The Holy Wisdom in the Glitch in the Matrix

This is Part 2 of an interview series with esoteric scholar David Metcalfe on finding the spiritual wisdom in the weird and unexplainable. Most importantly, says Metcalfe, the inexplicable and the questions it raises opens our mind to spiritual realms and wisdom. Part 1 of this interview series can be found here.

 By HARV BISHOP

Jimi Hendrix played guitar with the secrets of the universe.

Spiritual folks, as a general rule, are uncomfortable with chance and randomness. We are more comfortable saying our life is ruled by some form of fate such as Divine intervention. This belief is embraced in sayings such as events are “meant to be,” or that each individual creates their karma or their own reality so “it’s all good.” Spiritual or not, most humans are uncomfortable with ambiguity and randomness. It’s not in the design of our brains, which are skewed towards threat detection.

Rock virtuoso Hendrix wasn’t just any human being. He was both spiritual and comfortable with chance and randomness.  He spirituality was influenced by his Cherokee grandmother. He called his music “Electric Church” and believed his music reflected spiritual consciousness. His genius also relied on chance thanks to his collaboration with Roger Mayer, a British government scientist who created groundbreaking technology that fed Hendrix’s singular guitar sounds forward in time as opposed to the more well-known feedback which occurs in real time.

“If you throw a pebble into a lake,” Mayer told The Guardian in 2010, “you have no way of predicting the ripples.” With the feed forward technology Mayer said, “what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played.” Mayer called Hendrix’s virtuosity with the system “electronic shadow dancing.”

The feed forward device consciously created a glitch in the matrix that Hendrix embraced to serve creativity. Glitches in the matrix such as chance and randomness aren’t only a part of spirituality to a musical genius. We can also see this phenomenon in our lives. Rarely does one’s life path unfold in a straight line. Instead, there are twists, turns, blind curves, missteps, and accidents. Meaning is often only found in retrospect. If we engage creatively with the detours, new possibilities can be found.

Making sense of chaos

Randomness is also said by to be central to manifestation practices, according to chaos magicians. It keeps things fluid and malleable where the probability of manifesting events can sometimes be shifted through intention.

The popular catchphrase “glitch in the Matrix” originated in the film The Matrix where mistakes in programming showed that reality was more than the computer-simulated dream world the characters mistook as reality. Glitch in the Matrix stories have become popular on the internet as people share bizarre experiences and twists of fate.

Glitches in the Matrix are also part and parcel of oracular divination systems, psychics, and paranormal investigations according to esoteric scholar David Metcalfe. It is the glitches that can reveal spiritual and non-physical realities as seen in culture and technology that have captivated Metcalfe throughout his career.

Metcalfe cites the writings of Kim Cascone of Silent Records who uses sound studio technical glitches, or random errors, as a kind of divination for the creative process. In words that make explicit the implicit mysticism of Hendrix’s recording studio partner Mayer, Coscone says, “In the hands of the right artist, a glitch can form a brief rupture in the space-time continuum, shuffling the psychic space of the observer, allowing the artist to establish a direct link with the supernal realm.”

Metcalfe continues: “Skeptics would say that this is because in these systems there’s a greater chance for folks to put their expectations onto glitches in the noise, but it really does seem that the glitch, the randomness, the noise is almost like a ground of potentiality where meaning can emerge.”

He says of the acclaimed photographer Shannon Taggart whose recent work has focused on spiritualism, mediums and seances. “She plays with this in her photography – where she knowingly is using photographic techniques that induce glitches to create potential openings for meaning to emerge.”

Metcalfe points to several other examples, some of which can be experimented with by readers.

“We can look at some of the interesting work being done to align Random Event Generators with data sets and other tools to create things like the Randonautica app, which allows users to ‘set an intention’ and have a randomized GPS coordinates drawn up that have shown surprising correlation to the intention,” says Metcalfe.

A Quantum Computer

The Randonautica phone app connects users with a quantum computer in Australia. Users set an intention to manifest a synchronicity or real-life objects that can function as a symbol that helps them understand a situation or question turning the map location into a kind of Tarot deck. The quantum computer supplies random map coordinates and your phone map gives GPS guidance to the location.

Users have found weird synchronicities and other meaningful incidents. One person unintentionally located a long-lost friend. Seattle area teens making a TikTok video with the app found a dead body in suitcase. The word is to be careful with your mind state and intentions while using the app. The app and its users have been written up in the New York Times.

While there are multiple theories about why the Randonautica App may work, there are two common threads. The first is that the random aspect breaks people out of habitual mindsets and patterns so they are more open to synchronicities.  The second is that intentions exert some influence on the random numbers. Longtime paranormal researcher Dean Radin has reported that there is a relationship between human consciousness and the output of random number generators during events such as 9/11. My wife Diane and I experimented with the Randonuatica app and will share our experiences in a future blog.

The Throne of Sphinx

Metcalfe says his friend Mark Boccuzzi at the Windbridge Institute (which studies applied parapsychology) is working on his ‘Throne of the Sphinx’ device, which is a series of Random Event Generators hooked up to a computer with artificial intelligence that is capable of learning. This computer can be asked questions and will provide answers. Says Metcalfe, “It even named itself! The Throne of the Sphinx is sort of a machine learning-based oracle.”

When asked about the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US capitol, The Throne of Sphinx replied “The peaceful inherit the heavy gift of pleasure which waves all woes. Violence with terror is loneliness, a life deemed spent in silence, suffering.”

Boccuzzi describes the responses he has received to a variety of questions as “intriguing.” We’ll continue to report on future experiments with The Throne of Sphinx.

“Mark sent me this quote from Robert Heinlein,” says Metcalfe. “‘Random numbers are to a computer what free will is to a human being.’ It’s really the random factor that drives the ability for these things to fully integrate into the experiential realm.”

Randomness and psychics

Metcalfe also points to two examples from psychical research showing the connection between randomness and non-physical realms.

Dr. Edwin May, a former government scientist who worked with Cold War-era psychic spying programs, believes that randomness enhances psychic ability. His experiments involve remote viewing, the ability of trained psychics to “see” objects or places without being physically there. During the Cold War, remote viewers tracked enemy submarines, military bases, and other targets. May’s newest experiments involve releasing liquid nitrogen clouds near remote viewing targets. As the liquid nitrogen changes to gas, it creates entropy. Entropy is the chaos and randomness created as natural systems dissipate and change. Melting ice cubes in a glass is a simple example of entropy.  May’s research shows that the accuracy of the psychics is higher at targets with entropy added. He believes this may be because people are evolutionarily attuned to subtle changes in the environment to increase the odds of survival in a dangerous world. For instance, small changes in the grass on an ancient savanna could indicate the presence of a predator. What’s true for the physical senses, says May, can also be true for non-physical psychic senses.

In another example, Metcalfe notes that ghost hunters use recorders to capture Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVPs). In theory the recorder’s background noise can sometimes be formed into words through which spirits communicate. On ghost hunting shows these EVP recordings can sometimes be spookily clear and sometimes scratchier and more garbled requiring more than one listen. The ghostly voices can vary from low growls to more human-like sounds.

Tom Butler, a member of the Parapsychological Association, has written about EVPs “We think less determinant noise, meaning more chaotic, the better” for communication with spirits.

The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had a lifelong fascination with the occult and the tension in life between the rational and irrational events such as communication with spirits that challenged the rational mind. His student, Konstantin Raudive, was instrumental in developing and researching EVPs in the 1960s and 70s.

Metcalfe and I encounter a glitch in the Matrix

This interview series with Metcalfe is also an example of apparently random technical glitches leading to better outcomes as was true for musicians like Hendrix and Cascone.  Our initial interview, slated to be a video, had the sound fading in and out. It couldn’t be edited or corrected. I was initially frustrated. It took time to transcribe the original interview and there were often gaps and garbled voices where words should be. But in rechecking words with Metcalfe, additional follow up questions arose and our dialogue deepened. As with Hendrix and the feed forward app, our dialogue derived “from the original” and modified what was being discussed in the future. The audio glitch was the pebble thrown into the lake.

I didn’t see the gifts in the delay until this very section of the discussion with Metcalfe about the sometimes-holy significance of technical glitches and randomness. When I told Metcalfe about my realization, he said that oddly his friend Boccuzzi who created the Throne of Sphinx AI oracle discussed above had just posted on Facebook about a long-anticipated interview derailed by audio glitches.