 
ReSent-Message-ID: <0f3EFJu00VpC45EVVX@andrew.cmu.edu>
ReSent-Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 10:29:25 -0500 (EST)
ReSent-From: "Jon C. Slenk" 
ReSent-To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
To: angst+@CMU.EDU
Subject: more potentially irrelevant stuff from other lists
From: wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us (Bill Eichman)
Comments: Validated
Message-Id: 
Date: 	Thu, 19 Nov 1992 21:09:08 -0500
Organization: The Heart of Gold BBS, Lemont PA

Hi, all,

I'm sending to the CAMC list an essay I wrote for another list. Oh, yes, 
another one-- aren't all of you just so lucky.....  

;-)

If this particular essay makes you think I'm a wacko, then I'd say, maybe 
you're right, maybe you're right....

So, Jon, what are youi going to grad school for, again? Maybe you can get 
into a program in another, more interesting field?

Later, Bill

This is an 'essay' for the opti list.

I've written to the list, and to Jim Merrit, about the issue of
"purpose" as it relates to training for extraordinary and optimum
abilities in human beings. In private I have talked about my own
purposes and plans; Jim has asked me to explain further....

So... WHAT'S AN EXTRA-ORDINARY HUMAN TO DO???
---------------------------------------------

For me, this isn't a theoretical question. I've been training myself
with these self-development disciplines for twenty-five years now,
having started when I was a young teenager. The training has had very
real effects. I would never describe myself as a 'superman', but I think
by many means of measurement and judgement, that I am genuinely an
_extraordinary_ human being.

Most of my 'extraordinariness' would not be visible-- it lies more in
the way I use my senses, brain, and body, than in enhanced speed,
strength, beauty, etc, etc. Moreover, it's not something I ordinarily
discuss-- I only describe it here because I've been asked specifically
and directly.

The results I've gotten from this training are subtle, but internally
the changes that they've caused seems tremendously powerful. It appears
to me that these changes include improved memory, access to larger usage
of my 'mind', greater creativity, very enhanced sensitivity and perception
of both my surrounding environment, and the behavior and signals of
other humans, certain types of enhanced 'charisma', and much, much more.
I formally agree to subject myself to rigorous, methodical, and
professionally conducted tests of these claims, if such tests are
offered to me, professional recordkeeping and publication of results
guarenteed, and my costs are covered.

This training has made me a powerful person in many ways, but it has
also given me specific and real 'weaknesses'. For example, when I look
at the lives ordinary people live in this society, I am wracked with
revulsion. I would not be able to survive living as they do, despite the
fact that they often have very useful lives, and are happy. Another
example of 'extraordinary weakness' can be found in the restrictions of
"predictive ability", the union of intuition and reason leading to often
eeriely accurate 'guesstimates'. Why is this a weakness? Well, ignorance
is bliss-- it can be paralysing to watch the future blasting into the
_now_ like a runaway juggernaut. It can be demoralizing to be aware of
the apparently endless thread of suffering woven into history. And there
are more 'weaknesses', including such practical failings as an ethical
disgust at certain types of business, such as religion, government
service, and fad&fashion retailing. (This disgust keeps many a superman
from packing his wallets with clever schemes to seprate the suckers from
their dollars, which is too damned bad, really. I'm working on a vaccine
for this one, based on mutant cells I cloned from H.Ron Hubbard... :]

I have to take both my weaknesses and strengths into account, in my
search for purpose, and my pursuit of the Great Work.


The question of purpose
-----------------------

As I view it, "purpose" is an intensely individual issue. Each of us
must go through an internal, and sometimes agonizing, process of
discovering their own purpose. "Follow your bliss...", said mythologist
Joseph Campbell; my purpose is my 'bliss'.

So, all I can really talk about is my _own_ sense of purpose.

What types of purposes would most people ascribe to supermen? Stuff like
world leadership, or perhaps rock stardom? Scientific genius, great
inventions or ideas? Perhaps messianic teaching, the founding of great
religions? Perhaps something even more severely spiritual, nirvana,
enlightenment, even a complete escape from this world, the power to walk
through unseen dimensions of time and space as easily as I now step into
the kitchen for a cup of coffee?

None of these seems either interesting or wise to me. (Well, maybe the
last one, dimension walking. ;-)  Scientific genius isn't too
shabby either, if you could avoid the corporate/academic imprisonment
that goes with the job nowadays.) The work of leaders and teachers,
especially popular and effective ones, will inevitably be degraded,
corrupted, and used for killing and torture by the blind-primate masses.

Another possibility might be a life of hermitage, like Thoreau, or
Bodhidharma. Leave the maddened crowds to their fate, and, like a
Nietszchean Zarathustra, live life on the mountaintops.

I looked at all this, and thought about it for many years. I don't want
to be trapped in the "sound and fury, signifying nothing" of mass life
and popular issues. And, while I love nature intensely, I don't want to
"waste" my century+ of life in pursuits which produce no 'inheiritance'
to leave for future human benefit, or for my teenage daughter, or the
children I plan to have with my current ladylove.

(If I was childless, and intended to remain so, I think my 'purpose'
would be very different. Perhaps then I might go to the mountaintops,
though being an assassin of the powers-that-be also has it's own
'spiritual' integrity.... ;-}   )

So, I have decided to choose a path which is midway between the two. To
try to contribute to humankind through new inventions and ideas, while
at the same time living in a type of hermitage, at the cutting edge of
society, surrounded by nature rather than by concrete and symbols.

What is my purpose? I am devoting my life to building a new kind of
civilization, an alternative to the civilization that we have inheirited
from ten-thousand years of priest-king citystate urban-agricultural
ancestors.

I'm doing this by studying, developing, and starting various "seed
communities", real places to live, work, have children, and die, in
various places around the planet. I want to build the places where
extraordinary people will gather, train themselves, carry out their own
particular purposes and discoveries and plans, and raise and educate
their extraordinary children, love their extraordinary loves, and get a
chance at the extraordinary happiness that ordinary society doesn't even
know it's missing.

My purpose is to build the home bases, which will eventually grow into
the home cities, of Homo Novus. I'm a community pioneer.


How I use my training to accomplish my purpose
----------------------------------------------

The type of community building I have in mind is a vast subject. It
would take hundreds of pages to explain the ideas that I've formulated,
the ideas and plans that represent a radical quantum leap over the
community building concepts of many hundreds of thinkers before me.
(Thinkers to which I am deeply indebted, on whose giant shoulders I
unsteadily stand.)

It is so vast, that it's difficult to give good, clear examples of the
ways in which I am using my "extraordinary powers" to accomplish this
purpose.

Perhaps this is an 'accidental' example in itself-- my plans are as
extensive as they are because I've used my enhanced abilities in memory,
analysis, and information processing to sift through centuries of
community experiments, synthesize their results, and produce a new
paradigm of community building thought.

And I am trying to use my enhanced communications and verbal skills to
communicate these ideas, to this list and others, and in many other
potentially fruitful domains. I attempt to shape my presentation for
maximum memetic effectiveness.

I feel I'm using my training in literally thousands of ways,
continuously. Much of this training is easier seen in face-to-face
interaction, than in the isolated textual interaction here on the net.

"Extraordinary Powers" are really very ordinary, sometimes so ordinary
as to be invisible.

The Most Extraordinary Human Power of All
-----------------------------------------

The most extraordinary human power, the power that turns ordinary homo
sapiens primates into superbeings, is organized, coherent group effort,
on both macro and micro scales.

Think about it.


Postscript:
===========

As per Jim's request.... My favorite nmemonics include:

"I am a selfaware, bigbrained animal on the surface of a planet." (This is
sometimes continued, referring to the average solar system in the outer
arm of a small galaxy, etc, etc...)

"My body exists in space; my mind exists in time; I exist in awareness."

"Neti, Neti."

"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich."

"Breathe, Aim, Slack, Squeeze."

My favorite mental exercises, of which there are many, include:

Building a visualization of my exact position in history, including my
best estimate of the forseeable future. Visualizing myself existing in
the fourth dimension of time. This visualization can be simple or
complex.

Self-observation-- creating and holding myself in an 'observing I',
which nuetrally observes my own behavior, especially my reactions to
other people and events.

Imagining and visualising myself floating in earth orbit, observing the
planet below, and trying to 'feel' it with my 'mind'.

Memory organizing exercises, similar to the ancient Greek 'art of
memory', based on visualization and verbal association engineering,
using typically either biological, physics, or qabalistic imagery.

Etc, etc, etc.

Later, Bill


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