EmoryJournal1+entry

Less than a month ago, I met Eric Harris-Braun and Arthur Brock in the parking lot sitting between a solar energy company and an old run-down mill. We walked away from the flashy, operational solar energy installation facility and into the innards of an enormous, long-defunct paper mill sitting between a creek and railroad tracks. Eventually we unlocked the boarded-over doors to the office space of the mill, and entered a space that was best described as a total mess. A decade-and-a-half of neglect awaited us. We walked through the many spacious rooms, looking out on the waterfall trickling outside the eastern-facing windows, and eventually sitting on the dirty floors in the corner room with holes in the wall and wires and HVAC hanging lifelessly around us as a reminder of the life that once existed at the core of this cavernous mill. Scrappers worked outside, stripping the formerly machinated space of all valuable metals to be sold to China. Welcome to Day 1 of the EmLabs seed project.

23 days, and almost zero dollars later, we are now a team of six fully-engaged Makers operating among a team of at least 20 direct participants in the lively EmLabs offices, with brightly painted floors, white-boarded walls, frequent visitors from near and far, too many gracious hosts and supporters to list here, and our many projects progressing from spark phase to seed, sprout, and, hopefully, beyond.

While the office space now has working plumbing, solar-powered electricity, and high speed wireless internet beamed from nearby company offices, the walls still have holes, and it’s not hard to find evidence of recent raccoon play in the space. Congruently, the progress of the EmLabs group has been simultaneously swift, deeply gratifying, incomplete and rough. We seem to have come to a place with the group where we are progressing together. Despite coming together from totally varied locational and social backgrounds, we seem to be finding a bit of a groove in terms of learning how to create valuable projects that connect with our core intentions.

Today we held our second formal project slam (think ‘poetry slam’ with project presentations instead of verse). All six Makers, two on-site Source Team members, and three visitors from New York City gathered in the Sun room, agreed on the presentation format, and took turns presenting our projects to each other, a running hand-held video/phone present to archive our efforts.

I decided to make my second presentation much more broad in scope than my first. A week earlier I decided to pitch a project idea called “Build a WeeHouse”. Inspired by a tiny house that Aldo built in space donated by Jody at SunDogSolar, I decided I would explore taking the sparkling idea of building myself a tiny house into more sturdy phases. This project has advanced in some practical ways during the past week, and really wouldn’t benefit from another Project Slam appearance. So I shelved it for this slam and introduced a topic equally dear to me but much more expansive, intellectual, and non-visible. I pitched a project called BioSuperComputing, a structured method that humans can learn as individuals and groups to greatly enhance the generation of our desires in the physical world.

I’m fascinated with BioSuperComputing, and want to try building a practice that involves other people. Like the first inventors who began to harness computer chips and computer technologies in ways that allowed for the conversion from enormous and pedestrian computers that filled up entire rooms to hand-held devices with immediate access to what we now know as the internet, I wonder if a similar enhancement is possible not in the world of technology but in bio-psycho-tech. Like computers have enabled us to extend and network our consciousness in awesome ways over the past few decades, have we stumbled upon a method that will allow us to drill under our mental and emotional crusts to find enormous fields of liquid energy begging us to harness it and use it to more effectively and powerfully bring coherence and creativity to our physical world?

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet wondered, “what the heck is this guy talking about?” then you either deserve a prize or you may need to be checked out by a medical professional for being crazier than me. The problem though isn’t that I’m crazy, it’s that I never intended to use this journal entry to explain BioSuperComputing or the many inter-disciplinary lines of thinking and research that brought it about. This journal entry is about inspiring questions, interest and looks of astonished wonder. If you want to learn more, check back later on this site or the locations linked from my participant profile. Or come to our presentation day and visit our office space on August 25th, where we’ll be holding a group activity centered around a tangible practiced engagement with what I’m briefly introducing here.

Though we had guests in the space today who were involved with lots of cool urban/rural/activist/intellectual/collaborative projects ranging from Occupy Wall St. to Occupy Farms, the guests that impacted me the most came from across the parking lot. Two employees of SunDog - builders and makers on the shop floor - decided to wander over into the office space. I was struck by their authentic surprise at seeing room after room of this suddenly bustling, energized, active, plugged-in hive in full swing. “Six weeks ago this place was a mess, and now you guys are in here doing all sorts of crazy projects. I can’t believe it. It’s incredible” A freight train rumbled north on the tracks to the west of the building. To the east, the creek levels now returned to healthy levels after recent rains, the waterfall that once trickled now had a hint of roar.

This is the type of transformation that is possible in physical and mental and heart spaces. The decaying, scrapped caverns of the rational, industrial age provide a valuable half of the equation. Our life force, our will to create and be fully realized guardians of the earth - this bioIntelligence is the other half. It doesn’t take anything superhuman to plug in. We have the tools and, for better or worse, we have a very narrow window of opportunity. The only effort is in returning, and returning is in our very nature. Despite all the roughness and difficulty and fatigue and constraint of these projects within projects, this process is beautiful, and I aspire to honor it and all who have thus far participated with my full creative engagement.

I welcome you not only to a Lab. I welcome you to a breathing, living vault of latent energy waiting to ignite our collaborative embodiment of free will.