Sunday, February 27, 2005

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.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

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?

Friday, February 18, 2005

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.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

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?

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

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.