Predicting the future is hard. At least that’s what Nostradamus tells me every time I’m on mescaline. But, damn it, if Ed McMann can do it, we might as well take a swing here at Wondergressive.
According to the calendar, it’s been 2013 for a little while now, and that means it’s probably safe to say we didn’t all explode in boiling hellfire at the end of 2012. It’s unfortunate, because, of all the dooms-day prophecies floating around, that Mayan prediction was especially promising. That means, though, if ever there was a time to plan for the future, it’s today.
It may come in the form of implanting our sentience into cyborgs, imprinting clones with a map of the alpha version’s memories, or just extending our stays on this plane to 6 or 700 years via sea turtle style metabolism manipulation. However events may unfold, Carpe Diem has never before been so pertinent. (If immortality’s too big of a leap, just follow some of the previous links and see what we mean.)
So in the spirit of having oodles of time to do whatever the hell you want, we present you with part one of Qwizx’s guide to surfing oblivion.
Step 1: Shifting Perspectives (Introduction to the Avatar mindset)
Just change your mind a bit. The tools have been laid out already for those in the mood to adapt rather than shunt the burden off onto the next generation. Let’s take a moment and let some of the implications of prolonged life settle in…The ritual goes: same window, different visuals…
Instead of renting, or mooching off the parents, as immortals, we now own the property. Every perk and burden that comes with that. Global warming something you’re concerned about? You personally will be here in a few thousand years to experience the fall out. Think the country’s going to shit? You, yourself, will be witnessing the rise and fall of empires and shift of power regimes. Want to own your own continent? Spend a few hundred years amassing a fortune and learning all the skills you’ll need to rise to the top and control the ignorant populace. Want to topple a violent dictator? Same thing, control the ignorant populace. The point is, you will have the time, so anything conceivable is not only within your grasp, it’s your responsibility to foresee. Congratulations, us.
Just pretend you know with certainty that you and all those you love will live forever, then jot it down.
I understand this has just been a tease, a bit of intellectual foreplay to ponder, but I hope you’re as titillated as I am. Over the next few weeks we’ll be covering a whole range of lessons for the up and coming demi-god, from the 10,000 hour mastery law to do-it-yourself propaganda to Napoleon Hill’s formula for becoming the next Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
In any case, let’s not waste the next millennia on boredom.
In 1934, a product was created that has yet to be trumped in its incredible power, not by 3D printing, bionic hands, or even self slicing bread. One man had the revolutionary idea to take blank pieces of paper and bind them together with a spiral of twisting metal. Thanks to this pioneer of liberal thinking, today, if you have 79 cents, you can become a god.
I grow impatient of your incessant rambling, Qwizx. Just tell me this amazing thing already!
Alright, jeez, Fictional Naysayer, I gotta rope you in and build the suspense a little, ok? Cool your ADHD jets…
Buy a notebook, and you can have superpowers… literally.
Of course, there is the obvious, “hey kids, unleash the power of your imagination,” (as though Wondergressive would ever become some PBS special or episode of SpongeBob). Or the spot-on philosophy of sci-fi grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein, World as Myth. Or, like we’ve already shown, creativity is the meaning of existence. No, this is much much much cooler than all that.
So a friend mentions how he found this method of tripling your energy in the morning, and you placatingly nod and think, “Cool, I’ll add it to the pile of things I’ll blow off until I die, right along side lose 50lb, quit masturbating, and develop a photographic memory.” Except, do you actually have that pile? No? Then make one…
Get yourself a pad of paper and a pencil, those ancient technologies, to keep in your pocket at all times, and jot down any passing thought, even just a one or two word “note-to-self.”
Don’t be afraid to take it to serial-killer levels of obsessive compulsion:
Short-term memory is super limited, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed if, say, more than two things are happening at once. But your brain is a tremendously powerful biological supercomputer capable of… frankly we have no idea, because we are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we are capable of. What the notebook does is very simple; it allows you to set your subconscious to its own devices and create miracles on par with walking on water.
So, this time, a buddy mentions something about eating more spinach, and we try something new; instead of “yeah yeah, I’ll get to it eventually” we simply jot it down in our handy dandy notebook… and that’s it. Don’t think about it again. Set it and forget it.
Bullshit!
Always the skeptic, Mr. Naysayer. Good, don’t ever change.
When we half-heartedly think “Yeah yeah, I’ll get to it when I get to it” what we’re saying is “Hey Luxemburg, just sit around. We’re not doing shit today”
There is a general taboo on Magic, here in the age of science, but “magic” is just a word. The mind is so magnificently powerful that it’s incomprehensible to our thinking consciousness. Perhaps the first grimoire was just this concept; a young lady wrote down her inner thoughts and crazy “coincidences” started happening. (Shit, better burn her.)
Whatever. I have a journal and don’t own my own planet yet.
Touché.
First, go back right now and read your old journals. You’ll be astonished at how much of what you’d written has happened. You’ll be far more astonished at how much of what came true you totally forgot about and then put no conscious effort whatsoever into achieving, but it happened anyway.
Second, take a special look at your language. Our thoughts are noise, and even the smartest among us are complete morons. That’s a good thing. When you wrote, “Brian is so cute, but there’s no way he’d like me,” Luxemburg took that and created exactly what you wanted. They got together and filtered what they would show you (like how he’s talking to Hillary and hasn’t noticed your low-cut top, asshole) hiding anything non-affirming (see how he can’t make eye-contact and keeps shifting his feet when you’re around. That’s a good thing). You will see whatever you already expect to see. That’s why Brian’s an asshole.
Sure do. In ’95, Neal Donald Walsch was a broken man. Razor in hand, ready to open his wrists in desperation, he played one last-ditch wild card that he never expected to work. He pulled out a spiral notebook and started frantically scrawling a passionate hate letter to God, demanding answers to not just his own turmoils, but to the big existential things; why is there so much suffering? What happens when we die? Bad things to good people, all that.
A devout atheist, eventually, in his passion, something happened. He started expecting an answer. In that moment, he got one. His hand started moving of its own accord, and the revelations revealed were nothing less than divine. These madman scribblings have gone on to become a series of spiritual texts lauded the world over. God? Brain? It doesn’t matter.
Another. Are you reading this on a Mac? So you’ve heard of Steve Jobs? His biography flies off the shelves and one of the most beautiful things in it is his constant demanding of the impossible. All throughout the book are moments where a chief-engineer would come to him with bad news, “Steve, we can’t do it. I know what you’re saying; it’s just that what you need us to do doesn’t exist. It’s impossible.”
Top engineers for Apple or Pixar are kind of smart, so if they say something isn’t just hard, but utterly impossible, then, yeah, it can’t be done. Steve, charismatic manager that he was, would simply say, “Fucking do it, or you’re fired.” And it got done. Every time. (Screw you, reality)
Yep. When you write it down it gives your brain permission to do what it does best, solve problems.
Don’t think big. Think huge. Don’t think huge. Think cosmic. Just decide and don’t worry about the how. Your private fleet of subatomic-physicists, genetic-engineers, economists, composers, and dreamers can work out the details.
You know him. Maybe you are him. The casual acquaintance, not quite friend, he saunters forward, dilated pupils scanning over each of his shoulders, iPad casually out and ready, a knowing smile forming a crest of righteously pompous paranoia across his stubbled jaw, beads of youthfully enthusiastic perspiration clinging to his hipster handlebar mustache, and, beaming with false solidarity, he presses play:
Half-way through the clip, he starts digging through his leather “Tool” wallet and pulls out five pre-creased bills to further baffle you with (below).
Ok, great, I’ve seen this stuff before. So was 9-11 an inside job? Maybe just allowed to happen for private agendas? It’s old played-out news, and, most likely, your mind was made up long ago. The more important question no one seems to be asking is, “why should we give a shit?”
Woah woah woah!! You can’t mean that?
I do. Absolutely. And if I do my job here, hopefully you’ll be shrugging with indifference as well by the end of this article, and the world can be a happier place with just a few more rainbows and baby unicorn farts. Come follow me on this fanciful rollercoaster ride, enjoy all the benefits of “disregarding bad news.”
Where we stand
Today, 36% of Americans either are certain or pretty sure that 9-11 was an inside job. So, this is not some fringe group of loonies, but a rather hefty chunk of “we the people,” not to mention the masses on the fence open-minded to the idea. The countless YouTube links circulating Facebook are everywhere so the question has been posed to just about everyone by now. If we can all unite for a moment and assume the very worst, “9-11 was our government killing its own people,” that’s exactly why we need to knock this right the hell off. Terrorism is bad, but thinking about terrorism is far worse…
There is a natural rhythm to peering down the rabbit hole. First is the rush of finding something sensational; it triggers this carnal craving to be “in the know”. Then, once the initial high of learning something edgy wears off, the specific details slowly fade away from our memories and we’re left with only a few linchpin ideas. These are the singular points that, at least to us, are utterly irrefutable. The linchpin is a beautiful mental process that allows us to unburden and feel righteous in our opinion, free wonder about other things.
On the official story believer’s side of the case is the old, “how could that many people possibly keep something this big a secret?” Then, to the conspiracy theorists, all they need are 2 words, “building 7,” and the argument is over. In either case, it’s like an atheist preaching to a born-again; it always ends in a, “well I just have faith,” and a perforated stress-ulcer coupled with bloody stool.
I mean something far greater than apathy when I say this: once you quit giving a shit, it’ll all be roses. I promise.
Whoever the group responsible, there is a wide array of believed motives. Conspirators say Iraq war, oil, create enemy, repeal rights, globalization, fear agenda. Meanwhile, official storyers say… umm… “They hate freedom” or something, U.S.’s Saudi Arabia presence, sanctions on Iraq. Whoever the culprits, whatever the aim, each of these explanations shares a common bond; they all hide under the same umbrella: “propaganda.” There is some message that attack was designed to send. There was a message, and that is part of why we need to stop caring…
See, the mind of the conspiracy theorist is an interesting place. They tend to be the more curious amongst us, believing themselves more open to the truth than others. Whether their world view is ever validated or not, there have always been a segment of the people who don’t buy the “official line.” Be it JFK, the moon landing, Lincoln, freemason founding fathers, or “God” is a mistranslation for “Aliens,” alternative explanations of history abound.
What that means is, if a small powerful group of the world’s elite was responsible for 9-11, they knew full-well that some would shout “bullshit.” It’s a matter of human nature. So don’t you think, just maybe, if they knew how you’d react, that might have been part of the plan?…
I hope you can bear with me here. Remember, we’re still assuming the “truthers” are right.
Since the 60’s, the idea of “the man” has been all but ubiquitous, but in the last decade especially, an overwhelming shift in perspective has occurred to where it’s now just assumed common knowledge that “your government is out to get you,” like some unspoken rule. FEMA camps, chemtrails, illuminati symbols, clips of cops beating rioters all flood through our bandwidth. Ideas that would have gotten one ostracized a decade ago are now commonplace. politicians are corrupt, the news is filled with lies, food is poison and breathing causes cancer, so cynicism seems to be justified, but let me ask you this: How bad was 9-11 really?
Even the “they” out to get you isn’t out to get you.
3000 people died that day. That’s terrible, but not really (how dare you?). Nearly 3000 people have died since you started reading this article.
But those weren’t Americans so it’s not as important? Or, those were largely natural causes (circle of life)?
The callous truth is, in spite of all the hype, the numbers are a speck of rubble amidst the heap of steel and concrete that is human mortality. Being blown up by a terrorist is terrifying (hence the name), but not only are you more likely to die slipping in the shower than you are to die in a terrorist attack, you are 4,167 times more likely (where’s the war on hygiene?).
Here’s what I’m suggesting: the result has been accomplished. Even If our own government were the orchestrators of 9-11 (again, maybe so, maybe not), it absolutely doesn’t matter.
The numbers are so small they are inconsequential. If the government attacks its own people, you should worry about it if you also expect to be struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket; it could happen, but it won’t.
The dwindling baby-boomers who still trust FOX-news may fear terrorist, but the internet doesn’t. The internet, though, is afraid. We are afraid of something far worse…
If these elusive shadow men really run the show, the larger game was not anything tangible, but the propaganda campaign that followed, where we now collectively fear our government. That was the aim. The result has been this massive uneasiness on the collective mind of the people that the one’s they were supposed to rely on were out to get them, and that is far scarier.
Pissed off guys in caves with access to box cutters is not a threat to a heavily armed nation. But a group who controls the riot police, watches all the satellites, monitors your browsing history, and owns the judicial system is trying to kill you… that’s scary.
Guess what, my friends; they aren’t. 3000 people. Whoever it was killed just enough to make it seem plausible that they are killing us. They aren’t. They just aren’t. Do serial killers exist? Of course. Will you be skinned and made into a lampshade at some point this week? Absolutely not!!!
Now I can already hear the backlash. “He must be working for the man. They got to Qwizx, too.” Or, “What about the FEMA camps, flying drones, and U.S. citizens put on no-fly lists or labeled terrorists without trial?”
Yep. Those are things alright. So what? The only thing that’s changed is now we know about it. Far worse things have happened and will continue to, because that is part of the human condition. Say thank you to the internet for being a check on the villains of the world’s nefarious bullshit. You are just as safe you were before you did a Google search for codex alimentarius, but now you are aware.
They want you scared; there’s nothing to be scared of. When you “expose the truth” you’re really the one spreading the fear. The very powers you’re trying to expose, you are doing their job for them.
A few weeks ago, we posted a potentially paradigm altering question: Can the human mind be trained into photographic recollection? (This is a follow up, so maybe check out the link before reading on) Two sentences are more than enough build up. The results are in folks, and…
The short answer is “yes”.
The slightly longer answer is “FUCK YEAH!!!! WHEW!!!! (6 back-flips)”
For the last month, I’ve been religiously following this protocol, and it has worked. I have a photographic memory. No joke. After the power-lust erection and adrenaline jitters subsided, after a few hours of daydreaming plots to use this new ability for super-villainy, after a day of gazing at perfect recollections of stolen glances at cleavage, I feel I’ve calmed down enough to share with you eager readers the wonderful news… and you can totally have this too.
It’s incredibly easy. Do it. That’s really all you need to know. Do it now… but for the more curious, like I know you are, just a few things:
What’s happening in the brain that makes this work?
Well, there are 2 theories of how color vision works. Trichromatic theory says, essentially, that there are 3 types of cones (receptors) in the eye that sense specific pairs of colors; the occipital lobe then translates this information into what we call vision.
More interestingly, though, and what we’ll be looking at in detail, is the opponent-process theory of colored vision. With the opponent-process theory, whenever it suddenly shifts to dark, a perfect photo-negative image of whatever was just in the visual field gets transposed onto the retina. That’s the mechanism at work for the well-known illusion on the right (stare for ten seconds, then look away and blink fast) (or maybe it’s God talking to you. I don’t know). That negative image is what we utilize for super memory…
As long as the eyes are open, these negative images are constantly being processed and filtered by the brain. See, way too much is happening at once, though. Your eyes take in trillions and trillions of bits of visual information every instant, and almost none of it matters. So the occipital lobe, hard-worker that he is, weeds out what it doesn’t think is necessary. While you “see” everything around you, you only actually perceive an infinitesimal amount, the things that pertain to your safety/survival or what you’re focusing on in the moment. For example:
So, how does the occipital lobe know what’s important? Easy, you tell it. You do this all the time and don’t even think about it. A new parent will notice the “Diapers: Half Price” sign that the rest of us glazed over like it had neon lights, just like Alex Jones fans tend to see the chemtrails and “all-seeing eyes,” as though reality had been hit by a highlighter. Watch: right now, take a quick moment, without moving your eyes; notice all the things around you that are the color black…
Easy, of course, but did you notice that while you were doing that, everything else just sort of faded away? You could still see it, but it just wasn’t in focus, sort of. This is the process we hack…
The mind is plastic, flexible to our will, and if we know how it operates, we can train it to do just about anything. To develop a photographic memory; we need only develop a simple habit, so, real quick, let’s understand how habits work. It’s 30 days. That simple. If we do something every day, after 30 days, it no longer takes effort. The mind is retrained and the process is automatic (remember this for anything you want to do, because it’s universal, not just for memory training).
So with the dark-room process, we read words etched into our retinas, right. These negative images are always there and, usually, disregarded as irrelevant. What we’re doing is stepping into this process and saying, “Hey, don’t throw that out just yet. Let me take a look at that.” (You control your brain; your brain doesn’t control you, and never let anyone tell you otherwise), so the brain says “Oh, ok. Here it is. I didn’t realize you wanted that.” Your brain, however, is in the habit of tossing these negatives, so every day for a month we step in and say, “let me see that for a second.” after 30 days, the brain gets the point and will automatically save these images for you to look at whenever you want. Welcome to the club; you now have a photographically perfect memory.
Additional tips (in retrospect)
1.) Don’t read a book. The absolute best thing to attempt to read is not a book. What works much better is black background with bright and blocky white lettering. Far far easier to try to read.
2.) Wink. Part of the frustration you’ll come across with attempting to read your hindsight is overexposure. If you flash the lights before the image is totally dissolved, there is this overlap effect, like double exposed film (I’m not too ancient for remembering what film is, am I?). The solution: wink. Do it with one eye at a time; it has no effect on the process and allows one eye to recover as the other works. Doing this, my overall exercise got to as little as 3 minutes.
3.) Ask. Who knows how many little gimmicks and tricks I figured out? Feel free to write me at qwizx@wondergressive.com. I’ll get back to you as quick as my busy life will let me, and if there’re enough of the same questions, later, I’ll add an FAQ to the bottom here.
Finally, and most importantly, did I mention “fuck yeah” and “cleavage?”
Warning: this article should not be read within proximity to sandpaper or pumice rocks as there is a high likelihood of sanding down one’s skin in terror. This one gets gross, kiddies.
One of the many benefits already seen since the inception of the Human Microbiome Project in 2007 is the outrageous discovery that only 10% of our body is human.
What kind of madman rant are you going on this time, Qwizx?
As it turns out, crazy as it may sound, the overwhelming majority of cells within/out our person are bacteria. In fact, we are a staggering 90% non-human. Swimming amidst the estimated 10 trillion cells constituting your selfness are something like 100 trillion individual little critters that call your life-fluids home. In a microscopic landscape of terrain, legions of monsters are swathing, swarming, warring, breeding, breathing and all-out taking over the slabs of meat we self-reference as “I.”
100 trillion is a big number, maybe too large for a human mind to fathom, so instead, let’s imagine it this way: There are currently 7,000,000,000 people in the world (that’s billion, with a B)… There are 14 THOUSAND times that many (our current planetary population) bacteria wiggling inside you this moment, Jacuzzi-ing in your tear-ducts as you read this. When I say bacteria, by the way, I mean these things (thank you, electron microscopes)…
Cluster of E. Coli sipping margaritas by the lake of sulfur in hell, or…
Life always finds a way, just not necessarily humanoid life. A genomic sequencing study has recently discovered high numbers of hydrothermal vent eubacteria on prosthetic hip joints. This wouldn’t be a big deal, considering the plethora of ghouls infesting people, accept hydrothermal vent eubacteria are a species once thought only to live in the blackness of the ocean’s depths(you know, cause surviving on uranium isn’t scary enough).
(below) At Steve’s liver for the weekly orgy and ritual-sacrifice (BYOB)
By no means is this exclusively shiver-inducing news. Like when Copernicus realized the earth revolved around the sun, this is a “discovery,” meaning it was always true, just now it’s news to us. No need for mass panic, cause this is how it’s supposed to work, and always has. However, there are some interesting implications:
Hurray, no more lonely Saturday nights!
Imagine our bodies, now, as a planet onto themselves, where bacteria pay their property taxes, vote, and even take their kids to little league in the small intestine. We humans are not individuals, but a collective, a civilization or a conglomerate, united in a symbiosis where each individual creepy-crawly plays his part on the whole. Sure, just like in human civilizations, there are the equivalent of warring gang factions, and like we always do, these sparse rebels gets all the focus (I’m looking at you, gonorrhea.), but our microscopic brothers and sisters are absolutely essential to our continued existence.
If we’re like a corporation, hell yeah, I get to be the CEO.
Not quite. Sorry. We’re more like the semi-dipshit boss wrapped around his employees’ fingers. The sneaky scallywags just let us think the best ideas are ours so we can save face; the germs are in charge. Through the clever excretion of chemicals, our fuzzy little friends manipulate our lives in almost every conceivable way, from our health to straight up mind-control. However, don’t panic; it’s less like “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers,” and more like the Futurama episode where Fry eats the vending machine egg salad and becomes an Ubber-Fry.
The NIH’s Human Microbiome Project plans on cataloging the entire human microbiome, or metagenome, and thus far only approximately 1% of this microbiota has been characterized and identified. They’ve just begun to peak into the Pandora’s box of possibilities from our neighbors to the nano, so, I don’t know about you, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for sensory enhancing super parasites.
By all means, keep washing your hands, but these guys are unavoidable. See that cute fella hiding in the upper-left corner of this close-up of dust (below), the Kraken-lookin spawn of Lucifer posing for a cameo in your nightmares? He’s everywhere.
Wondergressive 
