Adventures at the End of the World

Soft, White, Computer Magic

2009-01-22T11:44:00.000-08:00

...they came to recognize this mental state of increased manifestative power, and developed a procedure involving facebook and the sims whereby they would create sims as similar (!) as possible to the people they knew, in some respects, and freer, happier and more alive in others. They then would watch them run and intensely focus on the sim for it's activity to "imprint" the energy fields of the real person at moments when, for example, someone not so creative in real life began panting a picture in the sim world.

A first stint at writing for Realitysandwich, which i haven't been able to complete but store here for people to read meanwhile.

2008-10-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

Mexico is a strange land, no doubt. A number of factors concur into making it a land of secrecy, “not-by-the-book-ness” and things that have had to be kept from the inquiring eyes of the successive teams of dominator-culture-style land- and people-rapists its population and wildlife have had to endure ever since old 1521.

Because you see, they used to know a lot of magic ‘round these parts, –and I do mean a lot; once you start being able to tell, it’s pretty much everywhere.

So let’s go into a little bit of detail, shall we? And try and give ourselves a picture that is a bit more clear about a few things.

Ok so it’s the 1500’s and all the high initiates of magic this side of the blue ball are faced with the biter realization that their superior understanding of the subtle realms of being (read: mind) was still no match for the brute force of that oh so wonderful combination of stirrup and cannon. The bearded, smelly, and drunken people that had gotten off the floating hill (give you an idea how hard it was for native people to understand a ship) were plain destroying everything, so the magic had to be hidden, and hidden it was, in the farthest mountains where the spanish-speakers never came, along with amaranto (is that called amaranth in english?), the plant that the smellies had to forbid because it freed the Indians from the obligation to come down work as semi-slaves in the haciendas, and along with the politeness of the land, a way of treating each other so incredibly careful and loving (once you’ve done the mushroom you can tell) that the motherfucker (it’s what they are) mentality mistakes it, to this day, for some pathological shyness, sort of the way people who are not happy enough find happy music silly.

So everything had to be like double-accounting.

Everyone started growing accustomed to the following situation: No matter where you are, no matter whatcha doin’ YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO PRETEND IT’S SOMETHING ELSE.

This duplicity (schizophrenia?) of the collective psyche is especially easy to perceive in language. To this day nobody dares speak to strangers like they speak at home. Nobody wants to be found out as the son of brown-skinned people, even though they might be brown-skinned themselves.

Ok, then 400 years later, the Revolution hands power over to your typical adult-male gang (only here they’re not Caucasian, but still just as castrated and life-hating as your modern-day immigrant shooting “minutemen”, for example) and all the practice the collective psyche had developed at living Indian under the nose of the pseudo-european was diverted into robbing the people under their own nose. (think of some ghoulish inbreeding hillbilly tying his daughters to the plow, or think of the guy in Austria (Don’t you find the Europeans marvelously civilized?) that kept her daughter in a cellar for raping like 20 years, and you’ll get the picture).

So it was pretty much Orwell’s 1984 down here, from the 30’s on to the year 2000. Doublethik levels kept rising as the foam on top of a pulque barrel, except...

There came the sixties. Avandaro music fest, the Mexican Woodstock. Number of naked people: one (it’s really catholic out here). A few guys and girls actually did acid and mushrooms, but they did not coalesce into anything visible, maybe because they were too used to living in hiding and fear (-This is beautiful, honey, but they’ll never get it, so let’s not tell anyone), maybe because the mushroom itself cautioned them against surfacing too soon. In any case the forces of Promethea (if we may so call them) were slowly gaining ground on another flank.

In 1967, just in time for some of the participants in the 1968 student revolts to read it, Gabriel García Márquez’s (GGM)“One Hundred Years of Solitude”(OHYS) came out. It did not come out of nowhere, for sure, and it would be arguable to trace at least some of his interest in magic back to Jorge Luis Borges, maybe 30 or 40 years older than GGM. But the thing is, OHYS is not about magic, in the sense Borges’s stories are. It is about human relationships, but it ever so casually mentions things like Narciso Babilonia (Narcissus Babylon for those of you not fluent) being followed around everywhere by a cloud of butterflies (Promethea variety, perhaps? Hmmm…) and stuff tantamount to coming out on a family dinner and saying: c’mon granma, we all know magic has always existed, whyncha tell us all ‘bout the talking deer you meet with everyday?

So one conjecture that imposes itself on the mind is that the book caught on because there were literally thousands of middle class housewives picking up (with their albeit muffled goddess sensibility) everyday perceptions of the immaterial realm on the clairvoyance-inertia left over in the collective mind-continuum by the ancients, imagine if you will the crumbling moment of a guilty-secret based domination scheme, the floggers (or their current version) have everyone intimidated into submission, but then the slaves start gaining an understanding of their power, and in the end it’s just a matter of looking at each other an finding the courage to stand up against it. Every oppressed-into-housewivery moon-priestess read the book and thought: “Maybe I’m not insane like my (impotent, alcoholic) husband says, maybe magic’s true, and maybe I’m not the only one living it despite herself”.

Ok fast-forward 30 years, and it’s the sons and daughters of the ’68 protesters (the ones that grew up with mommies that did believe in magic, and were allowed to say so) that are closing down (public, tuition-free, university’s) campus for 11 months and doing lotsa ‘shrooms in it, and yours truly with them. Please bear in mind that it’s tuition free, because that’s what allows for the grandsons and granddaughters of the not-yet-spanish-speaking shamans to attend the most important college of the Spanish speaking world only 2 generations away form magic. (I mean 2 generations ago their grannies were still cooking’it up with spirit and just 2 generations later they’re in college, with granny still alive and stirring the brew, in some cases).

Now here, if my kind readers will bear with such a display of narcissism, I will recount some of the events in the 1999-2000 student strike in a tone more autobiographical than “big picture-esque” (if I may take such preposterous liberties with no-longer-shakespeare’s tongue).

What I expound in the following paragraph serves to illustrate a metaphysical conjecture about the nature of novelty (more or less as defined by whitehead-mckenna).

Before 1999 the maximum number of days any school facility had been occupied by students was (I don’t remember) around 40. So a month an a half into the strike we broke the record.

We were living in a situation that nobody thought could occur.

And yet there we were.

My contention is that

· to begin with, reality is woven by the sum of minds (duh!)

· When minds perceive an improbability (something ordinarily unthinkable, like college shut down 11 months) effectively taking place, they sort of “relax” their reality-creation mechanisms and allow themselves to create/manifest/discover things that are more novel than the ones they’d allow themselves if there weren’t an elephant levitating over the kiosk (or any other effectively obtaining improbability).

So, people did large amounts of psychedelics in that strike, maybe substantially more than ever before, and they also lost the faith in their parents (as everyone with slave parents must, eventually), pretty much at the same time.

NOTE TO DANIEL: it’s what I have so far, around 1300 words. I think it’ll grow to maybe 5000 words, from here I recount some anecdotes from the strike and then start describing the actual mindscape and the systemic relations I spoke of in the e-mail in another 1500 words and finally the mushroom eaters-party and interviews in the last 1500. I’ll be happy to get your feedback and can send you the next draft in a week.

A short poem I wrote around 2004 (i guess)

2006-10-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

We come into existence
for the shortest of whiles
and busy ourselves
like a cloud of summer mosquitoes.

Building an Artificial Progressive State

2006-06-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

This post should probably be posted in spanish too, i guess i'll translate it later, so here goes:

What if we gathered 101 mexican hippies and went to live in a mexican town with 100 inhabitants?

Well, after about three years, we (the hippies) could all get new voting cards with our new addresses and just elect one of us as mayor.

(that was the short, comic-book version of it, so here goes the "a-little-closer-to-reality" version of the plan):

What is the state with the least population in mexico? Nayarit, inhabited by half a million people.

So what if we could come up with 500, or better yet, 5000 progressive, holistic, eco-spiritual liberals to go and live there as teachers in elementary schools and universities and other key jobs providing us access to the youth of the state? Of the 500,000 inhabitants, only 200,000 are actually old enough to vote. So 18 years from now, the other 300,000 (the ones we will -by that time- have educated in the mother-earth-loving ways of sustainability and community) will be voting too, so basically we could set ourselves the task of appointing a liberal, mexican-born governor for 2024-2030.

Once at that point, we can start remaking the local laws inasmuch as the mexican constitution allows us to.

People who come from other countries will probably not be able to vote, but there are many ways to contribute to the massive shift in values (from catholic-sponsored submission to self-organizing ecologically aware suficiency and wellness)which we intend to produce. I hasten to point out that i'm not proposing picking a fight with the catholic hierarchy, much less the secular powers-that-be, but rather a gentle integration of ever widening sectors of local society into community-building activities.

Here are some examples of specific strategies that can help gain the people's confidence, one soul at a time, in order to be able to draft with them a new social pact for the state:

-Getting teaching jobs.

(I guess i don't have to explain that one)

-Establishing autonomous community centers providing communitary daycare, basic healthcare and internet services.

(Here's where all those euros and dollars you blonde guys have been making in your industrialized countries fit in) Once we manage to get our man in the governor's office, we can legislate so that it'l be easier for foreigners who have helped our transition out of barbarity to become citizens.

This is a specially impotant strategy, for it garners us the attention of precisely the part of the population which, despite being the one that really keeps things going has been most debased in their collective integrity and self-image: the women.

If a young rural woman in her mid twenties finds she can leave her beating husband while leaning on the support of the local autonomous community center for daycare and work (at the local organic co-op) she will be grateful. Perhaps enough to even invite her sisters and cousins to either do the same or at least inform their catholic-raised husbands that they have a choice not to take the blows silently anymore.

-Establishing the appropriate autonomous mechanisms (perhaps i shold say organisms) to help peasants and farmers "go organic" and using our little computers and college diplomas to set up a distribution network of organic food for fancy citypeople who'll pay for it rather well worldwide.

-Establishing a worldwide support net that goes to the rich-but-kinda-progressive fellows elsewhere and puts out a hand for donations to speed everything up.

Now some of the things we could accomplish:

-Ban styrofoam (etc.)
-Tax ostentatious luxury
-Hyper-tax beef and pork
-Hyper-tax alcohol and tobacco
-Build lots of libraries
-Teach meditation in public schools
-Engage the huichol indians in a state-wide spiritual education program (in the long run, growing lots of greenhouse peyote grafted on faster-growing opuntiae for the mystical experiences ot those that choose to so have them)
-Address the age old problem of intitutionalized sexual repression of the young
-Build more schools
-Harness the wealth of the tourism industry on the coast to fuel social change
-Give away prescription cocaine and/or heroin to addicts to avoid their spread im the local community
-De-ciminalize marijuana
-Everything else that uptight people in governments have not allowed people to do despite it being a good idea.

-Et cetera.

I welcome everyone's comments, additions or criticisms

Taking Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in School

2006-06-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

I don´t really remember the first time i did it, but it´s sort of become standard practice for me to take mushrooms and go to school.

The first few times i would try to actually go to class under the effects, but soon enough i realized that the real point of doing it was to interact with people in the school square and garden.

I have consistently observed that even when people don´t know you´re on mushrooms they sort of "feel" the vibe, and it´s easy to congregate people around oneself by merely sitting down. I´ve also tried standing up and sitting down a few yards away, and after a while, everyone moves accordingly, though they don´t really know it´s you they´re following.

For more or less 8 years, i´ve been trying to turn my school into a psychedelic mecca, and to elevate the tripper/non tripper ratio of the population, with moderate results.

Some of the people more difficult to convince come from the ranks of tibetan buddhism. I find a significant resonance between some of the forms of early 21st century Mexico City buddhism and good old-fashioned bourgeois privilege; "everyone must work for their own liberation, so it´s not my fault you´re poor" they seem to say.

Two of my acquaintances are fat, they're a boy and a girl, and they´re also chronically depressed, as befits their income range (mid-high), he fakes laughter and she chews neurotically at her lips. They were separately on the verge of trying ´shrooms out of desperation when (un)fortunately they started going steady and, having found relative relief from their respective lonelinesses, forgot about the mushroom. I bet that if they hadn't found each other, they would have come across mental health so, in a way, they "saved" each other from happiness, ironically. Another friend of mine says i shouldn't have said that they didn't choose each other, but rather their fatness did. I am personally against the discrimination of fat people and the commercial imposition of slender looks as mandatory, but it is a fact that no one else in the whole school would go near them (emotionally) and so they just started kissing each other. What's funny is that if they had eaten mushrooms they would have probably started daring to ask thin people out.

On another very similar case (only with thinner people) the boy hated me forever when i told someone else who was also trying to make him take mushrooms "leave him alone, he's just got himself a girlfriend that matches his illness".

It is very sad to live among such neurotics, and i can´t wait to move into some holistic/psycho-corpo-therapeutic/artistic eco-village, so if you know about one, let me know.