🍄 Chasing the Intangibles

Culture desires to feel things they cannot see. See things they cannot feel. To sense when the intangible becomes tangible.

Jul 05, 2024

Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Listen to Precognition
🎧 Alice podcasts
📘 Alice books

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”
― The Mad Hatter, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Ephemerality is the concept of things being transitory, existing only briefly. It is things that are at once tangible but fleeting. We all experience things with our tangible senses—touch, smell, sight, hearing and taste. But a philosophical debate swirls around the contrast between appearance and reality. Studies of perception have primarily sought to explain how we can both perceive and misperceive how things are in the world around us. But an alternative explanation is to think of perceiving as analogous to belief or judgment.

In the coming newsletters we will dive deeper in the ephemerality of the intangibles that, in many ways, become real.

Perception. Consciousness. Intuition. Reality… and the Shadows. A brief taste of what’s to come…

Tangible but not tangible at the same time

“…my whole idea about metaphysics, or thinking about materials, metaphysically—simply because there is an obvious shift that happens, like a friend of mine once said that on a giant color wheel, it’s sort of difficult to tell what, or where, for example, orange would turn into yellow. Where that exact shift happens is kind of always unclear and a murky area to me. And that’s exactly the area I use to make my sculptures from, that area that becomes the thing that’s tangible but not tangible at the same time. And when I say ‘missing’ or ‘distant,’ I’m talking about that aspect of the world, or that aspect of the universe, the things that we cannot feel, but we can see; or the things that we see but cannot feel. That’s a sort of engine for a lot of my pieces.” —Tavares Strachan, artist, ALICE interview 2006.

Synchronicities are fleeting occurrences, but they are real

Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences, significantly related to patterns of chance. Synchronous events reveal what many scientists intuit but can't quite prove—that there is an underlying order in the universe which the laws of causality can't fully account for. F.David Peat, physicist and author, Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind, states that synchronicities appear when you are experiencing intense periods of transformation and creative growth.

“I start with this idea of epiphany because, for me, it focuses upon what I feel to be the essence and the importance of synchronicity—that sense of a unifying pattern of meaning which brings together in a perfectly seamless way the unfolding movement of inner and outer events.”—F. David Peat (1938 - 2017), holistic physicist and author who carried out research in the foundation of quantum theory, ALICE interview 2002

Intuition has wiggle room

“If at some future point there is an evolution of consciousness where we can go beyond the body — and it’s possible in principle there will be a development of the mind to the extent where its dependence on bodily functions is not as great as it is now — I think our next step will be certainly to integrate our non-sensorial channels with our sensorial channels. So if we use our full capacity of the brain, or as full as we can, we can open up this capacity much more than we are actually doing it in the ordinary everyday context.” —Dr. Ervin László, Systems Theorist, Author, found of the Club of Budapest, founder of systems philosophy & developer of the “Akasha paradigm”—the new conception of cosmos, life and consciousness emerging at the forefront of the contemporary sciences, ALICE interview 2002

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts