[ This is the second compilation of my draft writings for this year, from July to November. It takes the form of an expansive rant, centered loosely around the ideas of Hakim Bey and James Carse, along with other influences. A special thanks to Siona for introducing me to this material... in fact, this whole rant is a kind of 'gift' of thanks: I hope you like it! Also a shout-out to our Phoenix Awakened... keep up the good fight! We're waiting for you along the roads ahead. ]

[note: I will continue exploration of these ideas in the months to come, likely in the form of a fictional narrative that will bring them closer to the subject matter of 'The Shadow of Shambhala' or SOS project.]

The Poetic Terrorist

In Search of the Temporary Autonomous Zone

We are the disappeared. We surround you, invisibly, always subtle in our aid, vigilant in our patience. Our action is harmonious – though we may have never met, there is a faith amongst us that others, like us, exist.

We do not know the stories that come of our actions, and though this sometime pains us, it liberates our imagination. Our collaborative action is such that no one can take credit – for the collective is just as unknown as the action. We simply see what could be so, should others, like us, in fact exist.  We are discovering that we are a part of the Network.

It is difficult to suggest that this is a secret society. Commonly used, such a term implies cohesion, order, hierarchy, knowledge and the initiation of membership by the group – all of which the Network needs nothing. You join the Network by aligning yourself with it, by tuning in, by believing in it and then living your life as fully as you are able. You join the Network when you value your  own freedom and when you discover your own courage.

The earliest attempts to create a communications technology (Commtech) network using computers is directly related to the problem of centralized information and the threats posed by nuclear holocaust.  It is a democratizing medium, but as will be seen, it is still aligned with the system from which our escape is necessary. Such technologies may assist the Network, but are not themselves the Network. The Network is a natural phenomenon, composed of human beings.  It is concerned with invulnerability, first and foremost, and in a concrete sense this concern is likely due to the emergence of a nuclear umbrella which could, within hours, eradicate humankind in every sense that we have known it to be. But again, this nuclear umbrella is merely a physical manifestation of a psychic reality, a symbol if you will, that represents a deeper, inner conflict.

The emerging paradigms of decentralization in Commtech only mirror the social shift which has necessarily and forcefully evolved due to the species-wide, unconscious necessities of survival. Civilization as such has become an illusion, so that the tribal wilderness has flooded into every crack uncontrolled by State and Capital forces – the potential to manifest Temporary Autonomous Zones, or TAZ, exists as soon as Order shifts its Argus-eyes away.

There are many circumstances where Order cannot see at all, though this is a closely guarded secret. The illusion of complete knowledge, of perfect surveillance, must be maintained by Order so as to cover up its most flagrant of weaknesses. Even the gods of Order are rumoured to be omniscience and omnipresent, because this is their ideal, and the mythology necessary for control.

We see an abundance of regulation on CommTech, a culture where privacy becomes suspect as an entirety – becomes equated with conspiracy and pseudo-illegality. We see governments scrambling to defend themselves against ‘terror’ – sold as foreign terror, when in actuality, it is quite a great deal more concerned with its own nightmares of an emerging secret Culture (not secret society) that threatens to undermine the very fundamentals upon which its power and leverage for control depends.

However, as Order struggles to regulate Commtech, to further condition the masses, to disable centralized bodies it finds threatening, identify and hamper the leaders of social activism, all of its methods become starkly more ridiculous and apparently inexplicable. In search of an explanation, capable minds discover and adopt the secret Culture – freely, and without obvious outside aid. They become the Poetic Terrorist, and represent a form of poetic justice for the people.

The invulnerable become more so when attacked, hunted and threatened. Becoming a game, without an end. It is played for its own sake. As an infinite game, it aligns itself with the divine and the diabolical impartially. Offered a deep spiritual understanding, those that join this game quickly discover the ultimate fear that Order keeps so meticulously secret and that of course We do too: that the world is full of magic and mythology, and that its unorthodox “power” is a most natural and inherent potential in every single human being on the planet! Woe to the forces of Order, who know well this power, and fear it to such a hideously exaggerated extent, that they seemingly stop at nothing to continue the policies of oppressing the spirit.  Completely, utterly, until memory of it even is forgotten.

The supposed occultism of the Illuminati and Freemason – whatever these Simulated mythological institutions may be called – is a lie. A brilliant lie, perhaps. It is an extensive, frightened scramble to organize public perception in the only wa Order can: through violence, force and the carnivalesque farce of propaganda now termed Public Relations. Oh you poor seekers of truth! Order has spent even more time creating an imaginary world for you than for the fools who believe in the six o’clock news. Attempt to grasp the amount of resources spent on pulling the blanket over your eyes. Even your search for truth is a distraction, meticulously managed so as to be futile.

So concerned have they become with obscuring the truth that authentic magic could never actually be theirs – though admittedly, as Arthur C. Clarke sets down in potently relevant law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Here then, are introduced two key concepts in the life of the Poetic Terrorist, a member of the Network: Simulation and Immediatism. They can usefully be conceptualized as polarities on a sort of spectrum.

The Simulation

Simulation, whether as a verb as in ‘to Simulate’ or noun as “The Simulation” has to do with the military-industrial technologies used by Order that disinherit us from our actual experience of Reality. This disconnect is called disincarnate existence.  We are removed from our bodies, from our inner sense, and plunged into a labyrinthine realm of concepts and abstractions. So much as we can conceptually  know through exposure to Simulation, it divorces us from our body-knowledge of Life Experience, deprivates our cognitive sensory ability and shapes our actions in a way that is detached from the cues and stimuli  that would very naturally lead us to mystical understanding of ourselves and our world, spiritual fulfillment and divine purpose. Because the industry of Simulation is so heavily invested with the energy, analysis and resources of Order, it takes a co-ordinated effort to even see, had it never been seen before.

Everyone knows too much TV, or video-games or whatever mediated technological infotainment is “bad” for us. But Simulation is the larger, intentional system employed by Order, using media,  technology and information structure, to shape the common experience which forms the psuedo-predictable mass. Without such a mass, the current structures of the state system and the geo-physical organization of capital could not exist. So Simulation is a key component. It is extensive and those caught within it perpetuate it with all their actions, since their thoughts and actions are based on an environment  which is not immediate. It is simulated, virtual, illusory and most importantly: controlled.

Conspiracy is too weak a term for the extent which this is so. It has become a self-perpetuating system. It is quite possible that the highest individuals involved in it are no longer its masters, but slaves to it, just like you and I.

The noble ideal of those wishing to “wake up” the sleep-walking masses, bring awareness to the abuses of Order or ‘free the minds’ of the people, is frustratingly misplaced when it engages the Simulation through Commtech, or even the discussion and critique of the topics focused upon by the Simulation. The battleground has already been chosen and the lay of the virtual land is quite elegantly stacked in favour of Order prevailing – since the fundamentals are implicitly defined and redefined at the convenience of further Simulation.

Proper method leads an individual or group away from Simulation through the practice of Immediatism. This practice – a sort of life-long ‘play’ – and the presence of an  Immediatism (Poetic Terrorist) will act as a generally subversive element in any circumstances. Here though, we are no subverting in favor of another ideological structure, but always to align the fantasies of Order bac k to the tribal wilderness, to Nature – even Cosmos – of which liberated awareness is intrinsic.

Immediatism is a face-to-face, authentic and spontaneous practice. CommTech is used to organize a gravity which draws the inclined toward the Immediate – perhaps a dinner party – where play can be freely engaged in. Collaborative artistic acts are the ideal, yet immediatist art, in its most powerful form, is never surrendered to Simulation, but remains in the control of its authors, and is used as the primary weapon in the effort to further Free-the-Mind – an act of magic.

Work and Play

Because Art, by its nature, has this collaborative, playful essence, it is an innocent act – yet also necessarily, from the viewpoint of Order, bordering on the criminal. Immediatist Art is unsullied by Simulation. It is best and most vital when Simulation CANNOT capture or imitate it well, though frequently such will occur. Simulation usually finds a way to co-opt secret culture for its own ends. Media is awash with examples. For instance, the phenomenon of Parkour, or ‘free running’, basically emerged as a method of training against a post-industrial police state and quickly (even faster than skateboarding) became a trendy thing to associate with one’s brand.

Once Simulated, the Art is always deprived of a certain liveliness and spirit in favor of memetic power and potential exploitability. Profit is awful for Art, though it is quite aceptable to make a living from Design – the money from such can be used quite creatively to free more time and afford more opportunity for the Poetic Terrorist to play.

Once this Play is dominated by Work, however, we must recognize that nothing we produce through Work can do anything to bring Life into our actions. More money is not going to buy us more free-time! Work is slavery, always a reinforcement of Order, always a contributor to further Simulation and indeed a very real kind of spiritual vampirism manifests – we find our energy for thought and play reduced, not increased and we fall into the familiar promise of future gratification, a future that never arrives. Free-time (and Free-Space, together being features of the TAZ) is a creative act – merely to make the Time and Space is an act of genius – and sustaining it with as little actual effort as possible the ultimate game. We will refer to this as Timehacking, and what Timehacking produces is ’slack’ – a cumulative psychic substance that lubricates our world, permitting easier access to experiences we most desire. These experiences give us Life.

Work supposedly gives us wealth but we assure you those who toil on and on for Order are impoverished. The truly poor and oppressed are clearly denied, in concrete terms, whereas the promises of Order, and most relevantly property, keep us entangled in thankless work – the things we own end up owning us.

There is no excuse in the world for any form of impoverishment. Collectively we could certainly organize universal health and education; we do not. And here we say “we” do not figuratively, when what is meant is “they”, those wretches at the top, who could by lifting one finger do more good for the poor and the challenges of this world than the majority could do in a lifetime. It is hard not to imagine these people as anything other than monsters – look at the monstrous world they have worked so hard to create!

In so called ‘class’ and ‘richness’ their indifference and self-celebration, hypocrisy and greed is in sharp contrast to the values, often very human, of the materially poor – indeed unimaginably so. It is a fathomless, surreal divide, and as convincing as the matter is, as hard and as concrete as it seems, it is utter bullshit. Empty and illusory, in as sharp a paradox as the earlier mentioned dynamic. They do not know the meaning of Wealth, despite their riches and this makes them so much more impoverished.

But the real suckers are those of us caught in the middle.

This overwhelmingly implicit assumption that material equals wealth makes a mockery of any ‘Work’ that contributes to the maintenance of Order. It takes tremendous force and violence to maintain, and this requires continual war. This is a kind of war that is so extensive that it recognizes the need to sway by emotionality, extensively regiment the thought of, and target the spirit and natural, intrinsic virtues of human beings who compose the larger, alienated mass.

So we see that Simulation is very directly an evolution of Order’s will to dominate utterly. To in fact ‘win’ its battles before they begin. To design a world where certain emotions are impossible, or taboo. Where censorship is ultimately unnecessary because the really dangerous mind-stuff cannot be thought about or described in words – it is incommunicable, but certainly not due to some spiritual sense as Zen Buddhists might insist: it is an orchestrated, highly-developed effort to stamp out the very things that allow us to think outside of the system we serve with ‘Work’.

Even the ‘rich’ who Work, and act as if their mere $300,000 a year, or even their $10 million, are deluded into trading their abundant inner-world for the soulless toil of Order. All the while, Work keeps nearly everyone enslaved – worse: it becomes difficult to see that one is so enslaved, having perhaps never tasted real freedom in every cell of their bodies. Or if they did, thought they were losing their minds, or retreated in fear of the Life’s horizons opening to swallow them forever.

Simulation allows you to fill your belly with food that doesn’t nourish – even requires that you spend hard-earned ‘money’ on the poison that will make your condition all the worse.

This all seems very dire, no doubt, though there is a way out: but it means that you must think for yourself, and sacrifice some of the ’seeming’ rewards that are offered for being a good slave. It is very important to think for yourself, to free your mind from the psychic chains and the physical toxins that are making your brain not work right. It is of utmost importance to be able to see the prison clearly, so that effective actions toward freedom can be taken.

Immediatist Art

It is possible to wrestle a living from the system in doing what we most love to do, as we have heard from very young: follow your heart; believe in yourself; dream big. But in all respects this is much more a kind of liberated Play. It is very possible to excel at something we love to do, more so than anyone – the more specific and aware we are for our loves and hates, the more willing to stand by them, the further the fire of genius and creation is stoked with the precious fuel of enthusiasm.

This inward revolution is the first step – walking the talk and talking the truth. It is not an embrace of hedonism, or some selfish soliptic delusion. You can do nothing for others before you make certain of your own freedom, health and power – your own ability to act – to think critically – to find the point from which you can do the most good with the least effort – all the while in Play. A grand, cosmic game of divine intervention. An infinite game. Play.

Inspiration is the vital breath of gods and muses – there is to be little found at Work – though one can find it from other sources, it will drain over time. Enthusiasm is a renewable resource, but renew it you must. How lacking it is in our world – but there is a way of finding it and this way lies in Art.

Art, for the Poetic Terrorist must always be active and living. It does not do to dissect something long dead. Art can only truly be Art when it touches, moves, breathes. To the extend that something brings itself to you, it is successful. But Simulation, and our long exposure to it, helps us forget experiences of genuine contact with authentic Art. In our age, Art has become one of the rarest things.

We forget how to see authenticity, and we forget how to create genuinely. Both seeing and creating in these ways, we are already in the domain of Art.  Art is process, Work is toil. Neither has any final point. They are either living, or pointless.

Talking

We need more ways to talk and most of all more ways to act. From talking comes our conceptual basis for taking action – even reading this is a form of dialogue. If we cannot identify the influences or powers acting upon us, then to that extent we are reactionary. There is always more going on than we can immediately understand, and no one cause seems to lead to sequential effect: always, upon reflection, there are multiple causes and multiple effects. There is also a great degree of chaos, as these causes and effects differ in every individual.

Without talking, communication and a habitual desire to learn and invent, we’ve little chance of gathering an understanding of the factors influencing us. There can be little hope of escape from our invisible prison, let alone subverting a system or defeating an enemy, if we cannot understand it, see it, or talk about it. We are the more disadvantaged if the enemy or system in question is abstract or fundamental. As we look at the surface of things, at individuals or groups or institutions we are lost in a sea of fluctuating complexity, not even realizing, like the fish, that we are in water.

A system of power will obfuscate itself as much as possible so that only its symptoms are visible, whereas its paradigm is thoroughly concealed, meticulously engineered in such a way that those who are a part of its makings/functioning cannot be challenged or exploited.

It is important to see that we are dealing with a collective, alien intelligence, rather than individuals or their institutions. As much as I feel personal responsibility must be taken so that the individual can become authentic, liberated and so that justice can exist, I also put a great emphasis on the importance and power of the institutions, societies, cultures, traditions and whatnot that make up the system.

In this diatribe I speak of Order and Simulation as a system where Nature is a kind of anti-system that Order identifies as a threatening element, to be controlled and treated as a competing system. Nature is understood as a duality: “Man is separate from Nature” — which is patently absurd, and disconnected from what must be real, true and harmonious.

A distinguishment must be made between the term Nature and ‘Cosmos’ that emphasizes the way Nature is seen by Order and confused by Simulation, attacked or believed to be ‘the primary enemy’. Cosmos on the other hand is what must necessarily be – no matter what humankind believes or does because of those beliefs – synonymous with Truth and Reality, in this case.

The Poverty of Simulation

The penultimate issue to be explored thoroughly, for the ‘uninitiated’ is clearly Simulation, since it acts as such an effective hurdle to genuine realization and is so extensively internalized that it creates an environmental prison whose constraints are invisible. This confining prison is of our own making but simply understanding that is far from enough to break us free – we’ve created something much more resilient and enduring than can be dismissed by a few excited ‘oh wow!’ moments. Yet it’s the first and pivotal moment, that dawning awareness. It leads to the autonomous desire to claim as much personal responsibility as one can, as now it can be seen that there, within oneself, lay the most power up for grabs.

Yet ultimately, we must discuss the motive or impulse that will drive us to challenge simulation – a system so extensive will require a tremendous enthusiasm to overcome. So why bother? We find this difficult to answer, as it seems to us that we either ‘get it’ or we don’t, and that the essential motivation is some enigmatic, incommunicable nebula obscured from observation. I reject that premise.

I don’t think that many can deny that most of the world is an impoverished, war-filled place – and as to the situation in the supposed heights of civilization, where we are ‘blessed’ with a disproportionate material wealth, there is indeed a deeply sinister trend of ignorance, apathy and alienation. We see senseless violence that we can barely approach with our reason. We see all around us those who have accepted an imagined mundanity, who feel purposeless, whose spirit is drained – in fact, perhaps we find ourselves as one of them, from time to time.

The Spirit of the Western World is impoverished, and we feel poorer for it, unable to figure out why, what ‘more’ is needed. We watch meaningless conflicts, engage in perpetual toil, just to have our house, our car, and the same shitty, processed and altered food that day by day sickens us and dampens our minds even more.

We stand paralyzed as relationships become inexplicably more shallow, while communities drift into automation – we do not know our neighbours. We know that there is greater access to ‘information’ but somehow we’re getting more confused, and more convinced that we are being flagrantly lied to from all directions. There is only so much we can dismiss amongst one another as paranoia or superstition, before we are overwhelmed.

We are realizing the illusory, deeply false nature of ‘how things are’ – perhaps intuitively. Somewhere, deep down, all of us – no matter how we try to justify and explain away our fantasies of ‘human nature’, with idiotic references to Machiavelli, Nietzsche  or arrogant economic truisms – and I mean all of us have some overwhelming sense that the world should be different, or is different, than what it seems.

It should be, could be, better – so why is it not?

If you feel as if you are floating aimlessly around in a tepid ocean of idiocy – all the more hopeless you find the ‘uncontrollable’ aspects of your life.

We have to accept the perhaps yet unproved, but no less worthy, hypothesis that there are people smarter and more compassionate than we are, and that they are waiting, open armed, for us to ‘wake-up’, just as we may be waiting (pointlessly) for others to do so. We have to accept that we may in fact be the ones who must awaken.

Alternate Worlds

There is a basis for imagining, or rather, pre-conceiving, that a type of genius filled World exists – as well as explaining why it remains elusive.

Perhaps the most potent examples of Worlds within Worlds is the divide between living as a man and living as a woman. Surely we can very easily grasp that due to biological, sociological and psychic differences, many of the experiences a woman has in life are utterly secret and inaccessible to a man. Without a doubt, the reverse is true.

We see these segregated worlds appearing in age divides as well, called ‘generation gaps’. Peoples of different nations and cultures too have a degree of unfamiliarity with eachothers ways. They will organize together and instinctively – though exceptions are plentiful – exclude outsiders, with whom communion becomes difficult. Let us too note the class divides, the racial lines and the resistance academics hold between one anothers fields.

These worlds polarize and fragment, so that without any significant conspiratorial effort, the people participating within them, subject to their particular viewpoints and circumstances, very naturally organize into Worlds. That flow and intertwine alongside each other, but rarely intersect purposefully. Travel between such worlds, if not completely disorienting, is a heavily mystical act, profoundly existential and would leave a lasting, mind-broadening impression. We could drop a tribal into a bustling city and imagine his superstitious apprehension and have a good basis for understanding what travel between even these ‘obvious’ divides of gender, race, class and education might feel like.

If we can thus agree that within the one apparent world we all seem to occupy together, there are a great many social Worlds, we have a fundamental ground to further explore what other not-so-obvious Worlds exist, and develop means to travel into and between them. The occult underpinnings of this suggestion should be clear, though we can let go of a fair amount of superstition about the ‘other-worldly’ given the above examples.

We may immediately note that the most direct, and easy way to become part of one of these ‘worlds’ is to be a person that belongs in them in the first place: a woman’s world? Be a woman. An academic’s world? Study.

We can also note how a new technology or idea organizes around it a community or industry – and business is not the only approach. Especially evident are the many forms of mediated interactions on the internet – forums, games, social networks – which are increasingly leading to face-to-face encounters and manifesting as friendships or alliances that were not possible prior, due to tightly regulated geographic or telecommunication factors. Now that a certain degree of ‘past’ is archived on the Network, we can also begin to allow these communities to transcend time in practical ways – a little gem or particularly vital subculture can be found and explode memetically in a matter of days, regardless of having been niche or dormant for ages.

In the same way, we see a resurgence of interest and involvement in the spiritual and cultural practices of ancient peoples (such as the Asatru or Zen cults) being revitalized and updated by science, and fresh, creative minds. Because of the Network, we can expose ourselves on a more immediate level to contemporary cultures or explore what the long dead have left behind for us to puzzle our way through. New access is extensive.

However, it is only once we are practising immediatism that we are honestly living out the potential that the Network offers. One could say that “the purpose of the internet is to get off the internet” and into ‘real life’ – an apparently mammoth task that reveals just how widespread and ingrained the Simulation actually is. Though the Network and Simulation can exist together, Immediatism and Simulation are not readily compatible. Immediatism is the practice of the courage to be and freedom to do, a type of liberated Play that defies Order’s insistence on Work. Simulation serves to reinforce the system, Immediatism breaks us free of it inherently.

Immediatism implies several things, of which presence, living-in-the-now and meeting face-to-face are primary. They key concept is to be the original center of genius, ‘un-mediated’ by a third party or technology. The premise here is that the further we remove ourselves from eachother as creative individuals through the use of technology and media, the more alienated and isolated we end up being, abstracting ourselves from nature so that escape from the delusion of Order remains inconceivable: we depend entirely to much on it. It is literally built into the structure of our brain, into whatever psychic fabric that our minds are woven of. To remove it all at once would provoke satori, or psychosis (perhaps both) and would actually be quite dangerous and possibly harmful, even traumatic.

Only our minds know this, and have a habit that acts as a ’safety’. This habit is to withdraw from challenging situations and identify them with pain. In general, Change is one such thing that is typically identified with pain and thus avoided, a habit easy enough to clearly see in others. There are many such identifications that create the psychic resistance to Immediatism and its aims, and they must be approached and broken like any bad habit or addiction.

We ‘need’ our jobs, our cars, our mortgages. We ‘need’ our cable TV, our DVD collection (for surely we’d be bored without our mediated entertainment!!) Alignment with Order creates a self-sustaining prison of needs and obligations. The idea of surrendering this essential stuff of life equates with death. It is far from good enough to have clean water, a few meals and a safe place to sleep – we know that that would mean poverty, Maslow’s hierarchy says so. But that’s nonsense. What is required is a complete redefinition of Wealth, because our supposedly wealthy society, our ‘higher standard of living’ is being squandered in a most insidious way.

The core elements of Wealth, to the Poetic Terrorist: a playful nature, free time, flexibility, mobility, access to information, mental and physical health, freedom of association, freedom of speech, people’s justice and strong communities.

To the degree that systems of power (or any relationships) rob us of these things, we are impoverished. To the degree we rob ourselves of these things, we are running a spiritual deficit. We have opted to let our most vital years be drained day by day, week by week, until our electro-chemical functions become so seamlessly attached to Simulation, without our notice (indeed, eventually we can’t even care), that we are lost.

Even our seeming apathy will rarely protect us – only torment us further as we become malnourished, restless like the undead, sleepy ghosts waiting for the promised Doomsday – a future event that might shake us to our core, shake us so much that our dreamless sleep walking might end, that we might be free.

Behind every gesture, Order promises such a future. Simulation re-inforces that Plot will happen, promises to move us into Play. Its visions of armageddon, its promises of a final battle, are the ironic heaven-on-earth that the spiritless masses crave, not the paradise afterwards – so they align themselves with Order, bathe their senses in Simulation and ‘dig in’, preparing for the long haul, dutifully slugging onward, the gears of the wheels which push civilization to its catastrophic end.

But the end is not nigh. “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” No grand-finale, no curtains to close – no theatre at all. Just more restless, unrewarding sleep, and toil in a waking, pointless dream. Order promises Life, but only drains it and destroys it. Suffocates it. Simulation promises us power and drama, even knowledge, but really only imprisons us in the invisible cage of mass monotony, which our brain incorporates into its own neuro-chemical structure, which in turn permiate and influence every thought we are capable of having.

Closing Notes

The Poetic Terrorist has wiped the slate clean. We have given our minds away and build a playground in their place. Our minds are open, and you are invited to play and to explore and to find us within these halls of mirrors. We realize we have never been building this place for ourselves, however wonderful a notion that sometimes seems. It’s been for you: you, whoever reads this, yes. You.

It is a cosmic riddle, a puzzle game – a system to be tested and hacked and shaped. It goes ever on and changes forever. Why seek liberation? It’s only a Hell when we forget that it is heaven.

And for that, I am thankful.