Huntsmen call us goblins still

(Reposted from an old Medium post, Aug. 2, 2017)

If you can get yourself into a liminal state, I recommend trying this simple exercise. Along the spectrum of experience, it might fall somewhere between active imagination and day-dreaming — a bit like cloud-watching… or more hard-nosed people might call it pareidolia/apophenia. I think it’s probably better not to overly judge or conceptualize it ahead of time. Just see if you’re able to enter into the experience, and hold it for a moment. My thesis is that by repeatedly doing this, you might be able to tune into “natural transmissions” which were occluded/overlooked previously, or which your consciousness wasn’t able to demodulate before because it lacked the inner listening linkage.

Anyway, sit and stare at some trees “as a mass”. You could probably do this closer up with branches, but I’m testing at a distance. So sit there in a liminal state and “stare at the trees,” eyes slightly unfocused. It may be that as the wind moves, you will begin to see “shapes in the trees.”

Perceived shapes may include: faces, figures, etc.

A site with a lot of pop-ups has a quote by random doctor or other expert about the phenomenon of pareidolia:

‘But our findings suggest it’s common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognise faces, so that even when there’s only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face.’

Which, “if you think about it”, is exactly what Google Deep Dream does:

It searches out, and actively fills in figures, faces, bodies, etc as it tries to make sense of images.

So, whether this should be considered a “feature or a bug” of HumanOS, it definitely appears to be a thing.

The funky part, for me personally, was that yesterday I did this and saw for a moment the image of what I only knew from random visual references: the image of a ‘thai angel.’

Along the lines of this:

Which I knew nothing about, then looked up later online to find out is a kind of multi-cultural mythological creature across South Asia, the kinnara.

“In Jataka №504, we have the autobiography of a Kinnara who describes the Kinnara class as ‘human-like the wild things deem us; huntsmen call us goblins still.’”

So they’re described here as something between human, animal and monster — depending on the position of the observer.

Whether or not kinnara exist objectively, or the human mind ‘deep dreams’ them into existence via evolutionary invocation is kind of a moot point for me. It’s part of the Spectrum regardless, and a phenomenological manifestation of the same underlying Unified Field.