the new alchemists

A four-point poem to remember the four poles:

the eyes of Horus,
the vision of Wright,
the hands of volcanoes,
the engine of light,

What would it be like to live 90% of the day in literal vision & literal action? Don’t spend time in abstract vision (over-thinking) or abstract action (over-optimizing). There’s a plane of being that has pure sight & pure action. Remember those parrots from the book Island that just shouted, “attention!”

You can tip into the virtual engine

The only value of the past is in how you can access or transform it to shape your future.

When your stuck in your head, return to the pure attention and reset the loop; ARCHAIC (return to your literal vision) > MAGIC (with intention, refocus your attention on something that matters) > MYTHIC (tap into the narrative or story behind that action) > RATIONAL (embed what’s working into a virtue/plan).

MYSTERY SCHOOL: What could this look like? How could a group of people share and co-develop these practices?

• L1, ATTENTION: What are the actual practices to train your attention? Do breathing exercises. Try the different types of meditation (eyes open/closed, mindfulness, mantras, and void states). Add symbolic meaning to how you eat, wash, and show

We craft virtual machines to interact with our hyper landscape. Through meditating on what our story is and what we care about, we become fluent in it. We can get out of our head and act from our values. It’s a feedback loop. By changing your actions, you encounter new things that refine your virtual engine.

And most importantly: your virtues are co

It’s paradox all the way down (or, “nested opponent processes”).

• Consider the basic Yin/Yang duality.

• Now imagine 2 overlapping axes in a plus sign:

  • SEEING: literal<>abstract vision; up-down.

  • DOING: literal<>abstract action; right-left.

• It doesn’t stop here. Consider the pairings. There’s:

  • BEING (literal vision & literal action), and;

  • KNOW

Terence McKenna on the imagination:

The imagination is central to the alchemical opus; the process goes on in the realm of imagination, taken on to be a physical dimension; we cannot understand the history ahead of us until we imagine a journey into the imagination.  We have exhausted the Cartesian paradigm; the future of the human enterprise i

coincidentia positorum : (an alchemical term) the union of opposites; you can’t understand anything unless you simultaneously grok what it is and what it isn’t. By a mere shift in perspective, a thing’s opposite comes into focus, and the opposites melt into a new whole. This has many symbolic expressions: the hermaphrodite, soul/luna, mercury/sulfu

What writing prompts could lead to alchemical transformation?