Loving what is

According to chapter 2 of Douglass A. White’s Observer Physics, the word "believe" derives from the Indo-European root *LEUBH, which means to care, desire, love; with the intensifier prefix be. (This, by the way, is in the context of a discussion of four basic paradigms of belief: a priori, a postiori, empirical, and deliberate. Qubikuity is an example of the latter, in which an exploratory belief set is being articulated. Every blog post here is a piece of the puzzle, which is sometimes expressed more formally and other times more peripherally.)

Thus, to believe is to love being.

Of course, the idea of “belief” is much debased because today, most beliefs that are held, championed, and contest with each other for supremacy tend to be very low-order beliefs and have little integrity. A belief lacking integrity may be very persuasive to a believer but it fails to persuade non-believers because it is probably internally inconsistent, as well as inconsistent with general experience, scientific facts, or reason itself.

Why should we not resuscitate this oft-maligned term, the victim of shoddy usage? As we embrace the isness and while abandoning or rejecting beliefs that do not suit, let us adopt an attitude of belief whereby we love what is. Because we are worthy to recognize beauty and truth where we find it, and respond with our sensitive acceptance of that quality.

The results could be unbelievable.

Consciousness is quantum

Consciousness is quantum. Experience is fractal.

Consciousness may be expressed as shifts between integral dimensions (1,2,3,4,5,6…) Thus it lends itself to talking about in terms of states in the same way as we talk about states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma. Consciousness has the property of resolving into a discrete categories of functioning and can take the identity of individual modules of consciousness (my consciousness, your consciousness, his consciousness, her conscoiusness). Individual means undivided: i.e., integral.

The fundamental property of “having” consciousness is that it one is alone in that self-contained field. The root of who we are is consciousness itself in its quantum state. However, when experiences begin to accrete to our identity, in the random and fractional quality of real numbers (3.14, 9.86, etc.), we adhere to the infinitely varied fractal patterns that occur in our individual lives. And the stories we tell about our lives often develop into infinite real number sequences: 3.14159265…, 9.86965056… and so on. These stories are not individual in the sense of integral consciousness states. Like fractals, their forms are extraordinarily complex and may seem random and chaotic on the surface. Chaos mathematics might restore some sense of underlying orderliness to the fabric of these stories, but essentially we are dealing with fractional dimensions when we enter the world of experience.

Nonfractal objects are things like lines, rectangles, cubes. We don’t experience life this way unless we abstract out these objects. The fractal object expresses life as we meet it: a constantly shifting, unpredictable, seemingly random territory inhabited by a multiplicity of selves (the components of psychological subjective reality).

When we ask who we are, we can only temporarily alight in the quantum. Quantum, nonfractal states do not appear to occur naturally. Those quantum integers are quickly grabbed by free-floating fractal functions and appropriated as coefficients to produce the infinite textures of our lives.

...And the gods made love

The most important event possible at this point in time is that our galaxy is brushing up against another galaxy. Think of that. What a powerful, thrilling moment this is in the life of our cosmos. And it's just starting to happen, perhaps here in the last few years, astronomers think. And we're here to bear witness to this very rare and amazing commingling of the giant godbeing forms that are living intelligences of the macrocosm. Really, they define what it is to be alive, and here are two of them actually touching. On this level, when you so much as touch another godbeing, a cosmic orgasm immediately begins. This is the energy level that we have the privilege and pleasure and fulfillment of learning to transmit. There is some measure of courage required, like plunging into a still lake on a cold October morning. But the resultant tingle will be beyond our dreams. Bring it on.

Letter from an ex-God

Hello. It's me again. You remember, your Almighty God who took early retirement awhile back. Call it a case of creative fatigue...when you create the Universe, after all, it can really make you tired! (That's a joke, as I didn't really create it, you know. God knows where it came from. No, strike that, he doesn't either.)

Anyway, I'm blogging to answer a few of your questions that arrived via a very determined young FedEx guy. It's touching to think that you remember me and highly encouraging that capitalism is still capable of free enterprise. So let's take the first question: Where am I? Okay, that's a very good question. The first thing you need to know that I am beyond the Universe. When I said I was hitting the road, I meant that I was leaving everything. How can I be beyond the Universe, you ask, when everywhere that is anywhere IS the Universe? The easiest way to explain this to you is to note first that this is a misconception: there are many universes (but I'm not in any of the others either). So what's left? Nowhere. That's it. I'm literally nowhere. If this answer doesn't satisfy, consider your own existence and your location in it. Where are you? (Don't give me a city, state, country, or planet—I'm talking about your absolute location, not with reference to any relative object.) Thus your location, whosoever you are, is 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0. (I give the eleven-dimensional vertex). That means that you, too, are nowhere. You just think you're somewhere. That's an illusion.

Okay, next question. Are you happy now even though you're not God anymore? Hmm. That was from a woman. Probably concerned about my emotional well-being. The answer is yes, but not even though, because. Think about it. You want to be Madonna? Michael Jackson? Or even Mick Jagger? I didn't think so. These people are as famous as I am, or was, and they've all had their challenges keeping their sanity with that degree of notoriety. To be honest, I'm happy hanging where I'm hanging and nobody can get to me, except, as it turns out, FedEx.

One more. Okay, I know some of you have been wondering this. Any chance I will come back? After all, the Who came back. Cream came back. Jesus came back...strike that, he didn't and for your information, he's not going to...The short answer is No. I'm not nostalgic for my divinity days. I'm cool without having to play that role. And you should be too. Be free! Be your own god!Be yourself! That's my inspirational message for today. Bye now!

Thumos

In his superb translation of Parmenides, Stanley Lombardo renders the first lines of the poem as follows:

The horses that take me to the ends of my mind
Were taking me now: the drivers had put me
on the road to the Goddess, the manifest Way
that leads the enlightened through every delusion.

The more literal Peter Kingsley in his wise and revelatory book Reality has it thus:

The mares that carry me as far as longing can reach rode on, once they had come and fetched me onto the legendary road of the divinity that carries the man who knows through the vast and dark unknown...

Lombardo admits that his is a radical translation. "Ends of my mind" instead of "longing" might seem a distortion of meaning. The Greek word usually translated as "longing" or "desire" is thumos. Lombardo explains that his version is meant to suggest "a unique inner experience, the encounter of one's mind with Being and the realization that they are the same." If translated as desire or longing, thumos would seem an activity of the lower mind rather than an insatiable drive for an ultimate encounter with the divine; it is essentially untranslatable.

I see this as a case where the literal translation is an essential gloss on the poetry. On thumos, Kingsley writes that it is "the energy of life itself. It's the raw presence in us that senses and feels; the massed power of our emotional being." So it is not merely desire in the materialist sense of wanting to possess or objectify. It is the fire of life that impels us to travel in consciousness.

It is easy to forget that it is the thumos in us that is running things. If it wants us to ride the wild horses to the end of the galaxy and plunge ourselves into the fiery heart of God, we will do so or die trying. And that is a good thing. The varied veils of human life are relentlessly being peeled away as we struggle, as a species, to climb out of our cradle endlessly rocking, and try so awkwardly to walk. Thumos will not let us sleep forever. It throws off the veil, takes us out of the mind, and takes us to the halls of the inner divinities whose have been waiting, silently, since time began for us to recognize them, so they may whisper to us one true thing at last.

It is time to study Parmenides and Empedocles and the other pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, because they represent the lost wellsprings of the Western tradition. Logic, analysis, and science proceeded from them. Yet what they were about had nothing to do with what we made of their gift. We have yet to plumb the true meaning of Parmenides' statement: "for to think and to be are one and the same."