Skilluminati Research

Posted Oct 16, 2007 4 comments

For the next few weeks here on Skilluminati, I'm going to resurrect the site by getting out of the way. I've been assembling high-quality, high-potency quotes for a project I probably won't get around to until 2009 -- and there is no point in hoarding the goods. I want to share the treasure with you, a mix of familiar gems and hopefully some brand-new input. Thanks to everyone who's been supporting Skilluminati -- things will only get crazier from here.

--thirtyseven

Uncle Crowley Explains the Other

"My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings."

Frank Zappa Explains Freedom

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."

Abbie Hoffman Explains the Counterculture

"There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers... all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these 'flower children' who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?"

Gurdjieff Explains Religion

"There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.

"At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.

"And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.

"This tale is a very good illustration of man's position."

4 comments

Filed in: Future Tech

Posted Oct 03, 2007 2 comments

Alterati has been a rare animal: an extremely ambitious website startup that actually launched successfully and continues to thrive. By nescessity, their content covers a huge range of topics, but what I'd like to share with you today is their hidden gems: invaluable DIY tutorials that are all very clear, interesting and well written. Not coincidentally, a lot of these gems are from Wes Unruh, who is a damn good writer.

Here's a powerful tool right off: a lesson about How to Turn Teleconferences into Podcasts.

Not only can I host a teleconference with zero advanced notice, I can record them and, if I’m also at a computer with a web browser, I can even mute out callers on the line and unmute their lines individually, allowing for question and answer sessions. At my old job, this would be called a premium operator-assisted call, and would cost something like $2.50 a minute plus an additional 7 cents a minute for each line that was connected beyond some base figure. Those charges represent an insane financial hurdle for most private individuals who could otherwise fully exploit their telephones as note-taking devices, recording devices, and tools of mass communication.

Right now I do all of this for free, thanks to a company/website out there called TheBasementVentures and open-source software. Between this free conferencing service and the free audio editing software Audacity, there’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t have your own podcast up and running in just a few hours.

My personal favorite out of this material is the series Wes did entitled "Behind the Scenes of a DIY Book Launch," which lays out his experience working with Ben Mack:

When a friend of mine went to publish his book, he was faced with two questions. How does one make money from a book? How does one create a market for a book? book_marketing_article_seri.jpg Actually, he approached the second question like so: How does one create a marketing campaign for little or no money up front and still reach enough of an audience to culminate in ‘Brand Awareness’?

Part One: The Attention Economy

Part Two: Tellman’s Infoproducts

Part Three: Affiliate Economics

Part Four: Attention in Action

For those of you interested in the flesh trade, I'd recommend the fresh air of "Amateur Porn Web Development". On a related note, for those of you interested in learning about porno affiliate programs, I highly recommend the Sensual Liberation Army Primer, hands-down the best and most valuable info and advice on the subject you can find.

To top it off, Wes has also given us a very meaty interview with Ken McCarthy about the new wave of net-based, DIY journalism and the challenges, changes, and hazards it entails: start chewing on Part One, and then graze on to Part Two.

Do You Write? Then Read This.

James Curcio, who's running bands, websites and cults these days, has created a superb series about DIY hustling for counterculture authors. It's very useful and tasty stuff, and it's titled No Write Way:

Part One Self-Publishing Rules of Thumb: Characters and Concepts.

Part Two Self-Publishing Rules of Thumb: The Story.

Part Three Editorial: Reality Sets In.

Part Four Layout on the not-so-cheap

That last part -- which is outstanding -- was written by Tovarich.

Don't Sleep

This is merely the tip of their iceberg. Explore the site, it's badass. I especially recommend their Altertube, feature, which is an open video archive full of hilarious, bizarre and rare materials.

2 comments

Filed in: DIY Projects

Posted Oct 01, 2007 3 comments

Charles Tart was a real-deal superhuman. He has very quietly given us a huge body of work that covers dozens of areas, and all of it is perfectly written. Longtime Skilluminati Research readers will probably remember the name because this is the second time I've offered up some excerpts of Tart's work: last year I printed his meditation on Aikido, which is some of the very best western writing on the subject.

Here I want to present Tart's most central and personally important premise, which is essentially pure Sufi/Gurdjeiff theory: most humans are stumbling around in mutually-reinforcing trances, and it takes a great deal of effort, thought and time to escape from that trance. Rather than restate things any further, I will turn the microphone over to one of my favorite primates, Charles Tart:

States of consciousness, from altered states to the state earthlings call "normal waking consciousness," have been Charley Tart's specialty for two decades. Surprisingly, Dr. Tart no longer calls it "normal consciousness," and has substituted what he feels to be a more accurate term: consensus trance. To him, the idea of "normal consciousness" is the kind of convenient fiction illustrated by the famous folktale of "the emperor's new clothes." Together, human groups agree on which of their perceptions should be admitted to awareness (hence, consensus), then they train each other to see the world in that way and only in that way (hence trance).

Experimental psychology was the vehicle Tart chose to pursue his questions about consciousness and reality. Although much of his early research involved dreaming, he was attracted to the mysterious altered state of consciousness known as hypnosis. Tart learned from his earliest experiences as a hypnotist that reality can be influenced far more strongly by one's state of mind than most people suspect, most of the time:

"In inducing hypnosis I would sit down with a volunteer who wanted to be hypnotized," Tart recalled. "We were presumably both normal people. With our eyes we presumably saw the same room around us that others saw; with our ears we presumably heard the ordinary sounds in the room. We smelled what odors were there and felt the solidity of the real objects in the room."

"Then I began to talk to the subject. Researchers give the style of talking the special name of 'hypnotic induction procedure,' but basically it was just talking. The subject was given no drugs, was not in a special environment, had nothing external done to his brain -- and yet in twenty minutes I could drastically change the universe he lived in. With a few words, the subject could not lift his arm. With a few more he heard voices talking when no one was there. A few more words and he could open his eyes and see something that no one else could see, or, with the right suggestion, a real object in plain sight in the room would be invisible to him."

How can anybody distinguish, then, between dream, hypnotic trance, and reality? Dehypnotization, the procedure of breaking out of the normal human state of awareness, according to both mystics and hypnotists, is a matter of direct mental experience. The method can be learned, and that's the nutshell description of the esoteric wisdom of the ages.

The clues from hypnosis research, experiments into the influence of beliefs upon perceptions, and teachings from the mystical traditions, led Tart to see how normal waking consciousness is the product of a true hypnotic procedure that is practiced by parents, teachers, and peers, reinforced by every social interaction, and maintained by powerful taboos. Consensus trance induction -- the process of learning the "normal waking" state of mind -- is involuntary, and occurs under conditions that give it far more power than ordinary hypnotists are ever allowed. When infants are first subjected to the processes that induce consensus trance, they are all vulnerable and dependent upon their consensus hypnotists, for their parents are the ones who initiate them into the rules of their culture, according to the instructions that had been impressed upon them by their own parents, teachers, and peers.

Again, you can read the rest here. For more of Tart's work, start with his online library, which is a goldmine. Also, if you haven't read Ben Mack's excellent article on "The Psychology of Entrainment," please do so now.

3 comments

Filed in: Social Control

Posted Sep 28, 2007 3 comments

It was through the Grey Lodge Occult Review that I got ahold of Zygmunt Bauman's great paper Ideology and the Weltanshaunng of the Intellectuals. By the way, Weltanshaunng is German for (approximately) "world-view." I first tried reading it shortly after high school, before I'd read anything so academic, and I had to set it aside for several years. I'm glad I returned to it, because despite being obnoxiously dense and heavily caked over with mere concepts, it's still an amazing read. Bauman draws upon a lifetime of learning in a world of disciplines, and despite my instincts towards the highbrow, I've spaced out his paragraphs considerably for the excerpt below.

Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish sociologist who was hounded into exile in the UK for the rest of his life. (Because the Communists were trying to drive out the Jews in the 70s...History makes less sense the more you learn about it, huh?) Although his personal politics -- from support of Karl Marx and Israel to his undeniably elitist bite -- might raise your eyebrows, he's a great source of insight about the large, mostly invisible mechanisms of social control, and the history behind how those came to exist.

I also recommend his equally fascinating essay The Dream of Purity, and if you're really digging it, try his book: Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

"The new, much more ambitious, ubiquitous, all-penetrating order cannot rely on the ritual invokation of the Divine Sovreign. It can rule only in the name of the norm, of a pattern of normality, with which it identifies itself.

Since normality means in the end a continuous rhythm of bodily exertion and the unbroken chain of repeatable choices, it can be maintained only be a dense web of interlocking authorities in constant communication with the subject -- and in proximity to the subject, which permits a perpetual surveillance of his life-process.

Old forms are transformed into such authorities, and new authorities are brought to life. Thus families and sexual functions of the body are deployed in the new role: churches become teachers of business virtues and hard work; factories instill the habit of continuous effort; idiosyncrasy and non-rhythmic life is criminalized, medicalized or psychiatrized; any individual training by apprenticeship is replaced with a uniform education aimed at instilling universal skills.

No single power is now total...but nevertheless, this web of authoritative relations reaches the kind of totality no single power even dreamed of taking before.

In the course of this struggle, the human condition aquired a new conceptualization. It appeared now as a drama of Manichean forces of passion and reason, of the crude and the refined, of the beastly and the human. The subjugation of the animal in man came to be a major concern for humans. One had to life oneself to the human condition; being a human came to be a task, an accomplishment, a duty."

3 comments

Filed in: Social Control

Posted Sep 23, 2007 1 comment

I've been enjoying the study of history a great deal lately. 100 years ago, most humans were totally unaware of the concepts of "public relations," "disinformation," or "plausible deniability." The history books reflect that, and offer a generous amount of information about the mechanisms of social control. It's amazing how honest people will be when they don't imagine anyone would disagree with them. One of the best recent examples I've found is Susan Wright's paper "Australian Schooling: A History of Social Control".

In late Georgian and early Victorian years there was a prevailing belief and fear of a "criminal class" which contributed to the introduction of transportation. It was hoped that the entire criminal class could eventually be shipped off to a far off colony which would serve as a gaol of no return. Along with the 1500 adults of the first fleet were 50 children. Only three of these children were convicts but sixty percent of them were the children of convicts. The position of the convicts' children was an unusual one in that they were free but lived under convict conditions and were treated as members of the 'criminal class'.

The behaviour and attitudes of most of the convict population offended the values of the ruling elite. Initially men far outnumbered women in the population and convict women were condemned by their middle class male contemporaries as "damned whores" despite the probability that only 20% of them were prostitutes before transportation. Women were actually included in the settlement plans to provide for the sexual needs of the men and so guard against 'unnatural practices'. They were therefore transported to be prostitutes and then condemned with that label. In many cases 'prostitution' consisted of co-habitating with one man as his wife without being married. Many convicts were unable to marry because they left wives or husbands behind in England with scant hope of ever seeing them again. Marriages required official approval. Most children were born out of wedlock and from an authority point of view, they were the product of prostitutes and thieves and it was prudent to remove them from the harmful influence of their parents and school them into more acceptable behaviour. By 1798 children as young as three were attending school and children were taught to read so that they could receive moral instruction from the Bible. This was the avowed purpose of schools.

In 1802 Governor King expressed concerns about the moral welfare of children born to convict parents and wanted to withdraw children "from the destructive connexions and examples of their dissolute parents." He was especially concerned about girls between the ages of eight and twelve and established an orphan institution to "give them an education to fit them for work and discourage them from prostitution". The girls were trained in the values of work, decency, cleanliness and modesty. Barcan argues that schooling was used to foster political loyalty to established authority which "was a natural objective when so many of the inhabitants of the colony were from the criminal classes and from the restless Ireland." This need was re-enforced by the convict revolt of 1804.

Needless to say, the entire document is that good, here's the link again. A tip of the hat to Susan Wright.

Oh, and on behalf of the restless Ireland, here's a pint of urine on your grave, Mr. Barcan.

1 comment

Filed in: Social Control