The Icons of Victor’s Way

The sculptures of Victor’s Way are stone cartoons. The cartoons serve as icons (from Greek εἰκών eikōn "image"), just like those you would find on your computer desktop or smartphone. The Victor’s Way stone icons represent 7 basic self-development programs within the human and which contribute to biological survival. 5 of the icons represent dysfunctional states. Interacting with (i.e. worshipping, as it were ‘clicking’) an icon helps the observer access, navigate and defragment the particular basic program it represents in order to restore it to perfect functioning (that is to say, to ‘factory settings’).

Icon examples: The icon of Ganesh, worshipped (i.e. accessed) all over India as ‘Lord (i.e. Remover) of obstacles’, represents (in irrational but pleasing form) the human* capacity for problem solving. Ganesh actually functions as sub-program of the Basic Operating System of all living creatures. Worshipping (i.e. ‘double clicking or ‘touching’) the Ganesh icon outside activates one’s own problem solving program (or function) within. The ‘Split Man’ (likewise the Shiva) cartoon/icon represents the over 30’s screw-up who becomes self- and other destructive because he or she can’t decide on a goal worth sacrificing his or her life for. Idem Jesus on the Cross icon.

The 7 Victor’s Way icons are symbols for (or fanciful representations of) difficult of access (to wit ‘locked’ for self-protection) basic biological survival responses. Slightly irrational,** the icons are similar to highly abstracted traffic (i.e. road survival procedure) signs rather than a detailed description of the actual program they represent.

The icon serves serve as a sort of hyperlink to a basic program stored – and protected (against misuse) – within the unconscious (i.e. as data store) of the observer. The observer can activate (i.e. ‘click open’) an icon either by recognizing (i.e. superimposing) himself or herself in (on) the icon or simply by reading the information board. By activating an icon, the user can move indirectly into and out of the identified function (or program) without knowing anything further about the whole functions protocol of the bio-program represented by the icon.

*… Tat tvam asi, Sanskrit meaning: ‘That art that’ and which Hindus generally take to mean ‘You (and I and all life forms) are God/Brahman’. In the Upanishads (created beginning 600 BC and later commented by Badarayana in his sutras, Shankara in his commentaries and others and developed into the Vedanta belief system), archaic Indians first developed the notion of pandeism (i.e. Shankara) or pantheism (so Ramanuja), and restated by Spinoza in the 17^th century AD, meaning that all (that is to say, you and I and everything else) is God (atman ≈ Brahman), to wit, ‘there is nothing but God’. A medieval Christian view was: ‘We are but thoughts in the mind of God.’ In China in the 7^th century AD Hua Yen Buddhism developed the first holographic understanding of the emergence of phenomena, derived from the ancient Indian notion of Indra’s Net. Darwin (hero of the British Empire and Press) produced his extremely dodgy ‘random mutation of genes in large populations’ hypothesis in the 19^th century, and to which he added Spencer’s ‘natural selection’ hypotheses. In the 19^th century the Frenchman Lamark, much ridiculed by the British, advanced (formal adaptation capable of transmission) suggestions that are now coming back into view to displace Darwin’s gross hindsight speculations. I have developed the Turing Machine (i.e. as universal set of rules (or conditions, as in early Buddhism)) notion of the emergence of phenomena, loosely reflecting earliest Buddhist thought and which rubbished the Brahman/God speculation of the Upanishads.

** … The intentional irrationality of an icon serves to block rational analysis of and so direct access to the basic program it represents. By so doing the active human navigation system (or Bio-Nav, i.e. consciousness) goes down, i.e. into ‘waiting time’ and when the unconscious can (to wit, ‘the spirit of the deep’, elsewhere named Mephistopheles) resolve the difficulty created by a dysfunctional program.