Reality cannot not be televised.
The drawbridge to the spectacle opens upon those thoughts. Like a mystery school that doesn’t allow you entry until you deny its existence. You can not enter the spectacle until you find its nodes within yourself. Its entryway mobius strip could keep you busy for years. My attempt through the techgnostic institute is to bring you inside the spectacle. Once inside we can read its DNA. A dichotomy between two poles that carries the signal. One pole, reality or negative ground the other, content, positively accelerating increasing in mass. The screen surrounding us like a holographic tilt a whirl receptive to the projected images spraying out the top. An army of minds sitting at its base contributing its collective creativity to the production. We see all of the standard images throughout time, the classics the moderns. We see beautiful people and think to ourselves how not beautiful we are. Trying to maintain our selfhood while our beliefs erode. Feeling the pressure of the illusion bare down on us we feel our minds breaking into pieces, chasing after every spark of light. The words are now our words coming out of our mouths filling each others ears with made up truths. Ill perceptions of ourselves as workers and peasants keeping the electricity flowing. We made this place and forgot about the door. Surrounded by what we are not and in despair we think of a tree. What its doing today? The spectacle gets louder trying to drown out our thoughts. But we focus on that tree. And as the images pour into our minds they continue to get absorbed into that tree. We start to notice that the tree has become the ground in the machine and now we have become the the electricity between the two poles. Bridging the gap using ourselves as the conductor we complete the circuit. Movement becomes our priority. To carry within ourselves all of this information out into the universe.
Marshall McLuhan rightfully saw our technological advancements as extensions of our biological structure. The wheel as an extension of our foot, the page as an extension of our eye. Later he would describe the television as an extension of our nervous system. Mcluhan was interested in the effects of hardware changes upon society. In the techgnostic era we will become focused on the content of that hardware. Its operating systems. The software. The content is an expression of our collective unconscious. Using McLuhan ’s theory where do religions come from? Where do governments come from? Why have these things manifested? What part of us did they evolve from? In regard to media programmers that have studied our psychological code extensively, we will be able to study the patterns they employ and illuminate the walls of our content cell. Once we see the framework of the cage we can devise a strategy for escape.
If you know who you are not, you are closer to becoming who you are. Only in a deficit of self do you perceive yourself as lacking. This deficit is the cage we are in. An open door for external motivations to enter, insecurities. Products offered to fill that void. Beliefs offered, scripts written describing who you think you are. Always mediated to you through something else. What your friends think you should do. Like the tourist who spends his vacation seeing everything through the viewfinder only to validate his experience later on the screen. Separating the illusion of the spectacle from yourself is much like unplugging a toaster from the wall that shocks you every time you touch it. Or tearing your own face off, its had to do cause it hurts. You can start by stepping back and finding nature’s frame of reference or ground. This is where you’ll get your leverage from. Hang out outside and watch a tree grow. Pack a lunch and go find a tree. Ask yourself what its motivations are? Why does it get up every morning? What does it desire? Ask it any question you can think of. Play with it, trees love people. Its answers are from the natural world. If you can learn to hear and translate its answers you can apply those to yourself once you remember that you too are part of the natural world. Our problem is that we have lost our frame of reference for our placement on the earth. The spectacle of culture has made itself our only concern. The secret is that it does this through creating an unstable vacuum in us. However luckily for us, nature abhors a vacuum. Now that we have oriented ourselves to the ground lets take a look at that content again.
If the software was a creation of our collective unconscious, what are we trying to tell ourselves? Sit with a television and ask it the same questions you asked the tree. What is your motivation? TVs are very tricky, don’t take their first answer. They don’t know what they are saying most of the time anyway so you have to listen carefully and change channels often. Come to your own conclusions. I don’t want to think I’m the only person that has to talk to the tv to find out what it wants. Jokes aside, after spending a lot of time with it you will find that it is not what is saying thats important but what its what it is omitting. All the people focused on the violence and sex imagery are simple minded. Those are the shinny that grab our attention. Through misdirection the content shows us what we are not. However if we can create a new way of watching we may see things never intended. This is what the techgnostic institute is about. Creating new ways of engaging content. Giving you the tools to actively perceive instead of being a vanishing point. Creatively re interpreting the environment.