To a global, virtual, free, open, {future degree- & credit-granting}, multilingual University & School for the developing world and everyone, as well as loving bliss ~ scottmacleod.com
"Affordable Gene Therapies are coming-#GeorgeChurch at EARD" but #ExtremeLongevity is hard to plan for; Harvard & MA could help, so could #MITOCW-centric wiki @WorldUnivAndSch in CA as Harvard in 200 countries & in GROWING #WUaSabolition movement worldwide
"Affordable Gene Therapies are coming-#GeorgeChurch at EARD"
but #ExtremeLongevity is hard to plan for; Harvard & MA could help, so could #MITOCW-centric wiki @WorldUnivAndSch in CA as Harvard in 200 countries & in GROWING #WUaSabolition movement worldwide
but #ExtremeLongevity is hard to plan for; @Harvard & MA could help, so could #MITOCW-centric wiki @WorldUnivAndSch in CA as #HarvardU in 200 countries & in GROWING #WUaSabolition movement worldwide
Harbin is very un-really real - a kind of 'magical realism' has arisen here – and in Northern California. There are a lot of long-haired folks here, all living quite fully, especially when they get here. And if Harbin didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it. And Harbin kind of lives itself. No one is in charge, in a sense, and it's very self-regulating, in a Taoist sense. Some dramas unfold here between the residents and visitors, among residents and among guests. And lots is said and thought – some negative - about how Harbin is changing, and what goes on here. But people just keep coming through the gate, each on their own trip, and all varied, which kind of balances out and puts into perspective some of the dramas here, as well as life.
Harbin's virtualness emerges in peoples' minds, through a kind of shared experience, shared vision (culture?), and perhaps shared neurophysiology. This informs a lot of different experiences.
Words
To “Harbinize” – after soaking in the pools, - coming in touch with a kind of harmony, happiness and relaxed space, that is in sync with the fabric of Harbin. This stems directly from the oneness - the unique relaxation response (my language) - that the pools give rise to.
Obviously all the work would go into specifying and elaborating what care of self might be in this context.
One rather quick thought is this. Care of self for Foucault is expressed in the figure of Socrates, Socrates as a midwife of self-care, a teacher of self-care, and a philosophical provocation to self-care.
So in an open virtual world self-care might take the form of practical engagements between a wise lover of self-care and a beginning student of self-care. Indeed a virtual hot springs, while interesting, would be a rather desolate place were it not a site for some sort of interaction and engagement. I wonder if that resonates with your experience at Harbin? Why travel all the distance to Harbin when you have a hot bath tub and salts in the other room? It must have something to do with, among other things, the social milieu of the place and the forms of self-care that are socially established and extended there. Perhaps?
I have such an enormous baggage of reservations about Socrates from my reactions against a certain philosophical establishment that it's hard for me to know what to think of this. But when I can find the courage to read Foucault as trying to rescue Socrates from a certain interpretation of him that has been leveraged by contemporary professionalized philosophy then this all seems easier.
By the way, on open source the thing to cite is certainly not the preliminary study we did at Berkeley last year but rather Chris Kelt's Two Bits.
By David Marchese Photo illustration by Bráulio Amado
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It’s no secret — even if it hasn’t yet been clearly or widely articulated — that our lives and our data are increasingly intertwined, almost indistinguishable. To be able to function in modern society is to submit to demands for ID numbers, for financial information, for filling out digital fields and drop-down boxes with our demographic details. Such submission, in all senses of the word, can push our lives in very particular and often troubling directions. It’s only recently, though, that I’ve seen someone try to work through the deeper implications of what happens when our data — and the formats it’s required to fit — become an inextricable part of our existence, like a new limb or organ to which we must adapt. ‘‘I don’t want to claim we are only data and nothing but data,’’ says Colin Koopman, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon and the author of ‘‘How We Became Our Data.’’ ‘‘My claim is you are your data, too.’’ Which at the very least means we should be thinking about this transformation beyond the most obvious data-security concerns. ‘‘We’re strikingly lackadaisical,’’ says Koopman, who is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled ‘‘Data Equals,’’ ‘‘about how much attention we give to: What are these data showing? What assumptions are built into configuring data in a given way? What inequalities are baked into these data systems? We need to be doing more work on this.’’
Can you explain more what it means to say that we have become our data? Because a natural reaction to that might be, well, no, I’m my mind, I’m my body, I’m not numbers in a database — even if I understand that those numbers in that database have real bearing on my life. The claim that we are data can also be taken as a claim that we live our lives through our data in addition to living our lives through our bodies, through our minds, through whatever else. I like to take a historical perspective on this. If you wind the clock back a couple hundred years or go to certain communities, the pushback wouldn’t be, ‘‘I’m my body,’’ the pushback would be, ‘‘I’m my soul.’’ We have these evolving perceptions of our self. I don’t want to deny anybody that, yeah, you are your soul. My claim is that your data has become something that is increasingly inescapable and certainly inescapable in the sense of being obligatory for your average person living out their life. There’s so much of our lives that are woven through or made possible by various data points that we accumulate around ourselves — and that’s interesting and concerning. It now becomes possible to say: ‘‘These data points are essential to who I am. I need to tend to them, and I feel overwhelmed by them. I feel like it’s being manipulated beyond my control.’’ A lot of people have that relationship to their credit score, for example. It’s both very important to them and very mysterious.
When it comes to something like our credit scores, I think most of us can understand on a basic level that, yes, it’s weird and troubling that we don’t have clear ideas about how our personal data is used to generate those scores, and that unease is made worse by the fact that those scores then limit what we can and can’t do. But what does the use of our data in that way in the first place suggest, in the biggest possible sense, about our place in society? The informational sides of ourselves clarify that we are vulnerable. Vulnerable in the sense of being exposed to big, impersonal systems or systemic fluctuations. To draw a parallel: I may have this sense that if I go jogging and take my vitamins and eat healthy, my body’s going to be good. But then there’s this pandemic, and we realize that we’re actually supervulnerable. The control that I have over my body? That’s actually not my control. That was a set of social structures.1 So with respect to data, we see that structure set up in a way where people have a cleaner view of that vulnerability. We’re in this position of, I’m taking my best guess how to optimize my credit score or, if I own a small business, how to optimize my search-engine ranking. We’re simultaneously loading more and more of our lives into these systems and feeling that we have little to no control or understanding of how these systems work. It creates a big democratic deficit. It undermines our sense of our own ability to engage democratically in some of the basic terms through which we’re living with others in society. A lot of that is not an effect of the technologies themselves. A lot of it is the ways in which our culture tends to want to think of technology, especially information technology, as this glistening, exciting thing, and its importance is premised on its being beyond your comprehension. But I think there’s a lot we can come to terms with concerning, say, a database into which we’ve been loaded. I can be involved in a debate about whether a database should store data on a person’s race. That’s a question we can see ourselves democratically engaging in.
Colin Koopman giving a lecture at Oregon State University in 2013. Oregon State University
But it’s almost impossible to function in the world without participating in these data systems that we’re told are mandatory. It’s not as if we can just opt out. So what’s the way forward? There’s two basic paths that I see. One is what I’ll call the liberties or freedoms or rights path. Which is a concern with, How are these data systems proscribing my freedoms? It’s something we ought to be attentive to, but it’s easy to lose sight of another question that I take to be as important. This is the question of equality and the implications of these data systems’ being obligatory. Any time something is obligatory, that becomes a terrain for potential inequality. We see this in the case of racial inequality a hundred years ago, where you get profound impacts through things like redlining. Some people were systematically locked out because of these data systems. You see that happening in domain after domain. You get these data systems that load people in, but it’s clear there wasn’t sufficient care taken for the unequal effects of this datafication.
But what do we do about it? We need to realize there’s debate to be had about what equality means and what equality requires. The good news, to the extent that there is, about the evolution of democracy over the 20th century is you get the extension of this basic commitment to equality to more and more domains. Data is one more space where we need that attention to and cultivation of equality. We’ve lost sight of that. We’re still in this wild west, highly unregulated terrain where inequality is just piling up.
I’m still not quite seeing what the alternative is. I mean, we live in an interconnected world of billions of people. So isn’t it necessarily the case that there have to be collection and flows and formatting of personal information that we’re not going to be fully aware of or understand? How could the world operate otherwise? What we need is not strikingly new: Industrialized liberal democracies have a decent track record at putting in place policies, regulations and laws that guide the development and use of highly specialized technologies. Think of all the F.D.A. regulations around the development and delivery of pharmaceuticals. I don’t see anything about data technology that breaks the model of administrative state governance. The problem is basically a tractable one. I also think this is why it’s important to understand that there are two basic components to a data system. There’s the algorithm, and there are the formats, or what computer scientists call the data structures. The algorithms feel pretty intractable. People could go and learn about them or teach themselves to code, but you don’t even have to go to that level of expertise to get inside formatting. There are examples that are pretty clear: You’re signing into some new social-media account or website, and you’ve got to put in personal information about yourself, and there’s a gender drop-down. Does this drop-down say male-female, or does it have a wider range of categories? There’s a lot to think about with respect to a gender drop-down. Should there be some regulations or guidance around use of gender data in K-12 education? Might those regulations look different in higher education? Might they look different in medical settings? That basic regulatory approach is a valuable one, but we’ve run up against the wall of unbridled data acquisition by these huge corporations. They’ve set up this model of, You don’t understand what we do, but trust us that you need us, and we’re going to vacuum up all your data in the process. These companies have really evaded regulation for a while.
Where do you see the most significant personal-data inequalities playing out right now? In the literature on algorithmic bias, there’s a host of examples: facial-recognition software misclassifying Black faces,2 cases in medical informatics A.I. systems.3 These cases are clear-cut, but the problem is they’re all one-offs. The challenge that we need to meet is how do we develop a broader regulatory framework around this? How do we get a more principled approach so that we’re not playing whack-a-mole with issues of algorithmic bias? The way the mole gets whacked now is that whatever company developed a problematic system just kind of turns it off and then apologizes — taking cues from Mark Zuckerberg and all the infinite ways he’s mucked things up and then squeaks out with this very sincere apology.4 All the talk about this now tends to focus on ‘‘algorithmic fairness.’’ The spirit is there, but a focus on algorithms is too narrow, and a focus on fairness is also too narrow. You also have to consider what I would call openness of opportunity.
Which means what in this context? To try to illustrate this: You can have a procedurally fair system that does not take into account different opportunities that differently situated individuals coming into the system might have. Think about a mortgage-lending algorithm. Or another example is a court. Different people come in differently situated with different opportunities by virtue of social location, background, history. If you have a system that’s procedurally fair in the sense of, We’re not going to make any of the existing inequalities any worse, that’s not enough. A fuller approach would be reparative with respect to the ongoing reproduction of historical inequalities. Those would be systems that would take into account ways in which people are differently situated and what we can do to create a more equal playing field while maintaining procedural fairness. Algorithmic fairness swallows up all the airtime,5 but it’s not getting at those deeper problems. I think a lot of this focus on algorithms is coming out of think tanks and research institutes that are funded by or started up by some of these Big Tech corporations. Imagine if the leading research in environmental regulation or energy policy were coming out of think tanks funded by Big Oil? People ought to be like, If Microsoft is funding this think tank that is supposed to be providing guidance for Big Tech,6 shouldn’t we be skeptical? It ought to be scandalous. That’s kind of a long, winding answer. But that’s what you get when you talk to a philosophy professor!
Opening illustration: Source photograph from Colin Koopman.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Emma Chamberlain about leaving YouTube, Walter Mosley about a dumber America and Cal Newport about a new way to work.
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By David MarchesePhoto illustration by Bráulio Amado
It’s no secret — even if it hasn’t yet been clearly or widely articulated — that our lives and our data are increasingly intertwined, almost indistinguishable. To be able to function in modern society is to submit to demands for ID numbers, for financial information, for filling out digital fields and drop-down boxes with our demographic details. Such submission, in all senses of the word, can push our lives in very particular and often troubling directions. It’s only recently, though, that I’ve seen someone try to work through the deeper implications of what happens when our data — and the formats it’s required to fit — become an inextricable part of our existence, like a new limb or organ to which we must adapt. ‘‘I don’t want to claim we are only data and nothing but data,’’ says Colin Koopman, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon and the author of ‘‘How We Became Our Data.’’ ‘‘My claim is you are your data, too.’’ Which at the very least means we should be thinking about this transformation beyond the most obvious data-security concerns. ‘‘We’re strikingly lackadaisical,’’ says Koopman, who is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled ‘‘Data Equals,’’ ‘‘about how much attention we give to: What are these data showing? What assumptions are built into configuring data in a given way? What inequalities are baked into these data systems? We need to be doing more work on this.’’
Can you explain more what it means to say that we have become our data? Because a natural reaction to that might be, well, no, I’m my mind, I’m my body, I’m not numbers in a database — even if I understand that those numbers in that database have real bearing on my life. The claim that we are data can also be taken as a claim that we live our lives through our data in addition to living our lives through our bodies, through our minds, through whatever else. I like to take a historical perspective on this. If you wind the clock back a couple hundred years or go to certain communities, the pushback wouldn’t be, ‘‘I’m my body,’’ the pushback would be, ‘‘I’m my soul.’’ We have these evolving perceptions of our self. I don’t want to deny anybody that, yeah, you are your soul. My claim is that your data has become something that is increasingly inescapable and certainly inescapable in the sense of being obligatory for your average person living out their life. There’s so much of our lives that are woven through or made possible by various data points that we accumulate around ourselves — and that’s interesting and concerning. It now becomes possible to say: ‘‘These data points are essential to who I am. I need to tend to them, and I feel overwhelmed by them. I feel like it’s being manipulated beyond my control.’’ A lot of people have that relationship to their credit score, for example. It’s both very important to them and very mysterious.
When it comes to something like our credit scores, I think most of us can understand on a basic level that, yes, it’s weird and troubling that we don’t have clear ideas about how our personal data is used to generate those scores, and that unease is made worse by the fact that those scores then limit what we can and can’t do. But what does the use of our data in that way in the first place suggest, in the biggest possible sense, about our place in society? The informational sides of ourselves clarify that we are vulnerable. Vulnerable in the sense of being exposed to big, impersonal systems or systemic fluctuations. To draw a parallel: I may have this sense that if I go jogging and take my vitamins and eat healthy, my body’s going to be good. But then there’s this pandemic, and we realize that we’re actually supervulnerable. The control that I have over my body? That’s actually not my control. That was
So with respect to data, we see that structure set up in a way where people have a cleaner view of that vulnerability. We’re in this position of, I’m taking my best guess how to optimize my credit score or, if I own a small business, how to optimize my search-engine ranking. We’re simultaneously loading more and more of our lives into these systems and feeling that we have little to no control or understanding of how these systems work. It creates a big democratic deficit. It undermines our sense of our own ability to engage democratically in some of the basic terms through which we’re living with others in society. A lot of that is not an effect of the technologies themselves. A lot of it is the ways in which our culture tends to want to think of technology, especially information technology, as this glistening, exciting thing, and its importance is premised on its being beyond your comprehension. But I think there’s a lot we can come to terms with concerning, say, a database into which we’ve been loaded. I can be involved in a debate about whether a database should store data on a person’s race. That’s a question we can see ourselves democratically engaging in.
Colin Koopman giving a lecture at Oregon State University in 2013.Oregon State University
But it’s almost impossible to function in the world without participating in these data systems that we’re told are mandatory. It’s not as if we can just opt out. So what’s the way forward? There’s two basic paths that I see. One is what I’ll call the liberties or freedoms or rights path. Which is a concern with, How are these data systems proscribing my freedoms? It’s something we ought to be attentive to, but it’s easy to lose sight of another question that I take to be as important. This is the question of equality and the implications of these data systems’ being obligatory. Any time something is obligatory, that becomes a terrain for potential inequality. We see this in the case of racial inequality a hundred years ago, where you get profound impacts through things like redlining. Some people were systematically locked out because of these data systems. You see that happening in domain after domain. You get these data systems that load people in, but it’s clear there wasn’t sufficient care taken for the unequal effects of this datafication.
But what do we do about it? We need to realize there’s debate to be had about what equality means and what equality requires. The good news, to the extent that there is, about the evolution of democracy over the 20th century is you get the extension of this basic commitment to equality to more and more domains. Data is one more space where we need that attention to and cultivation of equality. We’ve lost sight of that. We’re still in this wild west, highly unregulated terrain where inequality is just piling up.
I’m still not quite seeing what the alternative is. I mean, we live in an interconnected world of billions of people. So isn’t it necessarily the case that there have to be collection and flows and formatting of personal information that we’re not going to be fully aware of or understand? How could the world operate otherwise? What we need is not strikingly new: Industrialized liberal democracies have a decent track record at putting in place policies, regulations and laws that guide the development and use of highly specialized technologies. Think of all the F.D.A. regulations around the development and delivery of pharmaceuticals. I don’t see anything about data technology that breaks the model of administrative state governance. The problem is basically a tractable one. I also think this is why it’s important to understand that there are two basic components to a data system. There’s the algorithm, and there are the formats, or what computer scientists call the data structures. The algorithms feel pretty intractable. People could go and learn about them or teach themselves to code, but you don’t even have to go to that level of expertise to get inside formatting. There are examples that are pretty clear: You’re signing into some new social-media account or website, and you’ve got to put in personal information about yourself, and there’s a gender drop-down. Does this drop-down say male-female, or does it have a wider range of categories? There’s a lot to think about with respect to a gender drop-down. Should there be some regulations or guidance around use of gender data in K-12 education? Might those regulations look different in higher education? Might they look different in medical settings? That basic regulatory approach is a valuable one, but we’ve run up against the wall of unbridled data acquisition by these huge corporations. They’ve set up this model of, You don’t understand what we do, but trust us that you need us, and we’re going to vacuum up all your data in the process. These companies have really evaded regulation for a while.
Where do you see the most significant personal-data inequalities playing out right now? In the literature on algorithmic bias, there’s a host of examples:
These cases are clear-cut, but the problem is they’re all one-offs. The challenge that we need to meet is how do we develop a broader regulatory framework around this? How do we get a more principled approach so that we’re not playing whack-a-mole with issues of algorithmic bias? The way the mole gets whacked now is that whatever company developed a problematic system just kind of turns it off and then apologizes — taking cues from Mark Zuckerberg and all the infinite ways he’s mucked things up and then
All the talk about this now tends to focus on ‘‘algorithmic fairness.’’ The spirit is there, but a focus on algorithms is too narrow, and a focus on fairness is also too narrow. You also have to consider what I would call openness of opportunity.
Which means what in this context? To try to illustrate this: You can have a procedurally fair system that does not take into account different opportunities that differently situated individuals coming into the system might have. Think about a mortgage-lending algorithm. Or another example is a court. Different people come in differently situated with different opportunities by virtue of social location, background, history. If you have a system that’s procedurally fair in the sense of, We’re not going to make any of the existing inequalities any worse, that’s not enough. A fuller approach would be reparative with respect to the ongoing reproduction of historical inequalities. Those would be systems that would take into account ways in which people are differently situated and what we can do to create a more equal playing field while maintaining procedural fairness.
but it’s not getting at those deeper problems. I think a lot of this focus on algorithms is coming out of think tanks and research institutes that are funded by or started up by some of these Big Tech corporations. Imagine if the leading research in environmental regulation or energy policy were coming out of think tanks funded by Big Oil? People ought to be like,
shouldn’t we be skeptical? It ought to be scandalous. That’s kind of a long, winding answer. But that’s what you get when you talk to a philosophy professor!
Opening illustration: Source photograph from Colin Koopman.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
Charan Ranganath: The neuroscientist and author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember” explains how to make precious moments last.
John Malkovich: The actor has played a million different parts during his decades-long career, but somehow they’re all defined by the John Malkovich style.
Andreas Malm: The climate activist established himself as a leading thinker of climate radicalism with his book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” Here is why he advocates political violence.
World University and School is sending you this because of your interest in free, online, higher education. If you don't want to receive these, please reply with 'unsubscribe' in the body of the email, leaving the subject line intact. Thank you.
* * *
Hunter Reynolds as contact at Harbin Hot Springs for Harbin ethnography 2 ?
Took a course or 2 at UC Boulder Colorado in early 1970s I think
Hippy minded
He's 'out there' & as a hippy astrologer
I don't think I mention him in "Naked Harbin Ethnography" 2016 ...
*
Mar 1, 2024, 3:24 AM (2 days ago)
to me
Styles of Awakening
Newsletter
Welcome to the March issue of Styles.
It's impossible to describe who we are. What we can say is that our psyches are edgeless and interpenetrating. We are "resonators of frequencies" and no sign knows this better than "AlphaWeep:" my newfangled name for Pisces and the focus of this month's Transit Update.
Is Japan on your Bucket List?
Would you like to have intimate access to an English speaking Japanese translator and deepen your trip with a tailor-made Astrodharma retreat or a two week chart-reading apprenticeship?
Introducing: Student-Traveler Retreats!
Starting this month, student-travelers will be arriving here in Bise, Okinawa and you could be one of them! Click here> for details.
Happy New Year!
In honor of the astrological New Year on March 19th , I present you with a special Equinox prayer and a dharma talk entitled, Losing our Knowability. Enjoy!
Are you (or is someone you know) an "AlphaWeep?" Good news: you qualify for a $50.00 Birthday Readingdiscount, if purchased and redeemed before April 1st. Reserve you spot asap!
We close this month with a dicey definition of "meditation." Someone had to say it!
RECENTLY, for the sake of my visiting apprenticeship students here in Okinawa, I've taken to rebranding the signs of the zodiac with names that more directly express their wound/gift predicament.
After months of dredging the depths of my psyche for soul-honoring soundbites, I've come up with 12 newfangled names that capture the enigmatic essence of each sign.
This being Pisces season, it is my honor to introduce you to "AlphaWeep."
The Essence of AlphaWeep
It's impossible to describe who we are. What we can say is that our psyches are edgeless and interpenetrating. We are "resonators of frequencies" and no sign knows this better than AlphaWeep.
AlphaWeep was born with the mandate to feel the collective fallout of Self-forgetting-- the normalized malaise and mean-spirited contraction of orphaned-ego-on-a-countdown. This endows them with high-caliber compassion and holy heartbreak.
The picture above presents a woman that some would call limp, defeated; bereft, perhaps, of any will to go on living due to being flattened by the collective suffering.
Others will see the inspiring symbol of a mind set free from compulsive "selfing."
Take a look at the image again.
Which view best describes you?
There's a fine line between ego-vacating transcendence and ego-friendly incandescence. AlphaWeep was born teetering on this tightrope.
Clearly, there a time for Aries will and there is a time for Pisces surrender and the genuinely meditative mind straddles doer-ship with boundless Being, striving for the optimal balance of both in each wildly fluctuating moment.
AlphaWeep (amused by this ridiculous assertion) moves in close to whisper:
Willful assertion and spacious flow are both acts of capitulation. Whichever we choose, we're acquiescing to the momentum of past karma or yielding to here/now nudges from the divine hand. Surrender is all there is.
Oh, thank God for AlphaWeep! She is the part of us that knows what astrology really is:
An archetypal handbook to flowing with the Tao.
It takes a soft, seaweed kind of hubris to practice our backstroke on the river of "separate somebodies" as we ooze, over lifetimes, into the ocean of Boundless Being. Perfecting this backstroke is AlphaWeep's one and only way to make sense of this place.
Note for fridge:
Security is the feeling of being well-used by a larger Will.
On to this month's transits...
__________________________________
"Strategy Staging"
Most of March is opaque, bewildering, inscrutable. A good time to reflect, question and immerse ourselves in a absorbing creative project. Big decisions need to be made early in the month and should be done in such a way that they can be revised later.
We need to act then double back- especially once we enter the pre-Mercury Retrograde shadow period which starts on March 18th. Think of it as an intelligent honing-in process-- rather than a defeat or a backslide. Life must go on.
Pisces tends to go into denial and "decide later." In this way, they let fate decide. With Mercury and the Sun conjunct Saturn during the first week, this flaccid, dissociative approach spells trouble.
Better to practice Strategy Staging: go ahead and decide, but pair your decision with alternate scenarios that go into effect down the line if and when the situation changes.
On the 2nd and 3rd and 9th and 10th Uranus squares Venus and Mars, respectively. A change may be necessary in our relationships to achieve peace. Incorporate something visionary and/or out of the box into your relationship's daily routine or expect restlessness and disruption. Build in more freedom and spontaneity. Announce a new collaboration. Stability is arrived at by doing something different.
March 10th New Moon in Pisces:
A Synchronistic Dare
Here we have a four planet pile-up in Pisces conjunct Mercury in just-do-it Aries. Time for a Synchronistic Dare. Send out an invitation, then let the signs and symbols come back at you. The response (or lack thereof) should tell you if it's meant to be. Aries fire has vision before rationale. Often, it stumbles on something viable. Trust it.
As the March 25th lunar eclipse draws closer, we may now get a preview of what wants to "go dark:" an old habit, a home or way of life. The Saturn/Neptune conjunction may dredge up survival fear to test our commitment to this new vision. Note for fridge: "The universe is on my side."
March 25th Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Libra
Taking refuge in the vision of our soul
Late March and the first half of April are powerful and chaotic. On top of the eclipses, Mercury retrograde in Aries starts in one week (April 1st). That makes this an "eclipse-o-grade." Will we struggle to prematurely understand the changes, or will we use the impermanence to brighten the eternal awareness that we are?
Eclipses come in pairs. The most intense period of change takes place during the two weeks in between them which is called the "eclipse window:" March 25th to April 8th.
What wants to "go dark" in our life? Somewhere inside we already know. March wants us to release attachments and re-imagine our life before the eclipse window starts shaking our mental rafters to the ground. That way, we have something steady to hold onto and take refuge in.
Would you like to have intimate access to an English speaking translator and combine your trip with a tailor-made Astrodharma retreat or a two week chart-reading apprenticeship?
Starting this month (March 2024) student-travelers will be arriving here in Bise, Okinawa and you could be one of them!
As the old rules crumble and the maps we use to navigate our world no longer apply, we take refuge in Your Shepherding Presence, the mysteriously emergent, faintly dotted trail that never fails to sail us through this blinding fog of separation.
For surely there is no one left unbattered by these waves of egoic posturing and deceptive data, and our only true "freedom" is to answer Your call to become a lighthouse, a flashing sentry that steers attention away from the rocky crags of personhood, sprinkles conversation with divine pauses and meets old age, sickness and death with a rock-solid knowing of our ageless innocence.
And so, as we stand before You now at the cusp of another astrological new year, we scan the horizon and gasp as we glimpse our rocky archipelago of past lives and ask only that our tippy raft be replaced by Your mighty cruise ship: our everlasting fitness, the Merciful Witness.
Losing our Knowability
Astrodharma Talk
March 2024
Self-forgetting is what we all have in common. That, and a heartbreakingly resilient "nobility of soul."
What does the March ramp-up to the lunar and solar eclipses (March 25th and April 8 ) ask of us? To take time to marinate in the pristine awareness that we are and strive for a better rendering of this inner Rembrandt onto the canvas in our hurtable human lives.
It's Pisces season, after all. The veil is as thin as it gets.
To "marinate" is to take Pisces refuge: the precursor to Virgo "quality of service." Apparently, we need an annual Pisces prod that "performing tasks in time" is not primarily why we are here. We're here to spread the virus of eternity-with-eyes.
Who are we infecting? In short, "the knower."
But here's the catch:
Knowers know they're a fraud and resent the reflection.
Somehow, we will need to break through the knower's line of defense but no matter how earnestly we try, we are simply not up to the task. Why? Because...
Only the Unknowable is capable of feeling warmly okay with the knower.
Communion can only happen to the degree we drop our preoccupation with "selfing" and lose our knowability.
And how is "losing our knowability" achieved? No, not through ambitious meditation marathons. In its most prosaic, Virgo work-a-day form, this blessed beheading takes place during conversations sprinkled with "divine pauses" that break the momentum of ego.
Fine. but what, exactly, are we focusing on during these divine pauses?
Perhaps a felt sense of this:
In every human interaction, there are always only two things happening:
1) Automated identity-grasping
2) The merciful witnessing of that
Period. Full stop.
Ah, now we're ready to let "space with a face" vibrate the air around an "imaginary other."
The Logic Behind Egoic Trance States
There is a rare psychiatric phenomenon called "Dissociative Fugue." (Actually, it's not so rare. It's epidemic). Here's the definition:
A reversible amnesia for one's identity in conjunction with unexpected wandering or travel.
Yikes. Can you think of a better description of the human condition?
Bottom line: until we pivot regularly out of our Fugue states, we're speaking Fugue-to-Fuge. We don't know who we are and we don't know who we're talking to.
Yes, the passage of time -and lifetimes- will eventually break the Fugue, but it's a painful, drawn out affair and, God forgive us, we've dragged far too many souls into our sloppy self-realization process.
Thankfully, it only takes a few fugue-recovered spiritual friends ("sangha") to speed up our Self-remembering until, finally, we dare to see it:
Everyone we meet is weaving in and out of Dissociative Fugue states, hoping and praying that we might be the one who jolts their memory.
Which leads us back to our original premise:
In every human interaction, there are always only two things happening: automated identity-grasping
and the merciful witnessing of that.
Sounds stark, I know.
But remember: automation is the real party pooper and-- with nothing to defend or prove-- the Merciful Witness is delighted to jump onto virtually any stage set: from the hilariously funny to the gravely serious, the wordlessly silent to the intellectually rigorous.
This is where Astrodharma shines. It provides us with a felt understanding of the seductive logic (and the positive intent) behind the 12 archetypal identity-grabs. This helps us meet a full spectrum of minds with compassion and targeted invitations to self-inquire.
The Whirlwind of Selfing
Ego is a fugue-wandering "experience junkie--" all verb and no noun: a desperate whirlwind of "selfing" in the infinite expanse of the Divine Mind.
Murdered by stillness, the Robosapien mind must stay perpetually busy "liking, disliking or being (aggressively) indifferent to other ego's styles of identity-grasping, so as to strengthen its shaky claim to personhood.
For the fugue wanderer, it's a mater of survival. His entire world flies apart without a steady diet of desire and distraction to drip-feed a sense of doership into the disorienting majesty of "what is."
The Merciful Witness, on the other hand, has absolutely no intention at all. It simply shines as itself. In the face of an agenda-less celebration of Being, surrounding minds must work very hard to not join us.
When the clenched fist of knowing playfully releases, the fugue state in others naturally lets go and, together, we recover the soul-mirroring joy of the divine play.
Breath is not holy or evil.
No different the vaporous mind.
Welcome to the "church of full arrival" where everyone is perfect and there's a boatload of astrologically ordained work to be done.
Based on cutting-edge Buddhist insights into the astrological signs, the Styles of Awakening Training will equip you with an uncommon ability to sense archetypes at play in others and the capacity to better guide souls on their path of self-realization: Perfect for teachers, mentors and counselors looking to upgrade their soul-seeing skills.
I am bowled over by this course's depth, power and brilliant acumen. Thank you so much for your unique and intriguing approach to astrology Hunter. I so appreciate conversations that go deep and wide enough that they wander comfortably into the vastness of silence.
A truly life-changing consultation must include prescribed daily practices: soul-specific meditations, Astro-Self-Inquiry questions and targeted archetypal homework designed to jump-start our ego-witnessing skills and break us free of the unconscious habits of mind that distract us from our soul purpose. This is modern, meditative astrology: the essence of Astrodharma.
Biofeedback brainwave headsets beginning in the 1970s ... how to ITERATE on these, sensor-wise etc, to map the WHOLE brain at the atom, molecular and cellular levels too - and from the Harbin warm pool, while people are soaking, and via full head headsets or headbands via broadband into our AvatarAgentElectronicHealthRecords for research, and think little Pegman become EHR in Google Street View with time slider GCellView, GMoleculeView ?
iterating biofeedback brainwave headsets for research purposes in the Harbin Hot Springs' warm pool for second Harbin ethnography ... to be published as a book in new ways, even into multimedia rooms at home, and for soaking at virtual Harbin in one's own bathtub ?
"A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images."
In what ways can we all write new forms of books from Google Street View with a time slider into new forms of book publishing @WUaSPress like brainwave headsets and multimedia rooms?
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Hunter Reynolds regarding the picture in his Astrodharma newsletter and web site - as Harbin Hot Springs' contact?
Neurofeedback: A Comprehensive Review on System Design, Methodology and Clinical Applications
"clinical and technical information about the following issues: (1) Various neurofeedback treatment protocols i.e. alpha, beta, alpha/theta, delta, gamma, and theta; (2) Different EEG electrode placements i.e. standard recording channels in the frontal, temporal, central, and occipital lobes; (3) Electrode montages (unipolar, bipolar); (4) Types of neurofeedback i.e. frequency, power, slow cortical potential, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and so on; (5) Clinical applications of neurofeedback i.e. treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, depression, epilepsy, insomnia, drug addiction, schizophrenia, learning disabilities, dyslexia and dyscalculia, autistic spectrum disorders and so on as well as other applications such as pain management, and the improvement of musical and athletic performance; and (6) Neurofeedback softwares
Could this $300 headset transform the lives of ‘locked-in’ patients?
Scientists are dismissive of the hype surrounding the Epoc device, yet advocates claim it can enable completely paralysed people to communicate with their loved ones. Does it give sufferers false hope?
BrainwaveHeadsets #EEGheadsets ? and how to map the whole brain model - connectomics?
Best #BrainwaveHeadsets #EEGheadsets ? How to ITERATE sensor-wise etc, to map WHOLE brain
via broadband >#AvatarAgentElectronicHealthRecords #GStreetView w #TimeSlider w #GCellView #GMoleculeView fr #RealisticVirtualHarbin warm pool @HarbinBook soaking
#Biofeedback #BrainwaveHeadsets #EEGheadsets ? How to ITERATE on these, sensor-wise etc, to map WHOLE brain in
#GStreetView w #TimeSlider at #GCellView, #GMoleculeView #GAtomView fr #RealisticVirtualHarbin warm pool @HarbinBook while soaking & via broadband > our AvatarAgentElectronicHealthRecords
Biofeedback brainwave headsets beginning in 1970s: How to ITERATE on these, sensor-wise etc, to map the WHOLE brain at atom, molecular and cellular levels too - and from the #RealisticVirtualHarbin warm pool @HarbinBook while people are soaking, and via full head headsets or headbands via broadband into our AvatarAgentElectronicHealthRecords for research, and think little Pegman become EHR in Google Street View with time slider GCellView, GMoleculeView ?http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2024/03/rhododendron-schlippenbachii.html ~
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best biofeedback headsets today
Best Neurofeedback Devices in 2024 For at Home Use
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a biofeedback machine, Resperate, for decreasing stress and lowering blood pressure. Resperate is a portable electronic machine that helps you have slow, deep breathing. The FDA doesn't control many biofeedback machines made for home use.Mar 18, 2023
Scott's an anthropologist of physical-digital Harbin Hot Springs, as ethnographic field site - https://goo.gl/maps/7gSsSTweRCBo9gf87 - who also finds fascinating the internet, ideas, poetry, sociology, art, science, genetics of aging reversal and extreme longevity, philosophy, history, music, love and life ~ as well as the anthropology of information technology & counterculture :) -
scottmacleod.com ... Am also the president or head of, and professor at, MIT OCW-centric wiki World Univ & Sch (& Academic @WUaSPress, planned in 7,164 living languages with machine translation, aka the WUaS Corp) planning free online degrees in ~200 countries & in their main languages, where you can wiki-teach, or wiki-learn, or wiki-create - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Subjects (see too: http://www.scottmacleod.com/yoganotations.html in exploring questions of Yoga & wisdom). Identity-wise, a Nontheist Friendly Quaker - a NtF or NtQ - with Unitarian Universalist sympathies as well, and an academic
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