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THE ULTIMATE TECHNOLOGY: B.R.A.I.N.S.
We ARE the ultimate technology. The human organism is an incredible work of cosmic genius, as are all the other life-forms who share the Earth with us. Life itself has been growing and evolving for billions of years, and millions of species have come and gone. The only constant in this miraculous process is change, and human beings have initiated a wide variety of changes into the planetary biosphere. Poised here as we are on the brink of the unknown, we struggle to understand ourselves as the Earth's dominant life-form...for this moment anyway.
We are unique in the kingdoms of life in that we have developed symbolic language and have an almost innate urge to make and build things. We as a species are highly intelligent in certain ways. From primitive tools and weapons to space-age electronics, all of our external technologies, and what these have made possible, have been created exclusively by means of our primary internal technology: our brains and minds.
The word "technology" comes from the Greek word "techne" which means "art, craft, or the ability to do." Life-forms are nature's way of doing things! Living bio-technologies!
We tend to think of "technology" as being machines or hardware, like cars or computers or mobile phones. Actually, however, a "technology" is anything that enables you to do something; and since everything we have ever done as human beings has been done by our brains and minds, working alone and together over expanses of time, space, and cultural relativity, our brains and minds and bodies ARE the most fundamental of technologies.
We are a lot smarter than we give ourselves credit for. Consider everything your brain is doing at this moment. You are reading this page, processing light patterns through your eye, recognizing words through your visual cortex and deriving coherent meanings using complex pattern-recognition software in your neo-cortex. You are awake, upright and all your internal biological systems are functioning normally. You know who and where you are, and have some plans for the coming day; you have memories, and you have goals and dreams. If you had to consciously deal with all this, you would be overwhelmed. Much of the infinite complexity of our existence is routinely handled by our brain. Your brain is really smart, even if you don't think YOU are!!!
Our brains are actually computers in the true sense..."computare", its Latin root, means "to think or reflect upon." Those number-crunching electronic devices that we call computers actually aren't! Also, the word "cybernetic" comes from the Greek word "kybernetes", meaning the pilot or navigator of a ship; cybernetics is the science of how biological or electronic systems are capable of guiding themselves...self-navigation. Therefore, we actually are cybernetic computers in the truest etymological sense. We are thinking, reflecting, and self-navigating living bio-technologies. It's kind of science-fiction sounding"but true nevertheless.
And the fun has just begun! Supposedly we only use about 10% of our brain capacity; and a significant portion of that works to filter out the vast majority of inputs we receive from the cosmos. This means we are missing out on a wide spectrum of possible "realities" which are within and around us all the time. So how do we go about accessing the unseen universe"
The first step is to regain your brain from external sources of "authority" and control which use a host of mass-media to persuade us to see things their way. Turn off your tv and turn on your "global eyes." By realizing that it's YOUR brain to use for your own purposes, you have empowered yourself with the ability to focus, to upgrade, and to reorganize your cognitional software. YOU are controlling transmission.
The second step is to recognize that you are actively creating and navigating your life by means of continuous decision-making at many levels, conscious and unconscious. Decision-making is a form of self-metaprogramming, or the ability to be fully in control of your inner and outer biotechnologies.
Now you have established a reference frame for exploring inner space. In the holographic universe every person is a center. And since we use our brains/minds in everything we do, inner space is the gateway to the entire omniverse. In a sense, our minds ARE the cosmos.
Much of what we think of as "reality" is actually a model or simulation created by our brains/minds of what is out there. Modern physics tells us that what is "really" there is a sort of quantum flux of indeterminacy consisting of vibrational holomovements of light/energy. The patterns we tend to perceive are processes and probabilities more than they are objects, and we are all participant/observers in the human experience.
Our collective "reality" is an immensely complex meta-continuum consisting of the total summation of individual "realities"; because we all live in the same cosmic context our individual simulations have a lot in common. This common ground is what makes possible our most powerful tool of brain/mind power: communication.
Communication allows us to share knowledge, experience, and wisdom; it allows us to understand each other and to work together; it enriches our minds and broadens the expanse of our awareness. High quality communication in effect gives us a much bigger "brain" which is actually a network of interconnected minds. High-quality networks exhibit synergy, wherein "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"; the total synergy of our consciousness gives birth to our planetary mind, or Gaian noosphere.
We each consist of and are blessed with remarkable internal technologies to use freely in a beautiful and highly improbable universe. Our obsession with external technologies and our flight from inner development has led us now to the brink of the unknown, for ourselves and for our planet. When we wake up to having a brain we become the crew of Spaceship Earth; we are each mind-navigating co-creators. From the threshold of inner space we can launch ourselves into whole new ways of thinking and relating with this self meta-program:
B eing a R esponsive and A ctively I ntelligent N oocybernetic S ynergist.
We can visualize a new paradigm of sharing and creativity because we ARE the ultimate technology!
JEFF PHILLIPS
MELBOURNE Australia
EARTH
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REFERENCES
1. Jose Arguelles, The Transformative Vision; Earth Ascending
2. Gregg Braden, The Isaiah Effect
3. Page Bryant, Star-Walking
4. Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, The Web of Life
5. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
6. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
7. Loren Eiseley, The Long Loneliness
8. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
9. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
10. Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
11. David Hawkins, Power versus Force
12. John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
13. James Lovelock, The Gaia Hypothesis
14. Guy Murchie, Music of the Spheres
15. Jacob Needleman, A Sense of the Cosmos
16. Eugene Odum, Our Endangered Life-Support Systems
17. Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness
18. Peter Russell, The Global Brain
19. Carl Sagan, The Dragon's of Eden
20. Jonas Salk, Survival of the Wisest
21. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth
22. Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life
23. Olaf Stapleton, The Star-Maker
24. Moira Timms, Beyond Prophecies and Predictions
25. Andrew Weil, The Natural Mind
DEDICATION
This image is dedicated to the whales, who have the biggest brains on Earth; to the trees, who are masters of photosynthesis and autotrophism; to all indigenous artists, who understand implicity the spiritual and thought-like nature of the cosmos; to all humans who are striving to use their brains fully; and to Dr. John C. Lilly, cartographer of inner space who has achieved fusion with the Star-Maker in alternity.
ABOUT THE IMAGE
This image is an analog/digital hybrid, consisting of multiple layers of hand-drawn patterns and meticulously assembled scans and texts. It was done primarily in Photoshop5.5 but with text-wrapping done in Adobe 9.0. It represents hundreds of man-hours of work. It is a spacecraft control panel for your mind/brain, and it is also a mandala. It is also a meta-mind-map, a star-chart for inner space. Jose Arguelles wrote a chapter entitled "Art as Internal Technology" in his book The Transformative Vision. This is the spirit of this image: a tool for inner exploration and self-actualization. Our sense of vision operates in a mode of simultaneity which helps us to grasp complex patterns and relationships more coherently. This image contains a multitude of associational matrices; it is an evolutionary instrument for mind navigation."The map is not the territory." Korzybski- "In the province of the mind, there are no limits." John C. Lilly- "Don't be a soldier in World War 3, park your car and plant a tree;
use the tube to educate, leave the plants to vegetate." The Lorax (the Second Coming)-
THE ULTIMATE TECHNOLOGY:
Notes on what it all means
The idea behind this art is that we ourselves, along with all other living things, are the ultimate technology; this piece of art is an attempt to show just how amazing "we" actually are, by creating a miniscule glimpse into the ultra-complex multi-dimensional nature of the reality-continuum which we both consist of and live within.
Everything on this chart is happening right now; each person is the "I" at the center. Every person is a center of the universe. Each of our brains are performing billions of computations and processes each second, to create what we experience as our "reality." Moreover, what we experience as "reality" is a tiny filtered subset of everything that is there; you can read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley which explains the history of this idea, going back to William Blake and Henri Bergson. This chart is about what all is there, beyond what we immediately experience.
The title is self-explanatory: B.R.A.I.N.S. at the bottom is not only what we need to use more but also a "metaprogram" for how to use more effectively not only your brain but your entire being, to live more fully. "Noos" is the Greek word for "mind." The left side has all of the paleo-geological epochs going back to the creation of the Earth; and the right side has the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from cosmic rays to radio waves, and out little window of visible light exactly in the center.
OK, look at the chart as if it were a clock face. At noon we have "kybernetes" in Greek, the root of both "cyber" and "governor." This is a very key concept concerning the process of self-navigation.
At 1:00 we have three Greek letters, "psi", "phi" and "omega." In this context these letters stand for "science fiction." "Omega" means "the end" or perhaps "infinity." Science fiction is my favorite genre of both film and literature.
At 2:00 we have a yellow disc representing our sun, and within it is a kokopelli, a native American fertility symbol playing his flute. The story says that he travels with a bag of corn-seed on his back, and when he came to the village all the crops flourished and they had a bountiful harvest, and when he left all the women were pregnant!!! The other colored circles represent the closest bright stars to the Sun; the Hunab Ku is a Mayan term for the center of the galaxy, which was their chief deity. Here we have energy going out from the Hunab Ku through all these stars and then to our Sun, then discharging as a bolt of lightning into the central circle. Imagine that these stars are all chakras in an inter-stellar being! [see painting "Birali Star-Lightning" on this site]
At around 2:30 we have hexagram 24 of the I Ching, "the turning point", "fu", "returning." "Go back, turn back to the starting point; recur, reappear, come again; restore, recover, retrace; an earlier time of place. A ray of light suddenly appearing in the dark; crisis as opportunity."
In the upper right corner we have the "roygbiv" panel, which shows the frequency/wavelength relationships between visible light and audible sound. The frequencies are from successive octaves on a piano; the wavelengths are approximate for the range of each color of the spectrum. Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that if you take the frequencies of audible sound and raise them by a factor of one million you get the frequencies of visible light.
In the lower right corner we have the "chakra" panel. "Chakra" is a Sanskrit term meaning "wheel" or "circle." The chakras are virtual energy vortices located along the vertical axis of the human body.
At around 3:00 we have a Sanskrit term meaning "the brink." The brink is not an edge we can fall off of but the horizon of navigation, the limit of our perception beyond which we cannot see. I have used the term "the brink" for myself in musical form since 1985.
At around 4:00 we have a sort of "lens" which connects the central "I" with the second chakra. This is the lens of meta-science and of "physis", which is an ancient Greek term meaning "the whole of natural science, including medicine." When the lens is focussed on the second chakra, which is the energy of sexuality and creativity, what comes into view would be "the natuaral science of human sexuality." This lens could theoretically move all around the arc it is on, yielding all sorts of correspondences and relationships.
At 4:15 we have three fundamental mathematical constants, "phi" (the Golden mean), "pi" (the ratio between the diameter of a circle and its circumference) and "e", the natural logarithm.
Down around 5:00 within the big circle lies the domain of the spiritual and metaphysical. In the center is a small diagram of the great pyramid, which shows how the angle of its sides is drawn from the intersection of two spheres. In the pyramid is not the illuminati symbol but the feminine (facing to the left) version of the "oudjat", or "Eye of Horus." This is the domain of sacred geometry, shamanics, and the ancient harmonic languages. At the top of the inner circle is the Tibetan symbol "phat." At 3:00 is the ancient Chinese symbol "yung" which means "eternal." At 9:00 is the Nepalese symbol "mandala." And within the tree is the ancient Egyptian symbol, the "djed", which is literally the backbone of Osiris, who was the "Jesus" of the Egyptians; the djed is a ritual technology for Earth stability and the "raising of the djed" is a ceremony of great cosmic significance. [see Moira Timms article]
V.I.S.I.O.N. stands for V ast I nternal S ystems: I mplementing O mniversal N avigation; like B.R. A.I.N.S., a metaprogram for living more fully.
The small circle at 6:00 represents the sum total of all human beings, who are linked via morphogenetic resonance [cf. Sheldrake]; we have 6.2 billion people who are each the "I" of the central circle. Each of our personal "realities" is different and unique but at the same time each one is quite similar.
At 7:00 we have the domain of humanity on Earth. Are we the HSMV (homo sapiens macro virus) or the planetary gardeners and stewards" Parasite or navigator" Passenger or crew" Here we are assessing our impact, weighing our fantastic ability to do things working together against the long-term ecological damage we wreak. This shows the true context of human values.
If we were to move the lens of meta-science down along the "arc of living information" so that it points to the "external technology" area above the "domain of humanity on Earth" circle, we would then open a window of information concerning mankind"s use of external technologies and its effects on the Earth and our fellow life-forms: a formidable area of research in itself.
In the lower left corner there"s a Sanskrit term "antariksha yantra" which means "travelling in the space."
At around 7:30 is the geometrical version of the encoded message conceived by radio-astronomer Frank Drake and beamed at the globular cluster M13 in Hercules in 1974 using the Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico. Designed to be comprehensible to a mathematical intelligence, the message encodes information relating to our numerical system, our solar system, our shape and size as human beings, and the structure of DNA. Travelling at the speed of light, it should reach its destination in about 50,000 Earth years! And beneath the pattern is the Drake equation, which gives a probability estimate of the existence of other Earth-like planets in the known universe.
The little rectangular face at around 8:00 is called Ahau, who is the Mayan deity of the mind of the Sun, who is also the guardian over passages in cycles of time, specifically, the end of the present great cycle in December 2012 and our passage into the next realm.
At 8:30 is a diagram of the Big Bang, one of the more widely accepted models of astrophysical cosmogenesis (others include the "steady state" theory; the extremely long cyclical world-view of the Hindu"they have unit of time called a "kalpa" which is on the order of 6 trillion years, and the theory that nothing really exists but is all just a dream in the mind of the wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd!)
At 9:00 we have a Chinese symbol meaning "the brink." And in the upper left corner, going down, is another Chinese symbol for "Star Maker." [see book by Olaf Stapledon]
At around 11:00 we have the moon, Venus and Mars. Our celestial neighbors exert constant influences on our planet. Here I am emphasizing the lunar or feminine side of ourselves, and the spiritual aspects of Venus, which would be enhanced compassion, and of Mars, which would be spiritual power based on intuition and a true understanding of the technology of prayer.
From 9:00 over to 3:00 we have the "arc of creative self-reprogramming" which essentially is the process of constantly upgrading who and what you are, doing this to yourself as opposed to letting outside forces mold you into what THEY want. Along this arc lie the most fundamental keys to creative self-reprogramming, an understanding of techne, kybernetes, and computare. This arc represents what we can do.
Underneath, from 9:00 to 3:00 we have the "arc of living information" which essentially is what we are: we and all other life"forms are not so much the matter we are made of but the patterns that the energy/matter form!!! This domain is about contexts, communication, edges and interfaces, a general systems perspective, environments, relationships. This arc represents what we are. Meaning is a function of context, on all levels.
In the circle in the center we have the "I", the "unified holographic operator" which represents not only each individual human being, but also every sentient being, every life-form, every monad/holon, as well as the highest level of awareness in the multiverse"you can call it what you want! The Supreme Becoming. But not the one of any certain religion or spiritual psychology; this is a more abstract, conceptual and non-anthropomorphic conceptualisation of divinity. Each little "I" is a low-resolution hologram of the Big "I". We contain the whole but the whole is greater than each of us. This "I" is the "self" in a Jungian sense; it is the "participant/observer" of modern quantum physics; it is the "monad" of Liebniz and the "holon" of Arthur Koestler [in his book Janus: A Summing Up Koestler gives his systems theory model in which every individual being or entity, from an atom up to a galaxy is a unique "holon" which has simultaneously complementary characteristics, what he called "self-assertive" tendencies which separate and define each holon as discrete, and "integrative" tendencies which are the ways that each individual holon fits into or exists as a part of something that is greater than itself].
I have been told that this central image resemebles an eye, an eclipse, and an egg...all are very significant cosmic symbols or images. The eye is the "window of the soul" and what we use to see; the total solar eclipse is a powerful moment of alignment; the egg is the origin of life and our source.
Around the central "I" are the eight trigrams of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese system of wisdom divination. From the top clockwise are the trigrams for "li", clinging, light-giving, or clarity; "k"un", receptive, devoted, yielding; "tui", happiness, joyousness; "ch"ien", creative, strong, active; "k"an", abyss, dangerous; "chen", arousing, inciting movement; "ken", keeping still, resting, calm, firm, quiet; "sun", gentleness, penetrating/enduring.
Finally, around the "corona" of the central eclipse-eye are eight symbols from ancient Lemuria, or Mu. They can mean whatever you want, and they are each raised to the power of the next!
The bolts of "star-lightning" coming into the trigram representing Earth/the receptive is interesting in that, according to my friend in Melbourne, this trigram also represents the solar plexus chakra in human beings. Interesting also in that this entire piece of work was completed in September 2001"a date which was specified in the Great Pyramid as the date of a major "initiation event" for all of humanity!
Basically this piece is a synthesis of art, science, spiritual psychologies and the visual display of conceptual configurations in a mandala-chart form. Time, space, mind/matter/ consciousness, energy, information, and identity are all expressed in this image. It"s also about grasping and comprehending complexity.
And it"s not that any specific part of it means one specific thing; this is about engaging YOUR own personal creativity to figure out what it all means"because you, as an owner/operator of, yes, THE ULTIMATE TECHNOLOGY"are this very moment CREATING YOUR OWN REALITY. We are all artists in this highly improbable universe.
Jeff Phillips
Christchurch New Zealand
Egyptian New Year
23 July 2002
