I am I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

"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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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.