2378 – Exploring Process Relations (UTOKing with Bonnitta Roy 2024)

Probably one of the most disconcerting things about Whitheadian process philosophy (or the philosophy of organism – as Whitehead called it) was its “theological” reception and transmission via American process theology (particularly Charles Hartshorne mentioned in this talk several times). It is a historically incontestable fact, that Whitheadian process philosophy survived in that milieu in mid XX century, although overall the chapter dedicated to God in ANWs magnum opus Process & Reality: An Essay in Cosmology is rather small. It almost feels like an afterthought.

I publish this here for anyone wanting to hear a contemporary discussion about inner and outer relations. This talk is a crash course of sorts through the difficulties (if completely unfamiliar with Whiteadhead’s metaphysics) but also a proof of the vivacity and constant evolution of process philosophy in today’s world. One could of course pick and choose favorite morsels about cells, agency, causality, and organizational levels – from this talk. To conclude with the conclusion of Bonnitta – the best of contemporary science and especially new contemporary scientific advances have to inform our metaphysics and philosophy – the same way the scientific advances of Whitehead’s time (quantum formalism and general relativity) were inspiring and reshaping those insights.

Whiteheadian Marxists like Steven Shaviro have taken another route entirely than the usual process theologians (check the pdf God, or the Body Without Organs from which I will quote heavily) and bringing forth Whitehead’s own criticism of both Leibniz’s and Spinosa’s notion of God, even if their positions are closer to him than anyone else. But like all thinkers of the last 2000 years (to quote Shaviro) they allow “ethical and religious interests. . . to influence metaphysical conclusions” (173). This Kantian Whitehead or critique of religion is indeed a different beast that we have become acquainted with (through let’s say essential immanentist readings like Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking with Whitehead). His criticism of religious belief is from a transcendental position rather than an immanent, Spinozian one. Rather than eliminating God (Shaviro underlines) like Nietzsche he seeks to accomplish a “the secularization of God’s functions in the world” (1929/1978, 207). This startling attempt is part of the Enlightenment project, but with a twist, because it does not seek to eliminate religion, only diminish its importance. Whitehead seeks to establish a God without religion as he wants to respect the findings of physical science without supporting “science’s reductionist positivism or tendentious separation of facts from values.” This secularized God is God as the Principle of Concretion. Coherence is here the most important thing and Shaviro continues to explain why in a passage from 2008 that is both memorable and crystal clear (coherence- a notion that is not so much logical as ecological):

The principle of coherence stipulates that “no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe” (3). In order to exist, a given entity presupposes, and requires, the existence of certain other entities, even though (or rather, precisely because) it cannot be logically derived from those other entities, or otherwise explained in their terms. Coherence means, finally, that “all actual entities are in the solidarity of one world” (67).

God, or the Body without Organs, ~Steven Shaviro

2284 – Entangled Life (podcast General Intellect Unit)

LISTEN HERE

In which we read “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake.

The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.

They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature’s processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world, and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself.

If you like the show, consider supporting us on Patreon.

Links:

2032 – The Green Planet BBC (documentary 2022)

timespace coordinates: I feel like we can speak as of 2022 about multi-temporal documentary making, especially regarding the lives of plants. Basically a camera shot that can fly in and out at many different temporal scales, induces the feeling of moving around microscopic objects and records microscopic movements imperceptible (to humans) at 3 years intervals (the saguaro cactus ridges extending during eet seasons for example).

Nature documentaries have been transforming and evolving their own technologies in order to track a changing evolving world – engaging and mediating the width and thickness of NOW. These documentaries are not just simply recordings of what’s out there – of some external reality. New visualization technologies, rigs and post production is developed in conjunction with gene editing (CRISPR) so that we can watch under UV light how a transgenic tobacco flares up, becoming “aware” (in the words of D. Attenborough) of an outside attack simulated by a pair of scissors ‘nibbling’ on its leaves. We can see it how a plant ‘anticipates’ or speculates about – further attacks and warns other distant parts indirectly affected. Because such newly mastered gene splitting technologies acquired from bacteria/bacteriophage co-evolution, one can insert genes from a distantly related phylum, a bioluminescent animal – a jellyfish probably into a plant. We can trace out a distress signal circulating inside the leaves of the plant in a laboratory setting. Such fluorescence markers dramatize how similar nerve endings and nervous systems are to vascular plant systems and how a signal can be carried and used as an early warning system in case of predator attack (caterpillar). The inner lives of plants are made visible akin to brain scan imagery – we don’t know what it is like to be a tobacco under attack, or how it prepares a chemical protection strategy, but we can watch and imagine life in a multi-processual way, a life not defined just by nervous systems.

It is only recently that one could track an interior activity that is completly below our radar – even if most of our ‘normal’ experience of breathing, walking, car driving lies at the same threshold of un-cognized activity. This is not just capturing the vector movement of a single plant or vine climbing, a plant activity noted by many observant naturalists in nature or a subject of process philosophy (Bergson, Whitehead), but a bundling of vectorial movements, of tropisms.

Take the example of plants moving and growing in the search of light(phototropism). We do not have here just the level of the leaf or vine, but of the parts inside the single cell (Chroloplasts) of one such leaf. There’s constant molecular activity, all under quantum mechanics rules – that powers up the cell during photosynthesis. This is mostly invisible activity. Most such energy harvesting by Chroloplasts is invisible, imperceptible. Such technologically mediated perception of invisible vector activities and micro-‘societies’ all happening simultaneously inside a plant is portrayed as a grandiose unseen choreography, jumping from level to level or switching scales.

The Green Planet encourages us to be a witness from our couch of the synchronous bloom (filmed with a drone) not only of two-winged flying seeds of gigantic Dipterocarpacae trees in Malayan archipelago (forests with the tallest angiosperms in the world), but also follow the migration of tiny Chloroplasts herds inside a single plant cell towards the light source. This involves making visible the cellular movements typical of daily photosynthesi, hidden movements that subtend all other movements (animal metabolism) and permit most primary biomass to multiply and replicate on Earth. It is important and a bit scary to imagine this biomass (80%) as active, sentient and not indifferent to what is happening all around and even chemically and termodynamically involved. This invisible world also includes the movement of life-sustaining gases and humidity that pass trough invisible mouth-like structures, the result of an invisible “breathing process”, of countless closing and opening stomata on a single leaf surface, on every leaf, all over the world each day.

For this to be possible, there is a combination of live field recordings (from the Pantanal – the world’s largest tropical wetland area) and filming inside a careful reconstruction of the Pantanal watery ecosystem. This reconstructed ecosystem (a large aquarium basically) in a small corner of Devon UK is place where the largest water lily Victoria amazonica traveled from the Kew Gardens in the hope it would play its part. That is why you have to watch at the end of every eps of The Green Planet HOW it was done. Lots of things came together from new lenses to skills aquired during competition drone piloting (First Person View drones, also called Stunt or Racing Drones). This does not dispell the magic of the series – but makes it even more graspable and adds matter to our imagination, fills in the gaps with the missing time that got edited out and that joint effort that went into it.

What a monstrous and prickly lilypad – to emerge and spring out of this Devon garage pool under the lense of photographer Tim Shepherd wading the depths of his small hot spring!

in a corner of Devon

More horrific in its way than all the natural horror movies – because its claims of staunch evolutionary storytelling of a “Tyrant” takes shape front of you. But hey, let’s not forget that it is also about sensitivity of such a huge aquatic plant that needs all extra care, the perfect conditions, artificial warmth and nurture – in order to perform. To see it in action, one needs the helping hand of many and lots and lots of kg of compost to be drowned regularly in order to match all the fertilizers of a South American river.

The water lily is a “Tyrant” only under these specific and unstable temporary conditions. So this is what it takes to be able to entice it to grow, emerge and rotate like a lasso under the eye of the cameras. It is also a fairly (pardon the pun) willful plant with a mind-of-its-own, that is never there for us or to satisfies our curiosity or the calibrated expection of the camera eye. It goes down into its depth and only unfurls at its own pace.

remote controlled filming and swooping along branches and rainforest terrain like never before

Also (for me) there is this important idea that the water lily only takes over at the end of a temporal-seasonal sequence. It closes down an ecological cycle of sorts, but is not at all there from the very start. There is a before and after. It needs particular conditions and before these conditions are met, there are other goings on happening. Some ‘winner’ plant is never there from the beginning or center of attention, and it might feel like it is always there. There is a set of events and various actors. This ecological succesion becomes visible in the Green Planet documentary because we can follow various species each having their own moment and strange mobility techniques, each its (Andy Warholas) ‘5 minutes’ of glory, each (buyoant water hyacinth and others) having a go at the sun rays in a situation of almost preemptive growth and resplandance as if anticipanting the coming of the waterlily giant.

The universe felt like a small and unchanging place even a few generations ago. There was only the Milky Way (still a huge place) rotating above, but no myriad galaxies in an ever-more rapidly expanding, all part of red-shifting spacetime continuum. On Earth there are all these unseen movments and animated sequences – all dramatized and as much part of what Deborah Levitt calls The Animatic Apparatus. We have to see these documentaries as part of a bigger continuum that comprises post-continuity cinema as well as a specific time of the 3D CGi effects world where one can watch rivers of leaves cut by leaf-cutter ants or think about the deep time history of patch of seagrass, that is basically one organism derived from a 80.000-200.000 year old clone.

What seemed like the domain of science fiction and materialist aesthetics – is now a living example of the history of science visualisation: a move away from the stained tissues, ‘dead’ 19th century outlook of wet collections, taxidermy and type specimens towards a dynamic and dramatized feature of life under various modified lenses, microcinematography, time-lapse camera, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) – under diverse set of laboratory and field conditions. This animating and dynamic recording characterizes what Hannah Landecker has termed the new “molecular vitalism”. This vitalism is not concerned with identifying the old Bergsonian élan vital, the vain search for an invisible lifeforce or one single majestic structure but with tracing, tracking with the aid of moving, living images the very activities that have escaped us. This time-based medium went from recording the machinations of the gene replicators but finished registering the protean proteinic 3D movability of these microscopic happenings, a window into their (ceasless) molecular activities.

All this existed till now, including the Scanning Electron Microscopy – yet it was still too static, too one-dimensional and static. This is why in 2022 and for The Green Planet BBC has hired an expert (Stefan Diller) that used a custom-made 8-axes electron microscope to ‘fly trough’ like a drone in a shot that can track around a mushroom spore, one thirtieth the width of a human hair. New light microsocopy techniques subtend this ‘indepedent’ imaginary flight around such plant microscopic worlds – with impossible clarity and depth by “holding focus all the way while also moving around the subject. “

electron microscope with 8 axes to be able to fly around tiny subjects

There has been a constant effort to make visibile the hidden life of plants available to the human sensorium. Plants are the most obvious yet the most ellusive of beings (of course if we ignore mushrooms). With their slow movements and apparent immobility, plants have been tricking us. It is as if they played dead-alive all this time, fooling us with their organic-anorganic liminal positions, mimicking their surrounding so well that so as not to attract undue attention. Plants do remember our touch and communicate with pheromones or using the mushroom enabled wood wide web. This is all very late observation, since they existed well before human minds or cameras eyes started following their secretive lives. They are waving in the wind or in the water following currents we have never been adapt at following. Already Charles Darwin become intersted in the way plants move, or how to record the speed of transformations that do not happen at human scale. The “view from nowhere” – or that unwated scientific attention made it certain that so much espaced our attention and perception. There is this entire realm of happenings and performativity of (especially) plant behaviour that makes them agents, forces and powers on their own terms. Darwin’s empirical experiments concering the movement and behaviour of carnivorous plants or the steady growth of humus via accumulated worm casting investigated such changes.

This apparent stillness and passivity (in comparision with animals) is something that David Attenborough BBC documentaries strived to demistfy or debunk since 1995’s The Private Life of Plants. The private life is not private at all, and has become very public. This new dynamism of the botanical world has since become public knowledge. Therefore during COVID years we the social animals are staying cooped up in our private homes, more immobile than usual, and more boring than usual while plants are being plants – taking animatedness and mobility as their own. Flights are going down and so they should in an era that realized how much global tourism is adding to the overall pollution. If you get bored with animal docus – you always have plants (said one commenter on YT). So The Green Planet is (also) about facilitating an impossible flying perspective, something typical to digital CGI effects to enliven, intensify a more and more (bored) ‘vegetating’ animal life with shorter attention spans. While the temporality of climate change is non-linear we still continue to hang onto a linear clock-time of calender COP26 deadlines. It is instructive to see this in contrast with the dramatized heightened attention and sensitivity necessary in order to percieve and experience such larger webs of invisible interaction and interdepedence.

2004 – Discognition: Fabulations and Fictions of Sentience by Steven Shaviro (book, 2016)

there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book

I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.

I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.

First here is a draft Intro to his 2016 book Discognition

Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one.
Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument.
What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm.
Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference.
The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.

In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless).
We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such.
He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath.
To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:

Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.

1976 – Out of the Present (documentary by Andrei Ujică 1995)

Out of the Present is one of the most mind-boggling examples of documentary making (in my experience) to come out of what the Germans call “Wende”, the 1989 turn, or what in Romania is known as the – “tranzitie” – the protracted transition of the early 1990s after the Romanian Revolution. The Romanian 1989 Revolution is left as the only – brutal, bloody revolution. Yet we have another example maybe even more emblematic – because it had much more wider repercussions. The 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt also known as the August coup – is often depicted as the fight btw the reformists and the old guard soviet apparatchiks, with the reformist faction run by Boris Eltsin winning. Well, the result was the total collapse of the Communist Party and the immediate collapse of the Soviet State. In fact, in retrospect, this could be read as actually the first important step in the shock therapy economic measures – that have afflicted Russia, but all the other countries of the east bloc as well – be it Romania, Bulgaria (maybe not so much Poland and the Baltic nation-states). Another exception is CPR – China being one of those rare, maybe only countries that got forewarned and beforehand refused any structural liberalization of its core industries preferring instead a gradual liberalization from the margins, a dual pricing system and many other things which none of the previous examples followed (including Romania and Russia). In fact one can say that without first the annihilation of the party and the state, all the other – price liberalization etc privatization of industries, even the rise of the oligarchs and Putin – would have not been possible.

Andrei Ujică is one of the most accurate analyzers of mediatic sociological political mutations – and he helped Harun Farocki make the Videograms of a Revolution documentary in 1992 practically the best documentation we have about the first televised revolution – about the various framings, affective overflow and post-spectacle operations taking place on TV, with actual theatre actors becoming revolutionaries and so on. They were both digging into hours and hours of TV materials to be able to offer this comprehensive study of broadcasted images and audio-visualization of politics.

Out of Present is something else – it presents the Soviet Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev leaving Earth and CCCP for a space mission on MIR to return and reenter Earth in a new country called Russia. It is for me one of the most stark example of space dilation that does not take just its relativistic time consequences to their limit but also the subjective experience of somebody who is caught on orbit, who is dependent on a sort of terrestrial life support system that was on the verge of collapse, an infrastructure that brought Gagarin first in orbit, the first human to leave terrestrial space. It spans the entire collapse of the Soviet Union but from a cosmic perspective of sorts and during the routine of one of the most enduring dreams of humanity, the one that links communism with the exploration of outer space. There is much to be teased out of this documentary so I leave it up to the viewers. This documentary was included in the New Temporealities show at the Scena 9 BRD residency in Bucharest this year. Below is my text on it – for the room 7 of the exhibition where the movie was screened.

07 Out of the Present into Space

What happens when time plays tricks on you up there, when you rely on and depend on once-functioning life support systems, guided systems that put the first humans in orbit around the Earth? What happens when you depend more than ever on a space exploration infrastructure that sent you there, but which for the moment remains suspended? Abandonment is the occasion to get out of a continuous present, dislocated from that home that is no longer on Earth, the place where even the system that sent you towards the stars will soon cease to exist.

This portal, which measures the drift out of time and into unknown space, is discontinuous. Just as time becomes difficult to measure, suddenly there is a place where worlds are suspended, and far too quickly destructured and atomized. Many SF comics and cover artists felt the need to abandon drawing when they encountered the prowess of CGI post-production, because they felt 3D modeling was already fulfilling their purpose, delimiting all possible actions in advance.

The exit from the present takes place when everything is spatialized, leaving room for movement through the frozen time of others, even through the unimaginable speed of some spaceships flying over a fiery exoplanetary landscape far from here and now. Entering in instantaneous and short-term memory, images are no longer subjected to linear succession. The fast pursuit is no longer a pursuit but a suspension in between. It’s ready to happen, and yet it doesn’t happen.

 

1946 – The Universe is Hostile to Computers (YT video 2021)

For me this video has some metaphysical dimensions – and you will perhaps pardon me for that. There is something very encouraging (even if with micro-catastrophist repercussions) in the fact that there is this flippancy of bits all around us, or the fact that all the Mars rovers are using some old hardy tech in order to minimize or become resilient in the face of the chaotic, unpredictable behaviour or highly energetic particles. Most of the time life here down below is kind of disconnected from the above (outside the realm of critical astrology or the like). This video exemplifies in a very specific way the proximity of the realms, of the so below as above, the fact that effects somehow overrun causes, that we cannot deal with a unicausality, and particles energized by black holes at the center of our galaxy actually reach us and somehow – influence or may affecteven results of e-elections. There is also these proof of vibrant materialism all around in the words of Jane Bennett, something that the micro processor industry had to deal with since the beginning. This enlarged affectibility (panexperientialism?!) – the affectations of matter in the Spinozist terms are all around, and even ultra rare events such as antimatter collisions highlight an invisible universe that is made visible via all sorts of glitches, via gaming impossible feats. Visionary artists such as Hilma af Klint that participated actively in the feminist occultures (like Theosophy that acted like a feminist liberation theology) around 1900 where also increasingly sensible to the insensible and the invisible realms and with the discovery of various ends of the spectrum – and new theories of “quanta”, “fields” and rediscovery of atomism, became also the artists to try and imagine and represent our first modern art abstractions.

It is important to keep thinking how the discovery of cosmic rays impacted our pop culture – even in the origin story of superheroes such as the Fantastic Four.

1925 – Machine Elf 100 – The Pineal DMT | Visual Fractal Meditation | Trey Ratcliff & Joshua Ryan

I’m extremely interested in how DMT is indeed an endogenous molecule (meaning naturally produced internally) that is in our bodies, plants, animals, and everything that is alive. What’s all that DMT doing in there? Not even any of the top studies (more scientific studies happening now at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University) can figure out what the hell all that DMT is doing inside of us. I experientially know with a surplus, you certainly have an ego death and leave your body to travel to “The Matrix” in a way. It’s quite tough to describe. But, if we’re in a simulation or a video game, you get to meet entities and Machine Elves that are building the reality around us. I know that sounds crazy… but, if you know, then you know.

As for the music, I collaborated on the it with Joshua Ryan, and he sent along these notes: “This was inspired by the visual entirely, no reference material was used and the journeys the music takes is an attempt at conveying the many fractal environments you can see. The seamless transitions flowing into one another melodically not diverging from the heavy meditative tone – just as the visual component achieves.” You can follow awesome Josh is on that new app called Instagram or something at @joshuaryancomposer https://www.instagram.com/joshuaryanc… or visit his website at http://www.joshuaryancomposer.com. (YT)