Monday, February 23, 2009

Gravitational Blind Spots

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.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The Charge of the Brigade of Light

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

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Cracking Cosmic Eggs

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.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Prayer 2.0

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.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

We're Holarchists, not Anarchists

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.

Friday, January 9, 2009

The Hypersecond

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.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Synchromysticism

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.