New year's resolutions

My first resolution is not to make any resolutions as I never keep them. In fact, making them is probably a sure way not to accomplish what I set out to resolve to do. If I inadvertently succeed in fulfilling them, it is out of blind luck and not because I actually had the will and energy to follow through on my own account.

However, in making this resolution I have already broken it, as I resolved not to make it in the first place. That proves the rationale for the resolution: that resolutions are inherently futile because they will invariably be broken.

My second resolution is to break any resolutions that I do make, on the theory that they will be broken anyway so why not just accede to the inevitable. If I have made a resolution not to resolve, I have already broken the first resolution not to resolve, but acted in accorance with the second, to break the resolutions I do make. However, by keeping the second I have broken both the first and the second: the first, by making another resolution, and the second, by not breaking it.

As you can see, it is a hopeless business.

Why America slept

They forgot they were free.

The wind swept across the open land where the birds wheeled across the clear sky and the men and women who settled and worked the farms stood proud and looked with fierce singleness of purpose into the naked single eye of the sun.

They looked with such power and purpose that they forgot to see.

And men in suits sat in offices and passed pieces of paper back and forth in the fading afternoon, and did not forget what they were about.

But the others forgot.

And so the land burned and seethed and started to rock.

You cannot fool the earth, the sacred earth, and it will never, never, forget.

Inside outside

inside outside
upside downside
oneside twoside
sheside heside

seeside hereside
whatside whyside
decide nowside
beside myside

Hidden meanings

There are hidden meanings everywhere you look. No nook or cranny of reality is exempt. Let's take just one example: Country Joe and the Fish. (I still listen to them because I still listen to a lot of Sixties music.) Well, it occurred to me the other day something that I had never thought of or heard before even after all these years, that the name of Country Joe and the Fish is an obvious Christ symbol. I mean, you've got the fish, which refer to Christ as everybody knows; and you've got Country Joe, whose initials are like "J.C." backwards. Ok, and you've got "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag," which is like Jesus knowing in advance that he was going to be crucified (and what was he wearing at that occasion but a rag?) —I could go on... "Sweet Martha Lorraine" was none other than the Martha who was one of the waitresses at the Last Supper. Two of the songs on the second side of the first album are "Love" and "Grace": tell me that's a bag that doesn't have "New Testament" written all over it. And check out these lyrics: "So I took out my harp and I played 'em a tune, I could see they were diggin' it, Then the one with the fez, well he turns and he sez,"We'd like to help you make your trip." Who wears a fez? Not people in the Middle East, surely (where Jesus lived!). And you have to go on a trip to get there, for sure! What kind of "harp" do you think was he playing? Maybe the kind they play in heaven, right? Anyway, you get the picture. Hidden meanings surround us, inform us, interpenetrate us. Go to them now, they call you, you can't refuse. Oh wait, that's Dylan. Well, there are hidden meanings in Bob "Buddha" Dylan too...but don't get me started!

C.J.=J.C.?

Whodunit

Ramana Maharshi says: "If one feels one is the doer, one must reap the consequences of his action. If one enquires 'who is the doer?', and enters the Heart, the doership idea will end."

I would add that thinking that you are the doer is just an unnecessarily complicated way of looking at things. Every perturbation in the cosmic manifold serves to rework and remold primary substance, which constitutes the Kosmic body of you. Godbeing energy is the quicksilver essence of your blood, tissues, and bones. The endless process of consciousness dancing through form is happening inside of you, all the time. So you aren't doing anything. If anything, you are being done.

Are you done yet?

Before long

what belongs
to me
longs
to be
so before long
leaves me
which leaves me
longing
for my former
belonging

Communication 101

Last night I spent several hours communicating with two friends, and it soon became apparent to me that what we were engaged in was a true meeting of the minds, or if you will a meeting of the Mind with itself, attempting to reconcile varying points of view. This is part of the homeostatic self regulating function of consciousness itself, checking in with itself to align the perspectives and allowing information flow from one mind module to another as needed.

One thing that I was struck with was that the very act of communicating, which we were doing with facility, must have been learned at some point, and I don't think it was in school, at least any school that I can remember. It was almost as if this triadic configuration was a pattern in itself that had been practiced, different from the dyadic and different from larger groups. If I were to guess I'd say that the monad, the dyad, the triad, the tetrad, the pentad, the sextad, and the septad are the fundamental building blocks of communication, and each has a somewhat different set of strategies associated with it. Obviously, there are some principles that cut across all the root structures: for example, the ability to listen (even to oneself, in the case of the monad). But there are some that are unique to each structure.

For example, in the case of the triad where you are one member, if someone is saying something, you can only focus on them and not the other person. You are not going to be able to have A and B in your awareness at the same moment. But you cannot go too long without referencing the one you are not focusing on. This ability to recoup the connection with the member that is subordinate in a given moment is one of those essentials to learning how to communicate in a triad. As I say, we learned this skill a long, long time ago. And though the place and circumstance of this training may be lost in the mists of time, it bears feeling into the fact that it happened, and that it is a clue to the hidden mysteries behind our bodily incarnation in this plane.

I proclaim

O you who have entered my blog, pity unto you. For this is no ordinary blog. Listen to me now and heed well my proclamation: HENCEFORTH YOU ARE TO BE OWNED, UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY, BY ME! ALL THAT YOU POSSESS, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE, IS MINE!

Perhaps you did not realize that merely reading a blog it could cause this rather disastrous (to you) reversal in your fortunes. You thought you were safe, indulging in your—what they call it—lurking. Well, you've just been outlurked! You did not suspect, you did not know—all of these excuses are to no avail. Come the morn, my agents will have liquidated all your property and my coffers, already bulging, will be that much richer.

Denial, then anger, is the usual response. All to no avail. By an indiscreet click of the mouse, my friend, you have hereby undone your fortunes for the remainder of your tenure on this mortal coil.

The reason I can do all this, and you have absolutely nothing to say in the matter, is that this blog has the power to allow me to convert whatever I proclaim into MY REALITY, where the ultimate arbiter of what is real, what is just, what is good, what in fact IS, is of course me.

All, however, is not without consolation. I have reserved for you certain inalienable rights that I will be more than happy to grant you. To wit:
1. Freedom of religion. You may worship any god you like, as long as She is black.
2. Freedom of speech: you may say anything you choose, so long as you say it in Sanskrit.
3. Freedom of assembly: you may gather in groups of any size so long as you do so naked.
4. Freedom of the press: you may publish anything you like in any medium except that of magical blogs.

For there can be no other blog before me. So I have proclaimed it...and in the country of the blog, the "one-I" blogger is king!

Shiva the deconstructor

In the traditional image of the Dance of Shiva, note that the angles of the legs form two intersecting planes orthogonal to the body's frontal plane. This implies Shiva is simultaneously dancing through many dimensions at once. He inhabits a multidimensional reality, and when we speak of Shiva as destroyer, the larger picture is that Shiva is the Great Deconstructor of realities in the matrix of mutually embedded N-dimensional quantum cosmological systems.

Certainly destruction, as by fire, is one way to purify ignorance. Another is by dismantling or deconstructing it, piece by piece. (I get the feeling that this is what Patrick Fitzgerald is doing.) It is interesting to regard the Shivaic force in this light because it is something we can participate in, not so much in the spirit of the rationalist French deconstructive literary theorists, whose purpose is to use relativistic philosophical strategies to give them power over the tyranny of textual misconstructions, but more as computer programmers debugging code with the purpose perhaps ultimately coming out with a new version. Let's put it this way: if God were Bill Gates, you wouldn't expect World 1.0 to be any good. You wouldn't even begin to take it seriously until World 3.0. I don't know about you but I'm expecting a new release of this buggy world any day now.

The lost art of acid rapping

I submit that there was a moment in time—the Sixties—when a confluence of a certain mode of questing consciousness together with chemical enhancement produced an ecstatic state of elocution called the acid rap, which in its most advanced form yielded miracles of verbiage the likes of which have not been seen in these benighted realms before or since. (Apparently there is a latter-day phenomenon called acid rap, which is an underground subgenre of rap music devoted to evoking the horrific; please, let us not confuse that with the original term.)

There seem to be few recorded examples of the classical acid rap, even those fabled rants of Neil Cassady at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, although here's an annotated one (you need the annotations, like when he says "I got the penguin right here in my pocket," he's referring to the Penguin edition of Kerouac's On the Road). We can only rue that there was usually no one around functionally capable of recording many such events when they occurred throughout freakdom in that epoch; although surely the most famous example of one that was recorded was The End by The Doors, improvised during the recording session by a subjectively altered Jim Morrison. (How prescient was his "The killer awoke before dawn/He put his boots on/He took a face from the ancient gallery and/He walked on down the hall..." For we are now in the throes of an administration presided over by just such an Oedipal lunatic.)

Some of the most inspired examples of this genre, however, were evidently uttered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose reputation as a conversationalist at the time (early 19th century) exceeded his considerable fame as a poet. So one can only imagine what kind of magnificent albatross-fixated, Khan-crazed, mariner-opiated torrents of words must have exploded from his bardic lips in those palpitating midnight hours of shared communion with the animating soul of the universe.

See eye, eh?

I am perhaps taking a foolish risk by revealing this information, but I work undercover for the C.I.A. It seems unnecessary to keep this to myself anymore, as my cover will probably be blown soon anyway by the current administration.

Yes, I was recruited to work for the Cosmic Intelligence Agency sometime between my last life and this one; I cannot recall the loka where this happened, but I surely must have been a little under the influence of some divine elixir when I signed on the dotted line, as I now have reason to seriously question the purpose of being here at all. There is precious little intelligence to make note of. The idea, you see, was that I would write up whatever I heard anybody say anything, or saw anybody do anything, that reflected some degree of intelligence here in this realm, which has the code name "The Pit." By this point I have lost the address where I was to send my reports, which I have never had the heart to fabricate anyway. Now it is true that no one has ever contacted me about these missing reports...yet! But it is always possible that I shall be called to account. And then what?

I realize that most people will consign this memo to the category of insane ravings. But if you should happen to know what I am talking about, if it resonates, as they say, then perhaps you too are an agent. Maybe you were recruited, as was I, and have forgotten all about it until now. If you suspect this to be the case, let me know. Maybe together we can figure out what it is we are supposed to do next, in the obvious dearth of data that presents itself. Perhaps we are living in the eye of the hurricane, where everything is happening except where we are. There may yet be hope that intelligent life exists somewhere on this planet outside the circumscribed area of our perception. The prospects for this, however, do not seem encouraging, I must say.

The whereness of here

Why are we here? There are several possible answers to that question. The first is simply, "I don't know." That is honest but not very satisfying. The second is, "We aren't." In other words, denying that we are really here. That is satisfying to some of the people some of the time, but not to all of the people all of the time. And it is not totally honest, as it contradicts bodily intuition about our experience. It can take the form of the noblest kind of transcendental vision, but it involves denial of life, usually by some form of spiritual reductionism.

The third answer to "why are we here?" is: "to figure out why we are here!" To me, that is the most honest and satisfying answer. Because any formulation such as "to help other people," "to glorify God," "to express our creativity fully," and so on, is a bit too restrictive on the radical individuality of the quantum self, if we are being precise. Anyway, it becomes very difficult to define those expressions in any meaningful way. Each of these golden ideals becomes fodder for the ego.

No, we have to figure out for ourselves why we are here, each and every one of us, and nobody's answer will be the same. Maybe we will live eighty years without knowing our purpose, let alone fulfilling it, and then a day will come—and it will come—that we are galvanized into action that teaches us the meaning of meaning, and the light that was trapped in our well-defended hearts will shine out and the bars will melt away and we will be liberated.

So let us start asking not only why we are here, but where here is. That may give us a clue.

On not having read Proust

Recently it occurred to me that I could die without having read Proust. Not that I am that old, but that Proust is that long. So I resolved to set about it. Having now purchased the first three volumes of the world's longest novel in a well-reviewed new translation, I have read all of fifty pages, hardly enough to be able to say I have even begun to read Proust. The question is, when I have finished all million words or so, will I then be able to say I have read him? By that point, won't I have forgotten almost everything I read, and have to start over?

Although I like long, slow novels (and movies) where nothing happens, this is perhaps the ultimate slow read. Proust is not inordinately fond of paragraphs and so he uses very few of them. The net effect is to elongate the normal time span in which one might expect to wade through even a miniscule piece of the novel (significantly titled In Search of Lost Time). I have to say, though, that thus far I am enjoying my Proustian journey, and that is fortunate, for by all indications, I shall wear out several pairs of reading boots while walking that "way."

Implicit hyperlinks

There are two types of hyperlinks: explicit and implicit. If I mention Shakespeare, my explicit link may take you to Wikipedia to see who Shakespeare is. Except if you already know who Shakespeare is, the implicit hyperlink will take you down the corridors of your own mind to remember plays read, performances seen, and innumerable references to Shakespeare in the culture. Obviously, implicit hyperlinks have the potential to be far richer.

But what if you know nothing of Shakespeare? Then you are at the mercy of my explicit hyperlinks. You will go where and when I tell you. You will understand what I want you to understand. And best of all, you will think you have learned a piece of the truth in so doing.

Discovery of the Dylan particle

When gas stations more or less unanimously switched from full-service to self-service in the 1970s, that was also the time when objective reality became more of a self-service phenomenon; postmodernism was coming in, putting the culture in relativistic hyperdrive. It became okay to dismiss consensual reality as a socially-imposed tyranny. Reality was DIY. The most famous articulation of this has come down to us in recent times in the form of the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, which posited that we create our own reality. This, of course, is a concept that the majority of people does not buy into. Which by definition means that it has a lot to recommend it. However, New Orleans changes everything.

Now, with the inundation of this city, which has occupied a such unique and crucial place in the cultural landscape of this country, we are entering a phase whereby nature is wiping the slate clean from both the arrogant suppositions of materialist science and the solipsistic excesses of postmodernism. It turns out that 9/11 was a mere warmup for apocalyptic scenarios that we will become more and more accustomed to in the upcoming years. Like the foundations of rotting buildings submerged in flood waters, the conceptual underpinnings of modern life are crumbling. The bipolar philosophical stance of subjectivism vs. objectivism, which requires dualism to sustain itself, is being swept away in the new imperatives of change.

What we need is a freewheeling quantum cosmosophy which privileges the awakened individual perceptual module as the reality unit, insofar as it is possible to discover reality. I call this unit a dylano (after Bob Dylan) to indicate that conscious unit within each of us that is attempting to come into its full conscious creative capacity. The dynamic release of the dylano particle in the human ecosystem will help the psychology and sociology of the evolving infrastructure to come into balance with the cosmic tidal forces sweeping away the old structures. We will have no choice but to become like rolling stones.

Unintelligent design

With all this controversy about "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary theory, let us step back for a minute and think about what the world would have been like had it been the product of Unintelligent Design.

With intelligent design, you would of course have the leader of a country who was articulate, well-informed, reality-based, and highly ethical. With Unintelligent Design, that leader would get into office by stealing the election, would pursue ruinous social and economic policies based on lies, relentlessly pummel the populace with slogans and verbal pabulum that had no relationship to the facts, and unconscionably take refuge in willful ignorance to protect himself from the immeasurable human suffering produced by his policies. With an intelligently designed world, people would have the natural intelligence to perceive what was going on in such a case and quickly oust the pretender, restoring the social system to its optimal state. Conversely, in an unintelligent design, they would easily succumb to the stupefying effects of mass media, of tendentious pundits telling them what to believe, so that the hideous perversion of democratic ideals could be allowed to fester with impunity.

But if, as we are exhorted by the Discovery Institute, the theory of intelligent design should share equal billing with evolution in the schools, then so should the theory of Unintelligent Design, because it perhaps explains some phenomena that the other theories do not. The devolution of human being into chimp, for example, seen lately at the highest levels, is inadequately dealt with by Darwin; it is here that the burgeoning science of Unintelligent Design truly shines. And yet, despite the continued elaboration of these sophisticated theories, there will always remain the entreaty lingering pathetically on our lips: "Say it ain't so, Lord!"

The transparent revolution

A new book is attempting to popularize the word translucent to describe what is essentially an enlightened state of awareness, except we aren't calling it enlightenment anymore. These "translucents" were interested in enlightenment fifteen years ago, they've been through the guru trip, they've maybe experienced some form of "radical awakening," and now they're into being integrated and holistic and not separating the material from the spiritual. So they're not really here nor there, and that's why we call them translucent. All these unsung translucent types are out there quietly integrating, changing the course of history from the meditation rooms in their upscale exurbian homes. They might be your neighbor; they might be you. But it's a revolution, and you'd best get with the program and buy this book and sling the term around to demonstrate your translucitude.

In search of a new marketing slogan to push my next spiritual best-seller, I am contemplating trying out "The Transparent Revolution." I think this might have much more popular appeal than "translucent." Remember science class in school, when they taught you the difference between translucence and transparency? You saw this piece of clear plastic, which was transparent, and this piece of cloudy plastic, which was translucent. Well, it was interesting that they had a word for it, but that first brush with translucence did not, I must admit, exactly inspire me. I mean, I did not there and then become a collector of pieces of cloudy plastic. As for transparency, I have gotten a lot of good over the years out of looking out of windows, and reading clear prose from transparently-written books. So I could argue that transparency has been practical in my life, even a source of inspiration.

Making an ideal of translucency strikes me as an attempt to make those who ran the enlightenment gauntlet and for one reason or another crashed and burned, feel good about their relative level of spiritual accomplishment, and give it a name. No enlightenment please, I'm translucent!

Well, get ready for the next phase. In my book, you're going to see through the crap like you've never seen before, O transparent one! Things will be crystal clear to you. You won't even see the separation between you and them. It'll be almost like...being there!

Seek ye first

Recently I was attending a lecture by a spiritual teacher who several times addressed us as "seekers." While I did not take violent exception to the classification, I felt somewhat uncomfortable with it. In truth, I don't think in my life I've ever felt much like a seeker; I prefer the word "explorer." The difference is this. If I am seeking, it means I am looking for something and I probably have some idea of what I'm looking for. As an explorer, I know I am in unknown territory, and though I will do a lot of looking around, and make discoveries in the process, I cannot predict in advance what they will be, or even what category they will be in. I may think I am looking for a new shape of cloud and discover instead a hedgehog.

Even before I seek the kingdom of heaven, I will explore the world without and within, because that is where I find myself, and perhaps I will stumble upon heaven in the process. Anyway, they just might have stuck it in a place you wouldn't ordinarily look.

Law of desire

The law of manifestation is the law of desire. That is, what becomes, comes into being because it wants to be. To understand how this might apply to human life, let us consider how it works in terms of the Absolute. The fifth-century Platonic teacher Proclus discussed the first manifestation of The One, which is the most fundamental reality, stepping into Being (which he calls the Noetic Absolute). At this level, Being is absolute and "unparticipated," or not yet manifested into form, but it represents an activated state that is stepped down from the undifferentiated absolute of The One. At this level, we're not even talking about God; God hasn't been born yet. This is something more mysterious even, like the unfathomable movements of the deep sea far below where we can see or sense.

Desire in human life is often seen as a mechanical principle. Drives for food and sex, for example, seem biologically programmed and the desires that spring from them are chemical impulses emanating predictably from a known configuration. But these biological life programs ultimately derive from the fundamental movements in the depth of Being when The One says, I want to be. Of course there is no I as we know it at that point. It's a movement of desire, though. And in all our human desires, that's really all we want too. To be, just like The One.

Ask yourself what you really want. Burrow deep into your desires and find the core question that always remains asking. You will never answer it. You will act, sometimes blindly, sometimes with consciousness, but never with complete success and fulfillment. It is in the nature of being to always begin again. And the ultimate mystery, that always hides itself in the final analysis, insures that the original desire that teases out the original condition of The One into the Seas of Noesis continuously breathes in us and through us.

Eggless in Iowa

In meditation I heard a voice say, "If you didn't eat any eggs this morning, then you have nothing to let go of." My first thought was, okay, I didn't eat any eggs this morning, I guess I'm all right. Then I thought, but I did take 12 large vitamin capsules. And who knows what else I might have taken in that could have implanted in me some kind of pattern or programming that I would then have to let go of, in order to surrender my egoity into the purifying fires of the absolute.

Woody Allen in Annie Hall maintained that we stay in relationships because "we need the eggs"—citing an old joke about a woman whose husband thinks he's a chicken, and the psychiatrist says he can cure him but the woman says, "No, we need the eggs." And it's quite true that we need the eggs, not just in terms of the human relationships but in terms of every facet of our worldly lives. We need those thought forms to drape around and cushion ourselves from the outrageousness of unmediated existence.

So although I went eggless today, I know I won't tomorrow. And I will pay the price. Yes, I will.

TGIF

Wagner held that Wotan in his Ring of the Nibelung represented humanity. This head god from Norse mythology, who in the story gives up an eye for the sake of knowledge that will help him dominate the objective world, is a tragic figure, as is modern man, who has sacrificed inner knowledge for the sake of worldly power. But it is more than that: to reflect upon the meaning of this primal act in Schopenhauer, who influenced Wagner tremendously, it is the wresting of consciousness itself from nature that is the "original sin," if you will.

If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that there is a fundamental shift taking place, and we can see Wagner as a prophet of that, as in Gotterdammerung there is a complete dissolution of Valhalla, the abode of the gods. The structures that held the whole concept of humanity in place, in this long past age from which we are emerging, are consumed in fire.

You could say that as Wednesday is Wotan's day, which ended in the twilight years of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century was Thor's day, Thursday. Thor is the god of the hammer. We saw a good bit of hammering last century and it's still going on, of course. Even as we watch in fascinated horror at the last throes of political demigods enacting their mundane power plays on the stage of the world, the day is turning from Thor's day to the love goddess Freya's. Thank god(s) it's Friday.

All is not one

To say All Is One is to immediately posit the opposite, All Is Not One. Because if you are positing All you are positing difference. With difference, the Allness encompasses lack of oneness. It might encompass oneness but that does not negate the multiplicity. You might have oneness contained in the All, but additionally you would have Twoness, Threeness, and so on. In fact, even without the concept of "all," the concept of One is enought to imply the concept of Two. There is no one without a second, especially in the field of time, which is why we call the units of time "seconds."

What about outside the field of time? Cannot there be an Allness that is just God, that knows no separation in its essence? Certainly. But if you are talking about all of the All, you have to include the relative world and its infinite variety. Whatever the world might reduce to in terms of a primordial metaphysical soup does not obviate the distinguishing characteristics of its objective phenomenal differentiation.

Really, it is far more interesting to conceptualize the All as all-encompassing, so that it can include our human experience. It seems illogical of the universe to organize these rich, colorful, variegated lives for us if they did not contribute something to the overall canvas.

It's all space

A light year is a measure of distance, not of time. It is the distance light travels in a year. But can you name a so-called measure of time that is not really a measure of distance? A year in ordinary time is the distance that it takes for the earth to make one revolution around the sun. Months, minutes, and seconds are divisions of this unit. They are merely increments of that unit of distance. We talk as though we know what time is. In truth, we are fish swimming in a sea that we cannot perceive. So we use these terms of time measurement which do not actually measure anything but space.

For to say that we have gone such and such a distance in so long a time is to say nothing more than that we have gone such and such a distance relative to another distance. If we are measuring time purely in terms of distance, we have no measurement of anything except space.

Ordinary units of space are not particularly meaningful in themselves, of course. A foot, a mile, and so on—these units are based on rough approximations which we have in latter days codified in arbitrary fashion. Spatial units of measurement are entirely relative, referring back and forth among themselves with no absolute meaning. You could argue perhaps that the Planck length describes something real and not arbitrary, but this is such a tiny unit (1.61 x 10-35 m) that it rarely figures in our calculations of, say, how far it is from our house to Bangor, Maine. (Those who live in Bangor, Maine, may, for the purposes of this example, substitute Ottumwa, Iowa).

My conclusion is that it's all space—what we ordinarily refer to as time, that is, in a misplaced metaphor. And space is nothing more than than the imagination that we can stand still long enough in this cosmos to fix a distance between two objects. (As if the concept of object had some meaning itself.)

To know real time and real space, we had better abandon all notions of time and space whatsoever.

Knowing unknowing

Isn't that nostrum irritating about how the wise person is the one who knows how much he doesn't know? I mean, if he really knows he doesn't know, then he knows. Quit disavowing you know anything. It's false modesty. You do know something. You know what you know, and what you don't know, you don't know. You don't know that you don't know. Otherwise, you know.

Now maybe you define some of your knowledge in terms of what you don't know. That's still knowledge! You see all the stars and planets but you don't know their names, perhaps. So you say, there's a galaxy out there but I am only vaguely aware of its vast complexities. That is my infinitesimal piece of knowledge and that will satisfy. Not! Who are you kidding? In my book, you aren't satisfied with half a glass. Only the whole draught will quench the thirst. And when you quaff it to the lees, you know that you have drunk. You know that you are experienced, as Jimi Hendrix says.

He who is wise, knows what he knows and doesn't know what he doesn't know. That is the truth.

Time release

It is indubitable that the human race has an antagonistic stance as regards time. For one thing, Time and Death are personified in the same way, as a grim reaper. To wit: "Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come." (Shakespeare) We speak of killing time, and in returned are killed by him—why "him," by the way? Why does the feminine (Mother Nature) bring life and the masculine bring death (Father Time)? Do we all hate our fathers, is that what this is all about? Is humanity Oedipal at its root? Is all this talk of an all-merciful loving God the Father who takes care of us just a smokescreen? Come on! We hate the sucker! After all, he spies on us, judges us, punishes us—kill him! Nail him up! We don't like him, not really.

As for Time, it is perhaps unfairly implicated in this species-wide psychological disturbance. Time is no doubt bemused that it is the object of such massive amounts of infantile projection. Why can't we let it go, release it from being victimized by our terrifying collective psychosis? The tyranny of the clock to which we are subjugated, which we chafe against even as we celebrate its cycles, has nothing to do with time, after all. It was not time's idea to invent these infernal machines. No, like so many of the messes that man makes, we did it to ourselves, sad to say.

The nonlinearity of the first dimension

We assume that a one-dimensional object is linear, because by definition a line is an extension along one dimension. But there can be no linearity without measurement and there can be no measurement in a first dimension without a second dimension, because there is no way to ascertain units of length within the confines of one dimension. You simply cannot compare one unit with another. A measuring stick cannot be created without the second dimension.

So because measurement is impossible in the first dimension, no finite linear object can exist in it. To propose that there may be only one object in the first dimension, an infinite line, is tantamount to saying there is no object at all, only dimensionality itself. To speculate that there could be a finite line whose existence is not invalidated by its lack of a property of measurability from within its own dimension, is to ignore that the quality of finitude is dependent on measurability; it is not an a priori property but one that has to be derived by systematic observation. Therefore, the first dimension is nonlinear—on its own terms.

However, here in the world of the third dimension we are very linear indeed. Even though we don't have to think in one-dimensional terms, we do anyhow. There is something about the crushing gravity of materiality that compresses thought. Perhaps Hamlet could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space. But there are too few Hamlets in the world, who have discovered the existence of depth.

One person at a time

What if there really is just one person in the universe at a time, and the idea that there are a multiplicity of people is just an illusion? The one person who truly exists is faster than the proverbial speeding bullet, darting around from mind to mind experiencing things from one point of view, then another, for an infinitesimal moment, then jumping into another point of view, but doing it so fast that each mind thinks itself experiencing time in a continuous unbroken flow, which creates the illusion of an individual identity. Like watching a movie with discrete frames, each individual consciousness is only experiencing individual moments.

This may not be a complete fantasy; physicist Paul Davies proposes it in his book About Time as a plausible explanation of what really is. If so, then One is truly the loneliest number, and God is a restless creator in an empty universe.

Base tables

Create a relational database describing the universe. There are people: John, Mary, and Susan. And there are planets: Earth, Mars, and Venus. We start out with two base tables containing the entities of people and planets respectively. Then we create queries on these tables and what we end up with is John's Earth, Mary's Earth, and Susan's Earth; John's Mars, Mary's Mars, and Susan's Mars; and John's Venus, Mary's Venus, and Susan's Venus. If we try to resolve the multiplicity of experienced planets, we can say that they derive from the base tables. Objective reality simplifies to the essential entities such as people and planets.

Except for one thing. Those essential entities were derived in the first place. And what were they derived from? The experiences that were supposedly derived from them. In other words, because an experience happened, we objectify it by deriving an experiencer and an experience. These objects are identified and categorized in base tables. Then retroactively the experiences from which they are derived are categorized as derived from them.

Before there was Susan or Earth, there was Susan's Earth. Mary's Venus preexisted either the planet or the person. After the entities were rationalized out, it was determined that there was a subject and object of that experience. The existence of those categories, and their population in base tables, "proves" that a complex reality is based on simple identies and categories. You can't fill out the scorecard unless you know who the players are. But who's keeping score? We are. We paper the walls of our world with printouts. But what are the databases based on? Where did the data come from? And how real are these entities it presumes to describe?

Blogging and the writing process

This being my second post in a row about blogging, I may be in danger of excessive self-referentiality. (But then isn't even one act of self-referentiality excessive? So if you're going to do it, do it big!) In any case (a convenient phrase of dismissal) I am going to risk overstepping my rhetorical bounds because I think the blogging medium offers a great format for developing ideas. If I were still teaching writing, I would definitely make it an assignment for my students to blog daily. Since blogging is writing for publication (I do believe more people read my blog than have read some of the books I have published!), and nothing improves your writing faster than knowing that people are reading it, it would be a wonderful teaching aid.

My current plan is to write a book on the physics, philosophy, and psychology of time. And based on my experience in blogging, I have decided to structure it in bloglike units. It will have chapters and so on, but the real unit within the chapter will be something that is more or less self-contained, like an individual blog entry. Not only will this make it possible to read the book non-sequentially, it will induce all sorts of thematic cross-referencing (without the hyperlinks, of course, at least in the non-digital version). In the process of writing I will be posting entries on the subject of time, thus generating content in a form that may eventually be reproduced in the same form in which it was written (or more likely go through a lot of transmutation first, perhaps to end up in the bloglike state from which it began). It will be an interesting experiment.

The existential blogger

To blog is to live. It is the act of thrusting one's naked essence into the indefinite void, of offering up one's humility and pride and passion and stupidity, one's eloquence and wit and desperation, into that by and large indifferent fog we call the blogosphere.

Why do we do it? For the momentary diversion of the few hapless strangers that might happen upon our markings in the cybersand? What real virtue lies in the exercise of virtual virtuosity?

Perhaps it is because we know deep down in our souls that there is something inexpressible yearning in us to be expressed anyway, like singing the blues during a tsunami, or playing chess with death. Is that overdramatizing what is going on with this phenomenon? How else to explain how even the most mundane narrations become peculiarly compelling once they have been bloggified!

A parenthesis on panpsychism

In my previous post Communique from Neverland I expressed a certain disquietude with being categorized as a panpsychic and felt that there was something there that did not quite mesh with the quantum cosmosophy that I am experimentally espousing. Now I see what it is. According to the definition on FutureHi.net, panpsychism is "the belief that mind, or consciousness, is omnipresent throughout the universe and is a fundamental aspect of the universe. Examples of panpsychic beliefs are that atoms have atom consciousness, rocks have rock consciousness, trees have tree consciousness, planets have planet consciousness, and the universe has universe consciousness, and so on." The probem with that is that it presupposes that there is an outside world! All these projections about what kind of consciousness might exist are posited on the qualities that we perceive "outside" ourselves. That's what I really mean when I say there is no there there! Any cosmology based on the myth of objectivity is bound to be bound in some kind of philosophic parenthesis.

Panpsychism is right to assume that we inhabit some sort of conscious matrix. But the warp and woof of it is nothing but ourselves. Does that sound lonely? It is indeed. Only an entity which knows true loneliness can ever break on through to the other side, to the incomprehensible true meeting with another quantum being. The quantization of consciousness is the fundamental principle, but it is not posited on the categories we see in the physical world. Let us not begin and end our investigation into the nature of things with the things themselves; they are part of the magic lantern show that has been conjured up for our entertainment by the incomprehensible, inexhaustible creativity inherent in the fiery furnace of formlessness. Quantum consciousness is based on the much more radical quantization of pure witnessing monads.

Communique from Neverland

Having noticed that I have been classed as a "panpsychic" by the good people at FutureHi.net, I felt it behooved me to find out what this thing was that I was supposed to be. My first thought was that it might have something to do with Peter Pan. But on that site it is explained that "Panexperientialism or Panpsychism is the belief that mind, or consciousness, is omnipresent throughout the universe and is a fundamental aspect of the universe." In other words, everything in the universe is made out of mind.

I would not disagree with that statement, except that it seems a bit limiting. If the stars, rocks, and seas, as well as the vast multitudes of living beings in the world, everything that exists, is a thought form, a construction of consciousness, then the conditional aspects of that creation must reflect the conditions of mind that constitute them. The objective world becomes a mirror for our fractured psyches. Unless, that is, the partial awareness that we bear is not really causative in this creation; the mind of God is the ultimate subjectivity that is molding things. But that seems too remote to me. In the various forms I perceive, I can only grasp them in terms of what I know and what I am, not in terms of what I am not. For as soon as I see something that is not me, it instantly becomes me. My knowledge of it is only a reflection of that temporary coalescence of thoughts and impressions that I call my self. Now, with that understood, it somehow makes the universe a little too small and claustrophobic, like watching a 60s Bergman movie. Which means that the world in which I find myself is inherently not one in which I feel totally comfortable. Too many pirates, crocodiles, and lost boys—lost souls.

Divine discontinuities

"Time is an illusion...death is an illusion." From the standpoint of our limited three-dimensional reality, that is correct. Certainly the appearances of changing phenomena, plucked through the narrow chink of our senses, are not to be regarded as "real" (although they seem real enough to the experiencing ego). The discontinuties that rock our world from time to time are relative fluctuations in a personal reality construct that is inherently unstable, a house built upon sand.

If you read Janet Sussman's book The Reality of Time you will learn that time from the higher-dimensional physics perspective is much different than the narrow linear referential time sense we all live by. "Real" time has an aspect of randomness and freedom; its shifts are experienced by us as actual breaks in the fabric of spacetime. It is as if at these junction points a tsunami of information from higher dimension pours into ours and our mental constructs are simply swept away.

John Lentz in Transposition holds that the greater godbeing of this cosmos is actually undergoing a shift out of its own reality structure into a new life that is unimaginable even to it. If that is the case, King Kong and Godzilla could come crashing through your living room and you would not bat an eye. There will be matters of greater moment engaging your attention at that point.

Tetrapartite telepathy

As Buckminster Fuller points out in this letter on Tenesgrity, the four vertices of a tetrahedron are the minimum number necessary to achieve awareness-recognition of a structural system. Could this explain why the Beatles were so much better together than as solo artists? Maybe a certain kind of musical telepathy was engendered when this critical mass was reached in the geometric configuration of genius.

The key of high seeing

John Lentz's essay Transposition is as concise and clear an exposition as presently exists on Quantum Cosmosophy, a term I have just this moment coined (and it will likely have a short life span). It is difficult, though, to put any label on a body of thought that (in my mind at least) is currently more of an inarticulable sensation than a coherent philosophical system. My own version of this is what you read in qubikuity, but I should explain that this all derives from John's original cognitions, though I put my own spin on it which I take full responsibility for.

The idea of transposition is, in short, that the "greater godbeing" (which you could call God, except that concept carries a lot of baggage) is going through a quantum shift in which it is evolving beyond this Creation, even as we here on earthplanet plane are being drawn into an inconceivable vortex of change. It is a parallel process. As the collective human mind awakens from its "world dream" which derives from the godbeing's own cosmic dream, the human story starts to completely unravel. As John writes: "Passing through the channels of the greater godbeing beyond, through the elemental godbeing walking the earth and into the human beings who are no longer moved by the passions of the race, the cosmic life force signals its intent to withdraw like a tide sliding back into the sea."

What does this mean? Is it all over? And if it is, does it really matter? Does it matter in the scheme of things that the dream we were dreaming the hour before morning got interrupted, then erased? Or to put it another way, if the universe were a Clint Eastwood movie, should we be surprised that there comes a time when, inevitably, the Man With No Name rides off into the sunset without a word or a glance backwards to the few bewildered survivors of the apocalypse He has wrought?

Random thoughts

Perhaps you have heard of the Global Consciousness Project. In this experiment, which has been going on for years, a group of 60 computers all over the world is generating a constant stream of random numbers 24 hours a day. The interesting thing is that on occasion patterns in the random number stream develop that should not be there by the laws of probability. These periods of coherence seem to correspond to global events such as the tsunami, 9/11, or Princess Diana's funeral, making it seem that the random flow is being affected by world consciousness at that point in time.

Can human consciousness, magnified many fold when cataclysmic world events are happening, cause aberrations in the usual random processes of nature? Quite possibly. But I am more inclined to look for an explanation in the philosophy of time, as propounded by Janet Sussman in The Reality of Time, rather than in the nature of consciousness. She says that time is a field that generates breakfronts when loops in the space/time continuum return to their source. These cataclysmic world events that we all feel so keenly are symptomatic of quantum shifts in the fabric of time. I think the real explanation of the random number anomalies is that it's a synchonistic phenomenon that registers on the level of consciousness the same as when you shift gears in the car; you feel a shift. And it registers simultaneously on the quantum level (the numbers are randomized according to observation of quantum-indeterminate events) because physical reality itself is shifting at these breakpoints.

Sensory metabolism

The nature of human consciousness seems to be one that likes to connect the dots. Because dots are what we are given in the perceptual field. As light particles strike the retina intermittently, and impact us through the on-off firing of neurons in the brain, we are receivers of a panoply of ones and zeros, a digital data stream. Immediately upon intaking this binary repast, we mash it up, homogenize it, convert it to a digestible waveform. We connect the dots between the points, between the bits, and come up with a rainbow of continuity that constitutes our comfortable known world.

This sensory metabolism is so pervasive that we never question the idea that we live in a waveform, despite how much the underlying reality is digital. On the particle level, not much is certain. The particle may be here, it may be there; you cannot pin it down without losing vital information. But we confront the quantum cosmos like recalcitrant audiophiles, preferring analog to digital.

We are dots ourselves, points of consciousness in an unfathomable multiversal ocean, flashing unpredictably in and out of awareness. We create a continuity out of our own thoughts and call that effect a self. What laser light will illuminate our digital souls, calling us forth one by one to see clearly at last?

Neither here nor there

In the 1950s, the You Are There show with Walter Cronkite depicted various historical situations (D-Day, the Gettysburg address, etc.) as if being covered by a modern TV reporter. Such a show would hold no interest today. We are no longer as innocent about history as we once were. We no longer believe there was something "real" there to retell in such a way so as to give it relevance and versimilitude; here at the fag-end of postmodernism, we see only one fiction dressing up another fiction, journalists constructing convenient narratives for our entertainment and politicians invoking mythical pasts to distract us from their nefarious activities.

Nowadays we know that not only we aren't there and can't be there, we never were there. Neither was anybody else. There's no there there. Never was. So it stands to reason there's no here here either. So where are we? Neither here nor there, it seems. Get used to it. This is about as much certainty you're ever going to have about anything.

Monadology

In Leibniz's philosophy, a monad is a conscious unit of perception. You could say we are all monads insofar as we are individuals, or undivided. On some essential level, we do not interact; we live in our separate universes and send signals to each other which we somehow receive and interpret. The most interesting feature of Leibniz's cosmology is how he deals with this problem of how a multiplicity of independent units of eternal substance, the monads, can find common markers so as to learn to coexist. His idea is that there is something called "preestablished harmony."

This is what lets my monad talk to your monad. And any soul communion is posited upon music, essentially. The Leibnizian parallelism of substances reflects what Mozart heard when he wrote the Jupiter Symphony.

Two Heads

The relation-net

It is time for a new kind of relation. A "relationship" is like the Titanic, too heavy to float in this iceberg-packed sea. It is a ship that has sunk many, to quote Osho. The problem is that the relationship has to be airtight in order to keep out the sea and thereby float and travel from point A to point B. The relationship feeds the ego and fixes the individual identity amdist the tides of change. That sort of relation is not what is called for in the current environment of quantum consciousness shift.

The new kind of relation I envision is a relation-net, which has an entirely different purpose, not to travel in any linear fashion but being porous so as to sink into the depths. Where perhaps a gleaming silvery treasure fish may be caught, alive and thrashing in the warp and woof of the matrix of complementary energies...of you and me.

New Age religions

We tend to underestimate the phenomenon of all the New Age religions that are growing up around us like kudzu on steroids. Don't you realize that Christianity, Islam, and so on are on their last legs? In a few years they will be as defunct as Mithraism, and instead people will be paying obeisance to images of Deepak Chopra or Neale Donald Walsh. Worshippers will do rituals at the lotus feet of Carolyn Myss and worship the Divine Mother in her incarnation as Madonna (Ciccione). Priests will intone passages from Wayne Dyer's holy writs; scholars will write exegeses on Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.

Of course, all of these charismatic personalities will have to be sacrificed in picturesque and gruesome ways so that some Mel Gibson of the future can make a stirring movie about how they saved us all from our New Age sins (such as low self-esteem, non-lateral thinking, and lack of quantum vision). Perhaps the Bush administration, with its new "mandate," will be persuaded by its core constituency to make a pre-emptive strike on all New Age religions lest they gain a competitive advantage over a certain legitimate state religion that should enjoy monopolistic privileges under our Constitution. That will be self-defeating in the long term, for martyrdom will feed the mania of self-empowered multitudes. But in the meantime, Deepak, watch your back!

Purpose of life

The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life. More specifically, your life. No one else matters. Their purpose of life is their business. They can and will answer this question differently from you. What's more, the way you answer this question will be different every time you ask it, because what is important to us is never precisely the same from day to day; certainly the way we express the answer changes, evolves, deepens.

What does this tell us? That the elusive answer to that eternal question is no answer at all, because it is so mutable? Does that mean we are left with only the question, unyielding, unchanging, while the multitudinous answers dance around it, mocking us? We mock ourselves in pursuing this quixotic quest. Why not let it go? Because we can't. It's our purpose to try to answer. Our very existence on this earth is testament to the fact that the question is on the table.

Why not

There are those who look at temporal things the way they aren't and ask not why. I dream of eternal things that are and ask why not.

Others dream of temporal things that will be and ask when. I dream of dreamers dreaming galaxies unborn and say whenever.

There are others who see my dreams and ask who what why when where. I dream instead of uncharted seas and say, hey look over there.

Others dream my dreams and ask whose. I dream my own dreams and simply snooze.

Letter from Mick #2

Listen, blokes. Now that I'm God, I have even less time than I did before, as what with agents, contracts, tours and the like, I also have to deal now with this incessant praying. Get off your knees! (Hmm...that could be a song title. Almost as catchy as "Under My Thumb"...especially if you conceived it as addressed to groupies...) Right, get off them. I'm particularly fagged with these spam prayers and I have installed an anti-spam-prayer filter. So just know that your time will be wasted if you indulge in this. Have yourself a good shag or at least a good wank, or even a bad wank'll be better than nothing and do you a power of good. Whereas if you keep praying at me (preying on me?) you'll be responded to with a deafening silence.

You cannot petition the Lord with prayer! (Where is Jim Morrison when we need him?)

Happy new year?

2005 A.D. is, according to the Vedic calendar, the 5106th year of Kali Yuga, a period of spiritual darkness lasting 432,000 years. If we are indeed ensconced in the Dark Ages (no, Virginia, they didn’t end with Y1K) then we indeed have something to be really happy about. That is, we’re only 1% of the way into this thing. Yes, it could be a lot worse. We could be 50% into it, and then we'd be in a real pickle.

I wonder about the tsumani wave I saw on the home videos that people took. It seemed fairly innocuous when it was first coming in, like just a large but otherwise normal wave. People watched it come in, greeting it with giddy laughing and excitement which quickly turned to screaming—as the wave didn't break, it just continued to move in relentlessly, suddenly washing away humans and houses and paying no attention to where the land thought the waterline ended.

Sitting here on the verge of what seems to be some sort of global breakdown, I wonder...has the real tsunami just begun?

Youcentricity

You live in a youcentric universe. You are absolutely the center of the universe. If you weren't, you would not even be able to walk across the room; you'd fall on your face. You need that youcentricity to keep your equilibrium. There's nothing wrong with it. Don't be ashamed. You're positioned perfectly for maximum mobility in this universe (look, they even named it after "U"!)

The medieval philosophers were not so far off, only they didn't take it far enough. They said Earth was the center. No, it's a little closer in than that. As close as wherever you are. By the way, where is that? Are you your body? Your soul (whatever that is)? Or are you merely a temporary cohesion in the flux? When you know the answer to that, you will truly be in the center of it all.

The duality in individuality

Obviously we are individuals, you and I. Aren't we? We are autonomous. We are not contiguous. You go your way and I go mine. Yet "individual" literally means "undivided." How is it that we can be divided from each other and still be individual?

Perhaps we will require some kind of fusion, not in a crude reverse-Siamese twins operation, but a more subtle soul-surgery, in order to overcome this contradiction. If no person is an island, we cannot be human in any case without renouncing our isolation.

So here's to a new kind of relationship. What it will mean, we don't know, but it should be interesting, to say the least—in order to finally, at long last, realize our individual freedom.

The present moment

If you would stop thinking for a moment...that's right, just cease that constant onrush of thoughts...you will have arrived in the present. You will know what it is to be "in the moment." What's that? You can't stop thinking? Well, there are spaces between your thoughts, aren't there? Just plop down in one of those for an instant; I know you can't stay there for very long, but try to be there just long enough to get a flavor of what I'm talking about, that nectar of presence.

They say this is being outside of time. Actually, it's being inside time. Past and future, they are outside of time. The present, if and when we can realize it, is like being in the body of time. And what a bod! If we could just get our head inside of time all the way and keep it there, we'd be the ultimate insiders.

The first day

Today is the first day. Not of the rest of your life, because that would presuppose you had been living before now. Or that you had a life. Or that there was a you. All of which are highly controversial theorems.

"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space," said Hamlet. And if you were, would you be just another nut in its shell? Or would you be finally privy to the clue that solves the whole conundrum? Ask yourself that, today, on the first day.