The
Conscious Explorer
[The following essays are
the creation of Amos Jessup, selected
by number from his menu of essays at
http://www.worldtrans.org/CE/CETOP.HTML ]
Warning:
Amos Jessup advises that the thoughts contained in his following writings are
not complete. Think them at your own risk. The Surgeon General reports that
thinking another's incomplete thoughts may lead to erosion of certainty,
compromised awareness of self and doubt of the others' Existence.
What we have called the Sea of Consciousness is not,
actually, a sea of consciousness but a sea of consideration.
Within there are endless motions of consideration, views of reality,
definitions of importance, perspective and quality, desire and resistance,
beauty, non-beauty, ad infinitum.
The wave-form we call a self is like a soliton formed in this sea, a
transient hump that somehow keeps its form and travels through the sea of
consideration as a unit. This is an interesting thing, since the dynamics of
the sea are such that continuity is next to impossible. But in the miracle of
perversity called organized life, we somehow manage to convince ourselves of
the timestream and each of our tracks through it as an 'individual', without
any problem.
The odd phenomenon that sensitive people encounter at the death of a
loved one seems described by this model. They sense that the deceased is very
present at the funeral and often for sometime thereafter. Sometimes he/she
visits various friends or old favorite locations. Then, a fade-out occurs where
his/her presence seems to have been subtracted. No matter how one scans the
psychic horizons, old Jack isn't answering up. He was last seen in the vicinity
of New Orleans, where he wanted to hear Dixieland music or some such, but as a
being he is 'off the scope' of psychic radar.
It may be that the soliton of wave forms in this sea of consideration
has simply 'disbanded' leaving the persona-operator unrecognizable, as the key
beliefs which held 'him' together in the lifetime just ending have evaporated.
Another amusing aspect to this model derives from naval experience.
There, we had a scale of conditions of the sea, called the Beaufort scale,
ranging from 'Sea like a mirror' (force 0) to an insane maelstrom of mountains
of white foam endlessly being beaten to smithereens on a cacophony of wind and
water (force 12). In between are gentle ripples, light waves, firm waves, big
waves and wind, and so on up to hurricanes.
In the sea of consideration we are all familiar with Force Zero -- the
quiet harmony where no self is needed because a tranquility of considerations
obtains. As the forms of selves and their pet ideas and right/wrong conflicts
and dynamic desires and resistances grows one can sense the sea of consideration
moving and heaving up through the scale from light chop to full gale, the utter
swamping confusion of full-blown overwhelming transition in all parts of all
lifetimes NOW.
The next question, of course, is what are the rules of navigation on
this sea? How does one find one's place, one's destination? Are there valuable
cargoes, pleasure cruises, smuggling operations and a Coast Guard in the Sea of
Consideration? As a sailor on this sea, what conditions cause sea-sickness?
What brings joy? Do you grin in the teeth of the gale and whoop as you slide
down the face of thirty-foot waves? Or does a light breeze send you to your
bunk?
This is not just whimsical analogizing. The dynamics of every motion
of your existence are tied to these questions despite their cheery tone.
And the analogy is useful.
Imagine, for your own entertainment, what the rudiments of coast-wise
navigation are in the Sea of Consideration. How do you fix your position? What
mathematics do you use? And what is the name of your favorite lighthouse? For
that matter, what constitutes solid land, the invisible basin that contains all
parts of the Sea? Fix yourself to that and you will certainly be ready for some
adventure.
# # #
The mechanics of communication within the apparent
continuum of time and space will produce an endless series of lessons about
motion, change, and life-as-a-particle within the continuum. Some of these
lessons can produce technology, such as steam engines, rocking chairs, cat-food
dispensers, Crest, Cheerio ovens, VCR remotes and monoclonal antibodies.
The idea of motion in a space-time continuum can be likened to the
bundled fragments of ice cubes being torn up into a milkshake in a blender. But
you don't see much of that if you are in the blender. You might learn,
to extend the fancy, what life is like near the blades, near the glass
perimeter, something about the nature of the currents, and you might conclude
after several lifetimes within these limits that life was inevitably,
ineluctably, a clockwise rotation. Those who focused more narrowly on smaller
segments in the blender could argue this conclusion because they found
counter-clockwise pools, and a philosophical debate on how to find out could
ensue.
Living within this blender you would have a viewpoint and a focus that
depended on your "template" -- the set of realities your beliefs
allowed you to recognize, the patterns of "what is possible" in the
blender-according-to-You. Depending on these templates different events -- the
changing of a whirlpool from clockwise to counter-clockwise, the passing of ice
particles, the changing of a local flavor-stream from banana to strawberry --
would be recognizable to you. Other events would not; some would seem
significant enough to you to be called "milestones", worthy of note
against the general background of normality.
In this blender it wouldn't matter if the 'fragments' you focused on --
the milestones in your particular template -- were annual sales at Mervyn's or
the rise and fall of civilizations, or the life span of E. coli. Certain
constancies would make themselves clear to you once you had studied the thing
long enough. You'd learn something about the patterns within the blender and
achieve certain insights. As a species, you and your kind could spend lifetimes
building up a knowledge of these patterns and uncovering and discussing them.
Some of them, as mentioned, would even yield technology but it is an
interesting question whether those that yield technology are "truer"
than those that do not.
Certainly, in a world dedicated to cause-and-effect beliefs, they look
more "true'. This may just be data-racism in disguise.
Within this acquired knowledge would be a certainty, perhaps, that the
nature of all particles was to 'die' sooner or later -- to meet the blade that
spins the Universe, through one trail or another; and that the apparency
of clockwise motion was -- however entertaining -- a ruse that ultimately had
to give way to the more fundamental downward progress toward the final impact
that is made by all things in existence as they approach the Final Blade. Thus
our Universe within the Blender would even have its inflexible laws of Entropy.
It might be argued that every major spiritual step
in our history -- Lao-Tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha, even Crowley and Hubbard, the
terrible twins of the Thirties, Madame Blavatsky and Aimee Semple MacPherson,
Seth speaking, Werner Erhardt and perhaps even Jack Kerouac -- that all of
these, all the New Age writings and channelings and teachings (from whatever
date) have been "pushing the envelope" of this blender, and shifting
the material belief systems within it closer and closer toward a recognition of
two things:
1.
There
is a distinct limit WITHIN WHICH all these phenomena are occurring, outside
of which the rules may be different, and;
2.
There
is a distinct possibility that the perception so described is not just
being projected from within the blender, but that the blender itself and
its ingredients are somehow connected with a consciousness outside those limits
-- in other words, perhaps a Cook.
But it is also true that there seems to be a real quantum jump involved
in shifting past the glass within which the Blade rules. Stretching the
envelope can go so far, but will not fundamentally break the glass -- indeed,
to contemplate breakage of the glass would be the ultimate Heresy! For one
thing, it would bring an end to all the lessons we were here learning! Agggh!
We would all have to apply to another University!
It is possible that all the lessons are One Lesson. Perhaps even
within the glass, leaving the Cook outside, the moral is really to know that
all lessons are the Lesson of You -- wholly, entirely, indefatigably in the Now
Now. (Now Squared).
One objection to this idea is that it abandons common ground; the ways
we relate to each other may be aberrated but at least we're relating!
"What? Is it possible? Can one operate like that, have relationships?
Continue communications?' To become wholly oneself is to somehow sneak out of
the matrix of limits that makes us recognizable to each other. We have a
superstition that enlightenment leads to disconnection, the fate of the
space-cadet.
But it IS possible. It is possible at any instant, at all instants, for
any past and in any of all possible revolutions of the Blade.
The possibility seems remote because of the nature of the dialog within
the glass. To transcend the glass transcends information itself, somehow, or at
least information as we know it. And so the limit seems clear -- one cannot
operate in the world, with the information of the world, if one is being
outside the quantum of the world, beyond dialog as the world knows it. To burn
with the gem-like flame of Entire You and Entire Now is to abandon dialog for
serenity.
But is this so? Is there no dialog beyond information?
The view from without is, in fact, meta-informational, para-datum,
hyper-facts. The dialog is not one of linkage, transmission, duplication of
view, form or motion. It is a simpler event; it is a dialog of Feel, in the
fullest and most complete sense of Aware Will Experiencing Directly.
In this it shines with the Source power of creation itself. Beyond the
power of words to add, interpret, modify or change, the dialog is of intense,
complete, impassioned feel for each cell, for each spot, for each sparrow and
meadow and light-year, for every twist the Blade offers, without hesitation or
hindrance, measure or analysis, resistance or regret. The Dialog of Feel is the
Whisper of God heard when one assumes a rightful duty as Godhead. Then does
Life make itself known, with a laugh that shakes the very photons streaming
through the Blender's walls.
# # #
When the rivers of creation cross in the sea of
consideration -- like the Gulf Stream meeting the cold Atlantic, or the
cross-currents in the Magellan Straits -- the confluence of impulses sets up an
interesting vortex called 'moment in Time'. This moment can be crystallized by
consciousness into a great hologram which contains all the intricacy and
detail of a real instant -- for example, the complexity of a great comber
meeting a rugged coast, thrashing and punishing its way up the cliffs and over
the obdurate rock faces, storming up into the air and heaving itself up, over,
back on itself and forward again, around upon the innocent and understanding
sands and across to the far edges of small bays. All this, captured in the most
fine-grain detail, the most delicate of detailed focus, is completely available
to consciousness for any of the trillions-to-the-tenth number of instants which
comprise the time-stream of what consciousness considers to be this universe.
Of course, that is not the only era available to consciousness; but
realities which are too many parallels over -- like countries too far removed
from one's own culture -- tend not to match the equipment that a segment of
localized consciousness is inclined to use for seeing with. Imagine, if you
can, what is occurring right now on the crude crank telephone system between
two frozen outposts in the hills of North Korea; or in the scholar's circles in
the remote fastnesses of monasteries in the Japanese highlands -- what are they
examining, testing, seeing through? What position do you take in the debates on
morals among Kalahari bushmen or, for that matter, for the equivalent
conversation between ants colliding in mid-trail on a log hanging over an icy
cascade in the high Andes?
The far easier thing to think about is what the current congressional
hearing, sports conflict or political move between like-minded suits is going
to look like -- at least reality structures there are a little similar to Mom
and Dad.
If even the neighbor segments of Species of Earth, not to mention
Branches of Mankind, seem too alien to interpret comfortably, too remote to
feel with -- how the devil can an aspect of consciousness release its patterns
of understanding freely enough to listen to the quasar's debate, or the sigh of
the local cluster of galaxies as it stretches in early awakening minutes?
The way to this freedom of consciousness lies in the recognition of the
equipment one is using, the paradigms that make it possible, and that
simultaneously steer us away from other equipment, and the belief structures
that define the conditions that make such equipment necessary.
For example, an early belief is set up that the noises and marks that
people make really do represent what they are saying. The conditions that one
must believe in (in order to experience this necessity for symbol noises and
symbol marks) include the belief that what we are is glued into proximity to
each other (and that these really are other people). That this bondage is
anchored by attachment to the horseless carriages we call 'Bahw - deez'
and that because of this semi-permanent condition and the fact that the natural
environment of these carriages with their carbon-oxygen molecular engines and
VHF field antennae, is enormously entropic and therefore hostile and likely to
crush any one of us at any time, making urgent organization toward better
survival necessary... etc. Whew! What a milkshake!
What is one of these things we call fellow-man? Weathered or
baby-faced, deep-hearted or frivolous, centered on truth and Knowing or
centered on purchasing and eating -- what IS one of these?
A localized segment of consciousness. Beyond that, definitions collapse
in the flood of variety available.
What are its capabilities? They are unlimited. They are to create, to
experience, and in the use of these alone are all the miracles of
life-forms (whose ever they may be) found.
In fact, these two are ultimately one -- the single face of ability
which will someday lead to the generation of the new Thought. Discover yourself
creating exactly what you perceive, and your riddle is entirely solved.
# # #
A man in search of truth once noticed that, in his
room, all objects were only apparencies because of the refection of light. To find
his way closer to truth and Source, he determined to investigate the source of
this light business. So he unscrewed the bulb in his room, and felt around in
the socket with his fingers to find out what was going on in there. His body
convulsed when 110 volts of alternating current ran through it and started
eating his nervous system for breakfast. Naturally, being philosophically
inclined, he wondered where he had gone wrong, and what lesson he should learn
from this painful experience.
The lesson was that of the appropriate self. While his exploration did
bring him closer to the generating power behind the light, he would have been
well advised to explore this realm attached to a more appropriate identity.
Instead, he chose a self -- the body -- which was geared to resist the very
nature of the reality he explored with it. This is like wearing a leisure suit
into the Arctic.
Explore realities without number; but first, seek selflessness. For
every level of form which is there in creation to discover, there is a level of
identity with its creation. Playing in traffic as a paraplegic, rather than as
a driver or as a city engineer, defeats the purpose of integration and makes
for rough times on the path. Seek selflessness and the appropriate self. As you
are free to have whatever self you can imagine, prefer with courage those
self-patterns which will add harmony to existence.
# # #
You can climb the ladder of awareness on several
sides or facets. Then you can argue with those who communicate to you from
other facets as to which side is better.
One side is understanding, which has its uses. Getting a frame of
concepts for seeing how things hang together -- such as understanding, for
example, that cutting apart someone's power to communicate will tend to sadden
and depress them -- helps navigate through the fetid bayous of rhetoric,
intentional and unconscious.
Another path is through feeling, which one can also learn to navigate.
Thus one finds himself finding his way among the dank tides of indifference and
into the clearer waters of interest even unto the warm currents of the stream
of enthusiasm. One learns the ebbs, the flows and the intricate turns of many
spiritual climates, simply by allowing his sense of feel to lead his attention.
A third way is the power of creation. Here one is constantly at home.
No matter the vagaries of light and shadow, warmth or chill, hardnesses and
softnesses, one discovers his own creative impulse in every rock, flake, bright
or bitter flavor encountered. Then one directs his streams of creative energy
toward preferred realities.
An adjunct to all of these is the mastery of passion. One could simply
learn the one lesson of Falu Eyre -- do what you do with passion or do not bother
-- and from that proceed to live a full life.
That may embrace all of the above. They are all worth knowing.
None of this calls into play the work of gods, mediums, spirits other
than Thou, or channels other than those you operate yourself. No crystals, techniques,
consultants need apply. The very source of all you survey and all you strive
toward and away from is within the Great Surveyor that is Thou. No god could
match you for sheer fiery creative talent, no matter how you bottle it up in
this lifetime. Even your creations of omnipotent Gods demonstrates your own
omnipotence clearly.
Would life be simpler knowing your own joy in creation is the entirety
of experience? It is.
# # #
The Nudist's Wardrobe -- jackets sewed to bathtubs,
shoes tied to trashcans. Buckminster Fuller commented that the fate of humanity
hangs on the issue of personal integrity. Amazing that a single voice could say
so much in so few words.
The forms that combat you and the beliefs you have about them are two
sided packages: the created form and the judgments. A form [or a scene made up
of forms] is backed by judgments about the scene or forms. When you put on the
judgments, you put on the weight of the scene those judgments were designed to
handle.
For example, a philosophy student solves the confusions of the world by
deciding on a set of beliefs about "confronting" things and
"intending" what he wants. These are how you get things done. They
solve the chaos of confusion that hit him who is busy not-knowing.
A Christian solves the confusions of the world by deciding on a set of
beliefs about "grace" "forgiveness" "salvation"
and "God". The world is solved when viewed through the personality
made up of these beliefs.
The problem comes in when you start wearing the judgments around. The
student knows that business responds to "confront" and
"intention" and when it is time to do business, he/she puts on those
beliefs. But glued to the back of them is the facsimile creation of all the
confusions these judgments and beliefs helped him/her out of.
You go to your wardrobe and select a nice leather jacket, so you can
look good in the world. But carefully glued to the back of the jacket is an old
bathtub with rust stains and garbage in it. The ruby slippers are Crazy-Glued
to the top of a pair of dirty trashcans. When you walk out in these clothes,
the "luggage" makes more noise than you can override in your nice
clothes.
When the surround of existence begins to look combative, or like a threat
of loss, it is useful to notice the wonderful belief The world is a
reflection of me at work.
Sourcing the world is not tough if you are totally happy to look at the
funny stuff in it. Resisting those things, and creating little identity
packages to meet the world's confusions, leaves you wearing hats tied to old
porkchops and watermelon rinds. Put on the hat and you start smelling like
garbage.
The answer is to be a nudist. Being a nudist, in this sense, is the
complete will to feel to the bone the entire world as it hums around you NOW.
If your preference is for a world full of laughter, compassion, and
energy, and you are finding yourself fending off a world of tears, selfishness and
sloth -- start laughing! Not only will you soon have something to laugh about,
but the world listens carefully to you, and robotically agrees with your
created structure. Your CHOICE of response, naked in the world, will overwhelm
any difficulty; wearing attitudes and judgments will simply perpetuate the
confusions that they sought to solve.
The world is a reflection of You; being as the world "should"
be will bring it into line, if done with love and open feeling. Then every page
in the book is a step toward the happy ending that starts the next book. The
being who is the world does not need clothes to be in the world. He or
she goes bravely nude, laughing with the atmosphere.
The Nude, in laughing, conquers the World.
# # #
There are eight wells in existence through which the
deep ground-water of the Self may be tasted. The first is the well-spring of
Who I Am Being. Who I Am Being is not the whole of Me, but the hand I have put
to the running Skit of Life for Now, the moment's role in the fullest sense of
the word. My identity can be intelligent, dull, genuine or evasive, sincere,
copied from another, borrowed or invented but it is momentarily a created lens
of a temporary "I", no matter how genuine.
Further along in the rolling plains of Experience are found the second
and third wells. The second is the thrilling fountain of personal creation. At
a physical level it manifests as romance, love, sex and reproductive channels
of effort, defense of the family, relating to the genetic patterns inherited or
borrowed from Granpa, and so on. Mentally it feeds the stream of invention and
learning and calculation.
Nearby, the third well is a sweet stream of creation as Union, the
multiple identity of the Team; here the self's power forms cities, companies,
networks, brotherhoods, classes, nations and races of all variety. School ties
and brown skin and New England accents and redneck attitudes and Sanskrit
surnames are all used to betoken the creations we are engaged in or separate
from; and in the deep, the undeniable water table of the Self reaches on.
Approaching the fourth well-head, the music of Union gives way to the
wonderment and laughter of wholeness in Kind. Man and woman here leave behind
their separations, brown and red and pale faces are kindled in mutual
recognition that the school is not one of group but of Kind; that the student
is not the man but the species; and that the urge is not to conquer Men, but to
renew and re-invent Mankind.
Below, the merry rills underfoot, out of the ken, laugh on.
In the gentle ripples of the Fifth, the voices of all forms of Life are
joined in a single song of growing, a hymn sung by life for its own benefit, a
cheer of recognition from every Form of Life for every other, according to its
perceptions. The wing of the hummingbird and the mammoth tusk and the opposable
thumb and the monoclonal antibody each hum their part in the music of the
well-spring of life-forms, the power of the Infinite embodied in the language
of the Finite.
Next over the beckoning hills is the Universe Voice of all energies,
all spaces, all lights and times and dimensions; the very spring of spatial
existence, of wavelength and particle dimension, of moment and mass, of century
and angstrom and quark. This well seems indeed closer to a source than any
before it. And, fathoms under, the groundwater tumbles in its passes, fastened
in its course by an un-namable Intent.
Being Springs, in the Valley of Insight, is the name of the Seventh
Well, whose strength is as all the previous ones combined. The song is high,
sweet, like a reflection of pure sunlight, and clear. The voices of spiritual
being combine from every face of every Name Named or UnNamed, every being who
ever found himself within Creation. High and low and powerful and modest, All
beings sing the rhythm of the Seventh Well. Here, the waters of spiritual
existence purify all who come before them. Still, below, the groundwater seeks
on.
The Eighth Well is Allah's Will, All-That-Is, the Eye of God's Tao and
the Hand of the Sky Father, the flood of Valhalla and the tears of Zeus.. Now
comes the endless Self to the higher strata, and encounters no let in its bold
ultimate passage. Here in the Eighth Well, outpours the heart of Ground itself,
of every power which ever preceded Thought; here the very Hand of Infinity
passes in the stream of God's well. Here the water table denies no more, and
finds in the fountain, its own reflection. Two Names of God, facing each other
in the juncture, melt in the passage of the Breath that is the whole Self.
All vectors and all streams begin Here, and all galaxies and forms
within them come back to this stream-head. And in the Breath is all that Shall
be, begun, complete, renewed and returned Here. Here is the well of the Self,
un-denied and unjudged, un-identified and un-explained, the wordless Certainty
of the Whole which you are Now. The instant is born, the lifetime awaits its
name, and the myth awaits its maker. Go forth from here girded by peace and
fired in joy; allow it, and its unalloyed clarity will empower your heart
forever.
# # #
Joan Borysenko describes them as interpersonal
bridges; they are the links that tie me to the many identities I hold
connection to, whether beloved or abhorred. These bridges, or links, are
tenuous in some connections and thick as ham-hocks in others, gristled and
unrelenting in the overlay they bring in of values, viewpoints, emotional
packages borrowed whole-cloth and the impact of remote events.
In direct one-to-one communication they are usually alive, and in the
best they are effervescent, an aurora borealis of live opportunity to
communicate. In the dullest they are sludgy, reactive, automatic, but at least
somewhat alive.
In remote connection they often make up the solidity of the
well-indoctrinated identity. They define our sense of community, being one with
the good old boys from this part of town or sharing the values of Mom and the
D.A.R., or the fellow-sufferers from parochial school or war-torn Lebanon; the
old school tie is a thin strand of interpersonal energy that networks me to
those who wore the Chartreuse; the language I speak identifies me as one who is
permanently bridged to Indiana, Boston, Rangoon or Marseilles.
These bridges are thin, heavy, slow or blazing with the light of live
communication between open hearts. When the link breaks, instant chaos of the
psyche reigns.
Sudden bad news, a quick dislike for a new environment, a collapse of
love into fear -- all these and many others can manifest when the link between
Self and Other collapses. It is a collapse of love, a refusal of a reality, a
shutdown of communication, and impossibility of understanding. These breaks,
more than problems or sins, can degrade the soul of any one person or any collection
of them.
What are these links?
Souls meet on the ground of common illusion, an averaging of individual
fantasy compounded by millions of views and impulses and averaged into the
peculiarly persistent backdrop called Space-time.
Whether they are meeting as meat-coated beings on the fields of Earth
or as energy vectors dancing among the meteorites, or as spirit beings in the
infrared, they are still meeting on the grounds of joint illusion. If it were
not joint, they would not meet. If it were not an illusion, it would not have
the qualities of continuance, weight, persistence and stubborn fricative
resistance that space continua seem to have (especially ours).
The means which Souls use to discover each other is the broad subject of
communication, including intent, telepathic exchange and insight, intuitive
two-way understanding, love, taking visual bearings on the motions around one,
perceptions of tactile, sound, light, warmth, motion, electrical sensation,
significance of every description. All these are communications. They can be
found in the ether between bodiless souls or in the way someone hauls his
little red wagon or in the speeches in Congress or the whispers in the trenches
of Syria or the laughter of lovers or the bullets of war. This means that these
interchanges between beings have two parts or ingredients -- communication
being one and reality, agreement on, being another.
The third is the raw feel of tolerance, from the highest enlightened
"co-existence as one" to the most individuated, apathetic, and
withdrawn sullenness. Somewhere between those extremes lies the man or woman
you last spoke to, their parents, your mailman, the dog and every life-form.
These states, emotional or spiritual, are the feelings generally seen as
affinity states.
Dry theory runs on forever in the human brains. The simplicity is that
we ARE connected with all things, because we share the entire universe of life
energy, like multiple rivers feeding a single sea. The connections between
them, like streams between one and another river, form the net of life. When we
send (think, act, transmit) affinity (the simple WILL TO CO-EXIST) along those
connections, the peace of happiness and the joy of our creation are the
inimitable, ineluctable flowering of our own chosen acts.
Thus, act in the wisdom that love brings; for there is no other. Thus,
seek the rewards of joy and of peace from the exercise of Self as Heart, for
there no other coins in the world than these.
# # #
There is a compelling thesis in modern thought that
the Earth itself is a single organism, and the duty of humans as a species is
to function as its mind. It is a challenging viewpoint; like a brain still
half-formed, we aren't yet able to manage ourselves well, let alone the poor
planet and its many other species. As a mind we are given to seizures in which
our own cells are destroyed and other bits and pieces along with them.
Stretch the analogy a bit, from the organic and material to the
spiritual. Consider the many faces of consciousness that make up the beings in
human bodies trundling around the face of Gaia; consider as well the many
beings in and around non-human bodies. But see them all for a moment in their
simplicity -- not attached inextricably to their carbon-oxygen credit cards and
their flesh-and-blood amplifiers.
Consider the many linkages that function, acknowledged or not, between
these many viewpoints of organic Reality between living creatures around here.
What motivates them? What are we, as a collection of beings pushing
into the space-time continuum around this sector of the universe, trying to
find out?
We may be peeking into an economic network of incredible magnitude.
Assuming for a moment that the economy of Earth, like the hectic coming and
going around an anthill, is coordinated in a way not easily visible to the
individual organism. Examine the entire market-place of life-forms in and
around this planet -- the hustles and bustles of growth, harvest, interchange,
food chains, chemical trade-offs, toxins and vital ingredients, wastes and
nutrients -- not from the material side of those interchanges but from the
complex of impulses that is driving Awareness into Production and Exchange.
What is this all about?
On the basis not of hard analysis but of a feel for what is going on,
from the Everglades to the Hilton Himalayas, in all the bayous, forest floors,
Arctic pools, vasty depths...there is a sense of unified quest. Not the
evolution of species A over species B or the conquest of older rams by newer
ones, or the passage of power from men to women and back again. There is a
common ground that sings in the veins of those that have veins, that tweaks the
chitin or the protoplasm or the nerves of every aspect of awareness from cockroaches
to Congressmen.
It is difficult to put such a global, omnipresent counterpoint chorale
into words. It is a little like trying to translate 60-cycle hum into English.
It is a debate, not a mission. It is a celebration of the First Law -- there
will be a show. It is a scriptwriters' conference, a
brainstorming session of incredible magnitude, coordinated by the nature of the
aether through which it is conducted. It asks of the Universe, "What is it
that is needed and wanted, that We may Produce it?" It is the song of
Gaia, debating among herself: "We are here to create an effect. What is
it?" As this question, and not any one species or organism, evolves, Gaia
will find herself in the dangerous position of the just awakening -- awake
enough to care but too asleep to handle well. Unless she is brought to the real
necessity level of the moment, much is at risk. From finding out what is wanted
of her, she will have to graduate to defending her right to deliver it. Once
one, her commitment will be to flourish and progress in the production she has
elected.
Tonight, step out into the world and listen. Hear your own
contributions to the Song of Earth as she seeks to discover her way into
Exchange with the Galaxy. Hear and understand the unfolding, unending unified,
pan-species debate, groping for the New Thought: We are the Life here. What
Effect Do We Choose to Create?
# # #
Of the many 'systems' of belief there are some common
threads which could be called arch-systems, or something. They are the ribs and
girders of how one exists in a certain condition such as 'human'.
One is kinds of logic systems. A logic system defines how the parts of
a system will go together rationally. Sequence, consequence, cause-and-effect,
induction and deduction, are all parts of our logic system in the West. Other
systems of logic may operate totally differently. It is useful to know that
one's very system of logic is subject to review, un-creation, or change and is
not somehow god-given or absolutely empirical. Pause and consider, for example,
the fundamental statement of Western logic 'If p then q', essentially a Boolean
statement which enables many manipulations of data to occur.
It is a core assumption in Western education that 'if...then' is a
valid and basic logical proposition, and it has certain obvious proofs: for
example, if there is gravity then objects will fall when released. Since this
happens every time, the 'if-then' logic is substantiated. In fact to many it
might seem to be absolute, ineluctable, an inescapable premise of any sort of
consciousness at all. But iron bars do not a prison make, and an extensive
investigation is called for to discover exactly WHY this particular control
device is so popular and so persuasive. At the very least, the question needs
to be asked. As a belief, 'if-then' seems to be part of one of the most
fundamental systems in human makeup, the logic system.
Another such belief system is the control system. The belief in control
systems states that certain things control other things: water puts out fire;
money does or does not buy happiness; beauty controls divinity, or does not;
justice draws all processes to their final resolution or does not; gravity
controls all objects; steam power controls engines; economics or politics are
the controlling factors of social change; etc. Perhaps the most important of
these are those that reflect the individual willingness to be controlled by
certain thoughts (I must make nice), certain emotions (I melt in front of
patient exasperation like Mom's) or certain beliefs (I cannot do, say or think
anything that will in any way detract from the mission of the Union of
Benevolent Troglodytes to rescue Earth). These stale but irresistible
recordings are like burned-in circuits defined by "control" ideas:
anything from "Oh Shut UP" to "God is Watching" to
"Nice girls don't..." can take on the weight of a major control
circuit and bend the entire fabric of a life out of it's natural patterns.
To believe that one is subject to a controlling factor is to ensure
one's own subordination to it, which can be self-defeating. Of course, some
people prefer to be self-defeating, which makes it an oxymoron.
But the point is, you can learn a lot about your life by examining your
beliefs about WHAT controls WHAT and WHO controls WHAT and WHOM.
A third core system is a preference system. Historically the widest
known preference system in this community of beings is the survival system: history
comes down on the side of that which best survives. Of course history itself is
geared to focus on survival by its nature. But the point is that preference is
a system of belief that governs aspects of life. In parts of the USA,
preference is monitored by salt, sugar, and oils contacting the tongue: any
activity is as good as it brings these about. Thus, fairs, movies, parties, and
barbecue dinners are good, while formal meals or vegetarian diets are not. It
is simply a matter of what preference system has been established. In other
circles, sexual energy thrown into re-stimulation, or fear, or passion for
conquest, is a preference. This defines markets and the various confusions
about what is good survival. Cowboys (urban or not) prefer wide-open spaces and
old pickup trucks, because in some way it tells them they are surviving well.
The greatest compromise is to follow some path against your own preference
system, which leads to justification, rationalization, self-diminution and
degradation, etc. One of the most deep-rooted preference systems is the
preference for harmony over chaos. It is so fundamental that it can be mistaken
for a given of existence itself. Consciousness, however, is perfectly capable
of appreciating the peculiar harmonies of chaos for their own beauty, or
considering certain kinds of harmony to be anathema.
Beauty systems are a subset of preference systems. Under control
systems you could also put the notion of source systems (what acceptable
sources exist, for what conditions? Who IS an authority? Under what
circumstances might I allow myself to think the thought 'Z'. Who MUST I pay,
and for what, for having been the source of WHAT condition?)
Between these three -- logic, control and preference -- you could
describe the world logically, if you so preferred. Or you could bring it under
a more logical kind of control, if you were beautiful enough. And you are.
# # #
Woman, or man for that matter, has several parts.
The understanding of them makes for better living with the whole.
One of these is primal, undifferentiated and chaotic. Call it Chaos or
the primal flux of creation at a level far beyond the normal ken of human
rationality. It is a sphere of impulses so instantaneous as to appear, to
normal human view, as chaotic. It probably is not chaotic on its own terms --
order is a relative thing. But it looks like chaos, from the framework of
"ordinary" order such as is reflected in a manager's desk trays or
the quotidian affairs stuck on the refrigerator door with cure magnets shaped
like watermelons. The Chaos Zone, oddly enough, can be partially analyzed. It
has two subdivisions, pro-future and con-future chaos.
The second major zone is Order. Like Chaos, order has its positive side
(order for better survival and greater communication) and its negative side
(order serving the purposes of destruction).
There is a clear and certain division between Order and False Order, as
well. False Order includes the calling into being of untrue 'facts' to support
a frame of reference, of mis-estimated importances, of fatal exclusions of key
realities such as justice, and so on.
False Order, Actual Order, and Chaos are something like the three
witches of MacBeth, except that one of them is on the side of the angels and
the only problem is to find which.
False Order is the bugbear of the artist, the genius or the ordinarily
sensitive person surrounded by intentional or obsessive alteration of facts.
Mr. Franklin Winters, who is a big frog in a small puddle and a major
mercantile influence in the small town of Gator's Breath, Arkansas, is a
proponent of false order. It is to his interest (he believes wrongly) to ensure
that certain facts are not brought to any public light because of what the
public would think about him if they were known. There is nothing inherently
wrong OR right in the FACT of this cover-up mentality. Just because he used
"undue influence" to procure the contracts that put his income into
four figures per week, and paid handsomely for the favor of those contracts, is
not in itself a right or a wrong, but simply a fact. Where moral judgment
enters in is at two points: first when it is compared to agreements he has made
about how it "should" be, moral codes of how he really must conduct
himself in this community. Second, judgments enter in to the question when it
is viewed with an eye to the breadth of survival value the action imparts.
While it augments his own primary survival and the budgets of himself and his
family, it has several negative consequences which more than offset the value
of these positive factors:
1. The economic frame within which he is operating is falsified, which
degrades the basis of his community economically, rendering it open to various
viruses and bacteria of an economic sort. In short he has falsified the actual
value of things, distorting his own sense of value and the community's.
2. He himself has promoted the virtue of falsification which debases
the social currency of his environment in a way which is very hard to revert.
3. The torque of dual reality eventually will either ruin him or break
him, by leading him into further obsessions with falsification or driving him
mad through the stress of double-tonguing everything he says.
The need to rationalize will seriously reduce his ability to perceive
clearly what is there to be seen around him. This will make him more reliant on
fixed ideas and irrational assumptions which in turn will not bear the light of
clear-eyed inspection. Thus he has ultimately betrayed the society within which
he lives by poisoning its ecology of life-transactions at all levels.
This is the promotion of False Order through a shortcoming in ethical
fiber. Obviously, compassion for the frailty of man dictates that it be understood
and his actual contributions to life be weighed in the balance in the formation
of any judgment; and often no judgments are needed beyond the merciless ones of
his own heart.
Susannah Belsop, of Twin Lips, Wisconsin, believes herself to be a Christian.
She has been one ever since she discovered God after a particularly nasty and
emotional series of encounters with a teen-age paramour in the wooded hills
outside the reservoir while in 8th grade, which left her terrified, breathless,
inflamed, and scarred.
In her view there is no room for dialog on the issue of who God is,
what He wants, what he says and who his associates are (including one son and
his immediate family who don't live in the same town).
She makes sure that any young children she associates with are given
this Correct Information about the nature of good (endorsed by Jesus and God as
she sees them) and bad (all the marketing work of one Evil Spirit who wears red
long-johns). The only actual benefit of all this is that it relieves her of the
dirty work of actually figuring out what good, bad, spiritual, life and other
such terms ARE, if anything. And they surely are something.
Here is a wonderful fountain of False Order. It is just as insidious in
its way as the ad work of the Coca-Cola men and the Pontiac promoters who
defined the American Way in the Fifties, through the Sixties, and on into the
present. It imposes a "reality" which is dysfunctional in terms of what
it makes possible. By actually lessening the potential for causative discovery
and action of those to whom it is successfully proselytized, the False Order
debilitates in order to assuage. This is reminiscent of the antiquated
psychiatric argument in support of electro-convulsive therapy: "Well, it
makes the patient tractable". False Order induces many interesting states
including Sports Hypnotism, Diet Worship, the obsessive, cross-eyed stare of
the Mirrored Facepainter, and the compulsive giggle of the Socially Right
Responsibility Shirker, to name a few. In any theater of life the promulgation
of False Order denies possible communication and debases possible
understandings because it imposes a non-genuine rationale. This suborns the
intellect, disconnecting it from the heart and the hand; the miracle is that
this kind of constitutional ravaging leaves anyone standing, especially in an
age when mass reaction-nets of electronic speed are presented as though they
were public communication lines.
False Order is routinely built up into waves of agreement by people
asserting what Ain't and saying it Is, through dramatization, misconception,
confusion, or highly vested interest in falsehood.
Genuine Chaos is in many ways much preferable to False Order. True
order, which imposes harmony and expands communication of a genuine order,
reinforces natural affinity and increases understanding, is preferable to
either. (But it is scarce; like buggy whips we have all but forgotten how to
make them!)
Genuine Chaos, as mentioned, has two sides. The one side has a dark and
whirling countenance, and it randomizes certainty to the extent that only
confusion remains. In order to fend it off, because it is judged uncomfortable,
the usual thing to do is to elect a false Order, some sort of stable
information which is entirely un-thought-out, but which serves as a palisade
into which the blast of hectic motion embodied in Chaos may not enter.
The other side of genuine Chaos is entirely another matter: it is the
highest velocity known to exist, outstripping the speed of light without even
trying. It transcends distance at the Speed of Is. It multiplies impulses and
reflections of impulses like sunbeams hitting a shop window full of diamonds.
Faster than the heart can calculate, the Undifferentiated Creative Wind defies
all limit and defines all quality, and sweeps our entire universe over and over
each time we blink, breathe or swallow.
Here is true Home and the concentric source of all the theaters of hell
and heaven, of harmony and confusion, of the light sweet touch of compassionate
but sure creativity and the sludgy panic that governs all crime against one's
kind. This is the center that powers every other face of every dynamic
involvement you have. It is you-before-you-invented-Something-to-Be. It is the
flame that sends one of its many, many fingers to fire the heart of your daily
affairs -- a mere tiny fraction of its energy enough to power a lifetime of
dreams and kindnesses. This is the true chaos of complete harmony, and it is
only chaotic when you try to barrel it into the containers of Moment and Place,
as it has none and transcends any.
Here is your autobiography at its headwater. Here is You.
# # #
The quest is an energetic pursuit in which the hares
and the hounds often change places and the poor horseman must needs gallop
hither and yon switching vectors on short notice. But the quest remains the
quest, and the consistency of Quest is, of course, in the questing.
This does not mean that there are not Answers. Demonstrably, there are.
And the test of these answers is not only in the significance which they align
-- phlogiston, after all, aligned a great deal of significance and yet was
somehow a wrong answer -- but in the use to which it can be put.
What is the use of answers? One, of course, is to pose new questions.
An answer is as useful as it evaluates known data and predicts the arrival of
new.
Another is the real business of the quest: the rehabilitation of the
knowing and thinking individual and, thereby, of the civilization for which he
is responsible. It is to this end that this quest is generated. These
discoveries, for the most part, have each been used to enhance individual
living of life, some more successfully than others. If you, friend, are among
those who have in some measure lived a better life because of them, you are
welcomed, and with joy.
# # #
Awareness is not exactly a quality, except in the
use of it. The immediacy of it is so vivid and alive that it is strange to try
and define it. Of itself , it certainly has no location except to the degree it
decides to have location and view from a location it has 'knowed' into
existence.
It mirrors all frequencies, and of itself has none. It has capability,
but no energy in the normal material sense of the word. In the normal material
frame it does not 'exist' or 'not exist', being the nothingness behind all
somethingness.
Before you Named your Name or claimed your position in the ranks of
beingness, you were and are, forever, an immutable awareness, an Aware Will
without Time or Form.
When we talk about the dynamics of awareness we are talking, then,
about You. Special space yet the source of space; timeless yet the master of
all times past or future; without intrinsic energy yet able to create and
perceive any energy, the Aware Will is unique in its signature from individual
to individual. And loving, creative, understanding and of free mind. It has
other qualities which lie deep in any 'personality' it may invent: courage,
justice, perception and play are senses that accompany it from the highest to
the most entangled state.
It can be degraded by the enforcement of lies, being convinced it must
do what it is already doing, or that it must do what it would not do on its own
determinism. But degraded or not it is still awareness and standing miles
beyond the most intricate, shiny, spectacular super-molecule invention ever run
out by the material universe or those who serve it.
Awareness then is where you live when you are absolutely and
unqualifiedly free. The restoration of its nature to itself is a reward of
almost incalculable value. In a world devised for and by and of the mechanic
and the solid, it is freedom and ability. In a world of lies it is the sole source
of truth. Where the gravity of depravity drags life toward the sewer, awareness
creates the sense of ethics, drive, courage and truthfulness which reminds us
that we do not yet have to give up on the Great Experiment of living. For being
all this, for what you have done AS awareness, and for seeking to return unto
it, thank you.
# # #
'Thinking' about spirituality is sometimes a futile
exercise when it is mis-perceived, itself, as spirituality. Spirituality is a
complete integration of action, awareness, communication and having in the
moment, at whatever level of operation. If it somehow represented as a purely
conceptual activity it is not handling the game of life but is only thinking
about it. In other words it is a facsimile of living rather than the real
thing.
A successful businessman flushed with the triumph of a major deal
closed which turns a rotten and harmful company into an ethical AND profitable
one, providing honest and proud livelihood, exchange and better economics to
people, is a consummate embodiment of spirituality at its best, and ten times
the worth of a gaunt escapist examining pictures of Spirits from a cave on top
of a mountain. Ethics, then, is a highly spiritual activity in the fullest and
most APPLIED sense of the word. Non-applicable spirituality is a mess of
pottage, not worth selling your soul for. If it isn't effective in some clearly
experienceable way when put to use (and this is not limited to 'through
bodies') then it isn't the real McCoy.
# # #
It is a valuable lesson to examine all the dynamics,
and to sort them into their proper categories. It is valuable to recognize the
tendency to make of the First a particle that then has to sort of manage the
others, like a small sheep dog yipping at the flock
If you go back and recognize that the best things you have done were
wins for a Self, mortal OR immortal, the YOU that engineered each major triumph
and win, a better perspective can emerge. In the ultimate analysis, the agreements
you have made for marriage and team and neighborhood and town and nation are
agreements springing from the First Headwater: the Self as You have Sourced it.
From there the rest makes better sense.
It is a valuable lesson to notice that in dealing with ANY reality the
reality scale holds valid. The top is experience. When one cannot exactly
experience, he can make a slight effort and confront. When that effort becomes
too much he can at least make the object or the reality invisible. Failing that
(when the creation of the reality over-weighs his ability to ignore it) he can
make it black.
And when that cannot succeed he can DUB IN realities which are not, as
overlays on top of the unconfrontableness of it all.
In a sense much of our cultural conditioning is AGREED-UPON DUB-IN
designed to enable us to creep along in ordinary human pursuits, watching
supermarket ads and football statistics so that we can stay away from the
blackness just behind those things. If we were to invade that blackness it might
well go invisible; if we pursued it, what would we end up confronting? Granting
that this is an awful question, a rude, impolite, vulgar and insensitive and
not-nice question, does it have any answers worth knowing?
One answer lies in the fact of lifetimes.
Because so much forgetting takes place between lifetimes, it is natural
that we have evolved a culture dedicated to this lifetime only, a 'mortal
values only need apply' sort of culture. Immortal values -- those derived from
a broader span of view over lifetimes -- get short shrift on the way to Big
Bear or K-Mart.
Even as individuals in a mortal culture, we are not too proud of our
racial history. It is fine to worship the ancient blade that Ancestor Tom
carried at Gettysburg or Waterloo or swung against Saracen necks in the deserts
outside Jerusalem. But we don't enjoy the fact, now, that we descend from so
bloodthirsty a species. Ever since our kind graduated from Advanced Chimping
and took a degree in Bipedal Locomotion and Opposable Thumb Technique, we have
been mounting up and running each other over, spilling blood on the moors and
the cobblestones wherever there was some effort at civilization going on. We
have, collectively, a pretty psychotic history, no mistake. God, how awful it
would have been to have to live in those times when men burned, pillaged,
raped, plundered and slaughtered on any pretext! Of course, that was before we
had television.
Imagine how heavy the task will be of recognizing that those psychotic,
frenzied murderous dancers on the stage of history were not 'remote ancestors',
but were US! Every leper, hunchback, battle axing murderer and crazed witch
burner that ever lived is probably somewhere among the ranks of today's human
population. It is small wonder we prefer a mortal explanation. To have to take
responsibility for descending from Khan and his hordes is tough. To take
responsibility for riding with him and burning virgins is a bit more than most
of us want to look at, eh?
Returning to the theme, it is useful to know that DUB-In (for example
the dub-in of mortal preoccupation) can give way to blackness, invisibility,
confront and experience, in that order.
This is a navigational aid in the stormy seas we encounter when we set
out from the sleepy little village of Bunker, where our mothers and school
mates are settling down for an evening on the telly watching advertisements for
shampoo and football re-runs, and our Dads are studying share prices and
military strategies. Not for them, the swell of a rising sea-change under the
keel or the snap of a squall attacking the main. The discomfort, you know. Why
bother?
# # #
164. Force, Geometry and
Being
It is clear to anyone who has survived a spell in the universe that there is a
great deal of force to it. Ask any sailor, any electrician, any fireman, any
soldier, and even any economist. All these people deal daily with force and
often it is with force beyond their ability to comprehend. The songs of
country-western and shanana are songs of hearts that have been steamrollered by
force.
For that, take a lover's stroll in a summer night and lie on your back
in the meadow studying the stars of August. What is there? Pure, violent,
unsensing, unqualified and ineluctable force.
Since the days of Egypt, man has had a sense that there are constancies
among chaos and truer truths to be found among the random impacts of brute
collision. This notion is a purely Human Idea: that orderly space can conquer
disorderly force. From this intriguing vision has been born the triangle, the
circle, the wedge and the plane, the lever, the wheel, and ultimately the space
shuttle.
There are no right triangles in the world as it goes about its forceful
way. Half of an engineers work, out defining roadways and bridge ways, is to
find perspectives from which he can impose these sturdy mathematical forms onto
the chaos of things at large, so that the truth of order can tame the floods of
chaos. He struggles up hills to plant theodolites and marks in places where
rugged Time has left only chaotic scars. Using these marks, he plants finely
rolled steel girders and concrete forms in place, and fills the whole with hot,
wet stone mush. A week later there is a highway crossing a chasm, a neat
surface bisected by a dotted line, with aluminum guardrails on the edges.
All this is interesting from the perspective of how space is seen and
how it is handled.
Another note to this contrast is that, in experience, space is
proportional to the power of individual beingness. Largely, this power derives
from the ability to comfortably enter spaces of all descriptions: mental,
physical, emotional, psychic -- and occupy them without flinching. As the
engineers teach us it is fine to have an orderly bit of Truth such as
Pythagoras' theorem, or trigonometric tables to impose on the chaos one is
perceiving. But first one must stand tall in the midst of chaos without
flinching.
It is the inability to do this in human spaces that makes such a mess
out of politics. There, no geometric truths have reached home; the chaos of
"natural" self-interest destroys such ideas before they can be
imposed except by the strongest will.
And it is a peculiarity of human spaces that when they are ordered by
other-determination, they do not hold the order well or truly. Witness the
brief history of the Soviet Union, whose greatest strength lay in the ability
to suppress a human communication line.
But though they are acting in different theaters there are still
commonalities between the engineering of material space and form in defiance of
the world's great chaos, and the ordering of human thought and feeling. In
other words there are truths against which thought and feeling can be arrayed
and in doing so they prove a strength greater than chaos. Straight lines may
not exist in nature's hairy nest but they can be laid out clean in shipyards,
in mills, and in the hearts of men. When being is sufficient to create space
rather than simply beg or rent it, any geometry, any truth, can spring out into
the world and lay chaos to its heels in flight. And so may it be.
# # #
The ultimate anthropomorphism -- among many that
color our physical sciences -- may be the notion that the center of a space is
where the most mass is. This is an experiential transfer from ordinary human
experience. I look out from the largest mass with which I can be identified,
the mass where I get my mail and pick up my perceptions. In most moments of
life this is the human body. But if I own a snazzy Cad or a large building or a
corporation, it is equally easy to look out from the space of that object. This
is a by-product of the light-space-mass configurations of organismation,
compound word coined to reflect the trick we have of existing AS a complex
organic structure and identifying with it rather than treating it as a node on
a communication network.
Returning to the point, it is interesting to take this mass-centric
view of systems and reverse it. For example, why is a nucleus considered to be the
functional center of an atom? Is it possible, for example, that there is
instead a linear link of information between the electron shell and the quarks
which actually defines all the phenomena we have attributed to the Bohr model
of atomic phenomena?
Mass, indeed, is a human experiential notion which successfully serves
us in estimating efforts. We can number it and multiply the numbers thereof,
calculate force and acceleration and terminal velocity. But we cannot say
clearly what mass IS. It appears to be a spatial phenomenon.
The critical transition to free-energy economics which is our next
great cultural hurdle may totally depend on our technical ability to work up
friendly answers to this question. If mass is a function of space, then we have
to answer the question of what space is. No-one from Plato to Hubbard or from
the cave-artists to Michelangelo has left an answer to this one. The closest
answer we have is that space is a viewpoint of dimension.
In modern college courses we are taught that space is the view we have
of distances between objects.
Neither of these answers is satisfactory, and this inability to
recognize the functional nature of space is the ultimate lock on scientific
progress. Because our systems of measure all derive from a postulated
uniformity of space, and because they have brought us so remarkably far in the
advance of technology, it is understandable that we assume space IS the way we
measure it. It is axiomatic that if you measure something a certain way long
enough you will believe that it IS that way.
It is also a global invisible assumption that space has a lack of
personality, a complete neutrality, an absent-ness to it which provides the
background for all sorts of somethingnesses to occupy our attention. Partly this
is because we are habituated to seeing through light waves, and therefore
defining things relative to them.
Light waves do not reflect or refract from space; therefore space is
nothing. Wonderful, idiotic analysis, but the kind of blind spot we are all heir
to, of the sort which gave birth to the 'humors' version of circulation.
Well, what is the alternative? If space is actually more than nothing,
what is its nature and quality?
We can approach this question from the fringes by looking at what space
DOES. It enables all sorts of material phenomenology. Essentially, space makes
EMF radiation possible, provides a backdrop for inertia and momentum and
differing distances to exist, offers a uniform measure of existence itself, and
a sort of medium in which all the communication links we have (including
physical perception) (perhaps short of direct spiritual linkages, whatever they
are) occur.
We are fond of speaking of inner space, outer space, going within, and
so on. It should be considered that inner, outer and other delineations of
space may not be the proper target; that the conquest of various spaces depends
first on the conquest of space itself as a phenomenon.
Freeman
Dyson quotes the wonderful differentiator Weichert, a nineteenth century
visionary among physicists, who said
'We
have to abandon the idea that by going into the realm of the small we shall
reach the ultimate foundations of the universe. I believe we can abandon this
idea without any regret. The universe is infinite in all directions, not only
above us in the large, but also below us in the small. If we start from our
human scale of existence and explore the content of the universe further and
further, we finally arrive, both in the large and in the small, at misty
distances where first our senses and then even our concepts fail us.'
Dyson brings Weichert out of his obscurity for good reason -- an effort
to deflect the massive mainstream of associative thought which characterizes
scientific thought in the school of Newton and Einstein, whom Dyson Freeman
characterizes as integrators and unifiers rather than differentiators. Weichert
is the ultimate differentiator, and as such he threatens unsettling
boundlessness to those whose impulse is to corral and predict the
phenomenological universe.
It may be that when the mystery of participative influence is resolved
it may find itself holding hands with Weichert and Dyson, by announcing to us
all that in taking on a view of any dimension, we add thereby to the space of
it, and in doing so, multiply the phenomenological patterns it may bring back
to our curious view. This is something like being entranced by the power of the
writing in one's own manuscript, and borders unsettlingly on the mystic; but
for physicists these are not new sensations and may even be the earmarks of
truth unfolding.
# # #
There are perhaps only three components which need
to be clearly, profoundly grasped in order to recognize a great many things
about sanity and the forms of life on Earth.
One is the nature of postulated reality and knowledge structures which
we call for short beliefs. The next is the adamant commitment to resistance
which, once established within a system of beliefs, does so much to perpetuate
it beyond its useful term. The third is the complex combinations of belief and
resistance which, like multitudes of layers making a solid mountain of soap
bubbles, makes up the cross-section of life we can describe as a sanity
quotient for any organism or section of an organism.
Beliefs are forged in the very heart of the living, conscious will, at the
quick of awareness itself, where the fullness of 'I ' in its
highest sense operates in complete command of what is, what was, and what shall
be. This is the heart of You before the Naming of You, what you were before you
created Self, the center of the endless torrents and vortexes of considerations
which make up your experience. This is the hot spot, where it all happens.
In this central forge of the conscious will, a reality is brought to Be
by simply willing it to be. In that instant of Creation As Is, without
alteration or second thoughts, the purest, simplest experience is of exactly
what is willed to be. It is a process without true time measures in it, but from
the ordinary view of human life it is what you might call instantaneous.
This process, viewed from the ordinary continuum of human efforts, has
a frequency so high as to be invisible. But it is the source of the endless
fountain of thought, consideration, change, desire and resistance that makes up
the paisley days of the human mind.
A belief created at this truth spot becomes a reality, generating the
exact experience it names. If that were all there was to it, we would be
super-free beings of light, dallying with pure power. But the second instant is
more familiar than the instantaneous pure creation of a belief. That is the
instant in which the belief thus created is cross-created with all other
beliefs and resistances in the system of beliefs of which it is a member. This
can alter or completely nullify its effect.
Someone who has believed their way into a protracted illness will thus
often take losses if they attempt to lightly think the thought 'I am well' with
the hope of experiencing complete wellness. This is because they have a system
of beliefs created at many different levels of creative energy, layered with
resistances and decision not to be responsible for those beliefs, not to feel
their existence or see what they contain. These decisions add up to a sum
experience which is at odds with the concept just created (e.g., 'I am
well'). Some of the counter-creates are creations of others, others' thoughts
and expectations, and 'juniorness' to them.
A belief creates a field of experience, a zone in which each perceptic
shows the reality called for. Any kind of knowing or not-knowing is scripted by
the dynamic generation of beliefs, or postulated knowledge structures.
A complex of not-knowing, desiring, and resisting these generated perceptions
adds up to the structure we call the mind, memory, the past, and our current
situation.
A person trying to believe simultaneously that he is a wicked profiteer
and that he has a heart of gold will find himself perceiving the kind of
blackness which surrounds most minds beyond their ordinary small-scale
concerns. Similarly, blankness and confusion or blackness and emptiness are
typical of the net effect of structures based on 'I cause all' combined with
structures based on 'I can't take this/face this/take responsibility for this.'
The broad power stream of 'I Know' becomes fragmented, silted,
turbulent, impeded and ultimately frozen by the devil within, whose name is 'I
don't want to know about it'.
Resistance is the general name for a variety of efforts to withdraw from a
creation. The names of resistance are legion. In fact they form a graded scale
from the closest and purest form to the most complex and compound. This is a
scale of postulated energies or intentions.
To Not Know
To Not Know About
To Not Look
To Not Feel
To Not Experience (Emotion)
To Not Experience Effort
To Not Think
To Not Symbolize
To Not Consume/Digest
To Not Generate Genetically/Sexually
To Not Experience Mystery
To Experience Hopeless Nothing
These levels of intent bring about occlusion, conclusive ignorance,
persistency of affect, psychosomatic disorders, a love of lawyers and doctors,
and the use of mind-altering drugs of all sorts, including alcohol. They are
the intentions which provide endurance and inescapability to the physical frame
of space-time, which blot out imagination and suffocate souls. In their
compound form they take on the appearance of syndromes which heartlessly,
automatically seem to drain the life from a man or woman emotionally and physically.
In fact these syndromes are compounds of Will. This is not an idea
which will meet with instant popularity, understandably. The full power of the
creative fountainhead of every being is invested, layer upon layer, in these
efforts at resistance. Threaten them and you threaten the world as it is known
to be.
Dastardly, no matter how truthful, this is a communication that will
not be remembered or highly revered by anyone wholly enslaved and contained in
the dark whirlwind of resistance. The exceptions will be those capable of
experiencing without dramatization of resistance, of following a pure trail of
consciousness wherever it leads without stalling out at altitude.
This is an ability often sought and achieved in the fields of
meditation and prayer: to be with and look at any form, any force, any fear,
and continue to be and perceive without reaction, perhaps the highest ability
religious insight can offer. Whether the religion is one of teachers, priests,
shamans, monks, television hosts, psychologists or boy-scout leaders is
immaterial.
When they succeed, they free. When they do not, they form cults. This
involves generating yet another layer of belief and resistance on top of
the compounded dung-heap within which each member is already struggling and
expiring.
The Sanity Quotient is a measure of the dynamics of any segment of a belief system.
A biologist can scrape a single cell, examine within it a single
mitochondria, and examine whether the correct proton transmigration is
occurring through its membrane wall. This in turn informs him in some degree of
other things about the mitochondria, such as whether it is contributing to the
creation of ADTP. This in turn informs him somewhat about the cell as a whole,
the tissue within which the cells sits, the organ of which that tissue is part,
the system which that organ serves and the individual human being from whom it
comes. It could conceivably tell the biologist something about the ecological
system in which that human being survives, perhaps something about his family
life or genetic inheritance, and so on. The biologist could go on and excise
more cells for inspection, look over the whole organ, or examine the interplay
between it and its system, that system and the individual, the individual and his
surrounding ecosystem, and so on.
In a similar vein the degree of communication, caused action and
responsible perception occurring within a belief system can inform us as to the
relation that segment may be having on larger scale syndromes, zones of activity
and interactions between the individual and others, and so on.
An individual person, running a body under a name on planet Earth, is
part of a system of beliefs. The composite realities of our kind, which make up
our actual history, are likewise part of a system of beliefs. The beliefs which
monitor how a family operates, what the family agrees is important, what they
agree they can and cannot do, what communications they allow or forbid, is
likewise a segment of a system of beliefs. A company similarly builds and
promotes systems of belief aimed at various goals: generating commerce,
improving profits, preserving the comfort of its owners or executives, or even
possibly destroying these things, depending on who promotes which belief.
Within any segment of beliefs one can assess a quality measurement
which reflects the degree of caused motion toward survival which that segment
is engaged in.
Caused motion toward survival, for example, in a family, shows up in
affection, honest and lively communication, a creative attitude toward
realities which can be brought about, and so on. Within the family, a smaller
segment of beliefs might be those around a younger daughter, who may have some
differences within her sphere. For example she may be more honest than her
parents, more communicative, or less productive. The sanity quotient of her own
individual sphere would be slightly different than the sanity quotient of the
family as a whole. A sane family in a psychotic culture would have difficulty
keeping its communication level, its causation level, up to a viable point; for
example, the many loving and accomplished families who were broken on the
psychosis of German politics before WW II, or destroyed by the battles of kings
throughout English history, or crushed by the American Western expansion or the
Japanese invasions following Pearl Harbor.
Conversely, an individual or a family with a high sanity quotient can
raise the sanity quotient of a group or country or civilization. Raoul
Wallenberg, Albert Schweitzer, Einstein, and possibly Whitehead come to mind
from recent times. Anyone who knows my mother-in-law will recognize the sort:
brightening the corner where she is, she tackles everything with a dedication
to professional results, clear communication, and making this turn for the
better no matter what she is doing. High sanity quotient.
There are essentially three component facets that make up the sanity
quotient. One is the degree of tolerance versus the degree of resistance for
being who and where one is, for the things and people around one. The second is
the degree to which one is or is not in communication with the environment and
the people in it, by which is meant exchanging and understanding viewpoints.
The third is the accuracy and depth of perception of reality, seeing exactly
what is, dealing with real factors, correct analysis of situations.
Thus a loving space cadet who merely sits and glows may have a lower
sanity quotient than a grumpy mother of three who knows how to communicate,
understands what needs to be done, and is exerting herself getting it done.
A group of people, as a whole, which communicates openly and freely
within itself will have a higher sanity quotient than the same group if their
lines of communication are restricted, assuming in both cases that the
communication is relevant and understandable.
In individuals, families, groups and species as a whole, the sanity
quotient is reflected in the quality and volume of communication that occurs,
the degree of positive tolerance of experience, and the accuracy of
reality-perception.
These factors rise and fall with each other, essentially because they
are three key factors of belief-structure experience. This interdependency is
not difficult to fathom. Whether you are labeling the tolerance of space in a
person, or the freedom with which he sends and receives communication, or the
accuracy and speed and depth of his understanding which agreements hold sway in
which context, you are still labeling the source-fire of the individual being,
the different faces of his many-faceted life-energy.
# # #
In the final analysis you can isolate sanity
functionally. To know what it is doing is a far more workable task than to
know what it is made of or what its mechanism is, if it indeed has one.
What sanity is doing within the limits of human existence is posing and
resolving the issues of future form, future existence. What sanity is doing is
essentially engineering futures. You who have risen today from your rest and
dressed within certain codes, jump-started your system of symbols and
communication in order to forward your own existence, or your existence with
your loved ones, or with your peers in your teams and societies and enclaves,
or even to improve the hope of our species and our environment, our buildings
and cars, or our spiritual sides and gods, whatever the field in which you have
acted, you have engineered or tried to engineer future. To engineer future is
the business of survival in every part of our life, not just ourselves
surviving and spiting others, but a quality of survival that spreads out from
the center of I to the centers of every other, and every entity with whom we
cross-exchange these survivals.
Thus the Native hunter thanks the spirit of the buck or bear in his
prayer, for offering his body to the survival of a family in camp. Thus the
American spy delights in the discovery that he is pitted against a brilliant
and worthy opponent, in a game whose outcome effects the survival of his own
group and their best ideas. Thus the wolverine, too, thanks the rabbit as he
tears the life from it, and the child as he is held thanks the woman who gives
him warmth. These are the building of futures for each cell, each organ, each
self and each group, and the interaction of these efforts is the chorale of
daily existence here on our small planet.
Sanity is solving the problems of projection into the future for those
forms it values. Which forms, and how valued, are part of the myriad variations
of a theme. But in all cases the future of forms is being solved by mental,
emotional and material effort on the part of awareness. And this process is the
function and primary business of sanity.
To map sanity then, we can assess the major patterns of reaching toward
the future. It is clear that those things which seem to destroy more future
than they bring about are less sane. We usually
reserve labels like 'crazy' for actions which, as far as we can see, are
blatantly destructive of future, such as indiscriminate firing on restaurant
customers.
It is possible that the lowest quotient of sanity an organism can have,
under normal circumstances, is a state which denies all motion. Absolute
deathful indifference to all aspects of life would be a low degree of sanity
indeed. It would be profound apathy incapable of sensing, feeling, causing or
communicating anything. Some very interesting beliefs about the future and the
present are imbedded in such an organism.
If we raised the sanity quotient of a person who was in such an
absolute apathetic freeze, he would gradually become overwhelmed with sadness
and regret. Still, he would be doing nothing toward the future. But he would be
at least feeling how awful the impossibility of everything is. He might weep
inconsolably as the irreversible loss of no-hope swept over him.
If his sanity quotient were raised slightly he would begin to have an
inkling that complete loss and despair were awful things. Instead of being
absolutely hopeless he would begin to feel terror that he could not avoid the
downfall of things. This is a bit better. At least some faint trace of an idea
that something should be done, however terrifying it is, is present.
The next band of ideas a person would incline toward, as his sanity
quotient increased, would be to become secretly destructive. His fear would
convince him that resistance would be useless. But other factors he is
beginning to feel might serve to make him feel like destroying things by secret
means. A person who is torn between fear and the urge to destroy has no
alternative but to dissemble. His hidden betrayals are usually accompanied by
the most persuasive and artistic explanations, rationalizations and assertions
of high purpose and good intent. But his genuine effects are viciously
corrosive on any group or associate he or she has.
If his sanity quotient were to be increased until he gradually outgrew
his terror we would begin to see the genuine rage of destruction in his eyes.
Too full of anger to be trusted to shoot straight or manage well, he is a
full-blown fury. Ask him for the truth and he will speak wildly and
inaccurately. Unleash him and he will drive toward the destruction of others,
himself, and any real or imagined enemy or opponent. He will do so in open,
screaming defiance, not secretly, because fear is below him.
The amount of future to be expected from any of these states of mind is
actually negative.
But if the sanity quotient of full anger is increased, it will modulate
into antagonism, combativeness of a non-destructive sort, more focused
resentment and a desire to beat a specific target in a specific fight. More
rational than unfocused rage, this is the borderline where positive sanity
begins and negative sanity falls away.
If we want to we can also follow this process through the pro-active
zones of sanity. As each is experienced and the sanity quotient raised, the
next set of traits will begin to surface in behavior, in emotion, in speech and
in the actual decisions an individual makes or a group of individuals make.
Above the strong motion "at" others which is typical of
competitive antagonism is a band of boredom where the future is better
understood but not of much interest. Actions which bring about future will be
done on a dull-witted, somewhat indifferent basis. But the indifference of
boredom is a positive indifference which is light-years closer to true
pro-activity than the deep deadness of the apathy level.
Add sanity to ennui and you will get cautious interest, a sort of
careful and conservative willingness to proceed in a positive direction, to at
least keep things working which are working.
Add sanity and the conservative woman or man will show a modicum of
interest, a small impulse to find out a bit more and answer a bit more and get
a bit more done.