the darkness conjecture

Just wrote this to Alex Tabarrok, creator of the Dominance Assurance Contract (a further tweak of the Assurance Contract, aka Threshold Pledge System, popularized by Kickstarter). In an assurance contract, if pledges toward a financial goal are insufficient at its deadline, then nothing is collected from those who pledged. With Dominant Assurance, “everyone who offered to contribute is given their money back plus a bonus. Thus contribution becomes the dominant strategy.”

~~~
Dear Mr Tabarrok,

Thanks for your idea of the Dominant Assurance Contract (DAC). I thought of a way to extend it to further open up opportunities in investment and value creation and make crowdfunding possibly more interesting than gambling. Maybe your students have already come up with all this and more, but what the heck.

Here are the rules of what I call Cooperative Dominant Assurance*:

1. The proposer seeds the failure-payback pot with any amount of money, sets the maximum payback rate between 100% and infinity, and sets the maximum profit rate. She can revise these rates upward until the proposal’s deadline. She also sets the investment reduction rate (explained below).

2. A contributor sets her rate of payback from 0% to the maximum.

3. Contributors with payback rates of less than 100% get the difference added to the payback pot. Any contributor can revise her contribution upward and her rate downward until the proposal’s deadline. The investment reduction rate determines the percentage of her contribution that reimburses the proposer’s seed investment and how much increases the pot.

4. In case of failure, the pot is divided amongst contributors in proportion to their contributions and according to their final payback rates.

5. In case of success, contributors with average payback rates of less than 100% are treated as investors who profit in inverse proportion to their average rate. Or get other bonuses, such as the opportunity to collaborate.

6. Contributors can make multiple contributions with different payback rates.

Thus someone with a really good idea but little seed money could still create an attractive DAC. Whole-hearted contributors (those with <100% rates) could profit from the risk of enticing the half-hearted (>100% rates ). The higher the maximum payback rate, the wilder the game gets.* It could be a spectacle of brinkmanship between the whole-hearts and half-hearts. Half-hearts would help attract attention to the proposal initially. Whole-hearts would help continue to attract half-hearts as the deadline approached.

*For example, due to Rule 4, a sole contributor of $1 (maximum payback rate) toward a failed proposal with an infinite payback rate would win the entire pot. A second max-rate contributor of $99 would take away 99% of the pot. If the proposer set the max rate to 110%, then the first would only get back $1.10 and the second $108.90, regardless of pot size. Due to Rule 5, in a successful proposal with a 20% profit rate, a contributor whose rate was 60% for 10 days and 20% for 10 days would have an average rate of 40%, earning her 12% on her contribution (to be paid upon proposal execution).

What do you think?

I’m not sure the rules are free of conflicts or redundancy, nor do I grasp the math or game theory involved. But it was fun and exciting to think about.

Which is ironic because I came across your uber-cool dealio while looking for ways to finance my recovery from exhaustion-depression. (Take something worse than chronic fatigue syndrome but better than death and combine it with clinical depression. A real kick in the pants!) Because I have less-than-zero confidence in medicine or its common alternatives, I spent 21 years looking for a way to heal from it before hitting upon darkness retreating (see website below). It’s relatively cheap ($2500), but money-making is not my strong suit.

Anyway, thanks again, and,

Cheers,
Andrew Durham

(*EDIT: I just removed this sentence from the third to last paragraph: “And I could not decide what to call this variant of DAC: Self-Funding, Autonomous, Automatic, Inclusive, Cooperative, or Viral DAC? DA Orgy?” I decided on “Cooperative”. If you think of a better name, please let me know.)

I had a depressive breakdown in December and let out a cry on my personal facebook page for help with a darkness retreat to recover. Within a few weeks, and with the help of a small, far-flung team of supporters, I did a five-day darkness retreat. I am feeling much better. (Fourteen days as planned proved impractical in the location, so I am still psychotic )

The lesson: approaching darkness as something I needed personally worked a whole hell of a lot better than approaching it as a world-saving idea in need of testing. Shame about my own psychosis, based on early bad experiences with expressing my suffering, had led to this charade. People, it turned out, care a lot more about me than my big ideas.

The major thing I learned this time about retreating itself is that scheduling sufficient time afterward to absorb its value and readjust to light is critical to a retreat’s overall success. So while I did not complete a 14-day retreat as planned, neither did I waste one learning about this, either. Instead, we spent only $285 discovering this final big piece of the puzzle.

Along with with this major lesson, I learned some useful minor things to be carefully applied in future retreats:

• having warm fresh air is a lot more comfortable than cold air combined with a powerful heater
• even a small amount of exercise really helps the whole process
• noise from other occupants, both audible and psychic, and electromagnetic distortion from the building’s steel and wiring has a huge effect on the quality of rest possible in a darkroom.

Will soon commence 12th attempt at a long darkness retreat, somehow, somewhere.

Hey, I just came across this web-based credit clearing system
Community Exchange System
It is international, free, simple, super cool. Just what is called for by the godfather of new money, Thomas Greco (author of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization and beyondmoney.net).

Other worthy systems I’ve come across in the last couple days:
cyclos.org open source software to run your own bank, complete with free hosting; boggling!
payswarm.com html-based, frictionless payment system
picomoney.com based on http://opentransact.org/
opensourcecurrency.org run your own currency; need coding smarts
ripplepay.com solves LETS accountability concerns, unfortunately asocial
e-flux.com/timebank hip and simple
friendlyfavors.org 2nd largest after CES, clever and a bit complicated
johnturmel.com/uniset.htm very simple, start alone now
JEU/GAME not web but paper-based, very elegant, semi-private, decentralized accounting, best for when the lights go out.

CES is the most accessible, practical, and mature, though some of these systems, have much greater potential. Open source money has finally gotten legs, wings… and teeth.

At my request, xda developer, verygreen, with support from ros87, has done in 24 hours for $10 and a $109 donated device what tens of companies could/would not do in four years with all their resources (like the $500,000 one company told me it would cost).

Watch him type on the Nook Simple Touch on youtube:
Nook Simple Touch usb host support

Development thread with instructions:
(Nook Touch Android Development) [WIP] USB Host support (working)

There are still some bugs, and the instructions are over my head at this point. But the basics are there now for people who know how to use them. Once the bugs are worked out, I plan to simplify the instructions for everyone’s use. Maybe even offer microSD cards with everything pre-installed.

Here we go.

Something important started to changed for me last week. I have been hiding my need for darkness by trying to make it happen for others. Here is a reprint what I wrote about it on my facebook page this weekend:

1. (Status on Thursday night:)
Dear Family and Friends: I am very sick. For the first time, I feel
that I am slipping, that I might not make it. Please help me realize
the solution I found. Not because it could be a solution for you, too. But simply because you care about me. This is what I have been trying to say for three years. Andrew.

2. (Friday, in response to 20 people who wrote in support of me:)
I am relieved to hear from each one of you. I also got supportive emails.

What I need is help in arranging and paying for a long darkness retreat.

It needs an empty, functional house and people to bring food and say
hello to me each day. And I need to not return to the US, where I feel very unsafe, to do it. There are places to rent here (Sweden) and new friends who could help.

The thing is, my 25 years of studying the absolute depths of both my
condition and the world’s made me good at solving extremely complex
problems, but not good at making money or simple arrangements like
this. I cannot overstate how much shame and embarrassment I have felt
about this. But I can state the truth about it.

Please do not let my articulateness fool you into thinking that I am
ok. No matter what, it seems, I am able to talk.

3. (Sunday)
Thanks to everyone who wrote. My immediate problem is solved. Nearly
undetectable poor air quality where I have been staying wore me down
over the last month. I am making arrangements to move into a proper
apartment tonight.

The wider issue of why I ended up in that situation in the first place is also getting addressed by rekindled support for the darkroom and other unforeseen means.

4. (Yesterday, in response to a Swedish friend who asked how I was doing:) I’m basically okay now, Maria. Still edgy, but not as bad as
yesterday. It was nice to be able to walk with you the other day. I
had been slowly suffocating (literally), and then I suddenly crashed.
It felt like I’d been run over by a train.

5. By the way, I never identified my sickness here, so I will now.

I view it as functional psychosis manifesting as a rigid dependence on my mind. This has numerous ill effects on my life, some of which some of you know all too well. For example, unconsciously setting myself up for periodic breakdowns like the one this weekend.

At 16, I had only a vague sense of my sickness. But it was strong, and it motivated my long search for the root cause of rapture: sanity. My discovery of darkness as an irreplaceable condition of psychological health ensued. This is why I have confidence only in darkness retreats as a means of healing from my sickness and why my wish to do one has finally found its way to the top of my priorities.

Dear Illuminati,

My understanding is that there are two factions of your organization: both people who try to use their power and wealth to free humanity, and those who use it to enslave us.

To both groups within your vast network, I wish to say that I understand and accept that you are each sincerely trying to handle our collective mess the best way you know how. For a long time, I thought that you were my enemy, and hatred and sadness about your activities consumed me. But now, as a result of my long search for understanding, I am extending both forgiveness and the offer of a way to handle our situation differently.

Since this subject is your main interest, please read my darkness conjecture. Then write me if you would like to help make this deep way of healing possible for yourselves. I could use your help, you could probably use a break, and working together would be a nice change from our previous isolation.

I have tried to see a way through our conflict that makes a place for everyone at the end, especially those of you that many in my position would wish to exclude (if not summarily execute). In my opinion, you are hurt by all this worst of all, and I believe the way I have found would serve you in an acceptable manner. I really believe there is place for all of us, even you.

Welcome.

Sincerely,
Andrew Durham

Here is something I wrote a friend about conspiracy theory following a conversation we had recently on the subject.

~~~

…I had a thought during our conversation about 9/11 that there wasn’t time to voice, but which I think you would like to hear. So I am writing you with it.

I think the reason that the idea of a conspiracy can be hard to entertain is that it seems to mean that the people involved are evil and consciously do evil things.

This, of course, is nonsense, and people are correct to reject it. The nature of human consciousness is such that it is impossible to do what one considers to be evil. However, rejecting conspiracism on this basis does not follow. What is considered to be evil and what is evil are not the same things. In other words, one can do evil while believing it to be good.

Any honest observer of history and current events can see that it is possible to justify anything (including the justification itself). For example, listen to professional political commentators of any persuasion. What is obviously evil to ordinary people can be seen as good and even obligatory by someone in power. Hitler and his helpers thought they were doing the right thing. Even on the stand in Jerusalem, Eichmann never really got what all the fuss was about. Some National Socialists (NAZIs) actually disliked the program, but they believed in it. It is only people’s basic innocence combined with their great naivete that enables them fail to make this distinction.

All this is aside from the fact that the ultrarich and powerful are psychologically damaged to a degree almost impossible to believe. I hesitated to mention the other night—and it is horrible to think about—but in the more established families, children are subjected to ritual sexual abuse from a young age. If you imagine a boy who is sexually molested in group Satanic rituals from the time he is less than a year old, with the knowledge and even participation of his own parents, then maybe you can see that his view of right and wrong might be a little bit distorted by the time he is forty years old and running a bank, a corporation, or a country (or these days, all three).

If so, then you can also see how it is possible that if the interests of enough organizations require, for example, the events of 9/11, then as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, those events will take place. Obviously the people in power are deadly serious about making omelets, and it matters to them not one whit that you and I happen to be the eggs.

That was the thought. As I write, it leads to a few similar ones.

Exactly why any organization would require such events as 9/11 has a lot to do with the fiat, debt-based money system I tried to describe to you. Since money comes into existence as interest-bearing debt, the money available is always less than the amount owed. So as some pay their debts, others must default on theirs. This is why money is always running out and there is never enough.

Then people borrow more to stay afloat. This inflates the money supply and devalues cash holdings. So just to stay even, individuals and groups must always be climbing upward financially, stepping on others as they go. We know how desperate the situation is at our level. Imagine the wicked cut-throat tactics necessary to stay atop a game in which there can never be enough.

Poetically, the naive resistance to the idea of an inside job on 9/11 rests on the same benevolent metaphysics as conspiracism. To the conspiracists, the universe is a friendly, life-supportive place and people are basically decent. Therefore, the horrors we witness in our culture must be created. To those we consider denialists, we conspiracists issue this challenge: prove how the material beneficiaries of 9/11 did not perpetrate it.

Lastly remains the simple fact that government has ever been a tool of the elite to control the (admittedly infantile) peasantry (including the professional class). That government could one day benefit the peasantry is merely popular propaganda. Since the job of the state consists of subjugating us—since that is what we pay it to do and as quietly as it can—9/11 is precisely what was required of it at this critical juncture in history. So, again: prove that it failed to perform its function.

With convention stood on its head like this, you can see the difficulty that conspiracists and denialists have in communicating. It is not just about the facts. It is about what a person considers humanly possible. Philosophically, it is a metaphysical difference. This is usually unbridgeable.

Everyone experiences what I am talking about, but as part of a whole lifetime of conditioning in resignation (hospitals, TV, industrial food, school, the legal system) and at a low level where the causes are invisible. This is especially true due to the common preoccupation with survival. Few have the time, stomach, or resources to even consider events in these lights, let alone understand or do anything about them. We issue bitter little complaints as we accept it incrementally.

And then there is the successful propaganda campaign about our masters’ being too stupid and incompetent to pull off something like 9/11. It is an impressive conceit that we are smarter and more capable than people who coordinate transnational corporations, global wars, and mass media. Those who deny conspiracy have underwhelmed me with their snide ignorance of basic facts of the case. In my few brushes with the ruling class, even average members impressed me as sophisticated and whipsmart. Now they have accomplished the additional feat of convincing most of us they are otherwise.

For the benefit of both us and our tortured masters, I hope that my work can help bring an end to the madness I describe. Like most people, I believe that each of us, underneath the exhaustion, resignation, and damage, is still innocent at the core. I cannot believe that anyone really likes or is satisfied with what is happening. Surely we can find another way to be here together. But surely we cannot find it without first seeing things as they are, both in our souls and in our society.

Well, it was nice seeing you, again. Thanks for dinner.

Best regards,
Andrew

I made a facebook page called Darkness Conjecture. There you can read about the latest goings on, including current public talks in southern Sweden.

Location secured for world’s second hygienic darkness retreat: newly remodeled small cabin in quiet neighborhood of Swedish resort town. Modifications commence tomorrow; first retreat within two weeks.

EDIT: the above attempt failed. Taking a bare cabin with only electricity and heat and trying to make even a simple bathroom, kitchenette, and ventilation proved overwhelming. No, the thing is to start with a fully functional building, darken it and start retreating, already. This will require taking the message to the people again.

Let us say Bodhisattvas are both sincere and realistic in their vow that, after their own personal enlightenment (which will free them from the necessity of reincarnating on this planet) they will keep reincarnating here anyway in order to help liberate all sentient creatures.

Let us further say that they, combined with those of equal realization and commitment in other traditions, manage to liberate a million people a year until the job is done. At that rate, it will still take them 7,000 years to finish. That’s if population remains constant from now on.

Keep in mind this is a 2,500 year old tradition. And that all spiritual traditions combined are not pulling off more than a hundred genuine liberations a year. Which, according to some wise men I once knew, is an extremely generous figure. How are we to make sense of the Bodhisattva’s project What are they counting on

Maybe they are banking on an exponential effect of their efforts. Maybe we are only a few years or generations away. The results come faster as time goes on and the task gets easier, because its enormity nonetheless is shrinking, while their collective power grows.

Maybe they, like the Mayans, are merely holding out till a cosmic event completes the task in one fell swoop.

So they’re not worried. Maybe I should not worry so much, either. Many people have said as much, and lately, I have begun to notice what they’re talking about.

And, maybe it is time to review the effectiveness of the method of liberation. Or maybe we could just eliminate the need for it.

I moved to Greece, partly as a result of my darkness retreat in March (more on that soon). My new friend and final client in Guatemala, Ajna of Yoga of Beauty in San Marcos La Laguna, Solola, Guatemala, is taking over the darkroom. Contact her through her website. I will be building a business here in Greece to open more darkrooms around the world.

Just saw this movie. Awesome. But just for the record, darkness is going to make NZT-48 look like potty training.

Now you can register for your retreat online.

If the Problem results from error, then virtue is the solution. If the Problem results from injury, then convalescence is the solution. Either I am sound but mistaken, or I am unsound and malfunctioning. Let us stop equivocating.

Here is my clearest articulation yet of the conjecture’s chain of causation, in the form of a seven-line syllogism:

Suffering comes from a catastrophic injury to the psyche;
the psyche is a system of an organism;
organisms are self-healing;
healing requires vital energy;
vital energy accumulates during rest;
psychic rest is most profound in absolute darkness;
therefore, darkness is the solution to inordinate suffering.

[Note 1: See end of basics for updated version of this.]

[Note 2: I learned this is not a syllogism, just a regular old argument. Syllogisms have only three propositions.]

This post is now a page called six-day darkness retreat. It is a sub-page of . Look for future reports of retreats in the same place.

photoperiodeffect.com

This site talks about the effects of light on health and the use of darkness to reverse many illnesses. The author, Russell Johnston, who has used darkness to significantly heal from a serious malady, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, is a dogged researcher and a very clear writer.

I wrote instructions for retreating in my darkroom here in Guatemala in retreat manual and for creating a darkroom in your home in make darkness. These are now included in the paper booklet about darkness that I offer.

Visit the Official Atlas Shrugged Movie Web Site!

Hey: Dagny Taggart has blackout blinds @1:45

I was talking with someone about my undying quest for typable e-paper. He concluded his comments with this suggestion:

“You can get an ipad and compose a book on that. The ipad has more glare to look at than e-paper that is e-paper’s advantage.”

I replied:

I say it in my plea, but let me state my assessment of the advantage of e-paper slightly differently here to better match what you are saying.

The advantage of e-paper is something much greater, much more fundamental, much more affecting than its lack of glare. A matte finish can be put on any display, or even achieved after the fact with plastic screen protectors.

What is different about all e-paper devices, regardless of their finish–is the absolutely still nature of the image. Once the page changes and the new words and images appear, the screen holds perfectly still. [EDIT The rest of this paragraph is erroneous. See NOTE below {It does not continue to refresh. The tiny pixels are not quivering with reinstatement 60+ times per second. The eyes, which normally make 80 movements per minute are not constantly exhausting themselves in adjusting to the movement of the image. As with the static nature of ink on paper, the eyes do not get irritated. Thought and emotion thus remain undisrupted.}

This is why:

• people love reading on e-paper devices, even if they do not understand exactly why.
• e-paper would matter even more to a writer
• I think this would be the most important invention since the personal computer, if not the typewriter or even the printing press.

The written word is the motive power of this culture, the fulcrum at its center. E-paper device makers are thus sitting unawares on a revolutionary opportunity to do something super cool, serve the world–and make a pile of well-deserved money in the process.

Who will be the one to stand up at a company meeting and help connect the last dots by pointing out the simple, obvious application of an existing product For the sake of everyone who has ever suffered from:

• an aching hand from handwriting
• injuries from typing on a manual typewriter
• the strained eyes, headaches, and insomnia of the hundreds of millions who write on computers
• and far more importantly, the consequences of ideas that had to be dragged through all this torment.

I wish I knew how to help this happen in even the smallest way. I want one of these things in my hands as soon as corporately possible.

[NOTE I learned that it is strictly backlighting that causes the eyestrain I feel with LCD screens, whether the backlight is fluorescent or LED (due to Pulse Width Modulation). See my topic on mobileread about this, Project: E-Paper Tablet (typable!).

Just came across these three entries in Wikipedia about the strange light that people often experience in darkness retreats:

Ganzfeld Effect, Phosphene, Prisoner’s Cinema

“Cinema” certainly coincides with my idea of the entertainment value of the light show in the dark. It is just the “hallucinations” that the Ganzfeld Effect entry describes.

But maybe hallucinations are not fabrications of consciousness after all. With enough time inside, I think it will become evident either way.

Here is a letter I sent an e-ink reading device manufacturer.

———- Forwarded message ———-

From: Andrew Durham
Date: Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 18:49
Subject: a plea for an e-writer
To: sales@pocketbook-usa.com

Dear Ms Sergiyenko, Mr Bondarenko, and Mr Sheiman and everyone at Pocketbook around the world:

I have heard your devices will have typewriting functionality soon, and I want to express my bottomless support for your efforts to complete this task as soon as possible.

As a philosopher, health practitioner, designer–and a human canary in a coalmine–I cannot overstate how much I would like to type on a non-irritating machine. So: if your device can host a USB external keyboard so that I can use it as a typewriter, not just a reader, then I will buy it. Otherwise, not.

That’s a little blunt. But frankly, I am baffled that no e-ink device maker has figured out yet that their e-ink device will only go viral when it becomes writable out of the box–and I mean serious typing with a proper external keyboard for touch-typing. Why

Because then the e-ink device can produce its own content, just like computers and cellphones, the other big viral devices of our time. With one program and a USB host, you could double the usefulness–and the thus value–of your device, yet sell it for the same price as other devices.

I like USB because it eliminates the complication of recharging the keyboard, problems with bluetooth reception, and the alarming irritation of wireless radiation. For all the same reasons, you would much improve the device with an ethernet port or a third USB port for use with a USB-ethernet adaptor. WiFi burns and numbs my hands when I have to use it. I know other people who experience this, too, some of them without necessarily realizing what causes it.

Why else would you make your reader typable? Because writers, whose numbers have exploded since the beginning of the web, have not had a psychically neutral medium for writing–one that holds perfectly still to the eye–since the typewriter. To take advantage of the wonderful tool of word-processing, we have had to look at screens that exhaust the eyes, alter the mind, and disrupt the emotions.

This is not just a bad combination for us writers. Too much of what is done in this culture is harmful. Nearly everything done today is first written about. If the machine we wrote with did not hurt us, it stands to reason that we writers would cause less harm to the world as well. More people would participate in the process of cultural creation with less difficulty and more psychic integrity. This is a radical proposition. For every writer there are a thousand readers. Every device you sell would support the freedom, self-determination and harmony of a thousand people.

In short, all the reasons for reading on an e-ink device apply a thousand times more to writing on one.

Please help us writers with what, in a subtle way, may be the most important invention since the personal computer. Give us a modern (word-processing) typewriter: sleek, humane. Do so, and I believe that, in the e-ink device competition, you will take a leading position. Do it well, and you might keep it.

With sincere hopes for your success, I am,

Yours,
Andrew Durham

UPDATE:
No reply as yet from Pocketbook, a company which has left multiple promises unfulfilled and many deadlines pass unremarked. FAIL.

However, another company, as yet unnamed, has responded positively to my idea. We’ll see how that goes. [2012 Jan 23 EDIT: this was with ctaindia.com. The effort failed in 2011 July due to my impatience with the guy's lack of vision. Bad combo. No matter how much I explained it and how much he agreed it was a good idea, he'd always start in again with questions that began, "But what about..." ]

http://noteslate.com is the advance marketing effort for an unproduced but extremely interesting e-ink device design which is “pencil” based and hyperconnected. Here is an unequivocal picture of their plans for typeability: http://noteslate.com/img/photo/gal/NoteSlate09.jpg (note the noteslate logo on the keyboard.) There is a small sketch of a keyboard with the noteslate in this photo: http://noteslate.com/img/photo/gal/NoteSlate11.jpg These are actually not photos, but photorealistic renderings of the design.

UPDATE (2012 Jan 23)
Success! See today’s blog post, above.

Other failures for the record: Jinke makes the Hanlin reader. We emailed for a few weeks in 2011 June about making a custom device for typing. The representative, Liumin, probably realizing I wasn’t some deep-pocketed entrepreneur, but just a homeless slob, sarcastically estimated development at $500,000. It was kind of disgusting. Today I was able to I let him know that my team proved the concept for $119. That was satisfying.

Then there was Edo-Tech. Apparently no one reads their email, but I finally I got a message through to them by guessing the management’s addresses. Got a hasty reply from the president. A couple emails later with the vice-president, the homeless slob was dead in the water again. They only work with market leaders in a given region. But they also could not even tell me where I could get one of their devices. Business is so strange.

Anyway, now that we have proved the concept, I felt like unloading a little.

I have been playing with new names for this project. One that really strikes me is Wicked Rest. And here is a potential intro to the site with this name:

Wicked rest is what you get in a totally dark room. It is, finally, rest for the wicked, the tormented, the restless. It is automatic and foolproof as long as the room is set up properly. A couple weeks straight of wicked rest may also be sufficient to recover from the functional psychosis that characterizes the people of our culture, which may be what causes all our suffering—spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, social, and ecological. Below are three more formulations of this idea. The rest of the site provides elaborations upon and background for this proposition… (segue to three versions of the darkness conjecture).

Another word I like for a name is trapdoor. I think this gets closer to what I am trying to provide: a hidden door out of the otherwise seamless box of life in this culture.

(Update, 2011 Jan 30: What am I really offering here What is the value of wicked rest or a trapdoor These questions started bugging me after I wrote this post. So far the answer to the first question is, sanctuary. Asylum, refuge. Maybe one of these should be the name.)

I guess it does not really matter till I do the long retreat. Surely the correct name would come then. Vamos a ver (Let’s see).

Long time, no news.

All spring I built a darkroom. I opened it in late May and 10 people got their first taste of darkness. All gave positive reviews. Generally, people felt more in their bodies, more awake, and more aware of how tired they had been. Some saw light of varying durations and intensities. Many had intense dreams. All went through some version of the nice/rough/nice cycle I describe in four darkness experiences. I had an interesting time keeping the room going for them, bringing them food, not making too much noise upstairs.

The better rested a retreatant was in the beginning, the less affected by darkness he was. A handful said they were just starting to get somewhere when it came time to exit the room. Those who felt major benefits did not really have time for the changes to become established. My conclusion from listening to the retreatants is that people would benefit much more from longer retreats. About the same time, some noisy construction occurred at the house, so I closed the darkroom for improvements to make it suitable for longer retreats.

I also made a reasonable amount of money for my efforts and with an unusual degree of satisfaction. Businesswise, darkness retreating is very promising. The entire town knows about the darkroom and many are interested in going in. Word is getting out beyond the lake, even. Once I finish the room and do my own long retreat, there are 5-10 more people ready to do both short (3 day) and medium-length retreats (5-10 day). Wicked Rest Retreats (or whatever I’m going to end up calling it) has been a going concern from even before the room opened. Most of the first 10 retreatants made deposits on their retreats. And some of the depositors have not done their retreats yet. The proceeds allowed me to keep working on the room this spring until completion.

At first, I offered the retreats on a donation basis thinking it would be a cool way to do it. But I found myself thinking about money a lot more than necessary and expecting donations from people—very uncool. The donation model must be based on a genuine spirit of giving. I could not hack it. After one retreatant with lots of money donated very little, I got really annoyed and decided that simply setting a price would be better for me and everyone else, too. After that, I have had no dire problems with money. My scarcity habit will likely die hard, but something, at least, began to shift for me money-wise.

Recently, I have become very burned out from building, from being alone in the project (a bunch of friends left suddenly this summer). I have felt kind of shell-shocked from it all, weeping almost everyday for weeks. Living at the lake is very intense, especially near San Marcos, which is traditionally the spiritual/ceremonial center of the lake. In other words, even native people never lived here before. I’m across the lake at the moment, on one of my recent mini-vacations in San Pedro and Panajachel. I’m going back tomorrow to finish the new ventilation system. If I finish, and if beginning to sleep in the room helps me rapidly recover from my burn-out, I will continue working. Otherwise, I’m going to take a week vacation away from the lake.

Since closing the room, I have been living on some unexpected donations from my father, with whom I had a massive falling out three years ago about what the hell I’m doing with my life. Pretty ironic. But I’m glad he found a way to help me for awhile.

It has been a rigorous year. Not bad at all till the last few weeks. Let’s see what the next few days bring.

Mayan youth, a quietly defiant demographic, have been playing “Love the Way You Lie” by Eminem and Rihanna over and over. So I read the lyrics.

OMG.

I hear a torturous description of true love colliding with a singularly unworkable culture, internally and externally. Perforce, most of us give up on, fail at, or get ruined forever by true love because we are already too shattered, and the social context necessary to maintain love is cynically absent. Only manageable and “sensible” relationships remain, being better than nothing. This song represents to me a blistering indictment of civilization, its inherent bankruptcy, and the thoroughgoing resignation and selling out that it demands and gets from all but a few, whose autonomy is not a theat. Like Sinead sang years ago, “They only laugh ’cause they know they’re untouchable, not because what I said was wrong.”

Shortly after returning to San Marcos La Laguna from my seventh attempt at a long retreat in San Pedro La Laguna, several doors opened for me.

I was given a lovely house to sit for an indefinite time period. A friendly elder took stong interest in doing a darkness retreat, and then in the darkness project itself. Many people he talked to about it expressed interest in doing it. Then a suitable room for short retreats emerged. I have begun the minimal work necessary to prepare the room for retreats.

So basically, I almost have a going concern here. Amazing. Now it is much clearer what I can offer people related to darkness besides this free website: free talks, an affordable booklet made of the main content of this site, and short darkness retreats.

For years since my first retreat, I have had in mind to design and offer a proper eye mask for sleeping and resting in darkness. So this could come come next.

I think that with the intensified interest in the darkness conjecture that all of these services will generate, the opportunity for a long retreat for me will finally emerge.

For the record: when I finally succeed in spending two weeks in darkness, here is one thing I predict will happen.

I will access the dreamworld and see the light that pervades it. This light is called superlight. I believe it may be the subtle kind of light perceived directly by the pineal gland.

If so, then, superlight is food for the soul, just as the gross light of this dimension (sun, fire, star, northern, electric, etc) is food for the mind. Superlight is what floods consciousness from the inside out in moments of rapture and realization.

It is the light most of us are starved for and seek to replicate with technology, movies, computer screens, light shows at concerts, etc. That we do not see much of it is not a spiritual or moral shortcoming, but a physiological malfunction resulting from psychic injury.

(I believe this injury, by the way, resulted from the shock of incarnation on this planet after leaving the dimension and place in which many of people here were proficient. Earth is a crash-and-burn/trial-and-error planet. This makes more sense if you read the myth of three cultures.)

In mid-December, I made another serious attempt at a long darkness retreat. I thought I would try something different and keep it under wraps till it was over.

Across the lake, outside more populous San Pedro La Laguna, I rented what I thought was an appropriate house and bought supplies to darken it. The whole nine yards. Then the place turned out to be too noisy, cold, moldy, etc.

I spent all my money and a lot of energy. One of the first things I did afterward was write a long list of criteria any new space must meet before I spend a dime or minute on it. Then I returned to San Marcos to work and collect myself.

My new idea was that I will simply spend longer finding and preparing a place so that when it is finally time to begin, all I have to do is walk in, shut the door and turn of the light and everything will just work.

In the meantime, I would find a decent place to live (done! great housesitting job), decent work (done!), spend more time with the people here (doing it), and see to my immigration status in Guatemala, which I consider my home now.

Now cool developments have emerged since then. See my new post, serious darkness.

As I wrote in background, I was overwhelmed by rapture when I was 15 for three months. When it began to fade, I wanted to know what had happened. What caused this feeling Why did it fade away

The short answer to this question just came to me: I went into remission. I had been suffering from complications arising from an earlier injury, and the complications temporarily and partially cleared up as a result of the surge in development during adolescence. The underlying injury remained unchanged, and so when the surge abated, the complications returned and the feeling faded.

While I had answered these questions at length, I have not, until now, been able to put it in a single sentence. Recently an acquaintance asked me what was the answer to my original question. When I launched into my longer explanation, she lost interest, and I realized I needed to have a simpler answer. It occurred to me a bit later that the idea of remission would enables me to respond succinctly.

Wikipedia defines remission as “the state of absence of disease activity in patients with a chronic illness, with the possibility of return of disease activity.” In my case, it was like an infected broken bone. If the injury is cleaned often enough, or if circulation is improved sufficiently, the infection can disappear. But if the bone is not set and immoblized correctly, the infection will return.

In this case, the infection is my inordinate suffering and problems. The break is the injury to my psyche that long preceded the suffering and problems. The increased throughput of vital energy in my whole being during adolescence is the increase in circulation which temporarily and partially cleared up the infection.

I’m sitting in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, on the shore of Lake Atitlan in an internet “store”. It is just a painted cinder block room with a bare light bulb and four desks with computers. For 60 cents I can use the computer for an hour.

It is warm here. Everyone is out on the streets as Christmas Eve is a big deal here. Apparently the best way to celebrate it is with firecrackers. Very large ones. As often as possible. Small bombs, really. And the big show is tonight at midnight. Then I will sleep.

Speaking of the weather, the temperature here is the easiest thing to get used to. It hovers in the mid-seventies (21°C) all day. Last night it got really cold: 58 (14°C). Last week we had three cool days of rain. Very rare in December I hear.

The noise pollution is the hardest. It is like they were all born with earplugs in. It is hard for me to convey the intensity of the situation. My new house design fantasies involve caves dug deep into the side of the mountain behind several, thick, airtight doors. Maybe I can buy compressed air and just keep the valve open a little.

I have a job at the moment translating Spanish into English. Which is a joke, because I still speak Spanish only in infinitives in the present tense. However, there are automatic translation services online now that spit out very rough English versions of Spanish text. So I go through and make it intelligible. I know enough Spanish now to check it against the original. I get a whopping $1.80 for an hour of work. This is also how much a cheap hotel room costs here for a night. Truly, it is a foreign country here.

The people are wonderful. Period. Despite 500 years of various levels of European and American terrorism and extremely vigilant evangelism that continues to this very moment, the people still have the sense to carry, nurse, sleep with, and always be deeply connected emotionally to their babies. This is my only explanation for their near universal good natures (even the drunks lying face down in the street). Calm, relaxed, with a ready smile and time to ask your name and where you are from. It is an enormous blessing to be surrounded by a people who are like this.

When Mayans play basketball, they can hover over the court while shooting backwards. The crowd laughs as off-balance players dogpile into the children sitting at the boundary. The instant a period ends, tens of children dash onto the court with every kind of ball for 60 seconds of hoops and tag. Vendors ply parents with water and candy. And oranges, with whose peels mischief-makers hook me into a friendly food fight.

Wheelbarrows and handtrucks are a luxury here. Very young men two feet shorter than I carry twice their weight on their backs. It never fails to drop my jaw. A bag of cement is 90 pounds. I saw a man carry TWO on his back. I did a triple take then followed him to make sure I was seeing things correctly. The “cargadors” use a simple strap that goes over the forehead, then behind the back and under the load, which they secure against their bent-over backs with their arms. I think they must have the strongest necks in the world.

The mountains and lake continue to radiate their world-class beauty. I feel like the lake is where everything gathers, like I’m in the center of the world. The locals know they are a lucky and blessed people to live by this sacred lake, Atitlan. The volcanoes rise like three reticent and omnipotent gods from the south side of the lake, extending their protection to all who can see them. Really, they are the small children of a super-volcano whose crater now holds the lake. Seen this way, it is a little intimidating. It is the Mayan version of the fear of God, I suppose.

Well, Merry Christmas to you all there. Bundle up and sip an egg nog for me. When I get more settled here (still looking for a place to stay longer than a couple weeks), I hope you will come visit me. Tickets are very reasonable, as low as $124+fees one way, depending on departure city and date. For fun, check spiritair.com.

On the metaphysics of self-preservation: “Consciousness, for those organisms which possess it, is the basic means of survival.” —Ayn Rand

This idea is one of the roots of the darkness conjecture. Since our lives are so thoroughly screwed up, our consciousnesses must be comprehensively impaired.

Generally, we try to use will—part of the very consciousness that is so damaged—to fix our problems. How has that worked out for us As a designer of the Los Angeles freeway system would later put it, “Each and every problem we face today is the direct and inevitable result of yesterday’s brilliant solutions.” If I were the left hand, I’d say the right hand’s bluffing.

Which is why I think it would be better to use will to provide the organism, including consciousness, the conditions it needs to heal itself autonomically.

secret design, the site I made in late 2001 to present my design for Tribal Housing and a bunch of writings that followed, closed Monday with the rest of GeoCities.

GeoCities was cool. I learned basic HTML by tweaking the code on my templated home page. I published a lot of my ideas. It helped me see the coherence in my thought and helped me communicate it to what seemed like a lot of people: tens, maybe hundreds.

Of course, WordPress and Blogger and posterous and so on are much better because they simplify things and make websites more powerful and cohesive. I would not go back to GeoCities. But it was cool. It hosted lots of sites with tons of rad information from the early days of the web boom. I hope the site owners migrated the data in time. I still have everything I wrote from then. If you do not see it on my “other writings” page, let me know and I will send it to you.

For a long time, I have wanted to move to the tropics. It is warm, the people are not insane in the same way that they are insane here, and the food I would rather eat grows there. In short, the grass in Guatemala is not greener than it is here, but it is green year-round. I leave Nov 9.

The strangest thing happened last night. I woke up with a strong sense of vertigo. I was having dreams of being way, way up high, of trying to cling to the flat surface I was spread-eagled on. When I woke up, the feeling persisted for a long time, with various high-up imagery to accompany it.

It is all coming from finally doing something I want to do: going to the tropics. I do not have money. I do not know anyone there. I do not even speak the language yet (started studying yesterday, though). But aside from all my grand ideas, my default vision for myself has, for a long time, included going there. It is like I have been huddled on the ground all this time, and now I’m climbing this crazy tower of my own desire. It has overwhelmed me in the past. It is still often scary lately, but sometimes now it feels exciting, like when I’m making arrangements for it, one after another.

I read in _The Continuum Concept_ years ago that children who are held a lot when babies, like native people generally are, grow up without a fear of heights or agoraphobia. It is so odd now to feel it in connection with doing what I would like to do. It is as if people in this society, without necessarily knowing it, automatically stopped carrying around babies, especially with Victoria’s popularization of the stroller, in order to condition children to a future of not doing what they want to do, not daring, not being free. And should we begin to act from the heart again, a tidal wave of fear rises to discourage us.

A friend just said we should take this fear as a sign we are doing something right, but also to prepare.

Tonight, I report my sixth and last failure to arrange for a long darkness retreat. I made two business propositions to people, the dome and health proposals. But my heart was not really in them. The effort was putting too much pressure on me and the project. It needs no pushing. And so unconsciously, I made these proposals randomly so they would not get enough response.

The benefit of all this has been to become able detach from the retreat in a way new to me. In other words, I no longer feel the need to make it happen right away or as a direct function of my livelihood.

Now I will find some simple work and do the retreat on my own time. If it works, then other opportunities will arise naturally.

Above all, one must be some place. Cold weather has not made sense to me for a long time. Nor has the American way of life. So I traded in my expensive winter coat for a flight to Guatemala on November 9. I will find a group to volunteer with, then go from there.

8.17 – Ok, I got most of the content back up. It is still pretty rough around the edges. The look is temporary. Some links do not work. Pictures are missing. Some pages have funny bits of code visible. But at least the content is up. Will fix the rest soon.

(two previous posts:) 8.17 – I will have the site back up soon. Fortunately, before it crashed, I got a backup of everything. Watch for most important pages and blog posts to start going up tonight. I should finish with the details (photos) by Monday night at the latest. Thanks for your patience.

8.16 – My site was hacked. Please check back soon.

On the wish to recover:

There are two kinds of doing—automatic; and doing what you “wish”. Take a small thing which you “wish” to do and cannot do and make this your God. Let nothing interfere. If you “wish”, you can. Without wishing, you never “can”. “Wish” is the most powerful thing in the world.
—G I Gurdjieff

So far, Natural Hygienists have said that toxemia is the cause of illness [NOTE: actually only some say this. See CORRECTION below], and that toxemia itself results from misinformed behavior. But how did this cycle get started I do not think it just started out of the blue, as if otherwise healthy people started eating incorrectly and then lost their way. Something else had to have happened inbetween.

My first clue was how crazy illness is. Consider the lung cancer patient who keeps smoking or the overweight person who keeps eating junk food. What causes this craziness

I think something hurt us very, very badly—worse than we typically imagine being hurt—and we never had a chance to recover. This makes us crazy. In my view, all our suffering and all the problems that attend it stem from this unhealed injury. In my approach, which I view as fundamentally Hygienic, we provide for the healing of this injury so that, with our newly recovered sanity, we can freely apply the more common Hygienic practices.

CORRECTION (2010.10.13): I was mistaken about the hygienic position on toxemia. Fully informed hygienists actually hold that the basic cause of illness is enervation, in this sense, the chronic over-expenditure or lack of energy). Toxemia is simply closely related.

I finally finished reading the super rad central text of Natural Hygiene, The Science and Fine Art of Natural Hygiene by Herbert Shelton. His clearest statement of this in the book is in the chapter on Rest and Sleep. The nine Laws of Life on which Hygiene is based are, in fact, largely about vital energy and the supreme and unsubstitutable intelligence with which the organism manages this energy. I had heard a little about the hygienic idea of enervation before, and it made sense to me. But later, a student of Hygiene whose views I overly regarded said that, according to Natural Hygiene, toxemia is the cause of all illness.

Enervation as the cause of all disease is an idea much more compatible with the darkness conjecture than mere toxemia. Enervation would naturally result from catastrophic, unhealed psychic injury. Enervation would, in turn, lead to toxemia and deficiency. Without energy, the body cannot clean itself out or deliver nutrients, whether the food is appropriate or not. The psychic injury would also explain the strange persistence of our obviously unhealthy lifestyles. Taking this persistence as “just how things are” instead of being part of the pathology itself, Hygienists have so far enjoined people to exert effort to overcome this persistence with willpower. Thus dependent on effort, a very unreliable foundation, success is correspondingly rare. (This position is useful, however, for maintaining the puritanical, self-righteous elitism that characterizes some Hygienists.)

Anyway, I knew there was some reason I liked Natural Hygiene. There is nothing like finding out things for oneself.

I’m now promoting my health proposal, starting on facebook. Though published, I was still editing it and working out some logistics. There is a lot more to do, but the basics are in place now.

I have made two new pages of some older writings: my poems from 1992 to the present and a short memoir, The Ashers, a River, and I of a canoe trip I took as a boy with the Boy Scouts, my Scoutmaster, Jack Asher, and his wife, LaVerne, which I wrote for their 50th Wedding Anniversary.