Writings Depth Charge
by Jane R. McGoldrick
This time about cliff Bostock.
the invisibles
Psychotherapy: Why some people have abandoned it, more from Cliff Bostock:
So, in soulwork, our task is to imagine our way to truth, our calling in the world. The work does not require artistry, only the willingness to engage in the imaginal. The psyche naturally communicates metaphorically and in images (thus the work is often called “psychopoetics”). The imagination places us in the realm of “the invisibles,” to use Hillman’s term, or in mundus imaginalis, to use Henry Corbin’s term. This is the place where our destiny reveals itself — between the literal and the wholly imaginary. In this place, so unfamiliar to most people in our society — and even scorned by much psychology — life speaks clearly to us through the autonomous voice of personified soul.
Cliff Bostock
Writings
Deiknymena: Erotic revelations in cyberspace
by Cliff Bostock
“But who is imagining in cyberspace?As we surf the Web an apparent random series of images begins to arise that at some level has coherence to the psyche (if we can presume some kind of coherence is necessary to maintain our attention). Any web surfer can verify that this “dialog” can go on for hours. The lived experience is not of incoherence and disassociation. It is instead of fascination and learning. One feels in contact … but with what?
This too is similar to accounts of the mystery cults. One is taken over by the experience – specifically by the “god” in the experience at the center of the cult. Despite the balkanization, the fragmentation into various cults with different contents, the shared experience in all of them is of being overtaken. The same is true in cyberspace. To put it in Marshall McLuhan’s terms: We are re-tribalized (into newsgroups and chat rooms), but the particular content of the tribe doesn’t matter so much. Why? Because the medium itself is the message.
But, again, what is the fundamental quality of the medium – or, as the Greeks might put it, what is the god in the medium? Perhaps, as Ulansey seems to suggest, it is the collective psyche or anima mundi – the “megasynthesis” of matter and thought into a self-reflective colelctive envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin (1959).”
The line “…what is the god in the medium?” interests me here. It is a project of mine – the archetypes of cyberspace.
Jim Kent & the Genome Data
O’Reilly Network: Keeping Genome Data Open [Apr. 05, 2002]
“Jim Kent was a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), when he wrote the program that allowed the public human genome team to assemble its fragments just before Celera’s private, commercial effort. His program ensured that the human genome data would remain in the public domain. Kent wrote the 10,000-line program in a month, because he didn’t want to see the genome data locked up by commercial patents.”
A hero indeed! One of the spin-offs from now using GNU/Linux is that it is easier to see how locking away human knowledge for the benefit of the rich is just evil!
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O’Reilly Network: Inventing the Future [Apr. 09, 2002]
“Weblogs. These daily diaries of links and reflections on links are the new medium of communication for the technical elite. Replacing the high-cost, high-octane, venture-funded Web site with one that is intensely personal and built around the connectivity between people and ideas, they are creating a new set of synapses for the global brain. It’s no accident that weblogs are increasingly turning up as the top hits on search engines, since they trade in the same currency as the best search engines–human intelligence, as reflected in who’s already paying attention to what.”
“connectivity between people and ideas” – that is what I like about it.
Danger to the planet in dismissing the soul in tech
Cliff Bostock – Writings
Hillman Speaks: The topic is depression and the man is confounding
by Cliff Bostock
“This curious habit of exempting certain areas of inquiry from his own method of reversal permeated the weekend. While valorizing shattering, the suffering of depression, he seemed unwilling to look at what mania itself might be asking of value. To my own mind, mania, as a social descriptor, may be telling us we really do need to speed up our attention, that if we live on a dying planet, we need to begin merging our bodies with new forms of technology. It is in media – the internet, the cell phone, the television – that we see the most visible expressions of consciousness speeded to “manic” rates. There was just no opening in Hillman’s (anti-technological, anti-speed) cosmology to discuss this in a serious way.”
“Indeed, the entire room seemed unwilling to go that way. One man spoke negatively of the way the “window to the world” has been replaced by “Windows ’95.” It is a great mystery to me how people in archetypal psychology offhandedly dismiss the idea that technology itself might be ensouled, that in a world on the apparent verge of environmental disaster, our survival might well depend on our capacity to take on new forms of embodiment. There has been a lot of (optimistic) writing in recent years about the internet as a group mind that may be the planet’s salvation.”
A nice essay on depression from yr 2000. This is also a link which in turn links to a lot of writing by Cliff Bostock. Look for his article on Archetypes for example…
The whole essay follows:
Continue reading “Danger to the planet in dismissing the soul in tech”
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The Internet Archive: Building an ‘Internet Library’
This is so good!
I hope it can last – or will there be some sort of collective memory loss?
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Audio Online: UCB Speech Archives: Streamed Audio Files, Media Resources Center, UCB
UC Berkeley Lectures and Events (including materials from the UCB Language Center Speech Archives)
A great collection!
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The hypnotic, intellectual, satirical, spiritual, and philosophical world of Aldous Huxley.
Brave New World and other works – Extensive information, discussion forum