Coming Up From the Undersane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quantum Faith and the Physical Limits of Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Narrative Tzol'kin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Errata

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dad's Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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