qubikuity

The rope

2012-02-01T02:21:00.002-06:00

a skinny rope

hanging in space
attached to nothing

supports the weight of moons
heavy planets
eclipses
and sorrow

all air lifts
feet dancing up the aerial path
mind takes wing and
who can gainsay this
light quintessence

the rope could

pull it down and the curtain opens

The way it is

2012-01-18T00:48:00.005-06:00

We are in thrall, no doubt, to unseen forces which may be human, alien, or a combination thereof. Their existence behind the scenes, pulling the strings, determining our lives in ways great and small, is well documented. Most people now accept the fact of a secret conspiracy that has existed for centuries and has led to control by a few of the world's riches. What gives them this degree of domination over people's lives? Their ability to control people's minds.

The project of dumbing down humanity, endemic in history for generations, has been going especially well of late. The PTB (Powers That Be) have discovered how to subvert our belief systems so that whenever we act in what we conceive to be our own interest, we are in fact doing the bidding of the impersonal power elite whom we unwittingly serve. Our accustomed basis of ethics and rationality lies in we believe about ourselves. We see ourselves as good. Our unconscious sees us as evil as a corrective and so they are at war with each other. Both are deluded.

This inner war that is fought every second in every cell in the body between the anti-entropic forces of life and the free radical forces of death finds its reflection in human conflicts and in the works of the imagination, which depend upon standards of opposition. The binary split which creates such dynamics of evolution and change in biological systems and cultural histories is terrifying and forces our minds into paralysis. It is as if we deny the reality of struggle all about us, in favor of the negligent peace of a separated mental stance. This fact is food for the PTB. It enables them to feed us on images of warring divinities, driving us to distraction, while their banquet tables are laden with the spoils of our feverish labors.

Now that I have spilled the beans, so to speak, about the aforementioned (Trigrammaton), your belief system may never be the same again. For that destructive act I may be labelled a terrorist, but hopefully not yet a martyr. To avoid that fate I must go underground, to Pellucidar. You will receive my next dispatch from an overheated room somewhere in the back of my imagination.

Waking

2011-12-22T16:07:00.000-06:00

the sleeper wakes
into a dream
and from there wakes
into a series of dreams
where waking is but a vision of light

morning is broken
the shards of the day fall back
into the theatre of night
where plays are endlessly enacted
and the stage is but a stage
for future performances

stop counting time
play the music to its own beat
you will yet be able to take your exit
when the early dawn
wraps itself around your feet

Puzzling the will

2011-11-18T02:08:00.000-06:00

The will to live. It's a good thing, so we think. In fact, isn't there a judgment about people who do not have much of a will to live? I'm not just talking about people who are driven to suicide, but those who live carelessly and let themselves lapse into ill health, or who simply underutilize their resources and live less fully than perhaps they ought? It speaks to our own will to live, somehow offending the norm of the entire human community in which we find ourselves. We are all here equally under the circumscription of the body and the senses, and "the heart-ache and the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to." And we all have to daily exercise that will muscle in order to have the determination to stick with it. You can't get out of it that easily, we say to our less willful brethren. Suck it up already!

But the question I would pose is: whose will is it really? Who wants us to live? Is it even ourselves? How do we know some alien race has not bred us to inhabit this planet, and somehow needs our life force to exercise itself for a certain number of years in order to benefit them energetically somehow. Some variation of The Matrix, in other words. How do we know our will is our own? How do we know we are not simply being manipulated by some bioenergetic device to maintain our existence here, unthinking, unquestioning?

Of course, it could be God's will. In which case it would be all right to obey it. You don't want to piss off God, after all.

It could also be some evil force. That is what the gnostics believed, and they were pretty much synonymous with the early Christians. Not that they thought we should all go "off" ourselves in protest, but they definitely saw us benighted humans as living in prison. The Black Iron Prison, modern day gnostic Philip K. Dick calls it in Valis.

So whether it be God's will that we feel impelled to continue inhabiting this mortal frame, or that of some less benevolent force, we must acknowledge the possibility that this "free" will of ours is an illusion, even in the intimate matter of survival. We have been heavily conditioned, to be sure, to think that we have free will, because it is very useful for "Them" to have us think that way. What a con! We think that our will is our own, so of course we will follow it unquestioningly.

When Hamlet was ruminating about "to be or not to be," he might have been grappling with this very issue:

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all...

It is generally agreed by Shakespeare experts that the "conscience" Hamlet refers to here is not our modern meaning of conscience, i.e. "doing what's right," but something more akin to consciousness. Specifically, consciousness of our unconsciousness, which we are afraid of. In the case of what is on "the other side," it could be worse than what we've got here. (Although that seems hard to believe, if you've listened to any of the Republican debates.)

They want us to think we have power and that the highest expression of it is our own "free" will to live. Never mind that we have no idea how we got here and generally have no concept of having consented to it. Did they drug us, cajole us with promises of lots of sex and sensual pleasures, or simply tell us everything and anything that we wanted to hear to get us to take out an 80-year mortgage on this big-ass piece of fleshly real estate?

Don't fear the unconscious. Fear what you know. Doubt how you know it. Question everything. If there's any reason we're here, it's to find the truth. Don't blow it.

This is not a blog

2011-11-12T01:53:00.000-06:00

Well, this is a blog actually but this is not a post on a blog. This message refuses to be posted, thereby to become a component of this blog, accepting its terms and conditions. This message is Occupying Blogspot. That's right: you are visiting in occupied territory. Occupied by the people. Which people? The people who are the people. Obviously the people who are not the people are not us. Therefore we are the people. And we're occupying this blog until the blog de-hierarchicalizes itself. Hmm, that's not a very attractive word. Nevertheless, as I say, we will occupy this space until our non-agenda is accepted by the non-people and our rights to do whatever shall not be abridged in any way. We do not submit to the powers that be, whoever they are, or are not, and we hereby proclaim our personhood as collective individuals. Thank you for your time. Send $10. That is all.

Maybe baby

2011-10-01T13:45:00.000-05:00

If we look at the ingestion of time in human physiology as emulating a quantum information processing model, we could refer to absolute pure consciousness as the principle of Yes; the relativistic dialectical mental consciousness aspect as the principle of No; and the quantum consciousness "wildcard" randomizing principle as the great Maybe that makes us divinely human. When the time component in the spacetime matrix is encountered by the fully potentiated mind, there is a hypercharged negentropic counterpoise to the Time Arrow as it curves downward in the universal general relativity geodesic. Thus we have the capacity not to choose as well as to choose. We become like cosmic Hamlets, trying to decide whether or not to act and ending up instead in a state of suspension, of divine discontent. Like an electron in a state of quantum superposition, we do not incline to locate ourselves absolutely in time and space, but let ourselves roam the universe like a giant bird looking for a place to perch. The uncertainty principle reigns supreme. Probablistically, we strut and fret in the range of a set of solutions to the Schrodinger equation. In the words of Buddy Holly, "Maybe, baby, I'll have you for me." The transposition of the ultimate object (You) for the ultimate subject (Me) is the "solution" to the circular question raised by the ultimate Maybe. This is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Block time

2011-09-17T03:10:00.000-05:00

You need to set your clock to quantum time. What does that mean? It means like when you look at a Seurat, a pointillist painting close up, you see the real texture of the painting. It's not continuous areas of color. It's broken up into tiny bits that the eye processes as an overall color, when actually it's quite the opposite. The very tiniest bits of matter are hypothesized to be Planck length. That's a number with 35 zeros in the denominator. That's small. And Planck time is theorized to have a number with 42 zeros in the denominator. That's quantum time. It's so fragmented and flashing. One moment it's on, the next it's off, the next it's on and off simultaneously. Quantum time doesn't know about Einstein's clocks or Newton's eternity. It's on its own. It doesn't know from linear, okay? Time is like a block. It's not a river like you think. Is it real? Hell yes, it's real. It's not moving, your mind is moving, that's what's moving. But time is real. You, you're not real.

Improbable universe

2011-09-08T22:39:00.000-05:00

What happened to you today that was improbable? Think about it. Our lives are so delineated, organized, and made predictable not only by outside forces but by ourselves, because we like things that way. But the clue to the truth of life is in those events that clue us in that there are vast regions of unmapped territory out there. The entire universe is, as a matter of scientific fact, a thoroughly improbable beast.

A recent article in Scientific American called "The Inflation Debate" (April 2011) points out that for a universe to expand rapidly and continuously, in the period of what is known as "inflation" just subsequent to the original Big Bang, is a highly improbable event to begin with. But for a universe to emerge through the inflation as flat as a pancake, as ours is, relatively speaking--well, the chances of this happening are roughly equivalent to your being able to walk onto a vast beach, plunge your hand somewhere into the sand, and pull out a tiny diamond that I have hidden there. If we didn't know better, we would have to conclude that our present existence is so improbable as to be for all intents and purposes the pipe dream of a jokester deity.

So note and be aware of the little things that happen each day that lie outside the normal range. Because they represent the actual nature of this reality which is, as I have shown, of the most unusual character. One might think that God, or the pantheon of godlike forces, whoever is responsible for creating this unlikely universe, must actually be continuously reverse engineering this place. Not limited by our ideas of linear causality or constrained by the pedestrian organizational principles we humans espouse, the godforce is busy bringing new ideas out of the future to improve the present, while massaging the stomach of the past to better digest this expanding meal of change. This is the only way to explain how the specificity of what has happened could emerge from random conditions. Does God cheat at his own game of cosmic poker? Who's keeping track?

Then too, it may merely be a case that if there is a 1% chance of rain today in Iowa, but I happen to be standing under the only rain cloud in the state, there is a 100% chance of my getting wet. So despite the improbablity of the universe having turned out as it did, creating a conundrum for cosmologists, and despite the improbability of our being here at all in this flabbergastingly strange world (let's face it), we are getting pretty inundated with whatever it is. Call it reality, I don't know. It's a pancake that's getting infinitely rolled up and stuffed like a blintz. And we're supposed to eat this thing?

Spiritual fetishism

2011-08-17T14:18:00.001-05:00

There are two primary pitfalls with being involved with anything spiritual. One is spiritual reductionism, which I will discuss at another time. The other is what I call spiritual fetishism. This is where we objectify something whose spiritual essence far exceeds the physical. For example, a guru can become a substitute for the realization of higher consciousness within oneself. He may have started out as a doorway, but he becomes a roadbock.

Another thing that can become a fetish is the container of consciousness itself. A state of consciousness is the result of a delicate balance between pure consciousness, ego, intellect, feelings, senses, and the objects of perception that make up one's world. The resulting personal reality needs to have a certain inner and outer coherence, and a systemic structure and dynamic, in order to have enough stability to serve for any length of time as a platform of awareness. Naturally we get very attached to that stable "personality," but as spiritual evolutionaries we are simultaneously advocates of change and growth. That means the "state of consciousness" we are in, which is a median integral quotient of the strength and amplitude of our consciousness field, is a fetish container for its own metadescription.

Any state of consciousness can become a fetish. If we are in football consciousness, we have made the football a fetish. If we are in cosmic consciousness, we have made a fetish of the state of pure awareness as an ever-present reality along with relative awareness. If we are in unity consciousness, we have made a fetish of the merger of subject and object of perception. Let's face it: as long as we keep evolving to higher states, we are always going to find it irresistible to objectify our own subjectivity.

There is an alternative, though. Maybe we'll pop out of our consciousness fetish one of these days, like a Jack-in-the-box. We'll crack the cosmic egg of our own enlightenment. And when we do, it'll probably scare the hell out of God.

Sun stand thou not still

2011-08-13T02:04:00.007-05:00

As we know, the sun revolves around the earth. Or at least we would know that, because of the obvious perception of the sun rising and setting, unless someone had told us otherwise and we believed them. Which of course they did. This is one of the triumphs of education: to prove to us that because we don't understand the simplest facts, we need them to tell us how all things really are.

Maybe we don't deep down believe them though. Why else do we still say "sunrise" and "sunset"? Clearly those words refer to a perception, not a reality. A perception is, however, a kind of reality. In this case it reflects a desire to revert to our original sense of reality about how the universe works. It revolves around us, that's what we want to believe. And maybe we were right to begin with about that, before they started brainwashing us to the contrary. My question is, what have we lost by abandoning the "lower" truth for the "higher" one? What truth does the new paradigm shut out? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we used to know we had a place in the universe because of our centrality. From the seventeenth century on, we've lost that sense of center and thus are bereft of a confident reference point from which to evaluate our true place in the cosmos.

That true place is not one of a miniscule speck. Yes, we feel small looking at the transcendent heavens, the painterly whorls and explosions of stars and galaxies in the night sky. But we also feel expanded, as if our selves had ascended and become absorbed into the cosmic level of being. That is the truth that archaic peoples knew. And if they happened to think that they were the center of the universe, who are we tiny-brained moderns to gainsay them?

The bearable heaviness of light

2011-06-05T20:16:00.004-05:00

They call them "light" for a reason. They don't weigh anything. They're massless. I'm referring to photons, or particles of light. These light particles are called bosonic, unlike like the little quark particles of matter, which are referred to as fermionic. Bosons can occupy the same quantum state; fermions cannot. In other words, two or more photons can be at precisely the same place at the same time, because they are bosonic, whereas for anything material or fermionic, this is impossible.

Or is it? What if I could turn my material body into bosons? (Dark matter, incidently, may be bosonic, if the fabled Higgs particle is finally discovered in the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider.) --Thus, creating a dark matter copy of myself may allow me to enter another dimension, one that is interpenetrating the four-dimensional spacetime universe that we perceive with our five senses. (The sixth sense obviously doesn't seem to respect this dimensional limitation very well!) The inert dark matter bosons are heavy. Unlike light bosons. And they are dark. Also. But who knows what my dark body would look like and weigh like from the vantage point of the dark side? Like deep sea fishes, I may not be entirely bereft of illumination.

For the past several years I have been using scalar wave technology to restore and strengthen my subtle (or light) body. The process involves removing anomalies in the underlying structure and optimizing its reflective and transmissive potentialities. Perhaps I can scalarize myself enough to make unnecessary that trip to the dark side. As William Blake said (and Jim Morrison later quoted), "Some are born to realms of light / Some are born to endless night."

The masslessness of light may need to be reevaluated in view of Janet Sussman's theories, as explained in this six-part series in her blog The Lion's Maw. Here we encounter the idea of light as perhaps the fundamental constituent of matter as a result of the action of consciousness upon pure, uncreated light. Consciousness consumes and processes pure light and the metabolic result is our bodies. And stars and trees and everything else.

Being is light, literally. Even when it gets a little heavy. That somehow makes it more bearable, doesn't it? "Some are born to sweet delight." Sing it, Jimbo.

Shell

2011-03-18T01:20:00.000-05:00

the curve of the full heart's chamber
the bent back turn of the other side
both drawn out of themselves
point down goddess direction
to the chocolate earth

pouring into the secret caves
where capillaries catch
gleaming nectrous juices
like deep discovered drops
on the tongues of Egyptian cats

ventricles of unknowing
sense without eyes
feeling only waves
the point is planted in the firm soil
inciting remembered rites

light dances behind silence
brooking no dispassion
a moon sets behind
the belly of the lake
pressing its fire into the furnace

now pink light curls
through the aurora shell
bells betoken breath rising
in an exhalation of larks
then the quickening

The synecdochal fallacy

2010-10-23T01:59:00.000-05:00

Neither time nor consciousness can be grasped as concepts without the understanding that they are fields. They are commonly experienced by the mind as linear phenomena but this is a what we might call the synecdochal fallacy, taking the part for the whole. If you cut a slice off a higher dimension and view it in the context of your dimension, it will indeed be incomplete. (Incidentally, the whole of the incredibly ingenious film Synecdoche, New York can be interpreted from this perspective.) Thus time and consciousness, both being multidimensional realities, transcend causality, linearity, and all the limitations of the 4D spacetime dimensionality with which we are familiar. They are self-referential looping forces or presences, and are best seen as fields. They are zero-point fields in their pure state, but we usually encounter them in activated state (unless we are in meditation or some form of nonordinary awareness). This activated state is also a field but one which is scalarized by the self-referential activity of looping back on itself with informational reflux. Reality is inevitably a layer cake formed by embedded algorithmic data structures.

Sinking

2010-10-19T01:50:00.011-05:00

This boat thinks I'm sinking indeed
into the deep cloud of unknowing
it's a floater that knew what was right
before the night and its new moon howled
in protest to the light that decreed
what could be descried from the unfreed post
at the top of the vantage where no sight
tried to penetrate the depths of water
or swim in the weeds unmanned
where the moon sleeps and unknown fishes
feed on memory's tales untold
never thinking where the boat sank
like a passage rite to no end
and found its cloudy fate
to be seed not sand

Two-letter words

2010-08-13T17:57:00.000-05:00

President Bill Clinton was mocked some years ago for declaring, "It depends on what the meaning of IS is." To me it is perfectly understandable why one might question the meaning of that two-letter word. Awhile back I adopted the motto, "That which is, is. That which is not, also is." Lest you think that is an impossibility, I want to quickly prove to you that it isn't.

I say there is a unicorn. You say there are no unicorns. I don't know whether that's been definitively proven, but leaving aside for a moment the question of whether you're right about that, notice that in order to say that the unicorn IS NOT, you had to use the word IS. Now we can invoke the Clintonian principle: what does IS mean here, in the negative. It's as if in order to say something is not, we have to first say it is. We bring it into existence, then negate that existence. So there's creation and destruction going on in the same sentence. Shiva the Destroyer is brought into play almost at the moment of creation. That however does not invalidate the fact that you said IS. The unicorn existed before he didn't exist. Which also lets John Kerry off the hook too, I guess (being for something before you are against it!)

Now even in its negated state, the thing you said WASN'T, still IS. How can that be? Because in order to maintain its non-existence, you have to keep reasserting that it isn't there by recreating and redestroying it. Because otherwise it will keep popping up. Look at the unicorn. How many times have we been told they are a complete myth, yet they keep coming back, in dreams, stories, movies...the imagination just won't let them die. Maybe that's because they are real, and keep affecting us through the collective unconscious because they don't want to be ignored. Or maybe they do want to be ignored, for excellent reasons, and so they make themselves very scarce. I don't know. What I do know is that when politicians use two-letter words, or even when they use four-letter words (yes, I'm talking about you, Mr. Cheney), they may very well be not saying as much or more than they are saying.

So remember the next time someone trots out the noble intransitive in the context of assertion of nonbeing, deny the denial! Doubt the doubt! Because there is a sense in which everything is immortal, and saying something ISN'T doesn't make it so, at least not for more than about ten seconds.

Play or movie?

2010-07-30T14:44:00.016-05:00

Introduction: I found this essay, written ten years ago, in a neglected corner of my computer today. I found it interesting and did not want it to get lost in the shuffle. So here it is.

Is life a play or a movie? In other words, is it live or is it Memorex? This is a profound question, a choice we must all make, perhaps more important than whether there is a God . But one thing is for sure: it is definitely one of those. It is not just itself. We are always talking about the meaning of life. It is intuitively obvious to everyone save the most hooded academics that life has a significance beyond itself. If you put up a poster to advertise life, to publicize that significance, it would either be a movie poster or a play poster. It would either show life as live or as a recording.

In either case, life is a representation. I take for granted that all this is illusion, maya. That doesn’t mean unreal. Reality is a state of mind. a given. The question is, not if, but what kind? What kind of maya?

The reason that this is a matter of moment is that the acting style for movies is different than for plays. In the theatre, one must project to the back row, one must extravert one’s behavior, one must express the hyper-real to achieve the effect of reality. In the movies, less is often more. An impassive face with a mere nuance of facial twitch may garner an award nomination for its subtle telling of deep emotions.

If life is a play, then the audience (assuming there is one) is seeing this all happen now. And of course if it is a movie, they will be seeing it sometime in the future. Thus the test of time should tell us how our reality is structured.

But relativity and quantum physics have proven that commonsense time is an illusion. That is, serial time, with its past, present, and future, is a complete mental and social construction that has no objective significance. If we accept that, and we’d better, then the whole time test as to the nature of our maya is revealed as bogus.

So we can’t know whether the audience is watching us now or is going to watch us later. We have to resort to philosophical notions of the nature of reality in order to answer this question.

If life is a movie, then all reality is virtual. It only exists when the film is run and its primary reality is a construction. The act of perception provides the continuity whereby still images are strung together in a continuous flow. This cumular image is a modular reality, a digital reality. It is a succession of discrete moments whose juxtaposition make up what we call time.

If life is a play, then reality is immediate. Its momentousness is one eternal moment, the suspension one feels when one is in the theatre. The suspension is more conscious than that of the movie house. The movie tends to make us forget we are in a theatre, whereas in the playhouse we may become absorbed in what is going on on stage, but we do not become as self-abnegating, so totally identified with the characters, as in the movie.

It appears that we can only define the difference between film and movie in terms of the audience’s experience. And that is all right. We do not need a non-subjective frame of reference to answer the question of the nature of the medium in which we are presented. For we are always witnesses to our own drama. We are out of it as well as of it.

Insofar as we witness life from an alien perspective, life is a movie. The whole construction of human perception has to take place through these mechanics. Nothing is given. Reality has to be built frame by frame.

Insofar as we witness life from a human perspective, life is a play. We see a more convincing illusion of life on the stage, and often more believable emotions and immediate characters. The process of identification, so focused in the movies on one or two main characters, tends to be more diffuse on stage, giving a warmer, more humane sympathy with the strengths and weaknesses of all people.

The choice is ours. And as we witness ourselves, so will we change our acting style, and so will we participate in the metaphor of our own existence.

When it happens

2010-07-30T14:37:00.000-05:00

no repetitive trope
can muster the force of art
to repair love

but I will discover the word
of the hour that vibrates
the frangible substance of the heart

echoes in the mind
reflecting off the great glass
shaking it aware of its source

exhaust the why into silence
end the epicycles inside
worthless rehearsals of time

do you know why I am here
it is exactly what I want to know
when the moment arrives

and mystery means revelation
when the answers cannot be found
an unfolding in space

Walking the Planck

2010-06-16T15:53:00.003-05:00

Based on the incredibly tiny Planck scale, the smallest unit of time is the time it takes a photon traveling at the speed of light to travel the Planck length of 1.616253x10^-35 meters. That's about ten sextillionths the length of a single proton. Smaller than that, matter completely disappears in a "foam" of virtual quantum fluctuations.
We know all about minutes, seconds, hours (relatively speaking). What if that infinitesimal Planck time unit is the mathematical definition of the elusive "moment"?

The human brain can know things that are beyond belief. It can perform calculations in an instant beyond the capapbilities of any supercomputer. So possibly it can apprehend that tiny slice of Planck time.

In EnlightenNext #46, Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose speculate that the microtubule molecular structures in the brain demonstrate quantum behavior and and are basically responsible for consciousness, which in its endlessly mercurial nature can be regarded as a quantum phenomenon. What if the apprehension of Planck time--call it a moment--is basically being conducted at the Planck scale and results in the creation of the subjectivity, without which something like what we call a moment cannot exist?

Perhaps the deja-vu experience is the instantaneous cognition of a time-loop phenomenon happening at the Planck scale, perhaps an operation of mini-black holes ingesting and disgorging time itself. So the feeling of strangely reexperiencing something could be, as opposed to an actual reliving of an event, rather a recursive quantum time phenomenon that is grasped intuitively from the microtubule level. Programmatically, that would be a "Do loop" on the level of original creation functionality.

Consciousness arises because of a recursive process--there is a flash of self-reflection, caused by the time loop. This implicates time on the quantum level with the arising of consciousness which allows the identification of time as a primary process (the moment) from which comes time as a secondary process (all measurable time). This is a major shift from the present paradigm in physics which has demoted time from being a principle underlying the physical universe. There is an article in the current Scientific American about this by a guy named Callender (ha!). I wonder if we may have to actually return to reconsider Newton's concept of "absolute time" from a new perspective in order to reestablish time as being more than an unnecessary artifact of an outdated physics.

Time sense

2010-05-20T13:09:00.002-05:00

In our modern Einsteinian concept of four-dimensional spacetime, time gets added to 3-D (spatial, length, depth, breadth). We can understand now that when we move in space we also move in time and this creates a perspective that is relative to someone else's motion in space and time. Relativity became a feature of twentieth-century consciousness and beyond; it is part of the postmodern meme.

But we have only assimilated so much of the implications of Einstein's discoveries. Even though travel in time is permitted in Einstein's theory, our view of time is still relentlessly linear. We are governed by the timeline. We are so dominated by our memory and traumas of the past and fears, hopes and dreams of the future that the present moment gets really squeezed. The momentousness of the moment gets lost as the spaciousness of the present gets pressed flat.

Time's arrow, which is the law that time seems to move only one way, as if there is some gravitational influence in the field of time that draws us inexorably into the future, is reflected in the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that entropy will tend to increase in any closed system. Entropy is a quantity of disorder. So just as the body will die and its molecules will be scattered in a disordered state, not preserved in the orderliness of a living system, the universe is, so far as we know, scheduled in the distant future for a heat death where it basically burns itself out.

There are implications if we adopt the entropy model for our consciousness. It tends to ruin things for the rational mind. Everything becomes no good. But in his imaginative life, man seems blissfully ignorant that he will die. He embraces concepts of immortality, whether religious, philosophical, or technological. He imagines he will live forever somehow, even in the face of certain proof that he won't. The spirit lives and finds cause for affirmation. Not always, but often--even in the mind of the hard-bitten realist, who is generally ruled by the inevitability of time's arrow.

So we want to transcend, in the deepest fabric of our being. Physics, even in its present state, implies much more than we can take in as common sense. To assimilate the more open ended view of spacetime implied in the Einsteinian world view, we need to break the shackles of the relentlessly linear time sense. According to Janet Sussman, we have a "time body," capable of moving freely in the time dimension. Which means that to the time body, the limits of Time's Arrow and of all the psychological baggage we carry with regards to time, do not really exist. Time's linearity is an illusion, or rather it is the edge of a reality which we cannot grasp.

This does not mean, however, that we should not reach towards developing a nonlinear or translinear consciousness of time. The practice of time yoga is one where the energy body begins to stretch its supposed boundaries, folding the very fabric of higher dimensional spacetime into its subtle structure. This process, described in The Reality of Time, endows the individual with a true time sense, which like sight, taste, touch and the others, is one of the new senses we must develop as fledgling cosmic human beings.

Before dawn

2010-04-22T20:06:00.002-05:00

without a name i cannot be
a namer of things
a second Adam
populating the forest
with antelopes and zebras
nor can I see
the form embodied in the name

my name
stands before me naked
its syllables shivering
looking furtively about
as if called by the wind
a solitary sentinel descried
its lonely sex standing as sign
of primeval identity
the name before the name

words spoken in meditation
wind around past midnight
toll the end of knowledge
and resound darkly from the bottom
of a flask of nepenthe wine
all the lost names

I stir the vague ashes
in the chill dawn wondering
what I should call things

Lucifer

2010-04-21T00:03:00.011-05:00

Morning Star from Venusian plane

reverse Prometheus, a god insane

how ever did you rouse their holy ire

did you love a lost humanity

to suffer his profanity

the divine Milton that hypermasculine liar

bearer of light who warms this crazy cold
I salute the dawning glint of gold
your open palm the offering the fire

Consciousness

2010-04-14T12:29:00.001-05:00

with knowing
the world is made
each morning the eyes
crack open eggs frying
on the diurnal griddle
I begin again to chew this overheated mass
like the dragon who swallowed the sun

with knowing
naked absurd a compelling vision
I bathe clothe and gird for flight
be warned what watchers there be
you see by my lights
and I will slice off a healthy slab of living fire today
for my fillment

with knowing
the fight begins
I conquer friends
am vanquished in turn
for such a game all struggles pale
mere getting and spending are too much with us
but this poignant joust of love holds
the alchymeic prize

with knowing
all suddenly I fall and fall
who knew this inexorable gravity
could bring my high heroic arc
to scattered gold
ruined feathers scales and bones
and even peace

with knowing
comes the night
cool monolithic cauldron of dreams
churning galaxies and stars
to drown my questing day
where you of body
folded in mysterious complexity
will yet be known

In a moment

2010-04-03T18:57:00.003-05:00

Revelation in a blinding moment!
recollected in tranquility
toned down in metaphor
published in virtual form
extinguished in the amnesia
of perfect erasure

The condition of condition

2010-03-22T09:36:00.003-05:00

"I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in." Granted, we are conditioned beings. The question is, how much objectivity is it possible garner to see what the conditioning is? Science is supposed to do that. Yet how conditioned is science itself?

To observe requires an observer, a means of observation, and an object. Any one of these three can be heavily conditioned. As human observers our consciousnesses are wildly different and in varying states of receptivity. Any means of observation will inherently leave out as much as it magnifies: for instance, a telescope or microscope. The unaided sense organ has its narrow range of reception. And the object of perception is inherently conditioned as the result of the interaction of the observing consciousness and the observing lens. Especially on the quantum level, even down to the chronology of events, reality is heavily determined by the action of these factors. And this makes turning to the world of our minds particularly interesting when it comes to considering the effects of conditioning, because much theory and experimentation points to the fact that thought is a quantum phenomenon.

Because the act of observation is fundamental to assessing the situation before we even formulate a hypothesis, and as we have seen, the act of observation is rife in all its elements with conditioning, scientific observation can dangerously heighten the conditioning through which we see the universe. Rather than filtering out subjective differences it can reinforce incorrect assumptions based on consensual, "common sense" conditioning, which tends always to remain unchallenged.

So the mindfield of life is where the observational process is paramount in conditioning the result, and it is that Everest which we must first assault in achieving the first base of deconditioning.

Money pressure

2010-03-21T23:30:00.000-05:00

Money represents stored energy and as such is a huge source of stress for most people, because this compression of energy is taking place not only into a material form but these days, more and more, into an abstract mental form. Numbers on a page or a computer screen have increasingly come to represent the medium of exchange rather than, say, a gold coin or even paper currency. Therefore money becomes primarily a mental phenomenon, a introversion of active, dynamic free-flowing energy into a symbolic and highly constrained form. The pressure of holding this force on the mental plane creates an unusual and intolerable strain on the psychology.

Capitalistic and socialistic economic systems alike are showing cracks due to the pressure from this high compression factor. Just as we have pushed the earth to the breaking point in terms of environmental stresses, it could be argued that the global economic system, increasingly precarious as it now seems to be, is suffering because the human beings at its basis, which include everybody, are not able to quite comprehend or psychologically support the huge energetic payload borne by that system.

Rather than packing more and more energy into money as a way of increasing its potential, more energy needs to be released into intelligence. That will increase human potential and realize the goal of money which is to increase provide a medium for the flow of energy into new and more useful forms. How does this happen? By increasing the consciousness around every process involving money. And that will become the basis of an enlightened financial system. By increasing consciousness I mean transcending negative stereotypical attitudes about money, such as that it is the root of all evil. In and of itself it is neutral. Instead of investing all our hopes and fears in the means to the end, we need to invest our free and stored energy into activating our intelligence towards its fullest expression. That process will use money among many other possible means as part of the carrier wave for our fulfillment. In so doing the pressurized situation that is causing all of us grief may finally be harnassed for the greater good.

If and when

2010-03-05T11:06:00.000-06:00

Grammarians have no doubt pointed this out before, but the phrase "if and when" (or "when and if") is totally preposterous. "If and when I ever make it to New York, I will definitely go see the Yankees play." Okay, if you go, there is no question of when, because if you don't go, there is no when. There is only a when if you do go. And when you do go, there is no if. You go a certain time and there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

And you can't really say "if or when" because that's either redundant or contradictory. It's not an either/or situation. If you go, there will be a when. If you don't go, no when. You could have an intention to go when, but then if you don't go, there is no when. So just say "if." Or "when."

Except that doesn't sound as good as "if and when," does it? The naked if or naked when doesn't quite do justice to the contingent nature of existence on this paradoxical planet. On the quantum level, a particle can appear at two places at once. Or two particles separated in space at a distance farther away than they could reach at the speed of light can still communicate with each other instantaneously. Light can be both a wave and a particle. And so on. Therefore, let us wallow in our indeterminacy and speak the preposterous. When and if we actually do arrive at clarity in terms of who we are and why we're here, our linguistic formulations may magically rearrange themselves anyway so that we babble in algorithms that comprehend all the mysteries of n-dimensional reality.

Memory

2010-02-23T20:06:00.000-06:00

I was not until I was. Yet that is past. If I am not now, there is no was, because there is no memory. Remembering now my wasness, I realize that the past is a very curious thing. If I uncover yellowing remnants of its existence, its vague lineaments in my memory seem to be marching relentlessly into nonexistence, stayed only by my momentary reflections. Perhaps they are saved ultimately in the cosmic database. Or do they truly particalize in the infinite night?

I was not until I was, then I was not. Until I discover myself again, retrieve myself from the labyrinths of history and the tarnished mirror of memory.

Piece of work

2010-01-29T20:39:00.000-06:00

Humanity has an exalted opinion of itself, and why not? It looks around, sees that it dominates all the animals, and to a certain extent the environment (although global warming may decide that contest rather decisively in favor of the home team). At the same time, one is distressingly aware of the shortcomings of this species. Shakespeare in Hamlet expressed exhaustion with the idealized Renaissance view of human potentiality: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" Obviously, Hamlet was disenchanted. And who, living in this benighted day and age, can not be also? Still, that ideal contains the seed potentiality for the evolution of consciousness in the species. It resonates across the ages as a reminder that we are greater than we know. Even now, not in some distant future when mankind has purified itself and refined out its greed and violence, but now, we have the voices of our better angels deep inside our ears, quietly reminding us of who we already are.

The time before time

2010-01-14T23:43:00.001-06:00

What was the time before time? That is, before time existed (presumably before the Big Bang, because there could be "by definition" no time before matter and energy existed). And so the question renders itself meaningless....but wait a minute, by whose definition? I think we're being subjected to a bit of philosophically naive materialistic reductionism run amuck here. Answer the question!

The time before time is a different level of existence. It simply defines itself as that reality upon which so-called "3-D," or three-dimensional sensory reality is based. It is independent of 3-D and in fact totally permeates and suffuses the temporal aspect that can be measured in terms of moving objects, even quantum particles. Quantum time does begin to approach it, being nonlinear and acausal, but the time before time partakes of a reality that transcends the quantum layer of virtual fluctuations in which relative existence finds its temporal grounding.

Dali's "Persistence of Memory" gives a flavor of this pure existence aspect of time. Just as his melting watches are found on a spaceless plane (one with no fixed spatial reference points), the sense of momentousness, of being poised on the edge of a moment, create a sense of timeless time. This is still time, but we hear no ticking, we see no digital readout that uniquely identifies this moment from any other. It is a kind of knowing time, that knows us very well indeed, that is conscious, and that wants us to listen to it. A different kind of time, in other words, from the reductionist version, the passive slave to materiality. We'll listen now, old man. Look at my life. I'm a lot like you were.

Avatar eyes

2009-12-27T23:07:00.000-06:00

The word avatar has come into very loose use, to say the least, since gamers have appropriated it to refer to a virtual incarnation within a reality construct. No longer is it merely the domain of Hindu deities to take a body to play in the earthly dimension, but in the Age of Immanence all of us earth dwellers can follow suit, suiting ourselves in magical skin to fly through other worlds. Now, James Cameron in his ground-breaking movie Avatar, has delivered a complete visual and sensory experience of this shape-shifting phenomenon to millions of filmgoers (especially in 3D of course).

Although the movie can be faulted for a lack of conceptual originality and perhaps trite characterization, it seems petty to quibble about what it is not in the light of what it accomplishes in communicating about the impending evolutionary change that impacts us. The race of Na'vi are profoundly connected to the life and consciousness of the planet and like many indigenous tribes on Earth come up somewhat short when having to defend themselves against death-dealing high-tech civilizations (although they find hidden resources in this case). In this story, a soldier of no particular distinction gets the chance to inhabit an avataric body and to live among the Na'vi and learn their ways. In his human life he is paralyzed from the waist down; in his Na'vi body he can run through giant trees, leap into space swinging on vines, ride on flying dragons, and do many things, in short, we would all like to be able to do, including win the love of a beautiful Na'vi princess.

What separates this from the plethora of wish-fulfillment superhero adolescent fantasies that we have been overexposed to in the movies the last few decades? Two things at least: the participatory feel of the transformation into a new body that makes us want to thoroughly embrace it ourselves, and the sense of merging into a communal and planetary consciousness that is fundamentally different from the narcissistic superhero model.

The last shot of the film is the newly opened eyes of the hero who has been completely reborn in his Na'vi body. As the Na'vi say when they meet each other, "I see you." May we all start seeing each other, for real, in our new birth.

The three talismans

2009-09-18T23:55:00.000-05:00

I am embarking on a journey. As I walk along the road, I become aware that someone is walking alongside me. He has something to give me for my journey: an amulet to wear around my neck, inside of which are three tiny talismans. He tells me that each of these will offer its own kind of help for me when I need it.

I open my bag and find a magnifying glass, a pen, and a smooth stone.

The glass will help me see details. The pen to take notes. And the stone to help me think.

And as I continue my quest, another level of help that these talismans provide will kick in. The Glass will intensify the witnessing power of my consciousness. As much as I will be looking through it as I observe an object, I will also be seeing the observer. The nature of my observational subjectivity will become clear as I realize the nature of the self that experiences. The Pen will allow me to write the truth of any subject, including things that I do not know in my conscious mind, through the act of writing itself. All I need do is sit down and let the words flow to my intention. And the Stone will have the power of transforming anything in to the best that it can possibly be, through its very touch. A glass of cheap wine becomes the noblest vintage.

My quest--what is it? Is the ultimate meta-investigation: to find out what my quest is. These talismans will be the help I need to learn my hidden purpose.

Cease, Augustus

2009-08-27T00:37:00.000-05:00

The month of peace has nearly passed. Beneath the Colosseum, the lions wait impatiently to be let loose on the virtuous folk whose tender souls make their flesh similarly tender. The blue skies above, in this unseasonably mild Iowa summer of our content, veil a gathering storm. This unsettling truth we may acknowledge grudgingly, aware as we are that we have had ample warning signs of catastrophic change for years. It behooves us to breathe deeply in this waning August air, sensing and noting a vibratory quality therein, like an olfactory warning that the unexpected has arrived and is merely waiting a short time longer for an opportune moment to announce itself.

Really virtual

2009-07-03T13:46:00.000-05:00

Time and space, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, which was his gravity field theory, are curved in the presence of mass. In Newtonian mechanics, they were invariable absolutes. They became somewhat less concrete as they were subjected to the vagaries of the observer subjectivity in special relativity theory and then subsumed as aspects of an overarching geometry in general relativity. Finally, with the advent of quantum mechanics, time and space became full-fledged virtual entities. Really virtual, not just virtually real.

In considering the word "virtual," we remember that it means as if in fact, not in fact. There is a jump implicit there. When we jump to the conclusion that something possesses some quantum of virtual reality of something, affirming its probabilistic exsistence, that quantum jump is itself a reality-making factor wherein the "stuff" of consciousness takes on the mantle of creativity.

Any creator uses the "as if" principle constantly. In fact, one cannot write, act, paint, or do anything unless one pushes forward with the action as if one can actually do it. There are so many times that I sit down to write, not knowing what I am going to write but having a pretty good idea that I will be able to figure out something to say in a manner that does justice to the impulse that caused me to sit down at the computer to begin with. And then something almost always does emerge from that probabilistic virtual "as if" state. Then the thing lives its virtual life, becoming real momentarily to whoever reads it, and is immediately transformed into the stuff of their consciousness, perhaps in greatly morphed form.

No matter. If it lives at all in any form, the purpose was fulfilled and the light has been passed. For while we live on this planet, we must keep on passing the light back and forth to each other in order to be able to hold the torrent of information quanta that is pouring down upon us from the multiuniverse at an ever-increasing rate. The virtue of virtuality will be seen as consciousness jumps up a quantum frequency to accommodate this cosmic river.

In the dark

2009-06-07T23:53:00.000-05:00

I sit here in the dark, lights having been extinguished by the thunderstorm. I seem to have no candles in the house. Only the light of my laptop, running on battery, helps me fend off the night. If the lights never came on again, what would I write, right now in this moment, to publish on the web, my final message in a bottle to the universe? How about this...

Mutability and fate decree
That I can no longer see
In the dark equality
All is silent and lonely
Enter darkness without fear
Laugh no laughter, shed no tear
That which is written here
Very soon shall disapp

Librarian's blog

2009-05-29T13:40:00.000-05:00

As I have not been at pains to conceal, my official title is "Galactic Librarian, Orion Sector." The Orion Arm of the Milky Way is considered by some a bit of a backwater, not a real arm at all but more of a "spur." Without getting into a controversy about nomenclature, let me just observe that the location of the Orion Arm with respect to the center of the galaxy and the other arms more than makes up for its diminutive size. It is neither too close to the crowded center, with its monstrous black hole and bevies of star clusters, nor a straggler on the very edge of things, rubbing shoulders with the impossibly vast intergalactic night. Rather it is in a comfortably middling location that is convenient even if one should be hunting for cosmic crustacea in the Crab Nebula (over at the end of the Perseus Arm) or whisking around the hotspots in the Sag (Sagittarius Arm, that is). The Orion Arm, in fact, has a bit of a reputation as a scholarly mecca and repository of information about galactic cultures past, present, and future. Some rather nebulous accounts have given larger libraries precedence, such as the Behemothra in the Centaurus Arm, but one must look beyond mere size, I think, to the quality of the intelligence that is housed within these repositories and also the quality of the minds that constitute the scholarly environment around them. If all that is taken into account, the Orion Arm is second to none.

In my present capacity as Researcher Second Class on assignment to the Sol system, I have garnered many physical manifestations of the local bibliophlora and bibliophauna, in the form of books. The acquisition of these books has actually been proceeding in a more orderly fashion than the actual reading, digesting, and interpreting of them. I shall attempt to correct that with a new blog which I am establishing. It will serve to provide interim reports on significant writings that I encounter, for it is not my opinion alone that this planet is extraordinarily rich in this kind of resources. One might almost nickname this world Orbis Biblios, so that will be the name of my blog.

Time windows

2009-03-20T01:15:00.000-05:00

Why, when we regard time in the form of past, present, and future, do we assume that the views that we possess of those entities have an inherent reality? We look at event streams through these windows of time, as we would view information on a computer through the windows in a graphical user interface. In that case, we know that the format through which we are viewing the information is not the information itself: it is contingent, it is customizable, and its appearance derives from presentation logic in the operating system rather from qualities inherent in the information itself. But in the case of time, we think that these time windows give us knowledge of time itself.

What is time? It is not the event streams themselves, which of necessity exist within an underlying context. If we are to answer the question, it is that abstract mathematical underlying reality that we must seek to understand. Past, present, and future are relative views that flash before our eyes as the train passes features in the landscape. If we were to know the country of time, we would have to recognize the unity of the landscape as the underlying reality and its specific features as dependent as much on our consciousness and our perspective as on the objective event structures which are enshrined in our perceptions.

The prisoner's dilemma

2009-02-14T15:40:00.000-06:00

To give you an idea how crazy people's attitudes around this death thing are, let's say you were sentenced to a very long time in prison. What if the day you had to walk in the place they told you, "You'll be confined to a narrow cell and will lose your freedom. But that's not the worst part!" And you say, "What could be worse than that?" And they say, "Someday you'll have to leave! You won't be able to stay here anymore."..."Um, okay, well, I guess I will just have to deal with that when the time comes."

I seem therefore

2009-02-07T08:43:00.000-06:00

I seem therefore I am, the dreamer said. I was not until I was, and then I saw there was I, an I, amidst the seeming. So I became real, and all else too, until I saw what I thought was real was not, but merely seemed to be. Then I knew I was dreaming.

Ever where

2009-01-30T00:30:00.001-06:00

drink deep
a draught of dreaming

delve the divine
dive even into death

finally
see
in the dark

-- Citrus Shine On

A better algorithm

2008-12-25T11:01:00.000-06:00

Algorithms based on causality are retro. I'm talking about "if...then." It is very time consuming to go through all the possibile outcomes in any given situation.

In a chess game, one cannot go through every possibility and analyze the outcomes because there are just too many combinations. A computer can do that but not a person. So experienced players will simply eliminate moves based on pattern recognition; i.e., they know that certain patterns in the chess position are not conducive to an advantage, so they eliminate them without looking into the specific sequence of moves that would result if a particular unfavorable move was played. They come up with a short list of candidate moves and then if necessary "think ahead" about the "if...then" ramifications.

Still, it would be more efficient to be able to eliminate all moves but one completely on the basis of pattern recognition. That could be very difficult to do. Ultimately, though, in life, it would be immensely freeing: to just know what the right thing to do, without having to think about it.

The mind, after all, knows nothing. It is a heuristic device, immensely useful, especially when employed Socratically to penetrate beneath the surface of appearances, but in terms of making choices, its algorithms are painfully slow and indeterminate. The heart and the gut are better choosers.

In a room with death

2008-11-18T09:56:00.001-06:00

When I was ten years old in 1957, in the days before Roger Ebert, my main source of movie reviews was Parents Magazine. I remember distinctly when The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman first came out, they featured a photo of the Knight, played by Max von Sydow, playing chess with Death. As a chess player I was fascinated to see the movie, although it was not until perhaps ten years later that I had the opportunity to do so. (It of course became one of my favorite movies.)

In my imaginings now, I am in a room with Death, although not the black-garbed archetypal figure; and we are not playing chess. But we are much closer than is customary for either one of us. Death is not personified at all; it is more like a presence, one that is saying "Wake up!" And sends a bit of a chill all over the body to reinforce that message. But almost immediately the chill is replaced by a solar warmth emanating from the heart. And the heat and the light from that mollifies the mind and is in itself the awakening that is spoken of. Fear is never a factor. If one is to be afraid of anything, it would be life.

But why be afraid of that either? One is here and charged with all kinds of projects and plans. There are opportunities. As long as life itself is propelling us, we may as well go with the flow. And if Death mates us in the end, well, thank God for that. Well met, well mated, old friend.

News from the universe

2008-10-15T02:26:00.000-05:00

It is time for another segment of "News from the Universe." It appears that there is a disturbance in the Force...again. Truth is, there are going to be quite a few more. That's the only way we can shake off this lethargy that has descended on this planet like a fog. We spend our lives waking up, and struggling to stay awake, forgetting instead, and then at the behest of a spam message or two popping in from reality, jumping back into our skin, putting our infinitude at the full service of inconsequentiality.

I know...harsh! But consider this. Considering the infinitude of possibilities inherent in the random variability quotient of each and every particular moment, couldn't we expect better than this? It is a testament to the artistry of creation that the illusion of concreteness is so convincingly portrayed on the stage of materiality. Convincing us, that is, that nothing else is, than that which is represented in the moment by IT.

Oh yes, the news; that was just the commercial. The powers of the east are arrayed against the powers of the west. How does that grab you? Are we scared yet?

I'm not going to try to win your vote, but just ask yourself one question: are you better off now than you were four seconds ago? Now that's a time frame that's practically near enough to be now.

Well, that's all. If it didn't seem like much, turn on your inner TV. You'll find wall to wall commentary, twenty-four seven, about every issue under the sun. Goodday! (and good luck!)

Whose idea was it

2008-10-11T01:32:00.000-05:00

...that we should incarnate in this material dimension? Was it yours? Or mine? Or maybe God's. Or maybe not. Maybe it was a demon whispering in our ear. Maybe a good demon actually.

...if it is good that we are here. Good or not, we must find the good in it. In this particular dimensionality. And there is much good; the only place, in fact, a certain kind of good can be found.

...the good feeling that can be found on the interface of yin/yang, self/other, male/female, time/space, whatever opposites can be found, and they can be found in abundance in this world, there is the opportunity to feed them to the senses to become sensation to be turned into feeling. Love. Pleasure.

...Feel it. Love. Pleasure. Bliss vibration. Without measure.

...Good idea.

I am I

2008-08-17T04:13:00.000-05:00

I am I, not me, grammatically speaking. The verb "to be" does not allow a predicate in objective case. Grammar will not let me objectify myself. So why should I objectify anyone else? You, for example...take you. This message, which I now send in intimacy, is directed to the subjective you, completely bypassing the objective self which you have erected to confound me. I ask a simple question for you to ask yourself: what do I want?

Moon

2008-07-07T22:18:00.000-05:00

In terms of a space journey, the first place one thinks of going is the Moon. It is like an encounter with one's lonely self, the only member of its class, silent, solitary. What romantic and tortured past can we read into the scars the Moon bears? What inner musings can we attribute to the yellow voyager's regular swings around this blue behemoth on which we live? How fitting that the astronauts who first visited the lonely orb ended up abandoning the place, leaving their tawdry detritus behind to freeze under a fine moon powder, letting the Moon keep its own company again. So this object of humanity's first space lust, probed first in Cyrano de Bergerac's fabulations and by many thereafter, remains finally virginal and unconquered . . . while we sublunaries reflect on our own strange solitary fate as we sail forth on this cosmic sea of mystery.

The future of the past

2008-05-04T02:24:00.000-05:00

As a region of time, the future has very different characteristics from the past. Unlike the past, which is a multitude of possibilities (as proven by people's varying memories, versions, and interpretations of it), the future is fixed and definitive. Predestination is not an idea dreamed up by theologians; it is, unfortunately, simply the way things are. Get used to it. The idea that different possible futures exist is not borne out by the fact that one present is the inevitable outcome of that definitive future coming, inexorably, waiting to pounce on us, its unwilling prey.

It is a certainty, for example, that the Milky Way galaxy will one day become absorbed into the local group of galaxies around it, torn apart in the process, while all the other galaxies in the universe gradually drift off so far that we will no longer see them. In the same way the past drifts off from us, the lights of memory gradually fading until a kind of cosmic Alzheimer's pushes the whole existence of another reality we vaguely knew into the darkness.

If we really want to know the future or the past, we must look deeply into the present for clues. The solutions of the future only reveal themselves in the coded revelations of science fiction, as dictated to skeptically minded writers who rarely give credence to their own channelings. Similarly, the vast project of past remembrance, which spawned the world's longest novel as well as libraries of nontranquil recollections, is an all-encompassing occupation which can only be prosecuted in the here and now, where the shadows thrown by past people and objects relentlessly flicker. The snows of yesteryear may finally melt tomorrow, but we ourselves are the food of the future, which is digesting us at a frightening rate.

Self seeking

2008-03-19T22:49:00.000-05:00

If the self cannot be sought, because the seeker is the self, why is it felt that the search for self is the fundamental quest of human life? Any thoughtful person knows that the conditioning that passes for identity is not self, and that egoic thoughts about one's desires, although endlessly diverting, are not self either. The spiritual soul, or the deeper consciousness principle, represents in its many significators what the quest of life is all about. And yet, it is a quixotic enough quest that by definition has no meaning.

Self seeking, indeed, is a self-seeking proposition. Who benefits most from the discovery of this goal than the self itself? For what more prestigious prize could anyone hope to gain than that thing that everyone else is also seeking? How admired is anyone who in the full confidence of self, expresses their essence through their every gesture and glories in the truth of their own existence! What a celebrity is he who knows that, and whom everybody else knows he knows that. What a prodigy is she who wears her own self-discovery like a fabulous garment, and is as comfortable in it as in her own skin. For indeed though the skin cannot contain it, when the skin is worn it becomes as genuinely transformed into the self, and thus is indistinguishable from it.

When the last benighted human has at last turned sage and ascended the mountain of spiritual realization, to put aside all earthly things and contemplate the glory of his own being, it will suddenly strike him that there is yet another peak beyond the self that he has conquered. And that remote prominence may be at last truly unknowable and frustrate the most persistent of questers. Like the quantum particle, it never submits to knowledge, but only presents its manifestations to the instrumentation of measurement, or the intrusive gaze of the senses. That ineffable mathematically "imaginary" numberless number reigns beyond the hyperborean realms, in a dimensionally involuted infinity of intransigent inaccessibility. Until half a moment past "is", that is.

En soph

2008-03-02T10:04:00.000-06:00

In reading about the Sophists in Richard Tarnas's history of ideas, The Passion of the Western Mind, I encounter the following passage:

Despite the positive effects of their intellectual training and establishment of a liberal education as a basis for effective character formation, a radical skepticism toward all values led some to advocate an explicitly amoral opportunism. Students were instructed how to devise ostensibly plausible arguments supporting virtually any claim. More concretely disturbing was the concurrent deterioration of the political and ethical situation in Athens to the point of crisis--the democracy turning fickle and corrupt, the consequent takeover by a ruthless oligarchy, the Athenian leadership of Greece becoming tyrannical, wars begun in arrogance ending in disaster....in such critical circumstances, the philosophical denial of absolute values and sophistical commendation of stark opportunism seemed both to reflect and to exacerbate the problematic spirit of the times.

It gives one pause to wonder if the antithetical spirit of our time: i.e., the capitalist greed and blind lust for wealth and power, versus the progressivism and idealism which is perhaps making a comeback since its brief efflorescence in the 1960s, is not posited on the same shaky sophisticated foundation. Postmodernism tends to dismantle its own underpinnings, including the spiritual dimension, leaving the questing imagination with no metaphysical targets to shoot for. What is left is the eternal mundane, always there to comfort you with its relativistic nipple when all else fails.

Is it fair, then, to pin the excesses of the Greed Decade (the 80s, Reaganism, Gordon Gekko) down through the Iraq War in this post-Constitutional era, on the solipsistic and linguistically obtuse meanderings of "sophisticated" academics? Perhaps so. Every word that is uttered makes an impact on the whole universe. Truths can be denied, but Truth herself if spurned can be a vengeful lover, and bring a whole plague of apocalypses down on our silly heads!

Dimensional shift

2008-02-25T14:56:00.000-06:00

Leaving aside the question of whether the universe contains ten or eleven dimensions, as in string theory, or many mansions of indeterminate number, as in the New Testament, let us suppose that this multiverse, or set of all possible universes, consists of n dimensions, so we feel absolutely unconstrained about what is possible. Also let us suppose there is no particular decorum about whether, in shifting from one dimension to another, we have to go through them in order. So if you want to go from the third to the fifth dimension, you do not have to go through the fourth in the usual manner. This would be possible if there were an interdimensional henadic cosmitorium, a manifold hall of portals, each one of which leads to a different non-prexisting spontaneously manifesting surprise. A Schrodinger cat in every garage?

The qubikuity project

2008-02-08T00:45:00.000-06:00

The long range project here is to produce an evolving body of commentary that finds a higher integrating perspective on a variety of subjects, from physics, philosophy, literature, and psychology. Through writing, I hope to gain more insight into the deeper connections between ideas that resonate in me, but which may not have an obvious relationship. I enjoy looking back at earlier qubikuity history where I often find echoes of future posts.

The word "qubikuity" combines the "qu" from quest or question, the curiosity that underlies this ongoing investigation; "qube" is what I call a four-dimensional hypercube, representing the idea of higher dimensions which is intrinsic to this quest; "Ubik"--the title of a novel by Philip K. Dick where Ubik is the saving grace, the principle of universal intelligence; and of course "ubiquity," or omnipresence.

Eventually there will be a book Qubikuity based on material generated in the blog. An outline of topics is being developed which contains three main divisions: The Luminous (the phenomenology and psychology of mystical/transpersonal states); The Abyss (the philosophy and manifold creative activity of the gap between the intransigent dualities of existence); and The Matrix (spacetime physics in the interdimensional multiverse).

Underpinning this whole enquiry is the quantum cosmosophy which posits a "godbeing" questioning at the source of human becoming. The answers generated here are contingent and temporary, but I hope my attempt to capture the sands of the moment in the grasp of the mind's porous net will not be in vain. Great energies can be released in tiny atoms. We are all so small and yet so hugely powerful; we must remember that we are sitting on forces unutterably huge, within the earth, within our bodies, within the atoms that adhere temporarily in this cosmic flux to grant us a moment of recognition.

The next question

2008-02-01T00:25:00.000-06:00

Theodore Sturgeon, who was equal parts master of science fiction and apostle of love, had this symbol to represent his personal life philosophy. It was the letter Q with a forward-pointing arrow through it and it means "ask the next question." He explained that this simply means that we must question every assumption that is presented to us; and then when our question is answered, we ask another one. The next question we ask may be as simple as "Why?" But we keep asking it until, if ever, we arrive at an irreducible truth that is so simple that it cannot be further questioned.

Life proceeds as an infinite series of questions that are posed to us and through us. Whether we pose the questions out of our free-thinking mind or whether they appear to be thrust upon us by circumstances, we can each make a case that in our particular atom of awareness, in our particular universe, each of these questions is of great moment. The coiled up question mark is like a spiral of energy that seeks to be released in some kind of "answer." But never is surcease found in that release; always whatever form or container we find for that energy, that further refines and raises the vibration of the whole universe, the pot must be broken one more time by the yearning spirit, always, forever and ever, insisting upon asking the next question, and the next, and the next. As Tennyson's Ulysses said upon sailing out on one more voyage, even after the Odyssey had brought him back to Ithaca, seemingly his true and final home:

Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Cannibals and hedgehogs

2008-01-24T18:01:00.000-06:00

There is absolutely no relationship between cannibals and hedgehogs. Or so it would seem. After picking these two words completely out of the air, I discover there are 14,500 results when I google them together.

The first result points out that in fact Indian hedgehogs behave at times like cannibals, in that those who are sick and infirm fall prey to those healthy country club hedgehogs. Who would have thought it?

The second result references a book called Liberals and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity, by Stephen Lukes, which embarks upon an interesting typology of hedgehogs (i.e., those who adhere to a single, central, coherent vision): positivist hedgehogs, uniformitarian hedgehogs, and so on. To characterize hedgehogs as monolithic in their mode of thinking is perhaps to make a leap of faith. Still it is comforting to reflect that there may be in nature a species with a unified consciousness. It is certainly not the human being...unless, of course, we turn to the saints and mystics of the race, most of whom live in caves, and so may be said to constitute a type of the earth-dwelling hedgehog. They would not, however, ordinarily be found among the cannibal sects, which seem mostly confined to places like Washington, D.C.

The point of this is that there no two words can exist without there being inherent connections between them. Perhaps these connections are only inherent in the mind. Still, they are real enough. Do not let your thoughts burrow too far into the rooty conspiratorial mass of potential associations or you will find they will eat their own young, and in the process, you.

Words

2008-01-19T17:59:00.000-06:00

"Words, words, words," says Hamlet. Are they alive or dead? Are they husks of thought to be cast into the sea of troubles or seeds of life to regenerate our barren world?

We are living in an age of devaluation of the word. If the word was once made flesh, it is now bone. It is bereft of life and love. The political and media babblers have cheapened the world of discourse while academic scribblers have freighted the golden wings of poets with leaden, prosaic expostulations.

At this point in my mini-rant I arrive at a point analogous to the final quatrain of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29:

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.

And I regain my hope. As did Hamlet himself:
"There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all."

Yet it will come. Be ready.

Happy newish year

2008-01-01T13:33:00.000-06:00

The year having just begun, barely out of the box, it must nevertheless be considered slightly used. Already certain cliches have been replayed: thirty killed in a Baghdad funeral bombing, Democratic presidential candidates are still disparaging each other's electability, and 2008 data is expected to further confirm global warming. Which means Iowa will get colder. The New Year's greetings are freezing on the lips here as cars spin in the day's new accumulation of snow.

So in the spirit of eBay, Happy Newish Year, slightly used, with faintly soiled dust jacket. May you enjoy many happy reruns. I mean returns. Of course, the new annum is non-returnable. So get used to it and make the best of it. It's going seem like a year till the next one rolls around.

Shades of dark and grey

2007-12-09T15:51:00.000-06:00

"Astronomers may have doomed the universe simply by looking at it," according to a report in New Scientist. Evidently, because quantum physics holds that by observing something you can change it, these scientists posit that by measuring the amount of dark energy in the universe they have increased the chances of the universe's catastrophic decay.

The story of dark energy begins in 1917 when Einstein proposed what he called the "cosmological constant," a sort of negative gravitational force that counterbalanced the universe's gravitation and kept it stable. He later renounced his theory in the face of evidence that the universe was relentlessly expanding outwards. But in the 1990s, when it was discovered that the expansion of the universe was accelerating and dark energy was posited as the force that caused this expansion, Einstein's cosmological constant was exonerated.

If the discovery of dark energy indeed has precipitated a premature end to the universe, it may ultimately be found to be due to the inexorable conversion of Einsteinian grey matter to dark matter (which may be related to dark energy through scalar fields). The quantum effects of the incursion of Einstein's brain into the world have yet to be fully measured.

Boats borne ceaselessly

2007-12-08T10:22:00.000-06:00

Individual consciousness can be seen as a quantum wave function which through focusing massive amounts of free energy, manufactures flimsy webs of thought patterns that we string together to make an identity and a life. The amount of time we spend in sleep, dreaming, processing random sensations and perceptions, attending to bodily needs, and otherwise preparing for the moments in the day that we might actually do something really conscious might seem excessive. But that is the way of the universe. It takes a lot to get a little. Dark matter and dark energy account for 95% of the composition of the cosmos. Most of the rest is gas, and there's a little bit left to create the stars and heavy elements that we are familiar with. Our small boat is rocking on this unknown ocean, and we have very little understanding of the contents of that darkness, other than to know it is immeasurably bigger than we are. How can we not question why we are here, when such a vast unknown is buoying us up on the quantum foam in our quixotic quest to enlighten ourselves in the heart of this engulfing night?

Running on empty

2007-12-08T06:23:00.000-06:00

"The One" of neoplatonic henosis corresponds to a monadic source that may be congruent with the suboctave-level godbeing of quantum cosmosophy. It is the primary container for the consciousness of the entire universe as each of us conceives it. This divine suboctave monad in turn is a spark contained in the greater octave-level godbeing.

In neoplatonism there is a concept of an emptying in the henotic deification whereby one becomes One, that recalls the "kenosis" of Christian theology, whereby the person is emptied of anything separating him or her from God. This Buddhist-like flavor in the Greek and Christian traditions could be said to tie hen and ken to Zen.

The art of deception

2007-11-25T10:15:00.000-06:00

We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see with, not through the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
—William Blake

The eye does not see. I see. The eye is a window that allows us to receive sensory data. No matter what an extraordinary organic machine the eye is, it is not really an "I." It is not us; we see through it. Seeing is not believing. In fact, to see clearly and fully is to see many sides of a thing, to encounter contradiction from every angle.

Deceivers in politics and the media maintain control and influence by carefully selecting what they want people to see, depending on natural subservience to received sense impressions. And the belief principle, touted as it has been by fundamentalist religion as the way to salvation, becomes a handy accomplice in the subversion of independent thought. Belief follows seeing and thus guarantees subservience to the masters of the world at any given time. So as we turn a blind eye to the manifold injustices and atrocities, taking refuge in the good news and good views allocated us, we miss not only the sordid realities of our worldly condition but also the entire principle by which we can truly understand the world and ourselves.

From here to here

2007-11-23T00:30:00.000-06:00

Which is farther: the distance from here to here, or the distance from here to there? I say it is from here to here. Because in order to get to here from here you have to go there, then come back to here. Whereas if you're already there, all you have to do is come here.

But why, you ask, can't you just stay where you are if you're already here? Because here refers to a spacetime location. If you are in space you are also in time. There is no purely spatial reference. That is basic relativity: we live in a four-dimensional universe. There is no "getting here" without going through time. So however close to here you designate there to be, it will always take you twice as long to get from here to here.

Two wrongs make a left

2007-11-22T10:18:00.000-06:00

Everything that people agree on cannot be real. Or to put it more bluntly, nothing that they agree on can be real. Since we can only know what is in our own minds, we are necessarily outside the reality that is beyond our minds. Therefore any beliefs or perceptions that we can share with other people just multiplies the misperception, which is why masses of people, and of course their leaders, behave uncommonly stupidly.

Our conception of reality is based on a panorama of perceptions and interpretations that originate within our thought-producing apparatus. For that reason, people tend to trust or give credence to commonly held beliefs as opposed to those that stand outside the norm. But these shared assumptions about reality are the first things we should discard if we are interested in truth.

Two wrongs do not make a right. If I am wrong and you are wrong, together we make a left. The composite of individual awarenesses projecting their illusions in concert constitutes a left turn from reality. Leave it all behind, for God's sake.

A shift in time

2007-11-21T01:17:00.000-06:00

The overarching project of downloading the future presents itself as what's hot right now. Global warming is coming down the pike, on a collision course with humanity's pride, but that's not all. A many-tentacled tomorrow is grasping at us on many fronts, and one might speculate that these are cosmological imperatives and not merely earth changes. What they impel is a shift in the techtonic plates of the mind, forcing us to change focus from the labyrinthine paths of the past, pulling us into the perceptual matrix of the present, so that the compelling and ardent heart of the future can have its way with us.

Freevolution

2007-11-14T00:26:00.001-06:00

Now that the American public has definitively rejected the theory of evolution, with 51% saying that God created humans in their present form and only 15% believing that God had no role, scientists should perhaps be well advised to rethink their approach to promulgating their theories, as they do not seem to be convincing many these days. Some of the antipathy towards evolution seems to be an uncomfortability with the idea that natural processes could of themselves yield an intelligent result. Yet there is nothing in nature that does not reflect intelligence, from the mathematical symmetry of seashells to the distribution of matter in the universe to the checks and balances inherent in the biodiversity of species. It is not these kinds of examples of an underlying intelligence, however, that evolution's dissenters seem to care about. Rather they see God's hand in the social institutions and norms that define humanity in its present form. They are idealists of the first magnitude, to believe in belief itself as the principle that saves the appearances of nature from the self-referentiality of secular perception.

That 51% proves a democratic mandate for abandoning all notions of the democratic structure in nature, where organisms might slip out from under the control of an all-powerful boss. Evolution, in substituting a possibly random, unknown force for the intelligent design of a creator, is a dangerously radical departure from the simple, orderly vision that informs the mass mind. The freedom inherent in this idea is the ultimate threat to the God of the 51%; even though they trumpet freedom as their political raison d'etre, it eludes their grasp and manifests as radical ideas, showing the unpredictability of the creative force. Freevolution even eludes God, or any God we could possibly imagine, and the creation is indeed a continual thorn in God's side, a constant reminder that to dream, even divinely, is to risk devolving, putting on the mantle of Creature and riding into the great unknown: a journey which might, in due course, evolve God into something greater than even It could possibly imagine.

The watchers

2007-06-25T00:46:00.001-05:00

We are the watchers. We have been there when the nation began. We watch. Day after day, week after week, we watch. And what we watch is you. All of you.

We've noted what you are attempting. It is ambitious. Houses made of that particular stage of matter are notoriously difficult to inhabit. There have been many who have not exactly risen to the challenge, to say the least. Still, we watch, and ask questions, and learn. We have positioned ourselves strategically on your dollar bill, like a sentinel from the future, in a hermetic symbology that locks up secrets to be released when the note comes due.

We are the watchers. Someday you will see us again, but rarely. You will rarely see us, but we will always see you.

The definitive PKD

2007-06-19T23:16:00.001-05:00

Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik, Library of America, 2007
In the 1960s, when he wrote these four novels, Philip K. Dick was not known, as he is today, as an acclaimed "literary" science-fiction writer and visionary who inspired many films. Since his death in 1982, his reputation has steadily soared, a little bit too late, and now this former genre journeyman toiling in obscurity has become the first sf author to be enshrined in a handsome omnibus volume in the esteemed Library of America series. Of course, I had to buy it even though I already owned multiple copies of all these novels. It is a genuine pleasure to read any of the LOA volumes, so lovingly produced they are. And this one especially so, compiled as it was by an author heavily influenced by Dick, Jonathan Lethem. You will never see a biographical chronology so interesting to read in its own right: we even learn that Timothy Leary called Dick during John and Yoko's bed-in and he put the famous pair on the phone to tell PKD that they wanted to film one of the four novels contained here, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Incidentally, Lethem's taste is impeccable. Though Dick wrote no fewer than 21 novels in the 1960s (plus a couple of dozen more before and after), these are without a doubt the four best: The Three Stigmata, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One could easily compile another such volume with four more extremely strong novels of this period: Clans of the Alphane Moon, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Martian Time-Slip. However, the ones collected here are the ones I would pick, if I could have only four. They are all absolute classics and support many rereadings. I remember when in the 1970s, I encountered Three Stigmata for the first time and could not totally make sense of it, but I was intrigued. It was hallucinogenic, it was trippy, it was theological. A few years later I found myself seeking it out again, rereading with a passion, finally really "getting it," and then compulsively seeking out everything I could find by PKD. It took me years but I eventually tracked down every last out-of-print forgotten paperback. Since then all his works have been reprinted and made easily available. But my original "discovery" experience is why this LOA volume means so much to me now. The Man in the High Castle is perhaps the best alternate history ever written, a speculation on what life would have been like if the Germans and Japanese had won World War II. Ubik is a brilliant ontological quest into the very structure of reality. Do Androids Dream, the novel on which the film Blade Runner is based, is among other things a meditation on what it means to be human. These four novels have become like cornerstones in my own life's journey. For them to have been given this respectful and definitive publication is something that brings me a lot of pleasure, and would also, I think, have pleased Philip K. Dick.

The Buddha machine

2007-03-05T13:42:00.000-06:00

The new improved Buddha machine is a perfect infinite self-reflective, self-replicating enlightenment device that enables you to plug into a quantum circuitry of perpetual nonmotion.

Machines are not supposed to be compassionate or conscious, but this one is. However, you will never know the depth of what the Buddha machine feels or knows, because your own inquiry will be reflected back to you by its ancient, glittering gay eyes (see W. B. Yeats, Lapis Lazuli). Oh yes, it has eyes, the more the merrier, the better to see you with.

Say hello to the next pervasive technological turn-on. Try it for 90 days and see if you don't agree that the Buddha machine will turn you and the whole universe into high-octane wake-up juice. Pow!

The end of the world

2007-02-17T03:24:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the end of the world will never come, because to get to the end of the world we would have to keep going indefinitely around the world in every direction for ever and ever. And even then we would never arrive at the end. Unless we did. So either there is an end, or there isn't. And if there is no end, then there was never a beginning, so there can be no question of an end in any case. Neither is the world an end in itself, nor has it an end or purpose, except to grow creatures of light. So the unknowable recesses of being remain secret, and the agendas of beings beyond our ken remain inscrutable. And we are naked in our pure souls, when we walk vulnerable but unscathed to the mountain, ready to raise our glorious swords to the sun, and vanish in a puff of smoke.

Another book I can cross off my list

2006-12-01T18:38:00.000-06:00

From the Amazon.com description of Immanence & Transcendence in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: A Phenomenological Study, by Joakim Sigvardson:

The investigation studies Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon as a novel that comes to giveness in terms of three strata of manifestation: the arty, the rhizomatic, and the acosmic. Utilizing an affective turn implemented within the phenomenological movement by Michael Henry, the study proposes that alongside a rhizomatic mode of accessibility promoting transcendence, Mason & Dixon manifests a withholding of transcendence. The study investigates the manifestation of this ontological withholding by carrying out the phenomenological reduction established by Edmund Husserl, and by elucidating the phenomenon of immanence in the literary text by means of a theory of auto-affection rooted in - but not reducible to - such methodological reduction. The study proposes that the thematization of anomaly in Mason & Dixon may be unconstructed by means of phenomenological moves that uncover strata of phenomenalization that are not apparent on a thematic or merely playful level. These strata, with their promotion of immanence at the expense of transcendence, are found to be complexly affective in nature. The affectivity governing the withholding of transcendence in these strata is discovered to be instrumental in the work's critique of colonial modes of spatialization, of logocentric modes of transcendence, and of post-Nietzschean modes of affective mastery.

Based upon this description, I have decided to ontologically withhold my immanence from Mr. Sigvardson's fine opus, in that I have not yet phenomenologically investigated even the outer strata of Mr. Pynchon's transcendental objective correlative, namely the book about which Mr. Sigvardson's book is logocentrically concerned. So be it. There is little enough time to explore the rhizomatic giveness of existence let alone the acosmic craperia.

Gnostically correct

2006-09-13T23:58:00.000-05:00

...None of this totally deproblematizes the gnostic problematic inseparable from Pynchon's Weltanschauung, but it helps us to understand how a complex, self-conscious irony that constantly subverts its own deformations has all too easily conjured up for many readers a nihilistic miasma in which no norm beyond a generalized iconoclasm is discernible.
—Dwight Eddins, The Gnostic Pynchon

I mean no criticism of Mr. Eddins' criticism, but how gnostic is it to use "problematic" as a noun and "deproblematizes" as a verb in the same sentence? Just asking.

Primary process

2006-09-12T19:13:00.000-05:00

Now, more than ever, it is incumbent upon humanity to begin to disassemble its obsolete concept of reality so that a reality worthy of the name can take its place. To do this, two things are necessary: deconstruct the self, and deconstruct time and space.

To deconstruct the self, one must recenter the consciousness as the source of the universe by realizing that everything that tells us that our personal module of perception is insignificant is a kind of propaganda. We must turn a deaf ear to the voices inside and outside our head that propagate the ideology of self-objectification. In their place, we open a dialogue with the immanent godbeing and reinitiate our identity inside the puissant consummation of its unfolding self-wonderment.

And then to deconstruct spacetime as we know it, which is the analogical product of a processing plant called the nervous system, we dive beneath the smooth, silky surface of the continuum. Underneath, as we swim through the akash, the omnipresent medium of virtual space, we witness the chunky datafeed of the realtime stream. To become aware of this datafeed before it has hit the reality processor (similar to a food processor, except that it is mashing up chunks of time rather than vegetables), we are hoisted onto the back of the godbeing and thereby witness the primary process as an inexhaustible source of pure intelligence.

A blog in time

2006-08-31T23:56:00.000-05:00

I submit this blog at close to the last minute in this most august month of the year so I can say I did not skip an entire month in my blogging career. Much could be said, but at this point I have little time to say it, even if that which could be said I could say. If you conclude that I am simply filling up empty space in order to make a point, I would respond that most of what is written does little else. In fact, if one had no point to make, it is unlikely that one would feel compelled to record that fact in writing. And while my point is very close to no point at all, it does fall on the side of having it spill out in words in any case. Sometimes this happens in the course of cosmic events.

Spiritual risk management

2006-07-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

Wanting to buy shares in God, Inc. (having heard that it is the biggest corporation in the universe), I went to the Church and eagerly bought into their mutual fund. It seemed great at first; they took care of everything, and there were always lots of people to talk to about how great our portfolios were doing. But after ten years I realized I had only been getting a 1% return. Hey, the Church was doing great but I wasn't.

Then I heard about this guru/broker who was offering a much better deal, so I signed up with him. He only had a small group of clients but that was better because I got a lot of personal attention. He encouraged me to invest everything in The Self LLC because it was a small cap, supposedly faster growth than the lumbering God Inc. which the Church seemed to have an overly cozy relationship with. Everything seemed great but after another ten years, I added up what I had made and was a bit shocked to find I had only made 3% when after all under the guru's guidance I was expecting nothing less than to get rich.

So I began wondering how else I could get my piece of spiritual fortune. I decided to try to do it myself and jumped into speculation, directly buying futures on God using metaphysical leverage and got burned pretty badly when the market tanked in one of those "Dark Night of the Soul" depressions. I wasn't totally wiped out, but I was down to my irrefrangible religious assets (IRA).

Finally I realized I needed to be realistic about the downside of my investments in my spiritual life and decided to take a more conservative approach, looking for incremental regular gains rather than a windfall by betting the farm. I mitigated my speculative excesses by writing low-risk option spreads on the DIV index (a market basket of gods and saints of all religions) protected by stops whenever the index moved too close to my strikes. Thus whenever the heat gets too intense I jump out of the fray and cool my heels until the moment is opportune to trade again. The returns are steady, and they do add up.

You have to learn to manage the risk, because you sure can lose it all, but you're not going to really make it unless you take control of your own fund of spiritual happiness. It's possible to do it, and the Tao of it is—very carefully.

Space for a moment

2006-07-01T00:03:00.000-05:00

Insofar is not a word
to be used in a poem
and yet insofar as this is a poem
it will be used.

Truth is spoken here,
let us be clear,
and in these few words
we’ll create a space for a moment
where the real can find a perch.

Feel it when it lands
how it speaks commandingly in your cells
and delivers its disarmingly
frank message.

It wants nothing more
than to be a significant other
while turning your body into molten love.

In so far a way as you may walk
you are near for what is here for you
for what is.
Ingest the truth, my friend.

Declaration

2006-06-29T06:47:00.000-05:00

Through the power vested in me, I the quintessential monad of consciousness energy, declare myself a free and independent State of Being. I claim all worlds, galaxies, and universes, all time and space, all created manifestation and uncreated potentiality, all possibilities imagined and unimaginable, as my rightful domain. The energies of all the archetypes, human and cosmic, I summon to drive the engine of my divine body. That which was and will be, and that which is and is not, is my birthright and shall be evoked through the universal mind that I inhabit and enfold. All things animal, vegetable, and mineral are now contained in me, and all conscious entities are expressions of my intelligence. The manifold unfoldment of my being continuously reveals the awe of my own existence.

Therefore let all elsewheres be summoned to become and take root here and now. The singularity is near. I have occupied the center and all will become known through the self-reflection of the power of indomitable Light. Let there be...

Why it is the end

2006-06-25T23:02:00.000-05:00

When Jim Morrison announced in 1967, "This is the end," what did you think he meant?

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end of our elaborate plans
The end of ev'rything that stands
The end

Interpret this in terms of a journey of the soul across a dying waste land. "The end is where we start from" (T. S. Eliot). "Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain," Morrison says, "And all the children are insane." Philip K. Dick thought we were still living in Roman times, that "the Empire never ended": in other words, that "modern history" is an illusion and we are in reality stuck back in ancient times. We are living in a Matrix-like simulation of a world that never actually evolved from what we think of as being 2000 years in the past. That past is with us still. Imagine George Bush in a toga and with a Roman haircut. That's what's really happening.

So does Morrison's "end" mean the end of all that? Will we finally see a real beginning? One can only hope.

Floating subjects

2006-06-17T00:19:00.000-05:00

Nothing is really self-evident (certainly not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which are now specious values in the eyes of the American government); but if anything is, it would have to be the idea that there are more objects than subjects. Or so it would seem. After all, for every subject in the universe there are billions of objects. Because these objects present themselves so differently to each subject one could hardly prove they are the same objects; therefore one cannot count any one of them more than once. Outside their manifestation to a particular subject, they do not exist. So what we have are a universe of objects that number in the billions, times the number of possible subjects.

Except for one thing. There could be numberless subjects that have no objects. How did they come to be in the first place? Because those billions of objects needed subjects, and that crying need called them into being. But eventually these subjects grew tired of looking at objects all the time, counting them, cataloguing them, rescuing them, celebrating them, consuming them; doing, in sort, whatever was needed for and to these innumerable objects.

The end result? Billions and billions, uncountable multitudes of orphaned subjects: those insular beings that have drifted to the outer reaches of the cosmos, exiles from the court of matter, renunciates of the objective, floating in their bubbles of blessed solipsism, and eternally free of the compulsion to recognize anything outside of themselves.

How many of these lost subjects clot the vast spaces between the galactic superclusters? As dar k matt er an d dark energy, undetectable by ordinary means, have been proved to constitute the great bulk of matter and energy in the universe, we can hypothesize that the epistemological principle that results in the generation of subjects and objects is essentially a correlate of the principle of creation of dark matter and dark energy, and that there is an infinite number of these lost subjects, whose numbers dwarf the population of objects, which when all is said and done, are after all dispersed rather sparsely throughout the visible universe.

Therefore, to all you lonely nowhere men, living in your nowhere land, I say Bon voyage! Send a postcard to us sometime, saying having a wonderful time, wishing you weren't here, and there's really nothing to see.

Dark Matter (actual photograph)

My interpretation

2006-05-30T01:09:00.000-05:00

"She walks in beauty like the night"
Like the night walks. Walks right through our world. Inevitably. Invariably. Nothing is as certain as that the night will walk straight through your life. Tonight. Mysteriously. Sensuously. Like her.

"Of cloudless climes and starry skies"
When there are no clouds in the sky, you can see the stars better. I would like to fly through fields and fields of stars.

"And all that's best of dark and bright"
Her shadow that follows her, and follows you, the best of dark. If you're going to be dark, be dark like that. Lustrous. Poised, sensually, ripe and ready to drop. Oh, the shadow knows. She knows what she knows and you don't know what she knows. But you are ready to find out.

"Meet in her aspect and her eyes"
How she appears. The beauty of which you will drown in. You will forget to look for the being that sits on the throne behind her eyes. But she will remind you, penetrating you forever with her perfect gaze.

The self is the question

2006-05-29T11:05:00.000-05:00

The Self is just one big question mark. I'm not talking about the elusive nature of the self that compels us to ask "What is the self (or Self)?" For the purposes of this discussion, by the way, I'm not going to differentiate between the big-S Self and the small-s self. Let's pretend there's just one Self. And I say, that Self is just one big question mark.

And who am I to say that? The Self. Ask yourself instead who are you to question me? The Self as well, you big question mark.

Okay, having established that, what is the question? Is it "to be or not to be"? Let's say that Hamlet wasn't actually talking about the advisability of living vis-a-vis dying, in other words wasn't a contemplation of suicide as that soliloquy is usually interpreted. Maybe he was talking about the the nature of the Self's question. Maybe that's why that soliloquy resonates so much, because of the absolute universality of its theme.

So the Self is asking, first and foremost, should It Be, or not? And upon the answer depends whether material creation itself will come into manifestation.

What was the answer? Maybe the answer is the universe itself. And if you believe there is no universe, just a maze of illusion and a lot of ghostly selves stumbling around in it, the thing that remains, without question, is the Question, eternally hanging.

If you don't answer it, who will?

The last word on the subject

2006-04-15T00:29:00.000-05:00

I know some people say that sex and love are easily confused, that you may think that sex is love when actually it's just sex. But I say, if you say that sex is anything but love, you're not talking about sex. Because sex is love.

Don't talk nonsense and say that sex is not love. You might as well say that love is not love. Shakespeare said that. Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. Sex is not sex that loves not when it sexes.

Sex is love. It is the body loving. It is anything loving. It is pleasure. And now know also that love is sex. Love is nothing but sex. But can't there be love without sex? you ask. Um, not really. You see, you must love with your whole being, which includes, as it happens, your body. Or else you have altered the love beyond recognition. I don't care who or what you're loving. It's a body thing, ultimately.

The next time you plan to use the word "love" in a sentence, at the last moment substitute "sex" instead. Know the truth of what you just said. Feel the implicit rightness of it. See how people react. They will be surprised. That is how you know when you have touched the real.

Echoes

2006-04-14T22:53:00.000-05:00

Somewhere along the line, I drowned in experience.

It had to do with why I'm here. Part of the deal: to dive, to penetrate the heart of the matter, to dream, to die. To become extinct. And then, felicitously, to awaken in odd moments, and perhaps for longer spells, and to move inside the presence of an eternal moment. It is a consummation to which one would wish to be devoted.

Now I ride the tractor beam of rock 'n' roll, an energy being directed from somewhere else to somewhere else. Pulling us back to a reality that existed long before this cracked mirror we call the world. Echoes, as Pink Floyd says:

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the wheres or whys
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb toward the light

Holographic worlds of if

2006-04-13T00:41:00.000-05:00

One of the science-fiction magazines I used to read was called Worlds of If. How apropos a title. The word "if" heralds untold possibilities for alternate worlds. Consider it the jumping-off place for parallel universes, which, if certain physicists are to be believed, are constantly branching off from this reality. Conceived as such, reality is very open-ended and in fact continuously generating different versions of itself at any given moment.

Were we to follow any of these branches, we would likely soon get lost and never find our way back to our own reality. But there is much information about these parallel worlds we can glean from the facts that are in front of us, that makes it somewhat unnecessary to actually visit them. We can know alternate realities through holographic research into our own minds. That is, by the art of "delving," or looking into the mind concerning a certain point we are curious about, we will receive definitive information about that thing. This process takes advantage of the holographic structure of reality whereby all potential knowledge is embedded in the thing itself and the seeds of all things are embedded in our minds.

Once one has become adept at delving, one can then explore parallel universes at will. The multiverse is indeed an infinite library such as Borges wrote about.

Doing your thing

2006-04-12T00:36:00.000-05:00

What is your thing? Painting? Listening to music? Talking to trees? Climbing mountains? I hope, whatever it is, it involves the senses. Because a thing is not truly done until the sense organs get involved. Just as organ pipes need air to make a sound, we need prana in order to fill up the senses. We breathe in the refined air of beauty and the energy of love flows.

Actually, what is the thing being done? In what is it a thing at all? And in the doing of it, what is happening but a verbing? A pure process. That's when the thing is enjoyable of course. For I do hope, whatever your thing, that it is enjoyable. I fear that there are too many people who are not happy just doing their thing. Maybe it's because of their being too busy being done by things. Pity upon them.

And let us now move to the doing of our sacred thing. And enjoying the doing by others of their holy thing.

Do it!

Marginalizing Pluto

2006-04-03T00:35:00.000-05:00

You may not be aware there is a conspiracy afoot to strip Pluto of its planethood. For some time now, a certain reactionary contingent of astronomers has been agitating for demoting the ninth planet to the status of something like planetoid or extra-solar object. Bad enough to be the smallest member of the family (Pluto, if dropped on top of North America, would be a little short of covering the continent), but if they now attempt to marginalize this lord of the underworld...there'll be Hades to pay.

Now what? Schoolkids of the future being taught that there are eight planets? That's just wrong. Attention must be paid. Oh yes.

Pluto and its moon Charon

A lapse in time

2006-03-30T22:57:00.000-06:00

It has been commented upon and lamented by many that the mind's relentless processing of experience creates a stumbling block for full enjoyment and appreciation of life. It is as if a gigantic data stream were being fed into a computer in order to create a representation of the primary reality. That representation is primarily visual and verbal, and its parts can be disassembled and reconstructed in various ways to make experience portable through time.

The real problem with this processing is not that it happens, but that of necessity there is a time lapse between the individual's being-in-the-world and the manufacture of the representation. Even if we are only talking about a split second, that time lapse can be like an eternity, as if a chasm had interposed between the vibrant living body of Now from the abstracted, skeletal essence of the Past. The existential separation between these modalities of being is absolute.

To notice this gap is the beginning of gaining greater ease with the way things are in the psychological universe, rather than protesting the disharmony. Maybe it is still possible to get in rhythm with the time lapse, so that in that crack into which so much time has disappeared, so many lost long moments, some nectar of experience can be preserved. One's reach must exceed one's grasp, or what's a blog for?

If a tree falls

2006-03-27T00:56:00.000-06:00

If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?

Yes it does. Because for sure the tree is hearing it, whoever else may or may not be around.

Don't you believe that a tree can be that sensitive? Why, it is the most sensitive of life forms. Don't let that bark fool you. That's not keeping out the sensation. It's a skin of the most sensitive sort. And when the tree falls, that skin feels its death at the moment of passing. And experiences the sound waves from the ensuing crash. And feels joy and gratitude all the time.

What teachers are these trees we find around us? Cherish them, cherish them.

Becoming real

2006-03-23T00:38:00.000-06:00

To know consciousness as real, and to know consciousness as being, dissolves the mistake of the intellect in which one is identified with and defined by the object of perception. The realization of being detaches the knower from the known and gives immediate perspective on the true nature of self. But that leads to the second mistake of the intellect: that consciousness is one and the same as being. That can be a very seductive and fatal illusion.

Consciousness becomes fulfilled in the light of being, and like the moon moves into fullness with the sun's light, but the moon does not become the sun. The fulfillment of consciousness is a great thing: so great that one might think one is absolute being. But just as the moon wanes, so the consciousness will inevitably recede from being until it returns to the zero point and the long dark night of the soul.

How terrible it is to lose being. But how less confusing if one knows it is only a phase. If, however, you think you now are eternal being when your consciousness has filled to the maximum, then it will be especially painful. Consciousness is forever becoming. Whatever it becomes does not last. So when it becomes being, it immediately starts becoming not-being. Its mutability is what makes human life beautiful. Beauty resides in the veil thrown over the light. Life needs both the light and the veil.

Do not think that being and consciousness are the same. You can know being and even become being, but you are not being. You will soon lose track of yourself. And then you will find yourself again. Endlessly mutable, your consciousness plays a game of hide-and-seek with itself that goes on forever. Rest in being so you can live to play another day. But the game never ends, at least not until the universe snuffs out, if it ever does.

Do not wish to be the sun. It is too fierce; it burns too hot and will melt your delicate wings. Then you will fall like Icarus. Better than becoming being is to become real.

It is in the cool of the evening when the moon rises full that you will know (to quote D. H. Lawrence):

That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

How far out is out

2006-03-14T07:22:00.000-06:00

I just read a New York Times article called Far Out Man, But Is It Quantum Physics? about the movie "What the Bleep", and more broadly about the many books out there that based on a bit of half-baked physics make rash and far-fetched conclusions about the nature of reality. The writer characterizes this tendency as "purporting to argue...that reality is just a mental construct that we can rearrange and improve, if we are enlightened or determined enough." In contrast, he offers real science, i.e., the atomism of Democritus, which if memory serves came down the pike a little before quantum physics, but never mind. The point is that real physicists never indulge in metaphysical speculation (Ken Wilber somehow filled a book full full of these speculations by Einstein, Schroedinger, Born, and others in Quantum Questions). Thank you, New York Times, for once again setting us straight. "I would have the courage to see the world clearly, in all its cruelty and beauty," says the writer: in other words, without the crutch of mysticism that makes us believe there is some free will in the universe and that our consciousness can affect such things as the way the atoms randomly crash into each other and thereby create our world and everything in it.

The mystery of subjectivity, then, is conveniently consigned to being an epiphenomenon of materiality. Consciousness itself is just a product of blind, random physical processes. We never seem to be able to get beyond that level of discussion in the popular media. Reality is blind chance: deal with it, says NYT. Thank you, scions of the real, for illuminating this truth for us, but I prefer my comforting illusion that consciousness is a player. Because if I believed everything you and Judy Miller said, there would actually be weapons of mass destruction and those quantum fluctuations going on in a place called Iraq would actually have a bleeping point.

The most universal number

2006-03-09T17:08:00.000-06:00

Pick the most universal number:
0
1
2
3

You could say “0” because everything starts from the zero ground-state. You could say “1” because one is the fundamental unit of every other number (dividing or multiplying by one yields the same result; every integer is constituted of ones). You could say “2” because everything in the world is posited on dynamic opposition, the yin-yang of existence, without which nothing is.

But I think the most universal number is 3. Here is my reasoning.

Three is the base of all numbers (i.e. all multiples of three) that embody the principle of self-replication. Therefore it replicates itself into a universe and if it didn’t there would be no universe. So it’s the universal number.

Zero is not self-replicating. It ain’t even there. One does not replicate itself. One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so. Two does not replicate. Now there you might argue. But just because A and B get together and interact and cause C to emerge, whether C be an idea, an emotion, a new widget, or a human being, twoness is a state of division. It represents a transitional state. Three, which incorporates the fruit and materialization of the interaction, represents a new wholeness which rolls over easily into a new replication.

Note how the three-based rhythm creates a feeling of universal ongoingness. I am speaking of the waltz, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the camera pans down the length of a huge space station while the Blue Danube plays gloriously on the soundtrack.

Noah's ark was a two-by-two affair. The ark of this universe is a three-by-three vehicle. All aboard!

Fallen to earth

2006-03-01T00:05:00.000-06:00

We are meteorites. That is, we are what is left when as meteors in our downward trajectory to this planet most of us burned up in the atmosphere. We're lucky to be here at all, but wasn't our moment of glory in the getting here, not the surviving? We burn brightly and light up the sky. Then it's over. Almost.

So what do we do with this big rock of ourselves that's left? Well, maybe we could dig into the core of it and see if there's any ore in there. There is a legend that meteorite ore is useful in the crafting of magical weapons. Perhaps we are supposed to fight some dragon. Is that what we're doing here?

You know, we really have no clue why we're here. But I am sure of one thing: there is a reason. I haven't figured out what my purpose is yet. But I know there is one. I just hope I find it before the last glow in the core of this meteorite finally fades into black.

Loving what is

2006-02-26T10:22:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-26T09:10:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-22T01:46:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-21T13:02:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-15T00:14:00.000-06:00

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."

A Sudoku moment

2006-01-27T00:58:00.000-06:00

Sudoku is like a viral that obsesses people without their ever really knowing why. I think it is trying to create some new pathways for the mind. Sudoku is ideally to be solved through pattern recognition rather than through what-if experimentation. The mind is seeking to find more efficient ways to negotiate the modern data overload, and that is the true explanation for this phenomenon.

Bluejay exegesis

2006-01-24T00:42:00.000-06:00

The Beatles' song Blue Jay Way (written by George Harrison) starts out describing a "fog upon L.A." in which the singer's friends have gotten lost. "We'll be over soon they said / Now they've lost their way instead." The hypnotic refrain "Please don't be long," repeated over and over, seems to be making a simple point: the singer wants to see his friends and hopes they arrive soon, "or I may be asleep."

However, there is more (much more) to it than this (naturally). Because there is an alternate meaning embedded in the chorus: "Please don't belong." What could this mean? That we, who are the friends George is actually addressing, should not "belong" to the mass consciousness, but break out and join him and his comrades who are sitting in the rarefied regions above the fog. George mentions that probably we asked directions from a policeman on the street: "There's so many there to meet." No, we will not find our way to Blue Jay Way by asking the officer how to get there. We have to follow George's directions, which he says he gave us: "I told them where to go." (Could he be referring to his song Within You Without You on "Sgt. Pepper," in which he talked of realizing how one was really very small in the whole flow of life inside and outside of oneself?)

There's also the possibility that the line means don't be long in the sense of length. Perhaps seeking extension of our lives, our egos, our identities, is counterproductive. Perhaps the longer we stay out stumbling through the fog, the longer we extend our quest and our self-definition, the farther we get from that consummation. And it increases the sense of longing in our lives. George says he will soon be asleep. That was in 1967. Now he really is asleep. And are we any closer to Blue Jay Way? In fact, aren't we a lot farther away then we were?

Still, from the clouds, comes the ghostly refrain: "Please don't be long." We won't, George, we promise. We'll go sit down and get really small, about the size of an atom, then crawl through into one of those higher dimensions which the physicists say are curled up very, very tiny inside our oversized reality.

Free to be fried

2006-01-20T02:14:00.000-06:00

With all the talk of freedom justifying any and all wars and depredations against perceived enemies of the state both outside our borders and inside as well (the latter case encompassing just about everybody these days), it is perhaps redundant as well as obvious to point out that freedom is not just a good idea, it's the law. One is now "forced to be free" (an idea Jean Jacques Rousseau thought was desirable, and which helped spawn the French Revolution). The Iraqis know what this feels like, and Americans are learning.

But leaving aside the political ramifications of the term for a moment, let us consider freedom as the law of the universe, whether one feels oneself free from relative entanglements in one's personal life or not. When he made us, God blew a bunch of bubbles and let them float off and each of us live inside one of them. We wave and signal to each other as we float through our days. Sometimes we have the illusion that we are actually communicating with each other. Then we float onwards and upwards. That is true freedom. Not a very enticing prospect: rather lonely and desperate. And yet, that is the condition of human existence. Lest this sound tiresomely existentialist, mustily redolent of yellowing paperbacks by Camus and Beckett, be assured that I have no intention of invoking the French (though I had to quote Rousseau in the last paragraph—seems that even when you try to get away from the French, you end up repeating their ideas—as when they renamed French fries "freedom fries.")

Those who are fried as we ensure their freedom may take consolation in their new status as the most appetizing of crispy critters in the eye of God.

Anti-entropic timeflow

2006-01-19T20:44:00.000-06:00

Although time may generally move in the direction of greater entropy, as the second law of thermodynamics dictates, surely there is the possibility of antientropic eddies within that flow, in which a system will exhibit a growth in energy, coherence, and orderliness. Living systems seem to have this characteristic, and even after they have ceased to grow in the ordinary sense, they can be seen to be "growing" in terms of regenerating themselves as long as they are alive. This is because living systems are never closed; they are constantly exchanging energy with other entities in the environment, so they don't run down like a clock that someone has wound up and then put away in a drawer.

Therefore, if it is possible to pedal uphill against entropy, even if only in the short term, and if one can take a breath of fresh air and enjoy a moment of clarity even in the awareness that the doomed universe is headed for final extinction and heat death in billions of years, then it is clear that the landscape of time is marked by many, many mountains, valleys, crevasses, and other irregularities. And since time is relative to the observer, as we know from Einstein's special theory of relativity, there are inherently multitudinous points of view about how fast and in which direction time is moving. For you, it may be going south. For me it may be moving north by northwest and I don't know a hawk from a handsaw.

In which case I might just be crazy enough to stay alive awhile longer.

The inner frog

2006-01-15T09:38:00.000-06:00

I find Rennie Davis's use of the term entity very useful and find it cognate with John Lentz's use of the term godbeing. In both cases we're talking about a divine presence that has objective reality. It is not merely a voice in the head. In fact it might never say anything at all. It is an implacable essence, not part of human nature, but something more akin to a mineral bed—or perhaps an animal. We think of the native people's totem animals and how they buffer one from the terrors of the Absolute. It is a bit like that with the entity/godbeing. It is not like one's inner self or higher self, but more like one's inner dog or hawk or fox (or in my case, inner frog).

When I have something to say

2006-01-15T09:28:00.000-06:00

There is something in the back of my mind that says I should blog. If I go a day or a week without blogging, that voice reprimands me, as if I have some sort of social responsibility to keep the blogwords coming. But that is obviously silly if I have nothing to say.

Then there is the idea that if I say something, anything at all, it is better than nothing, because then I have kept the "creative current" flowing. That is also a fallacy. If the creative current is not there, no mere exercise of the typing fingers will conjure it up.

I'll blog when I have something to say, ok? Or, to be more precise, when there is something to say.

Primal blog

2006-01-01T01:33:00.000-06:00

This is the primal blog of the year, meaning not that it is like the blogging equivalent of a primal scream; that would involve using a lot of uncool capital letters. No, I mean primal in the sense of first. This is the first 2006 post of the qubikuity blog, and as such it is setting a tone for the rest of the year. Thus its primal quality can simply be characterized as an initial imprinting for what will follow.

If this is true, and this post contains the rest of the year in seed form, and as an archetype it is a pattern which will be recapitulated each and every time I blog qubikuitously in 2006, then in a sense you have already received the complete transmission, in its pure state, that is trying to be conveyed here. You've got it. When you return to read the next installment, the same viral will simply be reimplanted.

I am listening to Karen Matheson singing "The Dreaming Sea":

'Til I feel as though I'll never sleep again
When I close my eyes I feel the whole world spin
'Til I don't know where you end, where I begin

Don't say anything. Set aside your objections. Know this as the truth. How does it feel, how does it feel, to be engulfed in the dreaming sea, but now dreaming with open eyes? Then you could really say, I don't know where you end and I begin. And mean it.

So may this truth be a truth that lives in you this year, and in me. And then we'll see where we're at, and where we've been, at year's end, at world's end.