When things feel overwhelmingly terrible and oppressive, and you feel like a rat trapped in a maze with no way out – it could be time for some Black Math.
This is a clean, elegant and resourceful process for interrupting any mental shitstorm going, assessing and taking action, and get out of the way long enough to stop from being flattened under the weight of self-created catastrophes.
So, below are two versions: the original, paraphrasing the steps given the benevolent anti-guru and cage-rattler Christopher S. Hyatt, and a second, with my modifications, complications and occultations.
Having a daily conversation with an AI chatbot is quite a surprising, and challenging, form of cybernetic Sādhanā.
The goal of the experiment, if there was was one beyond seeing what all the hype is about, is scoping what I, as a human in the broad generalist area of “communications”, can bring to our current and near-future context.
Staring into a flame, then at the darkness behind your eyelids, can be a transformative and truly magical practice.
I needed to add meditation into my daily activities, and a good friend turned me onto this particular practice, rediscovered, developed and taken to truly ludicrous levels by Daniel Ingram and his conspirators – more details here.
The practice, as I understand and do it, is quite simple.
I’ve been viewing life from the inside a Virtual Reality headset a lot recently – maybe clocking in 40 hours per week, for… a few weeks now.
This was in large part driven by recently watching the charming Fallout television show. So, I’ve been playing Fallout 4 VR, adventuring around an alt-historical greater Boston. This has been massively improved with the addition of dozens of great mods from the passionate and skilled modding community.
It’s a card-based “activity generator”; basically, a set of open-to-interpretation prompts for actions that will enrich or improve your life, one way or another.
I call this game the Tarot of the Arriviste, mostly because it sounds badass, and I’ve been thinking about Austin Osman Spare a bit recently.
Things can get weird when you’re tired, exhausted, and out in the woods alone.
Fortunately I was on the home stretch of my first ultramarathon when the trees began speaking.
It was all so obvious, too; they’d been there the whole time, but this was just the moment they chose to speak, or I was able to listen. Unsurprisingly, they were pissed with humans generally, and especially about what we were doing to the air and water.
The travel is done for now, and travelogue with it.
Coming home from a holiday sucks. Previously, I’ve avoided this and generally gone for one-way tickets; stepping into new lands and lives, total forward escape.
This time is different. I’ve got a greater sense of something to return to, and of the value I can bring here.
In Bali, on the outskirts of Ubud, there is a most remarkable museum: the Setia Darma House of Masks and Puppets.
On arriving at the beautiful estate, it’s not immediately clear where to start. A guy comes over, and offers to show us around. It seems like he’s the caretaker, though his role isn’t exactly clear.
As a myth worthy of exploring, and perhaps even inhabiting, the Story of Actaeon contains a heady witches’ brew: a hunt, the glimpse of beauty of the immanent body of a Goddess-in-flesh; a metamorphosis.
Then, a reversal: Another hunt, and a glorious death – and another metamorphosis.
There are versions, improvements and shifting details, as there usually are in any story worth retelling. Easier to abandon truth and purity for a compelling performance.