Bead Game

Global Architectronics

Hermann Hesse not only wrote the classic introspective novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, but won the Nobel prize in Literature (1946) for his final masterwork published under two titles in English: The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi. This work (set in the 23rd Century) describes a cadre of individuals and their headmaster -- the Magister Ludi -- engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectronics.

The Glass Bead Game requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. The Game's synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of virtual reality.

After each symbol conjured up by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, origin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique and practice of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care.

The variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Thus, "realizing" was a favorite expression among the players. They considered their Games a path from Becoming to Being, from potentiality to reality...We would scarcely be exaggerating if we ventured to say that for the small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship.

The name Castaglia, the place of knowledge, is the Italian form of the Latin Castalia, which was the Roman name for the spring on Mount Parnassus where dwelt the mythical Muses. Castalia was also the name for the abstract realm of the intelligentsia. Under the shifting hegemony of now this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another. Let the game begin?

Post-Metaphysical Spirituality

What happens when the prey realizes its predicament and become the predator?  In intelligence parlance, it is called Counter Measures, and that is just what is required by agent provocateurs in today’s world to maintain even the slightest semblance of ever-elusive “freedom.”  This is summarized nicely in the movie The Matrix, where Neo navigates his way through an artificially constructed maze of situations and synthetic environments the participants mistake for reality.

"Society is built on a careful balance of thinkers and non-thinkers. Society relies on a few thinkers to break the rules and bring innovation, but at the same time relies on non-thinkers to perform the daily tasks that keep society alive. Business relies on a few people to bring innovation and on millions of non-thinkers to buy it. Capitalism, communism, fascism [globalism] all rely on people not to think too much, otherwise the system would become highly unstable. If people thought, McDonalds and Coca Cola would be out of business, and nobody would listen to the Beatles or watch Hollywood hits. And probably very few people would work as hard as they do. It would be total anarchy. Not only there exist different levels of consciousness, but society (and possibly nature at large) depends on a delicate balance of those levels." -Piero Scaruffi

"...‘our rulers’...are engaged in the manipulation of symbols. We must consider ourselves a symbolic, semantic class of life, and cannot cease from being so those who control the symbols rule us. "Bankers, priests, lawyers, politicians, [and news media] constitute one class [of our rulers] and work together. They do not produce any values but manipulate the values produced by others, and often pass signs for no value at all. Scientists and teachers also comprise a ruling class. They produce the main values mankind has, but, at present, they do not realize this. They are, in the main, ruled by the cunning methods of the first class." - Korzybski

The shadow side of this historical current manifested in secret societies and an influential academic and political Enlightenment "priesthood" with sociopolitical agendas. The specific "gnostic" conceit of the 20th century was the attempt to OBLITERATE humanity through a combination of genetics, eugenics, social psychology, linguistics, pharmacology, eschatology, synthetic religions and robotology.

Powerful techniques of persuasion are used in the war for your mind. Persuasion is the ability to offer compelling value to others, promising motivation and direction toward goals and away from problems. Its modern roots include Tavistock Institute and the CIA's MK Ultra programs. Jung was supported by Tavistock, while the CIA funded nearly the whole field of parapsychology and mind control.

This human potential agenda has led to evironmental saturation with mediaspeak, pop culture groupthink, and mind control technologies that work by manipulating and controlling attention and beliefs. Postmodern thought is a reaction to it, rejecting all metanarratives. You cannot think freely without understanding the cultural background in which we all exist. Who among us is wise enough to be the Magister Ludi of the Glass Bead Game of Global Architectronics? Who actually plays the Game of generating the future and doesn't just say it?

The simple agenda is this. Whatever traditional images you have that make you think you're being affected in a certain way, get rid of those images! Break up those images you have. If you get lost in that thought form, and the doctors give you a "solution," then that'll cause you more problems. You need to just sit back and say, "Yep, I'm being massaged," and just accept it.

Basically the population's being put on a collective LSD trip, in a more subtle way than TV managed to do. Because these refined vibratory devices are affecting our chi levels, our etheric bodies, which is then affecting the astral plane. So we're being affected in ways that no knowledge system can map anymore.

The hidden environment is what's really motivating everybody, and creating a lot of obsession or neurosis, and the stress of life is always caused by the new invisible environment. Therefore, an antidote or an anaesthetic to that is the past environments, but to use them as props.

So, all human creativity is now provided as the content, but the mixed corporate-media create the stress on people, and they're trying to find out how that stress is affecting them. They'll never be able to find out how that stress is affecting them. But all they have to do is understand what I'm talking about.

You are saturated with TV by the time you are 18 or 19, you want to know what to do, you want to develop an identity. Study something that has taken the best of what has happened in the last 40 or 50 years. You study that and then you realize that the understanding you got from that is obsolete. Then that's the apocalypse - finding out that you don't exist. You have to deal with the fact you live in an almost Oriental oblivion, you live in a resonating void. Once you realize you are gone, you are invisible, in terms of expressing that relation to anybody else, you might then realize "I'm still here!", and then you start to realize you've survived.  (Dobbs)

Only when we are not obsessive are we at peace.