The Kubrickon

[Elliott Jonestown]

Hi Guruilla,

I'm interested in further exploration. The gulf between your posts and Agent Orange Cooper's seems to me small. You both agree Kubrick's films operate on a level beyond what is immediately seen. You both feel there is a hidden code or clues that point to some other truth, function, reality. Where exactly is the gap? Is it that you Guruilla feel the 117-711 mirror isn't totally compelling as evidence? OK, that's reasonable. But would you not agree that sometimes numerical synchronicity has a place in this type of research? Dates are important on many levels. You've already granted that Kubrick being born the same day as Jung spoke to you as some kind of strange confirmation. What about the fact, as pointed out in the blog post Agent Orange linked, that Kubrick died 666 days before the first day of 2001, the banner year included in the title of his most acclaimed film. And that 666 days before he died this happened:

"We have the world’s most advanced (at the time) chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, decisively defeating a human being for the first time. The computer itself is clearly modeled after the Monolith & the AI computer HAL (which is itself a rendering of the Monolith) & which also plays chess & defeats a human being (via deception). Deep Blue was built by IBM, the company from which the name HAL was derived, & which built HAL in the first place. And it happened exactly 666 days before Stanley Kubrick’s death, which itself occurred 666 days before January 1st, 2001." [From Agent Orange's blog linked in this thread.]

It's a curious phenomenon synchronicity, powerful in how it can confirm things. But it's also a very individual event. That is to say subjective. Guruilla, I'm sure you've heard the famous synchronicity surrounding a scarab dung beetle that Jung experienced? [see http://jungcurrents.com/synchronicity-t ... rab-beetle] The precision of that sync has to be confirmation of something, its full ramifications probably best understood by the individuals who experienced it. I'd be interested to hear your experiences related to synchronicity and media (films, music, books). Odds are you've had powerful ones, given your role as a leading "new age conspiracy theorist."

The line in this post that carried the most levelheadedness was this: "I think that the synchro-intuitive level of understanding is a necessary part of life but withers when left to its own devices, flourishing on the other hand when it's balanced out by detective work that maps the deep order of things more deductively," from a post on page 2 by tapitsbo. Guruilla, your move into more traditional research (citing research about Burgess) is an important one. I've always been of the mind that synchronicity can point the way or confirm intuition, but hard research must accompany it. Only then can we approximate truth. I've had the idea (after hearing your shows on Cohen) that Kubrick may have made A Clockwork Orange about Cohen. Maybe Cohen went through the experiences of the character Alex, or ones similar, depicted therein. See Leonard's song Teachers:

I met a man who lost his mind
in some lost place I had to find,
follow me the wise man said,
but he walked behind.

I walked into a hospital
where none was sick and none was well,
when at night the nurses left
I could not walk at all.

Anyhow, Kubrick's life has plenty of facts that show he was connected to the elite, etc. He worked with the military on 2001, using cameras no one else had. He is quoted as warning people to stay away form power because it's dangerous. He isolated himself in England and never left. The content of his films undeniably explore and expose structures of power in ways that do not reaffirm those structures or cast them in positive light. Eyes Wide Shut, which I am a fan of, I admit, effectively blows the whistle on elite sex rings, ala the Son of Sam cult based out of a mansion north of New York City.

That Kubrick's films are difficult to watch and require thinking and analysis, to me is an argument why they provide the antidote to "AI thinking," not a reaffirmation of it. Technologies that unconsciously transfer AI thinking to their viewers would be more akin to smartphones and swiping, Facebook, Tinder, etc., "feed culture." That is the internet culture of moving through digital feeds on a smartphone. My guess is the brain gets shut down similar to how viewing TV shuts down the brain, some kind of beta state. One literally feels taken over by the device. And unlike TV you're moving your hands and there's an appearance of decision making. The AI then gathers data on human preferences and movement, even typing (see this patent http://www.google.com/patents/US8332932). (By the way, you all would enjoy the film Ex Machina as it explores these very themes.) Consciousness, a subset of which is thinking, analysis, active literacy, is anathema to AI. Kubrick made films that the average Joe Six pack would discard as unwatchable. Average Joe Six pack isn't conscious. He goes to work happily, says the pledge diligently, loves God and country, and cheers the war machine, believing it noble and necessary. Kubrick forced the viewer to engage the very human qualities AI can never duplicate.

[Elliott Jonestown]

I see my last post was post 46. 4x6 is 24, a reverse 42.

Another interesting thought I've had, and I'm not a Christian, but have family who are: these Christians are always obsessed with "the blood." To them, everything goes back to "the blood," by which the mean the blood of Christ, as spilled on the cross. These folks might be onto something. If we ask, "what can't AI emulate," aspects of our animal nature spring first to mind. We have an inner battery that produces involuntary breath and blood pumping. It's AI independent. So in this way, "the blood" might very well contain the parts of ourselves immune to transhuman nightmare, the same parts AI are obsessed with understanding. Often on your show, Guruilla, you talk about being embodied as some kind of "solution." The blood and body of Christ pay an important role in a Catholic mass.(I agree with you about embodiment, but that's a huge topic that probably deserves it own thread. You've talked briefly on your show what that means to you, but I'd like to hear more.)

Then I read this last week further confirming the blood-overcomes-AI theory, an article entitled Why Menstruation Remains a Medical Mystery. (http://www.livescience.com/52896-why-me ... stery.html)

"It's still a bit of a mystery why women menstruate. Humans are among the few species in which the process occurs, and although researchers have ideas about why menstruation happens, there are many unknowns."

AI doesn't like mysteries. It like things that are mappable with certainty.

[Elvis]

Some of the more, er, obsessive efforts to find correspondences tend to put me off over-analysing Kubrick films (which I love, btw). Some things are too thin a stretch...

AOC wrote,

There's also this brief quote from the John Baxter biography, p. 324: "It was dubbed in eleven days, with sound and editing crews working round the clock. Right to the end, Kubrick made changes, deleting as little as one or two frames. For each change, however, a new black and white print had to be struck, and the music relaid." What possible difference could one or two frames (1/24th of a second) make to someone who wasn't paying extremely precise attention to frame-counts/timings? It could only make a difference on a subliminal level, which is where Kubrick was primarily working.

I've chopped a lot of film frames and one frame can make a big difference; two frames can make all the difference. Cutting two frames is not any fine obsession, it's just not always evident at first that those two frames have to go. In stuff I edited 20 years ago, I still see places where I wish like hell I could cut out one or two frames.

My point is, all the time & energy spent looking for hidden clues could pay for another fake moon landing! I think that some of the nature of the creative process is being misunderstood and Overlooked.

[Elliott Jonestown]

Elvis, what is your take on Kubrick using his films to communicate truths to the world? Was he trying to show us that our eyes are wide shut? Did he expose elites and attack militarism? My answer would be yes to these questions. A very sinplistic approach--cut out the synchronicity and details about frames--tells us a lot about what Kubrick was up to.

Some of the more, er, obsessive efforts to find correspondences tend to put me off over-analysing Kubrick films (which I love, btw). Some things are too thin a stretch...

AOC wrote,

There's also this brief quote from the John Baxter biography, p. 324: "It was dubbed in eleven days, with sound and editing crews working round the clock. Right to the end, Kubrick made changes, deleting as little as one or two frames. For each change, however, a new black and white print had to be struck, and the music relaid." What possible difference could one or two frames (1/24th of a second) make to someone who wasn't paying extremely precise attention to frame-counts/timings? It could only make a difference on a subliminal level, which is where Kubrick was primarily working.

I've chopped a lot of film frames and one frame can make a big difference; two frames can make all the difference. Cutting two frames is not any fine obsession, it's just not always evident at first that those two frames have to go. In stuff I edited 20 years ago, I still see places where I wish like hell I could cut out one or two frames.

My point is, all the time & energy spent looking for hidden clues could pay for another fake moon landing! I think that some of the nature of the creative process is being misunderstood and Overlooked.

[Elvis]

Elvis, what is your take on Kubrick using his films to communicate truths to the world? Was he trying to show us that our eyes are wide shut? Did he expose elites and attack militarism? My answer would be yes to these questions. A very sinplistic approach--cut out the synchronicity and details about frames--tells us a lot about what Kubrick was up to.

Hi Elliot, welcome to the forum!

I essentially agree with your take, and to me it's self-evident in the films. Although Kubrick himself would never say, would he? Which is fine with me, I think it would be ridiculous for him to have spelled out the concepts and symbols in his movies. On the other hand, I'd have loved to hear his comments about mainstream reviews of "Eyes Wide Shut"—not a single one of which got it right or even came close. (I find that fact itself quite interesting.)

There's no question Kubrick's films are loaded with...let me leave that at just "loaded." Some great, worthwhile movies are digested in a single viewing. Because Kubrick attended to the smallest detail, his movies bear repeated viewings.

(Which brings a question to mind: Guruilla, have you watched the Kubrick movies you dislike more than once?)

[tapitsbo]

let me just take a second to interject that the research that gets called "AI" is probably already getting computers to go beyond cold, hard certainty...

[Elliott Jonestown]

A computer can understand its coding and has to translate the inputs it perceives into its coding language, lets say a binary base language of some kind. So the mystery of menstration would be flattened into a string of ones and zeros: no more mystery. For sure the computers are getting more powerful, but the profound secret behind the involuntariness of human life to me doesn't translate easily into computer code. Hell, we cant even understand it without resorting to metaphor and poetry, strategies tha lean toward the outside of language.

let me just take a second to interject that the research that gets called "AI" is probably already getting computers to go beyond cold, hard certainty...

[guruilla]

Hi Elliott Jonestown! Thanks for joining the discussion.

First off, and I don’t know if AOC is still reading the thread since he “bowed out,” so that makes it sort of weirdly delicate, but one reason I asked for third person testimony is that I felt AOC’s leaving in the manner he did confirmed something: namely, the cultish devotion to Kubrick that colors (orange) the investigations that are being done into his work.

Essentially, all that happened with AOC was that I didn’t agree about the value or meaning of a set of data which he presented. It was only one set of data, and my opinion about it was only one point among many which I made, including direct questions for AOC, all of which got lost in the emotional reaction to my interpretation of that evidence . AOC felt dehumanized because I didn’t agree with its meaning, and suggested that it was ideological stonewalling (throwing my own words back at me by dragging them into a totally different context). And yet, as EJ noted, until that point there seemed to be a pretty small margin of disagreement. That small margin became large, so large that AOC left the building, once a central nerve was hit.

I would suggest that, as ever, this centers around an ideological problem. To me, the endless sifting through Kubrick-artifice for meaningful clues indicates a form of ideological enslavement to Kubrick and the work. AOC argues that writing about Kubraphilia is no less obsessive, libido-squandering or (I presume) ideological than writing about Kubrick-trivia. But there is at least one key difference: in the former case, there is the exploration of human behavior; in the latter, what is being engaged with is the dead matter of popular culture (and with apparently very little focus on the psyche of the investigator). There’s even an objection to the term obsessive, when to disallow obsession as a designator for this style of behavior would effectively mean invalidating the very word “obsessive” ~ presumably as politically incorrect.

From my own perspective, one might just as well argue that there’s no difference between writing endless homages to Leonard Cohen’s music, and analyzing it for proof of the depth of his wisdom and genius as an artist, and the sort of explorations that I or Ann Diamond have done. But surely there is the world of a difference, if the one serves to perpetuate the spell of culture, the other to break it?

My interest in Kubraphilia is as an example of how a spell is cast and in exploring whether it is possible to break that spell. I felt called to the task partially because I never fell under that particular spell. (For me his movies were always insanely overrated.) On the other hand, I am completely susceptible to the spell of culture itself, and most especially to movie culture; so I have a deep ideological investment in the idea that Kubrick is a clothes-less empower, a false ceremony master, etc. To separate that “agenda” (of negative identity, to be a Kubrick-debunker among Kubraphiles) from the actual mission to break the spell of negative identity-culture and free souls from cult-bondage, is my own challenge, frustration, and delight in engaging here.

It is a massive relief to read a post like Elvis’ (even if he loves SK films, bleh!), about film-cutting, not only because it brings some solid reality-checking to the table, but also because it feels like a breath of sanity blowing into the S & M chamber of Kubraphilia, where generally only those fully sold on the inherent value and meaning of “The Monolith” ever care or dare to venture.

This has made it all but impossible to explore the subject with other people, because the meanings I have found and wish to unpack, in analyzing the quest for meaning in Kubrick, is opposed to the meanings which those questers so fervently believe in. The obvious danger is that they start to feel like they are being pathologized, demeaned, dehumanized, as soon as their value system is not being validated.

On the other hand, as with Strieber, I am validating that Kubrick’s work is of profound interest, even or especially for those who are turned off by it. Oh, for just one ally who can see that Kubrick made some pretty poor (and, in at least one case, REALLY BAD) movies, and still want to explore this mystery with me!

But would you not agree that sometimes numerical synchronicity has a place in this type of research? Dates are important on many levels. You've already granted that Kubrick being born the same day as Jung spoke to you as some kind of strange confirmation. What about the fact, as pointed out in the blog post Agent Orange linked, that Kubrick died 666 days before the first day of 2001, the banner year included in the title of his most acclaimed film. And that 666 days before he died this happened

How many numerological oddities do we need before being persuaded that a) there is a mathematical order to the universe; b) this appears to be especially the case with certain areas/events/individuals/movies; c) there is apparently at least some overlap with conscious human design?

Can you move from this 666 business to either present compelling evidence that Kubrick, or someone, deliberately engineered it that way, or to show why and how they might have, without going off into highly subjective interpretations of symbolism and occult arcana? And if not, can you explain how this is helpful to you? As I said to AOC, where does it end and what’s the actual goal?

I've had the idea (after hearing your shows on Cohen) that Kubrick may have made A Clockwork Orange about Cohen. Maybe Cohen went through the experiences of the character Alex, or ones similar, depicted therein.

Wouldn’t that just be the synchronistic forum-stopper if we could find evidence for that!

Eyes Wide Shut, which I am a fan of, I admit, effectively blows the whistle on elite sex rings, ala the Son of Sam cult based out of a mansion north of New York City.

Can you explain to me how exactly it blows the whistle on anything? Were elite sex rings scrambling to cover their tracks after the release of EWS, desperately shredding evidence and burying bodies? This to me is the sort of claim that Kubraphiles make that only points to their emperor’s nakedness by their own imitation of it.

That Kubrick's films are difficult to watch and require thinking and analysis, to me is an argument why they provide the antidote to "AI thinking," not a reaffirmation of it. Technologies that unconsciously transfer AI thinking to their viewers would be more akin to smartphones and swiping, Facebook, Tinder, etc., "feed culture." That is the internet culture of moving through digital feeds on a smartphone. My guess is the brain gets shut down similar to how viewing TV shuts down the brain, some kind of beta state. One literally feels taken over by the device. And unlike TV you're moving your hands and there's an appearance of decision making. The AI then gathers data on human preferences and movement, even typing (see this patent http://www.google.com/patents/US8332932).

This is a critical area to get into, but for now I will just say that my own thesis is very different, and that the sort of consciousness which Kubrick films are designed to bring about is not what you call “AI thinking”; on the contrary, it is a highly charged and particularly “human” sort of thinking (the obsessive sort). Not in order to engender it in the species, but in order to harvest it.

Kubrick made films that the average Joe Six pack would discard as unwatchable.

Is this true though? A Clockwork Orange was a big hit, apparently with violent thugs as well as gentile academics. 2001 was a big hit with LSD-dropping hippies. I don’t know this Joe 6 pack guy you talk about, but I do know quite a few really intelligent guys who seem to have been fooled by Kubrick. Including the idea that someone who worked in close collusion with the military-industrial-entertainment complex was really anti-military. It might be good to cross-reference this thread with the prescriptive programming one, which suggests how seemingly “conscientious” content can be useful to strengthen a weaponized meme. A Clockwork Orange is a very obvious, to me, example, of a film that promotes a certain form of behavior while pretending to denounce it.

Average Joe Six pack isn't conscious. He goes to work happily, says the pledge diligently, loves God and country, and cheers the war machine, believing it noble and necessary. Kubrick forced the viewer to engage the very human qualities AI can never duplicate.

This is a very subjective statement, based on your own experience of the movies. Many people, myself in included, find his movies lacking in much by way of human qualities. Yet oddly enough, forcing the viewer “to engage the very human qualities AI can never duplicate” fits with my thesis also.

I am curious, that you mention the Burgess points as being vital, but haven’t addressed the idea (admittedly very tenuous) that SK might have been involved in MKULTRA research. Would this alter your view of him and his films?

.(I agree with you about embodiment, but that's a huge topic that probably deserves it own thread. You've talked briefly on your show what that means to you, but I'd like to hear more.)

I did a series at the blog of 100 posts, "What is Embodiment?", starting here.

Guruilla, have you watched the Kubrick movies you dislike more than once?

Oh yeah. For the record, the ones I dislike are 2001, Clockwork Orange, FMJ, and, most especially, EWS. Besides FMJ (which I think I only saw twice, once recently), I’d say I have seen these films an average of maybe six times. I used to like 2001 & Orange. I used to dislike The Shining but more recently I liked it. Who knows what may still change?

[tapitsbo]

So the common ground you have with AOC, guruilla, is that Kubrick's work is a sort of tuner.

I find the questions you are asking more interesting though. You're asking what the purpose of his making the films was, not what we can learn about our purpose in the universe from them.

Even if there was a scientific method to the madness of the Kubrickon, it would be indistinguishable from magic to the viewers due to the method's opacity.

A hypersigil harvesting attention paid to talismans of techno-gnosis wouldn't need a secret team minutely analyzing the obsessives' intineraries (though that may well exist) - their secondary activities could themselves attract entities as they elaborated correspondences, meanwhile enrapturing onlookers

Binary code and DNA code both undergird life and computer systems; the language an artificial consciousness could use to map a mystery might eventually be like our linguistic one, yeah.

Apologies in advance if I am bastardizing this conversation.

[guruilla]

Even if there was a scientific method to the madness of the Kubrickon, it would be indistinguishable from magic to the viewers due to the method's opacity.

And maybe that opacity, combined with the hint that there is something behind it, compels a certain mindset to try.

You're asking what the purpose of his making the films was, not what we can learn about our purpose in the universe from them.

It's an interesting polarity, because my overall impression of Kubraphiles is that they believe that Kubrick's purpose was to teach us our purpose in the universe (starting with 2001). Hence he must be viewed as an Artist, not as a social engineer (as if the two were mutually exclusive!). Or to put it more finely, to teach us/them to decipher the code of the Universe and so discover our purpose thereby. My own view is that this is as ultimately futile as every other systematic amassing of knowledge. But that there is a system that can use this knowledge, just not a human one.

A hypersigil harvesting attention paid to talismans of techno-gnosis wouldn't need a secret team minutely analyzing the obsessives' intineraries (though that may well exist) - their secondary activities could themselves attract entities as they elaborated correspondences, meanwhile enrapturing onlookers

Binary code and DNA code both undergird life and computer systems; the language an artificial consciousness could use to map a mystery might eventually be like our linguistic one, yeah.

Apologies in advance if I am bastardizing this conversation.

You're not, but your posts tend to be gnomic and difficult to parse. You could unpack some of the more dense phrases, if you find yourself not getting much by way of responses.

[tapitsbo]

The schizo-gnomic shitposting was me trying to take part in the conversation while my attention was elsewhere, sorry about that

I'm trying to run with your Kubrickon hypothesis, maybe in a different direction than you are going with it

Thinking the Kubrickon might be an attempt to create "life" from scratch by creating a memetic strange attractor powered by harvesting the attention put into it - by harvesting the power of synchronicity too (synchronicity that is itself somewhat of a "collapse" of two domains that are normally distinct and therefore impermeably split but have become entangled but split in time)

as I'm sure you're all aware this is a common practice in magic

I know this is basically your idea, but you were also suggesting maybe there are teams monitoring the Kubrick obsessives; maybe there are and maybe there aren't

but the organic, self-sustaining nature of this artificial ecosystem is really, really interesting

like Elliot was saying machines map mysteries such as menstruation in cold code, at a deep remove from them; we are doing the same thing in a more fluid way though, with DNA acting for us like the binary code does in a computer programming; advanced future forms of computing will spin off strata of abstraction that float way above this binary code but are themselves fuzzy maps somewhat like the ones sketched by our brains

Kubrickon-as-golem would indeed be a source of Saturnian supplication and fascination - the consciousness of the rapt fanbase would be the underlying "code" and therefore would be mystified from the inside of the Kubrickon looking out (assuming it has its own, uncanny kind of awareness - maybe an awareness sought out by Kubriphiles for them to dissociate into - and come home to as a collective/group consciousness akin to the ones studied by Tavistock)

Vice versa the Kubrickon could be a forever unaccessable background code downloading itself hacking into the basement of our consciousness - as well as any built-in purposes to the project it could also serve as an open-ended psychic resonator or "operating system" for various messages, experiments, results

I'm really just trying to make sense of your ideas here, maybe I don't have a ton to add that's original. This theory of yours really, really gets me thinking.

[Elliott Jonestown]

It's going to take me some time to get to all points I'd like to expand on. Please forgive. I'm breaking my response down into shorter posts.

First, I'd like to point out that no monolithic Kubrick fan exists. In my experience, there are many different approaches to understanding and engaging his films. Room 237 is an example of the diversity of strategies. Most of the interviewees in that film I wouldn't consider synchromystics; the ideas expressed were mostly in line with what's taught in film analysis 101 at university: paying attention to shot composition and props, analyzing theme, etc. Other than Jay Weidner, none of the theories were so controversial. By the way Weidner's approach is the kind I've been advocating for here, one that relies as much on hard biographical research as on symbolism, numerological associations, etc.

And each of the interviewees carried some level of obsession about Kubrick. Why are we associating obsession with a negative connotation, when it can be the driving force behind any number of great creations, including synchromysic art.

Part of why your take of Kubrick might rub some the wrong way is this constructed Kubrick-obsessive you keep referring to. I find it best to take each persons work individually. If we use, for example, the shawnfella material as the focus for unpacking the ideas, the insights will be more easily digested; or any material, but being specific about what theory or concept is being discussed. In this way folks wont feel grouped into something they dont identify with. Maybe AOC wanted to stay on that specific thread longer, not defend a more amorphous, generalized group.

As for myself, I enjoy SK films, but I wouldn't say obsessively so. I have not seen them all, for example. Most of his movies Ive seen only once, the exceptions being A CW Orange, EWS, and The Shinning. I do come from a synchromystic background, but prefer to use those approaches in conjunction with traditional approaches to film analysis, "conspiracy research," and biography.

Guruilla, you're onto something, I think, when you hint that Kubrick's body of work is part of the greater culture in which it emerged. Your discourse about a "spell" being cast I don't find particularly accurate or useful because there are reasons, outside of his biography or any speculative theories, why Kubrick's movies were special. For example no one had used the lenses he used during 2001 before. It's like wondering why there is research and "obsessive" interest surrounding Da Vinci or Michaelangelo. The grandeur of the work itself necessitates a following. As his wiki entry states, "Kubrick's films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be 'among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century,' and he is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential directors of all time." And I don't particularly like Da Vinci, for example, but am not flummoxed by the writings about his work that have extended over centuries.

My interest in Kubraphilia is as an example of how a spell is cast and in exploring whether it is possible to break that spell. I felt called to the task partially because I never fell under that particular spell. (For me his movies were always insanely overrated.) On the other hand, I am completely susceptible to the spell of culture itself, and most especially to movie culture; so I have a deep ideological investment in the idea that Kubrick is a clothes-less empower, a false ceremony master, etc. To separate that “agenda” (of negative identity, to be a Kubrick-debunker among Kubraphiles) from the actual mission to break the spell of negative identity-culture and free souls from cult-bondage, is my own challenge, frustration, and delight in engaging here.

It is a massive relief to read a post like Elvis’ (even if he loves SK films, bleh!), about film-cutting, not only because it brings some solid reality-checking to the table, but also because it feels like a breath of sanity blowing into the S & M chamber of Kubraphilia, where generally only those fully sold on the inherent value and meaning of “The Monolith” ever care or dare to venture.

This has made it all but impossible to explore the subject with other people, because the meanings I have found and wish to unpack, in analyzing the quest for meaning in Kubrick, is opposed to the meanings which those questers so fervently believe in. The obvious danger is that they start to feel like they are being pathologized, demeaned, dehumanized, as soon as their value system is not being validated.

On the other hand, as with Strieber, I am validating that Kubrick’s work is of profound interest, even or especially for those who are turned off by it. Oh, for just one ally who can see that Kubrick made some pretty poor (and, in at least one case, REALLY BAD) movies, and still want to explore this mystery with me!

[Elliott Jonestown]

To be fair, Guruilla, we must point out that you did discuss some of the shawnfella material directly but decided, after rejecting a portion of it, not to continue further. I'm not at all critical of that choice, but think noting it helps understand what might have happened with AOC. You then shifted the discussion back to the kubrick-obsessive at large.

[Elliott Jonestown]

Preliminaries aside, there's quite a bit more to unpack.

How many numerological oddities do we need before being persuaded that a) there is a mathematical order to the universe; b) this appears to be especially the case with certain areas/events/individuals/movies; c) there is apparently at least some overlap with conscious human design?

We learn about the mathematical order of things early in life, so I don't think synchronicity research is needed to confirm it.

guruilla, your point B is astute and is the justification for most sync work. Yes, it appears to be especially the case that "oddities" exist with certain films, etc. But without paying attention to the oddities we'd never find them. So if you were to advocate a wholesale dismissal of paying attention to synchronicity you might never know which films might be "special" and which not. Remember, my belief and experience is that this process is highly individual and the importance often specific to the "seeker." Paying attention to sync in films and movies runs concomitant with paying attention to other aspexts of life, like the body, soul, emotions, etc. I find these practices mutually supportive. This is why I was curious about your own experience with synchronicity. Didn't you mention personal syncs related to a Leonard Cohen song and an old ex girlfriend? That to me is the gold of this work, when sync patterns can help us individuate and stay embodied.

So to restate, those certain special sync hub movies, individuals, etc. are that way for a reason. The work is to discover more about what that reason is. This can be through any channel available. In the case of Kubrick that would be biographical research certainly. I'd like to know more about his associations in the 50s, for example.

Maybe these sync oddities are really just telling us to pay attention and focus, like a smoke signal. Additional research would fill in the intentionality you allude to in your point C. But do you see how these methods can work together, and why, therefore, paying attention to sync connections can be an integral part of the search for truth? It's the very reason Jung was interested in the phenomena in the first place, to help us heal and grow.

[guruilla]

I'm trying to run with your Kubrickon hypothesis, maybe in a different direction than you are going with it

By all means. There wouldn't be much point in an exploration if we already knew what was there to discover. My initial response to your last post was a feeling of excitement that someone was at long last "getting" it. But what is "it"? It's a very subtle signal and tuning to it means tuning one's own instrument, at which point, the parts that begin to reveal themselves through decoding will be unique to the tuner/decoder. The idea of Kubrickon is a lot bigger than me and than Kubrick or his movies. I think, based on this post anyway, that not seeing Kubrick's films, or at least not being overly familiar with them (& above all not being invested in them) is a significant advantage to understanding what they are part of.

Thinking the Kubrickon might be an attempt to create "life" from scratch by creating a memetic strange attractor powered by harvesting the attention put into it - by harvesting the power of synchronicity too (synchronicity that is itself somewhat of a "collapse" of two domains that are normally distinct and therefore impermeably split but have become entangled but split in time)

as I'm sure you're all aware this is a common practice in magic

I think you are referring to evocations & entity summoning, even if you don't mean to. If we assume that human beings (besides through the usual channels ~ i.e., the female womb) cannot create life, & that the same applies to AI, then how is a machine to be made to live? Frankenstein had the same problem: the parts are not enough.

I know this is basically your idea, but you were also suggesting maybe there are teams monitoring the Kubrick obsessives; maybe there are and maybe there aren't

I wasn't intentionally suggesting this. I don't have a strong opinion about whether, say, shawnfella's work is being monitored by intell. teams. The work is being processed by and through the Internet, and creates a sort of human psyche vector between the growing database of the Net and culture and collective humanity at large, with Kubrick's body of work as the scrying mirror & strange attractor. Roughly.

like Elliot was saying machines map mysteries such as menstruation in cold code, at a deep remove from them;

There's the female body & womb again.

we are doing the same thing in a more fluid way though, with DNA acting for us like the binary code does in a computer programming; advanced future forms of computing will spin off strata of abstraction that float way above this binary code but are themselves fuzzy maps somewhat like the ones sketched by our brains

Getting gnomic again, but I can tell you are seeing something in new ways.

Kubrickon-as-golem would indeed be a source of Saturnian supplication and fascination - the consciousness of the rapt fanbase would be the underlying "code" and therefore would be mystified from the inside of the Kubrickon looking out (assuming it has its own, uncanny kind of awareness - maybe an awareness sought out by Kubriphiles for them to dissociate into - and come home to as a collective/group consciousness akin to the ones studied by Tavistock)

Keep going with this & I might just have to abduct you into the novel.

Vice versa the Kubrickon could be a forever unaccessable background code downloading itself hacking into the basement of our consciousness - as well as any built-in purposes to the project it could also serve as an open-ended psychic resonator or "operating system" for various messages, experiments, results

I'm really just trying to make sense of your ideas here, maybe I don't have a ton to add that's original. This theory of yours really, really gets me thinking.

It seems highly original to me, close enough to the thesis to help make sense of it, but far enough from it to force it to mutate and expand.

Why are we associating obsession with a negative connotation, when it can be the driving force behind any number of great creations, including synchromysic art.

The term doesn't carry especially negative connotations to me, & I use it because it seems accurate. We could talk about the pros & cons of obsession, but that would be a separate & more general discussion. In some ways, perhaps the Kubrickon is very much about this already, only using a very particular and fantastic example. In the end, however, I consider all obsessions to be dead-ends. Yet immersion is an open road, and what appears to others to be obsession can really be a means to immersion.

I find it best to take each persons work individually. If we use, for example, the shawnfella material as the focus for unpacking the ideas, the insights will be more easily digested; or any material, but being specific about what theory or concept is being discussed. In this way folks wont feel grouped into something they dont identify with. Maybe AOC wanted to stay on that specific thread longer, not defend a more amorphous, generalized group.

This is interesting, because part of the Kubrickon thesis is that when individuals, wittingly or not, join an audience cult (in this case Kubrick's), they do become an amorphous, generalized group, and this is very much how the operation works (and how culture and ideology takes over organisms and prevents embodiment/individuation). So I am not sure of a way around this, as shawnfella's work is only, or at least primarily, of interest to me as an example of this phenomenon, a fact which I made clear to AOC at the start. Otherwise, this thread would be no different from a Kubrick audience cult and/or synchro-mystical discussion.

Your discourse about a "spell" being cast I don't find particularly accurate or useful because there are reasons, outside of his biography or any speculative theories, why Kubrick's movies were special. For example no one had used the lenses he used during 2001 before. It's like wondering why there is research and "obsessive" interest surrounding Da Vinci or Michaelangelo. The grandeur of the work itself necessitates a following. As his wiki entry states, "Kubrick's films are considered by film historian Michel Ciment to be 'among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century,' and he is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential directors of all time." And I don't particularly like Da Vinci, for example, but am not flummoxed by the writings about his work that have extended over centuries.

You are citing consensus now as proof of ontological reality. "History decides." This is directly at odds with the premise AOC cited of history being a fiction narrated by gatekeepers. If Kubrick was one of those gatekeepers, a leading culture-maker, then he himself (with a little help from his friends) created the narrative of him being a great and influential film artist. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy-narrative, since people are greatly influenced by those the culture puts forward as greatly influential. Your premise presupposes that culture itself is a kind of byproduct of a planetary meritocracy, with no underlying deception or injustice driving it. Is that so?

Since I do not see the inherent value in many of Kubrick's films (or in culture at large), value which I have been told is there, I feel fairly secure in referring to it as a spell that's been cast ~ especially as I have been under similar spells, and only come out of them through a massively painful process of self-examination and confrontation.

Culture is a cult.

his is why I was curious about your own experience with synchronicity. Didn't you mention personal syncs related to a Leonard Cohen song and an old ex girlfriend? That to me is the gold of this work, when sync patterns can help us individuate and stay embodied.

Sure. I don't see much point in or need for people to defend SM at this thread, it's just another practice that can be helpful and can also be indulgent and obsessive. I do yoga twice a week, but it's not the basis for an ideology; its mostly so I can stay flexible and have at least some of my time dedicated to placing attention on and in the body. I see existential detective work as using but very different from SM. I imagine Jung did too. Observing syncs can be a tool, but it should not become a methodology or a practice, IMO, much less a lifestyle. Also, the syncs that really need our attention (i,e., that offer meaningful clues) come to us; we don't have to go looking for them, and to do so undermines the whole process, IMO, because looking for these sorts of things is a way also to bring them into form and focus.

So to restate, those certain special sync hub movies, individuals, etc. are that way for a reason. The work is to discover more about what that reason is. This can be through any channel available. In the case of Kubrick that would be biographical research certainly. I'd like to know more about his associations in the 50s, for example.

If you mean the work is to uncover what sort of social engineering agendas were behind Kubrick and the creation of his oeuvre, then that's part of the work (with Kubrickon), but certainly not the whole of it. The larger portion I keep referring to, relates to ideological contamination (ideation contagion was a phrase I heard one of the Collins brothers use recently), audience cults, group think, and what happens to libido and awareness (the psyche) when it is prevented from becoming embodied: how it can be redirected, siphoned and harnessed.