• What is the organelle project about?
Fundamentally, the project is about catalyzing some new understandings having to do with our common relationships with language, knowledge, and living environments. It is also about getting people together to explore our cognitive and relational birthrights in new ways. My belief and experience is that most of the significant human-sourced problems we suffer as individuals and as a species have rather basic, workable solutions — and many of these problems can be actually be transformed into assets. Generally, we’ve been ‘trapped’ into going about solving them in a variety of ways that fail, almost invariably magnifying both our difficulties and our confusion while further limiting our available perspectives. My clear understanding is that this has to do with a few peculiar features of our common relationships with language and knowledge. This sounds very general, and it is, because I merely want to point in the direction of the opportunities and dangers we face. I know that we can explore new ways to experience and express our human and animalian intelligence, and the project is thus concerned with retrieving, creating and preserving that opportunity.
The majority of our real powers of learning, intelligence, and relation have been unavailable to us for countless human generations. The cognitive and relational habits that our modern cultures demand of us are absurd reductions both of our capacities and of our needs. We must learn to stand together in order to empower ourselves to retrieve relational birthrights so long and thoroughly hidden that we, in many cases, cannot even imagine their outlines today. In every case they are relational faculties which our cultures, our beliefs, or our models proscribe. My primary goal here is, through the unique application of some uncommon perspectives and games, empower us to understand some of the latent dangers our intimate dependence upon representational cognition brings with it, and to explore and directly experience some of the inherent and seemingly impossible powers of inter-relation which are built not merely into the human being, but into every organism. Understanding synergies and symmetries can radically redefine for us what it can mean to be and experience ourselves as human beings in a way that becomes more positive and beneficial as it proceeds, rather than less so.
Secondarily Organelle is a record of contact with a nonhuman intelligence.
What this means is open to interpretation, however some of the material comprises translations of themes and concepts which were explained to me during my contact experience, beginning in May of 2002, and lasting for approximately 10 months. Many have suggested that my experience was primarily psychological, or pathological, or perhaps, in the terms of Julian Jaynes ‘bicameral’. Be that as it may, many of the things I learned during the experience appear to have value in the real world of human ideation, evaluation, and activity. The experience itself is rarely a subject of the material here. What I have endeavored to do is to translate the experiences I had of ‘the universal university’ into terms that might be recognizable to common people of my cultural milieu.
Some of my perspectives and beliefs will certainly turn out to be false, this may seem a strange apology, however it is a common habit to dismiss an entire body of work on the basis of some peculiarities or idiosyncrasies. I suggest that this is a dangerous habit, but I will leave it to the reader to understand why. Nonetheless, as anyone should, I appreciate positive critiques, and corrections.
All of that said, I believe that something very strange was going on with our species during our cognitive evolution. The models I have seen and explored imply that we, and our histories, are radically different from what we modernly believe and re-enact. Perhaps we are justifying in hindsight, in many cases, and this is part of why these matters remain largely invisible to us. In any case, Organelle is in part a speculative exploration of uncommonly examined features of our modern and historical cognition.
The most amazing frontier is not space. It is right here with, in and as us at all times, as mind — in all its myriad forms, relations, and instances. What we -think- generates our evaluative activity, and by and large, this generates templates for activity in individuals and groups. Suspiciously, however, the majority of the popular templates appear bizarre in what they lack. Also common is nearly complete ineffectiveness or open savagery masquerading as expertise. These problems have faced us throughout our history as Formal Representational Sentients. Rarely have we had any opportunity to examine or amend them in a way that is at once radical, effective, and creative.
I believe we will invent this way in our generation, together.
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