Wednesday 25 February 2009

WORLD PREMIERE of CtCw: KUCI Radio Interviews Karl L Le Marcs

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With Tony's valuable support I'm delighted to announce that I am finally about to begin unleashing CtCw (Collapsing the Consciousness wave) onto the unsuspecting public. Of course, those of us who are in the know and have frequented this fabulous place (and FORUM) for sometime now are well aware of CtCw and its implications within ITLAD, and in expanding the theory, so it has been wonderful that Robert Larson at KUCI in California, who has been such an advocate of Tony's theories, has taken an interest in our expansions and has asked me to be his guest next week to discuss CtCw, its implications within Consciousness, its links to ITLAD/CTF and ultimately towards Tony and I's BIGTOE (Bohmian IMAX Grand Theory Of Everything).

I will be interviewed by Robert live on his Out The Rabbit Hole programme on KUCI which can be found at the link below. They have a LISTEN NOW facility at the top right of their webpage for anyone who can listen live but I will also attempt to record it and make available for download here as well after the show.

http://www.kuci.org/

The show will be broadcast on Thursday 5th March Evening (US Time) and the small hours of Friday 6th March Morning (UK Time)
(I always knew my legendary insomnia would have its uses)
*smile*

The times will be 17:00 (California) and 01:00 (UK), I will be interviewed for about an hour.

This is the beginning of a culmination of work that has involved a lot of people from BLOG and FORUM who have helped me, inspired me and stimulated me to formulate these theories and I thank everyone who has done so.

I hope you can listen in.



A Dark Philosopher
Karl L Le Marcs

Friday 13 February 2009

Neurological proof of my Bohmian IMAX? - The Zeitraffer Phenomenon

In my research I have just come across a fascinating, and little reported, neurological condition called the Zeitraffer - Elebnis Phenomenon. In German a "Zeitraffer" is an apparatus that accelerates the apparent motion of a film. This is used in a similar way to time-lapse photography.

It seems that for some people this apparatus is not needed. Under certain, little understood, neurological conditions, the world is suddenly perceived to be speeded up. One particularly fascinating case is cited by Ferdinand Binkofski of the Department of Neurology of the Heinrich Heine University and Richard A Block of the Department of Psychology and Montana State University. The paper was published in Neurocase (1992, vol 2 pp. 485-493) and was entitled Accelerated Time Experience after Left Frontal Cortex Lesion.

Block and Binkofski report that a right handed, 66 year old retired clerk with no history of neurological disease was driving his car along a German road. The man (known as BW) was horrified to discover that suddenly external objects starting rushing at him at great speed. As he described it it was as if somebody had pressed a fast-forward button. He also found that his car was also running at a fantastic speed. He could not control the car as his reaction time remained 'normal'. He found himself driving througha set of red traffic lights because he simply could not stop. He slammed his brakes on and stopped the car. He watched in horror as the world around him still ran around him in super-speed.

This state continued for him and two days later, in a state of great stress, BW was admitted to the Heinrich Heine Neurological Hospital. He described what was happening as an "accelerated motion of events, like a time-lapse film". He complained that he could no longer tolerate watching television because the progression of events was too quick for him to follow. He also described that life had begun to pass too quickly for him.

On his admission to hospital a CT scan was done it showed that he had a lesion on his dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex. He was then given a series of tests. He showed no prtoblem with time orientation, it was just for him it was going faster. However when asked to decide how long a 60 second period was for him some strange things were discovered. BW was told to say when he wished to start then remain silent until he felt that a minute had gone by. He was then to say stop. They repeated this test many times and his BW's subjective average 'minute' was 286 seconds.

It was then discovered that BW had a glioblastoma tumour centered in "Brodmann's area" in the pre-frontal cortex of his left hemisphere. Sadly he died soon after without ever regaining normal time perception.

Now what is interesting about this paper is that the two scientists suggest some possible explanations, including one that we all have an internal "pacemaker" that controls how we subjectively perceive time duration. However they finish off by writing "It is unclear how best to explain the phenomenon".


May I suggest an itladian interpretation. as we have discussed elsewhere in this FORUM, there seems to be a link between certain aspects of ITLAD/CTF and the prefrontal cortex, possibly this link may prove as significant as the link to the temporal lobes. As such could it be was that what happened to BW was that the tumour had caused a problem with the 'viewing' of the "Bohmian IMAX" - that it suddenly got stuck in "fast-forward" mode? How else can neurologists explain such a perception. In order to be placed in "fast forward" there has to be a recording to run faster. as such it was not his perceptions that ran too fast but the external BIMAX film was running too fast.

Of course there is an even more controversial conclusion .... and that is that BW's Daemon had again failed to avoid the development of the tumor in this run of the BIMAX and decided that it wanted to get quickly to the next performance. It knew that there was nothing it could do and recalled that last time BW was in pain and discomfort for too long. By "fast-forwarding" the BIMAX the Daemon had its Eidolon experience those painful last few weeks in a blur of speeded-up time!

So here we have yet another term for our ITLADIAN dictionary - "Zeitraffer" - when time runs faster within the BIMAX.

Tuesday 10 February 2009


The Secret Life of Movies (Schizo Cinema)

Hi all - been forever since I posted here, I know...
Finally digging all the way into Tony's Daemon prompted me to show up again.
Here's an interview I did for the upcoming book, which I think overlaps in certain areas with AP's work.

What prompted you to write The Secret Life of Movies?

I started the book back in 2000, and I wanted to write a follow up to The Blood Poets, which was about savagery and violence in American movies. The reason I wrote about violence was simple: I wanted a thesis that would include all my favorite movies, and I soon realized that the common thread running through them was violence, destruction. As I set about writing the book, I found out a lot about why I liked certain movies, and about the basic appeal of vicariously experiencing, via movies, things we would otherwise be careful to avoid in real life. If you narrowed it down to one thing, it would be “intensity.” Movies provide the kind of intensity which we would only experience in real life if we were in crisis, when such experiences tend to be traumatic; but in movies, as in Greek tragedy, they are potentially cathartic. During the process of writing The Blood Poets, then, I discovered a lot about the movies I liked and why I liked them, and therefore about my own psyche. These were movies I had seen many times, and in the process of writing about them, looking for ways to develop my thesis, it opened up a Pandora’s Box. I found out that, by writing about movies, I was able to go into realms of the psyche and of society that I normally wouldn’t have gone into. This gave me a clue: movies were like windows onto the collective psyche. The things I liked about movies at a conscious level were a lot less revealing than what appealed to me at an unconscious level.

That gave me the idea of the occult text. A lot of movies seem to be about fictional scenarios, but actually they are archetypal. Like myths, they allow us to uncover and map areas of the psyche that are otherwise hidden from us. If we scratch the surface of a sci-fi movie or a horror movie, for example, we find that they are using the same archetypes as ancient myths, and that they serve as a kind of psychological blueprint. But movies are unlike myths, in the sense that they are superficially much more sophisticated, more “realistic.” Even sci-fi or horror movies are more realistic than ancient myths, which often aren’t populated by human beings at all, and which are full of impossible possibilities. Even fantasy movies attempt to be realistic, and when they aren’t they are either considered to be kids’ movies or just bad ones. The realism of popular entertainment means that the mythic function of movies is more hidden, it gets suppressed through the process of conceiving and making the movie, to the point that even the filmmakers usually aren’t aware of it. Mythmakers were generally aware of what they were doing, of giving coded information in the form of a narrative so that the average person could enjoy the story, while “initiates” could read it in a more abstract way, as a mythic blueprint. But movies are different.

Movies are like myths at a different stage in our society, a stage when we are more ego-developed beings, when we have a sense of identity that is more rigid, and so our sense of reality is also more rigid. So we require our myths to be more realistic as well. We have disconnected from our subconscious, basically, and so movies have to be more covert in their mythic unfolding. It was only by analyzing movies for The Blood Poets that I found out about this occult text. It intrigued me, because it was like movies themselves had an unconscious. The filmmakers obviously had an unconscious, but unlike mythmakers they were not working from it—to some extent, perhaps, but not entirely. They might be aware of the subtext or they might not, but even if they were aware of it, there would be a still deeper subtext, and that was where the real juice was. Essentially, I was drawn then to look at movies not only that had hidden texts (all movies do), but that dealt with the unconscious in an overt fashion, and with the conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind of the protagonist. That drew me naturally to the idea of madness, and specifically schizophrenia: the idea that there could be a conflict between one’s perception of self and one’s reality, between what one consciously believed was real and what one unconsciously felt was true. Schizophrenia is to do with a splitting of the self from the environment, so that the self doesn’t feel a part of environment. You could even say that the more the ego develops, the deeper schizophrenia becomes; in which case, those diagnosed as schizophrenics and who experience a loss of identity are in a sense less schizophrenic than the rest of us—because they are more acutely aware of their condition. As I looked into the subject more, or rather as I was writing about it, I realized that this state paralleled the act of watching a movie itself: a disconnection from the reality we are seeing (on the screen), as well as from our immediate environment (the theater or living room). That’s the pleasure of movies – to be emotionally involved in a surrogate reality without having to take part in it. So the pleasure of movies—and the reason violent or tragic movies are often cathartic— relates to the schizophrenic nature of watching movies, the possibility of observing our environment without being a part of it. This is the schizophrenic experience: through the act of watching movies, one ceases to exist as a self.

Isn’t there a mystic tradition similar to this idea, that of dissociating from objective experience to view one’s life from the outside, i.e., “as a movie”?

That was also what I was looking for, the shamanic dimension of movies, that they shape our perception, which is a shamanic method. And also the parallels between schizophrenia and experiences of other realities. This idea brings it back to myth again, to ancient myths. They all tie in. The violence in a sense related to the symptoms: in Blood Poets, I was analyzing the symptoms and following them to the condition, which led me to a diagnosis, that of schizophrenia, the cut-off of the mind/identity from the physical world, which is schizophrenia in its most basic form. You could say that, having described the symptoms, I wanted to describe the condition itself, and even if possible to find a cure. That became The Secret Life of Movies. It was an attempt to use movies more deliberately, as a way to diagnose a culture. Movies are made by a collective of individuals to meet the demands of a whole population, so what we are seeing is not informed by an individual’s unconscious but by the collective unconscious. Movies are being shaped by collective dreams through the plastic medium of film. They are a shamanic tool that’s being used unconsciously, at least at this time. (There are cases where this tool is being used consciously, films like The Matrix or Fight Club that actually become shamanic experiences because the unconscious and conscious minds of the filmmakers are working together, and so text and subtext are intertwined rather than at odds.) What writing this book entailed, then, was allowing movies their occult function as collective dreams, dreams that, if analyzed, provide information in symbolic form as to the condition of society and of the species. It’s rather like taking a blood sample, a psychic blood sample from the collective unconscious. By looking at movies, we can find out what condition the system, our culture and society, is in.

So your book presumably draws on the work of Carl Jung?

Not directly no, but it’s certainly informed by it. Jung was a psychologist as a shaman, or vice versa. He entered the field of psychology realizing that it was actually the same field that shamans had worked in for thousands of years. Psychology is a science in that it follows and maps principals, conditions, that to a certain extend are empirical, universal. The shadow, the anima and animus, and suchlike, these are principals that apply to absolutely everyone on the planet, so far as we know at least. So it’s a science, and it can be used like a science; but since it’s the science of the psyche, it’s not a hard science but a soft one. It requires imagination and creativity, both to understand and to apply it. Jung was an alchemist who described his practices in the terms of a budding new science called psychology.

So although the basic idea of this book can be compared to psychology and dream analysis, that’s really just a way to update it into terms the modern, rational person can understand. A more primitive or “superstitious” mindset could understand this book’s premise more easily, since the “superstitious” mindset is also more open to the realities of the psyche, for example, to the idea that our whole culture could be a sort of collective dream, “the imagination of God,” say, or the perspective of an animistic universe, a living conscious system. These ideas are acceptable to a primitive understanding without resorting to psychological terms. Within that frame of reference, then, what I’m doing predates psychology: it’s a form of scrying, based on the understanding that nothing in nature is random. Whether it’s goat’s entrails, tea leaves floating in a cup, an egg in a glass of water, or whatever, the patterns these things create is a coded language that can be deciphered, according to the present moment, to find out whatever the shaman wants to find out. This is what myths are, except that myths are consciously designed in this way by sorcerers or shamans so that others of their kind will recognize them. Movies are both less and more pure than that. Being shaped by the unconscious makes them more pure, but they are also being shaped by conscious agendas of commerce, propaganda, popular taste, and so forth, agendas which overlay the work, rather like a person who edits their dreams to make them more “wholesome” or entertaining. Movies have been heavily edited and filtered, but the basic components still come from the unconscious , because everything does. So as long as you can sift through the noise and get to the signal, you can still use them to diagnose; and even the noise can be diagnosed, too, because we can see the ways in which we are blocking out our unconscious.

So in writing this book you are acting in the manner of a contemporary shaman?

Well, it’s an armchair shaman, isn’t it, because I’m just watching movies and writing books. So far as I apply what I write to my own life, that would be shamanic.

But presumably one of the functions of the shaman is to steer the community into healthier, more integrated directions?

I don’t know if that’s one of their functions. Shamans tend to live on the outskirts of town and work one-on-one with sick people. I don’t think they tend to go and preach to the community. They might give them guidance if there was a catastrophe or some such, but I think that they are generally marginalized even by the culture that depends on them for healing. I would say that they only have the influence that you are referring to when people are desperate enough to actively seek them out, and the same probably applies to what I’m doing.

So how do you prevent your subjective perception of films from interfering with your objective analysis of the culture?

I don’t. The more wholly subjective you can be, the more objective you are.

That seems counter-intuitive.

It’s counter-rational, perhaps, but not counter-intuitive. But it would be impossible to explain rationally without going into shamanic terms, or at least Jungian psychology, which academics are not generally open to.

But surely filmmakers are?

Some of them perhaps. If you think of a collective unconscious, by definition it is shared, so that means our own unconscious is part of the collective. So anything that communicates from the unconscious, even though in the process of writing a book or making a film it passes through the conscious mind and is shaped by it, it is still sourced in the collective unconscious. This means it has a dimension, an under layer, of universal or so-called “objective” reality. So if we allow ourselves to be fully in our subjective experience, both of reality and of ourselves, then we are not blocking it to the same extent with futile attempts to be “objective.” We are dropping into the unconscious state, and so objectifying the subjective, as it were. By allowing our subjective experience of conscious reality to deepen, we are allowing it to overlap with our unconscious, which is collectively subjective, let’s say, and therefore is “objective.”

Like a herd of cats?

There’s no such thing as a herd of cats.

Exactly.

Yes, well. The idea is to surrender one’s subjective point of view rather than surrendering to it. But to surrender it, you have to surrender to it first of all. But it must be consciously. If it's done unconsciously, it leads to ego inflation. Consciously surrendering to the subjective experience is alchemy, Jung’s individuation, which is recognizing that one’s conscious mind is only a small, superficial aspect of one’s whole psyche. If you consciously surrender to your subjective view of things, it’s like going into dream while awake, like lucid dreaming. In ordinary dreams, you forget you are dreaming and your dream takes over, your whole environment becomes you and you become your environment, there’s no split-off. Again, it’s schizophrenia, loss of self. In lucid dreaming, you enter your environment consciously so you are aware there’s a separation, and yet it’s not like ordinary consensus because you are aware that you are creating your reality. At that point, you can take responsibility for it and start to read the images, the symbols of your dream life, and to use them alchemically, for individuation. If you are unconsciously surrendering, then you don’t have that option.

So what you’ve done is you’ve viewed these films in the manner of lucid dreaming?

Well, the dreams are somebody else’s dreams, so I can’t do that. I view the films as a Jungian analyst would listen to a patient’s dreams. The lucid dreaming element comes in when I am using the information of these collective dreams—the movies— in my own daily life.

So if you continue on this course, ultimately you will arrive at a project that would be more or less incomprehensible to the rational mind?

Like James Joyce? I hope not. (pause) Life as theatre is the end to which we are evolving, at which point we would become playwrights and play actors and directors in our own lives, alchemists. We will become that, we will turn ourselves into fiction. It’s inevitable. We will eventually allow ourselves to realize ourselves as narratives, seeing as that is what we already are, and cease to cling to the illusion of being a leading player in the narrative. It’s a paradox, but by insisting on being the lead player, we become puppets. By allowing ourselves to become the story, we can attain a level of surrender and begin co-authoring our stories. In our present culture, this is a religious or mystical perspective, and hasn’t evolved into one that is scientific or shamanic, and therefore practicable. It can only be talked about under the rather flimsy guise of “faith.”

We are stories, that’s all we are. Every narrative that we are not surrendered to as a co-creator, that hasn’t been specifically shaped by our perception, or that hasn’t shaped who we are from birth, all of these narratives must be discarded. That means every narrative save our own. Everything that has come from elsewhere, our social, cultural, racial and religious conditioning, is just crust, other people’s imposed narratives. Unless we can turn these other narratives into an element of our own narrative, an integral part of it just as our mother and father are an integral part of it, unless we can live the truth rather than simply pay lip service to it, these external narratives are all equally worthless to us.

Sunday 1 February 2009

Now we have "Itladian Art" as well as itladian literature!


I received a fascinating email from artist Richard Boote. Richard has read both my books and is now painting pictures that attempt to explain my Daemon-Eidolon Dyad. The picture above is entitled "The Burden of the Eidolon. Richard has explained the symbolism to me in this way:

'The Burden of the Eidolon' was inspired by your work its true. That particular piece is really to show empathy towards the incarnate soul, and all that it has to endure in its physical existence (hence the figure in the bottom right). The picture also questions why some souls have an easier incarnation than others. The ladder bridge and stairways denote progress; the lanterns represent learning and spiritual illumination. The figure at the top of the picture appears to have an easier life; there is foliage on the trees by this figure, as opposed to the dead looking trees in the lower part. That is just one interpretation, other people prefer to see the picture in whatever way is meaningful to themselves."

I am really honoured that such a talented painter is interested in my theories as an influence on his art and now Richard informs me that his next painting will be a work involving "The Daemon". I am really looking forward to seeing this piece.

If you are interested please check out Richard's work at: