My previous three of four posts have addressed (directly or indirectly) the subject of Genesis. Specifically, the origin of our ideas and whether we really know where our ideas about ourselves, others, and the world we see around us actually originate from. It’s my contention that most of us don’t know their origin, and that these ideas originate mainly from unconscious ‘cues’ that we’re only dimly aware of, if at all. The unconscious ‘cues’ we unknowingly detect are reflected ‘out there’ in the 3D dream world we call ‘reality’, where they bounce about like sounds in an echo chamber. This will sound familiar to those who’re aware that our ‘reality’ is suspect. For example, when a word or image catches your attention for a split second you can virtually guarantee that this same word or image will be staring right back at you when you turn a corner, open a magazine, switch on the TV, or speak to a friend. Pay attention to it and it’ll follow you around until you focus on something else instead. This, in effect, is the ‘programming’ aspect of The Program.
Language and the phonetic alphabet holds the key to understanding how this works. We often focus on the thinly veiled ‘synchs’ that appear in articles and books and films, but underneath are multiple layers of ‘code’. Its existence becomes apparent only when you appreciate how The Program manipulates the alphabet. In computer programming terms, its use of the alphabet works very much like programming constructs such as loops and recursion.
This will probably make no sense at all unless you understand that our ‘reality’ is very much like a mirror, which flips and ‘inverts’ what we see in it. If we apply this mirror imagery to the alphabet itself then we notice that individual letters are interchangeable. For example, a ‘b’ is a mirror image ‘d’, and when we invert a ‘d’ we get a ‘q’ and a tailless ‘g’, which is also a mirror image ‘p’.
If we look more closely at the letter ‘p’ and its mirrors then we notice that we can separate the ‘head’ and ‘tail’ of the character. The ‘head’ can be an ‘o’ or an ‘a’ or a ‘c’. If we rotate the ‘c’ 90 degrees clockwise or anti-clockwise we get an ‘n’ or a ‘u’ or a ‘v’. As for the tail, it can form an ‘l’ or an ‘r’ or even (if we apply a horizontal stroke) an ‘f’ or a ‘t’, which are also inversions of each other.
If we apply these principles to a sentence then it becomes apparent that words ‘hide’ within and across words. These hidden words repeat themselves endlessly within sentences and paragraphs. It’s a curious sight to behold. Hundreds of words can be ’embedded’ in just two or three adjacent words. However, if we take three adjacent words from one sentence, and compare them with three adjacent words from another sentence, both ‘strings’ contain almost identical ‘code’: the same references to people, events, films, and novels appear in both.
In a long line of text, the repetition reveals itself and becomes obvious, as in the below example.
And from today’s DM headline. I’ve used DM because they have long headlines, but the same applies to any text you care to look at. Multiple repetitions of ‘cancer’ (I’ve highlighted the two most obvious) alongside multiple repetitions of many other words. Names appear as well. Merovee regulars should be able to spot the obvious reference to ‘Frank’ in ‘Strangers’ for example.
I call this the ‘glitch’, because it seems to defeat the whole purpose of reusing code to avoid repetition. As far as I can determine, the point of this repetition is the repetition, i.e. its purpose is to drive certain messages into our skulls (or rather, our unconscious).
We don’t even need to analyse ‘code’ to appreciate that everything happening ‘out there’ is ‘history’ repeating. For example, as I was writing The Crack in the Wall it seemed that every billboard in town was advertising the ‘monster’ film The Great Wall. One of the recurring references in the ‘code’ is Troy and the Trojan Horse built to penetrate the wall. Across the pond, Trump wants to build a Great Wall to keep ‘aliens’ out of the US, a direct reflection of the film Monsters. Everything appears to be a mirror image of a mirror image. Does it actually ‘mean’ anything though?
One film that keeps raising its head is Inception, in which an idea is implanted into the unconscious mind of a dreaming subject. The point was to make the person in question think that the idea was his idea and to act on that idea in a way that served someone else’s interests. The film refers to a ‘Cobol Engineering’ job, which I’ve mentioned before. COBOL is a programming language that was designed to imitate the English language.
The point I’m getting at here is best demonstrated by a comment on Merovee that caught my eye recently.
“*A relative of his, Clicky. I remember because his birthday was ten days before mine. He played the drums…*
The last two words ‘the drums’ immediately caught my attention, because the letter ‘h’ also contains a mirror image ‘r’. When we put this together we have a word from a film that keeps recurring, one that has been written about on numerous occasions on Merovee and elsewhere. One which includes conscious and deliberate mirror imagery.
This caught my attention for another reason: there’s a very strong ‘anal sex’ theme in the Merovee post referred to above, which is amply demonstrated by the Elon Musk ‘tunnel boring’ story. In my own novel, Cultish, the word ‘redrums’ appears as a drunken mispronunciation of the word ‘rectums’ and was a deliberate reference to The Shining on my part.
I don’t doubt that few people reading the words “the drums” would consciously associate them with The Shining. What about on an unconscious level though? Themes and ideas and film plots and songs pop into our mind all the time without us knowing why, and this is usually the result of a ‘trigger’ that has escaped our conscious attention but registered in the unconscious.
And my point is? Well, if our ‘reality’ is a mirror then the more often these cues appear (and register on an unconscious level) then the more likely it is that they’ll be reflected ‘out there’ in 3D. When we become conscious that these themes are repeating we assume that they must be ‘significant’ and ‘meaningful’. Our conscious attention amplifies the process, which becomes self-reinforcing – the echo chamber I referred to in my opening paragraph.
There may be no meaning to these themes whatsoever, beyond our own belief that their appearance and reappearance ‘must’ mean something. Ultimately, their recurrence may be nothing more than a product of the amount of attention and significance we afford them.
In all this, I’m reminded of McLuhan’s warning about the danger of focusing on content rather than the medium used to transmit content.
For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
McLuhan’s point is that there’s nothing particularly ‘novel’ about content. The content of one medium is always the content of another medium, i.e. the content of television is the screenplay. But by focusing exclusively on content we become like Narcissus transfixed by his own reflection. We become numb to the effects that the ‘medium’ itself exerts upon us. McLuhan’s conclusion? That the fundamental structure and social organisation of our world is a reflection of its dominant technologies or ‘media’. Also, that our addiction to the ‘Narcissus Narcosis’ blinds us to the very existence of this ‘hidden environment’ of structure and relationships.
That in itself is rather interesting, because although we’re accustomed to seeing reflections of ourselves in the ‘impermanent’ and transitory (billboards, adverts, Tweets, etc.) we’ve yet to adequately explain the apparent existence of the ‘permanent’: the universe itself, the ‘environment’, the illusory ‘consensus reality’, the water the goldfish swim in but seem oblivious to.
Of course, the issue with ‘consensus reality’ is this: I’ve just googled ‘space message’ and the below story about the ‘Pioneer Probe’ and ‘aliens’ appeared. It’s dated 17th May, my last day of being 45 given that I turned 46 the next day. I should probably point out that I’m tracking an old Pioneer ghetto blaster on Ebay, and that this reflects my interest in…ahem…the old ‘analogue’ ways…
And let’s not forget the Alien megastructure…
I suppose another way of saying this is that everything we see ‘out there’ is ‘content’. The universe itself is ‘content’ in the same way that what lies between the cover of a magazine is ‘content’. In both cases, the point is to determine what the ‘medium’ itself actually is, along with its effects.
Therein lies ‘The Problem’: it’s not real. The only conclusion we can draw is the obvious one: in an unreal reality the ‘non-fictional’ becomes ‘fiction’ by default. In this ‘reality’, a scholarly paper on the ‘mysteries’ of the universe has the factual basis of…ahem…a children’s fairy story.
Feel free to insert your own coughing fit at this point.
One of McLuhan’s lesser known works is a tome entitled From Cliché to Archetype in which he advocates the use of ‘cliché probes’ (how odd…) to ‘penetrate’ this hidden environment of structure and relationships. It’s an elaboration of his earlier framework called the ‘tetrad‘, in which he focuses on what a specific medium amplifies, retrieves from the past, makes obsolete, and ‘flips’ into when pushed to extremes. In this later work, the focus is on the ‘scrapyard of history’. For McLuhan, the ‘unconscious’ is a scrapyard made up of all the themes and concepts and ideas that escape our conscious attention due to the Narcissus Narcosis.
It goes without saying that as I’ve been thinking about these themes, Frank on Merovee has published a blog post in which he refers to junk DNA. Last night, for example, I watched a series of videos about Chernobyl, which contained more references to ‘junk’ than you can shake a stick at, together with this interesting phrase.
Amongst this random junk you all of a sudden find a box saying ‘radioactive material’…
The link between DNA and nuclear material isn’t obvious until you consider that the only other field in which ‘nuclear material’ is commonly referred to is biology, i.e. in relation to cells.
In other words, the ‘nuclear material’ of a cell is DNA, which is interesting because DNA is codified by letters of the alphabet. Million and millions of ‘characters’ repeating and spiralling and coiling.
DNA is an acid. We literally have ‘acid for blood’.
And of course, the discovery of DNA has allowed us to become ‘engineers’.
Oddly, ‘junk’ has some slang meanings: one relates to heroin (addiction, narcosis), the other to genitalia. As much as 97% of our DNA has been assumed to be ‘junk’ with no obvious function – but now we’re not so sure whether it means something or not.
Now, in a series of papers published in September in Nature and elsewhere, the ENCODE group has produced a stunning inventory of previously hidden switches, signals and sign posts embedded like runes throughout the entire length of human DNA. In the process, the ENCODE project is reinventing the vocabulary with which biologists study, discuss and understand human inheritance and disease.
So exactly how much of our ‘reality’ is ‘junk’ retrieved from the scrapyard of ‘his story’? How much is, so to speak, the equivalent of a radioactive golden nugget amidst all the scrap metal? Does it matter? When you think about it in biological terms, is there a difference between splitting hairs and splitting the ‘atom’?
Or is it all just a game of semen-antics?
Ben Rhodes, who ran foreign policy errands for President Barack Obama as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications & Speechwriting, created an infamous “echo chamber” of fake news to sell the Iran deal.
Tommy Vietor? Hhmmm…
Rhodes first took aim at Gorka in response to a tweet by Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman under President Obama who infamously attempted to dismiss the Benghazi scandal by telling Fox News’ Bret Baier: “Dude, this was like two years ago.” Vietor was, in turn, quoting a Newsweek article criticizing Gorka for criticizing a critic for criticizing his credentials. Rhodes piled on, mocking the “Breitbart credentialed Gorka” for his sensitivity.
Are you getting ‘it’ or are you too busy admiring your reflection in the mirror?
You can get ‘it’ below…
It’s a bit ‘heretical’, a bit ‘blasphemous’, chock full of ‘semen-antics’, and keeps spinning round and round for some reason…
Hugo's Probe 