Magenta is an artist, healer, and systems engineer. She is the Executive Director of the Evolver Network, an open-source community platform for sustainable planetary culture. She designed the HiveMind festival as a community forum to coalition build among organizations and leaders devoted to healthy ecology, spiritual realization, and right use of technology. Magenta has served as editor and curator for Aorta Magazine, a magazine for female and trans-identified radical political artists. She advocates for the legalization of entheogenic plant medicines, and educates about the history of global shamanism. She teaches psychic skills through a lense of chaos magic, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and the physics of light. She is also an illustrator, collective marketing strategist, and designs clothing using recycled materials. To bring all this under one “job”, she calls herself an imagination healer – reminding people of our collective power to create the reality we truly want to live in.
As part of an on-going series of features on the co-creators in the film, Time is Art, we put together some pressings questions for them. Enjoy Magenta’s inspiring answers.
Has a dream you had ever come true?
Every day. I believe in dream walking – that the different states of consciousness are permeable. The Toltecs and Tibetans have practices for learning this. Basically, I try to be in tune with my dream consciousness and be aware of what images I’m walking forth into. Ayahuasca taught me a lot about how to do this. I hold firmly in mind many expressions of a global society in balance with the Earth. I’d like to draw these someday, but for now I meditate on it and encourage others to remember that it’s possible for us to create Eden together, we’re sort of just deluding ourselves that we don’t have power to do that, or…. Maybe it’s taking us some evolution to work together in a way so we take care of each other.
What’s a song that has special meaning for you?
Luzmila Carpio’s “Ama Sua, ama llulla, ama qhella.” I’m learning it now as my first quechua song. She wrote it in defense of the indigenous cultures of Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.
Recently a 6 min clip featuring Jennifer’s inspiring conversation with Magenta in Dolores Park, San Francisco was featured on RealitySandwich.com
If you could time travel, who would you like to meet?
Tesla, definitely. You can all time travel astrally so, I recommend giving it a try.
If you woke up tomorrow with no fear, what would you do first?
I don’t think I’m afraid of anything. This has gotten me into trouble in the past but I’m getting a little smarter about it. When I’m living in a place that doesn’t have a lot of fear in the culture, I walk outside and greet the sun and plants and dirt and open my being to being alive.
If you could spend ten minutes with your ‘hero’ alive or dead what would you ask them?
Mark Lakeman of City Repair in Portland. How can I help share the practices your community is doing? – http://cityrepair.org/
What is one influential film that you feel has affected the collective unconscious, positively or negatively?
Future dystopia movies (and books). When do we get Hollywood movies about a world that is peaceful and balanced. Imagine how shockingly beautiful that could be. CGI is so advanced – I have friends who know how to do the most exquisite digital 3D modeling… I suppose most people like drama and fear, but I also think we’re addicted to and trapped by it, and that there is a vast infinity of “other” possibilities that I hope start to open up, especially as entheogenic culture becomes more mainstream and starts to mature so people start creating art and businesses as expressions of their experiences and knowing more is possible. There’s a lot of singular egoism in that culture right now, people in awe of the personal visionary experience, and people in true need of deep personal healing. But I’d like to see more collective action emerge. We’re working on that through the Evolver Network. I spent three years developing a concept for a media company, it just needs to be written up so we can ask for seed funding. Once TEN is up and running stable I can jump over to that project, or allocate some energy to getting the tech built out for it.
If you had to teach something, what would you teach?
How to awaken your imagination again. I do this in a weekly class and through social media and everyday play.
What’s something you know you do differently than most people?
I know I process sensory experience differently than most people. I’ve been trying to understand what’s going on there, I’m very synesthetic – I hear and feel images, I feel and see sound, I experience all my senses linguistically as if I’m making shapes with my mouth, most things I experience kinesthetically, like my body is moving as the thing. It can be overwhelming, almost like being a baby, just always in a space of interconnection and not having much of a handle on boundaries.
What do you love most about yourself?
Enjoying creating beauty.
Would you like to know about all your previous lifetimes so you can learn from your mistakes?
I don’t think I’ve been incarnate before, at least that’s the answer I get when I go to the Akashic Hall of Records or whatever hippy people do to find this sort of information.
How would you describe ‘freedom’ in your own words?
Liberation to be, express, and receive love.
What makes a person beautiful?
I find people who aren’t guarded and have done a lot of healing work on themselves beautiful. I like seeing people’s hearts shining and their bodies free to create.
If you were forced to eliminate every physical possession from your life with the exception of what could fit into a single backpack, what would you put in it?
Right now my laptop and projector, so I can keep making the Evolver Network happen. If I could be computer free, probably a set of watercolors and paper, toothbrush. I have one nomad friend who only has a backpack of possessions, and I’m amazed that she always ferries objects around to gift to people – special pieces of clothing or crystals… She gifted me a rainbow tail made of alpaca fur, all the way from Peru.
When does silence convey more meaning than words?
Dance!
What music do you listen to to lift your spirits when you’re feeling down?
Huun Huur Tu. They’re a throat singing band from Tuva. It’s a culture that still has nomads. All their songs are about how specific places are so beautiful. Their singing is about singing the spirit of place – with throat singing you hear the harmonic overtones of what’s around you, the sound glances off of objects in a prismatic way. It’s very fun to do.
What is your favorite fictional story? (novel, movie, fairytale, etc.)
Flatland – it’s a story about math. The main character visits different dimensions where people can only perceive parts of him/her/it.
What artistic medium do you use to express yourself?
Visual art – painting, drawing, graphic design… Business… Dance… Music… Poetry… Clothing design. I <3 art.
Who or what is the greatest enemy of mankind?
Our intellectual constructs – to some extent I think the way most modern cultures use language gets us into trouble and disconnects us from the way other species use language and communicate with themselves and with us.
What does God mean to you?
The infinite-sided polygon! I like to joke that “I’ll see you another side of the infinite-sided polygon”. I love God. I wish more people were more playful with the concept. A chaos magician friend of mine once told me to be aware of BS – belief systems. I started a tumblr to collect the sacred pattern art of many different world cultures – Shipibo, Celtic, Islamic, crop circles, and more… to show that these cultures are all talking about the same thing. They’re literally drawing the same (or quite similar) patterns when they represent the sacred. I need to spend some time adding to it, but it’s here: http://psychedelicpatterns.tumblr.com/
How do you know when it’s time to let go of something or someone?
I’m terrible at this. I usually wait until something quite aggressive or insane happens. I *have* to stop doing that. Or start being smarter about when someone is coming to me for healing, and take the step of making a formal container for that instead of doing it with friends and lovers.
What have you witnessed that has strengthened/weakened your faith in humanity?
What’s happening right now is phenomenal – so many projects and initiatives, social entrepreneurial endeavors… people are coming to a shared understanding that we can work together and address big systemic problems by taking ownership over our actions, and sharing with each other. Moving from competition to… I really feel like we’re approaching hivemind or insect consciousness as a species. Maybe we’ll stop being a parasitic insect on the planet, maybe that will happen very soon.
What are some of your favorite books?
Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Kandinsky… The Media Ecosystem by Antonio Lopez… Empowering Public Wisdom by Tom Atlee… Fuzzy Dice by Paul Di Fillipo… Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig… Pale Fire by Nabokov… Glyph by Percival Everett… Postsingular by Rudy Rucker… My Journey with Aristotle to the Anarchist Utopia… A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys… anything by Bruno Schultz and Mark Leyner… You Bright and Risen Angels by William Vollmann… J.G. Ballard… Out of the Silent Planet (it’s a C.S. Lewis book – the next two in the series get too Christian preachy for me, but that one is a very strange landscape)… Philosophy in the Flesh by Geroge Lakoff and Mark Johnson… HERmione by H.D… Jorge Borges… The Tuning of the World by R. Murray Schafer… The Palace of Memory by Frances Yates… Visionary Architecture: Unbuilt Works of the Imagination by Ernest Burden… After the End of Art by Arthur Danto
What do you think we could do to best improve the education system?
Stop having a top-down approach. More autodidactism. Learning by working on actual, not abstract problems. Intergenerational collaboration.
Who is one of your favorite philosophers, spiritual leaders or adepts?
I like how Arthur Danto writes about art.
Have you ever had contact with beings other than human beings? If not, do you believe other entities or beings exist beyond our third dimensional reality?
All the time. I don’t identify as particularly human – identity is a weird construct, and humans are particularly sophisticated spiritual channels. I’m not arrogant enough to think I know what reality is or what the extent of life is. My intuition is that it’s quite infinite, and that the astonishing diversity of physical life-forms on Earth are a sliver of indication of what’s possible with other types of lifeforms. I suppose I’m an animist in a way… I experience sounds and minerals and art pieces as sentient beings in a way, perhaps it’s all vibration organized in particular ways, some of which we can see the way we’re told is possible to see, and some of which we can’t. I think the world would be healthier if more humans opened up to the extended landscape of sentience and interconnection. We run around in all these silly language channels and the capitalist industrial complex, giving our life force away to others instead of basing our actions on physical, intuitive presence with each other. This has to change, it’s going to. I have some friends who believe what’s actually going right now is some kind of extra-dimensional parasitism, why the excessive resource extraction and poverty gap etc. I think people are just trained to be blind and limited by self-reinforcing systems we’ve created, but who knows. Media is incredibly powerful and I don’t think people understand that – billboards and mainstream TV, I recently started seeing TV once in a while again and it’s shocking the behavior programming that is permitted, it’s criminal – police state has it backwards. Time to monkey wrench the matrix – everyone will like it, it’s much sexier on the other side, trust me.
Do you think the majority of human beings will ever live in true harmony with nature in this lifetime?
Maybe next generation, 100 years. I’m opening to it happening much faster, I’m doing what I can to make that happen.