Welcome to A<>A!
I've been wanting to write this blog for a long time, but until now have felt it lacked a core concept to hold it all together. What am I going to explore here? To put it simply, conciousness and perception- how it affects us, and how we can effect it. This gives me room to go everywhere from neurology to comic books to mental health and magic. I'm going to explore a wide range of topics- a lot of them probably seeming unrelated- but the intention is to have a core topic that revolves around what I essentially see as programing reality.
What is up with the name? Apophenia to Apotheosis encapsulates my interests.
Apophenia is seeing connections between unrelated things. On a visual level, it's called paralellia- finding recognizable images in random patterns. It can be seeing the virgin Mary in your macaroni, but it is also a technique that DaVinci used- he would stare at the woodgrain on his floor until images and inspiration emerged. On an action level Apophenia is like a synchronistic event, but a little more loosely defined. French philosopger Guy Debord talked about a technique called derivee or drifting (in English) which was used to explore cityscapes. Derivee can be used to explore ideascapes as well. In some senses a lot of people see apophenia as a potentially dangerous thing- I think the main use for the term is in a mental illness setting when it is related to paranoia and seeing signs and symbols everywhere. However, I think apophenia can be used as a tool, one to understand the world around us, and also one to use as a mirror for ourselves. Sometimes we have experiences like the main character in Aranofsky's Pi- seeing 216 everywhere and existing in everything. Left unexamined this could be a maddening place to be trapped in, but with a little deconstruction it could also lead to incredible insight- figuring out a personal langusge of signs and portents.
This is what leads to Apotheosis. This is the process of a person realizing their own god self and the god inside of everything. At least that's how I interpert it. What processes lead to that divine feeling of being plugged into the universe? How do you get there? How do you stay there? What relevence does it have in a person's life?
So in essence this blog is about moving between these two states, living in a land of paradox where meaning becomes meaninless and vise versa. We will spend most of our time in the Temporal Autonomous Zone- a place where anything and everything can happen. The fool will be crowned king, and our cells are holographic images of the universe.
What this blog is not. I want to say here and now that I am not a positive psychology person, I think exploring our dark sides- or as Jung would put it our "shadow selves", is more important to exploring reality and finding whatever truth is out there than "thinking only good thoughts". I don't believe in trying to be such a good person that we repress our innser primal nature. Darkness, depression, anger and all those other so called negative aspects of ourselves are still part of us! They can be tools that are just as useful as positive visualization techniques- you just have to know how to use them. Repressing them, pretending it doesn't exist, denying them a voice leads to a warped perspective, and from my own experience, a lot of mental anguish.
So that's it for now! I have a bunch of articles broiling around in my brain that I can't wait to get started on. It's going be be an interesting journey!
Starhive
