When you come across someone who is going to change your life, you know it immediately.  Looking over my life in retrospect, I think that’s been nearly 100% true.  You never know how, why or when, but that basic super-electric charge is there the second the connection is made.  I’ve been learning many things from many people, here on these internets, but I owe more to Ben Mack than pretty much anyone else I can think of.  I am writing this as a thank you to Ben, and as a heads-up to you, the reader.

There are serious problems in the world today and I have no interest in complaining about them. Whatsoever, yo. I expect my friends to slap me as hard as they can when I start backsliding like that.  Because when I find myself asking “Why?” at this point, I’m just lying to myself.  I know exactly why, I know exactly how to change it, and neither answer is comforting. How do we break the cultural hypnosis?  How do we expect to get people to wake up and change their own lives?  I’m bringing this up here because I believe that Ben Mack has a great deal to teach about mass media, about persuasion and the creation of consensus reality, and most of all about realistic solutions to these problems.

Interested? 

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Awhile back, Nick Pell from Key 64 asked me to write an article for him, on the topic of “Ten Ways YOU Can Fight Fascist America.” After I got that done—and you can read it here—Nick generously offered to return the favor.  So I’ve asked him to write something for all of Brainsturbator’s younger readers.  I asked him to lay out a plan: “How to Destroy Your High School in Seven Days.”

I didn’t know if I’d get a magick ritual or a treatise on home explosives, but Nick surprised me and came with a truly interesting angle.  His recipe is something anyone can apply—in fact, our sick culture will do most of the work for you. He’s also got the personal experience to prove that it works.  I’m very happy to offer this, and since Nick has a lot to teach, I will now get out of the way.  Enjoy.

--thirtyseven

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I was going to do a “We Salute You” tribute, but I realized an interview would be better.  Besides, I’m honestly unsure about how to approach even an introduction to Godforbid.  Do I say he’s one of my favorite rappers?  After all, the dude has moved on from mere hip hop—he’s currently working with That Handsome Devil, making some of the most creative shit I’ve heard since Zappa was wearing tight pants and frowning at the audience. 

Shit...there I go, making music critic comparisons. Here’s the bottom line: this interview is some of the best stuff Brainsturbator has done in 2007.  That Handsome Devil is an amazing band, and I feel confident saying that checking out their music will radically improve your day.  Godforbid is a singular human being, and you’re about to find out why directly from him.

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We talk about the third dimension a lot, but most humans don’t live in it.  Abbot’s Flatland was not so much a metaphor as an operational description of the sensory world most people inhabit: a continuous, unbroken plane that, despite surface variations and wrinkles, remains a flat stage for our two dimensional lives.  This is inevitable, since humans cannot hover or fly without technology assistance, and few of us can jump higher than three feet off the ground. 

And let’s be serious, here—what is a dimension? Have anyone ever even proved they existed?  Sure, you can draw a Cartesian XYZ grid on paper, but you can also draw a unicorn vomiting angels. I’ve been digging through the concept of time for a month, and it’s a concept nobody can really define, despite the fact we all experience it.  I’ve come to realize there’s very little humans can say for sure about space, either.  The more we learn, the less we know.  Everything you were taught in school is currently falling apart—so let’s take a look at a theory that will likely be replacing all this Big Bang horseshit: the Universe is fractal and infinite at every level of scale.

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“The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.”

--St. Augustine

I’ve been working on an article encompassing these themes, but I had a revelation.  If all I’m doing is re-organizing and synthesizing the work of other humans, why do I write so much?  Rather than burden you with my own meditations on “The Illusion of Control,” I’ve decided to abandon that illusion altogether for this piece.  I’m going to keep going for three more sentences and then I will step out of the way completely.

Everything assembled here is brainfood with a purpose: triggering shifts in perspective.  When you get used to the same perspective—or “stuck”—it can be alarming to feel yourself shifting, but that’s a good thing—that’s neurons waking up, that’s muscle tissue saying THANK YOU, that’s new hormone combinations in your bloodstream.  After all, even if your conscious “self” actually was in control, you’re only driving the car—you’re only manipulating something else.

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In the last installment, a meditation on the concept of the “Chronon” and the total failure of human beings to understand and define time, I threw a ton of brainfood together and overstuffed the turkey.  Despite that, I still left out a lot of material, and I’m going to cover most if it in this “sequel,” epecially the work Jacques Vallee.  Vallee is one of my favorite authors because he precisely conveys meaningful content.  When I do that, it’s generally by accident.  You can decide if this article is worth reading in five sentences:

Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information. What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.

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In the past century, human science has advanced beyond anyone’s wildest dreams: we’ve put humans into space, eliminated entire cities with a single bomb, industrialized the genocide process, poisoned our entire planet, and figured out how to stick over 5000 albums into a small plastic box.  We have peered billions of light years into the cosmos, we have unraveled the atom and discovered quantum weirdness, and even transcribed the human genome.  As a direct consequence of all this glittering achievement, scientists are understandably pretty cocky these days. However, I would like to pass anyone reading this the Silver Bullet to instantly deflate the ego of anyone who’s exponentially more intelligent than you are: just ask them to explain what time is.

Time is the single most universally constant of physical constants, and yet we barely know anything at all about it.  Here in 2007, we still don’t even have a working definition of what it is.

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This is a series I’m working on with Garett Heaney, editor of Wishtank magazine and a friend of mine.  We’re having a cycling discussion about organization, motivation and focus.  I hope it’s useful, and please feel free to contribute advice of your own.  I would appreciate the added value, and so would anyone who reads this.

--thirtyseven

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Did you know that you have a 70% higher chance of having a heart attack between the hours of 7 and 9 am?  That’s averaged out over the full year, but if you look from a larger level of scale you’ll find that winter months are also especially high risk.  The more I dig into Chronobiology, the tenor of my investigation has changed from simple wonderment (after all, this stuff is pretty damn cool) to more sinister speculations.  Among them is the suspicion that “Daylight Savings Time” causes epidemic levels of depression, as well as a sharp increase in accidents, both on the job and on the road.

Even thought the “facts” bear my theory out more or less completely, I just mention it in passing.  We still have a lot of ground to cover, laying out the basic mechanisms and principles behind Chronobiology.  The closer I look, the more important this material seems—whether that’s a trick of perspective or a valid point is strictly up to you.

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