PsiKiGram

Coming Up From the Undersane

2010-03-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

As I start this piece (I'll by no means imply I'll attempt to finish in the same state) I find myself on a sort of finely balanced personal edge, in a liminal state of consciousness, poised between undersanity and supersanity. I've barely slept in days, having spent much of it in transit and having begun the saga with some scientific discovery: staying up all night asking the stars above to tell me some of their secrets (while every night for the past two weeks, on which it had been cloudy, I stayed up late asking for other secrets from the same sources, by means of astrology), and then staying up all the subsequent night having my awareness peeled open with a uniquely Liberatory Scientific Detection instrument so that I could speak to the stars within, and discover the stars around me. Following which came the seemingly endless grey airport-and-plane limbo-state of travel, a shifting time of movement from one context to another in which, regardless of how comfortable it is made, little of any consequence can be accomplished ... save to move with that flow, and arrive where you're going.

You might say that's a metaphor for the flavor of the times: we're in transit, though we've forgotten from where and nobody seems to have a very good idea of where to, either. Everything's shifting beneath our feet, like a tectonic dream getting ready to move the world into a new configuration. There's no telling where or when these outbreaks of novelty will take place. Forces so deep as these cannot be predicted as to precisely where, when or how but only evaluated as to a momentary 'if' ... and that if gets more pressing it seems by the day. I'm not talking earthquakes here of course, or not just earthquakes. Things are rising from the depths of the collective human soul and from the deep, forgotten history from which it emerged, things that that few alive today can comprehend, and that incomprehension is all those Lovecraftian elder gods need to keep their movements invisible, save to those few who are able to regard this spectacle with an unblinded third eye.

The footprints however, are getting harder to ignore by the day. Forget being pissed on and told its rain, what's coming down now is leaving craters and people are starting to wonder how it is that raindrops are stamping out subdivisions. A ravening beast with an octopus for a mouth can't stay hidden forever, even if it's so large you always just thought it was a part of the landscape.

There are some wild stories told by the men who've gone mining in that mountain, the wilderness-eyed and wild-haired explorers at the reaches of reality who have found the secret tunnels and the caverns and stared into the chasms, into an abyss that one by one they learned had been staring back the whole time. Most still write their descriptions off as the crazy ramblings of deranged lunatics but ... well, the Italians thought Marco Polo's tales were made up too, you know. Back then a truth that strikes us a mundane and very prominent facet of reality - the existence of China - seemed an elaborate fantasy intended for no more than selling books ... and where have we heard that before?

You can draw an analogy too to the old story of the natives who couldn't see the European vessel anchored just offshore, until after a few days their shaman had a dream about it. Of course, the natives listened to their shamen and so it only took them a few days to process an Out of Context Event such as the European colonization wave proved to be. We on the other hand call most of ours schizophrenics, put them on drugs to make them crazy and lock up the ones who object, some of whom get electroshock and maybe even a lobotomy to supplement the intravenous cocktail.

They say it's because schizophrenics behave erratically but then you see cases like Dr. Romesh Senewiratne, an Australian GP who got diagnosed with 'hypomania' (which means, he was too happy) and injected with drugs because he wouldn't shut up about the benefits of meditation, creative activity, learning and access to the third eye (which is as he insisted on pointing out, the pineal gland), and how much more effective such a path was as a treatment option for maladaptive behaviours such as depression or other neuroses, as supposed to the psychiatric regimen of intoxication, torture and mutilation. His videos are all up on Youtube by the way, and they're a bit rough-and-ready but given what the man has persevered through he deserves to become a global cause ... both for how he's been treated, and why.

That's not at all an uncommon story, though, these days. Is it?

But that's just what you get I suppose in a situation in which every sector of society has been progressively infiltrated and then dominated by the insane. Whether the ones who were born psychopathic are the main problem, or it's the sociopathic institutions and practices and belief systems and ideologies and religions that are their legacy to the world, that have made the majority of the population neurotic, apathetic, depressed and dysfunctional, the problem of mass insanity remains. It is something each of us must live every day and no, none of us are immune. If you think you're going crazy, you're only wrong in the sense that you already were ... and so long as society remains insane, so must we all be, in one way or another and usually several.

Maybe it isn't a problem, though, so much as a joke, a cosmic giggle. You might almost characterize this as the universe's primary vibration, that initial fluctuation within the fabric of creation in which God perceives himself through the universe and, like a happy eight-year-old arriving at the end of a ride in an amusement park built just for her, coos, "Cool! Again!" And so the cart trundles back up the track as the cosmos, in all its thrilling, throbbing, terrifying wonder is born again amidst shock, confusion, violence and pain.

What is sanity? Is that even a meaningful question? Certainly it's not taken up in the DSMV, nor in any of its previous editions. The main difference between one through four and the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is that in the new one, they've managed to define just about every human behaviour there is (as supposed to just the dangerous ones) as a symptom of insanity. I don't think I'd really dispute this diagnosis, nor their statistics, although their notion of a panacea for the problem - the mass drugging of us all - strikes me as somewhat missing the point.

Unless of course, the point is that secret definition of sanity - and why else would they not discuss this openly, unless it's an open secret? - means restricting consciousness to those states society deems fit for it. But then they would no longer be doctors but mind police and that, I think, is not far from the truth. Ever notice how when you're at a party everyone gets a little quiet when it comes up that someone there is a psychiatrist? Maybe a little cagier afterwards ... which behaviour is duly noted by the competent and observant head-shrink, no doubt, though whether he chalks it up to paranoia on their part or thinks they actually respect his position comes down to his own hubris because in the end this kind of thing is all entirely subjective (and it's exactly that subjectivity that the discipline, presenting itself as a pretender to objective science, seeks to deny).

The Mind Police have always been there: the priests of the Inquisition, the Soviet politburo, the beard-cutting Taliban inspectors, the Great Firewall of China, every censorship board or secret court in history, all have served this function in some respect, and that function is to control behaviour through the exploitation of fear on the one hand and the limitation of information on the other. One society might interpret this as the imposition of ideological conformity, others a harshly enforced purity of the soul. In ours, it is expressed as a certain nebulous ideal of perky but dull and servile 'mental health': with just enough energy to execute necessary functions and consume material 'goods and services', but not enough to, you know ... live. Not enough to be complete human beings, able to create their worlds independently and explore those worlds with curiosity. Funny how many dangerous things there are that begin with a 'c': creativity, conscience, compassion, consciousness ... but curiosity. Too much curiosity killed the cat.

Of course curiosity will do no one any good if what the curious find is ... unpleasantly surprising. Who knows what they might do if they found out?

And so the Mind Police maintain their unspoken order by means of guarding against liminal states: those rare and delicate moments of altered awareness in which anything and everything within self and world is in flux, uncertain in its definitions, open to ... whatever it now realizes may really be out there. So long as nothing out of the ordinary happens the psychic equilibrium of society will be maintained, as the majority of its constituents remain happily inside whatever psychic box they've found themselves in.

Anything that disturbs this equilibrium - doubts about the consensus version of reality, whatever it may be, as well as any pursuit of spiritual disciplines (especially outside of established religious pathways), predilection for creativity or any other eccentricity of belief or behaviour - anything that threatens to wake the individual from his trance belief in her reality box is defined as 'crazy' and targeted for psychopharmaceutical termination at the very least. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3, Prozac times a day!

Fortunately there are consciousness warriors out there still, scattered across the world, hidden here and there where no one expects them, keeping the flame of ancient wisdom alive, men and women who refuse to let the Mind Police and the society they help govern dictate to them how they should behave, what they should believe, what drugs they should take or in any way how they should live their lives. And no, they do not live in Zion.

Of course the Mind Police's masters feel the same way, for the most part, as regards who can tell them what they can and cannot do; the difference being that in this War of Consciousness, one side seeks to awaken, the other to stupefy; one to enlighten, the other to misdirect; one to show the way to freedom to any who will see it, the other to guard it jealously to themselves and indeed profess outwardly that there is no such road. It is the difference in temperament between a prison guard and a teacher.

I had the fantastic good fortune of enjoying the hospitality and company of two of these warriors recently, 13 Muluc and GodIAm, and so was able to get another look at a side of reality - and of myself, but then, same thing - that I've been meaning to check in with for some time now. I can't remember the last time I met such people, with this incredible chi rolling off them and a deepness and intensity to their eyes that I almost never encounter. It was strong enough that I was skittish of eye contact at first, so unused am I to interactions with such beings, whose awareness I feel penetrated to the core of my being. But in casting this light I was able to penetrate perhaps more deeply than I've ever been before, and with them to laugh and Lucidly see the Synchronicity while denying the Dichotomy, to get a glimpse past the data Matrix of maya and open hyperdimensional hatchways to hyperfractal higher selves, Self, Source and inner messiah.

Certainly this state was not one the Mind Police would deem sane, but to experience it neither does it seem to be insane. This is where we get into notions of supersanity and undersanity: the latter what happens when an otherwise logical mind fails to question any aspects of its reality, and thus leaves itself open to intentional misdirection as maladaptive beliefs (in lies, obviously) are locked into belief structures. Undersanity is almost guaranteed to result in safe, predictable behaviour in the short run and neurosis in the long-run, arising as a natural consequence of maladaptive belief structures coming into conflict with reality without being revised. Trapped in their boxes, the undersane come increasingly to resemble neurotic lab rats.

Supersanity, on the other hand, is the state of being open to reality and everything it might contain: a state of oneness with reality, devoid of fear or judgment, accepting that what will be will be and not attempting to limit it in any way. In the short run, supersane individuals can get up to some strange behaviours as the belief structures that influence them grow ever further beyond consensus reality; in the long run, as supersanity becomes increasingly congruent with the world as it is, behaviour becomes more tranquil and compassionate.

There are few of us indeed who can see the inner fire, though it burns in all. Or nearly all. However, to see the fire is to see that the cosmos looks through your eyes, to look out upon all of creation and know that you created it because you are it. It's a lot to wrap your head around and sometimes it can help to have the blinds chemically kicked down but ... not always. Certainly it had no such affect on me earlier in my life but then, at that point black magick was really more my thing: the Left Hand Path of occultism, twisted by materialism and ego-infatuation, founded on the belief there ultimately is no God, or if there is She probably hates you anyways. That's too simplistic perhaps but the point remains that back when I saw the world through a black magicians eyes, tripping never did much but freak me out or bore me. There was no revelation of oneness ... perhaps because I was expecting such a thing from the drug, while denying its existence within. You can lead a horse to water....

And that's rather the issue that confronts us now: the masses of undersane horses that aren't so much being led to water as in danger of being carried off by the flood.

And still the beasts won't drink!

And we must live with the knowledge that those that don't, won't, until they drown.

Something's coming....

Retrospective on 2010

2010-01-08T17:17:00.001-08:00

So it's a week into 2011, and the world, well it isn't pretty but let me tell you, man, it's never been better, either. It doesn't much matter where you are - it's fucked everywhere - but who you are makes all the difference and it's starting to look like people are finally getting that ... and getting too that 'who' they are is the only thing that's really under their control.

The mood at the beginning of this year is noticeably different from the collective outlook at the beginning of 2010. Not completely different: no one's sorry to see 2010 passing safely into the pages of history, just like when 2009 bit the dust and people were like, "naaa naaa naaa na, naaa naaa naaa na, hey hey hey, gooood-byyye". But a year ago you could taste the forboding in the air: the reigning confusion, the dim, dawning apprehension amongst the still-largely-befuddled masses. No one was looking forward to 2010 (save those few who'd already been disillusioned). And they weren't wrong.

You can't say the same thing this year, though. The energy is totally different.

Despite everything, the air tastes optimistic, this year.

Sure, we're beset by threats we'd never have even imagined we'd be dealing with, not so long ago, and some of them just keep getting worse. I mean, who knew we'd be assimilating knowledge of ET infilitration of our ruling classes going back thousands of years? Some of us suspected it for a while but when that floating pyramid appeared over the G20 in Toronto and just hung there, well ... and then a week later when that Ukrainian interview with Mork went viral on YouTube ... people went crazy. Literally. When Mork explained that 'they' could very easily look just like us, regardless of whatever form they might take on their own worlds, that was the beginning of what I guess we're now calling the Alien Wars hysteria. It started with a few lynchings in South America and rural China (were they really aliens? If so how many? Who can tell?) and one of the major brushfires we have to put out this year is to keep this mass paranoia from getting out of hand.

Not here, thank Source. For whatever reason it seems, my little corner of the world had enough relatively with-it people that it's been able to maintain it's equanimity in the face of all the revelations and disclosure. It's emerging as a model for the rest of the country, I think. It probably helps that Kingston's last (openly) Freemasonic temple closed down almost a decade back. When that first temple was busted into in Atlanta last summer, and the pictures of those dead kids hanging from meat-hooks with pentagrams and Seals of Solomon and shit drawn into the ground in their blood hit the Net, well, that kicked the Alien Wars hysteria up a notch because now it wasn't just aliens (which is scary) it was evil child-eating satanic fiends (which isn't so much scary as it is enraging at a deep and primal level). A year ago, those of us with the sense to know shit from crushed raisins by look and not taste despaired of the masses ever being aroused from their drugged slumber. Now it's more like, "All right, seriously, enough already...." Some in the Movement are feeling a bit like Sorceror's Apprentices, truth be told.

Yeah, and meanwhile it's looking like it's not just one or a few aliens who've been around these parts: it's more like hundreds of thousands of species, from all over timespace, popping in for a look-see and maybe more. Our condition isn't so much one of war with the aliens, at least not from their perspective: to the galactic civilization we're just another backwater world full of half-smart savages. Mostly what we get is nature tourists, family trips, that sort of thing; but we attract our share of unscrupulous corporations, sex tourists and criminal entrepreneurs, as well, simply because we don't know enough to recognize them for what they are.

That our entire recorded history is one of deepening bondage to these extraterrestrial conquistadores is reflected in the oppression of aboriginal civilizations the world over (though more perverse as at least those natives knew they'd been conquered. For all the good it did them.) But just as those cultures have reached with increasing success for emancipation over recent history, so thispresaged the mad and novel possibility that humanity might soon - and finally - escape the control of its alien overlords.

Pause for a moment to think how crazy that would have sounded to you just one year ago, to even consider it as a problem to be solved. You've come a long way, baby.

World War III is shaping up to be a lot different from what we were all told to expect. After the spasms in the Mid-East over the spring, conventional military conflict seems to have leveled off, more or less. A lot of places this is simply because there's no government left to tell the soldiers what to do, the local Globalists having been chased out or executed. Also not many soldiers much feel like taking orders in those few regions where the elite still hang on. They're on the defensive now, there's no question about that. Which isn't to say there aren't still plenty of dead: the bioweapons cut a swath through the population, especially those primed by the swine flu vaccination campaigns. Then there's HAARP, the chemtrails, the cell-phone towers, all the masses of toxic shit they were pouring into the food and water to keep us dumb, sickly, and slow. That shit is still taking its toll.

But how many of us don't even have a cell phone any more? So many towers have been ripped down by volunteer demolition teams that our smart phones are becoming paperweights and, good riddance. And now that the Famine they threw at us by warping perception and policy with climate lies has curbed our appetites, well, we're a lot more careful about what we eat. If not touching corporate food means not eating for a couple of days, well ... so be it, the consensus seems to be. That's helping with the detoxing everyone's started doing, too: more and more of us are sweating and fasting the accumulated toxins out of our body.

In fact you might say that this Mass Detox is how we are fighting this new war. Over most of the past century the alien elite did everything they could to poison our planet, our health, and our minds, unleashing weapon after weapon calculated to have effects with the potential to echo down the generations. Our witless complicity in this act of grand sabotage amplified anything they might have accomplished alone a million-fold. Our air, soil and water has been polluted, our (by which I mean, Gaia's) gene pool distorted, our cultures dismembered and degraded. And now, here at the tail end of this sad epic, as we have woken up and begun to fight back against this monstrous oppression, they have concluded (quite rightly) that we are of no further use to them and so we face the possibility of an outright scorched earth policy.

Negotiations between the world and the Rothschild family (and what an odd and strangely pathetic clan of inbreds they proved to be, once necessity forced them out into the public light) are proceeding apace. They are quite tense. The floppy-faced chinless ones seem to think they can, if they choose, use some sort of doomsday Tesla weapon they spirited away from Cheyenne Mountain. Seems they've used this thing several times in the past to trigger some of the larger quakes and tsunamis. One of the settings would essentially crack the Earth like an egg (an apt analogy, with the revelation that the Earth, like all celestial bodies, is quite hollow) and the clan has indicated that if they can't have the world, well then they don't see why anyone should.

No one really believes they'll go through with it. They're just a front, obviously, and the channelers (which seems to be the preferred method of contact by ETs) are pretty unanimous in saying that this is not a line the Rothschild's alien masters are prepared to cross. Which of course doesn't change the fact that in the meantime it's entirely possible that a city or a seaboard or two might be knocked into the ocean, an eventuality everyone's anxious to avoid. So yeah, things are tense. We're offering them some really nice tropical islands, big houses, all the comforts: gilded cages in which to live out the rest of their tawdry criminal lives, with no one to prey on but each other. Really what we're hoping for is that their fragile fear-based group mind will crack under the stress and they'll turn on one another. Actually this is already happening but it would be nice if things sped up in that regard.

Regardless, the fate of the elite one way or another is a distraction from the real issues at this point: issues of survival (food, shelter, medicine) are top of many people's minds, a major priority for the self-organizing networks that have been taking over the functions of government in region after region. Then there's the soil to remediate, the water to clean, the plastic to collect. Every city and especially every suburb contains block after block of poorly used land cluttered with toxic buildings containing hidden within them a treasure-trove of useful but idiotically used raw materials. So much of it - especially the strip malls, the big box stores, the cubical farms - is empty now that no one has a job anymore. A lot of the houses, too, partly because a lot of people died. And partly becase we all went so utterly broke when the derivitives crash wiped out very bank on the planet.

We learned something over the past year: none of us really need a lot of stuff to live. It is not, as Tyler Durden said, necessary to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the term. Out of work, out of money, out of luck, or so it looked. How many of us were living with nothing but a room and some even less? Almost no one lives alone now: it's not at all uncommon to see ten people in a three bedroom house, some of them with just a backpack and a sleeping bag on the couch. We're living cheek by jowl again with our families and our friends and we've discovered (or some of us have) that we love it: what we've lost in stuff we've gained in companionship. We've started to form tribes again. We're reconnecting, with one another and with our own deeper archetypal human nature. We've learned that when we share everything, we want for nothing.

Some of us have seized that, and we're running with it and running hard. Yeah, and things are hard: we're getting less sleep than most, and we're all going a bit hungry. But we're taking every challenge as an opportunity for change, excercising our creative powers whenever we can. Riding the chaos, surrending our fear, our lives have become art. We're reinventing the culture, spreading vision and inspiration in those of our brethren who've been slower to catch on - not because they're less intelligent or bad people or because of any defect worse than any one of us can find within our own selves, but simply because we happened to be sleeping more lightly - and every day I see the early fruit of this Great Alchemical Work blossoming within people's eyes, even if as a feeling and not yet a full understanding. That's fine with me. A feeling is enough.

There is no telling as yet what 2011 may bring, though speculation is rampant. The possibilities seem endless and that's because they are. We might still lose everything, but between now and then, however many nows we get, we might well get to experience everything that could ever matter.

Getting High With AIAB

2009-11-09T15:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-20T19:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-12T18:24:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-17T19:12:00.001-07:00

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.

Finding Heaven in the New World Order

2009-04-15T08:54:00.000-07:00

After my recent Moon Food posting, Headlines in Hell, I felt the need to balance things out with an appropriate essay here and so, here we are. I stated at the end that our earth is a kind of hell, and I truly believe this because all the trappings of hell are to be found, right here on Earth. Coming back for another go 'round is the 'eternal damnation' that's always talked about by the descendants of the Council of Nicea, who suppressed the Gnostic strain of the faith which argued that, in fact, the lord of this world was none other than the Devil himself.

At the same time, though, this world can be heaven. None of us would have any pleasant memories whatsoever if this were not the case. All those perfect moments in your life, in the company of friends, family and lovers or alone with nature or one's own private epiphanies, all of these are refractions of the heavenly kingdom, as it were, into our own 3-dimensional time-space continuum. In exactly the same way the nether regions of the cosmos refract themselves up into our experience, and so our world becomes a mixture of one and the other, in greater or lesser ratios depending on the particular moment in history that one looks at.

Now there's a lot of people out there talking about this thing called the Law of Attraction, which states more or less that you draw into your experience those things you focus your attention upon. What then are we to make of the general perception that things on this world are less-than-heavenly? You might say that's because they aren't, and you might also say that merely holding that perception enables that situation to continue and worsen. I'd add that there are those who profit by chaos and take their sustenance from suffering and have thus been cultivating this perception over great spans of time both by directly perpetrating the sort of acts that lead to it and then bringing those acts to as wide attention as possible.

And so we find ourselves in a world where parents don't trust the safety of the streets to let their children run around unsupervised, where every act must be minutely scrutinized and controlled lest something untoward take place. And all the while the grim tally of terrible occurrences continues to grow, with school shootings and suicide bombers and SWAT teams shooting grandmothers and pedophiles and rapists and muggers and embezzlers and.... Every day there's more cops, and more crooks to keep them busy; more laws, and more breaking them.

There's a shift I see, or I should say feel, within the noosphere. I'm not the only one to feel it, and though it's yet of a subtle nature, it's everywhere if you know what to look for. Here, for instance, is the Health Ranger's experience of it. Here's what Reality Sandwich is giving birth to as a result of it, and if you poke around there you'll see that the consensus seems ... positive. It's not a positive consensus that the slumbering, lumbering masses are feeling, of course, and while they are awakening they don't yet know why and there's still the danger that they might be successfully stampeded, like a herd of buffalo, off a cliff. But the awakened minority, that tiny handful who over the past few years have used the internet to free their minds rather than further distract them, are beginning to redirect their efforts, focusing less on exposing the lies and more on building something new and brilliant around the few grains of truth each has been able to collect. And as for our opposite numbers in this, those cold manipulators of reality that have for so long ruled by secrecy, fear, and misdirection, even they seem somewhat less sure of themselves, now. There's a fear in their eyes that wasn't there before, a realization perhaps that despite all their hard work, all their sacrifice of self and 'other' and soul and spirit ... despite that, they still might not pull off a win.

And the consequences, for them, of loss are catastrophic beyond anything we can imagine. Just as the prize for winning - immortal dominion over the material earth - is tantalizing to a degree few can fathom. It's a high-stakes game these high-rollers have been playing, and for a long time it's been the centrepiece of a fantastic ongoing party, but now....

Of course a large part of them losing inv0lves their opponents in this game simply walking away from it and starting a new game with their own rules, one perhaps in which concepts like 'win' and 'loss' are done away with altogether. If there's no one left to sit in the casino for the high-rollers to card-shark, there'll be no one left playing but them and the house. And we all know who always wins at the end of the day.

We can build a new society if we want to. A few people, focused on creating an experience of life fundamentally different from anything in recorded history, who have the patience and determination to become the change they wish to see, will be enough to shift the momentum (in fact, it feels like it's already shifted, or started to) towards the growth of a new and vastly better world.

There's this idea that's been kicking around Christianity essentially since the dawn of the faith called the Kingdom of Heaven, the gates of which, it's said, are to be found within. That's pretty much what I'm talking about here: a few people, focusing inside on their own personal idea of heaven while supporting each other in this will begin drawing the experience of that world towards them. The first manifestations of it will take place around those who are doing the work of manifesting it, but those early signs will give others a taste, thus drawing their attention away from the Spectacle of Death and feeding more emotional energy into the blossoming new paradigm, accelerating its growth still more until it becomes rampant and claims the world for its own.

The phase shift in consciousness that our world is approaching will be something fundamentally new: a social system shaped like a circle rather than a triangle; a reorientation from 'self and other' to self-as-other; a respiritualization of matter that reformats crass materialism into spiritual self-discovery; a change in values, such that narrow economic specialization and competition in the accumulation of stuff is dethroned in favor of a new guiding ideal, Self-realization through full development of all human faculties. The society that will arise from this will be the first truly ordered society in history, for the order will be built of mutual agreement and allowance from the bottom up, rather than clumsily imposed from the top down.

Conspiracy theories often talk about a New World Order, but isn't that exactly the same thing as what I'm describing here? Not the prison camps and the police states and the global banks and all that rubbish. What's new about that, outside some of the technology with which the finishing touches are to be completed? Where in that control system is real order to be found? Properly speaking a 'New World Order' should be our rallying cry, rather than their snickering in-joke, because what they represent is the Old World Disorder.

It's sad that the Old World Disrder we're all familiar with had to happen. But by succumbing to fear and greed throughout history its rise became inevitable, and so we find ourselves now, as a species, with the greatest challenge we have ever faced arrayed before us, a challenge that as of yet few admit the existence of let alone have a precise idea of what, exactly, is to be done about it. Perhaps it was always inevitable; life must include challenges, after all, and they must above all be convincing because otherwise, what's the point? And so, as a sort of final exam before graduating to the next grade, we are presented with the current conundrum. And what will our answer be?

No one knows, exactly. But if we don't know precisely what the answer will be, I think we have a pretty good idea about how we are going to answer. Maybe that'll be enough?

One thing I do know is that I'm not worried, really. I've never really suffered from test anxiety so, your mileage may differ, but ... cheer up, man. One way or another we're coming through this thing.

My Date With Fractal Time

2009-04-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's ever looked into novelty theory - you know, Terrence McKenna's theoretical exposition underlying and centered around the (in)famous Timewave Zero program that first and most famously highlighted the possible importance of the date 2012/02/21, at least for those of us in the West - has doubtlessly come across the concept that time is fractal, that is, that rather than being simply a featureless metric against which the accumulation of history is measured, it has a certain structure to it, one in which similar archetypal patterns of events repeat in a self-similar (though not identical) pattern at all scales of time. Thus, for example, the rise and fall of an empire might be reflected in the story of a business mogul's life or the events of a single day. Of course, it's possible that you've never heard of McKenna or the Timewave but have noticed this very same dynamic on your own, simply through observing history, and if that's the case then my hat goes off to you as being a profoundly observant and original thinker.

At any rate, this past Sunday I was given a vivid demonstration of this dynamic, in the context of what I believe to be a very important life lesson. It was nothing so grand as the rise and fall of a great empire, mind; but it was for me something just as significant. You see, I experienced a recapitulation of my entire romantic life in the space of a single day, and if you follow along with this piece you'll learn more than you've ever known about me. Quite possibly far more than you wanted to know for things may come out here that may well change how you view me, aspects of my shadow self that I myself prefer not to dwell on though I am, of course, quite aware of and ... in the final analysis, it is perhaps best to be fully open about. For concealment, after all, is the very definition of lying and lies are not what this blog is about although they are of great relevence to this particular post.

Let me define terms, here. By 'romantic life' I really mean, the ways in which I've interacted and can interact with the female energy of the cosmos.

Backing up a bit ... for some time now I've had a profile up at a certain large dating site. A month or two ago I updated it, for the first time in a long time, in order to let the ladies know I no longer lived in Tokyo and of course to change my profile information to more accurately describe the person I'd come to be at that point. I searched a couple of time, finding two lovely young women who seemed in many ways exactly what I was looking for, but neither of them replied to my overtures and for the most part I simply kept an eye on anyone who viewed my profile or whoever the algorithms determined I was a good match with (and which determinations were, as a rule and not at all unsurprisingly, utterly worthless.)

Now, I know what you're thinking. Come on, man, a dating website? Really? Don't you know how dodgy those things are?

Well, yes I do know as a matter of fact, and of course also knew, and realizing the deeper reasons for why that's the case is a large part of what the lesson was but I'll be getting to that.

Of course, using an online dating service is mark of desperation, isn't it? Well, it has been a long time, and especially so since I had a real relationship with emotional and spiritual levels of committment and so admittedly I had reached a certain point of, not despair so much as a deep and aching loneliness.

I haven't been limiting myself to a dating website, of course. Though I'm also not in a position to really go looking for a mate, isolated as I am for the most part in cottage country. However, that's no reason no to be proactive about things, and so it was sometime in the past month that I sat down one night and defined, for myself, my ideal mate. Not in overly specific terms, or at least I don't think so, but rather, in broad outlines, I described to myself the kind of person - body, mind and soul - that I wished to meet. Since then, periodically, she (whoever she may be) has come to me in the midst of my meditations (or prayers? Increasingly I make little distinction) usually at my own behest but sometimes at her own. I've seen her, seen flashes of our life together drawn in the holographic imaging system of the imagination, whilst feeling our love radiate from my heart to suffuse every moment with a its glow.

And so, of course, I set in motion the process by which the world will guide us together, knowing not when or how it will happen, simply that it will. Until such a time and for such a one I'm 'saving myself' as the euphamism goes amongst those who most often call themselves Saved, for when I meet her I want there to be nothing standing between us.

It was with this in mind that I found myself on a date this past Sunday. I found her, of course, through the aforementioned dating site and this was by stumbling upon her picture whilst searching for a suitable candidate from amidst a seemingly endless parade of deeply uninteresting faces. I was reviewing another - her friend - and saw a blurb she had written at the bottom extolling the friend's virtues and, intrigued, clicked through to see her own profile. Her picture was quite attractive and there were aspects of her profile that triggered a certain 'button' within my sexual psyche that I'm hesitant to discuss, whose disclosure I've been mulling over for some time and am currently with some difficulty forcing myself to get out because it is, I believe, of some relevence to this tale and ... I'd rather this kind of thing was revealed by my own hand, for it's utility as a potential weapon is in that way largely nullified ... and its efficacy in healing is that much more enhanced. That, and it's a quarter past two in the morning, a fine hour of the day for rash disclosures.

Well, now that I've got you all squirming in your seats wondering what terrible grinning skeleton I'm about to jerk out of the closet and and commence a macabre dance ... What, you are asking yourselves, is the big secret?

This kind of thing turns me on.

Now some of you are no doubt disgusted (as a part of my own personality is.) Others are bemused. Still others are probably chuckling to themselves thinking, 'that's all?' while others - those who know me, perhaps, in on offline context - are thinking, ah-hah! That explains some things that didn't make any sense before. It's a rare and odd kink, I know, and not something I'm proud of ... its origins and significance I've only recently started to come to terms with, though it springs from an early experience so deep and overwhelming that its effects on my psyche may well never be fully dealt with. There are quite a bit of things I could go into in that direction but it is beyond the scope of this current post and so, I'll just leave the map that territory undrawn for now and get on with the story.

So, the profile of this woman pushed that button; what was of course just as important, she seemed attractive enough; from the information available her personality seemed congenial enough and so the combination of these influences was enough to motivate me to forgive the small defect 'a few extra pounds' ('a few' to me suggesting just what it is, a numeric and not a literal handful) and the observation that she was not, perhaps, as activated a person as I might have liked (which observation later led me to have the premonition that our paths were meant to intersect perhaps precisely so my influence might help begin the process of her own activation.) I sent her a message, to which she replied; the flirtation moved to instant messaging; and before long, a date was settled upon. Throughout this she seemed perfectly charming, and my beguilement grew to a pitch of anticipation. Perhaps, I dared myself to speculate, she might be the one?

Of course I knew it would not be, as one so often does, and yet I did not listen to that inner voice and so ... the lesson began.

The night before, I slept at a friends' place, and began the day with them and their two children, a one year old boy and a four year old girl. Their daughter is a wonderful, bright, enthusiastic energetic and sunny child that I get along with effortlessly in a sort of 'cool uncle' mode, and whenever I go over there we inevitably spend some time playing together. Thus my morning featured a miniature recapitulation of my own childhood relationship with females, the uncomplicated and innocent mutual pursuit of simple fun and laughter. That the parents are high school friends of mine - and the father, an elementary school friend (with whom I spent the rest of the morning playing Magic: The Gathering, the sort of activity I loved as a child) the sense that the morning was in many ways symbolic of my childhood becomes for me even stronger.

Afternoon, of course, came, and with it the lunch date. My friends drove me into town, I bid them goodbye and went on my way to the pub, where I waited until she arrived, centering myself and going through a chakra-opening visualization in order that I might be fully centered when she came and....

She'd warned me she was short, which she was, but were you to balance us on a scale I believe she'd likely tip me in the air. I am not by any means small, so that perhaps gives you some idea. There was in addition a mustache and a hairy mole, neither of which were present in any of the (apparently dated) pictures just as the gap between every single tooth had been so artfully concealed. Of course the back of my mind immediately went into overdrive, alert for any way to draw the encounter to a close at the earliest graceful opportunity. At the same time another part of me was struck speechless, for not two days before I'd emphasized to her, over MSN, the importance to me of truth, as a principal (perhaps she'd thought I'd just been saying it because I liked the sound of the word?)

In keeping with the theme of this essay, let me mention that my first sexual experience (not my first girlfriend, mind you) was with a girl whose face was not at all unattractive, but who was quite ... husky and whom I selected as a vessel with which to put an end to my virginity due primarily to adolescent desperation. In retrospect that was a poor choice whose consequences lingered for quite some time, and my encounter with this woman was a stark reminder of that episode, though thankfully confined to an hour and a half rather than months.

Well, we finished our food - and she is lucky to have gotten my company for even that duration, for many men would not have given her even that much after their expectations were so betrayed, and one of my friends went so far as to say that she would have simply stated 'Sorry, wrong person', gotten up and left - after which I made up an excuse and fled, regrouping shortly after at my sister's house where, upon stepping in the front door, I learned that my presence was urgently required at the artists' coop where she works. Thus drafted and so with no time to mope I went over to the store, where I spent the next few hours lifting heavy things, sawing wood, and helping the artists to redecorate.

As soon as I walked in the door my sister asked, of course, how the date had gone and at my curt reply one of her friends looked over, our eyes met and a spark that I felt through my whole being seemed to jump through our gaze. I was instantly certain the attraction was mutual and over the next few hours casual touch and verbal flirtation more than confirmed that intuition. An interesting thing was that the pull was so strong that although the little button I mentioned earlier wasn't being pushed, I couldn't have cared less and ... when I later found out that she did push that button, it seemed the most natural thing, given everything about her, a normal outgrowth of who she was and thus nothing at all to be ashamed of.

In virtually every way this amazing young woman lived up to the 'ideal', as I've conceived it. Self-actualized, creative, intuitive, independent, wise beyond her years and in my eyes very attractive. That said she is also 19 and lives with her mother a fair distance from me (who in turn lives with his parents) so I don't expect anything to happen between us however ... the very fact of her age is perhaps significant because in this tale she stands in for my second girlfriend and first love, who embodied and expressed many of the same virtues, albeit in a less developed or conscious fashion (and whom I expect was in many ways perhaps a reverse temporal echo of the woman I will, I am more sure now than ever, be united ... or is it reunited? No telling what has happened in previous rounds through the material plane....)

Now, let's review. There is a key point that is being illustrated here, which is quite obvious I think once you see it, but which I want to emphasize. In the former case, I went looking for a certain set of attributes, and as a result creations of artifice lodged as figments in my imagination and I was led down a primrose path towards a dead end of disappointment. In the second, I met entirely by chance, while not looking for anything at all, a far more congenial dance partner who expressed all the attributes I am looking for, with whom our interactions and discoveries were in every respect both spontaneous and delightful. The lesson I think is a clear one: essentially, Life was telling me that the way I am going to find my soul mate is not by looking for her, but simply by being so clear about who she is that when fate draws us together I will know, well free of any creeper of doubt, that this is the One.

The story is not over yet, for our ways parted for the night long before the night, for me, was over, and I found myself at a small housewarming party whose hostess was a graduate student, slightly older than myself. She'd completely remodelled the interior of the house so that the living room was dominated not by a ring of couches around a screen but by a bar and its surrounding stools, behind which she stood for most of the evening mixing a drink I dubbed the sangrita (wine mixed with frozen organic fruit.) A few of her friends, other grad students from the same department, were present at the intimate gathering and as the ice was broken I had the opportunity of several fascinating and enlightening discussions that have strengthened my certainty in an oncoming intellectual revolution within the moribund departments of an academia fragmented by hyperspecialization, whose various incoherent disciplines profer understandings of the world that offer fantastic detail on their own but taken together make no sense at all ... an intellectual (or is it a spiritual?) revolution understood in its principls if not all of its details by many if not all of the fine minds that grace this blog with their readership, and whose nature I will thus say no more about here.

One by one those friends of hers left (at each occasion, the hostess or one of the other remaining revelers would ring a fire bell, for she seemed determine to alienate every property-value conscious yuppie neighbor within earshot ... blind as they are to the essential part people such as her play in the gentrification without which their property values would go nowhere) and as if I'd passed a test by earning at least the tentative intellectual respect of her friends I found myself in conversation with the hostess herself. Her head was shaved, and full sleeves of ink coverded both arms, a butch appearance that takes a great deal of courage for a woman to adopt (yes, it does take courage, even if she's a lesbian ... which she might be and ... well, some of my best friends are lesbians....) Beneath that appearance, as though deliberately concealed, lay a striking beauty, and as it transpired she was also entirely brilliant, not to mention aware and activated in a way few yet are. We made contact very quickly at a level that was more spiritual than physical, and before long I found myself slightly besotted (and yes, both of us were also a bit sotted, myself only a bit and her more than that but not at all to the point of embarrasment.)

You'll have noticed perhaps that I failed totally to mention a certain hot button issue ... and here, too, there was a lesson, a certain emphasis upon the crucial importance of careful attention to the deeper issues of the soul, of the necessity of looking beneath surface appearances and moving beyond the mere physical reactions of chemistry in order to make space for the more refined actions of alchemy. The former is a necessary precursor, of course, for the latter to take place but ... it cannot be the sole or even primary focus.

Thus it is that this fascinating woman represents, perhaps, some taste of what the future has in store for me and that, my dear and patient readers, is the story of how I was given a recapitulation of the significant features of my romantic history within a single day. I'm still reeling from it all myself as you can no doubt tell however ... I also feel that I have learned a great deal, or at the very least gained some small grains of wisdom with which to continue the quest that this aspect of my life has been and for now continues to be.

And that, I think, seems a good place to wrap this up.

A Stranger Makes Contact Through Facebook

2009-04-06T19:28:00.000-07:00

Just a few minutes ago, I got an anomalous message to my facebook account. It came from one Simon Solomon Faust (a pseudonym? Naww) and the subject line was 'Can You Recommend a Good Trepanist?' The body of the message ran as follows:

I just want to get these spirits out of my head. I am also curious as to how your own transcendence of the human condition is proceeding. Gotten any good implants lately?

I was about to reply to the effect of 'Who are you, who or what led you to me and why?' when my eye caught the following notice underneath the reply box:

If you send Simon Solomon Faust a message, you will give him permission to view your list of friends, as well as your Basic, Work and Education info for one month.

No doubt this has been the case for a while but for some reason ... my hackles rose a bit and I didn't reply.

But since he'd already messaged me I could see his information and so:

Sex: Male
Birthday: May 27, 1962
Hometown: Centralia, PA
Relationship Status: It's Complicated
Looking For: Networking
Political Views: Theocratic
Religious Views: Gnostic
Employer: The Foundation
Position: Consensual Reality Maintenance engineer
Description: security through obscurity

Clicking through to find out what, precisely, The Foundation is I found that half of the other people in that network are Japanese.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this....

Update

Talking this over with a friend of mine I found that she'd come to the conclusion - quite independently - that this character found me through this blog.

And his MySpace page is public. The blog is ... interesting, quite a bit on an obscure branch of gnosticism relating to Mephistopeheles (ahhhh, the reference to Herr Doktor Faustus starts to make sense....) He is also, apparently, the Right Reverend Most High Minister of the Gnostic Church of the True Light.

So, my good doctor, if you did find me through these pages then I shall assume you will read this and let me commend you on your detective work on finding my true name (it's not a secret, just not obvious) but let me add that I'm still not exactly ... convinced about you if you take my meaning which you no doubt do. So, consider this my reply and you are of course welcome to reply in any fashion you so choose.

A Reconsideration of Technique

2009-04-02T07:02:00.000-07:00

Recently I've had cause to take a closer look at myself, and at some of the beliefs I've allowed to influence that self and the esoteric techniques I've been using to get in touch with mySelf (or is it ourself, in Jj's excellent formulation?) What I'm talking about here is the Hathors, and their Holon of Ascension, which as I mentioned in the last post I've been practicing diligently, attempting to master the technique in preparation for the Planetary version this coming Sunday.

Well, Visible read that post too and with the single comment, "Interesting that these people you refer to are meeting in Seattle on the Weekend," touched off the re-examination I mentioned. Because, you see, there's been a lot of bad, weird energy swirling about Seattle recently, with some speculation that it's the - or one of the - sites for the Event we all know is in the works, and likely sooner rather than later. Now maybe it's coincidence that this gathering is being held in Seattle and maybe it's not, and if it's not it still doesn't follow than anything negative is involved. The Event itself, after all, will involve the release of considerable negative energy and perhaps Seattle was chosen as the gathering site in order to at least partially neutralize whatever it is that's coming down the pike.

Now, I haven't been too sure myself of the Hathors and that's right from the beginning. I've always been leary of channeled information, at least initially, but the Hathors seemed to be more or less in line with the information that was coming from those entities referring to themselves as the Pleiadians and the Cassipaeans, as well as with the nameless creatures who (might have) penned the Handbooks. They're somewhat more vague, yes, but then again the messages are considerably more compact and so a certain degree of vagueness seems necessary. What information is there doesn't seem to contradict what I've found elsewhere, and so, I've been inclined to trust it.

Perhaps, however, I've been too hasty. It wouldn't be the first time and probably won't be the last that I've jumped in without looking closely enough and, thus, gotten myself into a spot of trouble or caused some damage I might otherwise have avoided.

But I thought they were telling the truth? Well, so far as I can tell, they are. That does not, however, automatically get us out of the woods, so to speak. How can I put this? Think of a lighthouse. The beacon it puts out is real enough, but how can you know that it wasn't deliberately placed in order to lead your ship onto some rocks? Ahhh, that's the trick.

Here's the thing: any source even initially worth your consideration will tell you straight up that the best misinformation will consist of a whole lot of truth wrapped around a single, very significant lie, like a cyanide pill stuffed into a thanksgiving turkey. Whatever truth is included is strictly for the purposes of delivering the payload, namely the lie, and that lie if accepted unexamined will get you every time. This is why discernment - listening to the heart's reaction - is so crucially important, and that's something else that any source even initially worth your consideration will not fail to emphasize. Trust, but verify ... and sometimes you have to verify within.

So where does that leave us with Tom Kenyon's Hathors? Do I have any proof that they're cosmic COINTELPRO? Well, no, I don't, nothing damning at any rate. But ... one thing that's crossed my mind is that there is absolutely nothing analogous to the Hathors 'holons' in any other channeled sources. And this might be significant.

For anyone who hasn't bothered reading the Hathors' messages, a Holon (in their formulation) is essentially a thought-form that you create around yourself, with different forms having different effects. There's the Holon of Healing (a sort of streamlined dolphin-like shape), the Holon of Balance (an octohedron), and the Holon of Ascension (a rotating disk with the rim at eye level and the axis connecting perineum to BA, a point above the head where the hands would meet.) The Holon of Healing is meant to increase immune system function, the Holon of Balance supposedly helps keep energies and thoughts balanced in chaotic situations, and the Holon of Ascension is intended to charge up the KA, or etheric body, by creating a vortex of thought-energy and sending up feelings of appreciation for the good things in ones life.

So, that's all very well and good, yes? And maybe the whole point of the Hathors was to deliver those Holons to humanity, which they claim to be very simple, yet highly effective techniques and practices. That 'simple yet effective' formulation sets alarm bells ringing, now that I think about it, bells that should have rung quite some time ago but ... C'est la vie. You see, if those methods are so simple and effective, then why weren't they mentioned by any of the previous sources? Sources whose information runs into the hundreds of pages.

Lets have a look at those Holons, forgetting for a moment what the Hathors say they do and considering only their forms. The Holon of Balance, for instance ... 12 bars of light arranged in an octohedron ... might it not also be a jail cell? And the Holon of Ascension, which involves sending feelings of appreciation to a point just above ones head whilst sitting in the middle of a rotating disk ... might this not also be a great way for an entity to suck up emotional energies from a subject no longer available as a source of fear-food? In that context I have noticed, myself, that on those occasions when the H of A seems to have been performed 'successfully', I'm left with a curious emptiness. Everything inside goes dark, and ... it becomes very difficult to appreciate anything.

Something to think about. And that's the spirit it's intended in. I'm certainly not going to tell you 'don't trust Tom Kenyon!' because I don't know. For myself, however, I think I'm going to discontinue this business with Holons and let my practices become less defined and more intuitive, because the one way I can be sure I'm not being manipulated is to follow only those practices that grow naturally from within.

Hawk Vision

2009-03-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm walking up my favorite hill this afternoon, taking care not to slip in the mud left behind by the last couple of rainy days, and for some reason halfway up or so an image pops into my mind, of a guy sitting at the top of a hill meditating, opening his eyes and seeing a hawk climbing a thermal in front of him. It entered by way of thinking over what to write for my next Dreamscapes and Night Terrors story (yes, I know, it's been a while. Writer's block is a bitch.) and while the image was all very well and good it wasn't much to hang a story on so I discarded it.

So, I get to the top of the hill, a large granite outcrop covered with lichen with an inukshuk standing on the highest point. I have a pee off the cliff side, find a place to sit, settle down, put on the headphones to get some binaural beats going, assume a mudra, and commence my daily meditation routine. Still the mind with my mantra ... go through a visualization/affirmation I've developed ... massage my chakras open one by one and then draw my kundalini up through it ... finishing off with the Hathors' Holon of Ascension (which I've been practicing daily for a while, but particularly the past couple of weeks in preparation for the Holon of Planetary Ascension this coming Sunday.)

The binaural beat track was still going when I finished holon, and I fully intended on completing the hour, for the purpose developing my will if nothing else. But ... for some reason I had an irresistable urge to open my eyes and there, right in front of me and very close were five turkey vultures circling over the trees.

Now, a turkey vulture is not a hawk, but country boy though I am I've been known to misidentify the two before and so ... I have absolutely no idea what to make of the whole experience. Coincidence? An omen, good or bad? (can a vulture be a good omen?) Temporal bleedthrough?

I don't know.

But it was very, very strange.

Dwapara Yuga: Solar power thru metallic balloons

2009-03-13T21:12:00.000-07:00

What the title says.

The current oil crisis and housing market crash has concentrated many investors and engineers in silicon valley to the problem (including Ananda India).

The Ectasy Scam

2009-03-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

There comes a point, in every man's journey through time, when he must look upon what is called reality and call it for more or less what it is: a scam, a gigantic scam perpetrated over eons of time by fourth dimensional entities that have been manipulating an inherently chaotic time-line towards a desired end and it is not, from the looks of things, promising to be a gentle one. Whether you get that point sooner rather than later is, sadly, rather to the point but rest assured you shall get there eventually ... the only question is on whose schedule.

You see, if you figure out the scam early, before it's scheduled denouement and scripted unveilings take place, well ... you're prepared for that, now. You know what to look out for. And in that line of thought one wonders just what those lab techs in the Czech Republic read on the internet? The heroes who detected the subtle attempt at slipping the human race a bird flu pandemic. What do they know? An interesting question.

Terrifyingly, a search on Baxter pharmaceuticals and bird flu vaccine does not reveal the crime until the third link. Merely typing Baxter should proclaim the crime for all to see from the very first link, but no, it is hidden away, shrouded by obscurity from the condemnation it deserves. This is the kind of thing that should require a corporate death penalty, but no, we are not quite there, as a society, at least not quite yet. How we might get from here to there is interesting to speculate about, but neither here nor there I think as to its desirability.

As it stands, not many people get the scam. You have to admit it's pretty impressive, once you start to take it in it its sheer scale, well, it's a wrenching shift from all of your preconceived notions of what reality is, let me tell you. That makes it pretty hard for people to believe, which is of course to be expected for a Big Lie of such epic complexity, as keeping people from perceiving what reality truly is is its sole and singular over-riding purpose. The plan is to keep more or less everyone wrapped up in it right until the very end, when their little bubbles will be simultaneously popped and the resulting panic and terror fed upon by the greedy demons who have, as it were, been cultivating our species over thousands of years for the express goal of feasting upon that energy.

Wow, sounds crazy, doesn't it?

Right.

It gets so you protect people. Let it little bits, here and there, initiatory hints to those that you think can take it, and silence for those whom it is quite obvious cannot. For those who can take of it in, though, just a bit at a time and then stand back, watch them chew at it for a while, then point them in another direction and wait for them to puzzle through that, too. The unveiling has to take place at it's own pace for everyone, but that pace is increasing. Even to those going down the invisible path, deeper into their own conceptual rabbit hole, those deeper down are careful not to speak too much of what they saw. You now how it goes. "Reptilians? You're nuts, man, that shit doesn't exist." A 9/11 truther is as likely to say this as, say, whatever species of bungling troglodyte watches Fox News ... though at least their is hope for the former.

Of course, the fun thing about running this gamut is that on the other side you've also maybe figured out a bunch of other things about how reality really works. You have to, because in order to peel each layer of the onion you need to assimilate certain new ideas about the structure of reality, certain under-standings that allow you to see how, one more time at one more level, you've been scammed. But then that perhaps helps you get a little bit of what that part of the scam was designed to obscure and ... well, now. How many people do you know who get the scam? How many who also get, as they must, that it runs so against the grain of cosmic law as to be destined to failure? Who understand that it will all come down, indeed is designed to come down, but that as it topples to the ground it will be possible to, as it were, sidestep the crumbling edifice and be there in one piece to pick up the pieces.

How many will there be?

An interesting question indeed. But I'm willing to bet there will be more than are now expected. Possibly a great deal more. Were the Awakening to happen tomorrow, possibly the majority of humanity might be saved but of course that will not and can not happen. At any rate, there will be some number of survivors, unplanned survivors who will be self-sufficient and possess a more or less common worldview characterized by a general disdain for the Lie such that, all taken together, they will be quite entirely beyond control. Yes, some of the elites will no doubt survive in their compact slave-hives, their sickly and short-lived minions stacked and packed in isolated fortresses while they, ascended into their technological utopia, have merged with the machines. They may have it, indeed are welcomed to it if that is their choice.

The land, however, shall have reverted to humans gone wild but in a very different, much for civilized way than in previous ages. How long both might co-exist for is hard to say - I for one would expect the Lie to persist for eons, until the gentle passage of a golden age lulled mankind into losing its resistance to the Lie once again ... but that would be a very long story, one entirely of its own.

There are many who will survive. But let us spare a thought for those who do not, for doubtless a great many more who will succumb to the special effects that remain in store. Remember, we're talking cometary impacts, alien invasions, the manifestation of demons, the trump card in a deck that's been stacked ahead of time with the usual severities of war, plague, famine, and plain awful old death.

Of course, all of those things could have been averted. If they'd only known sooner.

If only.

You've no doubt encountered the idea, had the experience, of ecstasy. Emotions have vibrations, you see and ecstasy is amongst the highest. Of course there's the ecstasy of great sex and sometimes in the same hand there's great ex, but the truly ecstatic experience is another thing entirely quite apart from the pleasure with which it is usually associated, for it can come up in the weirdest situations. Immediately preceding deathm for instance. Possibly and even especially a violent, traumatic death might well be an occasion for the classic ecstatic experience, in which the vibratory rate of the body increases, the light body starts to take shape, and ... one way or another, you're going somewhere from there after you die. Of course, the object of the violent death is to get a sip of that delicious panic, and if it comes just right, at just the right pitch, well ... it's a tasty meal, for those who've aquired the taste, and what you fall into there will indeed seem like an eternity.

Lets talk about eternity, actual mathematical eternity. Speaking of demons being fourth dimensional entities with the ability to travel anywhere in time and space, it occurs that they might ultimately be resolved as mobile wormholes smaller than atoms, through which realities may refract but for the most part act as silent observers and quiet manipulators. And what's on the other side of this wormhole, well, that could of course be anything. A black hole, though, may well provide an apt description of the entity that resides beyond that gate. Get sucked into its maw and instantly you're a part of it, due to be torn up for atomic scrap and eventually recycled back into the universe, but not for a long time. I'm talking a life-time of 10^30 years but that may well be just for smaller ones, and the monster I'm considering at the moment is one that holds the universe in its orbit ... or perhaps a better way to put it might be, all those black holes at the centers of galaxies are exactly the same black hole, just as demons are but portals into it. One that large, well, the span lengthens expontentially with mass, and ultimately we're talking the entire mass of the universe because that black hole is the origin of all matter. (That every galaxy seems to have its own black hole is, I'd suggest, just an artifact of hyperdimensional refractions that cause our third-dimensional structure to take on fractal dimensionality.) At any rate, there's no real reason to worry if you get sucked into the black hole, because the eons you'll spend locked inside will pass in a seeming instant. Just a thought to perk up your day.

So, go to your death terrified and you're part of the Mother of All Homecoming Dinners, but what if you're not scared? What if, when death comes for you, you're ecstatic, joyful, your light body fully charged up and pulsing in and out of reality at some insane frequency? Where does one's soul go to from there?

A mass transcension is part of what's in the cards. Christians call it the Rapture and have some idea it's going to be God grabbing them and because they're faithful and returning them to the Kingdom of Heaven and metaphorically at least they're onto something but of course Christians don't generally pause to think of it in those terms and that, of course, is another part of the scam which, even when it's technically telling the truth, is still presenting a perversion of reality.

Let's pause to think of what that means. On the other side of the transition period, there are going to be a certain number of people left physically standing to pick up the pieces. There will undoubtedly be a great many dead, the souls of many of whom will have fallen down the gullet of a black hole and disappeared forever, of no further use to either the black hole or any of its mobile access points because that is the nature of black holes. There will be some number amongst the dead, however, who go to their deaths ecstatically, and they too will in some sense survive, for their light bodies will perhaps reach the energy levels necessary to attain coherence and in this, following the death of the physical body, the consciousness would remain imprinted. It's hard to say what this would be like but I sort of think it would be kind of like the birth of an angel.

So now the survivors at the other end of this are not just left with a planet at their disposal and a weakened and diminished adversary, they would also have vast hosts of angels with which to protect the planet from the Lie that had in a perverse sense given birth to them. You want to tell me with a beginning like that, God couldn't write a great golden age?

And that, I think, in the end, is mostly about what the scam is trying to hide.

Gravitational Blind Spots

2009-02-23T15:25:00.000-08:00

It is purported by many and perhaps believed by most that science provides the single best explanation for the phenomena of the world. I'm inclined to agree, myself, provided you're talking about science as a methodological practice and not Science, the Ideology. The virtues of the scientific method - close observation, rigorous thought, lightness of belief - are of unparalleled importance in any investigation of the cosmos, but modern science often commits the error of disregarding the latter and possibly most crucial, namely holding one's beliefs lightly, for it is only by making as little investment of self in the rightness or wrongness of one's theories that one maintains the flexibility of mind to modify those theories when new data presents itself. Once the ideas are believed for their own sake, well, the thought becomes muddled and the observation develops blind spots.

We have a theory of gravity, general relativity, bequeathed to us by Einstein, that does a stellar job of describing the gravitational behaviour of large objects. Well, within certain tolerances of course: the Pioneer anomaly showed us that our understanding was actually subtly incorrect, though as of yet there has been little explanation as to just from where the correction might arise. The other, maybe better known problem with relativity is that it breaks down completely at the atomic scale, yielding nonsensical answers. You might almost say that the theory has an enourmous gaping blind spot at the scale of the atom. Despite this flaw it is, I think, taken for granted that the answers it yields at a mesoscale are accurate.

Then there's QED, quantum electrodynamics, otherwise known as the Standard Model by which the subatomic world and all of the electromagnetic phenomena it gives rise to is so fantastically described. Well, fantastic except insofar as the theory breaks down at the stellar scale. Thus physics has found itself for more than a century at a schizophrenic impasse, it's two most successful creations intractably posed against one another.

It's not surprising, then, that there are vast and intricate structures composed out of charged plasmas linking stars and planets together in what may well be a galactic power network, structures that conventional Science ignores altogether because ... well, for no good reason, really, except perhaps that it doesn't want to see them because it would make the universe look too much like the living body it is rather than the dead wasteland of empty stars they'd prefer to see.

What then of gravitation? That's really what I'm here to talk about today. Chances are you've never heard of biogravitational fields. I hadn't, until the phrase came to me as the logical thing to call an idea that's been swimming about in my head for a while, like a freshly hatched fingerling looking for it's mother. I googled the term and while it's certainly not original to me, it's not a widely used one.

All matter, you see, generates gravitation. It's a very weak effect: it takes the entire gravitational field of the earth to keep us in place, whereas the electromagnetic effects of even a small piece of the earth are enough to counteract it. When you hold something in your hand, for instance, the earth's gravitation doesn't rip it through: the electromagnetic forces of the atoms making up your hand are sufficient to stay the object's motion. In fact, of the four forces known to conventional physics (gravity, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) gravity is by many orders of magnitude the weakest.

The usual conclusion within the physics community is to state that since gravity is so weak, the gravitational force of anything smaller than a moon is pointless to measure or contemplate. That their mathematics work so well at large scales, and so poorly at smaller ones, only makes their failure to consider the gravitational fields of mesoscale collections of matter (like trees or people) an easier route to take.

But here's this interesting Eastern idea, regarding the subtle body with ki in place of blood and chakras for organs. Now, what sort of leaps out at you about chakras is that traditionally they line up along the axis of the organism, something I think is very significant. Another significant point is that the subtle body is just that, subtle. It can't be observed by the eye, nor felt with the hand; it is there, but leaves so faint an impression in material reality that it cannot be seen and its influences cannot help but be (there's that word again) subtle.

The subtle body has another interesting property: it is said to be entirely nonlocal, in the sense that once activated it can go anywhere, or to any time, all in zero time, because it partakes of the field of consciousness that weaves the universe together into a single timeless whole.

Now, what of gravitation? It, too, has the property of linking together bodies in space in an instantaneous fashion, not in a direct material way but in an informational sense. The Earth, for instance, is eight light-minutes from the Sun, which means that light - the fastest thing in the material universe - takes eight minutes to get from the Sun to your eyes. The Earth orbits the Sun not where the Sun was eight minutes ago, but where the Sun is right now: otherwise, the orbit would rapidly destabilize and our world would either fly off into space to freeze or fall in and burn. The corollory: gravity is a nonlocal field, transmitting information regarding the distribution of matter to every particle in the universe.

Is this not exactly how Eastern mysticism describes the field of consciousness?

And how about the Law of Attraction?

I guess I'll just come right out and say it: gravity and subtle energy is one and the same thing. If the equations of relativity were solved to show the space-time distortions caused by a human body, or better yet a sensitive enough gravitometer were to perform the measurements directly, I strongly suspect something very like chakras would appear. I'd like to think that the consequences of such a discovery would be enourmous, heralding as they would a merger of the most advanced western thought with the most ancient Eastern traditions, but I have a feeling that the initial response would be rather underwhelming on the part of Science: a whole lot of silence, perhaps, and maybe some character assassination if the discoverer refused to shut up about it.

Well, in the meantime, I don't intend to wait for the lab results. This seems to me to be an understanding from which practical results at an individual level can be gotten without expensive experiments involving high tech lab equipment and brilliant scientists, for if true than the ideal laboratory is your own subtle body and the best scientist is yourself, for it is through your subtle body that you are gravitationally linked to the whole of the cosmos and there is no one better to explore that cosmos through that subtle body than you.

The Charge of the Brigade of Light

2009-02-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

by Jj

I heard a voice one day that called to me
And within that voice
I found my voice

I found friends of like mind
Individuals of character
Friends of wisdom
No more distant than their words—given freely
Shared
Eternal
Life giving

A place I had always been
A hope I had always dreamed
Now filling the air with the sweet music
Of truth

Buried beneath the crescendo of voices
Are the lies of the Ages
The professional liars
Shouted down
Cowering at what they had wrought
The abyss of their own creation
Turned now
Bearing down steadily
Their own words-suffocating them
Their own lies-crushing them

The white horse of truth
Riders all
Thundering down the hillside
Across the plains of deceit
Trampling everything in our path

We are many
From all lands
We ride with truth as our shield
Justice as our sword

Scimitar’s joining Sabers
Sabers joining Cutlass
Cutlass joining Wodao

We are the light Brigade
And it is YOUR valley of death
Reap your whirlwind
Choke on your deceit

We breathe freely and call each other brother
And sister—terms of honor you know not

Joyous in our simplicity and purpose
We will not play your shell game

We shall live the life we choose
With gratitude
And Joy
In Peace

Cracking Cosmic Eggs

2009-02-03T13:42:00.000-08:00

All of us have inner theories by which we operate. Some of these are conscious and learned only by long discipline - such as scientific or esoteric disciplines - whilst others are as innate as expecting things to fall when unsupported. Together all of these theories make up a worldview, more accurate and self-consistent or not as the case may be, which informs the mind as to the nature of reality. In a primitive sense, animals share this making of world-theories, but in the case of humans it is possible for a large number of others to share more or less the same set of theories, the same cosmic egg as Joseph Chilton Pearce called it, a unifying world-view most commonly known as culture.

Now, cultures often have very different outlooks on the world. Some believe in God, others in Nirvana. Some practice divination by reading the cracked lines in a burnt tortoise shell, others forecast climate change with elaborate computer models. Some teach that America won the war of 1812, others insist it was the British Empire, yet others shrug and call it a draw. Some believe in goblins, others in djnni, others in greys, and others in none at all.

Whatever the particulars, the accuracies and the curious blind spots, so long as various points are agreed upon by enough people, you have a more or less coherent culture. The world-views of two cultures might well differ dramatically, especially if separated by millennia of mutual isolation, but so long as they remain internally self-consistent, they can survive as the collective lens through which a human group observes reality.

Self-consistency is a key aspect here. So long as the generally accepted theories describe reality, few will deviate from them and the cultural continuity remains intact. If reality should do something the theories don't account for, though, it increases the chances that people will deviate as they formulate new theories to make sense of the contradictory data. For most phenomena, the culture can change in a more or less coherent way, with the majority of its people flowing along the same mental direction. Sometimes, though, something so huge happens that it breaks the culture completely.

Now, we've got a particular problem in our society. It's called secrecy. Governments do it, and corporations, and individuals. When the culture does more or less what its world-theories tell it to do, you can exert a lot of power if you can control those theories, and the best and easiest way to exert control of information is to lie. Indeed controlling information and lying are virtual synonyms. Most societies are in some sense built of lies (for absolute truth is an incommunicable state), but in our society the Lie has been institutionalized to such a degree that much of our cultural programming consists of very deliberate lies, put there for one purpose and one purpose only: directing the actions of vast numbers of people in the most subtle and efficient ways possible. What need of force? when most think slavery freedom, and love their servitude.

The peculiar power of mainstream, modern Western culture is the stunning detail and painstaking accuracy of its scientific theories, a dense profusion of laws and equations and catalogued stars, trees, proteins, atoms.... There is simply so much of it, and it accounts for the day-to-day aspects of life so very, very well that it is difficult to even conceive that the whole thing might be a web of exquisite lies. While purporting to exist for the noble purpose of knowing nature, the true purpose - not necessarily the original purpose, but certainly the hidden end to which all the disciplines of science have been bent - is to support the larger edifice of lies that has been erected, like a huge, elaborate, and lovingly crafted machine for the purpose of social control.

There's just one thing: the theories are built to account for the day-to-day, but fail entirely when presented with the extraordinary or miraculous, unless it is the extraordinary miracles of its own creation. This is because the theories are built to explain the world without recourse to fantastic things, the a priori assumption being that they do not exist and therefore need not be accounted for. Of course, if they don't exist that's a logical presumption ... but one might also take the opposite tack, and question whether that presumption is precisely the reason those theories exist?

So long as a truth can be suppressed, so long as control can be exerted over a piece of information, its effects upon the world-theories of the mass mind can be obviated. Once it slips through, however, its effects can be quite dramatic. Uncontained truth is a powerful thing; if too much of it leaks out, the whole clanking contraption will come to pieces. Each truth that slips its bonds is like a bolt popping off or a bullet being fired through the engine block.

There's a schism in our culture, for all intents and purposes already here, and though small the crack that's appeared will continue to grow. The internet has catalyzed things: too much of that truth has gotten out, and spread to every corner of the globe. It takes the form of the extraordinary and the miraculous: government black projects and UFOs, secret prisons and crop circles, fluoride poisoning and alternative medicines, ghosts and telepathy and past lives and precognition, all those singular phenomena for which the mainstream theories that keep society together cannot account. Without the internet, very few of us would have the opportunity to gather so much of what's out there, to question so many of the theories we've been taught, to pull back all the way up to a high altitude and take it all in and say ... "Wait a minute...."

It really all comes down to the belief in a single Great Lie. Precisely what form the Lie takes is irrelevant; only it's size is of consequence. 9/11 is one pretty staggeringly obvious example of this: everyone who bought it, bought the need for the War on Terror and made a deep personal investment in ignoring the growing signs of global fascism with all their might. Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory is another: built on shaky foundations from the beginning and by now demonstrably false, it channeled the energies of the world's environmental movement away from any of a wide selection of desperately needed efforts and towards the cause of supporting the same globally metastasized meta-state the Terror War was intended to create. There are no doubt countless other examples I could name, now and in the past, but the one thing they all have in common is that their sheer audacity enables them to hijack whole societies.

So long as that Lie is believed, you're lost.

Once the Lie is perceived, well, you're not found, exactly. But from that point on the search can begin in earnest.

Here's the thing. On one side is a huge clanking world-spanning Machine, which from our perspective scattered about the globe and largely isolated from one another appears utterly indomitable. Our fellow humans, most of them willing components of the Machine, all believe the Lie and have done for such a long span of time that the Black Sun has cast its false light over their entire world. It looks pretty hopeless. Ah, but on our side we have something the Machine's operators don't: Truth. They must suppress it, control it, conceal it in order to put it to use, like gasoline in an internal combustion engine; we have merely to set it free, expose it to the light and the air, and it's own nature will work to our benefit. Think of it this way: they have to keep their Machine operating smoothly. All we have to do is set it alight.

There's a Change coming. On top of all the changes in climate, politics, technology, and everything else, it's a coming sea change in consciousness. Metanoia - sudden spiritual conversion - on a mass scale. As the Great Lie, the keystone of the entire edifice, breaks for an increasing number of people, the Machine will come crashing to the ground, its components flying off in every direction to be picked up and re-purposed by anyone who's had the sense to walk away from it ... and a surprising number will have, when the dust settles and someone takes roll. Their cosmic eggs will hatch and they will - painfully, but inevitably - emerge into a new and more spacious world, one with room for extraordinary phenomena and miraculous occurances, one in which the lies that dominated their lives will have evaporated like morning dew.

Prayer 2.0

2009-01-28T06:57:00.000-08:00

Divine mother who art the source from which all life springs,
Thy unfathomable love embraces all the ten thousand things.
What must be born and grow,
You nourish and nurture;
What must decay and die,
You harvest and devour.
When my cup is empty it is at your bottomless well that I fill it,
That I may drink deep the waters of your inspiration,
And with your hands become mine shape the world in reflection of your infinite beauty.

Cosmic Father who art the Heavens,
Hallowed be Thy infinite names,
Teach me today my daily lesson,
And correct me in my errors,
As I correct those who error below me.
Grant me the courage to seek truth,
The discernment to see it,
And the wisdom to act in accordance with it,
That I may model my kingdom within upon yours above.
For thou art the ultimate answer,
And the final destination.

For together thou art the beginning, the end, and all points in between,
One and not-two, indivisibly present,
The matter, the light, and the gravity,
The disintegration, the change and the evolution,
The power, the will, the wisdom, and the way.
As we are in god is in us,
So help me to become,
For I am a human becoming.
I AM.

We're Holarchists, not Anarchists

2009-01-27T20:37:00.000-08:00

Anyone likely to read this will no doubt agree with me when I say that most of the established hierarchies by which we order our civilization are not just superfluous but actively detrimental to the health of our species and the planet. I speak of the hierarchies we know as corporations, governments, religions, and yes, even the mafia. The sad truth arising from the study of human nature is that whenever a hierarchy manifests, whenever power begins to orbit about a single center, the human predator known as the psychopath is ineluctably drawn to the sweet allure of that power, like a pederast to a smooth young boy. Should the hierarchy persist, it will inevitably be infiltrated by a growing number of primary and ultimately secondary psychopaths; the process of ponerization will proceed apace, the hierarchy will inevitably be turned to destructive purposes and ultimately destroyed.

It would seem that if one wanted to design a society optimized for the neutralization of psychopathic behaviour, the issue of hierarchy cannot be avoided. The only certain long term defense would be to do without hierarchies to whatever degree is practical, for if there is no hierarchy to infiltrate the individual psychopath's range of influence will be greatly frustrated. When hierarchies cannot be avoided, they would have to be fluid, temporary, and task-specific, 'adhocracies' as Alvin Toffler called them.

A lot of people would call what I'm talking about here anarchism, a word that thrills a few and scares many with its associative imagery of imagery of black bloc street fighters tossing rocks and molotovs at riot police and dreadlocked hippies with bloodshot eyes passing a joint around a drum circle. Okay, I'll admit it: both of those images bring a smile to my face. Anarchist is certainly a label that's been applied to me in the past on numerous occasions, but while it's a label I've often accepted it's not one I've ever felt really comfortable with.

The problem - beyond the massive number of mostly negative associations that have attached themselves to the word - is that anarchy implies a state of violent disorder. No matter how much one might point out the benefits and attractions of everyone just staying home, growing their own food, harvesting their own power, and doing their own thing more or less as they will, people will always point out that while that's all very well and nice, what's to stop some band of raiders coming by with some AK-47s and shotguns and taking all your stuff, raping your daughter and feeding you to pigs? You can be damn sure you wouldn't hold off those hellhounds on your own, and with no government there to save you with its police and its army you're taking your life in your hands.

Of course, no one ever stops to think how often this happens even though we do have police departments and armed forces, and how often those very establishments create the very conditions that then require their presence (most especially they've been good and ponerized.)

So, I don't like to call it anarchism. Anarchy's what you get when you're dealing with man in his current state: weak, ignorant, and afraid, a domesticated slave indoctrinated from birth into a self-defeating meta-context he barely comprehends. Take off the leash and he's liable to be so unnerved he'll kill the guy next to him for a sandwich. It's not entirely the modern human's fault that she finds herself in this state: the metacontext she inhabits has been designed specifically to keep her in this victim state. The strategy is simple, even if the tactics are complex beyond possibility of human undertaking: our cultures are set up so as to obscure as totally as possible certain fundamental truths governing the nature of the universe. I'm not simply talking about physics here; this is deeper, something from which physical law as we understand it emanates.

When those laws are understood - and they are undoubtedly few and very, very simple - when those laws are held deep in the hearts of a majority and form the context by which they live their lives, what sort of a society do you think will grow from that? It certainly isn't anything you could call a mere anarchy, for such a society would be ruled, not by any merely human agency but by the fundamental and eternal laws of the cosmos. And yet it would be so unlike the hierarchical civilizations we have built up to now, for no hierarchy would be justified or even needed when all are conscious of the place they occupy within the vastness of creation. I thus propose that the term holarchy be adopted to describe such a society, for reasons that willl become clear, I hope, shortly.

Now, I'm not going to say I know what all those laws are. I have some idea, and I'm willing to bet a lot of you are on the same page as me on this: free will and personal responsibility are high on the list of fundamental concepts, here, as is karma. Anyone who's read the Handbook for the New Paradigm knows the acronym AIAB (Attraction, Intent, Allowance, Balance), a handy shorthand for what it maintains are the only four laws you have to know. Maybe that's the full list and maybe it isn't; at this point that's not important. All that we need to know is that those laws exist; they are relatively simple; and that when they are followed, they produce Results.

A society following such universal laws would govern itself through maintaining a natural harmony with the way of the universe. It could not be otherwise. There would be no need for legislatures: their sole function is to make laws, and the laws of creation have always been, will always be, and can never be modified. No need for courts: when natural law is violated, its judgement is instantaneous. And none for police: after all, nature corrects violations of its own accord. Armies would similarly fall out of use: what use war, when all is in balance? Likewise there would be no place for a mafia, for the conditions that create crime in the first place would cease to exist: no man who understood free will or balance would try to harm his brother, and no woman who took to heart allowance and attraction could fail to help a sister in need.

Imagine, for a moment, that such a society might be created, in microcosm, not just in one place on the earth but in dozens, hundreds, thousands. Small communes, villages, associations, networks: loosely connected or tightknit, localized or distributed, but consisting always of people who know the laws, understand them, seek to live by them.

Indeed, you don't have to imagine it because for all the talk of impending armageddon that clouds the modern mental landscape, those microcosms of what I'm talking about already exist, dotted around the globe, like seeds that have been planted just in time within the cracked interstices of the crumbling Machine. I have a feeling a lot of you have glimpsed this even in your own personal associations, and more rather than less in recent times: a growing reliance on friendship and gifts and less on commerece and money. I assure you it is a trend that will intensify. As the ponerized hierarchies rage in their death throws, they shall prepare the earth for the growth of those seeds that survive into the next phase of human civilization, if in truth civilization is even the right term. Once the hierarchies die, as they will and of their own accord, the new society will blossom: unified in understanding, galactic in its orientation, a holarchy that reflects the whole of the cosmos at every level within itself down to the minds of the humans who compose it.

The Hypersecond

2009-01-09T07:16:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, it feels like the internet's talking to me, trying to tell me things. A moment ago, posting a comment on the latest post at Smoking Mirrors, the verification word was 'hypersec'. My brain couldn't help but interpret that as 'hypersecond', and then immediately after ask itself, 'what in the heck is a hypersecond?'

Time is a nonlinear, fractal thing. It is not the mere ticking of a clock: a clock is nothing more than a machine that attempts to bound infinity within a circle, slice it into arcs, and count them as they pass. A convention, a piece of sophistry, useful but not fundamental. No, time, if you really look at it, is history. Some moments have more of it than others, for in some little changes - little can change - whereas in others there is great ferment, great potential for change. There are moments that are full of peace, which achieve a kind of timelessness (or, one might better say, make the eternal timelessness more perceptible than usual); in other moments, chaos reigns, and since things can go off any which way nothing seems to last for very long at all.

Mathematically, one might picture the entire history of a universe as a vast static structure in an n-dimensional phase space, where n is the number of particles, and thus each point represents a potential material state of that universe. Time appears as connections between the points: points in close proximity to others are close in time, whereas points that are more distant are more separated in time. One might expect the structure that emerges to be very complex, with some points connected to a great profusion of other points, while some points stand all but isolated from the larger structure. The number of paths that can be negotiated through the structure are essentially infinite, each appearing to itself as a consistent and logical timeline.

There's also the possibility of a point from which all other points can be reached. Imagine if you will a sort of still center, a moment of infinite potential when literally anything can happen ... and so, from which, everything happens. It need not be merely the beginning of the universe (though it would be that), nor would it be the end (though in a very real sense it would be that, too.) Looking at such a moment as either the source or the goal of any given timeline wouldn't be quite correct, however; in and of itself, it has no essential superiority over any other moment, for all are equally necessary to the whole. Not a beginning or an end but rather a junction, where all moments meet and and from which any trajectory can be chosen. That moment is the hypersecond.

Synchromysticism

2009-01-08T18:38:00.000-08:00

Recently I came across a new discipline, calling itself 'synchromysticism'. It's a divinatory method for the 21st century, scrying into the prodigious output of every kind of media and hunting for symbolic clues to the future. Taking its cue from synchronicity, the idea that events may take place in an acausal fashion influenced by other events in the future (or in parallel timelines) as well as in the past, synchromysticism takes the position that if that is the case, we'd expect to find things whose explanation is not mere coincidence. At times resembling a wild magpie hunt for correspondances, the main difficulty would seem to be confirmation bias (though I sometimes wonder if confirmation bias is not simply a flaw within human perception, but an indication of an underlying way of the cosmos, that reality becomes what we believe it to be in a very real, physical sense.) Combing the endless torrent of media and for the clues requires creativity in itself, but also a deep knowledge of symbolism, and the discipline to see not just what one wants to, but what is actually there.

I've linked to some synchromystics in the sidebar, The Cleaver and The Blob: the former merely talks about it, while the latter really does it.

It's still an open question to me whether or not synchromysticism is a useful art or merely a novel form of postmodern masturbation. The latter would be an easy position to take, for as of yet I'm unaware of any useful information to have come out of it. Whether or not such information can be found even assuming it's there is debatable. As a case in point, there are three instances I know of in which 9/11 appears in some way before the fateful day: an episode of the Simpsons, in which the family goes to New York and Bart unaccountably holds up a 9 next to the World Trade Center and laughs; an episode of the short-lived X-Files spinoff Lone Gunman, in which the entire plot more or less resembles what actually happened that day; and The Matrix, in which Neo's passport expires on 09 11 2001. It's hard to credit that the Lone Gunman episode resulted from anything other than a leak from the national security state to the script writers, so close is the correspondance, and the case can certainly be made that the other two instances resulted from similar sources. Whether the origin was transdimensional or merely clandestine, from neither the Simpsons nor the Matrix would it have been possible to forsee the kickoff of the fascism superbowl on that day, at least not without a lot of other data to draw on.

Now, I'm not saying that renders synchromysticism useless, merely very difficult to use accurately. As with any kind of scrying, be it Tarot, crystal balls, the I Ching, or cabala, pulling out straight answers from the source material is difficult at best, and without a pretty sound intuition along with a solid familiarity with the divinatory material, it can be impossible. Learning everything there is to know about the Book of Changes is one thing; studying every movie, TV show, comic book, video game, etc., out there is flat-out impossible. If you watch a lot of trailers you might be able to get a high level symbolic overview of what the TV programs are programming into the mass mind, but if it's clues you're after, you actually have to dive in and watch things. So in addition to the qualities of creativity, knowledge, and discipline already listed, discernment must be added, because if you choose the wrong thing to look at, you may not find what you're looking for.

Or is that the whole point? Not looking for something, but simply looking and trying to really see, without prejudice as to what should be there? Alert for whatever hyperdimensional easter eggs have been hidden inside the media, might you be able to view without being sucked in: remaining detached, conscious and critical even while the flow of flickering imagery attempts to lull you into a suggestible hypnotic state?

Now, strictly speaking, synchromysticism isn't just this discipline I've been outlining. Or if it is, it's a poor name for it, if only because synchronicity would be expected to be pervasive throughout one's life and not simply a feature of the media. Synchronicities are found even in the events of one's day to day life, for instance, as well as throughout all the works of man. One that I just noticed myself, while in conversation, is this: octopus and cactus readily come to mind as two nouns whose plurals, octopi and cacti, end in i. What's another one? Well, I'm sure you all know the plural: illuminati, whose singular is illuminatus. There are other nouns, of course, that have follow this pattern, though precious few of them. And aren't the similarities beyond grammar striking? The illuminati are like an octopus in society, their tentacles stretching everywhere; while at the same time (and I'm using some poetic license here, I admit) they protect their power with their lies just as a cacti protects its water with its thorns. (I also admit to being somewhat flummoxed as to how the platypi fits into this.)

Now, is that a synchronicity? Or merely a coincidence? Certainly no useful information resides in it ... but the mere fact that I noticed it might indicate that a hyperdimensional influence directed the words to form as they did, specifically to plant that correspondance there. Whether they did or not, I don't know.

Life From Lightning

2008-11-30T17:03:00.000-08:00

It's easy, in any age, to think that we've got it all figured out; that, regardless of how much remains to be discovered, what is known rests on a fairly firm foundation. At the risk of singling out the present as somehow unique, however, these days it seems that mankind is particularly prone to this illusion. Our scientific knowledge is so vast that to imagine that any one part of the edifice rests on the infirmity of illusion is, for many, unthinkable.

Take DNA: the hereditary molecule, repository of a species' history, determinant of an organism's attributes, blueprint by which the cell and ultimately the body is constructed. Deterministic, Darwinian theory relegates DNA to the status of historical record and blueprint ... whilst demoting living beings to no more than the machines constructed by it. The process of evolution is thought to be nothing more than the happenstance 'improvement' (if such a word can be said to apply, which committed Darwinists insist it doesn't) of the organisms built by DNA: random changes in the genetic code, tested against a randomly shifting fitness landscape over geologic spaces of time, stretching from the now back to a chemical mud puddle somewhere on the Earth's surface 3.8 billion years ago, when a set of molecules just happened to accidentally fall into a self-replicating configuration.

Well, that's the story according to mainstream biology, and so the one the man on the street knows, more or less vaguely, as the truth. Within the confines of official culture Creationism is peddled too, as a sort of jester at the feet of dignified science, its bald-faced denial of reality and wide-eyed innocent credulousness in the face of the most ridiculous of Biblical stories held up now and again for public ridicule. There are those who believe the Creationist line, but in truth, its cultural function is primarily to prop up Darwinian biology by providing a false - and by necessity absurd - alternative, one that cannot possibly survive inside the halls of academia. It's the hoary old dynamic of cultural polarization all over again, analogous in both form and function to the left-right political function: by gesticulating at caricatures of the opposition, either side is able to keep its followers from straying too far from the official line.

Then there's Intelligent Design. Darwinian apologists often try to connect ID to Biblical creationism, but it's been a tough charge to make stick because ID isn't a coherent theory so much as a stance: a growing community of scholars who, having looked at the fantastic intricacy and sophistication of molecular biology, and having been told it all arose according to chance fed through a recursive algorithm, shake their heads and shout, laughing and incredulous, "No fucking way, man!"

You won't find many books by ID proponents that lay out how, precisely, life was created; rather, most of the literature consists of a catalogue of inconsistencies, improbabilities, and anomalies that, taken together, produce quite a bit of negative evidence against standard evolutionary theory, but very little positive evidence for any alternative (a charge Darwinists make frequently, often stating sarcastically that the implication is that God fits into the blank spots.) So, into this theoretical vacuum I'll throw out my own speculations.

It starts with an interesting experiment conducted in 2003 by Romanian biophysicist Mircea Sanduloviciu at Cuza University, in which an electrical discharge inside an argon plasma caused cells to form, dubbed 'plasma blobs'. The plasma blobs contained no complex structure - at least, none has yet been observed - but they did possess properties of growth (by absorbing gases), replication (by dividing in two), and communication (by emitting electromagnetic waves, causing the atoms in other plasma blobs to vibrate.) So right here we have a possible origin for cellular life, taking place not in a puddle of slime but in a plasma. The early atmosphere of the Earth was a highly charged environment, in which plasmas were very much dominant, so if such structures could form there - and form naturally - this would be a worthy line of inquiry.

Now, let's jump ahead and look for a moment at some of DNA's largely unsung properties. Everyone knows about DNA's hereditary attributes, but few outside of the New Age community have heard about DNA's amazingly sophisticated function as a transceiver for biophotons. Outside of a few scientists - who over the decades since their discovery in 1923, and largely under the public radar, have advanced the understanding of the phenomenon - mainstream science has largely ignored biophotons, leading them to dismiss the parts of the molecule that function as a transceiver as 'junk DNA'. What is known is this: DNA molecules continually emit and receive photons of coherent light in a highly sophisticated fashion that indicates the photons may well serve as a communications medium, linking perhaps not just the cells within an organism but potentially organisms throughout the biosphere. Many researchers speculate as to an identity between biophotons and ki energy, suggesting that techniques such as acupuncture work by manipulating this photonic communications web. At any rate, we see that DNA and the cellular plasma blobs communicate in much the same fashion: with light.

Finally, I'll draw your attention to an interesting morphological correspondence. Look at these two images:

The first you no doubt recognize: the familiar double helix of DNA. The second is a Birkeland current, that is, an electrical current that naturally arises inside charged plasmas under the influence of magnetic fields. Birkeland currents are interesting beasts: they scale through at least 14 orders of magnitude, ranging from the planetary to the intergalactic, representing one of the only phenomena in the universe exhibiting an essentially fractal dynamic over such a broad scope. So far as I know, at present it's unknown whether or not Birkeland currents can form at molecular scales, though I myself would not be at all surprised to find that they do.

In that case, we'd have a situation whereby not only cellular analogues arise in high energy plasmas, but DNA analogues as well.

So, here's my theory: that's exactly what happened, and it happens everywhere throughout the universe, more or less continuously and entirely naturally, though absent certain very specific conditions the structures remain more or less ephemeral. However, the early earth, with its preponderance of solid and liquid state matter in close contact with high-energy plasma, provided exactly those conditions. By a mechanism as yet unknown, the plasma blobs cooled and precipitated as cellular membranes; whilst the Birkeland currents wound amino acids into ropes of DNA, drawing them into place through electromagnetic influence, then leaving the structures frozen in place as energy levels decreased and the currents ceased.

From this point, the initial 'programming' could well have been random; evolution might have picked up from there, and moved things along in an entirely conventional Darwinian way. However, there's reason to suspect that this, too, is not the whole story, for DNA's primary function appears to be as a transceiver rather than a simple historical record. Evidence suggests that 98% of the structure - the so-called 'junk' DNA - fulfills just this function. I'm getting quite a bit more speculative here, but as I noted in Electric Astrology an energy conduit can also transmit information, meaning that early earthly life may well have received programming instructions from cosmic sources. If this is the case, the first cells might have been created as nothing more than simple cellular membranes together with molecular antennae. A cosmic intelligence, reaching down to the earth's surface with fingers of lightning, would be able to program these early cells with the data necessary to make use of the self-organizing properties of the ambient building blocks - ranging from simple molecules such as methane and ammonia up to the more complex but still abundant amino acids - in order to bootstrap the construction of appropriate proteins.

Is this what happened? Hey, I don't know. As always with anything you read on the internet, caveat emptor. This much I do know: if God exists, and permeates the universe, then there must have been some physical mechanism by which She created life. The above, at the moment, is my best guess at what that mechanism is.

A Prayer

2008-11-29T20:20:00.000-08:00

Cosmic Father who art the Heavens,
Hallowed be Thy Infinite Names,
Teach me today my daily lesson.
Grant me the wisdom to seek Truth,
The discernment to see it,
And the courage to act upon it,
That Your Will may become mine,
And Your Hand act more perfectly through me.

Divine Mother who art the Source of all Life,
Whose Boundless Love encompasses All,
Guide me along the true Way,
That I may this day grow closer to You.
Grant me to drink deep of the water that flows from Your bottomless spring,
Filling my cup with Your inspiration,
And make of me Your instrument,
That with me You might shape the world yet more fully
With Your immeasurable Beauty.

For Thou art the Beginning and the End and All in between,
The Matter and the Light,
The Power, the Will and the Way.

Conversation With a Baptist

2008-11-26T05:45:00.000-08:00

Our electrician came over yesterday to hook up a 400W metal halide lamp in our workshop (so bright it leaves a green afterimage on your eyes, even when you don't look directly at it.) At one point he needed our stapler.

"Ask, and ye shall be given," I intoned, handing it to him.

"Hey, pretty good, do you know any other Bible verses?"

"Just a second ... 'From he who hath not, even what he have shall be taken, while to him who has shall be given'." (I paraphrase.)

Thus launched the first conversation I've had in I don't know how long - years, likely - with a real-life, died-in-the-wool believing fundamentalist Christian, a man who takes his Bible so seriously he homeschools his kids (not that I've anything against homeschooling. Based on a reasoned critique of the public ~~education~~ indoctrination system, it's an admirable act. Which doesn't apply in this case.)

It was an amusing conversation. He was thrown for a loop, it seemed, by my statements, questions, and responses; obviously not a practicing Christian of any sort, he expected me to be your usual godless heathen atheist, I think. For instance, I could tell he was expecting an eyeroll when he put forth that the world was of the devil; when I agreed with him unconditionally, he wasn't sure what to say next. When I suggested further that the devil, too, was ultimately of God, and should be seen as a part of God's plan ... well, he wasn't sure what to say to that.

We discussed the gnostic texts, and I explained to him my views on the origins of the Bible, both the pentateuch and the gospels. He of course took them as the literal view of god, and was perplexed - though not angered - when I suggested that Christ's original teachings were likely suppressed, and that furthermore much of the Bible, though ultimately based in historical fact, consisted of mythologized oral history recrystallized into written 'history' along lines intended to materially benefit a small priestly class, not to elevate the consciousness of the masses and thus bring them closer to God.

When he said, Jesus was the literal Son of God, born of a virgin, descended from heaven to save mankind, and that only by taking Jesus into our heart could we be saved ... again, I agreed, and pointed out that the Christ figure is unique in any era but not in history (being the Son of God he manifests wherever and whenever he is needed most), that the virgin birth could well be an allusion to a personal rebirth inside the Kingdom of Heaven (an internal state of consciousness in which one is in direct contact with the Absolute), and that accepting Jesus in our heart amounted to achieving inside ourselves what Jesus achieved inside himself (namely the Kingdom of Heaven.)

At one point, clearly perplexed, he remarked that I seemed to believe a bit of this and a bit of that (i'd been throwing some vedic ideas into the discussion), and how did I decide what was true? Obviously, for him, he took the Bible as being true and everything external to it as part of the Lie, which greatly simplifies things. So, I admitted to more or less following my own gut instinct, to which he replied, but how can you trust yourself? Of course, I don't, not entirely, and so I alluded to the Cassiopaeans, telling him that I participated in an online group whose main focus was holding up mirrors to one anothers' beliefs in order to detect falsehoods arising from wishful thinking or psychological shortcomings, a task no man can accomplish alone.

I'm sure he still thinks I'm a lost and damned soul, and the jury's still out on that one so I won't say he's wrong. I could as easily tell him to open his mind and question things, for when you're exploring the most important matter in life (which we both agreed this was), you want to proceed with care. Yet at the same time, God is a merciful type; to those who ask - sometimes even without knowing they're asking - he shows the way. Especially in this age, as the veil lifts, the way becomes increasingly clear. And though knowledge might hasten the journey, God doesn't care in the end what words or ideas one of his appendages uses to grow closer to him; in the end, it is only the growth that matters.

Life Becomes Art

2008-11-25T18:53:00.000-08:00

Remember the movie The Abyss, where deep-sea oil drillers fall so deep they encounter an alien civilization of bioluminescent invertebrates with a water-based technology?

I couldn't help but be reminded of that by this video at National Geographic (shot by an oil-rig ROV, no less! Just like in the movie!) Of course the Magnapinna squid featured there isn't thought to be an intelligent creature, so much as either a living bottom-dredger or a passive ambush predator (or both), neither of which is an ecological niche likely to earn a species intelligence.

So the search for the deep ocean squid cities continues....

Another Letter From the Devic Realm

2008-11-25T07:04:00.000-08:00

At last! I've been waiting for this one for months, now. Be still my beating heart.

Another chapter of Les Visible's invaluable primer, Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World, has just gone online.

If you haven't read the first 12 chapters, they're still available at JustGetThere.

Electric Astology

2008-11-22T20:39:00.000-08:00

The electric universe theory postulates the existence of vast interstellar networks of electricity carried by helical plasma structures known as Birkeland currents. Spanning so-called empty space, these currents power the very stars, the planets, and ultimately connect every piece of matter in the universe.

Now, where energy can be carried, so too can information (just see your USB port!) Indeed, the one virtually presupposes the other; in physical theory, 'energy' and 'information' are mathematically synonymous, as various theories of quantum information demonstrate. The universe can be described as a vast hologram projected inside a quantum computer that is continually computing its own existence, a description that is completely compatible with the electric universe model, discussing as they do complementary rather than contradictory aspects of reality.

Conventional astronomy, predicated on a Newtonian world-machine of gravitational force, posits that every body in space is ultimately nothing but isolated matter, cut off from any surrounding system. Stars are vast nuclear reactors, slowly consuming their own small store of fuel until one day they die; their movements inside the vast clockwork machine governed by nothing but impersonal laws that render any evolution ultimately purposeless. Save clumsy destruction such as a nearby star going supernova and inundating the earth with radiation, or a random comet slamming into the ocean and initiating an ice age, events far removed from one another in time and space can have no mutual influence whatsoever.

The ancients studied the skies, too, and their traditions are kept as the various forms of astrology. Whatever their many and varied particulars, one axiom every system held in common was that all astronomical events had real effects on the lives of humans and every other being in the universe, for the cosmos was seen ultimately a single whole. To the modern, scientific mind the idea that Mars being in the house of Scorpio might cause a man born at one time of year to meet his future wife and another woman born a different time of year to lose all she owns seems a laughable superstition, for no plausible causal connection could possibly exist....

Unless, that is, one brings to mind the electric universe's fractal web of electric charge, connecting all things in the universe with currents ranging in size from vast intergalactic trunks that power quasars to the filamentary sparks that forms the conversation of the atoms. Stars, planets, moons and asteroids and the smallest grain of interstellar dust: all are hooked into the same web. The shape those connections take - the double helix of the Birkeland current - is even suggestive of a certain famous molecule, one whose hereditary and even computational properties are well known, but whose function as a sophisticated electromagnetic transceiver is generally not.

By this vast web, information as well as energy can travel. One wonders if the various astrologies - either as the disjecta membra of a lost civilization, the misunderstood teachings of visiting aliens, or the philosophical inductions of inspired minds - had this in mind when they took it as obvious that all was connected. I am not saying that any of these traditions are necessarily correct in the particulars, for no art that studies so complex a system can ever hope to divine all its secrets; that many, if not all of the traditions are fragmentary and corrupted, reduces their reliability still further. Nevertheless, there may well be something to them, not on their own individual merits as fully developed theories, but in terms of the way that they look at the world.

The exclusive focus on solid bodies moving through space that has preoccupied astronomy since the days of Newton is akin to considering exclusively the skeleton of a body; and when the skeleton only is studied, the study can be of nothing but death. This is reflected in the grim picture painted by modern astronomy: the stars live solitary existences, burning up their own small supplies of fuel until one day, either in a spectacular explosion or with a gentle sigh, they die. On some of their planets life may. perhaps, by some accident, arise, but that life too is doomed by its star's inevitable fate; its history shall amount to no more than the clever re-arrangement of some small fraction of the matter around the star, with no wider significance for the universe at large. In the end, as the universe's expansion continues, all matter will eventually disperse into a thin atomic cloud, dim and dark for all of eternity.

If gravitational astronomy amounts to a study of the bones and nothing more, the electric universe theory offers up for our consideration the connective tissues, the circulatory system, and perhaps the nervous system of the universe. In short, it provides the parts of the universe's body necessary to bring it to life, on a cosmic scale. No matter the seeming gulfs that separate the parts, nothing is ever even for a moment separate from the whole.

Might it not be that the universe is at once a vast living being, and the living dream in the mind of god? Where actions taken at any one point, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can have repercussions of cosmic dimensions, whilst movements of the remotest of heavenly bodies reach down to influence the lives of the smallest of its inhabitants?

Secret Histories: A Tale of Two Books

2008-11-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my last post. Not coincidentally, it's been a little over a week since my copy of Laura Knight-Jadzyck's imposing tome The Secret History of the World (and how to get out alive) arrived in the mail. I spent my last forty bucks ordering it, so you'll understand my excitement, and perhaps forgive me that my internetting (particularly the blogging) declined precipitously while I read my way through it. And a fascinating read it was, too.

Now, here's a strange thing: I'd already read The Secret History of the World, several months ago. The volume remains on my bookshelf. So why would I be so excited to reading it again? Well, to start with, they weren't the same book. Before I'd even heard of Laura Knight-Jadzyck, Mark Booth's (much slimmer, much less scholarly) volume - The Secret History of the World As Laid Down by the Secret Societies - caught my eye at a bookstore in Japan, and for some reason I just had to read it. At the time I found it extremely interesting, although not entirely credible ... for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. I knew (and know) very little about secret societies and other esoteric matters (a statement I make, not in comparison to the great mass of Other People, but to the Great Sea of knowledge); and yet, something about Booth's book struck me as, well ... not quite right. He makes an incredible list of claims, including: Adam and Eve were vegetables; the Sphinx was built in 10,000 BC; Jesus came to Earth in order to spread a new kind of consciousness, and had a twin brother who lived in Mesoamerica.

And yet, for all that, in a stunning lack of discernment on my part ... I actually kind of liked the book. Many of its ideas spoke to me.

Then I found out about the real (and original) Secret History, and, well ... there's just no comparison. Knight-Jadzyck's book is based on a lifetime of research into, well, everything; the things she uncovers are incredible, every bit as incredible as Booth's, with the crucial difference that she provides footnotes whenever she can. Her method is that of a proper historian: to drill down to primary sources, and then consider whether or not those sources can be trusted. She takes the rigorous methods of academic historians, and applies them to topics that are far outside the purview of respectable academics: Atlantis, hyperdimensional beings, cyclical catastrophes, ancient technologies ... all within the context of trying to understand how, and why, we have gotten where we are (and where we are likely to go next.)

The picture she paints is far from a reassuring one. Our distant ancestors made an unholy pact with hyperdimensional reptoid beings that feed on our negative emotions, and manipulate our reality in order to maximize their food source. Since then, at least one major global civilization (Atlantis) and possibly others, have come and gone, reaching as high or higher than our own civilization only to be dashed to pieces by the arrival of periodic cometary swarms. Most of our mythology is the fragmentary memory of lost technologies, warped beyond recognition after endless millenia of history's longest game of Telephone. And the same fate is in store for us ... unless we Ascend spiritually, and get out of the Matrix in which we live. It's paranoia of a spiritual depth, and written here - in such brevity - it looks like a psychotic's dream castle.

Well, except ... she isn't just pulling all this out of her ass. It's based on decades of careful research, pulling together threads from comparative mythology, archaeological anomalies, and virtually every science you can name. Her 'wild claims' are arrived at after looking at a great deal of evidence, and are stated with much qualification for - as she would be the first to say - if our history has been intentionally falsified, getting to the Truth is, as a physicist would say, a nontrivial problem.

Now, it's curious, don't you think, that a few years after one Secret History is published, another appears. The first is dense, scholarly, well-researched ... and presents in the end a way of looking at the world that would rock the powers that be to their very core, should its message be widely received. The second is superficially interesting, but on closer examination falls apart into a big pile of intellectual junk food. They both have the same name, and similar-looking covers; but while you'll never see the former at Indigo or Barnes & Nobles, the latter was widely released (and critically panned.) It's almost as though someone wanted the second book to be associated with the first; the Control System going into damage control mode, patching up the little hole in the carefully constructed Matrix that had been opened by Red Pill Press.

I consider myself fortunate to have come across the real thing.

The Free Currency Project

2008-10-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about solutions, for a change.

I'm in the process of putting one of mine up at the Free Currency wiki. Here's an excerpt, to whet your appetite:

For the past few hundred years, ever since the establishment of the first central bank, the creation of money has come with a price attached: an interest fee, which must be paid to the issuer. In the end, such money is nothing but debt, and it's ending now in the only way it could: everything, all the real wealth in the world, is being sucked to the top of a pyramid billions of people broad and hundreds of years old. This end was inherent in the way our money works, but it is not inherent in money per se. Our modern monetary system is, when you get right down to it, nothing but a game that we play. On this page, you'll find the rules of a new game. One that just might be more fun to play than the one we're all sitting at the table for now.

This isn't just some bullshit idea I came up with on my own (although certain details of the implementation are, so far as I know, unique.) The basic concept was brought to my attention in a series of articles (Money: A New Beginning Part 1, Part 2, Money and the Crisis of Civilization) by Charles Eisenstein, a thinker whose thoughts are deep in that way that many philosophers aspire to but few are able to pull off with such grace (his book, Ascent of Humanity, is online, free to all, and highly recommended.) The key idea is that of demurrage, which is very simply the opposite of interest: whereas the money we use now gains value over time simply by virtue of being money, free currency loses value until eventually it just dries up and vanishes. This is odd, until you consider that in the real world, actual physical goods and, yes, services, also decay and must eventually be replaced. Use money that the same principle applies to, and the potential changes are enourmous.

Now, I'm not going to explain all the ins and outs here. That's what the wiki is for, so if you're interested, go there and check it out. What I'm really interested in, is help (that's why it's a wiki.) Reformatting our currency is one of those things that, by definition, cannot by done alone. It's a big project, and it requires more than just me (good for big ideas, and not much else.) The project needs web designers, programmers, graphic artists ... and that's just the initial stage. Later on, when it's time to go live, it'll need people on the streets marketing the currency, talking to businesses, getting the word out to the man on the street. I've got ideas on how to do all of this; no doubt others out there have their own. The project needs them all.

If you want to help, drop your name in the comment string and I'll give you edit permission on the wiki (it's closed to the public until I've got everything up.) And even if you don't, don't be afraid to mention this at whatever forums you hang out on.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to take our economy back.

Comets and Strange Clouds

2008-10-11T07:02:00.001-07:00

Last night I had a dream. What it meant, if anything, I don't know, but this is what I saw.

Initially, I was inside a room, at a party which many of my friends were attending. It was night, of course. Most likely in the city, as I couldn't see any stars in the sky. Then, looking through the window, I saw a light, high in the heavens, and so went outside, where I could get a better view of things.

It started as a single meteor, streaking through the sky. Before long it was joined by others. All came from different directions. They came down, and hit on the over the horizon. A flash of light, followed long after by a boom that rolled over the landscape. By this time my friends were joining me outside, and they were starting to panic, a bit. Me, I was just watching.

Clouds followed the boom. Dark, roiling monsters that blotted out the heavens.

Shortly after, what I can only describe as rainbow clouds appeared. Not your standard rainbow, arcing from one point to another. These were more like shifting bars of light, high in the air and perpendicular to the landscape, their colors moving through pure reds, blues, and greens.

That's all.

V for Ve know vere you sleep

2008-10-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

No doubt you all remember how AIG had it's bottom pulled out of the fire by the American people last week. And maybe you've heard how the executives had an all-expenses paid corporate resort weekend at a spa in California. Bless their hearts, I'm sure their nerves were just wrecked by the trauma they'd undergone in the near collapse of their livelihoods. A weekend of pampering was just the thing that was called for!

This is just a thought, but since we know that they're planning another getaway, and we know where it's going to be ... well, wouldn't it be kind of cool if someone were to pay them a visit? Or many someones? A great gathering, perhaps?

Now, I won't be anywhere near the place in question. But I figure there must be a lot who are. Would it be asking too much, for a flash mob to gather on top of them while they're being massaged and bathed and dining on their organic produce, and, well ... put the fear of G-d into them?

That would send a fun message, don't you think? Just a thought.

People of the Circle

2008-10-06T20:51:00.000-07:00

Read the following short article, and ponder everything you think you know about history.

"We do not know why, but all of the 4,000 Cucuteni-Trypillians settlements were intentionally burned," said Sergiy Krolevets, director of the National History and Culture Museum of the Republic of Moldova.

Gee, I wonder why anyone would've wanted to do that?

Ahimsa

2008-10-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

Free will and evil.

Small words with big implications. They're two of the biggest problems in philosophy and theology. Resolving them isn't easy. For millenia, priests have asked how we can have both an omnipotent, omniscient, and omi-everything-else-ient deity, whilst still maintaining Free Will for either It ot It's creations. And if one of It's other omni's is omnibenevolance - something every authentic tradition agrees on (though sometimes you have to hold 'em upside down and give them a bit of a shake to see it, as they they don't all use the same word for it) - well then, how do you account for a creation that contains within it so much pain and horror that it can as easily be a festering hell as a verdant heavan? The usual answer is that Evil occurs because all entities within creation excercise Free Will, and I think while that's not really far from the truth, though it doesn't really get us out of the woods because all of the Creators other attributes really seem to work against the whole 'Free Will' thing being anything but an illusion, an artifact of our impossibly narrow perspectives.

Traditonally, science has seen it a little differently. Evil isn't so much of a problem; in an inherently random universe, with a meaningless history that amounts to little more happenstance and an endless series of (un)fortunate accidents, it isn't really hard to see how what we call 'Evil' has come into the world. The tricky part is, again, Free Will, because the picture science generally paints with its metaphors is that of a world that reduces to the deterministic, mechanical operations of atoms and various subatomic particles. It's all a great and fantastically complex Machine, and Free Will is, again, an illusion, this time an epiphenomenon of minds that, for some reason, would go insane if they didn't believe in their own Free Will.

Well, okay. That's a bit of a strawman, I admit; the image of old science, hollowed out with age and the creeping toll of it's own contradictions. There is also New Science, a strange mixture of quantum mechanics and ecology, it's math a heady brew of cellular algorithms, fractal geometry, and nonlinear dynamics. It's still in it's infancy, and if we continue to call it science at the moment it is only because we do not have a better name for it. We will, though, because when it matures it will be as different from science today as science is from the Aristotelean academies of the Middle Ages.

But that's not our topic today. Today, we're talking about free will, and evil, and seeing if they have any relation to each other. Or, indeed, if they exist at all.

The astute amongst you may be scratching your heads around now, wondering why on earth the title of this post is 'Ahimsa', the Hindu concept of non-violence. There's a connection there, I promise, if only you're a little patient.

Free will exists, because it has to. At any moment, you have a choice. Right now, you could continue reading, go to another page, get up and go to the bathroom, go outside for a smoke, get back to thinking about how to go to Mars, or just about anything else. No, really, the choice is yours. In the next moment, you could be doing any of an uncountable number of things, and before that moment comes, there's no way of knowing just what that thing will be. Not for you or for anyone else.

As for much else in the macroscopic human realm, there's a quantum mechanical analogue here. The wavefunction of any subatomic particle will continue to evolve for however long it's wavefunction isn't being collapsed by observation (or measurement, or whatever else you want to call it); as it evolves, it ceases to be a definite point in space and probabilistically smears, occupying an infinite number of different positions simultaneously: some highly probably, some vanishingly improbable, but all, to one degree or another, possible. Once it's observed, it snaps into one or another of those myriad states, and it does so randomly. Neither an observer nor, one suspects, the particle knows what state it will occupy immediately after a measurement. Of course, physicists generally speak of the particle's wavefunction randomly 'collapsing' to a certain state, but we might as well impute a tiny fraction of consciousness to the particle, and state instead that the particle, itself, chooses.

Electrons with Free Will. Now isn't that a concept that turns everything on its head.

Free Will, you see, is inherent in the very structure of the laws of physics. It's there, right from the beginning, and it's there all the way up to the very top. As such, it's a very important, dare I say even Sacred, thing. There may be no principle more fundamental to the workings of the All.

Now. Evil. Well, that's simple: Evil is whatever attempts to abridge Free Will. Whenever one entity tries to limit the free choice of another, it is engaging in an evil act. This can be overt - a mugging, a murder, a mob or a mass bombing - or it can be covert, as in advertising and propaganda, or any other form of lying. All lies are attempts to deny others of their free will by altering their perception of reality. This is manipulative evil. There's also coercive evil, which tries to make people do things through brute force, and preventative evil, which attempts to keep people from doing things. Regardless of what shape evil takes on, it is identifiable, always and everywhere, by one over-riding principle: it is that which attempts to weight choices, to make one entity choose A over B.

Hold on there! Am I really making such a sweeping statement? Surely there are times when it isn't evil to deny Free Will. For instance, what about when one is trying to prevent evil?

Here's the kicker, folks. Free Will is so fundamental a principle that even those who are doing and pursuing an Evil path are excercising their own Free Will, and Must be allowed their own Choice.

And that, my friends, is Ahimsa. Nonviolence. Not just being a Vegan anymore! (and since when has that ever been a viable ethical stance? What, just because they're plants it's okay to eat them? You think having a nervous system privileges animals when it comes to pain? Even cells sense. Hell, even electrons sense, and respond to that sense: they too can be repelled, and there you have the essence of fear and pain together. No, you don't get off that easy. You can't just change your menu to keep your conscience clean.)

Surely, though, it's right to intervene, to do what you can to stop evil-doers from harming others? That's what some of you are thinking, I'm sure. Others, who know it's right, jump right to pointing out the consequences of just letting evil people do as they please: looting, rioting, murder in the streets and anarchy in the countryside. In our society we have Rules, damnit! There are Laws here, and all must Obey, for if not it would be a Hobbesian nightmare, the war of all against all.

That way of thinking, right there, that's one of the greatest tricks Evil ever pulled on this planet. It's got the best of intentions, but what it fails to take into account is that when you fight evil, you feed it. Fighting fire with fire just feeds the fire. The aim of Evil is to abridge free will; when you fight it, you're first of all violating your own free will (because you're reacting instead of acting), while at the same time violating the free will of whoever is engaged in whatever particular evil du jour is being fought today. By definition you're engaging in evil. By fighting the monster, you become it.

Ahimsa is a very different path. It's one that says, sure, evil exists. And what of it? It is Evil's choice to be evil. And it is my choice to be ... however I am. One on the path of non-violence will of course not attack another, but that is just the beginning. Neither will they counterattack one who assaults them (which doesn't mean they will stick around to be hit!) True ahimsa, of course, is impossible in this world: merely by living, we unavoidably prey upon other creatures, for survival is impossible without it. It can only be followed to the degree that one refuses to violate another's free will.

This doesn't just mean not hitting people, and not hitting back. It means not attempting to pursuade people through lying or cajoling or any other way of manipulating; nor trying to restrain one person from doing something bad to himself, or to another.

It is not an easy path. When you see someone being beaten in an alleyway, it's natural to want to help. When the country's laws are lax on air pollution, it's only normal to want to campaign to change those laws. When your nation is invaded, or your family threatened, there is nothing more human than to throw one's life on the line to defend it.

Walk away from any of those struggles, and you risk being branded a coward, even if only inside your own heart.

But all of them violate ahimsa.

It's a difficult path, there's no question.

It's also a path of unexpected power. Witness the British leaving India: Ghandi wouldn't give them the time of day, a hundred million Indians saw him doing that and thought, hey, that's a good idea, and before you know it, the Raj is gone. Without a shot fired. For no other reason than that a large number of people decided not to believe in it anymore.

Ponder that. And look out at the world we live in, the Planetary Control Grid and everything else that has been wrought by our desire to fight evil. By fighting evil, we've become evil. The harder we fight, the stronger it becomes. And the stronger it gets, the harder we want to fight.

It's an ugly cycle. Until you grok it (and very few have, by this point, but have patience, they will) you're a rat on a wheel you don't even know exists. But once you do, that hard path of ahimsa starts to look a lot easier in comparison.

Waking Up

2008-10-02T15:36:00.001-07:00

Years ago, I used to think I was awake. Most other people walked blithely through a nonlinear world, holding fast to their unstated, unconscious beliefs, but me? I could see the writing on the wall. The Singularity was on its way.

A year ago, in the clamor of cognitive dissonance following my first 9/11 truth video, I thought instead that I'd woken up. The masses lived in a delusion, brainwashed by shadowy Powers that used them for their own cynical and heinous ends, but I? I was on to their Game. I had woken up, roused from my pleasant dreams as though by an alarm clock ... and a glance at the time told me that I had only a little time to get to class. A rude awakening, perhaps, but better than being jerked awake in the small hours of the morning by the sound of armed intruders storming every egress.

There weren't many people in the classroom. It seemed most of the student body was sleeping off a hangover, and was declining to attend their lessons. And if I was in class then, it was halfway through the semester, and I've had to scramble to get up to speed. That said, I counted myself lucky, to be attending these classes. One of the few awake. An elite.

Well, then, am I awake? Am I really? I'm not so sure of that, any more. The rabbit hole goes deep indeed, and if its seemingly endless depth teaches no other lesson, in and of itself, it teaches us at least this: reality is not real. It is all a dream, an illusion. No one is ever truly awake, though some few achieve the One and only then and thus do they awaken. Certainly I dare not count myself as one of them, for that would be a Lie of the worst sort.

But at least I am, I think, waking up.

I am not alone in this. There are millions of us out there, who have felt the call, for whom the curtains of reality have started to peel back, if ever so slightly. The images we perceive are indistinct, blurry, as though we're still wiping the sleep from our eyes. But already, we can make things out. We can see others sitting up, rubbing their eyes and yawning, still others running about, trying to shake a few last people awake, though there isn't much time. You see, the other thing we can see is that the house is on fire, and outside, laughing maniacs on horseback are brandishing torches and trying to shoot anyone who escapes.

I speak in metaphor, but you take my meaning, I am sure.

Anyone who's woken up even halfway knows that the only thing that can save this planet now is a spiritual revolution. Nothing less will suffice, for that is just how dire the situation is. Unsolvable crises and unresolvable conflicts are converging from every direction. The odds of destruction are growing so great that the chances of survival are becoming positively quantum. Opening that narrow dooreway into a world worth having will be a miracle, one that reduces those of myth to mere special effects. A miracle so powerful, a million Ghandis, Boddhisatvas, and Christs would be required to pull it off.

And their appearance would in and of itself be a miracle of the highest degree.

But then, in what age other than the sort we're living through now would they appear? Where else, but where they are in need of most? And when else, but at the very last moment?

I'm not talking about saviors descending from the sky on beams of light (though I'm not ruling it out.) There is no need for such ostentation. No, I'm talking about spiritual enlightenment, striking real people around the globe as though God Itself is methodically flicking the lightswitches inside their brains ... though of course, it's not so simple as all that. We have to find the lightswitches ourselves; but then, we've all been placed, exactly where we need to be, exactly when we need to be, decades in advance. So in the end, when the switches all come on at the same time, the effect will be the same.

We're waking up. Millions of us. And when we're awake, what a different world we shall see.

HELLO WORLD

2008-09-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a long hiatus since my last foray into the blogosphere, marking the fourth time my blogging has ceased. As always, I return to you, now, with a new project, under a new name, with new beliefs, new memes, and a new outlook on life.

Who is this strange voice in the unread outer wilderness, lost til now in the icy howl of obscurity? Why, I've been blogging a long time, dear reader, since I launched myself into the blogosphere all the way back in 2004 with strangerAttractor. Ah, but I've changed quite a bit from the callow youth who typed the screeds in that deservedly unread blog (unread save for one dedicated reader, a loyal troll). Those interested in charting my journey can follow along in the subsequent projects: 1+White = One Hundred, which chronicles my introduction to Japan during my three years there; the aptly named Cracks in the Sanitarium, in which you can watch me descend ever further into the depths of neocon madness; and finally Dancing in the Minefield, where you can see the cognitive dissonance finally start to open cracks in the walls of the mental prison that I am only now starting to tear down.

Ah, but who has the time to go through all that? Certainly not I, I assure you. I've provided those links not because I expect or even desire you should read anything therein, but only in the interests of full disclosure. There is much in my past to be ashamed of, but pretending I did not write those things I believed is no sort of solution. You see, my friends, one of the major themes of this blog - one among many others - is Truth. Truth about the world, and Truth about mySelf.

Truth is a hard thing to come by, in this age, in our world. Lies permeate our language and our mental environment like a thick post-industrial smog. We are lied to unceasingly by our leaders, both political and religious, with every speech and sermon; by our corporations, with every ad campaign and press release; by our scientists, with every contradictory study and jerry-rigged computer model. We lie to our friends, to our neighbors, to our familes and our lovers, with little white lies and lies of omission, mimicking in miniature the greater sins that dominate our lives. Inevitably, we end up lieing to ourselves with every other thought we think, rationalizing away our instinctive actions and reactions and refusing to acknowledge the seething mess of contradictions that underlies the great egoic I that we've all been raised to identify with. Lies are so ubiquitous that it seems our very world is made of them; like fish in water, we notice them only by their absence, the uncomfortable silence that follows the voicing of any inconvenient truth.

Will I succeed in keeping to the truth, like an incorruptible witness on the stand of an ideal court? No doubt, not always. Only you can judge if I am, and I'm relying on your to keep me honest. In a world so full of illusions, a world that very well may be nothing but illusion, it is inevitable that things will be written here that are not, strictly speaking, True. All I can promise is that I will never consciously pollute these words with Lies.

So, first things first, yes? The name of the blog. This one's called Psychegram: the intersection between mind and mathematics, consciousness and matter. The more observant of you will have seen that the URL does not match the title. There, it is psi, the greek letter so famously associated with psychic events, and ki, the Japanese for the better-known Chinese concept of chi. No, I'm not psychic - no more than most of you (which is more than any of us likely expect) - but I believe it to be among the possibilities in this very poorly understood universe in which we find ourselves.

By now you're wondering, why should I read this? Hell, why is this guy bothering to write it? The quick answer to both questions, of course, is that it's fun, and really what more reason do you need to do anything? Ah, but what am I doing here? Besides writing sentences ending in question-marks?

Well, questions are importent, ne?

I'm experimenting on myself, and in this blog, I will be - amongst other things - documenting the results of those experiments. Living in natural time, summong memetic entities from my subconscious, meditation, mindfulness, and in general exploration of the outer reaches of human experience ... or at least, the outer reaches of what it's possible for this human to experience. By doing that, I hope only to become more Human, and I think that's a worthy goal, for this world has seen very few fully Human beings.

But that's something that is going to change.

Partly, this blog is here to keep me honest. It's here because I think I'm on a Path, and maybe this will encourage others to follow theirs (and if enough do, well then, we might save the world! The Revolution is Within.) It's here because with all the things the internet has given me, it's time to start giving back. And, it's here because writing is fun.

That's enough for today. We'll see what I feel like writing about tomorrow.