NitN 29 - Five of Wands (WeCo Creators' Holonic Philosophy)

James and LLC are two of the Liminal Web's friendliest luminaries; creators and founders of the start-up platform WeCo: a Holonic knowledge garden, where they (and you?!) are "developing tools and toys for serious play." Scintillating!

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Intro!

When I graduated from High School, my friends and I co-opted a hippy rite of passage and dropped acid in nature to mark our transition into adulthood.

There was this thing that happened to me while I was tripping that I have spent the last fifteen years trying to integrate: conversations between me and my almost equally high friends were repeating themselves with what seemed to me to be almost the exact same words. One of my more experienced friends sagely labeled the phenomenon, “Loops.” 

A few years later, I went through a hardcore anti-free will phase. Didn’t think it existed. Thought, instead, that all our actions were the result of physics. As if a causal chain linked me to the motion and trajectory of a handful of particles at the moment of the Big Bang. Like those looping conversations: a prompt leads to a topic, which prompts another topic… 

What effect is without a cause?

As if you could predict everything from geopolitics to my breakfast choices with a powerful enough computer, provided you fed it enough data. Which, I guess, is what the Surveillance Economy is based around.

Behave, by Robert Sapolsky is a good read on this. Very scientific, but also very accessible. The author describes all the influences on behavior from macro to micro including genes, culture, parenting, socialization, hormones, and neurochemistry… compelling stuff.

During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, however, I was starting to conceptualize that you can create space between impulse and action—between cause and effect—with mindfulness. Meditation leads to non-reactivity via adept observation of your own thoughts and emotions. 

Just a few months ago JT and I talked about intentionally brainwashing ourselves. About harnessing those brief moments of control to surround ourselves with media that provides emotional enrichment, spiritual fulfillment, and intellectual stimulation. 

A few Nodes episodes later, I realized I can choose to escape predetermination with Shadow Work. The rituals that I have up on creekmasons.com describe a step-by-step process to, at minimum, harness placebo (but potentially invoke ancient Magick) to effectively deprogram and integrate the kinds of instincts that Robert Sapolsky describes in Behave.

While typing this out, I realized that’s what gnosis is, at least for me personally.

Gnosis is the experience of being free of your conditioning. Free of the stories and illusions. Free of others’ trespassing on your own sovereign free will without your consent. 

My pitch is that there is a psychosocial stage of development after Adulthood (I’m coining Adept-hood) that is defined by an ability to exert conscious will toward living with intention and prosociality.

So let’s finish developing—become Adepts—to escape from the demented and dementing influence of the Survelliance Economy’s prediction engines.