I met an old friend yesterday after work who lives in Katoomba, and we had a good chat. After I left, I remembered what we talked about, which was cosmologies, and he spoke about indoctrination into religion. I was saying how I had studied Feng Shui and became interested in all sorts of different cosmologies and the way people found ways of making systems. My friend said it was how humans had dealt with the unknown and I agreed but I then realised that the late capitalist world we are in is full of cosmologies as well. Although I thought about this when I was on the tram home. I suppose Spiderman, Superman, and all of the myriad American superheroes and even Star Wars characters were just another cosmology yet it seems so shallow compared to what was happening in cultures that were basically obliterated by Western colonisation and imperialism.

I suppose the way these cosmologies are bankrolled to make entertainment fills that void left behind by all of the cultures that have barely hung onto their own cosmologies. It seems quite sinister in a sense yet also opportunistic to fill people’s minds with these new benign and malignant spirits. I suppose in Feng Shui as well as in all cultural attempts to understand our own roles in nature we find that benign spirits in certain situations can be quite dangerous and even neutral spirits can change in new situations in space and time. Not everyone wants to take a political stance if they are isolated which was something my friend spoke about, yet when they are in a certain community they feel more confident with their shared ideas.

We also spoke about parasitic technology and technology that is built to simply confuse and create barriers. When we spoke about Centrelink and the dole he had a lot to say about the way people who should be helping simply kept passing the buck and rather than trying to solve a problem for the person seeking the help they will make the whole process tied into the system which is meant to be the barrier to help. For example rather than help the person they will turn them toward the barrier which is the technology and the technology being the barrier itself is not supposed to help. It is simply meant to weed out the people who can’t navigate the barriers, somewhat like going into a labyrinth with multiple levels and many dead ends.

We didn’t talk about parasitic technology but more or less spoke about barrier-ready systems and I thought about parasitic technologies from another conversation with someone at work about a particular mobile application that feeds you behavioural cues. We didn’t talk in-depth about it but it made me realise that so much of mobile technology and tiers of desktop-focused tools are mostly parasitic and use behavioural cues to tie you into using them. If something is a tool, then you are using it for a goal but when the technology gives you real-time feedback and tracks your input it definitely becomes quite parasitic and controlling. I suppose when thinking about technology, cosmologies and behaviour we need to think about the time involved, and the cost monetarily and spiritually.

I remember when my QiGong teacher was talking about all of the devils the Hollywood movies devised such as creatures from movies like Aliens and thousands of others and I realised I had never thought about it from the point of view of human behaviour and belief systems when clearly every demon ever conceived is simply there to speak to you as the human subject. Any horror movie, science fiction, or comic book is there to fill you. We are essentially empty beings with nothing but the feedback that loops in and out, that is why the ultimate state is to be empty as it is our original state. 

We are empty but hang onto the cosmologies and cultural cues deployed. We then think it is about choice but really the only natural option is our original state of emptiness. Everything else is simply an illusion, and that is why people are never satisfied.