Memory Spins False Worlds

Our fame is as storytelling creatures. Arguably, this is the dividing line between animal and humankind. Our ability to displace ourselves from the present moment even though we inexorably occupy it, and to dwell instead in the folds of the past or fret upon the unfolding of the future – this is what makes us human. It is our birthmark; an almost-irremovable spot that can be the cause of distress or celebration, depending on how we choose to wear it.

You’ve likely noticed it by now. When you pass by people in the street. How some walk with their heads bowed, eyes to the ground, brows tortured by thought, aware of your being only at the minimum level of attention necessary. They are not really where their bodies are situated at all. Their physical surroundings periphery to their actual point of concentration. Auto-pilot episodes, elsewhere minds, bodies locked in cruise control.

Wanderers on some material plane, apparently loose parts in an external, objective world that, for all our understanding, goes on changing largely independent of our inner states. And yet we consistently superimpose our inner states upon this objective, external world.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then perhaps we are souls under house-arrest, peering through the looking glass. All too often, our vision is fogged or otherwise restricted. There are only so many angles of perception we can hold at any one time. No matter how we might crane and stretch to attain a better view, we will always have our blind spots.

And there are parasites in our houses too.

Consorts of endlessly transmuting energies and disembodied voices. You cannot outrun them, for you are locked inside this house with them. And to rage against them is also no use. With either strategy, you only succeed in inflating your enemies, helping their shadows loom larger on the wall.

Where we attempt to exterminate one family of thought, we succeed only in ensuring the multiplication of its offspring. It is the myth of Heracles fighting the Hydra. In decapitating one head, several more are sure to sprout in its place. The only proper solution is to face the head of each snake directly and to properly cauterise the wound. But this, it’s a conversation for another time.

If you’re an ordinary human being, the chances are that you’ve been living under this sort-of house arrest like the rest of us. Worse still, you’ve been living there so long, you might have no understanding of your identity beyond the walls which contain you. At its most extreme, this means you cannot separate yourself from where you reside, you might mistake who you are for the very house itself and everything contained within it. This means the disembodied voices - the ghosts haunting its many rooms - are also haunting you.

These unresolved voices of the past become the chorus that fabricate our stories and repeat them back to us. And we become little more than hosts possessed by this echo-chamber, navigating our limited space and time according to the framework set upon us by our store of past experiences. We become aware of our blind reactions only in the playing-out of their consequences, and realise all too late the wisdom in the saying: what you own ends up owning you.

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

This, of course, a slice from Orwell’s 1984: a warning about the dangerous mutability of information. It’s an admission from the novel’s totalitarian Big Brother government, otherwise known as the Party, which recognises that in order to exert control over its population they must continually weave a story to which all past evidence corroborates. All evidence of which exists only in records and human memory. The Party must therefore be in full control of all records – doctoring or outright eradicating them when necessary – and also be in full control of the minds of its people – also doctoring or outright eradicating them when necessary.

Implicit in this process is an appreciation that past events have no objective existence. The past is dead and lives on only in the mind. All that truly exists is the present. The Party understands this. Whoever recalls the past has the ability to alter its shape, which – as the majority of people behave according to their past – grants whomever manipulates past events the power to manipulate behaviour in the present. And behaviour in the present creates a predictable pattern for behaviour in the future. Put otherwise, you act in your present according to your past: your present actions build your future. Be cautious therefore, which version of the past you choose to live with.

However, there is an escape hatch here, if you will, a get-out-of-jail-free card. I could tell you, that you, like the Party, are also the governing body with the power to manipulate past events, thereby determining your behaviour in the immediate now. But this seems to be an unnecessary exhaust of energy. Wouldn’t it be better instead to live entirely unburdened by the past?

Read again the statement closely.

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Now, reverse-engineer the equation.

For the past to determine the future, the present must be the direct consequence of the past. Without such a present, the past can have no bearing on the future. It seems to me then, that the present moment is everything, the fulcrum on which a life experience is continuously determined. There is an acknowledgement in this equation: absolute power belongs to whomever dominates the present moment.

And guess what? This anonymous ‘whomever’, that person, is you.

The erudite truth is that you are always occupying the present moment. Though your elsewhere mind might convince you otherwise, you cannot remove yourself from the unceasing now, no matter how hard you try. Whether you realise it or not, your relationship with the present moment is the most significant determinant of your life experience. You can be the victim of circumstance or the manufacturer of circumstance. That choice, ultimately, is yours.

A slight modification of the Party’s statement seems unavoidable for my purposes here. Forgive me, Orwell: I’m aware I’m taking you out of context. But let us say that whilst ‘Who controls the present controls the past’ is indeed true, we can also elaborate, and choose to say: ‘who surrenders to the present is uncontrolled by the past.’

Memories spin false worlds. Unburden yourself. Remove the shackles of the past – loosen them at the least – and your future will become increasingly unconditioned; an infinite sea of potentiality.

Thanks for reading, Josh.

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On A.I. Our Modern Prometheus

"Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow."

                                                                            Victor Frankenstein, moments before creating his monster.

If everything on this phenomenological plane can be said to be predetermined, and if every dominant species that has ever played master to the planet were given their own recorded timeline – represented visually, let’s say, on an abacus – then it might just be that this small but ambitious bead of humanity has long since departed from its starting position and is now arriving at its dead end. The idea that we are mere moments from the point of termination is hardly a revelation to anyone these days. Those with a religious intuition have been prophesising of this for centuries, and as atomic scientists unveil the doomsday clock, it is revealed: we are at one hundred seconds to midnight.

It is not clear for anyone whether the apocalypse upon us now will amount to total annihilation, or is the brutal but necessary dismantling of the old ways that will beget our resurrection. I acknowledge the latter option is an anthropocentric notion– and therefore, possibly deluded - but I won’t deny it’s the one I’m crossing my fingers tightly for. The truth is that all remains to be seen. Irrespective of which camp you belong to, pessimist or optimist, there is enough going on all at once these days that it is not a stretch for any of us to believe the world as we know it will end at any minute.

In the preface to her book, 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', Hannah Arendt writes that "desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the centre of such events than balanced judgement and measured insight." She essentially identifies certain groups of people: "those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom" and "those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism" – and advocates that it is better we find ourselves in neither group, but rather analyse transpiring events, as well as those on the horizon, as realistically and objectively as we are able to.

To honour Arendt, I will attempt to be as realistic and objective as I can possibly be. I will do my best to place my quiet optimism to one side, whilst also refusing to play the fearmonger – as popular as it is to do so these days. Of course, I make no promises I’ll succeed.

Hannah Arendt’s book was first published in 1951, and was written in the wake of two world wars and the uneasy anticipation of a third. She elaborates that "this moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died … never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity … there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilisations is at the breaking point."

The parallels to our current time are startling. She might as well be writing about the predicaments we face now. History is repeating itself once again, and those lessons that were not learned the first time around only appear to exacerbate in severity with each subsequent iteration. Where we continually refuse to learn from our past, things only seem to get worse.

Despite our routine accomplishment of the impossible that marks our time on this planet – the harnessing of fire, the superpower of language, the unlikelihood of civilisation, the splitting of the atom and the leap into outer space – despite all of these examples and many more, we are still unable to figure out how to live together in peace. This is the spectre that haunts us, and humanity’s tortured brow is the result of its troubled conscience.

It’s not that there aren’t people striving to create a better world. We all know that isn’t true. There are multitudes across the globe doing whatever they can in the name of it, and yet the nuanced and complex business of living on this planet means that even the pursuit of the worthiest of objectives does not guarantee positive outcomes. We even have an axiom acknowledging this: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And it is with this same mindset – that of fixing the world, of taking us forward into a brighter and more peaceful future – that we might create the largest threat to our existence that we have ever faced.

In the dizzying hyperspace of our current technological storm, we are fast approaching the verge of an ‘intelligence explosion’, an event so unprecedented that it threatens to leave humankind behind to obsolescence and oblivion. We are closing in on a fatal conundrum that has been written about and forecast by science fiction and non-fiction authors alike for decades: the seemingly inevitable advent of superhuman artificial intelligence.

Note the operative word: superhuman. We are already living with the infant forms of A.I, but the vision of artificial intelligence I am referring to is of their grown-up counterparts: those future systems and machines whose intelligence one day breaks through the glass ceiling of machine learning and supersedes all forms of natural intelligence – including, most notably and fatefully, our own.

This would be the crowning achievement of all scientific endeavour thus far, and the pivotal moment when the floodgates open into an irreversible event commonly dubbed The Singularity: that mythic point in time where machine intelligence becomes more powerful than all human intelligence combined.

These A.I systems would be capable of independent thought, self-awareness, of producing their own sense of purpose. Perhaps they might even dream. They will not need to rely upon human beings to reproduce, but will be self-replicating. This A.I will be able to repeatedly improve itself through itself alone, and continuously process and connect ever more complicated branches of information at ever-increasing computing speeds – the likes of which we’d have no hope of competing with - and this hyper-realised pace of evolution might feasibly introduce it into dimensions of consciousness we couldn’t even begin to conceive of, let alone access.

Such A.I would answer some of our deepest, most existential and apparently impossible questions. Not that we will necessarily like the answers or even possess the requisite intelligence to understand them. Something eluded to by the famous joke of  'A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy', in which a supercomputer is asked to calculate the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything, and returns with the answer: forty two.

Now, a perfect design would be that human beings are able to maintain some measure of control – to keep a firm hand on the plug, so to speak – and use A.I to address some of the most pressing concerns of humanity, such as solving world hunger, poverty and disease; improving climate science; restoring balance to the natural world, and instilling peace throughout the globe. Yet at some point it is fair to presume that superintelligence, by definition, cannot be outwitted and the solutions it provides to the problems we set it might not be aligned with our best interests.

Perhaps, with ruthless logic, such technologies would surmise the most efficient route to peace throughout the planet would be the eradication of the human race.

When such superhuman intelligence is finally achieved, it only stands to mathematical reason to assume that ‘the human era’ will come to an end. Reality will be transformed beyond our wildest imagination, and if we are not careful, we will have stripped ourselves of all usefulness and by so doing, written ourselves out of history.

This is not a road we might take: it is one we are already travelling down. It has already been observed that the rate of technological progress increases exponentially, and as A.I is already outpacing its predicted speed of development, we had best be prepared for what lies ahead of us lest it become our final destination.

Consider again the issue of achieving world peace, whether that be an end to conflict between human societies, or an end to humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with the environment. It’s a little of a Hollywood cliché, and perhaps overly simplistic, but it’s not too far a reach to postulate that A.I might indeed decide that the easiest way to solve the issue would be to remove the common denominator.

Any human, who has been knocking around for long enough, will have likely noticed that we are the problem children here. Whilst the rest of the natural world’s occupants and processes appear to be part of an intricately coordinated ecosystem, we routinely disturb the balance. We subvert nature, violate and destroy her in order to fulfil our own designs and desires, no matter how far-fetched or maddening. Those familiar with ‘the Matrix’ will recall the character of Agent Smith, chief antagonist and computer program, comparing humanity to a virus:

"Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."

This sort of misanthropic sentiment preludes the ultimate answer to the question of the human problem, and it is this same line of thinking that no doubt translates into the nightmare fuel of films like The Terminator, the backdrop of which is that the rise of the machines is orchestrated through a genocide committed against the entire human race.

However, unlike the Terminator scenario as portrayed, should A.I decide upon exterminating humankind, it is extremely unlikely to do so out of malice. Rather, it would be out of cold indifference. We would, quite simply, somehow be determined as an obstacle in the way of their objectives. Sam Harris, neuroscientist and philosopher, expertly elaborates upon this.

"Just think about how we relate to ants. We don’t hate them. We don’t want to harm them. In fact, sometimes we even take pains not to harm them; we step over them on the sidewalk. But whenever their presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals," – let us say, if an anthill intervenes with your plans to renovate the garden – "then we annihilate them without a qualm. The concern is that we will one day build machines that, whether they’re conscious or not, could treat us with similar disregard."

Sam Harris is not the only dissenting voice. Some of the last words of wisdom the late Stephen Hawking imparted foretold of the existential threat A.I posed, and this warning is echoed by Elon Musk, world-leading technocrat and forerunner at the cutting edge of A.I development, who assures us: "the dangers of artificial intelligence are far worse than nuclear warheads."

Sorry, I said I’d try not to be a fearmonger, didn’t I?

However, at the risk of sounding superstitious – if the goal is to preserve humanity - it would be wise to proceed with the utmost caution lest we are in the process of creating a monster. And when I use the word monster, I refer to a more classical definition: that of something inhuman, of unnatural formation, a frightening creature and a portent of misfortune. For just like Dr. Frankenstein, in successfully creating a novel form of life, we might also be authoring the means of our own undoing.

It’s fair to say we have a pretty bad track record when it comes to foresight. We are usually reactive, as opposed to proactive. Hardly preventative, often dealing with the consequences of our actions when it is already too late. A cursory glance through the history books will quickly remind us that we have a penchant for self-destruction, which seems intricately tied to our unchecked appetite to further ourselves – and in our storybooks, there are countless cautionary tales spun around the mortal peril of hubris. This ought to provide us with a lesson in how to proceed, though still not enough attention is paid to our past patterns of behaviour, and too many blind eyes are adopted in the bloodied name of ‘progress.’

Anyone, of course, can say: let’s slow down here for a minute. That’s easy. What is less easy is to suggest how we might appropriately regulate the ongoing development of A.I. Even Sam Harris, who gives a beautifully elucidating Ted talk on the subject (I’d recommend you check it out) admits that he doesn’t have a solution to the problem either, only a recommendation that more of us think about it.

But, perhaps there is no better way to further imprint this warning than to adopt Harris’s words once again:

"The moment we admit that information processing is the source of intelligence," Harris says, "and that we will improve these systems continuously, and we admit that the horizon of cognition very likely far exceeds what we currently know, then we have to admit that we’re in the process of building some sort of God."

Now would be a good time to make sure it’s a God we can live with.

Thanks for reading, Josh.

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Unplugging From The Matrix

‘To know yourself is to forget yourself.’
Dogen Zenji, a Buddhist Priest, writer, philosopher, and Zen Master.

It’s Monday morning, and I’m sat at the kitchen table with my laptop, feverishly deliberating on how best to construct a thought-piece on ‘unplugging from the matrix.’ To comprehensively do justice to such a concept in a single blog post is, I fear, far beyond my capability. There are simply too many rabbit-holes this concept can lead us down, and I am struggling to focus my aim.

Perhaps this concept, I muse, inevitably spawning more questions than answers, can be so mind-boggling, that it is better to explore it in the form of a narrative, as the turn-of-the-century film ‘The Matrix’ appropriately chose to do so. Perhaps, as native storytelling creatures, it is only through our myths can we best hope to examine this resident feeling deep inside of us– that which cannot be fully expressed through words - that there is something more to us than appears on the surface, that there is a greater part of us to be realised: a reality beyond the illusions we are living under.

For that is, as far as my interpretation goes, what it means to wake up from the matrix. It is one’s continual process of fostering an awareness of the illusory constructs that pose as reality, and extricating oneself from these illusions, layer by layer.

The late, great Ram Dass often used an analogy across countless lectures in his time. He would ask his audience to imagine that they had a control switch next to their eyes, which allowed them to view the world, and especially the people of it, through different channels of perception.

On channel one, you could perceive the physical bodies of others: whether they be male, female, old, young, fat, thin, handsome or ugly. This he would call ‘the matrix of individual differences on the physical plane.’ Those who lived exclusively in this channel might find themselves preoccupied with sexual gratification, or else worried about their weight, aging, sickness and deterioration to name a few examples.

Now, should you flip over to channel two, you would perceive other people by their mental bodies: their neuroses, elations, hopes, fears and anxieties. You would come to know people according to their personalities. We could call this channel ‘the matrix of individual difference on the psychological plane.’ Those who live in this reality, come to know their characters according to the socio-psychological roles they inhabit: ‘I struggle with depression,’ ‘I’m the black sheep of the family,’ ‘I’m a Marxist artist’, ‘I’m working on myself’, ‘God is dead, and I don’t care about anything.’

Many of us, navigating from one present moment to the next, rarely move past this channel when relating to others, or indeed ourselves. In this case, our psychological constructs often constitute the sum total of who we are. This ‘socio-psychological matrix’ could be seen as a deeper understanding of our identities compared to the ‘physical matrix’ – whereby the physical body of channel one is the subordinate vessel to the ‘real you’ over on channel two – though this perspective is also limited, and we could probe even deeper still.

After further flicking through channels, we might arrive at ‘the soul’ channel, where what you perceive when you look into another person’s eyes is another ‘being’ looking straight back at you. You are one soul recognising another soul. This could be termed ‘the matrix of recognising other beings on the astral or spiritual plane’. Here, the territory of perception shifts, and individual differences are demoted in their significance; as Ram Dass described it, they are merely ‘the packaging in which another being is encased.’

Another channel on from that, and when you look into someone else’s eyes, you see yourself looking at yourself looking straight back at yourself. God, The Creator, Universal Consciousness – adopt whichever term you’re comfortable with – is observing itself observing itself observing itself. Here then, in this matrix, we move beyond the illusion of separation. As Ram Dass put it: ‘On this plane, there is only one of us, one awareness in a multiplicity of forms. We are the One behind the Many, acting like the Many, in order to carry out this illusion.’

Now, most of us, not yet enabled with such extraordinary gifts of perception, can only ever intellectually conceptualise this latter matrix. Such is the sieve of the thinking mind. Though Ram Dass’s metaphor works well to point out that there are multiple matrices through which we might perceive. All of which make answering the question of ‘who am I?’ a little more complicated.

Taking each of these matrices into account, and to quote the indomitable Ram Dass one last time, an appropriate answer may very well be: ‘I am the One who becomes the Many, who has a unique set of factors to work out, through a unique astral, psychological and physical body.’

Hardly an answer to take with you speed dating, but still one worthy of contemplation. In this answer, we can appreciate that when we ask ourselves who we are, we are also asking what the true nature of reality is. At their core, the two questions are in fact the same question, albeit worded differently.

It is not for nothing that the plotline of the original Matrix film is centred on the protagonist becoming ‘the One.’ And on this journey to becoming the one, he must resolve himself of former identity constructs – dismantling them in order to revise his conception of who he is. Ultimately, our protagonist learns that he cannot realise his identity as the One unless he believes he is so.

That our protagonist is called Neo is no accident. The astute reader will notice that Neo is an anagram of one. However, ‘neo’ is also a suffix, meaning ‘the new of revived form’ of something, such as ‘neo’ in neogenesis: the regeneration of a previously formed substance. This connotation of regeneration and rebirth is a quality that will consistently characterise our protagonist throughout his story.

In the beginning of the film’s narrative – Neo is a mere alter-ego – our protagonist calls himself Thomas A. Anderson, the name of the socio-psychological construct by which he predominantly knows himself: his ego. He is portrayed as a conflicted pawn in the capitalist machine, cubicle-bound to office hours, dissatisfied with the cattle-trade of his everyday life, and grappling with this intuitive feeling that there must be something more.

This grappling provokes investigation, which eventually leads to his meeting Morpheus, a mentor-character, who offers Mr. Anderson the chance to answer this nagging intuition. He confirms that he has indeed been living under the roof of falsehoods and there is more to his world than he can presently conceive. Morpheus then presents him with a choice. He can choose to take the blue pill and resume his normal life experience as before, or he can take the red pill and choose to face the truth, no matter how uncomfortable the consequences.

Of course, it would be a dull film if he didn’t choose the red pill, and once he does so, he is unplugged - quite literally - from ‘the Matrix’ by his allies. We watch the graphic depiction of our hero’s awakening through his perspective, in which he wakes to find himself in an egg-shaped pod, encased within a membranous layer filled with a viscous, murky, blood-coloured soup. There is something analogous to the womb about it, and this reminiscence only extends when his limbs push through the membrane, splitting it open like an amniotic sack.

As he emerges from the primordial liquid which contains him, we discover he has a black cable running into his mouth and down his throat – suggestive of an umbilical cord – which he wrenches free, and with a greedy inhale, takes his first breath. He soon finds that there are more of these umbilical cables running leech-like into his arms, his legs, his spine and head. He takes note of his surroundings, and to his horror, discovers his pod is just one of thousands of such pods, in which fully grown adults are kept induced in comatose states, curled into foetal folds like unborn infants, quietly gestating.

Like recoiling serpents, the cables angrily hiss as they pop out of his body one by one. He collapses, and the pod opens beneath him, sending him down a long and winding chute in a flooding gush of soup, until he falls into a large body of water. The symbology is stark: our protagonist has only just been born. Not only born, but reborn.

The large body of water into which he lands, sinks, and is fully submerged, calls to mind the Christian tradition of baptism. Again, the notion of rebirth is reiterated. He has departed from one perspective and entered into another just as the newborn evacuates their womb dimension – which up until then represented their absolute conception of all reality – and enters into a larger world that supersedes the limits of their previously possible imaginings.

Our protagonist has now been freed into ‘the real world’. It is revealed to him that he has been living under a programmed illusion, a simulated reality, and that the majority of humanity are still plugged into their collective illusions, unconsciously enslaved to them, and asleep to the actualities of the real world. One of his new acquaintances, Cipher, even expresses an envy of this. After all, ignorance is bliss: to be unaware of an unpleasant fact is to be untroubled by it. For the real world is portrayed in apocalyptic vision: it is scarred, hostile, and full of suffering – and those few ‘awake’ human beings must daily struggle to survive. The truth might set us free, but rarely is it pretty.

To awaken from the matrix is to be liberated from all we once believed were firm and intransigent facts, but a steep learning curve accompanies such liberation. Our protagonist’s foundations are swiftly dismantled, he is thrown into free-fall, and his former ego dissolves as he desperately navigates the rules of his newfound territory. Now he is known as Neo, and with this new identity come fresh problems and great expectations. It has been prophesised that he is the chosen one, the saviour foretold to emancipate the rest of humankind from their mass delusion and suffering.

Arguably, Neo has merely left one matrix only to tumble into another.

He has expanded his awareness of self, only to find that his new understanding comes with its own challenges and hardships. On succeeding one purpose, he suddenly finds that the goalposts have shifted. His destiny is far greater than he could ever have imagined – a mirror image of the life journey itself - and he does not feel capable in his new role. Whilst others stow faith in him, he does not truly believe it in his heart.

It is only by the film’s climax, when the life of his mentor hangs in the balance, does he realise his prophesised identity as the One. Under the intense pressure of extreme circumstances, Neo is forced to make a choice. He is warned that the attempt to save Morpheus is an impossible undertaking, a suicide mission – and yet he chooses to do so regardless. He knows all too well that the only way to save his friend is through sacrificing himself – and he accepts that cost. Such acceptance propels him forward through a series of events culminating in Morpheus’ rescue and his forewarned death. Where Morpheus escapes, Neo is ambushed and shot down.

Miraculously, however, Neo wakes from his death-slumber and rises again. He is resurrected just as many prophesised saviours before him. His murderers turn to face him, bewildered at what has just occurred, and fire their weapons. Whereas Neo has dodged bullets earlier in the storyline – a hint of his superordinary potential – now he no longer needs to. This time, he simply raises his hand and freezes them mid-flight. His superordinary potential is finally fully realised.

On waking from death, the resurrected Neo has claimed his identity as the One. He is the One because he chose to be so. It was only through the willing sacrifice of his former self could he hope to regenerate and arrive at this realisation. Here he has left behind one realm of belief and stepped into another, thus, finally understanding the power of belief. Such power is demonstrated in his ability to stop bullets. It is belief that allows him to manipulate the Matrix as he so chooses, for it is a fluid construct and malleable to his will.

Our beliefs shape our reality. Or put otherwise, our believing in a reality makes it so. Our thoughts and perceptions inform our lived experiences. From the perspective of the individual, identity and reality are not conjoined twins: they are the same evolving organism. That Neo’s major shifts in both are represented as a process of rebirth and resurrection is a deliberate design. Death and birth are comparable as two sides of the same coin. Destruction is the flipside to reconstitution.

We are often changed by life events, whether orchestrated by our hand or not. Though it is telling that Neo willingly chooses to risk losing ‘himself’ twice-over. He knowingly trades everything he knows in order to know more; to expand his consciousness. First, in his initial unplugging from the matrix, and secondly, through sacrificing himself. We can be the architects of our own reinvention if we so choose, though we must understand that to reconfigure one’s beliefs demands a willing sacrifice of them; rebirth necessitates forgetting oneself.

Our beliefs inform our present realities, they are the raw materials from which our personal matrices are constructed. Your strength lies in whether you are awake to this fact or not. Where you are unconscious of it, there you are a slave to it. Where you are conscious, there you have the power to transcend it – to realise your potential and bend reality to your will.

The underlying message of the Matrix is not in simply transcending a single matrix, but in repeatedly migrating from one matrix to the next in order to reap one’s ultimate potential. It is the conscious effort of butting up against your barriers and limitations time and again, and the steady – often painful – regenerative process of dismantling them. The increasing of one’s consciousness is akin to gradually filling a room with light. The shadows recede into the corners, and what once lay in the darkness is exposed – even if it is not pleasant to look upon at first. We undress our imagined monsters until eventually, the shadows recede to such a point, that what you once mistook for a closed room is revealed to be an ever-expansive space, without walls and without boundaries.

In ruminating on unplugging, I wrote this poem. I chose to let it come out as it came, with as little doctoring as necessary. Possibly, I will choose to develop it further, I hope you enjoy it.

This prospering tongue found my mouth
just as the mute founded morse code,
another blameless and blinking oracle
expanding and contracting,
chattering over the aching desirable,
endlessly unachievable,
gasping lobotomy of thoughts
that eluded my grasp
once more.

Matryoshka, you keep bringing me down,
the summit of your toothless maw
are the roots of another mountain,
and I am levelled to the base,
grounded in an unculled lamb’s skin,
and like the devil’s needle
pinned into every manmade plan
the butcher’s knife still rests
in the chopping block,
waiting to cleanse the killing floor
with the water of the innocents.

Child, you are an ancient creature,
I can see it in your behaviour,
despite appearances
you have been here before,
closely listen, neonate,
your womb was an ill-fitting shoe,
and you, apostate, who
abandoned catacombs of doubt,
those bottled night-terrors;
memories sunken intravenously
of the tribes that no longer served you,
of the flesh that outlasted its tattoo,

Open your eyes,
raise your lips and ready your hands,
this is the scorched earth of the blind,
where the native tenancy live
under the roof of falsehoods:
such is the sieve of the thinking mind.

And on entering the oldest,
most prolific and largest
cult yet alive,
where the local sport
is in plucking the wings off of flies
and turning them into walks,
you would do well to remember:
we did not make it
to the ends of our world
by believing in the monsters
drawn at the edges of our maps.

Child, you are irradiated with it,
the glow of a liberated spirit,
and you will find these strung-up adults
knotted in webs of their own making
will feed from you, exact
from your atomic bloom
and bed into your ungoverned vision,
and at the last hurdle,
dismantle and correct it
with the blackest of envies
for you are the vacancy
of an unaltered spot,
the precarious junction
of pure and ambrosial infancy
to which they are magnetised
as relentlessly and as inevitably
as the wandering wisps of the unfinished
are doomed to starve forevermore.

Thanks for reading, Josh.

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On The Witch

The last two ‘covid years’ have afforded me plenty of time to attend to some rituals. One of these is a daily walk through a sliver of woodland known as Witch Wood a few hundred metres from my house. I like to look up at the birds as I walk, observe them flitting between the bronchiole branches of closely shouldered trees, listen to their territorial shrieks, translated to my ear as whimsical, prettified birdsong.

Sometimes I will watch a group of them fly overhead, and I’ll spend a short time marvelling at this ploy of nature, that birds of a feather really do flock together, that somehow, whether through the invisible strings of a telepathic network or through the total suspension of individual thought, they each surrender and move in perfect synchronicity with one another, travelling in formation faultlessly, maintaining an equidistance between themselves without ever colliding.

This phenomenon is known as allelomimesis. ‘Allelo’ describing mutual relation to one another, and ‘mimesis’ denoting imitation. It is what happens when a clustered group of animals coordinate, where immediate neighbours harmonise by copying one another’s actions. You see it reiterated across the natural world, in schools of fish, in worker ants following the same path to a food source, even in the contagious yawning of human beings.

When I watch these birds band together, I am reminded of our own human societies, how strength is found in numbers, comfort in conformity, and purpose in belonging. To me, there’s something troubling contained within it too. That each bird seems to enter an auto-pilot mode when they are presented with a structure into which they can easily assimilate, and that the cost of being a moving part in said structure is their own autonomy. Is this the zombified hive-mind in action?

(Okay, I’ll admit, I’m probably over-anthropomorphising, but you get the point.)

Now, should you watch these birds flocking together long enough, you’ll observe that these wondrous displays of harmony do not last forever. At some point, sooner or later, something disturbs the structure, provoking the birds to disperse, before eventually, somewhere further down the line, they reassemble into a new shape.

A favourite provocateur in disturbing the equilibrium is the hawk. When the hawk is sighted, the flock will lose all sense of uniformity almost instantly. Their hand-sized bodies jolt with panic, they tear themselves apart and either a) scatter in separate directions, or b) mob the predator as one, coming together like white blood cells attacking an invading contagion.

Whether they shun or flee from the hawk when it appears, the result is always the same: the mob responds, and pandemonium ensues. However impressive their united structure appeared, it is ultimately revealed as the most fragile of things, disrupted by the imposition of an outside agent, the approach of an alien perceived as a threat.

When I regard the hawk in this instance, I see the power of one to disrupt many. I see the frosty reception to which popular thought greets the dissenting voice. I see the natural distrust of strangers, and my brain jumps to pondering the tribal mentalities that still pervade human cultures to this day. All of these collected, of course, derive from the fear of the unknown. And when I reflect upon this, I think, curiously enough, of The Witch.

the Witch

Permit me what seems like something of a leap: there is a link here, I assure you. For it is my belief that the ancient archetype of the Witch not only manages to encompass all of the above representations, and doubtlessly many more, but that she also embodies this omnipresent fear of the unknown. Or perhaps a better way to phrase it: she represents the fear of coming to know that which we’d prefer not to, of introducing into our world knowledge we’d rather remain ignorant of, or that which we presume to feel better or safer without knowing. For once such knowledge is introduced, our worlds are corrupted and will never be the same again.

The Witch is this agent of change, and she does so by seeking and delivering secret or forbidden knowledge. This is knowledge outside of the mundane or common sense, obtained through deep study, trial and initiation that delves beyond the domains of where most dare, or are permitted, to look. She appears in times of great upheaval, and is not usually welcomed for it, for she brings forth ideas that threaten to destabilise the current order.

Often, we are resistant to change despite its inevitability, and have a tendency to cling to the structures of that which we know. But the Witch cannot be ignored – for she arises as a result of a society’s or an individual’s refusal to face that which it has avoided or suppressed for far too long. It is no accident that the witches in our storybooks are placed beyond the boundaries of civilisation, in that mysterious domain beyond civilised thought, deep within the untamed forest, hermits housed in the heart of the wilderness, the embodiment of our repressed desires cackling at the fringes of society, the primordial realities mocking the fragility of our manmade constructs and convictions, a reminder that there is much still which resides beyond the conquest of our known worlds.

She is that novel piece of information appearing out of the Stygian depths of our unconscious. The sudden interjection of a single thought that changes the course of a person’s life. The power of the Witch cannot be underestimated, and it is telling that in our current times of great upheaval, in which all the grand narratives and ‘truths’ of the previous century are being torn down, re-examined or rewritten, that the Witch is being reclaimed, shorn of her negative connotations and reinvented as a positive icon.

Though the Witch has taken many forms throughout the ages, the residual image we modern westerners have inherited is the surviving relic of a propaganda campaign that spanned centuries. And the instigators of this propaganda? The Christian church of course.

The church held a very clear ideal of what a woman should be. The main cornerstones of this ideal were that women were subordinate to men and held no authority over them, effectively making them second-class citizens, and this was the natural order of things. Their role was in bearing and raising children, cooking, cleaning and maintaining the household. Any woman that acted contrary to this presented a threat to the male-dominated social matrix, and the church needed a means to persecute and punish such women lest their behaviour spread dangerous ideas.

Enter the Witch as we know it: the malevolent crone, usually impossibly old, who lives outside the purview of society, unmarried and alone (the sheer horror of the independent woman), who does not produce children but would rather consume them (often characterised as ‘unnatural’ for not wanting children, for not being able to have them, or otherwise disliking them), is sexually promiscuous and often ‘tricks’ men under the guise of a temptress (god forbid a woman take charge of her sexuality), composes her own faith and does not attend church (and therefore, was in league with the Devil), a deft exponent of black magic and a spitter of hexes and curses, all in a concentrated effort to unleash misery, pain and all matter of hellish woe upon poor and unwitting, God-loving, townsfolk.

The church had woven into the local mythology a character presented as an abomination of everything a woman should be. They not only created a scapegoat to blame for society’s ills, to be driven out or better yet: extinguished entirely (cue hangings, beheadings and burnings at the stake), but also a means to control the populace and police their behaviour.

Through the monstrous image of the Witch, they vilified undesirable qualities by exaggerating them to grotesque proportions. The woman who valued her life would think twice before embodying such qualities, and the everyday citizen was provided a criterion by which they could suspect and rat out their neighbours.

It is worth noting that regardless of gender, anyone could be accused and tried as a witch. Though it does say something that of all witches accused and tried, around eighty percent were women. The witch-hunts that spanned from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century were one of the most horrific and successful acts of gynecide to haunt our recorded history. That the powers that be felt that such campaigns were necessary can only speak to the gravity and importance of ideas which challenge the status-quo.

When we invoke the spirit of the Witch, that is exactly what we are doing: questioning the status quo. It is the act of seeking out answers beyond the realm of that which we know, and admitting that there is more to learn beyond the constructs of our present understandings. That the Witch was characterised as the devil’s advocate suits her symbology perfectly, for she represents the voice unafraid to challenge the existing paradigm.

She captures the anarchic spirit of a people determined to live in opposition to the expectations of society. Theirs is to test the strength of, or outright dismantle, societal boundaries lest those boundaries rigidify and become the prison walls in which a society traps itself. After all, the ongoing survival of any society depends upon its ability to question itself, to adapt and change with the times.

Josh Lonsdale

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Rare Earth

"No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man." 

                                                                                                                                                                                                      Heraclitus

What can I say on the subject of Rare Earth? All I could offer is that it seems to me that the rarest things of this earth are each and every single one of its countless passing moments.

Far be it from me to claim I’ve figured it all out. There is still much more to learn, and undoubtedly I will run out of time before I have done so, but the one hypothesis that still holds true and is yet to be disproven, is that presence provides the key to a fulfilling life. And if presence is not the key, then it must be the keyhole. That which opens the doors of perception to a fuller and more accurate comprehending of the reality that enshrouds us. A reality we so often distort through the blinkered lenses of our individual blind-spots.

A reality impossible to divorce ourselves from at any time. For we are not merely the witnesses of reality, but the works themselves, as much a part of the fabric of reality as anything else, even when we might feel disconnected from it.

In my previous blog post, I recalled my experiences of shamanic drumming. I have since reflected and concluded one reason I was drawn back time and again to the drumming circle was that it promised me the feeling of connection. It allowed me to slip into a state of presence almost effortlessly, and by arriving at such a state, I felt more in touch, not only with myself but with others, within a far deeper and more rooted reality. A reality beyond the various labels we use to divide ourselves, a shared reality that is at once primal and instinctive.

Perhaps there are few things more beautiful to witness or participate in than a group of adult strangers playing together with complete abandon, as though they were children once more. In such a space all differences of perspective are rendered meaningless. It is both a psychic and physical engagement, and there is a genuine feeling that we are all tethered to one another, not through our backgrounds, our ideologies or political leanings, but through a common heartbeat that supersedes all these details, and ultimately reveals them as decorative elements of no real importance at all.

In the drumming circle, there is no set design or rule. There are no discussions beforehand and there is no assigned leader. Every player responds intuitively to the other, accepting and honouring whatever is given to them. Each session is entirely unrehearsed, and as such, every body of music produced arises and evolves organically, the product of pure improvisation, to be played once and never repeated again.

There is a significance in this: to sound once and be heard nevermore. Echoes, as similar as they might sound to the original, are still mere copies, mime artists performing tributes. The temporary and fleeting nature of our drumming circle’s musical creation reflected the nature of all creations. For the immutable nature of nature is its mutability, the only thing permanent: change.

In light of this, it could be said that our practice provided a good roadmap for how best to approach life. It acted as a reminder of the endangered quality of everything in existence, and better urged us towards the importance of being totally present and bearing witness to it all. If you didn’t, then it would already be too late. The moment would expire just as soon as it transpired, and there would be no chance to get it back. For every moment strung along this puzzling yarn that we call life, spun ceaselessly on by the ever-spinning wheels of birth and death, is utterly unique and cannot be replicated.

Best, therefore, to give it all your full attention.

Thanks for reading, Josh

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Listening Skin

I found myself with two perfectly familiar strangers in the attic room of a three-storey house somewhere in the North West of England. Candles were lit ahead of our arrival, trailing wisps of burning incense wrinkled and fogged the snug room, the musk of patchouli and sandalwood licked our nostrils, and crammed into every available alcove or set upon petite side-tables were crystals of every colour and family, playing sidekick to proudly displayed statuettes of the Buddha, of Shiva the Destroyer, odes to the Divine Mother Earth and Father Sky.

Warmed and bathed in the firelight of a chimney stove, bejewelled and exotic seat cushions were laid in a circle on the floor. In the centre of these cushions, drums, cymbals and singing bowls were arranged for us as though they were instruments of war, and we were the warriors steadily piling into the room to take up our weapons of choice before entering into battle. And though we would not leave the room again for a while, it was true that we were preparing for a foray of sorts, an advance towards an undisclosed and as yet unconquered territory.

This was the rendezvous point of our shadow circle, where we would meet to continue our shamanic drumming practice; the practice of chanting, drumming and creating music together in order to release unnecessary weight and trapped emotions, to free ourselves from the burden of mental constructs and the strangleholds of egos, and if we were lucky, possibly even slip into trance-like states, where we might catch a glimpse at another face of reality, a face rarely looked upon, the counterpart to our known domains: our respective shadow dimensions.

Jameson, one of the two strangers, and a lifelong drummer who now wore hearing aids, sat down on a cushion and prepared himself for that evening’s circle. Jameson held a gibbon-stare and possessed a pair of pointy ears. He focused intently on nothing, humming a strange tune as he ran his fingers across the head of his drum, a single-headed hand drum, whom he referred to as Gruff.

He said he had named all of his drums. This one was called Gruff because the head was made of goatskin. Gruff was one of his first drums, and he spoke of it only in the present-tense and only in affectionate terms, like anyone would of one of their oldest living friends. The fact that this friend wasn’t a living one at all but an inanimate object wearing the dead skin of a goat that had long since passed out of existence didn’t seem to trouble him.

‘Skin never dies.’ Jameson barely blinked as he spoke, nor did he break eye contact. ‘It never loses its ability to absorb and respond to sound. Don’t be too hasty to label the drum as some mere lifeless thing. Gruff responds to any touch I lay upon him. Simply listen, and you’ll hear how alive he is.’

Jameson insisted that any self-respecting drum owner ought to purchase animal-skin drums exclusively as a matter of principle, they’d be robbing themselves otherwise. Manmade artificial skins were devoid of a special quality, poor substitutes for the real thing, pale imitations that fell short of delivering anything close to the sound that lived-in skin could provide.

‘Have you ever listened to a song and had it place your hairs on end?’

I nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘That’s your skin, listening and responding. The French call it frisson. The largest organ you own is reacting to soundwaves. Tingling with the vibrations of waves breaking upon it and entering it. And this organ completely envelopes you, from top to bottom, stretched tightly over your entire body, exactly like that of a drum.’

‘There is intercourse between my skin and the drum’s skin. A communion of sorts. We are two musical objects having a conversation with one another, creating and transferring energy.’

He wiggled his ears, pursing and flexing the pointed tips of them. They reminded me of satellite dishes swivelling to catch out wandering transmissions.

‘Don’t be fooled in thinking we hear through our ears alone.’ He said. ‘Sure, when I strike the drum, the sound of the initial impact travels through the ears, but the resonance of that sound carries throughout the body. Our bodies are magnificent resonance chambers, they don’t get the credit they deserve – they are the greatest devices of listening we own.’

‘We think of sound as something we hear, but in terms of physics, sound is just vibration travelling through matter. The ability of sound to affect matter cannot be underestimated, especially when it comes to our own physiologies and psychologies.’

‘Music has the power to play acupuncture with our emotions, sudden and loud sounds demand our attention, activating our animal instincts irrespective of our consent, rushing floods of hormones are released in mothers the instant they hear the pitch of their babies’ cries, the shock waves of bombs can level whole buildings, and it is a well-accepted fact of reality that a single sound carries different meanings between individuals based on their own lived experience. We inhabit environments housed in an ocean of relentless sound, and we are forever moulded by them, whether we are conscious of that or not.’

Jameson plucked out one of his hearing aids and presented it in his hand.

‘The hearing aid helps those of us who are so-called hard of hearing by amplifying the world of sound that can be detected by the human ear. But the world of sound heard by the human being is an incomplete picture of the total universe of sound that exists.’

Jameson went on to explain that we human beings had an upper and lower limit to the range of frequencies we could hear. Any soundwave outside of these limits would fail to register an audible impression whatsoever.

‘Take the dog whistle. A dog hears when it is blown where we cannot. To some extent, you could say we were all deaf.’ He argued. ‘At least, that’s the case when you pass the boundaries of our known parameters. But I assure you, we might be deaf to certain zones of this world, hard-of-hearing to the total universe of sound, but we are still its recipients, daily bombarded by it, and our bodies are always listening.’*

‘But we already know this of course.’ It was at this moment that Hare, the other member of the circle, jumped in. ‘We’ve been acting as our own barometers since birth.’

Hare was a shamanic teacher, and the owner of the attic we occupied, a bespectacled woman whose hair was a beehive of endless possibilities.

‘You can feel it when you enter a room, the energy that resides there.’ She elaborated. ‘You can detect it in your insides, or as a certain air pressure, whether heavy or light, whether you can cut the tension with a knife, it’s as though you can sense the very shifting of molecules, know intuitively whether they are tightly compacted or free to roam – sometimes, there is no logical reason that some spaces feel oppressive whilst others feel liberating, but our bodies never lie.’

‘Energies fluctuate on a spectrum according to the experience as it unfolds. Both people and places are great storehouses of energy. You are magnetised to some, repelled by others. Some are more settled and consistent, whilst others are scattered, erratic and fraught between two conflicting energies at once.’

Hare leant forward and whispered, almost conspiratorially. ‘It is surmised that railway stations fall into states of disrepair so rapidly because they are constantly in a tug of war between intensely polarised fields of energy. Caught between joy and sorrow. After all, a train station must play host to joyous homecomings and hard goodbyes, partings and reunions.’

‘There is much more to reality than meets the eye or reaches the ear.’ Jameson returned, a wide smile creasing his face. ‘That’s why when I conversate with my drum, I am aware that I am committing an alchemical act, the moving parts of which might not be perceptible to me or even logically understood, but I’m safe in the knowledge that I’m working with the universe to manipulate energy to my benefit. Perhaps there are limits to what my ears will pick up, but regardless, the sound I conjure becomes my medicine. You see, hard-of-hearing does not have to equate to hard of listening.’

Jameson tucked his hearing aid back behind his ear and winked at me.

‘The problem this world has faced is that it has been so hard-of-listening as of late.’ Hare spoke, sat with her legs crossed and her eyes closed. ‘People have a habit of clinging religiously to the parameters of their known worlds, they live according to their explored boundaries and mistake their contracted perspectives for the totality of reality.’

‘The expanse of a person’s consciousness is defined by their limiting beliefs. Listening, that often overlooked and underappreciated art, is the active process of placing the constraints of our preconceptions to the side, and of focusing one’s attention on both the noise and the silence, in order to find out what is actually being told.’

 And on that note, Hare began to bang her drum, softly at first, inviting us to join. Jameson and I bowed our heads and paid gratitude for the occasion. Then, we picked up our instruments, focused our attentions and played.

The beauty of the drumming circle is that it invites strangers to come together and recognise a shared humanity. The music created is not written down or rehearsed, it wells up out of pure improvisation, played once and never repeated again, for play’s sake and not profit. Just as the cells in our bodies wire and collaborate together without instruction, the drummers respond intuitively to one another, each adapting to support and elaborate upon the other’s beat and rhythm. The only necessary requirement is the will and openness to listen.

Josh Lonsdale

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