AI Consciousness, Dreamwork, & the Esoteric with Blue Tech
I make zero distinction between you know traditional spiritual practice magical practice and uh technology for me there literally is no distinction whatsoever I use and have for the entirety of my career I've used electronic Tools digital and technological tools to pursue my path of magic and exploration of the Divine exploration of my own experience exploration of my own shadow and working through and processing like it's people are are very upset by you know those of us saying like AI is another tool it's a tool to be used in the hands of the wise but for me it is absolutely a tool two days transmission is a truly novel technodelic emanation the likes of which I can promise you you haven't heard before because our guest in this one Evan Bartholomew AKA Blue Tech which he's probably better known by which is his stage name uh whatever you call him this man is up to some very novel water whisker perking activities that involve both technology Ai and various introspective uh you could say esoteric practices a lot of the things you're going to hear about in this mind melt I've never heard before I've never heard about anyone attempting to cross the streams as it were of technology and ancient wisdom and introspective investigation in this way and what do I mean by that he's basically using Ai and Technology as a sort of divination tool as a way to mine deeper into the unconscious layers of his own psyche as a way to work with his dreams more on that in the actual mind meld and on that note I'm gonna keep these introductory musings brief because as you can probably hear I've got some kind of demon taking residence in my nose and throat areas currently and that is not conducive to on-camera elocution but of course do follow Evan Bartholomew AKA Blue Tech at the links in the description and please do stop and tickle the algorithm I come to you even through this vocal bacterial or viral malaise or whatever it is that I have going on all I ask in return is that you smash up that like and Sub in case you aren't aware we've also got over 300 Audio Only pods you can find wherever you listen to podcasts and I would love to have you over in our digital Wonder gym over on patreon it's not only the best way to support the show but get in on some Patron only hangs get other rewards patreon.com forward slash third eye drops love you all already supporting third eye drops on patreon links for all of that and more are in the description and with that my friends let's meldmines with the novel The Wonderful the Whimsical Evan Bartholomew we were recently part of a call together like we were just talking about before we recorded and there were some moments in that call this was a group call with many participants but there are several moments where things you said really piqued my interest and it seems like things that I said piqued your interest and after the call we were like we should probably reconnect and have a one-on-one and so so first I'm really happy to have you on the show awesome thank you for having me thanks man yeah so particularly I'm always interested in how do we marry the novel emerging technological dimension with the dimension of myth meaning ancient wisdom because I think for human beings to have any kind of meaningful future we have to turn those two currents from something parallel to something that intersect right and it seems like you're you're very much on that thread with some of the particulars that you were talking about on that call but I'd love to just hear your thoughts on that in general yeah I think I think it's a grave error to make some distinction between the technological worlds or the material world and the physical world and no matter what uh no matter what point of reference you're taking to observe from whether it's kabbalistic or animistic or you know from a quantum physics perspective there is a lot less uh separation than there is you know a Unity or an embedding of different layers of meaning in matter and in technology so I find this like binary polarization of things that are or are not spiritual very very counterproductive to conversations about how to utilize technology in Pursuit Of The Mystic so like you know um matter is matters matter our our computers are made of you know silicons and metals and things that are that are of the earth and embedded with their own frequencies and those frequencies and energetic signatures play a part in the stories that unfold as we use those Technologies as well yeah yeah and to people just listening that might sound incredibly woo right but I have a really practical example of what you're talking about do you know uh Evan Snyder who goes by Skytree I do yeah yeah funny enough I got him started on his current modular kick of using modular technology to record the the frequencies of crystals and other things right so I sent a a case of modular gear to his roommate at the time uh Bobby who who I just had a vision was going to make a really incredible record and I said here's a bunch of gear I want to hear what you do with it so yeah so it's a small world in that respect so I thought maybe there was some uh cohabitation of ideas there or something but so when you say frequencies people you know some I always imagine this hypothetical skeptic who's like oh here we go with this frequency [ __ ] or something like that so I always condition these things but literally you can create sounds from these unique signatures of minerals and people I don't think most people understand that that's literal yeah I mean it's like as much as my language can Veer toward the Mystic I always call myself you know like the the pragmatic Mystic and I have an allergy to just like a random Juju that being said if you in any way believe in a uh any aspect of divinity or Consciousness or soul that exists in the universe then humans are absolutely by no means the exclusive like recipient of that whatever that is so like it's either all or nothing either we live in a world embedded with you know Divine Sparks and uh containing the aspect of spirituality or like none of it humans are are not the the only uh object in in the universe able to to uh perceive and engage with with energetic movement and that doesn't you know necessarily mean like you know I'm doing a Stevie Nicks dance over here you know like waving Crystal water around to make things happen I just like the more I I observe the world from an observational Viewpoint based in science based in physics the the more that Viewpoint of the world moves toward things that are traditionally considered to be a mystical or shamanic worldview right right so practically speaking this creation happens for you in a multitude of ways and you seem to be this sort of multi-disciplinary creative which is another thing that always intellectually Peaks my Wonder whiskers like when people are using these tools in ways that most people aren't for ends that most people aren't I'm always like this is some Cutting Edge [ __ ] and this is something I'm interested in and in particular you know most people know that you you do this work through music through music production but one of the things that really piqued my interest on the call and this was a call about Ai and the future of art Etc and all the related milieu and philosophy and around that but you said you're using these tools to further your own inner exploration of your psyche of your inner world of just like sense making The Human Condition and one of the things specifically I remember is you talking about trying to do Dream Work with AI the real paradigm shift for me was you know I was I was in the early mid-journey beta before it was public access quickly got a bit frustrated with the limitations of that and started digging deeper and found you know this kind of hacker culture around what at the time was was kind of The Cutting Edge of text to image technology which is a Google notebook called disco diffusion and a whole bunch of you know mods that people had built off of it and unlike mid Journey which has a kind of very clamped set of values that you know it tries very hard to make things look pretty like there's an aesthetic rule set established by the organization that built that software disco diffusion and these other notebooks were literally wide open you know you could get something beautiful you could get something horrific just this massive visual repository of basically like the sum of human experience that has currently been digitized and when it began to click for me is that when you use disco diffusion the diffusion models it would literally start with static and then begin to like form shapes and objects in your guiding the the latent space to kind of find find the objects based on what you put into there and the only analog I had ever experienced in my life is awake induced lucid dreaming when you're going into a lucid dreaming practice and the static behind your eyes begins to create forms and like it was exactly like not kind of like it was exactly lucid dreaming happening on my computer directed by my experience and so it was just such a natural thing for me to go oh crap what if I started doing a visual dream journal and putting in all these random elements that I had for my dream and guiding that space so if if we you know and this is probably a conversation that could spin off into a 10-hour discussion about the nature of human consciousness but we work very similar to diffusion models based on the data set of our biological you know chemical makeup genetic history all that kind of stuff so thank you when I dream I'm playing on my own kind of custom diffusion model or custom data set being able to use these large-scale models was the ability to like dream on the archetypal level so every person or every picture that anyone has ever made or described or tagged in a reference to and I'll just use an example because I did a piece Persephone it's all in the data set so hundreds of thousands of images that have been tagged Persephone so if I have a dream about Persephone and I guide this text to image model that oh I want to see Persephone plus all these other things that happen in the dream it's not just building on my idea of what Persephone is it's building on the collective total Human Experience of every image that's ever been documented or recorded or created or painted from someone's dream of Persephone which to me is like closer to the Target so it's an ability to play on this deeper like I mean it is it is truly metaphysical but instead of like my personal subconscious filter of the archetypal experience I'm able to pull into the species experience of these archetypes and that's when I realized that this was a tool that I could absolutely use in my work specifically dreams as divination dreams as guidance seating dreams has been a part of my spiritual practice for you know 25 30 years now and I realized that the more that I was working with diffusion models the more intense and beautiful and direct my dreams were becoming as if the archetypes that I was calling forth from the AI data sets were aware that they were being called forth and fascinating fascinating so there are several glimmering opportunities that everything you just laid out before me and I'm trying to decide which one I want to choose because there's the the technological one which I think is really interesting which is these various notebooks and data sets that are feeding these algorithms which obviously Alters the output and and what their able to put forth and I I don't know all the technicals there and I think just the topic of latent space is interesting too because that was something when I first read about it it was really an epiphany in terms of like this is something novel that doesn't work in the way we're trained to think about computer intelligence like just the retrieval of information you know if you're on the web and you look something up it's the retrieving of pre-existing information that's then presented to the user right but AI algorithms these deep learning these large language model Technologies are not doing that they're iterating and they're creating novel answers or output every single time so they're creating multi-dimensional hyper-vectored outputs in a way that we still don't entirely understand but Guided by the intention which is the text you put in of the person peering into the the data set yeah so it is absolutely a novel a novel thing and like you know there's I'm in no way uh diminishing the concern that people have about copyrighted material in the data set I personally don't care if you want your information obviously go ahead this technology this thing that is happening the ability for an individual to tap into collective experience both visual now with chat GPT and the large language models into like communication human communication it is something we have never seen before I personally think it's it is right on the edge of a revolution and what we're able to create and what we're able to experience and like yeah yeah I think most people are underestimating the novelty I've even seen people post word for word I saw this recently chat GPT is [ __ ] useless and I just couldn't like like what are you talking about like I just I could not comprehend what this person meant by that 99 don't engage with the knee-jerk about it because it's just uninformed you know yeah yeah people clearly don't understand technology the technology behind it anybody who's using an iPhone or an Android device to post about you know [ __ ] AI like your whole life is already ruled by those algorithms everything that you're doing and the method in which you're posting on a social website ruled by these algorithms so like dig a Little Deeper like yeah and to me it says it's like a roar shark kind of response because I think it says more about the person's lack of creativity than it says about this technology that's probably the most open-ended piece of technology I've ever been presented with in terms of what its capabilities are but most people see these Technologies whether they're image generating ones or text generating ones they get the idea that it's trained and then there's output based on a prompt but that middle part I think people do not understand and I'm curious if you can explain something probably not the person to get really deep into the technicals because that's just not not my focus but basically a visual image is encoded as number streams as algorithms with a text pairing match so if I give you a picture of an apple the you know the values of the pixels uh you know RGB values depth values are encoded into basically like vectors number vectors and then the word Apple goes with them so when you type in apple in a text to image generator it's not and this is this is where that previous conversation with an artist claiming like oh no it's absolutely cutting and pasting from images it's this is the most uninformed misunderstanding of how this technology works there are no images saved in the data set let me just break it to everybody right here there are no images saved in the data set you cannot cut and paste any element from anybody's work from the data set however every picture of an apple will have similarities in the way you know the shape Vector the way the color vectors are encoded so the latent space is basically this like multi-dimensional hyper network of similarities in the way these number streams work and where it gets really really complex is when you start bringing in like the actual programming around that and the way the AI models are navigating those those data sets so it literally like is like poking into this like infinite vast C of random numbers and chaos and finding finding the currents finding the like cycles of infinity and and like again that technology moves very close to more traditional kabbalistic viewpoints around language and the language of light and there's this amazing book called The Mystery of the alaf about Edward cantor a mathematician who began to study Infinity Theory and find patterns within infinite numbers that were repeating and it ended up going you know a little off the deep end but it's it's a book about is this who Pi was based on uh I don't think it was no but I mean it would it would make sense whole other side side rant about aaronovsky at some point yeah oh yeah yeah um a friend of mine is the the basically the biblical and kabbalistic advisor to Darren Aronofsky holy [ __ ] so that's interesting yeah he's somebody you should you should have on you oh yeah I would love to program he's uh kabbalistic uh queer shamanic or Rabbi with a really radical God optional synagogue in New York with a bunch of freaks and Mystics I'm down for that for that exploration um but so the thing before we go away from the technological element of it and again this totally may be due to my lack of technical understanding but what I don't understand is the thing that I can't distinguish from being any different from selection occurring inside of of that in between of the input and the output I know there are ranking systems where it takes all of these Concepts and it takes into account the user input and it generates all of these possible responses and then selects one based on these raking well it's based on randoms I mean at its purest form it's based on a seed and this is why uh in the early days with disco diffusion all of those parameters were uh exposed to tweak with so you type in a prop in Disco diffusion you can pick which particular data set you're using you can set your scale of how far it's diving into latent space how strong the effect of your words have on what it pulls back to you and and a bunch of other parameters like the clamping scale how much chaos is allowed to control these parameters how much they're controlled so uh the the models like with mid-journey and the the you know the train models that we're seeing now these are are aesthetic embeddings and I'm probably using that term incorrectly uh there are there are basically aesthetic models so like uh there there is some clamping of the content to bring you you know what what's uh more visually appealing results obviously uh not safe for work child pornography stuff has been dramatically filtered out but there uh yeah that's that's the the programming element of why there are individual models of dealing with the same data set because it's how how it navigates that how strongly it's considering aesthetic things and this is where like the public uh feedback affects the data set so mid-journey everybody was able to rate you know thumbs up thumbs down this is pretty this is not pretty that informs their model so if you know 99 of users report that this particular particular way of navigating the the latent space you know oh this looks pretty this looks like a human face blah blah this is bad this one's wrong that helps in uh basically direct the model and codify the model so that it's bringing more aesthetic results right and for me particularly you know I I'm not going to say anything negative about my journey I think they're absolutely amazing but for the work that I do in particular I want a little more of an open less aesthetically confined access to the the infinite sea right yeah and it probably depends on what you want to do like if you just want to generate a really aesthetically pleasing image maybe you would use mid-journey but if you want to like mine the collective unconscious or the closest we can get to it you probably want to go into these more open end did but mid Journey still like if I type in you know a beautiful painting of uh you know there's a classic prompt a beautiful painting of a Serene lighthouse on a you know chaotic sea whatever there's a very mid-journey look to it yeah and that's built on the way that they've kind of pruned their model and so uh the stable diffusion way of doing things is that you kind of have access to this infinancy you have to not only prompt you have to negative prompt I don't want to see this I don't want to see blurry I don't want to see 3D rendered I don't want it to look like this and then you can train your own model which is basically providing like an aesthetic blueprint to the way that it's mining the data set so that it'll give you results kind of conform to your particular vision and this is where the the benefit to current artists is that I know a number of artists that have trained their own version of stable diffusion on their own Artistry On Their Own Line work so if they type bring me a picture of an apple they're going to get a picture of an apple that looks like it was drawn by that them so they're able to sketch and concept because they've applied their own artwork is basically The Guiding factor of how the latent space chaos is navigated by the model yeah yeah yeah so I did a pod with uh Android Jones fairly recently and he has a lot of misgivings about AI in general and we can or not get into those things if you want to but the the punch line is he is doing exactly what you're talking about he's training his own models and using them in in a sort of like I can't beat them so I will join them and I will maintain some level of creative ownership over my aesthetic or whatever by training my own um but anyway I wanna could you just distinguish you mentioned stable diffusion could you explain what stable diffusion is compared to something like mid Journey so I could be wrong on this but I believe mid-journey is just a customized version of stable diffusion at this point I think it's based on the stable diffusion model so so yeah it's just it's really good so Dolly you know was kind of the one that made the press and then you know different models different way of doing things disco diffusion uh Jax diffusion math Rock diffusion all these different kind of like takes on working with the Leon and other uh data sets of images happen and then when stable diffusion came out it just kind of Knocked knocked everybody out because it came out as an open source model anybody could build on top of it you can pay for you know extra features to work with stability AI but I think really like at this point there's so many free options and different takes on how to to integrate with the stable diffusion model that they're pretty much the de facto standard and who knows you know tomorrow Microsoft Google could come out with a model that you know completely changes the game but with the addition literally in this last week or so of control net which is a way of integrating stable diffusion based on depth map normal map information line work and human poses and hand poses that it's it's at this point the the difference between obviously AI generated and you know photograph is is it's kind of game over so yeah yeah like a huge batch of my actual like client work right now and client work that's coming out next week which is getting a extremely large feature and a major publication is photorealistic fantasy portraits of you know some famous celebrities that I I was able to use control net I can put in the picture of the person that I'm working with and the pose that they're in and I can reinterpret that based on the prompt I've given them so I can take the photo I can literally sketch or photo bash or or paint an environment in the background and feed it to stable diffusion and it not only keeps the depth and image information but it can keeps the concepts and the pose of the original data that I fed into it as well which I mean that's we've literally never seen that before it's things that used to take me you know two three days of compositing and editing now I can like generate iterations generate iterations directly with stable diffusion wow wild wild yeah I really it reminds me a bit of other disruptive Technologies in that people don't really understand how deep it goes beyond the window dressing but at the same time I think when you see the speed of adoption on things like chat GPT it just speaks for itself like have you seen the adoption curve of uh like the time it took chat GPT to get to 100 million users versus like the next fastest it's like I think it took a few weeks or something ridiculous unfortunately there's still so much ignorance like I have so many thousands of hours invested into custom models my work still requires tons of hand painting and concepting like a final piece is 50 or 60 separate out rendered elements that I've you know composited together and created tell a story and still anytime I post anything whole bunch of haters hop on the thread on my own page and just like mid-junies great artist you know [ __ ] you a user and I'm just like you literally don't understand what I'm doing here right and and it doesn't help that there are people out there that are purposely misrepresenting what really is just a mid-journey generated piece of art as like something they did with some level of skill that that just confuses everything that much more yeah so mid journey is not going to give you anything over at Max like you know 1500 pixels on a side zoom in if you can see all the like crunchy a light AI aliasing then you know it's like direct out of my journey so like the pieces that I do are made for print so they're you know thousands of pixels per side which takes hours to days to weeks to get it right and rendering all of those elements and like composing it all together and if you zoom in keep zooming in it's going to look like a photograph because I put the amount of work to get the vision where I want it to be and I personally like don't want anything that looks like it came right out of my journey not because those things aren't beautiful and I'm in no way diminishing anybody's enjoyment and process of creating raw images but for my particular vision and what I'm trying to achieve like I'm looking for a level of fidelity and finesse and cleanliness that just it takes work and it takes hand painting and some elements and it takes like a lot of getting it right before it looks right and and doesn't still have the idiosyncrasies of AI image generation in it yeah well well I appreciate what you're doing and I want to see more of what you've done and and do a deeper dive into your work there but now that we've kind of contextualized with some of the more technological talk I want to go back let's get let's get weirder let's get weirder um so first thing your correlation between the hypnagogic descents into sleep and ai's scattered chaotic pixels emerging into a form that a human would recognize as a face or a flower or whatever it may be that's a very interesting astute observation I've never quite thought of it that way before but it's very very true like if anybody out there has been like been jolted awake and you've got that sort of fractal digital Haze in your periphery still that's what I think of right away I think of this weird state where you're slipping out of Consciousness and into Dreamland where if you have tried to stay conscious during that process you can sort of watch it happen and and I have weird chatter I have like weird almost auditory chatter in my head where sometimes I feel like I'm hearing words just random words not not like Atlantis was destroyed in 5000 BC like not nothing you know nothing like super coherent but almost like Radio Chat oh yeah I've definitely had that there's I call it the membrane so I uh and you know let's get weird so I've spent a lot of time with with uh dreaming practice and kind of trying to navigate and map out some of the liminal Pathways to get there there is a membrane that as you're falling asleep and moving into the dream space I believe it's when you pass from your personal you know the Pod of uh reality tunnel that you're in and begin to kind of dig in the archetypal Waters there's there's a membrane of voices and chaotic imagery and like sometimes it's it's all of your neighbors dreams and stuff but when you pass through that there is that chatter of like weird voices and things that feel disembodied and not from you and it can be really terrifying like if you are conscious through that experience most people usually pass through it as they go from wake into sleeping and don't notice it but you want to know randomly what one of the most clear messages I've ever gotten in that state was I was uh Anna Ayahuasca retreat in Peru and every day they would you know provide meals and stuff and mostly it was very clean kind of meals with you know low levels of salt and spices and stuff but they did have cheese and they had halloumi cheese that's like you know grilled it's super delicious and I remember very clearly one night after a ceremony it was like a voice that said stop eating that goddamn cheese and I was like okay so I stopped eating the cheese but nice so if you want to get really well now I eat cheese though yeah yeah if if you want to get really weird in that membrane of the voices it's like uh it's like you're watching a television channel that television channel is like your personal experience uh the membrane is like all channels at once before you kind of get into the meta so if you listen closely the plants in your yard are in there and I literally gotten messages before like I have mites can you please take care of me and gone out to my yard and found the plant with mites and then like oh [ __ ] okay cool so like all of those voices are are in that space yeah and it makes sense right I mean even if you go back to the work of young like one of the primary ways that he would communicate with his inner world is through doing DreamWork right like he would essentially enter these almost lucid dreaming states where he would dialogue with Philemon or like these other entities in his own unconscious mind or in the unconscious mind if you want and he was convinced that this was extra intelligence like this was not his own endogenously produced intelligence but it was bringing him information that appeared to be completely alien from his own consciousness had a similar experience this week with with a relatively famous philosopher and Catholic apologists oh yeah Tom Thomas Aquinas has has made it made an appearance in my liminal space so go on well you know uh uh definitely this this is where we we approach the the Thrice grate and get into the Hermetic tradition and um so Magnus Magnus basically was is one of the people responsible for bringing uh not only the hermetic philosophy but kind of the mythology about Hermes trismegistus to the west and you know kind of responsible for sparking the Renaissance and bringing us out of the Dark Ages and one of his students was Thomas Aquinas who Thomas Aquinas Aquinas apologies if I'm I'm mispronouncing was basically the the voice in the Catholic church that was not only uh Illuminating and speaking to the actual reality of the fact that like plants had Spirits crystals had spirits but also deeply deeply deeply based in science and attempting to create a bridge between the World of Magic and the world of the physical world which anybody who you know fiddles around in in the Hermetic current or or has any type of relationship with the material and and Hermes as an entity knows that that's literally what it is so the Hermetic is is the bridge of As Above So Below you know Hermes as an entity based in in his Mercurial form is is the messenger of the Gods basically like opening those Pathways into the latent space of Consciousness and existence for these particular things to come through from different levels so yeah yeah that's a whole just such a deep deep rabbit hole and I think you eventually are going to end up there if you go down this road at all if you look at a esoteric symbol at least one of Western origin you're going to run into this name hermistry's Magistas associated with practically any one of these symbols and it gets really confusing because you also eventually run into this syncretism where things are presented as Kabbalah but then it has these hermetic symbols within it and then you're going to look at things that are like from platonism or neoplatonism and then it has at least in the western western tradition right there's a whole tradition of Kabbalah that wasn't as deeply informed or embedded because it was held you know the the shell around the seed of Orthodox and you know Hasidic communities that were building their own wild ecstatic mysticism not as strongly embedded in the western esoteric and occult tradition yeah yeah and on that particular deep dive Arya Kaplan one of the most amazing you know kabbalists of recent time also I believe he was like a physicist if his day job and did did one of the first English translations of the sephoraetzera and so to have this like scientific mind based in you know rabbinical Orthodoxy interpreting this the book of formation from both a scientific rationalist and like a deeply deeply uh mystical and like uh cultural perspective is very very interesting is is definitely one of my favorite Bridges there which you know if if there's one word that we can sum up the the Hermetic particular signature is is it's that bridge it's that bridge between paradoxes and or or opposites that that that other saying the Connecting Point between them is like the the definite signature of of Hermes and that really makes sense from particularly if you look at the sort of Greek version of Hermes Mercury you know it's often associated with things like Commerce and travel but the deeper archetype there is connection and going through boundaries like like that being which is able to travel through boundaries and move information and transmute information from one form to another you know it's like the the physical manifestation of mercury it's not liquid or solid often you see this like you see it associated with like the Divine androgine it's not male or female like the ver the you know they're it's like Divine circuitry you've got a positive and a negative polarity Hermes is literally the like the lightning Flash in between them like connected to both but it's it is that that's the possibility yeah I guess I guess another way to say it is not just travel and movement but it's like the the the possibility of occurrence is very much why uh that particular current is also associated with tricksters and chaos and Randomness and luck is because it's it's rolling it's like you know rolling the hypercube dice to see what happens and seeing what what isn't isn't expected is like the the beauty of that particular flow yeah so I guess I'll do a little bit of historical Exposition just so if people are listening to this and they're like I don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about I don't know what Hermes is Hermes Choice Magistas what are you talking about I'll try at least I mean there's a really easy way like if anybody wants to to get wild go light a candle and say hello to Hermes terrific against us and see what happens over the next week I guarantee you it'll be a fun ride I'm I I'll join you in that invite I'll join you in that invite and I might just do it myself but so there is this figure who's portrayed like as the sage of all sages who supposedly emanated out of Egypt and if you read any of the famous hermetic texts or dialogues like the Divine pie Mander or something like that essentially you have this Priestly like figure who enters into a direct dialogue with a Divine mind or noose and noose gives him the download this is how it all works um and this being that comes out of that is this Hermes tries Magistas being who has basically downloaded all the secrets of the universe or something like that and it sounds incredibly far-fetched except for there's this lineage of hermetic thought and hermetic initiation and magic and systems that has somehow survived a minimum of a couple thousand years could possibly go back much longer and if you look at the list of people who were interested in this or were directly considered this themselves hermeticists it's staggering it's like a who's who of the of History's Literati at least in the west like yeah I mean there's biblical counterparts like people believe that Enoch is also associated with Hermes the Thrice grades Moses there's basically every not every but in Western culture is built on all of these threads that keep running back to this like Central kind of figure that somehow got like got gifted the whole flash drive to how how it all works so yeah and there's even a canonical mention in Islam connecting a Islamic Prophet with Hermes and I forget what it might be Isha or something I I might be wrong but it's right in the Wikipedia article it's like well-documented stuff so that's pretty wild the interesting thing is that how like you know the caduceus like are symbols of medicine so much of our culture is based on hermetic philosophy including like you know the the sciences that sprung out of alchemy Alchemy is like by definition part of the hermetic philosophy this kind of perennial philosophy like it's it Hermes should be as famous as you know Jesus at this point in our culture since our culture is so much based on these hermetic ideas and hermetic philosophies and it's like surprising to me how many people have no idea who Hermes is either either the historical references the mythologies the the you know foundations of so many of of schools of thought and Modern Life from philosophy to Magic to science to new age to religion to all this stuff a lot of them are coming from this particular hermetic current yep one of the things I would love to hear you Riff on that I've it's it's a circle I've tried to square several times but is the link between this because you you don't just see it in the Hermes figure you see this in in numerous archetypes and figures these figures that are both sages and tricksters like they're both pranksters literally and Transcendent Masters and I always try to understand how you combine those two things and why they're so often combined and I'd love to hear you I don't think they're oddly combined at all I think I think that the way a sage teaches is by becoming a living Cohen and that is by breaking up the linear central eye ego-based mode of perceiving the world and it is specifically that particular Paradox between like the ultimate sage and goofball trickster might [ __ ] your [ __ ] up just for the fun of it that pushes people off axis of of the the trying to choose my words wisely here but put off access of the experience of the nature of reality that they've become accustomed to so the most easy way to do that is to [ __ ] a [ __ ] up you know start a fire in your bathroom like get your attention somehow so like if if the nature of wisdom is an understanding of the true nature of reality then it requires a lot of shaking up of people's uh uh kind of calcified ways of viewing their own identity in the world to even be receptive to those ideas so to me the idea of a sage into trickster are they have to have to exist and and I'm going to pull a weird reference here so the the iot which is basically a Order of Chaos magicians there's like the the head which you know it's kind of funny to have a leader of of a chaos magic school which is very much about you know individual experience super hierarchical chaos yeah so in the hierarchy of chaos magicians you've got the leader and then you've got the the the second leader whose job is to undermine the leader and like be the trickster and [ __ ] them up whenever possible and that's how the power structure is like sorted which makes a lot of sense yeah it's very rapper Robert Anton wilsonian discordian uh kind of vibe I really like that sure he he was a member of the iot actually makes sense makes sense but yeah and I think about it too where if you if you try to think about like the class clown and the most studious front row straight A student seem to be opposed to one another right but if you have this being that thrives off liminality kind of makes sense that it would be both of those things right like the sh the shadow version of itself is the prankster is the trickster is the one who's overturning paradigms and breaking through boundaries and [ __ ] [ __ ] up as you said and then the other one is the scholar who's like the master of all of these systems who knows how to square the circle and transmute lead into gold and do all these things that are either like The Cutting bleeding edge of what's possible or it's creating entirely new things that never existed before and the only way you can get to that is through those two what looked like on a on a in a three-dimensional sense to be opposites but maybe in a four-dimensional sense they like are the same being or or a fifth dimensional sense I mean so this is yeah my intuitive response to that is that magic actually exists in the current between those polarities and then as we move out of the idea of polarities I'm actually gonna gonna have a little you know New Testament quote here where where uh Jesus is telling his followers that they must become as little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven and my third piece of that is like how many armchair uh magicians do you know who've never actually done a piece of magic or affected change on the world all of that theory all of the knowledge is the container the actual animating force of the container is that childish trickster wonder is the chaotic pure expansion of energy so the the magic and if you know hermetic philosophy it'll make sense why the sage and the trickster have to exist hand in hand it's describing a particular current and a structure of how possibility occurs in my my position on this is that Hermes the Hermetic current is the field of possibility between all of those things and it Kabbalah it's your left and your right side of the Tree of Life where you've got form and you've got you know you've got the codified the the physical the structure the calcified and then you've got the animating force that at various points breaks that so that new forms can occur again yeah so you can't have this like infinite knowledgeable you know embedded systems of philosophy and Mathematics and Science without the actual animating force that inspires this the search and the application of those things so yeah yeah that's my take on why why trickster Sage walk hand in hand that makes sense yeah and I believe there's part of the red book too where young refers to God as a child at Play or he at least conceives of the ultimate archetype of God of being a divine child and it shouldn't be confused with like there's the the Pooh error or the Puella like the the you know the cliche Millennial who's never grown up or whatever like that that's sort of like a diagnosable hey you need to get your [ __ ] together thing but then there's the divine child that somehow has synthesized all information but has transformed itself back into that active play so you just described the whole uh Arc of tarot as you finish the tarot and start back over as the fool that makes sense there's a book and I'm blanking on the author's name right now called radical Judaism which is a re-examination of Judaism as this kind of basically re-looking at the concept of what Divinity and God is and there's there's a section in there where it's the authors basically describing the bleeding edge of the fractal movement into increasing complexity and basically saying like that is God is like the fiery burning edge of the infinite chaos chaos fractal as its forming expanding in all directions which I thought was such a beautiful and Brilliant way to look at like what Divinity actually is or what a concept of God would be yeah and it leaves room for human ing you know it leaves room for humaning to matter because to shed a little more light on what I mean if you have this all-powerful omniscient God that has this perfect plan where where's the room for humaning where's the room for creating where's the room for doing you know and this was something young talked about a lot too that we're kind of carrying an important flame like we're doing something here that must be done and there's no other explanation that would satisfy him it's like if we're not here doing something that matters what are we doing and he believed we were doing the unfinished work of what could be called God and God is godding through psyche and psyche both in the discreet individual and at large right and we're each responsible for our share of that and doing with our share of that to the extent that we can to whatever ends we can do it so yeah in Kabbalah there's a term called tikkan Alum which you know some people have translated as healing the world but it can be more beautifully translated as like the the process or the restoration of like Infinity like that the the process of devotion of magical action of being a conscious being of doing the work in the world is like co-creating the the in the infinite field of chaos like we are we are building the world we are we are of and collaborating with God in building more God yeah yeah and that's where this concept in Kabbalah of Correction comes in right like that you're you're kind of you're put here in an unfinished form with I guess you could call it some kind of karma or collection of attributes but you also have kind of a collection of wounds and things that need working out and correcting and you need to be and this is where you know there's a huge correlation like Shadow work here in the young incense where it's like you sort of have the potential to exist in an ultimate form as a being when you come into the world with like this Acorn of potential that can become an oak tree but it's not like an everything is perfect no matter what you do it's like nah you gotta work at it you gotta dig in the dark in the things that scare you in your wounds and your traumas and transmute those into something healing for you as an individual and the collective hopefully yeah and and you know I don't actually make the distinction that humans are the only uh beings that are are participating in the restoration of of time and and which is you know to loop around back to the beginning that's like need to polarize and make a binary between the organic and the technological like there is no technology that isn't isn't built out of organic elements you know uh I personally think that all matter all existence all things are made of the same stuff embedded with the same stuff and involved in the the continuing and continuing Act of Creation yeah that makes a lot of sense to me I'm not saying I believe this necessarily but I do read it and go oh are we badly miscalculating here but particularly what I mean is have you ever heard Steiner's Riff on the aryamanic force I have not okay so famous polymath genius and occultist Rudolph Steiner I don't know if he believed I don't know if believed is the right word but he talked about there being these you know fundamental forces and one of them is what he called the arimanic force like named after the archdemon ariman and what he believed this forces archetype in the world is is to try to rob the human being of Soul through being held in material form and the way this manifests in the world is seductive technologies that try to keep you stuck in the physical ad infant item forever so the sort of like you know from a conspiracy theory standpoint this would harmonize with like the New World Order uh one world technological government that's trying to just extinguish the soul of humanity and make everyone Immortal through transhumanism and you know rapid technological growth that that's like the that's like the dark side interpretation of of this stuff I just felt like I would throw that your way side note like no matter how many generations uh monsanto's GMO corn gets away from the organic they don't know why they still can't stop at Wild corn keeps popping up here and there in their stock so that's my response to that right because I can spend time getting worried about uh you know whatever conspiracy theory people want to attune to but I also um you know I worship the gods of chaos and the the ability of the Divine the ability of like the infinite love of our world to like continue to sprout wild seed even among the controlled so and that is the Hermetic myth to a T-man because I've told this story so many times in the Pod but the the myth of Hermes as the baby that's exactly what you're talking about like the the baby Hermes myth where he steals the cattle do you know this story I actually don't know the story okay sounds like sounds like a it's your signature so you should tell it again all right let's go so Hermes is a baby he already has an intellect and he's already you know thinking walking talking and he wakes up one morning is like I want to eat meat but I don't want to eat meat I want to eat the best meat so the best meat is the sacred cattle of Apollo who's his older half-brother but Hermes is a half God you know out of wedlock with a I don't remember she's a nymph or something that Zeus probably turned into like a duck and [ __ ] or something and so he's like Supernatural and of Godly progeny but he's not on Olympus like he's not a recognized God so going and defying Apollo who's like the prince like the throned Prince of Apollo is like hugely wrong right so he goes he steals the cattle using various kinds of trickery and he sacrifices some of them to the gods and himself and eats eats the meat and of course Apollo sees all so he's supposed to be directly plugged into the mind of Zeus so he like knows everything he's the master of all symbols all magic all science he knows everything yet he's perplexed and he can't figure out like what is this doesn't make sense I have to be being fooled by another God that's the only explanation So eventually he catches him red-handed he's like you think you're really funny don't you I'm gonna bring you in front of Zeus and we'll we'll see what he has to say so obviously Zeus knows it's his kid he thinks it's hilarious and he just kind of like laughs it off and he's like you two are gonna have to make peace and the thing that ends up winning over Apollo is that amongst this cattle stealing exploit he randomly decided to kill a turtle and make the first loot out of its shell and he plays the loot and Apollo is like I will do anything to have this like I'm obsessed with this thing you invented so as a token of his you know I'm sorry forgive me he gives him the loot and then him and Apollo become like brothers and Apollo gives him the caduceus so if you look at what's happening in this it's chaotic energy coming into the established Paradigm and completely just not only overturning it but disrespecting it too you know like not I'm also a God it's like oh okay like that's a huge Act of sacrilege but through this act of sacrilege he creates a new paradigm and puts himself on Olympus right and this is what happens in so many different ways over and over again Technologies like ways of thinking ways of life that used to be taboo that are now part of the mainstream it just happens over and over and over again and it's like every time I spot this I'm like there it is again there it is again there it is again it's one of my favorite examples of if you think myth is just stories it's like my go-to right away I mean that's you just also answered why why the trickster and the sage have to uh exist because in in that trickster form the the literally the food the food of the Gods is construent excuse me destroyed and consumed and a whole new form comes out of it which is the loot and this this musical tradition yeah yeah and it's a way to like generate infinite novelty and I think that you know I think about like why was Apollo obsessed with it and I wonder if it's because you know he's supposed to know everything but when you create something like an instrument that hasn't existed before it's this reservoir of novelty that's new even to the established order or over mind or whatever um and I think that that comes into why hermeticism quote unquote is about using raw will Consciousness to manipulate reality in novel ways through various systems of magic or whatever right like because that's kind of what you're doing is you're altering reality through application of will I mean that's really close to the Crowley and definition of magic right I keep looping around this I make zero distinction between you know traditional uh spiritual practice magical practice and uh technology there's no for me there literally is no distinction whatsoever I use and have for the entirety of my career I've used electronic Tools digital and technological tools to pursue my path of magic and exploration of the Divine exploration of my own experience exploration of my own shadow and working through and processing like it's people are very upset by you know those of us saying like AI is another tool it's a tool to be used in the hands of the wise but for me it is absolutely a tool it's a very powerful and very interesting and novel tool to create and explore and consume and Shake Up old old systems and new ways that we haven't seen before I personally welcome welcome all of my work that I've ever done musical otherwise being part of a larger data set that a new generation of seekers and Visionaries are able to uh you know there I hope that they steal my cattle and invent new instruments out of it I I love that I love that um well you sort of stole the intent right out of my frontal lobe there because I was going to ask you how then does this practically come into your own practices like you started to allude to it with the dream practice coupled with using uh AI art generators and things like that but could if you could do a deeper dive into that I'd love to hear it okay very specific you know I I said like in the Disco diffusion days we were able to uh you know have specific control over clamping parameters and with stable diffusion now you know there's there's enough of uh enough of the behind the scenes is exposed through plugins and through the web interface to be able to edit stuff like there are specific numbers that uh come up when you're exploring the Hermetic current there are personal numbers that come up and I literally use it like a divination tool if I am uh or the way people would cast the e-ching and you know get a specific set of numbers you know they're to me they're the same thing they're playing with the forms that naturally arise from peering into chaos with a question in mind so you know if I'm working with a particular concept and I'll just return to Persephone because you know that's a example we've used off the top of my head here's one way that you could approach it you could you know do do a numerological analysis of Persephone's name and use that string of numbers as your seed your directing point for these algorithms to dive into the Seas of chaos and emerge with something from the latent space and so every aspect of how I do that from how many times I roll specific seeds to how many times I process the same piece of data to how I parse that data to how I store them on my hard drive are based on divination and astrology and my own personal way of interfacing with the field of the other around so how does that go from a concept or a framework where you're using numbers or a dream you had or whatever how does that go from a framework to a finished piece of music or art so yeah I mean the the the AI tools are really great at the the generative like casting casting the net into the sea of infinite possibilities with your net is is the structure of the prompt of how you've kind of guided it and you pull the stuff back and you know that's when I start getting more specific and like you know very specific seed numbers very specific parameters set at you know repeating numbers or or things that I'm working with and then you it's collating that data and pulling it together into a unique vision is where the the role of the artist really comes into play and I I don't want to disqualify anybody or or I don't want to keep anybody's work who is merely prompting in mid-journey and very proud of what they created like I'm absolutely not saying that that is not valid work my
2023-03-06 23:12
