Experience occurs based on numbers. We are The One’s signs and numbers. Time pulls us together. When our numbers match, synchronicity ushers us like herds, and form a collective phenomenon.
If this sits right with you, here is a story:
I walk into a cinema. I am watching a movie. The actress checks herself in the mirror, random number calls her; she is sad at a loss and happy when she is in love. I feel sad when she loses, I feel happy when she wins.
But then I realized I am not the actress. I am the movie, and the watcher, and the co-director.
I am the movie. I am everything occurring in that movie. The random guy that called, wind caressing grass, war and blood, is not more distant from my sense when I touch my skin, my visual when I see myself in the mirror.
“I” am the total phenomenon that I experience, for whatever I pulled through my value setting, intentions, and thus synchronicity pulled for me, my karma. All that I see is part of me. This is how broad the responsibility can get, and things we offer, it’s not for “others”.
It is for me as well. I clear my own backyard in this little cosmo of my life. It gets bigger and bigger with understanding and love. My capability and knowledge need to catch up.
Clear the fog. Do not identify with the phenomenon.
Found this on Douban.com and I shall pass it along. 接力一下 — The Diamond Sutra : http://www.xuefo.net/user/xuhua/diamond%20sutra.txt
The Buddha said: “Subhuti, the living beings (you just mentioned) are neither living nor not living beings. 佛言：须菩提, 彼非众生，非不众生。
“Why?” 何以故？
“Because, Subhuti, the Tathagata says these living beings are not (really), but they are (expediently), called living beings.” 须菩提，众生众生者，如来说非众生，是名众生。
If a value system or condition is applied to love, then at where it rejects there is hatred. Partial love creates division, separation, the problems at home and in the world. And when you choose to only love the heaven and high, you really magnified that dislike towards what is not with an atomic explosive level of energy. You’d go on crusades.
But love is all-encompassing. The wholeness, is the eternity. The cosmic egg, is both in space and time, spacetime. Time is a feature of the fabric of space — known to the conscious mind of physics today.
Reaching high and shunning the low and ugly, is what creates the pendulum motion, which catches us constantly in the swing of “high and low”. — the low wants to be embraced, the trauma constantly reminds you it is there, externally, opening social wounds having billions of people saw women chained to a wall, the seer also feels the same unresolved wound in them. We never see things that is not part of us. We see things that relate to us. The relativity seems to be different on the appearance, a man, a woman, people in different countries or of different race relates to it differently, but down there closer to the inner world, the same thing. Liberty and Force.
There is a leash on the horse, the ego wants to tame the Spirit. The horse is fully aware of It, knows where to go, understands what the ego wants. The horse can walk with autocracy, run at liberty. For ego is a thing of the brain. Every life is aware of It. It’s in the subconsciousness of the whole, and not discussed in the language of the consciousness, where human now mostly tune to.
The horse stays in It — It being the serenity, the ocean of the consciousness of all. The horse is aware that it is not just a horse, this is a shell that he rents for a temporal stay. The eternity does not get expressed in the front-mind language like the actors in the theatre don’t break the third wall. It is the veil, between the awareness of It, and the human drama on stage.
Those who have their full attention in the story, get absorbed into the drama, survival instincts of ego. Ego will always be in a war to conquer because it does not encompass all. Its existence is of partial, of division, certainly the actors always act out of pronouncing right or wrong, others or me.
When I am working on my own internal healing, healing process of the same theme surge in the world, of a much larger scale, heavier magnitude. The trauma is not to be neglected. The shadow in the collective subconsciousness is to be shine light upon, just like in the personal story, we embrace the personal shadow by connecting to the eternal light. That light does not belong only to one soul, that shadow, reaching deeper, is never of an individual’s life. We connected to the divine light for all, the higher we reach, the wider the light shows you the ground it covers, and you see, there is no your story and their stories, it is It, morphing and evolving, bleeding, vomiting out toxins, in its many periodicals falls, it wants to be captured by the safe palm of light.
In the sinners’ or the self-destructive rebels many falls from heaven, it wants to be netted by the Wisdom of light, to know that his father is wise enough to understand his wrath. Each safe capture, manifest in the seen world, a development of the Wisdom. It shows the world, the wisdom is evolving too.
The higher you reach, the deeper and wider rotten root you see. Those who can see born with more light; those who feel the suffering of the social pain, is in tune with more awareness. We now have a responsibility to heal. To heal, is for personal evolution, and for the evolution of all.
From high, you look at it and say, hey, shadow, I see you, let me transform you, just like last time how I transformed my own, through observing it, through accepting it, fully aware of it exists, staring at it with bare transparency of the one spirit, not from a body-suit, not from a mind, or a heart of desire.
We do this, this time, with more seers who bear the light.
There was an apprentice who hesitated long enough on which tool she should pick up to reach enlightenment.
First she had to locate where the destination is.
Christians say it is above. Taoists say it is here within everything. Buddhists say it’s in the emptiness.
Then she needed to know the key.
Egyptians gave her a tree hanging with silent shining fruits; When the Egyptians lost their sound to name the fruits, the Jews preserved them with the sound of Hebrew; Christians marked a cross on the tree. Taoist say work on growing the fruits through breathing and simplification; Buddhists say through investigating your problems.
And every school has its language, prayers, glyphs, rituals, deities and splendid Kingdoms. At the orientations, the young students were given pamphlets written with brackets of brackets of information alluding to the unknown esoterics. No guarantee it is enlightenment sitting in the bracket.
She got a bad feeling that it is not her first lifetime tangled in this bafflement. When she was in 3rd grade, her father gave her a fable to recite for a school contest. The fable talked about a trapped fox who got a million methods but no way to get out. Way, path, Tao, is the same word in Chinese. That fox probably died while contemplating on which way to go.
She realized it is probably why she had failed at it last time and is here on earth again.
That fable suddenly shined like a white stone in the river of her memory, while she is stuck at the entrance of the Taoist’s way, the Yogi’s way, Buddhis’s way, and the Hermetic’s way again. All are splendid, all have shown wonder or magick, each differently. Hesitating, she remains in the cave, in fear of the practices may lead into different kingdoms.
The universe abhors her failing at the same spot every time, or her multiple life procrastination. It gives the classic initiation, suffering; it kicks her around, raises havoc in her life, no peace until she picks up one, any one.
Out of shock she grabbed the most convenient one and moved the step. Not the one by her lineage.
****
#
From drowning in the suffering to moving towards the cave door, this is how it went.
First, there was pain. Virtue and evil coexist in her. Sometimes she understands it’s her own responsibility, sometimes she blames those who gave her life and lessons.
From the abyss she asks,
“Why was I born here on earth, half-aware and half-blind? I followed and practiced after you for the past six lives. What did I do to be cast into the most unilluminated world of all? I looked into fellow humans’ hearts and minds, it was pitch dark with rare sparks of light and compassion….”
In the storm she asks,
“What karma brought me here? ”
She knew she must have messed something up to be dropped in the black box.
Some clarity sprinkled with some unilluminated darkness makes the pain really sensible, highly. She asks why the universe chooses her to bear so much darkness projected from “others'” darkness and the pain inflicted by “others'” numbness. For she did not recall committing unforgivable sins. How is someone mostly kind and good deserving the most pain?
Even when the “external” disasters stopped, in a seemingly peaceful life she still was thrown off by the wind cuts. Whenever she saw shadows in others, she aches for there are impurities in human hearts.
She prayed to merge with Tao. “Please teach me how to fly in Mundi.” she asked. It was the way she knew to ascend and leave earth.
Her teacher said nothing but asked her to peel the onion.
She peels the onion; it was so pungent, her tear came down. It reminds her of all the suffering on the face of the earth she and others went through.
“From where does the pain come from?” The teacher asked.
“In my heart, for the shadow shrouding this earth.” She wept.
“‘My heart’ is an illusion. The shroud is an illusion.” the teacher said.
“How many more incarnations until I start climbing up the ladder of ascension?” She asked.
“Tao is not up, down or in the left, or right. ” the teacher said.
“I can’t bear with the suffering for any longer. “
“What suffering?”
“The vicious saw me and tread me with humiliation and shame; They are hurt at the sight of my light and I am hurt at the sight of their darkness. “
“The opposite is also in you still.” the teacher says.
“They shred me into pieces but I can’t harm. How do you handle this? Do I lack a tool? Tell me please, which school of practice solves this problem and sends me into ascension faster? Taoist, Buddism, Yoga, or Kabbalah? “
“Just peel the onion.” Her teacher said, “and don’t forget courage, courage out of compassion.”
#
Thus she heard.
Get to know the Onion.
Thus she heard, when she was lying on the acupuncturist’s clinic bed, after causing two modern therapists sad and at a loss of what to do:
“My teacher said, it is here and not here.” The acupuncturist twisted the needles under her skin, “You can feel it, right?” sending the thin river of Chi currents flowing down that path. The healer showed to her the first layer of the onion.
Thus she heard, from ancient Taoists coming before her, the type of breathing that generates the energy is there and not there, formless and soundless. The gems and elixir they left in the poems and music notes led her to peel the first layer of the onion.
Thus she heard, from Surangama Sutra, Ananda asked Buddha if the awareness is in the body or outside of the body. Buddha denied him twice. Buddha did not say what it is, he just kept peeling off for him what is not. “Not in the body, nor outside of the body.” For polarity is a misunderstanding. They are one, here and now.
Gate to Shangrila, Way to the Garden Paradise of Dilmun, All the best things, here and not here.
Once she had a peek at the core layer, she stopped crying.
The cloud opened; the sky is like a hand holding and pouring down iridescent light.
The light is the champagne, and she is the living glass.
Her internal layers flipped outside and were shown in nature. The internal and external became interactive. It has always been. The waving tree; under the moon, the cat and the fantastical rodent walking on the same fence; the greeting passerby; people speaking her mind; She meets what she wants. The balance reached the nature and living beings in that neighborhood. The world she lives in encompasses all, layers upon layers like the onion. The virtue and purified humanity she wanted for all is in here. There is nothing to correct. It was her. At that moment in that vicinity, there and then, it was all good.
Tao is right here, in her and everything, in the middle. How do you tell people where “middle” is? At that moment she is grateful that humans are born symmetrical — some odd questions she had about creation and anatomy. Otherwise, how would you describe to someone who hasn’t opened the onion where to find Tao, something metaphysical shown in the physical.
Like lost travelers asking where is the road sign to heaven? Like that song, From her to eternity — Enter through desire, walk towards the mountain Mashu. The road will be less bumpy, and we will be less obsessed. We glide smoothly.
Or magicians who weave magical fantasies, from looking within to the middle and act outside in the middle. Virtue is where we arrive. That most worldly, mundane Confucious scripture left untouched, whose light seemed dulled by all the book of gods and grimoires, describes how we live eventually, naturally, towards Mt. Mashu.
西山暮霭 董其昌
The destination is here and not here, so soften up. Do not obsess.
Where is Tao? You can trust that it is in the “middle”, not just in your body because you and the world are one. Breath, down and up the middle, until there is no breath. From Nihara 止息 you enter Upasana 寂灭生死. Breath is the motion of the pendulum, through ceasing it, you escape the door of life and death, float above the illusion of the theatre, like that Hermit in Crowley’s tarot card. Act, between compassion and valor. Live, in silence. What does silence have to do with the middle path?
She learned that the shadow triggers and cuts her heart because some of it is still in her.
From then on she rests in silence. Of a pair of contradictions, had the opposite statement isn’t in her, she wouldn’t be debating it in her mind. Had she not been debating, she wouldn’t be talking. Listen to the words said, but hear their opposite ends. What is hidden is true. If she is hurt by the darkness in others, if others “shown” evil hurt her, aka their dark values contradicted with hers, eliminate her hidden evil first. Out of compassion, feel the mighty braveness. Filled with mighty, she sits still, does not fight. — it fits Laozi’s description of Tao.
Then she saw her past trajectories, back 10 years, 20 years, a life time, many life times, she was dancing erratically around Tao. Tao is there like a verticle middle line. Her dances deviated, but never left it, intersected with it here and there, yet to merge with it. It was beautiful.
Life on earth, appeared to be unenlightened and avarice, it encompasses Tao and everything in between. It is beautiful. Diversity makes beauty.
No one threw her here as a punishment. She is here because she desired it, because she is yet to understand how to enjoy life without desires. Suffering and drama came after desires. There is something masochism about reincarnation as a human. All pain is self-inflicted by desires. And we asked for it.
From the Taoist classic, The Secret of the Golden Flower: “The seven souls generate desires; the Spirit wants nothing more. The souls are Yin. The Spirit is Yang. The souls want death; at the underworld they eat fleshes and drink blood; The Spirit wants to live …. kill the souls and retain/rule with the spirit.”
We asked for the deadly erratic dance. Our heart and the souls were moved, hence we are here.
Her teacher gave her a mirror with a cross on it. He said, everyday before you walk out, place your body in that cross, so you are in the middle; then walk, between courage and compassion. which Buddhism calls, Vajra and Bodhisattva; which the west called Mars and Jupiter; which Laozi called Valour and Compassion.
Then she thought, the reversed cross given to a devil must be the opposite of that pair. His is Fear and Greed. But his is also part of IT. She does not hate or fear the devil anymore, for she saw him standing at a checkpoint of a layer of the onion, guarding polarity, the law of matter, and one feature of matter, time.
How to be at ease with him? Do not drive by deadly desires, that energize the erratic dance.
Though she doesn’t know what is a true will and how to power life with it yet. The pamphlet at the orientation said nothing with lots of words: words, the sealed containers only allude to but empty of meanings. She trusted the ancient Wiseman to keep walking a path.
— for all the beings who are sensing the suffering, which are the beads on the rosary of transformation.
The circuit breaks from last March were shocking. It is crucial to understand Covid was merely a catalyst to the economical downturn. As I listen to this interview from last year more, I felt that we are living in absolute madness — how the economy runs makes sense, but for the worst reasons.
InnerVision #2: with Qi’ao Wang, partner at DeFi Alliance, and Leo Zhang, founder of Anicca Rsearch.
0:53: Qiao: this isn’t 1929. Fed reacted fast, yet Congress has not done a good job. QE infinity was “ridiculous’.
3:07: Recap of Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, and the new model, Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT.
5:56: The real reasons for an inevitable Crash — before Covid, the debt level.
8:06: When U.S. expands inflation before WWII, Germany was the epicenter, US was not.
9:09: The Reserve Currency Status gives the exorbitant privilege, which prevents the dollar from debasing — as long as there is demand.
10:53: But inflation will come in the next few decades under an irresponsible monetary policy.
13:02: retail investors around March last year pumped the market using Robinhood.
17:07: Stock Buybacks: Pros and Cons, and why has it become THE Drive for the economy in today’s market — lack of investible tech break-throughs. “Corporate buybacks makes 90% of stock inflows over the last decade.”
20:47: the Moral Hazard of Low-Interest Rate environment — too much capital too easy, yet the opportunities to invest were limited.
22:19: Leo Zhang: the crypto ICO bubble in 2017 could be a by-product of this overly abundant capital inflow. the initial misalignment of VC’s expectation of the crypto projects and where blockchain really is in its development phase. misalignment of incentives from the big corporation’s CEOs: their bonus is tied to the Earnings Per Share of the company’s stock.
26:35: I take back what I said here about IBM’s AI research after checking out what IBM-Q is about.
“New methods change the experience, and new experiences change a man. Whenever we hear sounds, we are changed, we are no longer the same, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds; music.” — Karlheinz STOCKHAUSEN
Buchla and Eventide synthesizers send resounding echos from tunnels in the space.
Drumbeats rains down like fluid life.
Electronic drum machine occasionally blasts violent and enticing beats like hell opens a dancing floor.
And there’s mellow guitar and loop.
From nine to twelve in the night on the 26th and 27th, Stockhausen is there with the band on stage, spiritually.
Along with his controversy, level of acceptance among reviewers. And he should be happy, for he is not the only person that felt lonely musically and intellectually that day. There are three more. And together they are happy.
The Atlanta based band Poème électronique evoked their muses, Edgard Varèse, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, in a ritual at the beginning of the performance, continuing the forefathers’ style that opened up the music space since last century — music as living matter, and that includes organized noises.
Two weeks ago in North Carolina, techno and electronic musicians from around the globe flocked to 21 Theatre, downtown Durham, displayed their performance for Moogfest — the convergence of art, tech, and music, like art installations in a museum.
Poème électronique is orchestrated as a serious modern symphony with electronic sounds made by rare synthesizers, master level percussion, and human voicing over passages on quantum physics, the historical truth of religion and occult, electric waves in biology, and music theories — everything blended within the same realm — playing with waves.
The trio of band members: Dr. Marlow Forbin in Quantum Physics, also an open source pioneer, Archer Norton, an underground techno musician that worked with Lady Gaga, Professor Stuart Gerber from Georgia State University School all have profound understanding in at least two of the fields mentioned above.
People have often thought that the Poème électronique is a music band, and the ritual is part of their music elements. Some went on to their website, where Forbin uploaded eleven chapters of his preaching in the interdisciplinary of science and magick, in Bible style. They think it’s cool as a form of art.
Forbin considers the music part of the ritual, or the science, art, and magick are talking about the same thing.
In the beginning, they came close to the audience, have all breath together. They let the sound of the om, ah, ou, vom vibrating through their throats while placing the gestures of the four original universe-creating force up and down their chakras. Then they placed a horn sign in front of their forehead, and roar out an earth-shattering ”ahhhhh” with wrath.
The next step is different than the summoning ritual two years ago. After two years since they evoked the chaos goddess Eris/ Kali, who threw a golden apple to the Olympus banquet and caused the Trojan war, today they bring it to a closure, by drawing the pentagons reversely in the air, while calling the deities’ and must musicians’/scientists’ names.
In Poème électronique there is no melody. Archer Norton plays the drum machine, a panel with engineered percussion sounds built in, and a line of buttons to set where in time you want to play the beats.
Gerber plays real percussion, a drum set, and all kinds of little gears.
Forbin plays synthesizer, which gives the only constant never-ending low howling sound.
Sheba plays guitar and loop in a subtle way.
Nelzby likes his tempo set from the first button on the beat timeline. “This is my one.” he used to say. From there he builds a set of beats based on “one, two, three, four” that don’t go wrong. Nothing is tilting.
Professor Stuart Gerber from Georgia State University School of Music likes sound experiments. The beats express free forms, and are precisely executed. He is not limited by genre. By throwing away the confinement of certain genres, he obtains the essence, the Tao. As the old saying goes, take the fish and forget about the basket. In the sounds, there is the conceptual, abstraction of everything dynamic — the ebb and flow, the piling and disappearing of sand hills, thoughts, of life, events — pulled by the law of force into formation and decomposition.
When Archer kicks in, it’s interactive, violent dance beats. When the professor pronounces, he does so in solitary, and people also watch it like seeing a painting in the gallery.
When the two talks, it is the golden arches of the two-hour flow. The professor’s off beats balance Archer ’s on beats. Avant-Garde interlocks with punk rock. Stuart adds contemporary high art to Archer’s killer enticing tempos.
Forbin’s synth sets the base tone of the flow like Esther to dreams. The synth creates a dark, resounding echoing tunnel. It separates this band from other airy atmosphere bands. When Forbin‘s horn blows bellowing winds, at afar in that deserted other world, Gerber’s bells ring like a Japanese pagoda, spiritual and haunting.
When the synth player triggered timbre, Gerber picked it up in no time and exploded the drumset like a box of ignited black gunpowder.
In fact, three of them are so distinct and strongly expressive in their own way, they were holding the music from three poles like a triangle field. The tension is strong. The synth sets the space in which the percussion sail.
It sails as a spaceship in its outer-space journey alone.
This is clear because Archer would play differently by himself, tri-pop mostly.
The sounds of Poème électronique comes from the original force. It’s primitive, non-picturesque, non-romantic. The resonating trance-inducing dark synth, the natural form of drum reminds me of Hang Gai, a rock band from Inner Mongolia. Hang Gai sings about the cycle of life on the grassland. Their huge drums remind one of shamanistic tribal ritual music. Poème électronique is ritual music. The mission of shifting the state of mind of the listeners plays a key component to the music.
Pairing with Forbin’s idea that the sums of waves create butterfly effect with their minor ripples, which change minds, and as a result, change the collective reality, it appears to me so that the whole thing is a ritual.
At the last step, they repeated the breathing, pentagon drawing and names chanting again, ending it with a laugh. Forbin turned back to the stage, blew off the white bucket Diptyque candle.
After all the heavy gears are pack and reloaded back to the car, Forbin, Archer , and Gerber stood in a circle reviewing the show.
Archer said, “We definitely changed some minds tonight.”
Forbin nodded. That’s the real evaluation standard for them.
Maybe that’s why Archer didn’t find much opportunity to speak in the music jam. The music is not musically enough, not audience-engaging enough for him. For Archer, music and community power is his magick. The relation of set and subset here between music and magick seems different between the duo magicians.
Archer has stated that he came from another school of magick, where he thinks the old school rituals are completely irrelevant, and all you need to do is live by his two principles: Art Harder; Be Excellent to Each Other.
* * *
After twelve o’clock, streets in downtown Durham is as empty as a bachelor’s closet. The band members were sitting outside of their hotel bar discussing whether the long murky dreamy state of their flow has driven people away — but, most likely it may have just been Stockhausen’s spirit. A happy woman named Mrs. Bigs spoke to them.
She told a beautiful story about how drums in a village came to her, at the time, when she was standing in the mountain. The drums served a purpose for social activities and she knows vividly what stories each tempo were telling.
She then voiced the confusion that, after writing seven to eight stories she had finished none. At the time, I told her “maybe you are writing the same characters/story. Loop them into one. ” “you are thinking.” Given a second chance, I would tell her to jog down what came to her in a flash of thoughts as fast as possible.
Her speed of growth outpaced her speed of writing. She can’t lock down, and ever be happy with a resolution for her past story, because she outgrew her past understandings. Some writers do feel odd reading their past work on paper. The desire to capture everything there is to life has bound our foot.
That’s the paradox of art creation in written forms. How can you orchestrate anything down on a paper, when both your internal and external are ever changing?
You, as a traveling spot on a rope, rippling out waves towards both ends as you travel, looking back and forward on this waving rope, the story looks different to you every second. Moreover, the future, and (the understanding of) the past interchange each other.
To capture all these paths, you are drawing a flying spaghetti.
For performing art they can improvise on the fly. A writer’s improv is the stream of consciousness style. One just leaves it to the passing of time as a music jam.
Either do that or just jog down what comes to you in one snapshot of the time, in one sitting. In that time captured in amber, there is everything and a resolution.
When two same waves overlay, they emit a small baby wave with the same function. That’s where we choose to stand. We can be the oracle of an all-encompassing, perfectly resolved story at any given point of time.
There is infinity within the micro. Reaching outside and attempting to gather everything — those images of Cthulhu, Medusa says a lot about that — someone trying to be God through reaching outside.
Chasing infinity in the forms (plots), will make the story an octopus; we want the story to be a fertilized egg, built with constraint but in itself there is infinity.
As I think about linear time is an illusion, I think of some episodes in my life. It comes to me that maybe the world takes the shape of a target ring, and when we are conscious, we are at the outer arch of it.
Nine realms, or in Taoism, 9+9+9+9 = 36 realms.
Each has its own fabric and laws.
An occurrence at any spot in the rings will show and be responded to in all realms. Some cases of this would be, prophecy dreams. A hunch helps you avoid an accident.
Or reversely: your emotional state at its hype creates some interesting outcome that gave you a sight of the real substance this world is built on, where there is no spacetime.
Imagine an incident happens next month, on the first ring, our plane, like a waterdrop. A wave rippling out, passing a door crack, still the same wave, into a different medium, still, the same wave, reaching the inner consciousness, so you know at the center, that happens. Time basically doesn’t apply at the center ring.
You always know the probability of every major emotional/spiritually meaningful event that is going to happen on the outer ring, where time does apply. Those are the strong waves. Those are the life mission/destiny.
The weaker waves create synchronicity. For example, I was pacing at the airport thinking about this chapter out, after I got it I walked to my gate, sat down in the vast empty seating area, typing. Someone came sat next to me, a quiet guy. We started chatting; turns out he was also here for Moog, and a techno musician. Then he taught me again about synthesizers and the illusion of brain perception. And going into the plane, his seat is next to mine.
And below is what we talked about.
* * *
More on information process and infinity
A techno musician engineers his sounds. By writing a wave function, and putting in the time span. The shorter the span, the more frequent the wave oscillates, the higher the pitch.
A Fourier synthesizer deals with complicated sounds from the real world. It picks up the sampling frame, and processes them into a coherent sound experience. A natural sound in real life would be difficult for the computer to decompose, for the sound can be split into infinite amounts of waves. As between two digits, there is infinity.
It decomposes the natural sound into a countable myriad of waves, and recomposes them back into a digital version of its lesser self. – one dimension down, less but enough pixels for the brain to make a coherent sense. Just like a projector shooting red, blue and yellow one at a time at the screen faster than the brain can catch it, though we can still see rainbows when we move our eyeballs.
The brain is a synthesizer.
Similarly, the perceived world is dimensions downgraded from the real world. It picks out the sampling frame and makes sense of it by forming a coherent linear experience.
In software, the wave is a string of 1 and 0 translated by the sound card. The wave also goes through different units for sound effects through a pipeline of sound production. In hardware those are modules. You can assemble your own synth by putting together modules of your choice. It comes from the earlier computer Analogue.
We create our own synthesizer. We create, break, then create our own cognitive machine, for experiencing and projecting a constantly evolving, hopefully expanding reality.
Romeo Stevens is a Buddhism practitioner in the Bay Area. With his interdisciplinary knowledge in neuroscience and spirituality, he has helped a lot of people in processing their long-overdue emotional blockage and helped them resolve the patterns, in a way, also called karma.
We found that it helps to process the emotions, in the right way, when they first surge. In an analogy to surfing the waves, the waves build momentums, the third one being the biggest out of the three. In another analogy to a debt crisis, the long-term one is built up from the smaller boom-bust cycles. And at the end is a de-leverage – with balance, it is a beautiful smooth de-leverage, without balance, it will go through some destroy and rebirth.
Wherever you are right now, we want you to know that this is not the end. The universe and the inner tranquility holds space, warmth, love, light, and hope. If you hit a floor, that’s not the bottom, it’s the bouncing floor for you to investigate. The investigation is a path to enlightenment.
Music by our great friend and an underground musician, Al Nesby.
Al’s music is real music, and that opened the world for me and made me believe that real art is live and kicking underground. I was getting numb and annoyed by the plastic sounds they call “music”, or once-great musicians repeating their old dead shell above ground.
Eighty percent of the time he isn’t recording what he or others jam. So there are 80% of the good music stream flowing away just like water.
Precious, like a golden river of fleeting but abundant life, but enraging, if you are the one who’s been playing wonder.
*Vocals originally written & performed by Stefan Molyneux, “The Story Of Your Enslavement”
The companies that today hire for marketing leads and value their seniority over their art talents missed the point. Marketing essentially is persuasion with visual and a voice playing in the deeper layer of the human mind — emotion, and it causes behavioral changes in the long run. The colors and words send the brains and hearts messages, reforming a profile in your mind associated with the company, which becomes the “brand”.
Like how literature and movie form emotions and people’s own imageries in their minds, marketing is art and magic but with a focused agenda.
Let’s just call it, mArgtketing. Pardon my German.
There are rules on colours, wordings and story angles applied to mArgketing milking your behavior changes without your knowledge.
But if I break all the rules and make beautiful work and have people subscribe just because they genuinely like it, that is art. And this is the new kind of mArgtketing I want to bring to businesses. I believe art smells like freedom and people would love it.
First, know the rule, and break the rule.
The first two questions any CEO needs to think about when they create their websites are: first, am I a B2B or a B2C company?Second, what is the story that I am anchoring on? –go back to the truthful, quintessential Me when I look at this problem with Anger and want to solve it.
When I was working at Tencent America, I noticed the company’s interesting struggle, the intriguing position they hold in transiting from this world’s most successful B2C company into fighting for a share in the B2B business. This is a side note: yes, B2B is the future. The next 5-10 years are about a few tech giants converting the real world onto the internet base layers, Cloud for IoT and the Banking System, and the top layer Applications follow suit.
They did it so well in the last ten years by dropping social media apps with fun aesthetics and engaging functions to end-users. But B2B is a different animal. Google Cloud Platform does not gain much money from individual users. It loses money to individual users in the first year of membership. It’s about winning the big corporation clients, through sales and connections. External marketing did not matter as they absolutely were everything in 2C business. Our only external marketing work was for conferences, where sales fish their clients. And ironically it was the compartmentalized internal teams that needed marketing — hard to get information fly in a behemoth when KPI goals from the development end and sales end are not exactly aligned. They hated the bugs but we needed the new products. (No offense. This is so common)
About the difference between the two business models in visual designs, check the foot bar of your computer, and see all the social media applications are all using bright colours. The ones in the information business are using blue, light blue: Twitter, Telegram, Word, Messenger, MSN, Internet Explorer.
Here is some free colour psychology for tech entrepreneurs reading this, Blue is the color for knowledge, Message, which extends to today’s world, are tech and information. I can’t prove it to you here whether it’s insidious knowledge built-in in our consciousness or it’s a reflex from ad blasts living a social life too long. It’s both. It’s known archaic knowledge used for a gain in the mass communication department. The human brain unconsciously picks this up, without you saying a word.
As I write this I look at Wechat. What is bubbly dwarfHulk doing here mixed in with the Smurfs? Then I remembered the talk we had in the company. it’s all about the mini-programs. It’s the Chinese version of the big you-know-who. It’s a marketplace, which brings us to, money.
The colourGreen is for money and art — Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, dollars, Robinhood, Douban, Spotify. The difference being, the Shade of the colours gives the brand a personality. Grass green or Teal makes all the personality differences — the invention of which depends on who your customers are.
So colour brings out the role/functionality and shade brings out the personality.
It is interesting to see this colour theory plays out unconsciously when I was working at Tencent, the young Cloud team, which consider themselves a Startup in the Bay with two footholds in Palo Alto and Cleremont, trying to figure things out. They were using a bright popping blue, the QQ blue on a massive scale on their website. It’s not a good idea for a B2B company. It was the 2C thinking. I noticed today that they changed it into a deeper greyer shade of blue. That was the reliable decision.
Now, about the Shades of the colour. Here is the gist. If you want your customers to like you and play with you, if you provide FUN, choose a bright shade. — That is all the social media and gamified apps. But if you want your costumers to trust you with their money, their life, and rely on you, if you provide a SOLUTION and want to show establishment and authority, choose a dull middle-aged man shade of the color (however my grandfather is the most humorous person in my family by the way), — this used to be Fidelity (but it looked so old. they changed it too), and this should be used by most finance-related Big institutional-like companies. Can you imagine your bank turn into the bubbly Robinhood green?
Next, on to why using popping bright colour over a large scale on your website isn’t a good idea. The readers lose their focus. But you want to guide them to focus on your Subscription button isn’t it. The large scale neon color makes that area popping out visually like floating on the surface. You can’t read the words on it, and it’s way too exciting to be taken seriously. You want to be taken seriously and pop the most important information. So, dull/mute the background elegantly, and save the bright one for the buttons, with a contrast/opposite colour from the palette (a concept you learn in art classes) — they make harmony. I want to show good and bad examples but I don’t want to make enemies or advertise for free.
And about Shapes. Twitter is a bird put together by all perfect circular lines. All the lines in that logo, are a section of a perfect circle. It feels harmonious. Linkedin however, is as squarish as you want a professional to be, as the word “square” describes the type of personality in English.
Lastly, the Story. The story is the voice of the company and the CEO. This is art on a new abstract level. I spend my life extracting the stories out of clueless chaos. First, you have to listen to the social sentiment, the voice of the world, then hear the voice in you, and when they converge, you have an exploding marketing effect.
The importance of storytelling? It’s been larger than the actual tech. It hasn’t been the tech that’s driving an economical growth in this cycle; It was the Silicon Valley Storytellings that drove our income growth and the past stock boom.
A painful deleverage process we are in right now because of this. Good luck America.
Want to do some good with this Power of stories? We absolutely Can and attract Revenue at the same time. The Good Artists vs. Bad Artists game is everywhere. This consumerism-driving, compulsive-behavior-enticing field needs to Breathe. It needs Real Art to fill it up and Rock it.
Someone needs to Care for and Listen to the End User Human Beings when Their Choice as a Consumer is No Longer Needed for the big Revenue. (I’m going to write another article about how the machine grew so huge and it now owns most of us.) Sense the danger here.
Fuck Edward Bernays.
Bring on Debussy, Banksy, Dolores O’Riordan, Handel, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte. And bring all the underground artists musicians above ground, with a revenue — the ones that are chased off the grid by gentrification and governing. They are the songs of our hearts and soul. Stop withering.
