpses. Magic is profoundly opposed to religion. Although a religion may appear benign when it is in decline, at least half of the madness and violent deaths of history have been caused by the superstition that the world is wholly material and that mens actions are not intimately interwoven with the psychic sphere."

"To oppose repressive forms of order which often impose themselves by evil means, magic aligns itself to a vision of chaotic good. Magics commitment to the good is reflected in its concern with individual freedom and consciousness and its interests in all other life forms on the planet. At the highest level this manifests as some unspecifiable feeling for the 'vibes' generated by human thought and action."

Comparative Religion Made Easy
http://deoxy.org/wiki/Comparative_Religion_Made_Easy
this page links to books by some of the deoxy forums members. haven't gone through this yet..

Reality Sandwich is a web magazine for this time of intense transformation. Their subjects run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies. They hope to spark debate and engagement by offering a forum for voices ranging from the ecologically pragmatic to the wildly visionary (which, to our delight, sometimes turn out to be the one and the same). Counteracting the doom-and-gloom of the daily news, Reality Sandwich is a platform for voices conveying a different vision of the transformations we face. Their goal is to inspire psychic evolution and a kind of earth alchemy.

-- info adapted from the reality sandwich about page

Erik Davis is an award-winning journalist, independent scholar, and "performance lecturer" based in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape, with photographs by Michael Rauner. He also wrote Led Zeppelin IV and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, the latter a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages. His essays on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality have appeared in over a dozen books, including AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man, Zig Zag Zen, The Disinformation Book of Lies, 010101: Art in Technological Times (SFMOMA), and Prefiguring Cyberculture. Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of publications, including Bookforum, ArtForum, Salon, Blender, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice. For many years he was a contributing writer at Wired, and he is now the editor-at-large for Evolver magazine.

A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught workshops and seminars at the UC Berkeley, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the New York Open Center, and Esalen. He was one of the original minds behind Planetwork, an organization devoted to cross-fertilizaing information technology and global ecology, and continues to bring these passions to bear on the Evolver Project. He has been interviewed by CNN and the BBC, and appeared in Craig Baldwin's underground film, the SciFi media critique Specters of the Spectrum. He occasionally plays guitar in front of microphones.

-- bio from the techgnosis website

The Gnosis Archive offers a vast collection of primary texts and resources relating to Gnosticism and the Gnostic Tradition, both ancient and modern. There is also information on the Nag Hammadi Scrolls / Scriptures hosted on this site.

I came across a couple of interesting articles in the UK Telegraph paper today - about the history of art and discovery of 11000 year old paintings that seem to be painted in a modern geometric style.

'Oldest' wall painting looks like modern art
"French archaeologists have discovered an 11,000-year-old work of art in northern Syria which is the oldest known wall painting, even though it looks like a work by a modernist.

The two square-metre painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo.

"It looks like a modernist painting," said Eric Coqueugniot, the team leader. "Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee. Through carbon dating we established it is from around 9,000 BC."

...

The dating makes the designs at least 1500 years older than wall paintings at Çatalhöyük, the famous 9500-year-old Turkish village, among one of the first towns. Cave art dates back much further but it was not until the so-called Neolithic Revolution that people began marking up human-made surfaces.

Scientists are fascinated by the birth of art because it marked a decisive point in our story, when man took a critical step beyond the limitations of his hairy ancestors and began to use symbols. The modern mind was born."

related articles :

The birth of our modern minds ...

Two pieces of ochre engraved with geometrical patterns more than 70,000 years ago, were recently found at Blombos Cave, 180 miles east of Cape Town. If the current dogma is accepted, this means people were able to think abstractly and behave as modern humans much earlier than previously thought.

Lord Renfrew would argue that art, like genetics, does not tell the whole story of our origins. For him, the real revolution occurred 10,000 years ago with the first permanent villages. That is when the effects of new software kicked in, allowing our ancestors to work together in a more settled way. That is when plants and animals were domesticated and agriculture born.

...

Lord Renfrew puts his faith in "cognitive archaeology". This is not "thinking prehistoric thoughts" but has a more modest aim of revealing how ancient minds worked by studying what they did - how they counted, made flint tools or used measures.

Intriguingly, he argues, in his book Figuring it Out, that contemporary art also provides insights into how proto-societies grappled with the material world.

Cave find dates dawn of creativity

TWO pieces of ochre - a form of iron ore - engraved with geometrical patterns more than 70,000 years ago reveal that people were able to think abstractly and behave as modern humans much earlier than previously thought.

The discovery in a South African cave suggests that humans have created art for twice as long as suggested by previous discoveries, notably by cave paintings from France that have been dated to less than 35,000 years ago.

...

While genetic and fossil evidence suggests that humans were anatomically modern in Africa before 100,000 years ago, scholars are not yet able to agree on whether human behaviour and physique developed in tandem.

Some believe that modern behaviour arose relatively late and rapidly, 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, while others believe that it evolved earlier and more gradually.

The diversity of views reflects the lack of agreement among scientists on what behaviour best defines the difference between modern humans and their earlier ancestors.

But there is a general consensus that a clear marker of modern behaviour are the cognitive abilities that would be used, for example, to create abstract or depictional images.

"Archaeological evidence of abstract or depictional images indicates modern behaviour," Prof Henshilwood said. "The Blombos Cave engravings are intentional images."

Stone Age masterpieces shed new light on the origins of art

EUROPE'S oldest cave paintings - a menagerie of lions, rhinos, bears and panthers drawn at least 30,000 years ago - are so sophisticated that they may force scientists to think again about the origins of art.

New radiocarbon datings of the Chauvet cavern paintings in Ardeche, France, have confirmed that their Stone Age creators were as skilled as painters 15,000 years later.

...

"Prehistorians, who have traditionally interpreted the evolution of prehistoric art as a steady progression from simple to more complex representations, may have to reconsider existing theories of the origins of art."

The caves have challenged the conventional theory of the evolution of art which states that it had crude beginnings in the Aurignacian period followed by gradual progress over thousands of years.