Avatar eyes

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

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

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

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

The three talismans

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

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

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

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

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

Cease, Augustus

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

Really virtual

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

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

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

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

In the dark

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

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

Librarian's blog

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

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

Time windows

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

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

The prisoner's dilemma

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

I seem therefore

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

Ever where

drink deep
a draught of dreaming

delve the divine
dive even into death

finally
see
in the dark

-- Citrus Shine On

A better algorithm

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

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

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

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

In a room with death

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

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

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

News from the universe

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

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

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

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

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

Whose idea was it

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

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

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

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

...Good idea.

I am I

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?