Picking up from my last post, my new book... "Brave Noö World - A Guerilla Ethnography of High Strangeness" ...has been published by Tek-Gnostics Media and is now available on my Author page on Amazon. We will have signed copies available on our Head Gear products catalogue soon... but for those who want to get their hands on a copy now... You may find Jack's newest book at Amazon here... Brave Noö World
Find below a continuation from the Brave Noö World introduction. As you recall... The transformation from a mundane, to a bizarro world, did not catch all of us flat-footed. As we shall see, there were those among us who did anticipate versions of the unprecedented change that was to be unleashed upon us all... some foresaw and commented on the clear indicators of what was about to go down...
These visionaries came from a variety of unexpected sources. Some from the literary domain, others with more unusual pedigrees. Though seemingly dissimilar, these visionaries foresaw different facets of the same unexpected future. In exploring this premise, let us, for a moment, take a brief trip back in time… to the dawn of the 21st century.
As you recall… although the 2000’s were full of hope and promise, strange things were brewing just beneath the surface of our simmering new millennium. That great equalizer of digital information access: the internet, was about to show it’s darker side. The conspiracy underground was about to go mainstream. With total domination within their grasp, the globalist elite were about to be dealt a near-death blow. Out on the frontier of the fringe, strange, alternate realities that had simmered for a decade or two, were about to boil over.
The millennium’s previous half century of so-called trickle-down economics, had been exposed as a systematic theft… a fleecing of the 99, by the 1%. Despite then-president Ronald Reagan’s empty promise, nothing trickled down. In wake of this boondoggle, increasing numbers of the disenfranchised came to realize that the stacked deck of crony capitalism and corporatocracy was a no-win proposition. In desperation, people turned to occultic methodologies to level the playing field… to help tip the odds back in their favor.
In the ensuing years, we have seen an increased fragmenting of consensus reality, in favor of multiple, often competing realities. As our timeline accelerates, reality splinters and diverges along innumerably novel pathways. At times, these paths overlap, so as to give the impression of a consensus reality. But these conceptual pathways cross and re-cross… plummeting down temporal back-alley dead-ends and careening up and over speculative summits, like the most bad-ass roller coaster at the most surreal funhouse imaginable.
American author, 1980’s era counter-cultural guru, and world-renown, mystic-agnostic: Robert Anton Wilson (more on him later) once described these phenomena as reality tunnels, where our understanding of reality is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. It turns out that these reality tunnels can be manipulated, funneled, and redirected by those with nefarious intent.
Naturally these multiple, alternate realities propagate multiple, alternative facts (to borrow a phrase) and/or truths. One of the resulting casualties of our ever-changing paradigm, is a quaint little idea known as objective truth. Sacrificed before the alter of expediency, the (relatively) singular, objective truth of even the previous decades has splintered, and virally mutated into competing, convenient truths. And it was precisely at this juncture, at the divergence of once unmitigated truth, where things began to get… really weird.
In an environment of conspiratorial mistrust, certain cultic thought-streams became increasingly attractive to those who were marginalized over the past fifty years. Within the political arena, ideology became dogma… political party became religion… faction became cult. The so-called
Culture Wars have since gone from a domestic cold-war, to white-hot cultural rebellion. Issues such as gender identity, racial justice, climate change, the legitimacy of US presidential elections, even the very reality of a mutating coronavirus, have been weaponized by Psy-War factions.
Such issues have been turbo-charged by none-other than our newfangled communications technologies. As we all now know, social media platforms have a way of isolating, insulating and amplifying the content of an individual’s newsfeed, based upon past searches and likes. The most insidious feature of these platforms, is the way in which their encoded algorithms increasingly point to more extreme positions on whatever topic the user has pursued. It is as if the devilish algorithm is saying: “If you think that last article was extreme, wait until you see this next one!”…BAM!
Consequently, over the last decade, we have witnessed a marginalized, radical rise in magical thinking. Such thinking can be construed in a negative light, as unrealistic or worse, naïve. However, magical thinking can also be intentionally pursued as a mental and psychic tactic. Here, the emphasis is strategically placed upon one’s intention. This is an important concept that we will return to later.
The upsurge in magical thinking has been succored by a dramatic influx of people who have turned away from technological, linear thought. They have become disillusioned with a world culture that increasingly favors those at the top of the capitalist food-chain, at the expense of, or on the backs of, those who have been less favored.
This reemergence of magical thinking is evident in the cultural awakenings of political Left and Right ideologies, alike. Each bloc now recognizes the manipulation of the many, by the few. Tellingly, the extreme factions of Right and Left appear more similar than different… to the extent of appearing as ideological twins. Where the two extremes diverge however, is in their response… in the countermeasures and tactics they deploy. Like ideologies, magical thinking also manifests in a dichotomy… a right-hand and left-hand path, if you will.
To be continued...
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