Gnostically correct

...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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 dark matter and 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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!