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.