deoxy readings and irc chats

This weekend I've been trying to catch up on some of the MLA courses. the PKD course has finished. Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion finishes this weekend. I've enrolled in another self-study class called Tales of the Tribe - by Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) who has since passed away.

there was a class chat for Persuasion last night. I spoke to a fellow classmate earlier and they mentioned irc. I've been slack and hadn't used irc for ages - maybe over a year, and he mentioned chatzilla for firefox which comes with firefox. so I tried it out and went back to irc.deoxy.org. the channels have shifted slightly, but I found people I know in #gii, #bom, #chat has replaced #deoxy, GM made a new one #maybe for MLA (hopefully). so I spent the night chatting to otter, brains and glandmaster - hadn't spoken to the former for ages!

Psymbiensis is still running - though I had problems connecting last night. maybe this port is blocked by the isp I'm using atm. GM sent me a few links to things to read on deoxy - some are related to the courses, others things we were talking about.

on deoxy I also came across some lost PKD audio interviews : play them as an mp3 playlist in itunes or similar

new terms
a member of the Johnson family
-- from The Adding Machine - Collected Essays by William S Burroughs
-- http://deoxy.org/wiki/The_Johnson_Family

"the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct. To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He's a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble making person."

"A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn't stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car."

"The Johnson family formulates a Manichean position when good and evil are in conflict. It is not an eternal conflict since one or the other must win a final victory."

[Burroughs :] "I recollect Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and your reporter were drinking an espresso on the terrace of a little cafe on the Calle de Vigne in Tangier... after lunch a dead empty space... Then this Spaniard walks by. He is about 50 or older, shabby, obviously very poor carrying something wrapped in brown paper. And our mouths fell open as we exclaimed in unison

'My God that's a harmless looking person!'

He passed and I never saw him again, his passing portentous as a comet reminding us how rare it is to see a harmless looking person, a man who minds his own business and gets along as best he can in a world largely populated by people of a very different persuasion, kept alive by the hope of harming someone, on the way to the Commissaria to denounce a neighbor or a business rival leaving squiggles and mutterings of malevolence in their wake like ugly little spirits.

New Aeon Magic
http://deoxy.org/wiki/New_Aeon_Magic

I don't know much about magic or magick, so GM sent me this link. he'd done one of the MLA courses on it. the RAW course mentions it a bit but I'm a little behind in my reading assignments. below is an extract of a book called Liber Null and Pyschonaut by Peter J Carroll - there's a preview of this book on google books.

"The beginnings of the new psychic awareness have acquired a definitive subversive flavor. Magic is aligning itself against oppressive forms of order in many fields. magic is opposed to a psychiatry and medicine designed to patch up the damaged automaton and plug him back into the system. Instead it would rather that individuals learn to handle their own mental self-defense and treat their bodies with gentler remedies such as herbs. Magic rejects politics as no more than some peoples perverse desire to dominate others. It does well to dissociate itself from this monkey squabble and advocates instead personal enlightenment and emancipation which are the only real safeguards to freedom. Magic is anti-ideological because the main products of ideological solutions are repression and corpses. Magic is profoundly opposed to religion. Although a religion may appear benign when it is in decline, at least half of the madness and violent deaths of history have been caused by the superstition that the world is wholly material and that mens actions are not intimately interwoven with the psychic sphere."

"To oppose repressive forms of order which often impose themselves by evil means, magic aligns itself to a vision of chaotic good. Magics commitment to the good is reflected in its concern with individual freedom and consciousness and its interests in all other life forms on the planet. At the highest level this manifests as some unspecifiable feeling for the 'vibes' generated by human thought and action."

Comparative Religion Made Easy
http://deoxy.org/wiki/Comparative_Religion_Made_Easy
this page links to books by some of the deoxy forums members. haven't gone through this yet..