* Woohoobits approach in terms of aesthetics is heavily influenced by Leary/Wilson/Alli and the related sub/counter culture(s) in music, visual and performing arts
* in terms of content, pays tribute to the giants of philosophy such as Heraclitus, the Stoics, Nietzsche etc, as well as contemporary (or not) thinkers and creators
As such, here is a short introduction to some key concepts:
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* 1,2,3
The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to ten thousand things.
TAO TE CHING, 42
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* dialectics/dialectical
thesis - antithesis - synthesis
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* the three metamorphoses of the spirit | Friedrich Nietzsche
"Of the three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child. (...)
Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes'."
Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus spoke Zarathustra
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* autonomy | Antero Alli
"How one defines oneself is an expression of personal freedom. Self-definition is the basis of ego-strength. It is accessed whenever Status, Power and Winning are defined on one's own terms."
Antero Alli from Angel Tech: A Modern Shamans Guide to Reality Selection
"As we individuate, we find greater tolerance for differences we perceive in others. As our own autonomy and authority increase, we can allow more autonomy and authority in others. We are only as liberated as the freedom we can permit in others."
"While breaking out of oppressive self-imposed and socially conditioned habits and reflexes, we must also be willing and able to replace them with a greater force of commitment to our own truths. It’s not what you fight against that matters as much as knowing what is worth fighting for."
Antero Alli from The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body
self-actualization | Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers
"This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life."
Carl Rogers from On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
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* radical acceptance:
"Radical acceptance is an act of the total person that allows [acceptance] of ‘this moment,’ or of ‘this reality’ in this moment. It is without discrimination. In other words, one does not choose parts of reality to accept and parts to reject."
Marsha Linehan from Mindfulness and Acceptance
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* responsibility or response-ability
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor
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* watching the watcher, mindfulness
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* the name of the game, the game of the name
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* epistemology, linguistics, semantics
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* e-prime
E-prime is an English language derivative that eliminates use of the verb 'to be' in any form (such as 'am', 'is', 'was', 'are', 'were', 'be', and 'been').
"E-Prime allows users to minimize many "false to facts" linguistic patterns inherent in ordinary English, and to often move beyond a two-valued Aristotelian orientation which views the world through overly simplistic terms such as "true-or false", "black-or-white", "all-or-none", "right-or-wrong"."
E.W. Kellogg III and D. David Bourland, Jr. from Working with E-Prime: Some Practical Notes
"To start with, we reject an axiom of classical logic: the principle of identity. For that reason, we call ourselves advocates of 'non-Aristotelian logic: Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived before Socrates, insisted that everything changes: He saw this as the basic truth of existence. Time moves inexorably, and in the fraction of a second you need to describe a thing, it has already begun to alter. (...)
Using E-Prime can improve a person's outlook on life. Once you realize that every time you say is you tell a lie, you begin to think less about a thing or person's 'identity' and more about its function. I find that E-Prime makes me stay honest."
D. David Bourland from To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology
"To understand E-Prime, consider the human brain as a computer. (Note that I did not say the brain "is" a computer.) As the Prime Law of Computers tells us, GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT (GIGO, for short). The wrong software guarantees wrong answers. Conversely, finding the right software can "miraculously' solve problems that previously appeared intractable. It seems likely that the principal software used in the human brain consists of words, metaphors, disguised metaphors, and linguistic structures in general. The Sapir-Whorf-Korzybsld Hypothesis, in anthropology, holds that a change in language can alter our perception of the cosmos. A revision of language structure, in particular, can alter the brain as dramatically as a psychedelic. In our metaphor, if we change the software, the computer operates in a new way."
Robert Anton Wilson from To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology
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* cut-ups
The cut-up technique consists in cutting together of pre-existing material into radical juxtapositions. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists and was popularized by Burroughs and Gysin in the 1950s.
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
Tristan Tzara, “To Make Dadaist Poem” (1924)
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