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.

One person at a time

What if there really is just one person in the universe at a time, and the idea that there are a multiplicity of people is just an illusion? The one person who truly exists is faster than the proverbial speeding bullet, darting around from mind to mind experiencing things from one point of view, then another, for an infinitesimal moment, then jumping into another point of view, but doing it so fast that each mind thinks itself experiencing time in a continuous unbroken flow, which creates the illusion of an individual identity. Like watching a movie with discrete frames, each individual consciousness is only experiencing individual moments.

This may not be a complete fantasy; physicist Paul Davies proposes it in his book About Time as a plausible explanation of what really is. If so, then One is truly the loneliest number, and God is a restless creator in an empty universe.

Base tables

Create a relational database describing the universe. There are people: John, Mary, and Susan. And there are planets: Earth, Mars, and Venus. We start out with two base tables containing the entities of people and planets respectively. Then we create queries on these tables and what we end up with is John's Earth, Mary's Earth, and Susan's Earth; John's Mars, Mary's Mars, and Susan's Mars; and John's Venus, Mary's Venus, and Susan's Venus. If we try to resolve the multiplicity of experienced planets, we can say that they derive from the base tables. Objective reality simplifies to the essential entities such as people and planets.

Except for one thing. Those essential entities were derived in the first place. And what were they derived from? The experiences that were supposedly derived from them. In other words, because an experience happened, we objectify it by deriving an experiencer and an experience. These objects are identified and categorized in base tables. Then retroactively the experiences from which they are derived are categorized as derived from them.

Before there was Susan or Earth, there was Susan's Earth. Mary's Venus preexisted either the planet or the person. After the entities were rationalized out, it was determined that there was a subject and object of that experience. The existence of those categories, and their population in base tables, "proves" that a complex reality is based on simple identies and categories. You can't fill out the scorecard unless you know who the players are. But who's keeping score? We are. We paper the walls of our world with printouts. But what are the databases based on? Where did the data come from? And how real are these entities it presumes to describe?

Blogging and the writing process

This being my second post in a row about blogging, I may be in danger of excessive self-referentiality. (But then isn't even one act of self-referentiality excessive? So if you're going to do it, do it big!) In any case (a convenient phrase of dismissal) I am going to risk overstepping my rhetorical bounds because I think the blogging medium offers a great format for developing ideas. If I were still teaching writing, I would definitely make it an assignment for my students to blog daily. Since blogging is writing for publication (I do believe more people read my blog than have read some of the books I have published!), and nothing improves your writing faster than knowing that people are reading it, it would be a wonderful teaching aid.

My current plan is to write a book on the physics, philosophy, and psychology of time. And based on my experience in blogging, I have decided to structure it in bloglike units. It will have chapters and so on, but the real unit within the chapter will be something that is more or less self-contained, like an individual blog entry. Not only will this make it possible to read the book non-sequentially, it will induce all sorts of thematic cross-referencing (without the hyperlinks, of course, at least in the non-digital version). In the process of writing I will be posting entries on the subject of time, thus generating content in a form that may eventually be reproduced in the same form in which it was written (or more likely go through a lot of transmutation first, perhaps to end up in the bloglike state from which it began). It will be an interesting experiment.

The existential blogger

To blog is to live. It is the act of thrusting one's naked essence into the indefinite void, of offering up one's humility and pride and passion and stupidity, one's eloquence and wit and desperation, into that by and large indifferent fog we call the blogosphere.

Why do we do it? For the momentary diversion of the few hapless strangers that might happen upon our markings in the cybersand? What real virtue lies in the exercise of virtual virtuosity?

Perhaps it is because we know deep down in our souls that there is something inexpressible yearning in us to be expressed anyway, like singing the blues during a tsunami, or playing chess with death. Is that overdramatizing what is going on with this phenomenon? How else to explain how even the most mundane narrations become peculiarly compelling once they have been bloggified!

A parenthesis on panpsychism

In my previous post Communique from Neverland I expressed a certain disquietude with being categorized as a panpsychic and felt that there was something there that did not quite mesh with the quantum cosmosophy that I am experimentally espousing. Now I see what it is. According to the definition on FutureHi.net, panpsychism is "the belief that mind, or consciousness, is omnipresent throughout the universe and is a fundamental aspect of the universe. Examples of panpsychic beliefs are that atoms have atom consciousness, rocks have rock consciousness, trees have tree consciousness, planets have planet consciousness, and the universe has universe consciousness, and so on." The probem with that is that it presupposes that there is an outside world! All these projections about what kind of consciousness might exist are posited on the qualities that we perceive "outside" ourselves. That's what I really mean when I say there is no there there! Any cosmology based on the myth of objectivity is bound to be bound in some kind of philosophic parenthesis.

Panpsychism is right to assume that we inhabit some sort of conscious matrix. But the warp and woof of it is nothing but ourselves. Does that sound lonely? It is indeed. Only an entity which knows true loneliness can ever break on through to the other side, to the incomprehensible true meeting with another quantum being. The quantization of consciousness is the fundamental principle, but it is not posited on the categories we see in the physical world. Let us not begin and end our investigation into the nature of things with the things themselves; they are part of the magic lantern show that has been conjured up for our entertainment by the incomprehensible, inexhaustible creativity inherent in the fiery furnace of formlessness. Quantum consciousness is based on the much more radical quantization of pure witnessing monads.

Communique from Neverland

Having noticed that I have been classed as a "panpsychic" by the good people at FutureHi.net, I felt it behooved me to find out what this thing was that I was supposed to be. My first thought was that it might have something to do with Peter Pan. But on that site it is explained that "Panexperientialism or Panpsychism is the belief that mind, or consciousness, is omnipresent throughout the universe and is a fundamental aspect of the universe." In other words, everything in the universe is made out of mind.

I would not disagree with that statement, except that it seems a bit limiting. If the stars, rocks, and seas, as well as the vast multitudes of living beings in the world, everything that exists, is a thought form, a construction of consciousness, then the conditional aspects of that creation must reflect the conditions of mind that constitute them. The objective world becomes a mirror for our fractured psyches. Unless, that is, the partial awareness that we bear is not really causative in this creation; the mind of God is the ultimate subjectivity that is molding things. But that seems too remote to me. In the various forms I perceive, I can only grasp them in terms of what I know and what I am, not in terms of what I am not. For as soon as I see something that is not me, it instantly becomes me. My knowledge of it is only a reflection of that temporary coalescence of thoughts and impressions that I call my self. Now, with that understood, it somehow makes the universe a little too small and claustrophobic, like watching a 60s Bergman movie. Which means that the world in which I find myself is inherently not one in which I feel totally comfortable. Too many pirates, crocodiles, and lost boys—lost souls.

Divine discontinuities

"Time is an illusion...death is an illusion." From the standpoint of our limited three-dimensional reality, that is correct. Certainly the appearances of changing phenomena, plucked through the narrow chink of our senses, are not to be regarded as "real" (although they seem real enough to the experiencing ego). The discontinuties that rock our world from time to time are relative fluctuations in a personal reality construct that is inherently unstable, a house built upon sand.

If you read Janet Sussman's book The Reality of Time you will learn that time from the higher-dimensional physics perspective is much different than the narrow linear referential time sense we all live by. "Real" time has an aspect of randomness and freedom; its shifts are experienced by us as actual breaks in the fabric of spacetime. It is as if at these junction points a tsunami of information from higher dimension pours into ours and our mental constructs are simply swept away.

John Lentz in Transposition holds that the greater godbeing of this cosmos is actually undergoing a shift out of its own reality structure into a new life that is unimaginable even to it. If that is the case, King Kong and Godzilla could come crashing through your living room and you would not bat an eye. There will be matters of greater moment engaging your attention at that point.

Tetrapartite telepathy

As Buckminster Fuller points out in this letter on Tenesgrity, the four vertices of a tetrahedron are the minimum number necessary to achieve awareness-recognition of a structural system. Could this explain why the Beatles were so much better together than as solo artists? Maybe a certain kind of musical telepathy was engendered when this critical mass was reached in the geometric configuration of genius.

The key of high seeing

John Lentz's essay Transposition is as concise and clear an exposition as presently exists on Quantum Cosmosophy, a term I have just this moment coined (and it will likely have a short life span). It is difficult, though, to put any label on a body of thought that (in my mind at least) is currently more of an inarticulable sensation than a coherent philosophical system. My own version of this is what you read in qubikuity, but I should explain that this all derives from John's original cognitions, though I put my own spin on it which I take full responsibility for.

The idea of transposition is, in short, that the "greater godbeing" (which you could call God, except that concept carries a lot of baggage) is going through a quantum shift in which it is evolving beyond this Creation, even as we here on earthplanet plane are being drawn into an inconceivable vortex of change. It is a parallel process. As the collective human mind awakens from its "world dream" which derives from the godbeing's own cosmic dream, the human story starts to completely unravel. As John writes: "Passing through the channels of the greater godbeing beyond, through the elemental godbeing walking the earth and into the human beings who are no longer moved by the passions of the race, the cosmic life force signals its intent to withdraw like a tide sliding back into the sea."

What does this mean? Is it all over? And if it is, does it really matter? Does it matter in the scheme of things that the dream we were dreaming the hour before morning got interrupted, then erased? Or to put it another way, if the universe were a Clint Eastwood movie, should we be surprised that there comes a time when, inevitably, the Man With No Name rides off into the sunset without a word or a glance backwards to the few bewildered survivors of the apocalypse He has wrought?

Random thoughts

Perhaps you have heard of the Global Consciousness Project. In this experiment, which has been going on for years, a group of 60 computers all over the world is generating a constant stream of random numbers 24 hours a day. The interesting thing is that on occasion patterns in the random number stream develop that should not be there by the laws of probability. These periods of coherence seem to correspond to global events such as the tsunami, 9/11, or Princess Diana's funeral, making it seem that the random flow is being affected by world consciousness at that point in time.

Can human consciousness, magnified many fold when cataclysmic world events are happening, cause aberrations in the usual random processes of nature? Quite possibly. But I am more inclined to look for an explanation in the philosophy of time, as propounded by Janet Sussman in The Reality of Time, rather than in the nature of consciousness. She says that time is a field that generates breakfronts when loops in the space/time continuum return to their source. These cataclysmic world events that we all feel so keenly are symptomatic of quantum shifts in the fabric of time. I think the real explanation of the random number anomalies is that it's a synchonistic phenomenon that registers on the level of consciousness the same as when you shift gears in the car; you feel a shift. And it registers simultaneously on the quantum level (the numbers are randomized according to observation of quantum-indeterminate events) because physical reality itself is shifting at these breakpoints.

Sensory metabolism

The nature of human consciousness seems to be one that likes to connect the dots. Because dots are what we are given in the perceptual field. As light particles strike the retina intermittently, and impact us through the on-off firing of neurons in the brain, we are receivers of a panoply of ones and zeros, a digital data stream. Immediately upon intaking this binary repast, we mash it up, homogenize it, convert it to a digestible waveform. We connect the dots between the points, between the bits, and come up with a rainbow of continuity that constitutes our comfortable known world.

This sensory metabolism is so pervasive that we never question the idea that we live in a waveform, despite how much the underlying reality is digital. On the particle level, not much is certain. The particle may be here, it may be there; you cannot pin it down without losing vital information. But we confront the quantum cosmos like recalcitrant audiophiles, preferring analog to digital.

We are dots ourselves, points of consciousness in an unfathomable multiversal ocean, flashing unpredictably in and out of awareness. We create a continuity out of our own thoughts and call that effect a self. What laser light will illuminate our digital souls, calling us forth one by one to see clearly at last?

Neither here nor there

In the 1950s, the You Are There show with Walter Cronkite depicted various historical situations (D-Day, the Gettysburg address, etc.) as if being covered by a modern TV reporter. Such a show would hold no interest today. We are no longer as innocent about history as we once were. We no longer believe there was something "real" there to retell in such a way so as to give it relevance and versimilitude; here at the fag-end of postmodernism, we see only one fiction dressing up another fiction, journalists constructing convenient narratives for our entertainment and politicians invoking mythical pasts to distract us from their nefarious activities.

Nowadays we know that not only we aren't there and can't be there, we never were there. Neither was anybody else. There's no there there. Never was. So it stands to reason there's no here here either. So where are we? Neither here nor there, it seems. Get used to it. This is about as much certainty you're ever going to have about anything.

Monadology

In Leibniz's philosophy, a monad is a conscious unit of perception. You could say we are all monads insofar as we are individuals, or undivided. On some essential level, we do not interact; we live in our separate universes and send signals to each other which we somehow receive and interpret. The most interesting feature of Leibniz's cosmology is how he deals with this problem of how a multiplicity of independent units of eternal substance, the monads, can find common markers so as to learn to coexist. His idea is that there is something called "preestablished harmony."

This is what lets my monad talk to your monad. And any soul communion is posited upon music, essentially. The Leibnizian parallelism of substances reflects what Mozart heard when he wrote the Jupiter Symphony.

Two Heads

The relation-net

It is time for a new kind of relation. A "relationship" is like the Titanic, too heavy to float in this iceberg-packed sea. It is a ship that has sunk many, to quote Osho. The problem is that the relationship has to be airtight in order to keep out the sea and thereby float and travel from point A to point B. The relationship feeds the ego and fixes the individual identity amdist the tides of change. That sort of relation is not what is called for in the current environment of quantum consciousness shift.

The new kind of relation I envision is a relation-net, which has an entirely different purpose, not to travel in any linear fashion but being porous so as to sink into the depths. Where perhaps a gleaming silvery treasure fish may be caught, alive and thrashing in the warp and woof of the matrix of complementary energies...of you and me.

New Age religions

We tend to underestimate the phenomenon of all the New Age religions that are growing up around us like kudzu on steroids. Don't you realize that Christianity, Islam, and so on are on their last legs? In a few years they will be as defunct as Mithraism, and instead people will be paying obeisance to images of Deepak Chopra or Neale Donald Walsh. Worshippers will do rituals at the lotus feet of Carolyn Myss and worship the Divine Mother in her incarnation as Madonna (Ciccione). Priests will intone passages from Wayne Dyer's holy writs; scholars will write exegeses on Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.

Of course, all of these charismatic personalities will have to be sacrificed in picturesque and gruesome ways so that some Mel Gibson of the future can make a stirring movie about how they saved us all from our New Age sins (such as low self-esteem, non-lateral thinking, and lack of quantum vision). Perhaps the Bush administration, with its new "mandate," will be persuaded by its core constituency to make a pre-emptive strike on all New Age religions lest they gain a competitive advantage over a certain legitimate state religion that should enjoy monopolistic privileges under our Constitution. That will be self-defeating in the long term, for martyrdom will feed the mania of self-empowered multitudes. But in the meantime, Deepak, watch your back!

Purpose of life

The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life. More specifically, your life. No one else matters. Their purpose of life is their business. They can and will answer this question differently from you. What's more, the way you answer this question will be different every time you ask it, because what is important to us is never precisely the same from day to day; certainly the way we express the answer changes, evolves, deepens.

What does this tell us? That the elusive answer to that eternal question is no answer at all, because it is so mutable? Does that mean we are left with only the question, unyielding, unchanging, while the multitudinous answers dance around it, mocking us? We mock ourselves in pursuing this quixotic quest. Why not let it go? Because we can't. It's our purpose to try to answer. Our very existence on this earth is testament to the fact that the question is on the table.

Why not

There are those who look at temporal things the way they aren't and ask not why. I dream of eternal things that are and ask why not.

Others dream of temporal things that will be and ask when. I dream of dreamers dreaming galaxies unborn and say whenever.

There are others who see my dreams and ask who what why when where. I dream instead of uncharted seas and say, hey look over there.

Others dream my dreams and ask whose. I dream my own dreams and simply snooze.

Letter from Mick #2

Listen, blokes. Now that I'm God, I have even less time than I did before, as what with agents, contracts, tours and the like, I also have to deal now with this incessant praying. Get off your knees! (Hmm...that could be a song title. Almost as catchy as "Under My Thumb"...especially if you conceived it as addressed to groupies...) Right, get off them. I'm particularly fagged with these spam prayers and I have installed an anti-spam-prayer filter. So just know that your time will be wasted if you indulge in this. Have yourself a good shag or at least a good wank, or even a bad wank'll be better than nothing and do you a power of good. Whereas if you keep praying at me (preying on me?) you'll be responded to with a deafening silence.

You cannot petition the Lord with prayer! (Where is Jim Morrison when we need him?)