Way back when, Beatnik-era philosopher Alan Watts wrote a marvelous book:” The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.”
On his quest for understand of the Big Everything, it occurred to Watts that if you’re really the All and Everything, how would you keep yourself entertained over Eternity?
To his way of thinking, one way would be to play a gigantic Game with yourself. The way it works is simple: You mere sub-divide yourself into billions of smaller piece (not one of which knows All) and then set them out on a planet – like Earth – and then sit back and watch the entertainment as all these pieces try to reassemble themselves into something approaching the Whole/All.
Neat concept.
It explains why (when people are in love) they say things like “I feel more Complete with you in my life…” and things like that. In an ideal marriage, that’s why sometimes (in fact maybe often) people hook-up who are in many ways different.
Take Elaine and me, for example: She’s neat, right-brain, poetic, good-looking, and physically fit. I’m messy (at times), left-brain, not-so-poetic, not so good-looking, and if I lost 30-pounds it would be a good thing.
Yet we have aspects of each other that we admire, respect and really do find complimentary. Our home shows it, too. The big pieces are mine, but all the art, colors, and general vibe of the place? Totally hers. And it works…so much so that people who visit say “OMG This doesn’t look like this from the outside, at all!”
And that’s what happens when people “complete” nicely. The compliment and they don’t fight, they grow one-another…it’s way cool.
But Watts missed something, I think.
Writing in the period he did, the Internet wasn’t around, and so the whole matter of “Global Consciousness” was a very abstract thing. Sure, it could be imagined, I suppose, that these 7-billion little humans, each with some tiny aspect of Greater Whole might one day come together. But it wouldn’t come for billions and billions of years.
Without the Internet, that is.
But that all began to change when the Princeton EGGS program began the serious quest for simultaneity and coherence in global emptions.
And that’s where the bit curtain is being pulled back…in an amazing way.
I don’t think he’d mind my sharing an email with you, but Monday I dropped a note to Chris McCleary, who runs the National Dream Center. I told him it was an interesting bit of synchronicity that we both (in columns Monday) wrote about how “the technology” (dreams, futuring, software, and such) is working in some who new directions….
Yeah, Its like the rush of insights are too much to contain. Thanks for the plug about inputting dreams, by the way!! Maybe it’s you to thank for the sudden rush of several new dreamers in the past two weeks.
Okay, the more I’m working with historical graphs, the more I’m just shuddering at amazing stuff. I’ll give you a preview here. These words were collected for a certain meme, and they aren’t words that are normally used together, but nonetheless, they rise and fall together.
In other words, MEMES ARE COHERENT! It appears that certain related words (that don’t go into sentences together) nonetheless get used more or less in relative frequency. Check this out…
There were additional graphs attached, but this one gives you the idea: There is word-coherence in how the dream content being logged at the National Dream Center. Yikes!
Get this, I did NOT map first and then select the closest graphs. I selected the words I wanted and then mapped them, only to find out that there was a pattern among many of these words. Why would Real, Open, Sense, and Attention all be rising and falling all the same time? Even if that can be answered, the better question is what is making those significant peaks and valleys?
The whole point of this is that 1) dreams are NOT as chaotic or random as we thought and 2) The collective unconscious isn’t either!
And this gets me around to be Big Ponder of the morning.
You and I (and that person over there) are all discrete consciousness. When we get on the Internet, however, we somehow synch up and begin to operate in a coherent manner.
And it leads to some rather interesting speculation.
For one, if you were the [larger] Ruler of All/ Master of the Universe, would you somehow be related to this fledgling – still incubating – new planetary persona?
Or, after some portion of the 7-billion discrete pieces suddenly woke up on morning and 1/4 of the humans had assembled themselves into a mirror of the Rule of All/MoU, how would that relationship work out?
Might it be a father-son or mother-daughter deal? Or, would it be lovers? Or…would it be a challenge, and could there be TWO Rulers of All/MoU’s?
Right there, you’ve got an intriguing problem.
And it could be a very serious one, indeed. I could be that the Ruler of All/Master of the Universe doesn’t really want company because it would mean what? Power-sharing.
And this is an attractive avenue of thought because it would certainly explain why humans suffer…to make the reassembly game drag out.
Pretend now, for a moment as a thought-exercise, that we’re sitting around the campfire passing a doobie. looking up at the stars and asking questions humans aren’t supposed to ask.
“You know how I know that this Ruler of All is unbalanced? Because diseases like MS, Alzheimer’s, and the Big C, aren’t exactly expression of love.”
“Yep, know what you mean. That’s why every past civilization that got close to evolving a separate mass consciousness has gotten smacked down.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, you’re bright…so let me break it down to you. Let’s say Watts is right and that humans, the grays, and any other characters from Outer Limits are all just “pieces.”
How many ways would a a psychologist be able to gin up in order to “re-assemble” a broken personality?”
“You mean like….oh….drug therapy? Something like that? (Hit this…)”
(Cough)
“Yeah…presactly. So that would be the first approach…drugs and education…just like in psychiatry of today. Except that was back in Vedic times. Check this:
The knowledge about the Aryans comes mostly from the Rigveda-samhita,[18] which was composed between ca. 1500–1200 BCE.[19][20][12] They brought with them their distinctive religious traditions and practices.[21] The Vedic beliefs and practices of the pre-classical era were closely related to the hypothesised Proto-Indo-European religion,[22][23] and the Indo-Iranian religion.[24] According to Anthony, the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo-European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River (present-day Uzbekistan) and (present-day) Iran.[25] It was “a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements”,[25] which borrowed “distinctive religious beliefs and practices”[26] from the Bactria–Margiana Culture.[26] At least 383 non-Indo-European words were borrowed from this culture, including the god Indra and the ritual drink Soma.[27] According to Anthony,
Many of the qualities of Indo-Iranian god of might/victory, Verethraghna, were transferred to the adopted god Indra, who became the central deity of the developing Old Indic culture. Indra was the subject of 250 hymns, a quarter of the Rig Veda. He was associated more than any other deity with Soma, a stimulant drug (perhaps derived from Ephedra) probably borrowed from the BMAC religion. His rise to prominence was a peculiar trait of the Old Indic speakers
“See that? Soma. Drugs, dude:”
From the late 1960s onwards, several studies attempted to establish soma as a psychoactive substance. A number of proposals were made, including one in 1968 by the American banker R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur ethnomycologist, who asserted that soma was an inebriant, and suggested fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as the likely candidate. Since its introduction in 1968, this theory has gained both detractors and followers in the anthropological literature.”
“So the reason the Vedics tripped in and out of history was drugs. It’s hard to keep a balanced culture when you’re doing heavy drugs…which is why the ayahuasca types aren’t running the world today. Hard to rule when crapping your pants…insights, or not.”
“Hmmm…see what you mean…so drugs didn’t work. And maybe their references to flying were more drug-speak…like the witches of Salem who were a drug cult, huh?
But there may be another way to get center besides cell phones and that…what about just plain raw knowledge and following all the pieces?
“Glad you brought that up. Bible description of the Tower of Babel:
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. “
“Dude! That’s like the Linux guys can’t talk to the Windows guys and no one talks to the Max guys…they all just…go off…
So what about Hedonism…couldn’t there be some mass assimilation there?”
“Won’t bore you with it, but since the Bible is a handy reference book, see how Sodom and Gomorrah worked out?
Divine judgment by God was then passed upon Sodom and Gomorrah and two neighboring cities, which were completely consumed by fire and brimstone…”
“Too far, dude…too far! Look, it was well established by science that Sodom and Gomorrah were burned up by a large meteor that impacted somewhere in Eastern Europe. That wasn’t Rule of All, dude…that isn’t the way it would work…”
“Oh? Same conductor of the Big Orchestra that delivers MS and Ebola can’t time a rock-throw when too many people start reaching ecstatic states at the same time? You must have more faith than me.”
“So what’s going on now? We’re trying it “ALL AT ONCE?”
“Yes, I think that may be the case. Tear down the psycho-sexual barriers, bring on the drugs, agree on XML and HTTP and these are starting to hint that the Global Other is being born.”
“So you really think God is all twisted-up and doesn’t want companionship or a child if that’s what the Global Other turns into?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. But with any luck, maybe that will be decided before comes time for us to check out. In the meantime, I’m just watching the “flow” of the dreams being posted at the Dream Center because it’s the language underneath them that matters and how coherent it becomes. At some point, the Global Other will learn to talk. When it does, will anyone hear? Or is it already speaking and we’re just have shit between our ears?”
The camp fire crackles. You and I sit there silently for another half hour wondering.
Overhead, un-noticed, the stars were winking out.
Thanks, Frackers
I dropped a note to our friends who live in the castle up at the 7,000 foot level up west of Trinidad, Colorado because there were a couple of earthquakes up there in the weekend data and I was wondering if the Spanish Peaks were getting ready to blow, or something like that….
Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on! NOT!
We didn’t feel a thing from those two quakes. I think 2.5 is too small to feel. We did feel one a few years ago, woke us up, we looked at each other and said “earthquake” and went back to sleep. Although this is the most seismically active region in Colorado they are all pretty small (does that sound like ‘famous last words’ or what?).
If you look at a Google map of the area between Weston and the Spanish Peaks we are about half way between the two. All those little white circles are the gas wells which were drilled around 2005. They aren’t drilling anymore due to the gas price, so most of those employed in the gas industry were let go or are scattered from Midland to Minot. They are still working the existing wells, fracking them to increase flow.
Contrary to the PR the industry puts out, they frack them at each coal seam they find, and the results can be poisoned water wells, including ours. One day we woke up to black water coming out of our well with 80 times the allowable benzene content and a horrible stench. We have been hauling our potable water from the Trinidad municipal supply since then, including when you visited.
The gas company’s response is “its not our fault” which says a lot about their honesty. They poke a thousand holes in the ground, fracking with diesel, and our problem just randomly happened. Yeah, right. They do some re-injecting of produced water which is not good enough to dump in the creek, but I don’t think it would have any effect 5 KM deep.
The hell of this fracking stuff is congress is still being bribed into sleep by the deep pockets.
Don’t know if you saw this, but in one senate race which comes up in a week or two, almost $100-million has been spent so far.
Is this a travesty? No, it’s the most stupid Supreme Court case ever – Citizens United. Basically says corporations can spend freely and buy whoever they want. Yep, American government is for sale, like it or not. And we’re not even in the bidding.
Did I ever tell you about my plan to hold an IPO that would allow people to invest in congressoids? Might as well trade them publicly and continuously….this one trade every six years, in the case of a senate rate, makes it seem like they have a higher book value than they do.
They’re already incorporating., I kid you not: I got an email from a Texas guv candidate signed WXYZ for Governor, Inc. That ought to make an IPO easier, don’tcha think? Then we could force them to register with the state securities regulators and that might give us more control of these clowns. Some accountability be6tween terms is better than none.
At least that way, when these “citizen lawmakers” go back to Washington to get rich, we might be able to get some fat dividend checks, if they were managed more like stocks than two or six-year gigolos and hookers for the corporate Johns.
Wait! Did that sound bitter? Naw…just real.
The only reason I’m planning to vote this year is to get back at the pricks (and prickettes) who are stuffing my inbox with daily bullshit emails. If you run for office, don’t email me.
More Thursday…write when you break-even.
George george@ure.net