Getting High With AIAB

Today I'd like to share a little trick I've taught myself in the course of my meditations, a tool for raising one's vibrational state as rapidly as possible.

First, a disclaimer: I've only been meditating for maybe a little over a year or so, am a relative newcomer to things and have no doubt at all that I've yet a lot to learn.

Anyhow, on to the main topic: I'm aware of course of mantras, and the reasons for them. For instance, the paradigmatic ohm ma ni pad me hum, whose sounds are said to recapitulate the universe even as the repetition of its syllables lulls the monkey mind into manageability. That is, the vibration of the words resonates with the very fabric of the cosmos, while also serving a deliberate psychological end. It's tried, tested, and acclaimed as eternally true by generation upon generation of mystics and monks and I'm certainly not going to say they're wrong.

For some reason, though, I've always felt the need to do things my own way and to this end, some time ago I started thinking that maybe it was time I incorporated a mantra into my meditation exercises. When precisely I started performing the one I eventually found I can't remember, but I use it now practically without thinking and am discovering that it has a certain potency.

The mantra itself is very simple: AIAB. If you're thinking it looks like an acronym you'd be right. It stands for Attraction, Intention, Allowance, Balance, the four laws of creation as outlined in the Handbook, and I've yet to see a better formulation than this for describing how the universe behaves on both a physical and a psychic layer. I pronounce it like 'ay-ab', with a long drawn out 'aaaaaaa', a sustained 'iiiiiiii', another 'aaaaaaaaaa' and then a final, so-soft-you-can-barely-hear-it 'b', moving as seemlessly as possible from one sound to the next. The key thing, though, is pitch: on the A, I keep it as low and resonant as I can, an ELF wave shaking the bones of the earth. On the 'I', I allow the pitch to rise, to something around conversational level. On the final A, I go as high as possible, like an opera singer out to break every wine glass in the house, with the final B as the culmination of this vertical climb.

The reasoning is fairly straightforward: the mind interprets vibration as sound, thus perhaps high pitched sounds will raise one's vibratory state, in a psychospiritual sense. I myself find that to be absolutely the case.

I should also mention that I don't actually make the sounds, except inside my mind. This has two benefits: one, people aren't wondering why I'm doing this weird sliding moan-squeel thing over and over again; two, by fabricating the sounds internally I'm able to cover a much greater range of pitch than otherwise (my voice couldn't carry a tune if you gave it a bag to put it in).

Back to AIAB: (inhale) during the first aaaaa, attention is on either the material world and/or sliding up the lower chakras; during the iiiiii, attention focuses to personal self and the mid (heart to 3rd eye) chakras; (exhale) during the final aaaaaa, attention shifts through the crown chakra and into All, driving higher towards unity with increasing pitch until one fall's back into matter and (inhale) during the first A.... I suppose I don't have to mention that the afformentioned meanings of each sound are also being contemplated while all this is taking place? And that as time goes on, the note held by the 'iiiiiiiii' should be periodically increased?

Might seem like a lot of things to try and juggle but I find the result is a state of world-self-Self synchronization that so far, for me, has been hard to beat. As the state continues I notice high-pitched background noises I wasn't conscious of before. The vibration of everything - consciousness, my body, the world around me - seems to increase after doing this. It's almost as though, by psychically connecting the low-vibrational world of base matter to the mid-state of self to the high-octave realm of Higher Self, the negative associations that inevitably adhere to the lower vibrational states are, as it were, pumped upwards, while the higher vibrational states imbue the material plane with their uniquely elevated nature. And there I am, caught in the middle and high as the proverbial kite.

Well, that's just a short little something I thought I'd share with you. May any who find this, find it useful.

Quantum Faith and the Physical Limits of Reason

Here's a question: how do you know what's true? I mean, right down to the very fundamentals of your world-view, whatever that happens to be, how do you determine the truth? There are multiple ways of doing this, a whole arsenal of epistemologies, each with their unique way of separating the wheat from the chaff, their own apparent strengths and weaknesses, and their own unique blind spots.

Really, though, you can boil all the variations down to two opposed ways of looking at the world. On the one hand their is reason, logic, rationality: cutting the conceptual world into separate pieces, subdivided one into another, chunks of the logos that can then be moved about in the mind like legos. It is no accident that science finds its etymological origin in the Paleo-Indoeuropean root *skei, "to split, to cleave". Science is the ultimate modern expression of reason but really, the ability to do this - to separate one thing from another inside one's mind, and move them about in a deliberate fashion by means of the imagination - has been a faculty of mind since before it was human.

Reason has it's limits, however. This is partly because the rate of information transfer in the observable universe is itself limited (by the velocity of light); and partly too because information must be stored somehow, and the universe's favorite method seems to be fundamentally holographic in nature ... and the problem with holograms is that, while a fragment will in a sense possess an image of the whole, the resolution will naturally suffer. Put another way, nothing within the universe can ever be as complex as the universe: the universe includes it, and so that would entail one of the universe's components being more complex than itself and there we have a contradiction in terms.¹ Thus nothing within the universe can ever have perfect information about the state of the whole universe, and reason - which is only effective so long as it possesses good information - is left, unavoidably, in a certain sense wanting.

And yet ... at the same time ... somehow, every single particle in the universe knows just where and when and how to be, and they do so together, simultaneously and instantaneously agreeing upon what reality is and then being it. It is entirely impossible for this coordination to to arise from shared information: the light speed barrier, as well as the vanishingly small amount of information a single particle can hold (on the order of a single bit), prohibit it. And yet, it happens, so what gives? Ask a theologian and he might say this is the Hand of God orchestrating existence. You might also see it as every single electron singing its part in a universal choir, all of them maintaining perfect harmony as they vibrate in and out of existence and collectively happen; it is by keeping that harmony - that synchronicity - that each knows precisely what to do in order that the whole might continue to exist in perfect balance.

Balance is a really key concept here. The universe would not exist without balance. Action must be juxtaposed with reaction, matter with antimatter, positive with negative charge and energy. At all points and at all times what is taken must be paid for. On a global scale, everything is always in perfect balance or it simply would not be ... more locally, imbalances - departures from equilibrium - can arise, but these will always tend back towards balance and sooner rather than later, for the farther from balance something is removed, the greater the force that pulls it back.

And what is that force that pulls things back into balance? It is at once everywhere - for it has behind it the force of the entire cosmos, and effects every point within the cosmos - and at the same time is focused to a point, informing the motion, behaviour and very existence of everything within it. You might try and visualize it as a sphere with an infinite radius and its center everywhere. It inheres in every particle, the whole of it contained entirely within the smallest point. Paradoxically this renders any effort to understand it by subdivision of those particles and finer description of those points utterly quixotic: after any given division, the whole remains, untouched, regardless of what might have been learned about its 'parts'.² One is no closer to understanding than one was before. Logically, there is only one way a whole can be comprehended: on its own terms. Yet we've already seen that reason itself is fundamentally incapable of obtaining this sort of knowledge of the whole. Thus science remains at an impasse on this question, that of the ultimate nature of the Force that pervades the cosmos, and so consideration of it can be complete if one limits oneself to rational or logical modes alone.

Yet this Force exists, and must be dealt with. It is everywhere and so nowhere; it affects all particles and is affected by every particle, at once determining the changes in state of every particle and point, and being itself the sum determinant of all those changes of state, at once the conductor of the cosmic choir and the song the choir sings.

You won't find it stated this way in any physics textbooks of course, not quite so baldly at any rate but ... something like this is starting to poke through the math. It's certainly not a new idea: Gottfried Leibniz, the great contemporary of Newton (and were there any intellectual justice it would be customary to introduce them the other way around), published a theory very like this in his Monadologie, a forgotten work of philosophy in which he interprets the universe as a collection of autonomous, conscious atoms (monads, in his terminology), each of which is at once the whole of the universe and the smallest division of the universe. The work seemed the sheerest stark raving madness to his contemporaries and so is remembered today as barely a footnote in the history of thought, but it may well be that in this subject as in so much else Leibniz was simply far ahead of his time (we're talking here of a man who, in the 17th century, discovered the calculus, binary math, and the concept of both the computer and the internet.)

At any rate, through this digression into metaphysical physics we have found our way to the second of the two fundamental ways of knowing: this harmony, this great mutual action undertaken in perfect confidence due to an ineffable knowledge of what is the right thing to do, in a word: faith. It arises at the level of particles and continues on all the way up, through the various elaborations and refinements of vibrational existence that comprise the stages of matter, life, and consciousness. Nothing would exist unless it had faith it existed.

In truth, in the end we inevitably find that reason is a sham, an elaborate disguise for a simple faith at the core: that what was, is, and will continue to be. A reasonable man might expect that if he jumps off a bridge into a ravine he will die; thus a thrill-seeker with his reason in service to his adrenal glands will tie a bungee cord to his foot before taking the leap. But this is just more faith, faith of a particular, deep and unquestioning kind: the faith that what is, is. The Sanskrit had a word for it that survives in modern Buddhism: sraddha, the faith that a dropped rock will fall. Faith enabled by the existence of the universe; faith that enables the universe to exist. Which it is depends on your perspective, in looking out or out looking in, and if you look both ways you'll see pretty quickly there's no real contradiction there because in the end, 'in' and 'out' are illusory divisions of a united whole.

The universe sees to it, just by its very nature, that everything within it has some way of accessing this kind of knowledge, and in the case of humans you could say, from a metaphorical standpoint, that it's located in the heart. The heart chakra is located in the center of mass and this is no accident. Now you might look upon the emotions and the intuition that arises from them as mere epiphenomena of the brain chemistry, the changing flux of neurotransmitters, hormones, and other chemicals across synapses but ... at the same time ... that whole biochemical dance might also be in part a response to information coming through the heart, communicated not in a digital (separated, rational, comprehensible) sense, but rather in an analogue (continuous, inseparable) way. The intuition thus plays the roll of both the instrument on which the universe plays its song, and the instrument with which any being is able to read the universe with perfect certainty (albeit without being in any way able to explain this certainty.)

Now, you can choose to listen to this intuition or not. That gets more true the further up the scale you get from primal matter, which is why living systems are characterized by being far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and conscious systems most of all. The thing about complexity is, it enables an ever-greater resolution of the universe, an ever-sharpening (but never exactly true) picture of the cosmos to imprint itself into matter. Thus a methane molecule knows rather little, a fragment of RNA rather more, a functioning cell quite a bit in comparison and a human mind ... well ... you have one.

As the scale of complexity is increased, the tendency to act through 'reason' (assumptions about the world built into historically imprinted information) grows ever greater, at the necessary expense of the tendency to act upon 'faith' (that basic harmonic resonance with what is.) In the limit of subatomic particles, faith dominates completely: electrons carry no information within themselves save that acquired from whatever was the last particle to interact with it, and thus act as they do because they cannot act otherwise. In the limit of human complexity, it is often the other way around completely: for many, faith is ignored entirely in favor of a hypertrophied reason. By this I do not mean to describe a reader of the Skeptical Inquirer in comparison to a devout Mormon (neither science nor religion are of any fundamental consequence to the question) but rather to describe a particular sort of human so enamoured of their reason that they have lost touch completely with their intuition.

Faith and intuition are ultimately one and the same thing: arising simultaneously within and without, comprising one's instantaneous and inexplicable reaction to the universe as a whole. The funny thing about intuition is how rarely it's wrong: like the conscience (which is in truth itself deeply connected to this phenomenon), it will always prove to have been right in the end, whether that end comes in a fraction of a second or only after a significant fraction of your life. Sometimes it will seem wrong, even disastrously so but somehow ... with a little more time ... it turns out your intuition was leading you in the right direction all along.

Reason isn't supposed to dominate the intuition. How could it? The intuition is what connects the mind to the cosmos, and thus shares in the infinite and incomprehensible nature of the universe. Quite the contrary: reason is an outgrowth of faith, and always was. It exists that the universe (which expresses itself through every part of itself) might know itself; one might also say, its exists because the universe knows itself. The proper use of reason is to reflect within it the intuition, so that meaning can be found in what is intuited with an ever-finer precision, thus allowing a more subtle understanding of creation. The intuition guides towards the truth, but it isn't much on details and this is where reason comes in. The history of science itself bears this out: a series of discontinuous improvements in conceptual understanding brought about through intuitive leaps on the part of individual researchers that revealed heretofore undreamt of zones of intellectual inquiry, followed by slow, gradual improvements in the description of those regions thanks to the rigorous deployment of reason on their shores. There are also numerous examples of long marches down blind alleys into fruitless theoretical swamps, a condition brought about by ignoring the intuition entirely and trying to reason one's way out. That's particularly the case today in most any field you want to name: in science as in so much of modern civilization, the role of 'intuition' has contracted so far that for too many its influence is as invisible as it is crucial.

That's not a healthy state of affairs. Reason cut off from intuition can talk itself into anything; indeed, it can almost be guaranteed that it will. Rather than providing an ever-deeper categorization of truth, it almost inevitably ends up a shadow play of misunderstanding and deliberate deception. When you consider intuition's characteristic harmonics - conscience, creativity, compassion - well, if the intuition is ignored those capabilities are muted and reason can end up in the service of some nasty things indeed. Indeed, it is again almost inevitable that it will. Look around at the world you live in, and you'll see that it has.

Here's the punchline, though: all those people who've been trained to ignore their intuition? Whether they only shut off their conscience, their creativity, or their compassion when they punch a clock, or whether they've learned to live their whole lives blocking it out ... they still have it. It's still there. It always will be because their very existence necessitates its presence (and vice versa). And it isn't going to shut up, ever.

In fact, for people all over the world, that inner voice is getting louder every day....

1 You might point out that the universe is structured as a fractal, which is essentially true, and if you know something about fractal geometry you could argue that mathematically, any given part of the fractal contains the whole, and is thus as complex as the whole but really ... here in the 'real' world of matter, energy, space and time ... no mathematical abstraction is ever perfectly embodied. A tree, a road network, a river, or an African village all display fractal structure, but only to a limited resolution. The infinite recursion and perfect resolution of the mathematical ideal is a native only of the platonic plane, just as are the triangle and π.

2 The alert reader may have noticed a seeming contradiction here, between the notion that 'the part contains the whole' and the earlier qualification 'but only to a limited resolution'. In the former case, however, we were talking about how much information about the universe could be held within a given volume, be it a planet or a particle; now, we are (attempting, at least) to describe the influence of the universe upon that volume.

A Narrative Tzol'kin?

I was thinking about the symbolism of the tzolkin the other day, and while there's no 'official' beginning day of the Mayan calender, a common convention is that the beginning of the cycle starts with 1 Imix, standing for the primal body of the world and represented as a crocodile. Certain authors have pointed to the preponderance of dragons and magical lizard beings in traditions around the world and isn't it interesting, in that light, that the Maya chose the basest of reptilian entities to begin their sacred calender. I decided to have a closer look at the symbolic correlations of the various days in their order, and on Wikipedia (yes, I know, but bear with me) I found the following list:

• Imix : 'Crocodile' - the reptilian body of the planet earth, or world
• Ik : 'Wind' - breath, life. Also violence.
• Akbal : 'Night-house' - darkness, the underworld, realm of the nocturnal jaguar-sun.
• Kan : 'Maize' - sign of the young maize lord who brings abundance, ripeness. Also lizard, net.
• Chicchan : 'Snake' - the celestial serpent
• Cimi : 'Death'
• Manik : 'Deer' - sign of the Lord of the Hunt
• Lamat : 'Rabbit' - sign of the planet Venus, sunset.
• Muluc : 'Water' - symbolised by jade, an aspect of the water deities, fish
• Oc : 'Dog' - who guides the night sun through the underworld.
• Chuen : 'Monkey' - the great craftsman, patron of arts and knowledge. Also thread.
• Eb : 'Grass' or 'Point' - associated with rain and storms.
• Ben : 'Reed' - who fosters the growth of corn, cane, and man.
• Ix : 'Jaguar' - the night sun. Also maize.
• Men : 'Eagle' - the wise one, bird, moon
• Cib : 'Owl/Vulture' - death-birds of night and day. Also wax, soul, insect.
• Caben : 'Earthquake' - formidable power. Also season, thought.
• Etz'nab : 'Knife' - the obsidian sacrificial blade.
• Cauac : 'Rain' or 'Storm' - the celestial dragon serpents and the chacs, gods of thunder and lightning.
• Ahau : 'Lord' - the radiant sun god

So Imix is pretty obvious, but then you see lizard popping up again with Kan, primarily 'Maize', then a celestial serpent, three within the first 5 days. You might almost think there might be an outline of a story in this, an epic written into the very structure of Mayan time itself in which they are attempting to preserve forever ... what, exactly? A memory? A propechy?

Why not both? The tzol'kin is certainly a divinatory tool, but could it be that there is a history within it, as well, a very old story perhaps forgotten in the rest of the world and, thus, the ruthless suppression with which knowledge of it was wiped out upon contact between the Maya and a certain European church whose own top echelons, evidence suggests, are agents of reptilian beings from the deep past whose existence has been elsewhere forgotten?

If you scan the list again, thinking of the various symbols that pop up as linked together in narrative, one most certainly suggests itself, to myself at least. Some of the symbols evoke events, others a place, others a character, and some all three at the same time. It culminates with an Earthquake, the rise of technology in the form of Flint, a violent Storm and finally a radiant Sun. In between you might almost perceive a rough evolution, from primal forms to animals of greater advancement, though the agreement with a strict scientific chronology is far from perfect.

No one knows how long the Maya have been keeping the tzol'kin's count of days. It has certainly been thousands of years, at least, and there is some evidence that they acquired the habit from previous civilizations. It's origins are currently lost in the shadows of time but there is every reason it might have survived as an oral tradition for a great span indeed, perhaps - who knows? - dating back to ice age Atlantis.

On a darker note, the reptilian symbolism at the beginning might also be a clue as to who really created it in the first place. Drawing a parallel to the Illuminist use of symbolism, it might be another case of 'Will you notice who we really are?' in-your-face semiotics, a possibility that should certainly be taken into account lest one be caught unawares by another of history's hidden agendas.

Then again, it might equivalently be that the Maya knew something, something they were trying to warn the distant future about and set about doing so by burning the story of it into their calender.

What it all means, I don't pretend to know. But I'd be fascinated to hear the thoughts of others on the subject.

Errata

The observant amongst you will notice that I've added the Hunab'ku to the sidebar, as well as a link to the daily tzol'kin at the excellent Mayan Majix site, where you can go to learn everything you need and want to know about the Mayan calender. There's a lot of disinformation out there regarding the tzol'kin, the baktuns, the haab and such, most of it centering around the infamous December 21, 2012 date at which the world is expected to end (though of course, no one ever says how, or even why.) Even if this kind of thing isn't usually your 'thing', I have no doubt at all that the 2012 meme has come to your attention. By now it's dispersed throughout the culture, and in this age in which the Lie reigns supreme you really might want to ask yourself why, exactly, '2012' has gained such renown.

Despite all this there really is something to this whole Mayan calender business (else why all the disinformation? Such an effort would not be undertaken for nothing. Similar reasoning applies to UFOs, conspiracy theories of all kinds, religions and mysticism ... indeed any field or topic in which there is something of real value to be gained, and so vast quantities of mud poured into what by all right should be crystal clear waters.) The tzol'kin seems to reflect an understanding of time far more sophisticated than the linear Western concept, and I mean here the real tzolkin. Accept no substitutes (and if you rely on google, that is much of what you shall get.) You'd be well served to make your own. 13 Muluc has come up with an easy-to-make calender using just cue cards, which I commend to your attention. I made one myself last weekend (hers is prettier, I must say) and though it's only been a week that I've been following it the synchronicities are already becoming apparent.

Today is 7 Wind in the Mayan calender, 7 being the number of reflection (in the sense of a mirror), and Wind being the spirit of dissemination. It is, apparently, a good day for communication and so what better day than today to sit here typing a new post for this sadly neglected blog. I'm not aplogizing for the neglect, mind; I haven't been much in a mood for blogging recently but as of late the bug seems to have bitten me and so, here we are. Or here I am, at any rate.

And speaking of biting bugs, I'm pausing about every three seconds to scratch at one of the many bites covering my arms, neck, head, and, yes, face, some from mosquitoes but the really bad ones from those vicious little rat-bastards of creation, the common deerfly, a beast whose extinction would trouble me not at all. I've been spending a lot of time outdoors, the last few weeks. Events have compelled me to take employment, which I've found at a local resort as a general maintenance goon, tasked with everything unpleasant and everything extra, paid not so well but more or less in charge of myself and that suits me just find, at present.

And isn't that strange, in this time of rampaging unemployment, factory closures and banking collapses and going-out-of-business 90% off summer super sales, that I am now working? Stranger still perhaps is where: the resort is an ancient (for Canada) hotel on the Rideau canal, a family owned establishment for over a hundred years until just a couple of months ago, which relies for its business upon American tourists. By all rights, between the Americans being poor and suddenly required to present a passport at the border, business should be awful and yet ... it's not. It's not booming, mind, but there's no shortage of customers and this is partly because there are many elderly couples who've been coming for thirty or forty years, and partly because, in fact, many of the hotels on the Rideau have closed and so what residual custom there is, has been channeled our way. And so here I find myself, working in the midst of so many who are not, in an island of stability amidst a rising sea of chaos. It's just for the summer which is long enough for me and, for that at least, I'm grateful.

I don't wish to paint too rosy a picture here. Some days it seems I have very little to feel gratitude for, and the sad truth is that I've been one sad bastard, difficult at best to live with. Well, everyone in my family has, really, each in our own way, and that's to be expected I suppose given the circumstances so, no more need be said in that respect.

And with that, uncharacteristically perhaps, I find that I have no more to say on anything for now and so, I'll leave it at that.

Dad's Legacy

Note: I wrote this a couple of hours before the funeral, and it's intended audience is one that knew my father very well which might make it difficult for anyone who didn't to understand. Still, perhaps you'll gain some idea of the sort of man my father was, and so some measure of insight into how I became the man I've become.

Yesterday I was sitting in the workshop my Dad spent so much of the last few years building. Not doing anything, really, just looking at it, remembering the day we put up this piece or that, remembering how that one time his hand slipped with the saw or the chisel or the knife and blood went everywhere, at which he’d shrug and, not bothering with so much as a bandaid, carry on like nothing had happened. Dad’s hands and arms always had self-inflicted cuts and scrapes and the occasional black thumbnail from a wayward hammer, and while we’d all know about it when he incurred the wound, afterwards he’d say not a word of complaint. He never showed pain, no matter how much it hurt. Bad food, bad weather or bad service and you’d never hear the end of it, but pain? It was as though he didn’t notice it.

The workshop … it’s a mess right now, tools scattered everywhere in the sawdust, just the way he left it, and that’s fitting. Dad was always on our cases to clean up after ourselves, and almost never took his own advice in that respect. To the charge of “Who left this lying around?” as often as not the answer would be, “Dad, that was you.” It’s not that he was lazy, anyone who knows him even a little knows that charge would never stick … it’s that cleaning bored him, so as soon as he finished making one thing he was all too easily distracted by a new project. He always had several things on the go at once, especially after retirement when he had the time for them, and you can’t go many places around the house without stumbling upon a reminder of that. Sitting up there in the workshop, holding a half-finished police crest he’d been carving, it was as though he’d just stepped out for a moment, to go pick something up at the hardware store or maybe just take a break for a bit in his easychair.

If there’s one thing Dad loved more than wood-carving, it was nature. He never needed an excuse like hunting or fishing to spend time in the outdoors; for him, the simple pleasure of being out there with the trees and the rocks and the water was enough. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier than when we was out in the canoe, paddling around the lake and catching sight of a beaver, a heron, or a larger-than-expected fish … or sitting at the top of Rock Dunder after a long hike, enjoying the sunshine and the unobstructed view of the forests. Even winter didn’t stop him: once the ice was thick enough to walk on, he’d be strapping on the skis and shepherding the children through a long excursion into the cold. One of my earlier memories is seeing Dad powering on up ahead while I struggled along in his tracks, cursing the cold he was oblivious to and oblivious to the natural beauty he was so exhilarated by. One day I remember him telling me, while I was in that awkward stage between boy and man and trying to figure out what it meant to be the latter, that there was nothing wrong with a man shedding a tear because he was overwhelmed with the beauty of morning dew in a spider web.

You’re getting the sense maybe that most of my experience of him was very different from yours. There’s a lot of people here today for whom my father was colleague or comrade, who saw him mainly in one uniform or another, and while I was certainly aware that my father wore those uniforms it wasn’t something that he really brought home so much. To me he was always just Dad, and if he also happened to be an officer of the military and of the peace well, what was so special about that? I’ve been finding out the last couple of days just what was so special, about him, about how he touched the lives of those around him, about what he meant not just to his family but to the wider community and world around him.

When you’re as close as family often are, you can be afflicted with a strange myopia, blind to things that are obvious to everyone else, and perhaps as a result you don’t always see eye to eye on everything. My father and I have certainly had our differences, but then he’d argue with anyone, about anything. Fact was he loved a good debate the way other men loved a good bare-knuckle boxing match, but only because he loved things like truth, honor, duty, all those big old-fashioned ideals that people often talk about, but he tried to live by, and for the most part did. His lived his life by them, and he tried to influence others in any way he could, in every way he knew, to do so as well because he knew that the more we did, the better the world we could have. If you think back to your own interactions with him, whatever they might have been, I’m sure you’ll see what I’m talking about and … now … if there’s one thing above anything else that we might call his legacy, that, I believe, is it.

Deceptive Circuits and Honest Cycles: Conspiracies and Qi Gong

It's been a while since I've posted here and I feel like rambling for a bit and we'll see how that goes. What's on my mind at the moment, lying at the center of a spectrum of other issues, is the central yin-yang like duality of the Truth and the Lie. It underlies everything in our existence, a shifting matrix of gradual contradiction and periodic correction, continually reconfiguring our world into new images. Of course a yin-yang, as fantastic an image as it might be isn't necessarily the best image to use for the process, really you have to picture a nested hierarchy of cycles, for some lies are larger than others just as some truths are more profound, and are exposed with lesser frequency - and greater consequence - than their more trifling, little white kin.

I'm sure anyone reading this can think of several examples of what I'm talking about here, both within the wider world and in their own personal experience. Perhaps a lie we ourselves fabricated and spread, or a lie fabricated by another that we believed, and sometimes no doubt a little of both because after all, doesn't all lying involve a little self-deception? There are numerous motives to lie, though all ultimately come down to the desirability of wielding some sort of power over others. It is in the nature of a lie, after all, to centralize information within a limited sphere, and thus through deception to alter the perception of reality which is almost, but crucially not quite the same thing as reality. Information is power: allowed to flow and it becomes a current, bottle it up, however, and gain potential.

The temptation to use a lie to gain power is therefore quite great, and we might naturally assume some lies to be greater and more powerful than others. The bigger the lie, the longer it would take to be perceived, the larger the numbers deceived, and thus the more potent the power derived. Most lies of course are small, benefiting perhaps only a single individual's marital infidelity and affecting only those in his immediate family (as well of course as secondary and tertiary consequences in those affected by the actions arising out of the neuroses of any children, due to their home being broken, assuming of course the affair is eventually revealed.)

What's in the brackets there really gets to the crux of the whole lie vs truth thing, because the problem with a lie is that when it runs into the truth it tends to be negated, along with everything directly connected with it. Lies can be used to build things: returning to the image of the electric circuit, a lie acting as a battery can drive a circuit. The larger the potential, the greater and more complex the circuit that can be driven off of it. Maintaining the potential requires keeping the negative charge out of contact with the positive; however, in order to provide a source for the current, some contact must be allowed. It is this fundamental issue that consumes both electrical engineers and conspirators: not enough contact between the poles, and the circuit will not run; too much, and it shorts out.

Of course in one case we're talking electricity and in the other we're talking a fundamental element of consciousness. Discerning falsity from truth, T from F, 0 from 1 is really what consciousness is all about, even at such a simple level as, is something in one place, and not another? You can draw parallels with this process right down to the subatomic scale and I don't think this precise metaphorical mapping is at all an accident though this essay, right now, isn't the place to go into that. Right now I'd like to talk about another similarity, one between the logarithmic scale on which lies make a perfectly straight power law distribution, and the idea of fractal cycles of nested time.

Daily rotations of the earth, cycles of the moon, the motions of the Earth and other planets about the Sun, precession, and the orbit of the Sun within the galaxy combine to make a nested hierarchy of cyclic time that uses natural rhythms of the cosmos to map time on various scales. You could go in the other direction, too, and derive time using the same principles from the vibratory motion of atoms, providing a comprehensive map of time at every scale. Many modern thinkers have suggested that there are direct correlations between time and human consciousness, pointing to the rise and fall of empires, civilizations, and even civilization itself as resulting from the influence of various cyclic effects. This suggests of course that there would have been previous civilizations, arising during previous cycles and interestingly enough as the 21st century has progressed evidence of these has turned up at sites around the world.

Now, if there were to be a connection between cyclic time (and all time, ultimately, is based on cycles) and cycles within human consciousness and civilization, what sort of stares at me in the middle of all that, pulling the two together and uniting them as one is the dynamic between truth and lie. The larger the lie, the longer the cycle; the greater its power, the more its consequences when the truth negates it. The greater the negating truth, the longer its calming effect ... until some time later, another lie, large enough to again displace the truth, comes sidling up and into people's minds.

One of the reason's the whole 'cyclic time' idea is becoming so fashionable these days is that we're at the transition point for a whole lot of cycles. A lot of people are sensing this and it's showing up in our personal lives and in world events: human consciousness mirroring the cosmic cycles that gave rise to it. Right now is a pretty special time: with the flow of information within the circuit of human consciousness at such massive levels, it's become impossible for the truth to be entirely bottled up. The only way to keep the current from shorting out is to make sure there's plenty of distractions around, so that what grains of real truth escape are protected by obscurity. Still, that's an imperfect defense, and as events proceed ... the current rises ... the flux increases ... and more and more of the circuits 'short out'. More people have a run-in with enough truth that they stop being useful to the wider system, because they've started questioning everything about it and these days, once you go looking for truth you're bound to come across it.

The problem of course is that a system that's been built to run on lies can't run anymore when the lies are exposed. That needn't be the case but it's the situation we find ourselves in now and perhaps, it's been that situation for a very, very long time which again of course brings us back to the idea of cycles of time. Some lies, after all, are very much older than others.

This explains, of course, the massive growth in the conspiracy movement for a conspiracy, after all, is nothing more than a group agreeing to lie together, and very often of course to lie a great deal to one another as well which is what things like initiations and security clearances and need-to-know are all about. Any lie, if the truth is to be known by more than a single individual, must become a conspiracy to survive and given the way in which lies pervade our shared cognitive world (advertising, propaganda, victor's history, religious manipulation, censorship, faked research, secret research, fraud, to name but a few examples) we might reasonably expect conspiracies to be similarly pervasive. In fact to anyone who bothers to look it becomes obvious quite soon that there are quite vast conspiracies operating today that have exerted great influence over the course of human history for periods reaching perhaps in some rare (or at any rate particularly deep) cases back for thousands of years. As but one example, the Catholic church might be seen as a conspiracy on the part of the Roman Empire to extend its domination to the level of the soul and thus obviate the need for legions, a conspiracy that itself drew on magicoreligious mind control techniques (an old an sophisticated form of conspiracy) pioneered in Egypt and Babylon.

I am not saying that there is one, overarching conspiracy that guides the whole of the world. Some are larger than others and many larger conspiracies contain smaller ones (the CIA is a fine example of this), of which the wider conspiracy remains ignorant. Thus, it is certainly not my suggestion that there is some singular Conspiracy that wields overwhelming control, for that is not the case, and as often as not one conspiracy is in conflict with the interests of another. And yet a great deal of what overt control does exist, exists due to conspiracies ... conspiracies that become more easily exposed every day, in less time and to more people ... and those whose minds are touched by a few encounters, grow more sensitized to subsequent run-ins.

So when things like swine flu happen, it's no surprise that for a lot of us, the very first instinct we had was to suspect a conspiracy, and sure enough the warning shout of 'bioweapon!' has been heard across the internet.

These are dark, doom-laden times we live in. The economy is an ongoing train wreck in slow motion, the globe teeters on the brink of a war more catastrophic than any in history, the biosphere is stretched to the breaking point and the Earth herself shudders as though in sympathy. Yet at the middle of that we find that our species is being confronted all at once with the truth about all of the lies we've been telling ourselves, individually for our whole lives or just a few years, collectively for our entire history or perhaps, only since 9/11. It's in the nature of a lie that when it comes down, its collapse is catastrophic for everything connected with it and that, I think, explains a lot of what's happening now.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. It never did. At any moment we always have the choice of telling the truth, or continuing the lie ... even if it's just telling the truth to ourselves, and ceasing to believe a lie that we've swallowed. That choice is always present, and sadly few take it with any regularity but, that could change. It really could. It's as easy as telling the truth, starting right now.

There's something interesting going on in China right now, symbolic perhaps of the whole theme of this essay. When one thinks of China these days, one imagines giant sweatshops, rank upon rank of identical residential towers housing standardized workers, spirits broken through decades of ruthless Communist party suppression (and lets not forget to the Communist Party, one of history's great conspiracies.) Whatever comes out of China seems to be tainted, whether it's baby formula or children's toys, as though they cannot help but export back some of the pollution engendered by their pursuit of one lie (limitless growth) in exchange for another (fiat currency.) This is no accident; from the fruits shall ye know the tree, and China's been planting its orchards in some pretty rotten soil, recently.

I'm sure, however, that you've also heard of Falun Gong, the dissident movement that, for a decade now, the Communist Party has done everything in its power to stamp out. The Falun Gong are a loose-knit crew, united only by their practice of the Qi Gong (or Falun Dafa) energy discipline and their following of the short text spiritual text Zhuan Falun, authored in 1994 by Li Hongzhi. The movement's central tenets are Truthfulness, Compassion and Forebearance (their characters, 真，善，忍, shown above) and it's due to their cleaving to that first principle that the government, it seems, has taken such a dislike to them and invented, just for them, things like the death-bed, a modern innovation on the good old medieval rack. I myself just found out about this new innovation in torture whilst searching for a picture to illustrate this point and ... something else that struck me, was that all the pictures that came up were re-enactments. No doubt the government claims that these wild tales are all overly exaggerated, even flagrantly fabricated but ... then we come running up against that Truthfulness thing and really, do you think such people would lie about these things?

Of course, such people must be persecuted. For how useful is a woman who has made truth a pillar of her life, to a system of control based on manipulation through lies? Ultimately, force must be used instead, in such a case ... but even the most brutal of regimes prefers to minimize physical violence, expensive and inefficient as it is, and so any movement towards a general truthfulness amongst the controlled population must be stopped.

Of course, history teaches that such a movement is simply made stronger on its own persecution, and that remains the fact today. According to the Chinese government's own statistics, the number of Falun Gong practitioners is currently between 75 million and 100 million people. The latter estimate edges up on 10% of their total population. Now, you might argue that the government is inflating the numbers in order to justify their own continued crackdown, but you might also argue that their downplaying the true extent of their problem, in order to make the situation seem better than it is to the global investment class to which they owe fealty. Either way it seems apparent that there are a very large number of individuals in China who have dedicated themselves to truth, compassion, and forbearance.

How useful do you think they will prove as soldiers?

Well, that seems like a good note to leave off on for today. Light at the end of the tunnel, or just the bright circle in the big patch of yin, either way it is darkest before the dawn but even in the blackest of nights the light remains, if you look for it, for there must always be the seeds for the rebirth of the next cycle and those are everywhere you care to see them.

The Paraself

I enjoy taking long walks, even if, down the subdivision of dirt roads that is my rural areas' equivalent of the suburbs, there is not actually anything to do but look at the same old, same old scenery. Of course, the scenery isn't the point, it's mainly to keep my body occupied, get away from the house for a smoke or two, and free the mind from having to do anything save sit there and do its thing. Every once in a while, if I walk long enough and meet certain other still nebuluous conditions, something gets jogged loose, and I have one of those moments when large ideational chunks calve like glaciers and rearrange themselves, instantly, into a new configuration.

Lets back up for a second. You've heard at some point I assume of quantum mechanics, and may have come across the Many Worlds Interpretation of that theory, a speculative but very credible formulation wherein quantum effects give rise to an invisible multiverse that consists of every possible world. Conventionally, there can be no contact between parallel universes: once they split, in the quantum of time in which one state has the possibility of shifting to one or the other outcome, no further influence is possible. Just as the present is untouchable save for its immediate past and can touch nothing but its immediate future, so parallel universes are out of bounds.

(Well, that's not entirely true. The formulation of gravity within brane theory indicates it as the one force able to radiate through all dimensions, and due to this by far the weakest. That it would be gravity that has this property is especially interesting to me in light of where I'm going with this piece.)

This doesn't stop science fiction writers from speculating on travel between those universes, however, and it's thanks to their efforts and shows like Sliders that I can be so confident that you've come across this particular idea before.

Now, consider for a moment Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, in which like not just attract like (as in the law of attraction) but like forms affect like forms. This explains not just heredity but also instinct, as well as personal memory and a whole host of other tendencies within the universe. Although Sheldrake is a biologist and did his early work in botany, his morphic resonance theory is not, strictly speaking, a biological theory but a quantum one.

Now, hold on to that part about the theory regarding its explanation of personal memory. In the theory it is advisable to think of the brain as a transciever rather than a computer, as its function is to more closely resemble itself than anything else in the universe and thus to take advantage of morphic fields to send information within itself. Broadly speaking, the reason you remember recent events more accurately and fully than distant ones is that present-you is more like recent-past-you than she is like little-kid-you. But, there's still enough in common between the the quantum form of you now and you when you're very young that you can retain some memories of even very distant events.

What about you-in-the-future? I can already here some of you asking. Well, at any given moment the universe is splitting off into new, irreconcilable daughter universes, and so as you think into the future you're inevitably confronted with a combinatorially increasing number of potential yous. And so, in contrast with past you (of whom, at any given moment, you can remember only one) the signal from all those future yous, while present, is diffuse and mostly cancels itself. Which isn't to say, of course, that no contact is impossible. Only that it would take something pretty remarkable that got a large enough number of future-yous shouting at you in unison, in order to push some amount of signal through the noise.

But I'm not really here to talk about the future, though it is I grant you a fun thing to talk about.

Really, it's the present that interests me. What is the presnt, really? This infinitesimal moment on which our awareness balances its journey through time? We live in it but how well do we know it? Well, I needn't belabor the point, given the readership here, so I'll get right to another one: it's very possible to imagine each moment as one amongst the almost uncountable infinity of possible configuration states of the universe.

No doubt you've seen it on TV. One moment, frozen in time, motionless as a painting but in three dimensions (and often as not, one of the characters can move around in it.) Imagine your immediate surroundings frozen in this way, and now expand that to include your whole city, country, the world, and then the universe. That is what a moment looks like. Now,picture it moving one step forward, one little infinitesimal change: some parts almost certain to undergo no change at all, others as uncertain as the wind and it's out of that chaos that a tree is woven of the timelines.

In fact, this brings us back again to morphic fields: one moment is most like its immediately preceding moment, and its immediately subsequent moments, and so we experience time as we do, from effect/cause to cause/effect and so on, endlessly rolling forward through the cycles.

Now, sometimes, on a bad day when you're in a really terrible mood and thinking all kinds of despondant thoughts about life and the lack of justice of your place within it, you've wondered no doubt about how things might've been. About the other lives you might have led, if you'd done this differently, gone that way, went out with that girl instead or trusted yourself a little more (or a little less, depending on circumstance.) How different of a person would you have been? Happier, better, stronger, richer, married to a prettier woman or more skilled, able to play that guitar or write that code or catch that fish ... then again, there's other yous that are dead in a ditch, or about to be with a needle in your arm, or bankrupt or merely unloved. Past a certain point, there's no knowing where the path of a different you might take them.

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation, all of those others yous exist. All of them. Even the ones you just thought of now, the impossibly ridiculous ones you thought of just to test the theory, them too (that said, they're likely very unlikely, a small infinite set within a vastly larger fractal system ... but then, measured against the expanse of the multiverse, we are all of us both hugely unlikely and inevitable. What seems likely and what not is a measure only of distance between two moments, rather than an inherent superiority of one versus the other. From the standpoint of a ridiculous you, you are yourself impossibly silly.)

I call this vast, wistful cloud of potential and might-have-been other yous the paraself. The paraself, strictly speaking, might be thought of as all potential selves, past, present, and future, including as a matter of course the past you actually remember, and the future you perceive as likely. Or you might define it as all of the moments within the multiverse that include you as a character (supporting or starring, depending on how you look at it.) At any rate I imagine your mind is boggling somewhat now so I'll let it do that a second and then we'll get back to business.

Yes, I hear some of you say, this is all very interesting in an abstract sort of way but give us something practical, damn it! We're busy people. We've people to activate, societies to build, a world to save!

So here goes: might morphic resonance be used to contact other probabilistic 'locations' within the paraself? Similarity allows the communication, after all, and while of course any self that would be interesting enough to want to contact would also be quite different but ... how different is that, really? After all, you're probably pretty different from how you were ten or twenty years ago and yet ... you remember, don't you? At least, you remember some of it.

How then might one establish contact? Well, the logical way to go about it of course would be through thought. Obviously, this other you within the paraself branched off from an otherwise shared past at some point, so to follow them it might be wise to remember as clearly as possible everything about that time, to be there inside as fully as possible and then ... give things a slight nudge, perhaps, in a different direction.

The interesting question of course is how much contact one might gain with another self, how much information might actually pass between you and the paraself. It's all well and good we're talking about an elaborate sort of day-dreaming here but ... if the other self is truly there, might it be possible to transmit useful information through the paraself? To use it as a sort of referrence library, from which knowledge and skills might be accessed?

I wanted to illustrate that last bit with a scene from the Matrix, any of several shots of Neo plugged into the chair in the command room of the Nebuchadnezzar, learning kung fu in the time it takes ordinary mortals to learn what's on TV tonight, but, as luck would have it ... I can find no such image. So I'll just leave this off here, encapsulating finally more or less the sum of the epiphany I had on that walk two weeks ago and leaving the subsequent experiments (their logical subject, the aptly termed myself) for a later essay.