Communication 101

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

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

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

I proclaim

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shiva the deconstructor

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

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

The lost art of acid rapping

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

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

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

See eye, eh?

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

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

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

The whereness of here

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

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

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

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

On not having read Proust

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

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

Implicit hyperlinks

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

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

Discovery of the Dylan particle

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

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

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

Unintelligent design

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

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

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

The transparent revolution

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

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

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

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

Seek ye first

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

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

Law of desire

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

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

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

Eggless in Iowa

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

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

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

TGIF

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

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

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

All is not one

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

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

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

It's all space

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing unknowing

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

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

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

Time release

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

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

The nonlinearity of the first dimension

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

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

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