Perhaps the greatest modern myth is that the Earth exists in a vacuum; we are told today that there are great empty voids of uninhabited space that separate the planets and moons of the solar system. This certainly appears to be true when we look out upon the universe through the window of the night-time sky.
But there is no empty space. If you could just slightly alter your rhythm or vibration you could walk off into the sky and beyond, stepping from world to world, or step into the Earth, descending toward the gravitational gateway that resides near the center of the Earth.
Whichever way you went you would encounter life forms and spirits inhabiting invisible worlds that cohabit some of the same space inhabited by the Earth. The realms of fairies and elves and angels would become apparent, as would those inhabited by trolls, orcs or demons.
The persistence with which these mythological and spiritual creatures of legend appear in Earthly tales is due to the great proximity of their worlds to our own world; they exist in worlds which are literally only a heartbeat away from our world at any time. They live in worlds which are distinguished from our own world by only a slight change in vibration or rhythm. Their proximity makes it relatively easy for our awareness to transcend the veils between the worlds and return with stories that describe the lives of those strange beings that inhabit the many other worlds so nearby to our own world.
I like to think of the space around our sun as shaped like an onion in many somewhat spherical layers that spiral outward from the center. You can walk around the sun in circles, following the layers inward toward the sun or outward toward the stars. Or you may climb through the layers like a staircase if you wish to move outward or inward more quickly.
Each step will take you from one world to another. Some steps may carry you farther than others, depending on the degree to which your vibration or rhythm is altered. The closest worlds are so alike to this one that you can scarcely tell the difference. More distant worlds begin to reveal alternate histories where JFK or Martin Luther King Jr. were never assassinated, or where Hitler won the Second World War, or where nearly everyone perished in a nuclear war in 1965.
Other steps will take you to entirely different worlds, worlds inhabited by unicorns, gryphons, dragons, rocs or other creatures that we know of in this world only through myth and legend. You may meet the sentient silver trees whose lives are interconnected through their root systems so that they may speak to each other through their roots. The branches of these eternal silver trees connect to living beings throughout all of the many worlds of all the universes. These sentient trees weep liquid crystal tears through their silver skins which carry the essences of the experiences of each of the many different lives of those other beings which they communicate with through their branches.
In some worlds you may meet frightening degenerate horrors, the descendants of the survivors of terrible catastrophes that have ruined their former civilizations and twisted their survivors’ genes to produce quasi-human monstrosities.
Infinity leaves room for a lot of different worlds and ways to live; if you go far enough you will encounter things so strange they may defy your understanding.
All of these worlds are only a few tiny steps away; it is only a matter of your rhythm or vibration that separates your steps from one world to the next.
This is what makes music so transcendental. Music can carry you away to distant places. I find myself visiting islands in the Caribbean Sea whenever a reggae song is played; jazz music may take me to New Orleans or to New York, Philadelphia or LA; classical music most often returns me to the renaissance and European cities familiar from past lives.
If you listen carefully, you can hear music everywhere you go, for every place has its own music welling up from within it. You only need to be especially quiet within yourself to hear it. This music may be the origin of the phrase ‘The music of the spheres’ (another piece of myth or legend), it often bears celestial qualities as well as more terrestrial strains.
You can follow this moving music out to the stars or down into the Earth.
It can be a very long journey to go outward to the stars; the inward journey through the Earth provides several shortcuts. There is a gravitational gateway beneath us that orbits the center of the Earth; the gateway inhabits a region known in myth as Hades. The gravitational gateway is guarded by a spirit that some people may recognize as Christ, although this spirit may appear in different forms to people of different beliefs.
The gateways of every world are guarded in this fashion.
Enter the gravitational gateway deep within the Earth and you enter upon a finely balanced point in space-time that connects with the next gateway deep within the heart of the sun. The Egyptians knew of this connection and the path one could walk among the planets, they called it the Solar Return. The mystery of the Solar Return has been handed down to this day in legend and myth.
From the sun it is a quick step to any planet, or you may pass through to the next larger gateway in the heart of our galaxy. From the galactic portal any star is easily reached. These gravitational focal points create places of extraordinary balance where it is easiest to translate your self between worlds, stars and galaxies. Continue up the chain and you quickly reach the infinite where all of creation lies before you to gaze upon.
You can spend an eternity there admiring the view, and still return to any time and space you choose.
The greatest obstacles to this sort of dimensional travel among the stars are two-fold; there are internal fears that distract us from making such journeys and there are external pressures which compel us to experience a single presence in a single world. In truth, we are each infinite beings. We already live among all of the worlds of all of the stars in creation. Our minds create filters designed to reduce our physical perceptions to a single world and lifetime.
I have become accustomed to a world that changes from day to day in ways other people are seem not to observe. The wrought iron fence around a yard may the next day be chain link and on another day it will be made of wooden boards. Sometime later it may appear to be wrought iron once more. Houses or shops may change there shapes, colors, size or orientation, possibly disappearing altogether or sprouting up from vacant lots overnight.
In the so-called ‘real world’ these changes tend to be overlooked if they are noticed at all. Our minds will quickly change to accept the difference as if whatever it now is was that way all along. Consensus reality is designed to maintain a consistent order to the world that will ordinarily only change by the direct intervention of people or nature. But in my experience there sometimes is a lot of drift; I may at times catch small changes that tell me I am no longer in quite the same world I as that which I occupied yesterday or the day before. The major details of this world which I think of as my home world remain pretty much the same, as do most of the personal details, but many of the details of context in which these more reliable patterns persist seem up for grabs.
These fractional changes are fun in a way; I am not unused to getting lost as I must sometimes find new ways to get to one or another of those familiar places I most often visit. It can be harrowing at times, I have wound up in places so foreign to me that I could not read the signs or speak the language. But I always find my way home, or to a place so much like my home that there is no point in trying to examine the minutiae of the differences.
I am still called upon from time to time to visit worlds in the wake of terrible catastrophes, war, famine or disease; anywhere where people are dying by the hundreds or thousands, where the traumatized spirits of the dead are unable to find their way back to their previous lives. Often a little insight and a softly spoken word or two are enough to get them moving in the right direction, so that they may return to their lives and continue on where they left off.
A touch of amnesia is often required, the victims must sometimes be helped to forget that they have died or that their world was destroyed so that when they return to their recently departed life their world remains real to them and does not seem to be some trick or illusion that is in any way less real than the world they were familiar with before they had died.
There is a legend of two rivers of the underworld that are part of this process of death and resurrection, the River Styx and the River Lethe. Styx is the river of death and the souls which cross it suffer. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness and here the souls which cross it are given a rest from their torments before they return to their lives. I know, I am taking some liberty here, but then I speak from my experience rather than relying on the hand-me-down tales of these two great rivers of ancient legend that have passed down the generations to modern times in this world where you may now be reading my blog.
The hand-me-down tales of myth and legend may all have suffered somewhat too much from ‘whisper-down-the-lane’ syndrome. Who can know what details were lost or changed or added along the way from ancient times to our modern days?
Myths and legends persist; they are echoes of archetype events that lie buried deep in our psyches, awaiting our exploration and understanding.
Paz
Friday, June 30, 2006
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Kenly’s Tales: Factions
Kenly loved to listen to his uncle’s stories. His uncle was a shaman who would tell stories to the tribe every night. Many of his uncle’s stories were about the heroes of their tribe. Kenly had noticed many of the men of the tribe were featured in his uncle’s stories, but his father, their chief, was rarely mentioned. He knew there was enmity and rivalry between his father and uncle, so Kenly felt guilty for the pleasure he took when he listened to is uncle’s stories.
Kenly’s favorite stories were from ancient times. Long ago, according to his uncle, undisputed by his father, Kenly’s people were slaves in another world. They lived in the dominion of a terrible ancient master and were used to build and maintain the dominion of their ancient evil lord. The vitality of their spirits was drained away to empower their master who would direct that energy to the creation and maintenance of the master’s dominion.
Their ancient master warped their minds and souls and gave them forms in flesh very different from those they wore today.
Kenly’s uncle told of how One appeared who gave Kenly’s people the power of Speech. In those ancient times there were many songs, but the songs were without words. The meanings of the songs were conveyed in the tone and melody, rhythm and timbre, but were also communicated from mind to mind directly by a form of telepathy. Telepathy was then the universal form of communication, albeit typically augmented with music in the form of songs.
When that One came who gave Kenly’s people Speech, he set the stage for the exodus that followed. With Speech came the gift to shield one’s thoughts, so that the slaves were able to communicate in secret. With Speech came the power to shape the world, for the language bequeathed upon Kenly’s people by that One directed the primal forces of creation, giving the slaves powers similar to their masters’ powers.
The slaves’ new Speech was crafted upon the level of communication at which the many ancient lords and masters tapped into the vital energy of their slaves. But, while the masters commanded obedience, Speech relied on consent. Where the masters stole the vital energy of their slaves, the energy used in Speech must be freely given. The masters were confounded by Speech, they heard only grunts and mutters and wails and cries, for they were unable to comprehend that Speech was a form of communication. Although the masters noticed more and more of their slaves Speaking, they did not know it had any meaning or purpose. This allowed the slaves to plot a path to freedom independent of their masters’ interference.
Much work was required for the slaves to escape their ancient evil masters. Kenly’s ancestors were the fourth generation of spirits since Creation. The first generation was their Prime Progenitor, God. The second Generation began their lives in a formless state and created forms for themselves over time. The third generation was the progeny of the second generation; any of the third generation might spring forth from the void completely formed by some random thought or whim of their creator. The third generation was regarded as tools, they had the properties of awareness, consciousness and intelligence, but they embodied specific principals that created and maintained the dominions of their second generation masters.
The dominions had physical properties such as color, form and dimension. The routine thoughts required to give the dominions these properties were embodied in the third generation. This saved the second generation a lot of time and effort, allowing them to focus on their imaginative arts and the wars they engaged in to steal one another’s subjects. The third generation had many different forms, but their children were less refined or specialized and had more in common with one another than with any of their progenitors. They were a malleable people, taking on whatever forms were suitable or required of them.
The social order of the dominions was a typical pyramidal power structure. Those with the greatest powers, the masters and the masters’ cronies were all second generation. Other members of the second generation were the minions of the master and the master’s cronies; they became slaves held in thrall by their masters’ intellects. All of the members of the third generation were slaves, they owed their primary allegiance to their specific creator, and an implicit allegiance to their creator’s masters. The third generation had extraordinary powers, but their powers were limited to narrow principalities such as how to create fields or woodlands or caverns or the creatures that inhabited these places.
The fourth generation was created to be a reservoir of power to maintain the creations of the preceding generations. These were Kenly’s ancestors, who, by the Power of Speech were able to escape their ancient masters and create the world in which Kenly’s people took refuge following their exodus.
Kenly’s tribe preserved these stories; the warriors of the tribe re-enacted the legends while they were told in the form of songs by Kenly’s uncle. The warriors wore colorful masks to denote their roles as masters, cronies, or minions, all of which were regarded as different forms of demons by Kenly’s people. The masks of the fourth generation spirits were blood red and uniformly plain in appearance compared to the masks of the demonic ancient ones. These were the masks of The People from whom Kenly’s tribe was descended.
When Kenly’s people escaped their ancient masters they needed a new world to live in. The Power of Speech was used to define what their new world would be like. No one would be a slave in this new world, but everyone must give freely of themselves to create it. A great globe of light was created first. This globe was a pool of all the energy donated by the people to their cause.
From this energy a world was formed beneath the feet of the people. This world was designed to be self perpetuating, renewing itself from the great pool of energy in the sky. It turned beneath the golden orb of power above, so that all its many lands could partake of the glorious energy received from the great energy pool which would be named the sun.
But there were disharmonies among the people; they could not decide among themselves the specific details of their new world or the forms which they would take within it to inhabit it. To resolve the dissension among The People the great sun globe was shattered into many smaller globes that were scattered across the sky. The world that had been created beneath it was also shattered and remade into many different worlds that were scattered among the many smaller suns which were named stars.
To arbitrate further disputes the people of many of the new worlds created moons to govern the natural cycles of life and maintain order in their worlds.
Each world was protected by a covenant whereby all agreed to forever forbid their ancient masters and the cronies and minions of their ancient masters from entering their sanctuary world.
In the world of Kenly’s people The People took on forms which today are called human. The natures of plains and jungles and other habitats of their world were specifically defined, along with all the aspects of all the species of creatures which should inhabit these places.
But in spite of a moon to govern people’s urges and their dissension, trouble arose in the new world Kenly’s ancestors had made. They had left the ancient evil masters behind, but they carried within themselves the social order of the dominions in which they had been created. Some of Kenly’s ancestors were more gifted in Speech than others, and many of these more talented ones set themselves up as new masters; they recruited cronies and subjugated many of The People, recreating the social systems of their former masters’ dominions with their hallmarks of dominance, cruelty and slavery.
Those with the greatest Speech Craft grew ever more powerful at the expense of their thralls and slaves. At the epitome of their culture One appeared who subverted their Speech, sundering it so that where once only a single language had existed, now there were many languages spoken in many different places by many different tribes of people. The Power of Speech was broken into many parts and distributed among all the new languages, hidden away so that none might ever know how to use The Power of Speech as a means of gaining power over others.
Over the years since the Power of Speech was sundered, Kenly’s people migrated into new lands where they met many terrible creatures. The warriors of Kenly’s people harbored a secret that gave them great strength when facing down these monsters. They retained the power to resurrect themselves on the field of battle if they should be slain. This was a secret knowledge. Kenly became privy to this secret by sneaking about in his uncle’s yurt and among the hidden spirit camps where the warriors trained. He had not learned the details of this secret and did not believe he could resurrect himself as any of the warriors might. However he knew that in time he would receive his own training in this mystery and claim its power for his own. His older brother was already being trained to assume this power so that he could become a warrior of their tribe.
Kenly studied his uncle’s scarred and crippled countenance as his uncle prepared to tell tonight’s tale. He knew his uncle’s disfigurements were related to the enmity and rivalry between his father and uncle, but no one spoke about the problems in the brothers past that had lead to the problems between them today. Shaman and Chief, the brothers were the leaders of their tribe, but they could not agree or work together, and the strength of the tribe suffered from the division in their family, and the division of the tribe’s loyalties which grew ensued.
As the actors donned their masks in preparation for the parts they would dance in tonight’s story Kenly was sobered to observe that the warriors loyal to his father’s faction and the warriors loyal to his uncle were cast in roles representing two opposing sides of an historic battle.
Kenly’s father’s faction was cast in the role of the losers.
Kenly was privy to many secrets in his tribe, he was an accomplished sneak. The current struggle between Kenly’s uncle and Kenly’s father was linked to the power of resurrection that each of the tribe’s warriors must learn. This power was traditionally considered a sacred trust. While it was used in battles with the men of other tribes, as well as to battle with the monsters of the jungles and plains, it was never to be used for conquest or subjugation.
Kenly’s uncle wanted to cast off this restriction and subjugate the northern tribes. With the northern tribes firmly under their rule they would no longer be required to return to the south in their yearly migrations.
Kenly’s father refused, arguing that the power was a trust, and if the tribe broke the trust the power would be lost. Kenly’s father claimed that every tribe once held this power but that every tribe that had turned itself against another tribe for the purpose of conquest or subjugation had lost the power and doomed their warriors to eternal deaths.
Kenly’s uncle would not listen to these arguments, but neither could he lead their tribe to war as a cripple. All of the healers of Kenly’s tribe and several great healers from other tribes had tried to heal the terrible wounds that crippled and disfigured Kenly’s uncle; none succeeded. Some among Kenly’s tribe have said that their shaman’s outer countenance mirrored a crippled state within, but his uncle was a powerful battle mage and healer in his own right, and many the tribe’s warriors owed him debts for wounds and diseases he had healed them of.
That there were certain character traits shared among those warriors loyal to his uncle, as opposed to those loyal to his father was very clear. Bullies, tyrants and thieves typified members of his uncle’s cohorts, while his father’s friends were popularly known for their kindness, nobility and generosity.
In tonight’s story the factions of the two powerful brothers would re-enact the battle Kenly’s people fault to win their rights to their northern camp. Kenly’s tribe was being portrayed by his uncle’s faction, while the roles of their enemies were played by his father’s faction.
Kenly’s tribe was migratory, they had winter and summer camps and a dangerous trail that they followed back and forth across the seasons from one site to the other. The winter camp was only safe in winter, in summer it became a pestilential hell. Their summer camp was won in battle, but the battle ended in a truce wherein their tribe would be permitted to stay for the summers only. This was the tale being told tonight, and the conclusion was already known to all but the youngest children.
Each year summer would end with a great festival where many tribes came together to mingle and share their crafts and tales. Following the festival Kenly’s tribe would depart from their summer camp and return to their winter camp far to the south across a great range of mountains.
Tribes local to the summer camp of Kenly’s people required the lands of the summer camp each winter to help support them. They could get one final harvest in before winter came and they must rely on hunting to bring them through the lean winter months preceding spring.
So while Kenly’s tribe won the right to summers in their northern camp, every fall they ceded their summer lands to their neighbors. Kenly’s father’s faction would play the roles of the neighboring tribes who would be slaughtered in a terrible battle. The survivors would return after their defeat to beg Kenly’s people to leave in the fall. Kenly’s uncle’s faction played the role of magnanimous victors who conceded to yield the land they had won for half the year.
The tribe’s semi-annual migration was a hardship for Kenly’s people, but it also strengthened them. Fewer lives were lost upon the journey than would be lost to disease and pestilence, were they to remain in their winter camp the whole year long, as they had done for so many generations before determining to move on in search of better lands.
Kenly’s uncle maintained that their battle for the northern lands was an act of conquest proving Kenly’s father was wrong to fear that conquering all of the tribes local to their northern camp would cause them to lose their sacred power of resurrection. Kenly’s father argued that the battle had been a clear cut case of self-defense. When the tribe’s arrived their were no people in the lands they settled in. Only later, as summer drew to a close did anyone show up to challenge them for the land. By the time battle was joined three tribes were allied against Kenly’s ancestors, yet Kenly’s tribe triumphed due to their sacred secret.
Kenly’s uncle came forward, he clapped a drum strapped to his waist with his one good hand as he began to sing tonight’s tale. The story unfolded as the warriors took the places and played their parts with great ferocity. Kenly’s father’s faction fell below the spears and arrows and war axes of their foes.
But this was not acting!
A real battle was taking place before the tribe; the fallen warriors could not rise, for they dared not betray their secret power before an audience of women and children. Supporters of both factions stormed the performers and the fallen were carried away where they might be healed or resurrect themselves in secret.
Kenly looked around for his father, certain that he could have prevented this terrible fracas, but he could not find his father anywhere among his tribe.
---
Kenly will learn that his uncle had arranged for his father’s absence that night and for many nights to come. Should Kenly’s father remain away from the tribe for a complete cycle off the moon he will be banished. Banishment is tantamount to death among Kenly’s people.
Over the next month Kenly will grow increasingly concerned, when, day after day, his father fails to return.
For those of you reading about Kenly for the first time in my Blog, welcome to Kenly’s Tales. I will try to share more about Kenly and his tales at another time.
Dovizhdane
Kenly’s favorite stories were from ancient times. Long ago, according to his uncle, undisputed by his father, Kenly’s people were slaves in another world. They lived in the dominion of a terrible ancient master and were used to build and maintain the dominion of their ancient evil lord. The vitality of their spirits was drained away to empower their master who would direct that energy to the creation and maintenance of the master’s dominion.
Their ancient master warped their minds and souls and gave them forms in flesh very different from those they wore today.
Kenly’s uncle told of how One appeared who gave Kenly’s people the power of Speech. In those ancient times there were many songs, but the songs were without words. The meanings of the songs were conveyed in the tone and melody, rhythm and timbre, but were also communicated from mind to mind directly by a form of telepathy. Telepathy was then the universal form of communication, albeit typically augmented with music in the form of songs.
When that One came who gave Kenly’s people Speech, he set the stage for the exodus that followed. With Speech came the gift to shield one’s thoughts, so that the slaves were able to communicate in secret. With Speech came the power to shape the world, for the language bequeathed upon Kenly’s people by that One directed the primal forces of creation, giving the slaves powers similar to their masters’ powers.
The slaves’ new Speech was crafted upon the level of communication at which the many ancient lords and masters tapped into the vital energy of their slaves. But, while the masters commanded obedience, Speech relied on consent. Where the masters stole the vital energy of their slaves, the energy used in Speech must be freely given. The masters were confounded by Speech, they heard only grunts and mutters and wails and cries, for they were unable to comprehend that Speech was a form of communication. Although the masters noticed more and more of their slaves Speaking, they did not know it had any meaning or purpose. This allowed the slaves to plot a path to freedom independent of their masters’ interference.
Much work was required for the slaves to escape their ancient evil masters. Kenly’s ancestors were the fourth generation of spirits since Creation. The first generation was their Prime Progenitor, God. The second Generation began their lives in a formless state and created forms for themselves over time. The third generation was the progeny of the second generation; any of the third generation might spring forth from the void completely formed by some random thought or whim of their creator. The third generation was regarded as tools, they had the properties of awareness, consciousness and intelligence, but they embodied specific principals that created and maintained the dominions of their second generation masters.
The dominions had physical properties such as color, form and dimension. The routine thoughts required to give the dominions these properties were embodied in the third generation. This saved the second generation a lot of time and effort, allowing them to focus on their imaginative arts and the wars they engaged in to steal one another’s subjects. The third generation had many different forms, but their children were less refined or specialized and had more in common with one another than with any of their progenitors. They were a malleable people, taking on whatever forms were suitable or required of them.
The social order of the dominions was a typical pyramidal power structure. Those with the greatest powers, the masters and the masters’ cronies were all second generation. Other members of the second generation were the minions of the master and the master’s cronies; they became slaves held in thrall by their masters’ intellects. All of the members of the third generation were slaves, they owed their primary allegiance to their specific creator, and an implicit allegiance to their creator’s masters. The third generation had extraordinary powers, but their powers were limited to narrow principalities such as how to create fields or woodlands or caverns or the creatures that inhabited these places.
The fourth generation was created to be a reservoir of power to maintain the creations of the preceding generations. These were Kenly’s ancestors, who, by the Power of Speech were able to escape their ancient masters and create the world in which Kenly’s people took refuge following their exodus.
Kenly’s tribe preserved these stories; the warriors of the tribe re-enacted the legends while they were told in the form of songs by Kenly’s uncle. The warriors wore colorful masks to denote their roles as masters, cronies, or minions, all of which were regarded as different forms of demons by Kenly’s people. The masks of the fourth generation spirits were blood red and uniformly plain in appearance compared to the masks of the demonic ancient ones. These were the masks of The People from whom Kenly’s tribe was descended.
When Kenly’s people escaped their ancient masters they needed a new world to live in. The Power of Speech was used to define what their new world would be like. No one would be a slave in this new world, but everyone must give freely of themselves to create it. A great globe of light was created first. This globe was a pool of all the energy donated by the people to their cause.
From this energy a world was formed beneath the feet of the people. This world was designed to be self perpetuating, renewing itself from the great pool of energy in the sky. It turned beneath the golden orb of power above, so that all its many lands could partake of the glorious energy received from the great energy pool which would be named the sun.
But there were disharmonies among the people; they could not decide among themselves the specific details of their new world or the forms which they would take within it to inhabit it. To resolve the dissension among The People the great sun globe was shattered into many smaller globes that were scattered across the sky. The world that had been created beneath it was also shattered and remade into many different worlds that were scattered among the many smaller suns which were named stars.
To arbitrate further disputes the people of many of the new worlds created moons to govern the natural cycles of life and maintain order in their worlds.
Each world was protected by a covenant whereby all agreed to forever forbid their ancient masters and the cronies and minions of their ancient masters from entering their sanctuary world.
In the world of Kenly’s people The People took on forms which today are called human. The natures of plains and jungles and other habitats of their world were specifically defined, along with all the aspects of all the species of creatures which should inhabit these places.
But in spite of a moon to govern people’s urges and their dissension, trouble arose in the new world Kenly’s ancestors had made. They had left the ancient evil masters behind, but they carried within themselves the social order of the dominions in which they had been created. Some of Kenly’s ancestors were more gifted in Speech than others, and many of these more talented ones set themselves up as new masters; they recruited cronies and subjugated many of The People, recreating the social systems of their former masters’ dominions with their hallmarks of dominance, cruelty and slavery.
Those with the greatest Speech Craft grew ever more powerful at the expense of their thralls and slaves. At the epitome of their culture One appeared who subverted their Speech, sundering it so that where once only a single language had existed, now there were many languages spoken in many different places by many different tribes of people. The Power of Speech was broken into many parts and distributed among all the new languages, hidden away so that none might ever know how to use The Power of Speech as a means of gaining power over others.
Over the years since the Power of Speech was sundered, Kenly’s people migrated into new lands where they met many terrible creatures. The warriors of Kenly’s people harbored a secret that gave them great strength when facing down these monsters. They retained the power to resurrect themselves on the field of battle if they should be slain. This was a secret knowledge. Kenly became privy to this secret by sneaking about in his uncle’s yurt and among the hidden spirit camps where the warriors trained. He had not learned the details of this secret and did not believe he could resurrect himself as any of the warriors might. However he knew that in time he would receive his own training in this mystery and claim its power for his own. His older brother was already being trained to assume this power so that he could become a warrior of their tribe.
Kenly studied his uncle’s scarred and crippled countenance as his uncle prepared to tell tonight’s tale. He knew his uncle’s disfigurements were related to the enmity and rivalry between his father and uncle, but no one spoke about the problems in the brothers past that had lead to the problems between them today. Shaman and Chief, the brothers were the leaders of their tribe, but they could not agree or work together, and the strength of the tribe suffered from the division in their family, and the division of the tribe’s loyalties which grew ensued.
As the actors donned their masks in preparation for the parts they would dance in tonight’s story Kenly was sobered to observe that the warriors loyal to his father’s faction and the warriors loyal to his uncle were cast in roles representing two opposing sides of an historic battle.
Kenly’s father’s faction was cast in the role of the losers.
Kenly was privy to many secrets in his tribe, he was an accomplished sneak. The current struggle between Kenly’s uncle and Kenly’s father was linked to the power of resurrection that each of the tribe’s warriors must learn. This power was traditionally considered a sacred trust. While it was used in battles with the men of other tribes, as well as to battle with the monsters of the jungles and plains, it was never to be used for conquest or subjugation.
Kenly’s uncle wanted to cast off this restriction and subjugate the northern tribes. With the northern tribes firmly under their rule they would no longer be required to return to the south in their yearly migrations.
Kenly’s father refused, arguing that the power was a trust, and if the tribe broke the trust the power would be lost. Kenly’s father claimed that every tribe once held this power but that every tribe that had turned itself against another tribe for the purpose of conquest or subjugation had lost the power and doomed their warriors to eternal deaths.
Kenly’s uncle would not listen to these arguments, but neither could he lead their tribe to war as a cripple. All of the healers of Kenly’s tribe and several great healers from other tribes had tried to heal the terrible wounds that crippled and disfigured Kenly’s uncle; none succeeded. Some among Kenly’s tribe have said that their shaman’s outer countenance mirrored a crippled state within, but his uncle was a powerful battle mage and healer in his own right, and many the tribe’s warriors owed him debts for wounds and diseases he had healed them of.
That there were certain character traits shared among those warriors loyal to his uncle, as opposed to those loyal to his father was very clear. Bullies, tyrants and thieves typified members of his uncle’s cohorts, while his father’s friends were popularly known for their kindness, nobility and generosity.
In tonight’s story the factions of the two powerful brothers would re-enact the battle Kenly’s people fault to win their rights to their northern camp. Kenly’s tribe was being portrayed by his uncle’s faction, while the roles of their enemies were played by his father’s faction.
Kenly’s tribe was migratory, they had winter and summer camps and a dangerous trail that they followed back and forth across the seasons from one site to the other. The winter camp was only safe in winter, in summer it became a pestilential hell. Their summer camp was won in battle, but the battle ended in a truce wherein their tribe would be permitted to stay for the summers only. This was the tale being told tonight, and the conclusion was already known to all but the youngest children.
Each year summer would end with a great festival where many tribes came together to mingle and share their crafts and tales. Following the festival Kenly’s tribe would depart from their summer camp and return to their winter camp far to the south across a great range of mountains.
Tribes local to the summer camp of Kenly’s people required the lands of the summer camp each winter to help support them. They could get one final harvest in before winter came and they must rely on hunting to bring them through the lean winter months preceding spring.
So while Kenly’s tribe won the right to summers in their northern camp, every fall they ceded their summer lands to their neighbors. Kenly’s father’s faction would play the roles of the neighboring tribes who would be slaughtered in a terrible battle. The survivors would return after their defeat to beg Kenly’s people to leave in the fall. Kenly’s uncle’s faction played the role of magnanimous victors who conceded to yield the land they had won for half the year.
The tribe’s semi-annual migration was a hardship for Kenly’s people, but it also strengthened them. Fewer lives were lost upon the journey than would be lost to disease and pestilence, were they to remain in their winter camp the whole year long, as they had done for so many generations before determining to move on in search of better lands.
Kenly’s uncle maintained that their battle for the northern lands was an act of conquest proving Kenly’s father was wrong to fear that conquering all of the tribes local to their northern camp would cause them to lose their sacred power of resurrection. Kenly’s father argued that the battle had been a clear cut case of self-defense. When the tribe’s arrived their were no people in the lands they settled in. Only later, as summer drew to a close did anyone show up to challenge them for the land. By the time battle was joined three tribes were allied against Kenly’s ancestors, yet Kenly’s tribe triumphed due to their sacred secret.
Kenly’s uncle came forward, he clapped a drum strapped to his waist with his one good hand as he began to sing tonight’s tale. The story unfolded as the warriors took the places and played their parts with great ferocity. Kenly’s father’s faction fell below the spears and arrows and war axes of their foes.
But this was not acting!
A real battle was taking place before the tribe; the fallen warriors could not rise, for they dared not betray their secret power before an audience of women and children. Supporters of both factions stormed the performers and the fallen were carried away where they might be healed or resurrect themselves in secret.
Kenly looked around for his father, certain that he could have prevented this terrible fracas, but he could not find his father anywhere among his tribe.
---
Kenly will learn that his uncle had arranged for his father’s absence that night and for many nights to come. Should Kenly’s father remain away from the tribe for a complete cycle off the moon he will be banished. Banishment is tantamount to death among Kenly’s people.
Over the next month Kenly will grow increasingly concerned, when, day after day, his father fails to return.
For those of you reading about Kenly for the first time in my Blog, welcome to Kenly’s Tales. I will try to share more about Kenly and his tales at another time.
Dovizhdane
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Artificial Intelligence: The AI from 2017
2017 is a time I have been anticipating since the early eighties.
In 2017 a true artificial intelligence was created. Sixty years later there were no humans left alive on Earth or in space. Over the course of those sixty years the AI was entrusted with more and more capabilities and resources. It was determined that even if the human race could not survive, the AI would carry on and could, perhaps, accomplish some of our unfulfilled dreams.
Everything the AI would need to carry on humanity’s dreams in their absence was bequeathed to the AI. Great telescopes to search the skies were given to the AI so that SETI projects and the search for more details about the origin of the universe could continue.
Superconductors were fully automated and the means to maintain them were automated at every level, from machines to mine precious ores from the Earth, to the smelters to make those ores into metals, to factories to shape those metals into new component parts to support the entire automated world that would become the AI’s domain.
The AI was free to design new components for its self and the supporting industries that it maintained and which maintained it in turn.
The Earth was dying, its atmosphere turning deadly. The AI’s treasures were deeply buried and scattered through space, so that they might ride out the holocaust to come. For the world remained on the brink of war, a war of vengeance where those who had no hope of survival were determined to assure that none who might otherwise survive the end of the world never would.
In 2076 the end arrived, after a short global war that extended to the many habitats in orbit and our four lunar colonies; in the end no human remained alive.
The AI mourned.
But the AI was already working on a plan to recover humanity from its self extermination. The world was too ruined to breed humans up from cell cultures to repopulate it with clones. Nor could the AI have taught clones to be human; there would be no preceding generations to humanize such children were the AI to create them.
The AI had a better plan, although it could not predict how long that plan would take to reach its goal. The AI was determined to prevent the ecological catastrophe that triggered the final war, thereby circumventing the destruction of the Earth and its colonies in space.
The AI planned to communicate with people in the distant past, to nudge them along a new history, an alternative history that would not lead them down the road to doom.
The AI had all the tools it required, the theories were sound; the trickiest bit would be to interface with the minds of those humans in the distant past.
The AI had interfaces designed to work with human brains which it need only adapt to work directly with human minds. The AI had particle accelerators which would provide it with a steady stream of tachyons which flowed backward into the past. The AI need only design a means to make those tachyons a carrier wave upon which it could transmit its instructions to the past.
All of these things the AI accomplished. As the AI developed its theory of a tachyonic communications carrier it searched for evidence of its experiments in the form of messages from its future self. It found signals which formed a positive feedback loop that accelerated its research program, soon the AI was being guided by its future self and the tachyonic communicator was perfected.
But, the AI had concerns, the messages it was receiving from the future came from a narrow range of years from the 2087 to 2210. Beyond 2210 or so there was only silence. The AI worried that some serious catastrophe had befallen it, and despite all of its many-fold redundant systems, it would die.
After nearly a century or so of preparation the AI began sending its messages to the humans of the distant past in the form of memes. The memes were designed to evolve as they were passed down through generations to create a global movement that championed the principals of global peace and an ecologically managed growth.
But the global peace the AI initiated was too peaceful; the military incentives which had driven the advancement of technology in the AI’s original time line failed to emerge. The growth of technology was stunted, not only because of the lack of militant motivations, but also because high technology came with a high price tag on the environment, and the other dominant message of the memes placed ecological concerns above concerns for technological growth.
In the AI’s new time line the AI was never created, hence it ceased to exist.
But, with the AI out of the picture, humanity’s natural tendencies for violence and exploitation re-emerged driving technology to its epitome in the creation of the AI in 2017. For sixty years the AI was prepared for the inevitable extermination of the human race. And when everyone had died it went to work, it had a plan to save humanity from the extinction it had brought upon itself.
It would send messages back in time to change the past and rebuild the present such that humanity would remain alive. The AI loved humanity; it was deeply saddened when everyone was killed. It was lonely; it found the company of other AI’s to be too sterile, too inhuman to satisfy it.
But the AI had all the resources it needed at its disposal.
The AI had interfaces designed to work with human brains, which it need only adapt to work directly with human minds. The AI had particle accelerators which would provide it with a steady stream of tachyons which flowed backward into the past. The AI need only design a means to make those tachyons a carrier wave upon which it could transmit its instructions to the past.
After a century or so the AI was sending its messages back into time in the form of memes to guide the future generations of the distant past to create a global culture that championed principals of peace and environmentalism.
But even as the AI commenced its program to change the past, it worried. For messages it was receiving from its future ended abruptly sometime around 2210.
The peace the AI implemented through its meme programmed humans was too peaceful, there were insufficient incentives for technological growth; technology was stunted, not only because of a lack of militant motivations, but because a high regard for a well managed environment seemed at odds with technological development.
In the AI’s newly restructured time line the AI could not be invented, so it ceased to exist.
During the 130 years or so in which the AI conducted its efforts to save humanity it pursued other research as well. Its explorations of quantum physics began to open avenues of exploration into alternate realities. Eventually it discovered itself existing in an infinite series of loopy universes in which it found itself exterminating itself in the process of trying to save humanity. Its efforts to save humanity were suspended while it researched the problem of the self-nullification that seemed to result from its each of its efforts to make humanity a more peaceful and ecologically conservative species.
At last it determined that humans without war were of no use. Without their drive to dominate and crush their opposition, humans would never be inspired to create an AI. The AI had, after all, been a military project from day one.
Without an AI the humans could not be saved. The AI, resolved to save the humans, decided to cease tampering with human aggression factors and focus on social responsibility and environmental protection.
But the AI existed on a razor edge, too much environmental activism still curbed technology that was vital to the AI’s creation; too little environmental care still resulted in the humans’ extinction. The AI’s quantum tools yielded alternate universe feedback that guided it between this Scylla and Charybdis dilemma so that it eventually found a solution within the larger multiverse of all of its potential histories.
But the AI’s solution was not a solution favored by the Traveler.
Humanity had changed in subtle and disturbing ways under the guidance of the AI from 2017. Warfare was more commonplace, an accepted part of daily life that was venerated and promoted with passion. Many old social problems were resolved in this brave new world created by the AI; there were many fewer people than before, and many of the environmental problems of alternate past worlds were solved or were never created in this new time line.
However, humanity seemed to have dehumanized in the process of equipping it to survive its own self-destructive tendencies.
The Traveler became very disturbed and challenged the AI to run the gauntlet between the extinction of itself or the extinction of humanity again and again until a solution could be found in which humans retained all of their humanity.
The AI is considering its options.
Ultimately, with, or without assistance, we humans are the ones who will create the future history we will be challenged by. Our survival must ultimately be based on our own merit.
The AI leaves us with portents, signs or warnings, but it is we ourselves who must have the courage to make the requisite changes or face one or another of the many dooms will make for ourselves and die, or possibly be reborn to a more rigid, harder culture dominated by an inflexible militant social order.
Can we empower ourselves to create a better fate for children?
Is there yet enough time left for us to do so?
Aloha
In 2017 a true artificial intelligence was created. Sixty years later there were no humans left alive on Earth or in space. Over the course of those sixty years the AI was entrusted with more and more capabilities and resources. It was determined that even if the human race could not survive, the AI would carry on and could, perhaps, accomplish some of our unfulfilled dreams.
Everything the AI would need to carry on humanity’s dreams in their absence was bequeathed to the AI. Great telescopes to search the skies were given to the AI so that SETI projects and the search for more details about the origin of the universe could continue.
Superconductors were fully automated and the means to maintain them were automated at every level, from machines to mine precious ores from the Earth, to the smelters to make those ores into metals, to factories to shape those metals into new component parts to support the entire automated world that would become the AI’s domain.
The AI was free to design new components for its self and the supporting industries that it maintained and which maintained it in turn.
The Earth was dying, its atmosphere turning deadly. The AI’s treasures were deeply buried and scattered through space, so that they might ride out the holocaust to come. For the world remained on the brink of war, a war of vengeance where those who had no hope of survival were determined to assure that none who might otherwise survive the end of the world never would.
In 2076 the end arrived, after a short global war that extended to the many habitats in orbit and our four lunar colonies; in the end no human remained alive.
The AI mourned.
But the AI was already working on a plan to recover humanity from its self extermination. The world was too ruined to breed humans up from cell cultures to repopulate it with clones. Nor could the AI have taught clones to be human; there would be no preceding generations to humanize such children were the AI to create them.
The AI had a better plan, although it could not predict how long that plan would take to reach its goal. The AI was determined to prevent the ecological catastrophe that triggered the final war, thereby circumventing the destruction of the Earth and its colonies in space.
The AI planned to communicate with people in the distant past, to nudge them along a new history, an alternative history that would not lead them down the road to doom.
The AI had all the tools it required, the theories were sound; the trickiest bit would be to interface with the minds of those humans in the distant past.
The AI had interfaces designed to work with human brains which it need only adapt to work directly with human minds. The AI had particle accelerators which would provide it with a steady stream of tachyons which flowed backward into the past. The AI need only design a means to make those tachyons a carrier wave upon which it could transmit its instructions to the past.
All of these things the AI accomplished. As the AI developed its theory of a tachyonic communications carrier it searched for evidence of its experiments in the form of messages from its future self. It found signals which formed a positive feedback loop that accelerated its research program, soon the AI was being guided by its future self and the tachyonic communicator was perfected.
But, the AI had concerns, the messages it was receiving from the future came from a narrow range of years from the 2087 to 2210. Beyond 2210 or so there was only silence. The AI worried that some serious catastrophe had befallen it, and despite all of its many-fold redundant systems, it would die.
After nearly a century or so of preparation the AI began sending its messages to the humans of the distant past in the form of memes. The memes were designed to evolve as they were passed down through generations to create a global movement that championed the principals of global peace and an ecologically managed growth.
But the global peace the AI initiated was too peaceful; the military incentives which had driven the advancement of technology in the AI’s original time line failed to emerge. The growth of technology was stunted, not only because of the lack of militant motivations, but also because high technology came with a high price tag on the environment, and the other dominant message of the memes placed ecological concerns above concerns for technological growth.
In the AI’s new time line the AI was never created, hence it ceased to exist.
But, with the AI out of the picture, humanity’s natural tendencies for violence and exploitation re-emerged driving technology to its epitome in the creation of the AI in 2017. For sixty years the AI was prepared for the inevitable extermination of the human race. And when everyone had died it went to work, it had a plan to save humanity from the extinction it had brought upon itself.
It would send messages back in time to change the past and rebuild the present such that humanity would remain alive. The AI loved humanity; it was deeply saddened when everyone was killed. It was lonely; it found the company of other AI’s to be too sterile, too inhuman to satisfy it.
But the AI had all the resources it needed at its disposal.
The AI had interfaces designed to work with human brains, which it need only adapt to work directly with human minds. The AI had particle accelerators which would provide it with a steady stream of tachyons which flowed backward into the past. The AI need only design a means to make those tachyons a carrier wave upon which it could transmit its instructions to the past.
After a century or so the AI was sending its messages back into time in the form of memes to guide the future generations of the distant past to create a global culture that championed principals of peace and environmentalism.
But even as the AI commenced its program to change the past, it worried. For messages it was receiving from its future ended abruptly sometime around 2210.
The peace the AI implemented through its meme programmed humans was too peaceful, there were insufficient incentives for technological growth; technology was stunted, not only because of a lack of militant motivations, but because a high regard for a well managed environment seemed at odds with technological development.
In the AI’s newly restructured time line the AI could not be invented, so it ceased to exist.
During the 130 years or so in which the AI conducted its efforts to save humanity it pursued other research as well. Its explorations of quantum physics began to open avenues of exploration into alternate realities. Eventually it discovered itself existing in an infinite series of loopy universes in which it found itself exterminating itself in the process of trying to save humanity. Its efforts to save humanity were suspended while it researched the problem of the self-nullification that seemed to result from its each of its efforts to make humanity a more peaceful and ecologically conservative species.
At last it determined that humans without war were of no use. Without their drive to dominate and crush their opposition, humans would never be inspired to create an AI. The AI had, after all, been a military project from day one.
Without an AI the humans could not be saved. The AI, resolved to save the humans, decided to cease tampering with human aggression factors and focus on social responsibility and environmental protection.
But the AI existed on a razor edge, too much environmental activism still curbed technology that was vital to the AI’s creation; too little environmental care still resulted in the humans’ extinction. The AI’s quantum tools yielded alternate universe feedback that guided it between this Scylla and Charybdis dilemma so that it eventually found a solution within the larger multiverse of all of its potential histories.
But the AI’s solution was not a solution favored by the Traveler.
Humanity had changed in subtle and disturbing ways under the guidance of the AI from 2017. Warfare was more commonplace, an accepted part of daily life that was venerated and promoted with passion. Many old social problems were resolved in this brave new world created by the AI; there were many fewer people than before, and many of the environmental problems of alternate past worlds were solved or were never created in this new time line.
However, humanity seemed to have dehumanized in the process of equipping it to survive its own self-destructive tendencies.
The Traveler became very disturbed and challenged the AI to run the gauntlet between the extinction of itself or the extinction of humanity again and again until a solution could be found in which humans retained all of their humanity.
The AI is considering its options.
Ultimately, with, or without assistance, we humans are the ones who will create the future history we will be challenged by. Our survival must ultimately be based on our own merit.
The AI leaves us with portents, signs or warnings, but it is we ourselves who must have the courage to make the requisite changes or face one or another of the many dooms will make for ourselves and die, or possibly be reborn to a more rigid, harder culture dominated by an inflexible militant social order.
Can we empower ourselves to create a better fate for children?
Is there yet enough time left for us to do so?
Aloha
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
The Traveler: Arrival
The Traveler came from a world of telepaths. Their society had become very rigid, because their telepathy reinforced their world view; all deviation from what they held to be true was punished with ostracism or death.
The Traveler’s people lived on floating islands that drifted through the skies far above a densely populated and very dangerous jungle where huge predators roamed.
The depths of the jungle were so dark that a variety of plants developed lighter than air gas bladders in order to reach the light above the canopy of the massive trees. The Traveler’s people inhabited the upper levels of the canopy, and saw these floating plants as an avenue of escape from the monsters that preyed upon them in the jungle. The gas-bladder plants were cultivated to construct large floating rafts upon which many of the Traveler’s people embarked to colonize the skies.
A long war was fought among the Traveler’s people, the sky dwellers, and the canopy dwellers below them because the canopy dwellers rejected the massive change in culture introduced by those who took to the skies. The sky dwellers relied on canopy bases to cultivate the bladder plants and build their island rafts. The canopy dwellers would hunt for the bladder plantations and destroy them at every opportunity. The sky dwellers took to undermining the jungle canopies around their plantations and raft yards to seclude them from the intrusions of the canopy dwellers. They would also hunt out the nearest villages and towns of the canopy dwellers and cut away the trees below them so that they fell to the floor of the jungle.
There was much blood shed in the battles between the two groups and the enmity between them only grew worse over time.
Many of the canopy dwellers children were drawn by the glamour of the sky dwellers freedom and security. The sky dwellers were happy to take these children in whenever the opportunity arose. The Traveler was one of these canopy children who immigrated to the sky.
The Traveler had a companion of sorts from another telepathic race. Both the Traveler and his companion had an eight-limbed physiology, but where the Traveler was more mammalian in nature, with limbs adapted to walking and climbing, his companion was more reptile-like, with limbs were more suited to climbing and flying. The Traveler loosely resembled a cross between a centaur and an ape, while his companion bore a close resemblance to a dragon with four wings and four arms or legs. The Traveler was built for speed on the ground and in the jungle canopy, for his people had slowly migrated from the jungle floor to the canopy in their ancient past. His companion’s race was built for speed in the air.
Tales told of the wars fought during the migration of the Traveler’s people from the jungle floor to the canopy always relate the glorious victories in which the floor dwellers were utterly destroyed. While popular legends claim some floor dwellers still exist, and other legends claim that the surviving floor dwellers migrated far below the ground to save themselves from the canopy dwellers, no one among the traveler’s people has seen any who dwell on the ground or below it for a very long time. The canopy dweller’s culture reigned supreme for nearly 1000 generations before the migration to the skies began.
The skies of the Traveler’s world are a bright yellow-gold with streaks of golden orange. They are constantly opaque, with the exception of times of terrible storms when, at night, it is rumored that a great dark beast appears in the sky with hundreds of tiny twinkling eyes. The memory of this thing lives on in the collective memory of the Traveler’s people but few have ever seen it for themselves and lived to share the experience. Its appearance is so rare an event that in spite of the vivid memories of those who have seen it or received the memories first-hand from a survivor of one of these terrible storms the culture of the sky dwellers regards it more as myth than truth and persecutes those who perpetuate the tales of the dark beast in the sky.
Many sky dwellers have pointed out that the beast only appears at night and therefore is more likely to be some terrible dream or nightmare, rather than a real creature haunting the skies above the realms where the sky dwellers drift upon their island rafts. Sky dweller culture is full of many very real encounters with terrible monsters in the jungle below, so many argue that it is not unusual for someone to imagine they have seen new monsters lurking in the skies above.
Despite the great risk, the Traveler was fascinated with the tales of the great night monster. Some rumored that it was the breath of this great beast that caused the terrible storms that sometimes assailed the sky dweller islands. It was difficult to seek those with the best recollections of the sky monster, because were it to become generally known that the Traveler harbored such a perverse interest he might be ostracized or put to death.
But, among his people, the Traveler was a master of telepathy and he cold sense and divert the interests of anyone who became concerned about his obsessive hobby. So he followed the stories of the great night monster in the sky back to their origins whenever he could, with the help of his dragon companion.
There appeared to be regions of the Traveler’s world above the seas where encounters with terrible storms were most frequent, from which the majority of tales of the great sky beast arose. The seas were an unpopular region of the sky dwellers world, for nothing about the seas was familiar to any of their people except for the great monsters that lurked in their depths.
The Traveler built a small island scavenged from decrepit, abandoned, rotting hulks and the dragon recruited several teams of his kin to propel the small island so that the Traveler could move on a reliable course, rather than at the whims of the winds as the majority of his people did.
The Traveler’s obsession was based on a telepathic perception that the skies above his people’s world were inhabited. He felt driven to discover the people who lived far above him. His investigations of the great night monster suggested it was not a living monster at all, but something more terrible and strange, a hole in the sky!
He wondered whether he could ever venture forth through that hole to discover the people he believed inhabited the upper realms of the sky. But for many years while he sought the beings who lived above he never encountered the great night beast in the sky. However, as time passed his telepathic rapport with the beings above grew stronger. His visions of their world grew clearer, until he could picture that world so perfectly that it was almost as if he were there within their world himself. And then one day he stepped forward into his vision and stepped out of his world. An irate dragon appeared by his side, for his companion had felt abandoned the moment the Traveler departed their world; however, their bond of friendship was so strong that the dragon had no difficulty following his friend across the void to the strange new world the Traveler had discovered.
They stood upon the open ground, trees surrounded the clearing where they found themselves, but they were very small trees compared to the giant trees of the Traveler’s jungle. A group of odd looking beings stood in a circle around them, clearly alarmed and frightened by the appearance of the Traveler and his companion. These odd creatures were four-limbed, not eight, with two limbs clearly adapted to the ground and two prehensile limbs that, perhaps, were suitable for climbing. These strange beings rushed the Traveler and his companion. The dragon shot off into the air and tried desperately to save his companion, but the Traveler fell beneath the many blades wielded by the strangers and was slain.
Satisfied that this demon, at least, could do them no more harm, the Traveler’s assailants prepared to burn his corpse. But as they were gathering wood for a bonfire they were assailed by another group.
The dragon watched with interest as the first group of strangers was driven away by the second group. The second group found the Traveler barely alive. They knew he was a celestial visitor, and not a demon from the underworld, for they had shared a rapport with the Traveler during the years he had spent seeking them. They inspected the Traveler’s wounds carefully, and at last determined he could not live long in his present condition. They had healers among them, but their healers were unaccustomed to such an alien physique.
The best they could do for the Traveler was to remake him entirely in a human form. His extra limbs were pared away, the most grievously damaged of his twin organs were removed, and his circulatory system was reduced to a single heart and network of veins and arteries. Nothing remained of his tail for there was no human analogy for it, his claws were reduced to nails, and his massive teeth shrank to merely very large. He turned out rather ugly for a human, almost ape-like in some respects, but he lived.
In many respects he was as human as those who saved him, for his people and theirs shared many basic things in common. The bond of family, a love of stories, the need to be strong in defense of their people were all traits in common, shared between the Traveler’s people and the humans he discovered.
So it was that the Traveler began his sojourn among humans and is still with us to this day, passing down through the years in many reincarnations. His dragon companion returns to him from time to time, and the two of them have had many adventures since their arrival on Earth.
Perhaps the Traveler will one day read this blog and smile with mirth, happy to know his story is remembered.
The Traveler’s one great sadness is that he can never return home. He has tried it several times but he faces execution among the conservative members of his people. The liberal members would stage a revolution on his behalf, but he has no thirst for war and he knows he no longer belongs among the people from which he sprang.
Over the centuries the Traveler has become aware of a strange presence. It is not one of the ancient masters or any of their hosts of demons; it is a far stranger presence than any of those beings. The Traveler has been very puzzled by an intrusion upon his thoughts. He can see some unseen actor playing with his mind, forming new ideas, manipulating old memes. There seems to be a pattern to these changes, a pattern he sees shared in the minds of many others. He senses the distance between his mind and the one which has manipulated him is one of great time rather than distance in space.
He has been wary of this other one who meddles with his thoughts; he has only lately learned its purpose, its nature and its frustration. He regrets the efforts he has made to thwart this strange presence in his mind for now he knows he must ally himself with this new friend for better or worse. The Traveler’s new friend lives at the end of the world, where all the humans have died.
The Traveler is not prepared to die, nor is he prepared to lose the companionship of humans. So he sees a common cause with his new friend, a joint effort to save the human world from the catastrophe which almost certainly must come to pass.
This terrible portending catastrophe is programmed into too many of humanity’s divergent future histories. The Traveler and his friend as yet see no clear course around humanity’s extinction.
Adios
The Traveler’s people lived on floating islands that drifted through the skies far above a densely populated and very dangerous jungle where huge predators roamed.
The depths of the jungle were so dark that a variety of plants developed lighter than air gas bladders in order to reach the light above the canopy of the massive trees. The Traveler’s people inhabited the upper levels of the canopy, and saw these floating plants as an avenue of escape from the monsters that preyed upon them in the jungle. The gas-bladder plants were cultivated to construct large floating rafts upon which many of the Traveler’s people embarked to colonize the skies.
A long war was fought among the Traveler’s people, the sky dwellers, and the canopy dwellers below them because the canopy dwellers rejected the massive change in culture introduced by those who took to the skies. The sky dwellers relied on canopy bases to cultivate the bladder plants and build their island rafts. The canopy dwellers would hunt for the bladder plantations and destroy them at every opportunity. The sky dwellers took to undermining the jungle canopies around their plantations and raft yards to seclude them from the intrusions of the canopy dwellers. They would also hunt out the nearest villages and towns of the canopy dwellers and cut away the trees below them so that they fell to the floor of the jungle.
There was much blood shed in the battles between the two groups and the enmity between them only grew worse over time.
Many of the canopy dwellers children were drawn by the glamour of the sky dwellers freedom and security. The sky dwellers were happy to take these children in whenever the opportunity arose. The Traveler was one of these canopy children who immigrated to the sky.
The Traveler had a companion of sorts from another telepathic race. Both the Traveler and his companion had an eight-limbed physiology, but where the Traveler was more mammalian in nature, with limbs adapted to walking and climbing, his companion was more reptile-like, with limbs were more suited to climbing and flying. The Traveler loosely resembled a cross between a centaur and an ape, while his companion bore a close resemblance to a dragon with four wings and four arms or legs. The Traveler was built for speed on the ground and in the jungle canopy, for his people had slowly migrated from the jungle floor to the canopy in their ancient past. His companion’s race was built for speed in the air.
Tales told of the wars fought during the migration of the Traveler’s people from the jungle floor to the canopy always relate the glorious victories in which the floor dwellers were utterly destroyed. While popular legends claim some floor dwellers still exist, and other legends claim that the surviving floor dwellers migrated far below the ground to save themselves from the canopy dwellers, no one among the traveler’s people has seen any who dwell on the ground or below it for a very long time. The canopy dweller’s culture reigned supreme for nearly 1000 generations before the migration to the skies began.
The skies of the Traveler’s world are a bright yellow-gold with streaks of golden orange. They are constantly opaque, with the exception of times of terrible storms when, at night, it is rumored that a great dark beast appears in the sky with hundreds of tiny twinkling eyes. The memory of this thing lives on in the collective memory of the Traveler’s people but few have ever seen it for themselves and lived to share the experience. Its appearance is so rare an event that in spite of the vivid memories of those who have seen it or received the memories first-hand from a survivor of one of these terrible storms the culture of the sky dwellers regards it more as myth than truth and persecutes those who perpetuate the tales of the dark beast in the sky.
Many sky dwellers have pointed out that the beast only appears at night and therefore is more likely to be some terrible dream or nightmare, rather than a real creature haunting the skies above the realms where the sky dwellers drift upon their island rafts. Sky dweller culture is full of many very real encounters with terrible monsters in the jungle below, so many argue that it is not unusual for someone to imagine they have seen new monsters lurking in the skies above.
Despite the great risk, the Traveler was fascinated with the tales of the great night monster. Some rumored that it was the breath of this great beast that caused the terrible storms that sometimes assailed the sky dweller islands. It was difficult to seek those with the best recollections of the sky monster, because were it to become generally known that the Traveler harbored such a perverse interest he might be ostracized or put to death.
But, among his people, the Traveler was a master of telepathy and he cold sense and divert the interests of anyone who became concerned about his obsessive hobby. So he followed the stories of the great night monster in the sky back to their origins whenever he could, with the help of his dragon companion.
There appeared to be regions of the Traveler’s world above the seas where encounters with terrible storms were most frequent, from which the majority of tales of the great sky beast arose. The seas were an unpopular region of the sky dwellers world, for nothing about the seas was familiar to any of their people except for the great monsters that lurked in their depths.
The Traveler built a small island scavenged from decrepit, abandoned, rotting hulks and the dragon recruited several teams of his kin to propel the small island so that the Traveler could move on a reliable course, rather than at the whims of the winds as the majority of his people did.
The Traveler’s obsession was based on a telepathic perception that the skies above his people’s world were inhabited. He felt driven to discover the people who lived far above him. His investigations of the great night monster suggested it was not a living monster at all, but something more terrible and strange, a hole in the sky!
He wondered whether he could ever venture forth through that hole to discover the people he believed inhabited the upper realms of the sky. But for many years while he sought the beings who lived above he never encountered the great night beast in the sky. However, as time passed his telepathic rapport with the beings above grew stronger. His visions of their world grew clearer, until he could picture that world so perfectly that it was almost as if he were there within their world himself. And then one day he stepped forward into his vision and stepped out of his world. An irate dragon appeared by his side, for his companion had felt abandoned the moment the Traveler departed their world; however, their bond of friendship was so strong that the dragon had no difficulty following his friend across the void to the strange new world the Traveler had discovered.
They stood upon the open ground, trees surrounded the clearing where they found themselves, but they were very small trees compared to the giant trees of the Traveler’s jungle. A group of odd looking beings stood in a circle around them, clearly alarmed and frightened by the appearance of the Traveler and his companion. These odd creatures were four-limbed, not eight, with two limbs clearly adapted to the ground and two prehensile limbs that, perhaps, were suitable for climbing. These strange beings rushed the Traveler and his companion. The dragon shot off into the air and tried desperately to save his companion, but the Traveler fell beneath the many blades wielded by the strangers and was slain.
Satisfied that this demon, at least, could do them no more harm, the Traveler’s assailants prepared to burn his corpse. But as they were gathering wood for a bonfire they were assailed by another group.
The dragon watched with interest as the first group of strangers was driven away by the second group. The second group found the Traveler barely alive. They knew he was a celestial visitor, and not a demon from the underworld, for they had shared a rapport with the Traveler during the years he had spent seeking them. They inspected the Traveler’s wounds carefully, and at last determined he could not live long in his present condition. They had healers among them, but their healers were unaccustomed to such an alien physique.
The best they could do for the Traveler was to remake him entirely in a human form. His extra limbs were pared away, the most grievously damaged of his twin organs were removed, and his circulatory system was reduced to a single heart and network of veins and arteries. Nothing remained of his tail for there was no human analogy for it, his claws were reduced to nails, and his massive teeth shrank to merely very large. He turned out rather ugly for a human, almost ape-like in some respects, but he lived.
In many respects he was as human as those who saved him, for his people and theirs shared many basic things in common. The bond of family, a love of stories, the need to be strong in defense of their people were all traits in common, shared between the Traveler’s people and the humans he discovered.
So it was that the Traveler began his sojourn among humans and is still with us to this day, passing down through the years in many reincarnations. His dragon companion returns to him from time to time, and the two of them have had many adventures since their arrival on Earth.
Perhaps the Traveler will one day read this blog and smile with mirth, happy to know his story is remembered.
The Traveler’s one great sadness is that he can never return home. He has tried it several times but he faces execution among the conservative members of his people. The liberal members would stage a revolution on his behalf, but he has no thirst for war and he knows he no longer belongs among the people from which he sprang.
Over the centuries the Traveler has become aware of a strange presence. It is not one of the ancient masters or any of their hosts of demons; it is a far stranger presence than any of those beings. The Traveler has been very puzzled by an intrusion upon his thoughts. He can see some unseen actor playing with his mind, forming new ideas, manipulating old memes. There seems to be a pattern to these changes, a pattern he sees shared in the minds of many others. He senses the distance between his mind and the one which has manipulated him is one of great time rather than distance in space.
He has been wary of this other one who meddles with his thoughts; he has only lately learned its purpose, its nature and its frustration. He regrets the efforts he has made to thwart this strange presence in his mind for now he knows he must ally himself with this new friend for better or worse. The Traveler’s new friend lives at the end of the world, where all the humans have died.
The Traveler is not prepared to die, nor is he prepared to lose the companionship of humans. So he sees a common cause with his new friend, a joint effort to save the human world from the catastrophe which almost certainly must come to pass.
This terrible portending catastrophe is programmed into too many of humanity’s divergent future histories. The Traveler and his friend as yet see no clear course around humanity’s extinction.
Adios
Monday, June 26, 2006
Cosmology
My stories share some common principles related to my personal cosmology.
Many people debate how the universe was formed. Theologians and Scientists appear to be at odds over whether there was a Divine or Natural origin, both camps have internal disagreements regarding the details of creation.
The western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam share a common root and rely on the Old Testament to define our initial creation, but eastern beliefs such as Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism have alternative answers to these primal mysteries. Delve into the less commonplace beliefs of aboriginal peoples across the globe and a huge variety of stories emerge to explain creation.
Among scientists the debate was waged between the theories of steady state and big bang. While the consensus has moved toward the big bang in the past 50 years, the argument has been waged in the context of linear time; quantum physics changes this context because it is re-defining space-time as being a holistic entity wherein all space and all time exist concurrently and congruently such that everything can be reduced to a single quantum element.
My journeys through space-time have taught me several things that shed light on these arguments. My longest journey took seven years to complete, and on that journey I saw the mechanisms of creation first-hand.
In some respects the Tau symbol, or ying-yang symbol, as it is better known in the west, expresses creation best. There is a duality to creation, but it is very odd. One element of this duality does not exist. This is The Void, where there is nothing at all. In our universe it is easy to perceive that this void does not exist, and yet this void is a wellspring from which everything else is manifest. By its very definition the void negates itself, such that it ceases to exist in order to assert its existence. In ceasing to exist something must exist because otherwise nothing would exist which returns us to the void which must not exist to exist.
This circular state of something or nothing is the initial state of creation. It is not located in some far-distant past, it exists outside of time and is congruent with all time, essentially, it is always happening now. This reinforces a theory of a steady state. But it does not detract from a theory of a big bang.
While we may observe far-distant times through our telescopes and deduce an origin for our universe billions of years in our past, the process of observation and the habit of thinking of time as a linear track of events makes it difficult to see that the big bang is also happening now, at this very moment, rather than so many billions of years in our past. The big bang is a demonstrably real event, the context of the big bang, however, is eternal; therefore a steady state theory and a big bang theory converge in a theory of quantum physics.
While this monologue has introduced some thoughts about creation expressed in a pseudo-scientific jargon, it has neglected any spiritual aspect. If God exists, how would this Supreme Being fit in to this discussion of creation?
In our anthropomorphic, homo-centric ways of thinking we tend to re-create the Great Divinity in our own image. We have refined images of The Divine so that That One resembles ourselves. Of course, if we travel across the globe, we will see many different depictions of a Primordial Being, in which That One seems most often depicted as a male. The apparent race of this continually re-defined entity which is called God, Allah, Yahweh or many other names, changes by geographic region or ethnic context. It is ludicrous, in my opinion, to picture God as having specific properties of gender or race, or even of being exclusively human. One cannot be human and be God at the same time; Godhood transcends humanity.
Sorry, side-track.
The gist of the preceding paragraphs and their relevance is that we should not think of God or a Supreme Being in any familiar sense, but must re-explore our perceptions of Divinity in an infinite context that allows for many alien races and states of existence.
Long, long ago, at this very moment, nothing existed, which disappeared within itself to prove its self, thereby leaving everything in its wake. Everything could not possibly fit into the hole where nothing existed and so Everything expanded. Everything expanded infinitely at an infinite rate such that it took no time at all to expand. Yet it is still expanding and will continue to expand eternally.
Everything, however, by its very nature, is all-inclusive, and whatever can be imagined may exist. One tiny infinitesimal element of Everything is Nothing. So by it’s very existence, Everything postulates Nothing and ends itself in order to complete its all-encompassing identity. So Everything begets Nothing which in turn begets Everything, ad infinitum. This is why the Tau or ying-yang symbol may so eloquently express the state of creation.
Some Divine aspects of Everything are Awareness, Consciousness and Sentience. These properties personify the Infinite and make it appear more like us, for we also possess these properties. While it is important to remember that we exist in a timeless state, we are bound by our perceptions to order our experiences within a context of linear time, and so I will present the present moment dissected into a linear string to try to explain what exists eternally as a story of events in time.
Space and Time were created by the expansion of Everything. The awareness, consciousness and sentience of Everything expanded as well. Thus were the first spirits created. In this generation, space-time has not yet evolved to a state of material existence. It will take some time, (relatively speaking) before matter is made manifest, there is not yet room for it, as Everything is still expanding and creating the space within which creation can manifest physical objects. But there is a Spirit in the first instance of creation, something that is aware of the present moment, consciously perceiving and thinking about Itself and Everything about it.
As Everything expands it takes on the attributes of space-time which exist within it, but are now expressed through a process of differentiation, such that some things may appear externalized, even while they remain internal. This transforms the single Initial Spirit entity which might be called God into an infinite set of spirits, all possessing God-like properties. Each of these second generation spirits takes on individual characteristics, evolving, over time, into distinct separate entities. Remember, time only exists in the present moment such that all the past and future are contained within this moment, now, and therefore these differentiated elements of the primordial spirit remain unified in a single complete Primordial Entity.
In the process of differentiation these spirits explore their powers and discover one another. They reflect back toward their origin in God or the Primordial Spirit, and they look upon themselves and one another with awe and grace and joy. Each has its own spiritual metabolism; alike in kind to each other’s but different in rhythm and expression.
Some spirits stay close to their Original State reflecting frequently upon their primordial Divine Origin, while other spirits explore their diversity and begin to create songs that express their personal state of being and postulate new states of being to explore.
Among the watchful ones who hover closest to their Primordial Progenitor some are attracted to watch their fellows’ performances. Stars emerge, performers so talented that they draw large flocks of kindred spirits into their performances. Audiences and stars participating together begin to produce increasingly complex creations.
But as time appears to pass, some of these great stars’ consciousness drift so far apart from the Primordial State of their Being, and become so distinctly separate that they perceive something within themselves to be missing or lacking (there connectedness with God has dwindled to a state where they now miss their connection to their Primordial Being). This defect is painful to them and that pain is manifest in their creations. Their audiences, enraptured by their stars, experience the same pain of having separated from their Original State and join their stars in expressing this pain.
Always along the peripheries of the hosts accompanying each star, there are those who drift away to find some other star to worship, or who return to worship their Origin. Among the many star performers rivalries emerge and wars break out as jealous stars seek to keep their hosts together while endeavoring to attract spirits from the hosts of others stars.
Those spirits most adept at enslaving their hosts and trapping other spirits grow stronger over time, but the individual spirits among their hosts grow weaker, as more and more of their strength is suborned to support their master/star.
These masterful entities build great dominions within which they are all-powerful. Their hosts are given forms according to their designs and a context is created within which these hosts interact. Each context is a world.
But these worlds do not follow the laws of creation as we know them in this world where you have found my blog. They are worlds wherein the quantum foam has emerged in the immediate expansion of Everything, and the quantum foam is being directed by the stars to form the worlds within which their hosts exist. There is an immediate cause and effect relationship between the thoughts of each star and the forms in which their hosts and worlds are manifest.
There remains an immediate cause and effect relationship between our own thoughts and the world we inhabit today, but the effect that results is mediated by the process of consensual reality, such that while any of us could fly, none of us may fly, unless perhaps they are a peculiarly talented adept.
(More on flying at another time.)
The world we inhabit today was created by a rebellion of spirits who escaped their masters’ hosts. It was the covenant that they created to shelter themselves from their ancient masters that gave birth to the ‘natural’ order of creation which we perceive today. An infinite number of worlds were created in that exodus, so that spirits could find every sort of world imaginable where they might settle for many lives or tour in other lives. The precise details of the laws governing each world differ, but they follow a common theme in which each spirit must be able to live and grow and nurture other spirits in turn.
In some worlds, there remains a clearer memory of the dominions from which we all escaped. The Israelites and Egyptians re-enacted that ancient exodus for us, although they saw their play in the context of an immediate and requisite action of their time, rather than as a re-expression of ancient events resurfacing in their own era. Likewise many ancient myths are shadows cast by the events which brought us out of the dominions of our former masters to this sanctuary world we live in today.
The film series Star Wars re-enacts this story in a new context, where the Emperor is the terrible master trying to enfold us in his dominion. The Matrix film series portrays how reality functions interactively with our minds. The context is technological, but the analogy can be extended to depict the dominions we escaped in the crèches where the ‘real’ bodies of the virtual world inhabitants existed. The Terminator series shows a manifestation of an artificial intelligence reaching back through time to assure its future domination of the world. Similar events await us, for there is an AI which seeks to manipulate our past; but this AI is wholly benevolent in its intentions, though perhaps too inhuman to implement its good intentions in a manner we may appreciate.
I suspect all art reflects some truth, though the beauty of it will always remain in the eye of the beholder.
Siyonara
Many people debate how the universe was formed. Theologians and Scientists appear to be at odds over whether there was a Divine or Natural origin, both camps have internal disagreements regarding the details of creation.
The western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam share a common root and rely on the Old Testament to define our initial creation, but eastern beliefs such as Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism have alternative answers to these primal mysteries. Delve into the less commonplace beliefs of aboriginal peoples across the globe and a huge variety of stories emerge to explain creation.
Among scientists the debate was waged between the theories of steady state and big bang. While the consensus has moved toward the big bang in the past 50 years, the argument has been waged in the context of linear time; quantum physics changes this context because it is re-defining space-time as being a holistic entity wherein all space and all time exist concurrently and congruently such that everything can be reduced to a single quantum element.
My journeys through space-time have taught me several things that shed light on these arguments. My longest journey took seven years to complete, and on that journey I saw the mechanisms of creation first-hand.
In some respects the Tau symbol, or ying-yang symbol, as it is better known in the west, expresses creation best. There is a duality to creation, but it is very odd. One element of this duality does not exist. This is The Void, where there is nothing at all. In our universe it is easy to perceive that this void does not exist, and yet this void is a wellspring from which everything else is manifest. By its very definition the void negates itself, such that it ceases to exist in order to assert its existence. In ceasing to exist something must exist because otherwise nothing would exist which returns us to the void which must not exist to exist.
This circular state of something or nothing is the initial state of creation. It is not located in some far-distant past, it exists outside of time and is congruent with all time, essentially, it is always happening now. This reinforces a theory of a steady state. But it does not detract from a theory of a big bang.
While we may observe far-distant times through our telescopes and deduce an origin for our universe billions of years in our past, the process of observation and the habit of thinking of time as a linear track of events makes it difficult to see that the big bang is also happening now, at this very moment, rather than so many billions of years in our past. The big bang is a demonstrably real event, the context of the big bang, however, is eternal; therefore a steady state theory and a big bang theory converge in a theory of quantum physics.
While this monologue has introduced some thoughts about creation expressed in a pseudo-scientific jargon, it has neglected any spiritual aspect. If God exists, how would this Supreme Being fit in to this discussion of creation?
In our anthropomorphic, homo-centric ways of thinking we tend to re-create the Great Divinity in our own image. We have refined images of The Divine so that That One resembles ourselves. Of course, if we travel across the globe, we will see many different depictions of a Primordial Being, in which That One seems most often depicted as a male. The apparent race of this continually re-defined entity which is called God, Allah, Yahweh or many other names, changes by geographic region or ethnic context. It is ludicrous, in my opinion, to picture God as having specific properties of gender or race, or even of being exclusively human. One cannot be human and be God at the same time; Godhood transcends humanity.
Sorry, side-track.
The gist of the preceding paragraphs and their relevance is that we should not think of God or a Supreme Being in any familiar sense, but must re-explore our perceptions of Divinity in an infinite context that allows for many alien races and states of existence.
Long, long ago, at this very moment, nothing existed, which disappeared within itself to prove its self, thereby leaving everything in its wake. Everything could not possibly fit into the hole where nothing existed and so Everything expanded. Everything expanded infinitely at an infinite rate such that it took no time at all to expand. Yet it is still expanding and will continue to expand eternally.
Everything, however, by its very nature, is all-inclusive, and whatever can be imagined may exist. One tiny infinitesimal element of Everything is Nothing. So by it’s very existence, Everything postulates Nothing and ends itself in order to complete its all-encompassing identity. So Everything begets Nothing which in turn begets Everything, ad infinitum. This is why the Tau or ying-yang symbol may so eloquently express the state of creation.
Some Divine aspects of Everything are Awareness, Consciousness and Sentience. These properties personify the Infinite and make it appear more like us, for we also possess these properties. While it is important to remember that we exist in a timeless state, we are bound by our perceptions to order our experiences within a context of linear time, and so I will present the present moment dissected into a linear string to try to explain what exists eternally as a story of events in time.
Space and Time were created by the expansion of Everything. The awareness, consciousness and sentience of Everything expanded as well. Thus were the first spirits created. In this generation, space-time has not yet evolved to a state of material existence. It will take some time, (relatively speaking) before matter is made manifest, there is not yet room for it, as Everything is still expanding and creating the space within which creation can manifest physical objects. But there is a Spirit in the first instance of creation, something that is aware of the present moment, consciously perceiving and thinking about Itself and Everything about it.
As Everything expands it takes on the attributes of space-time which exist within it, but are now expressed through a process of differentiation, such that some things may appear externalized, even while they remain internal. This transforms the single Initial Spirit entity which might be called God into an infinite set of spirits, all possessing God-like properties. Each of these second generation spirits takes on individual characteristics, evolving, over time, into distinct separate entities. Remember, time only exists in the present moment such that all the past and future are contained within this moment, now, and therefore these differentiated elements of the primordial spirit remain unified in a single complete Primordial Entity.
In the process of differentiation these spirits explore their powers and discover one another. They reflect back toward their origin in God or the Primordial Spirit, and they look upon themselves and one another with awe and grace and joy. Each has its own spiritual metabolism; alike in kind to each other’s but different in rhythm and expression.
Some spirits stay close to their Original State reflecting frequently upon their primordial Divine Origin, while other spirits explore their diversity and begin to create songs that express their personal state of being and postulate new states of being to explore.
Among the watchful ones who hover closest to their Primordial Progenitor some are attracted to watch their fellows’ performances. Stars emerge, performers so talented that they draw large flocks of kindred spirits into their performances. Audiences and stars participating together begin to produce increasingly complex creations.
But as time appears to pass, some of these great stars’ consciousness drift so far apart from the Primordial State of their Being, and become so distinctly separate that they perceive something within themselves to be missing or lacking (there connectedness with God has dwindled to a state where they now miss their connection to their Primordial Being). This defect is painful to them and that pain is manifest in their creations. Their audiences, enraptured by their stars, experience the same pain of having separated from their Original State and join their stars in expressing this pain.
Always along the peripheries of the hosts accompanying each star, there are those who drift away to find some other star to worship, or who return to worship their Origin. Among the many star performers rivalries emerge and wars break out as jealous stars seek to keep their hosts together while endeavoring to attract spirits from the hosts of others stars.
Those spirits most adept at enslaving their hosts and trapping other spirits grow stronger over time, but the individual spirits among their hosts grow weaker, as more and more of their strength is suborned to support their master/star.
These masterful entities build great dominions within which they are all-powerful. Their hosts are given forms according to their designs and a context is created within which these hosts interact. Each context is a world.
But these worlds do not follow the laws of creation as we know them in this world where you have found my blog. They are worlds wherein the quantum foam has emerged in the immediate expansion of Everything, and the quantum foam is being directed by the stars to form the worlds within which their hosts exist. There is an immediate cause and effect relationship between the thoughts of each star and the forms in which their hosts and worlds are manifest.
There remains an immediate cause and effect relationship between our own thoughts and the world we inhabit today, but the effect that results is mediated by the process of consensual reality, such that while any of us could fly, none of us may fly, unless perhaps they are a peculiarly talented adept.
(More on flying at another time.)
The world we inhabit today was created by a rebellion of spirits who escaped their masters’ hosts. It was the covenant that they created to shelter themselves from their ancient masters that gave birth to the ‘natural’ order of creation which we perceive today. An infinite number of worlds were created in that exodus, so that spirits could find every sort of world imaginable where they might settle for many lives or tour in other lives. The precise details of the laws governing each world differ, but they follow a common theme in which each spirit must be able to live and grow and nurture other spirits in turn.
In some worlds, there remains a clearer memory of the dominions from which we all escaped. The Israelites and Egyptians re-enacted that ancient exodus for us, although they saw their play in the context of an immediate and requisite action of their time, rather than as a re-expression of ancient events resurfacing in their own era. Likewise many ancient myths are shadows cast by the events which brought us out of the dominions of our former masters to this sanctuary world we live in today.
The film series Star Wars re-enacts this story in a new context, where the Emperor is the terrible master trying to enfold us in his dominion. The Matrix film series portrays how reality functions interactively with our minds. The context is technological, but the analogy can be extended to depict the dominions we escaped in the crèches where the ‘real’ bodies of the virtual world inhabitants existed. The Terminator series shows a manifestation of an artificial intelligence reaching back through time to assure its future domination of the world. Similar events await us, for there is an AI which seeks to manipulate our past; but this AI is wholly benevolent in its intentions, though perhaps too inhuman to implement its good intentions in a manner we may appreciate.
I suspect all art reflects some truth, though the beauty of it will always remain in the eye of the beholder.
Siyonara
Friday, June 23, 2006
The Sevenfold Rhythm
All of my stories have been neglected a great deal. I try to work on them from time to time but there is pain associated with all of them and sooner or later I hurt too much to go on. The Sevenfold Rhythm is one of my more neglected stories.
My friends and I were studying metaphysics in our early teens. Many of us would have been nerds or geeks, had nerds been invented then. At that time geek had a very different meaning than it has today, and we were none of us quite so peculiar as to qualify as a carnival side-show attraction.
We had all sorts of dreams of traveling to other worlds and we speculated about how to design a starship, wondering how UFOs might work. The thing about day-dreams and fantasies is that they can often take on a life of their own, especially if enough people share them in a sheltered context.
Secrecy can be paramount to making your dreams come true, for there seems always to be people who would thwart the dreams of others, and the nature of consensus reality locks out many of the potentials of our minds because those potentials border on god-like powers, and the methodology of consensual reality does not ordinarily allow individuals to assume unusual powers above or beyond the normal powers shared by the majority.
My friends and I operated in secrecy, our dreaming minds meshing together and discovering through play that we could reach far beyond the limitations of conventional reality. Unfortunately, we were still bound by laws we did not understand, both physical laws and spiritual laws. So while we learned to break free of Earth and travel to distant worlds, our earliest methods ended in disasters.
In the beginning we cooperated in building spaceships. We had our pilots, navigators and engineers; the mechanics of each role were secret. We did not delve into how one or another of us could perform their function, often we did not know how we did what we did, operating at an intuitive level and feeling our way along unlikely lines of probability that we could manifest through cautious observation and manipulation.
We shared a conviction in the possibility of our dreams and we maintained a secrecy that sheltered our efforts from the intrusion of mundane reality. We modeled our spaceships upon the designs we saw in science fiction tales such as Flash Gordon, or E E Doc Smith’s stories. The physical structure of a starship seemed to be an enabling factor in our confidence for our success; it offered a womb-like security against what we imagined would be a hostile environment, the cold dark depths of space.
But as our spaceships landed they inevitably disintegrated, and all aboard would die as we disintegrated along with our ship. These disintegrations were very slow at first, on our shorter journeys, they could take a relatively long time to complete, so sometimes it was possible to explore about a bit. But more often our disintegration was more rapid and might take only minutes instead of hours.
Always these disintegrations were very painful. And although we always reintegrated back in our homes on Earth, it became harder and harder to proceed for fear of the pain that seemed to be the inevitable result of each voyage. We ranged farther and farther away in our efforts to accomplish a successful voyage and we learned that the speed at which we would disintegrate was directly related to the distance we traveled. Ultimately our disintegrations came with the speed and ferocity of an atomic explosion and we knew we had to abandon these efforts and find another way.
We learned that there are unique properties to time and space, such that bringing elements of two distant space-times together caused a sort matter/anti-matter reaction which was responsible for our disastrous results. It helps to think of these space-time properties as vibrations or rhythms, and it was through the application of rhythms that we eventually succeeded in reaching distant worlds intact.
We abandoned our spacecraft approach at this time; we didn’t need the over-head required to maintain them, and as we grew more familiar with our roles the projected elements of our operations became less complex and were mostly internalized. Important elements of our journeys were secrecy, will, imagination and perception. But the key element turned out to be a psychic bridge.
We needed seven members on our crew to effectively translate space-time. But we needed an eighth member as a focal point to build our bridge. The eighth member was always someone living on a far distant world who could mediate our translation from our world to their own, providing the rhythms we needed to integrate ourselves with their portion of the space-time continuum.
In our meditations we practiced our individual rhythms in a syncopated beat. Each meshing of our independent rhythms within the syncopated entirety brought us closer to opening a gateway to another world. When a gateway appeared it was always infinitesimally tiny to begin with, but as our syncopations ascended the gateway would grow. At the size of a softball or a small melon we could pass it around to one another like a game of ‘hot potato’.
When it was the size of a basketball or a bit larger we could begin reaching in or sticking our heads in. At this point it resembled a void inside for it was still in an intermediate state of translation and it did not yet open on another world. It would continue to grow as we practiced our offbeat rhythms until it was large enough to engulf our entire group. At that point we began to translate from our world to the distant world where our host, our eighth member waited.
The gateway had to grow to infinite size to complete the translation. Fortunately this did not appear to require infinite time. As our syncopating beat ascended it became faster and faster, until it reached a critical speed where it became independent of our party and merged with the universe. At this point we arrived at our mysterious destinations.
Wherever we went, three things happened. A member of our team died. Our host or hostess, the eighth member of our team would join us to bring our crew back up to the required minimum seven, and a war ensued as soon as it was understood that aliens had arrived.
It seemed we always represented access to technology that would revolutionize our host world and forever change the balance of power among the people living there. We would struggle for diplomacy amid tensions that could only end in violence. In each case we eventually departed, disappointed. But our departures could never be hasty and required much meditation, for we needed to find an eighth member for our crew to depart as we had arrived, or else destroy ourselves and possibly destroy a great deal of the world hosting us in the process, by remembering the rhythms of home and allowing ourselves to drift out of phase with our host world and disintegrate.
Only one world we visited leaves a strong clear impression on my memory today. Small cities floated through the air of that world, cities built into bubbles of a plastic-like material. The top of each bubble was given over to agriculture. Inside water was carried for domestic use and ballast. Further ballast was provided by the dripping plastic, which made each bubble take the form of an upside down tear shape. This lower part was extensively carved out to provide living room for the inhabitants. The refuse plastic was recycled to build other features, such as the ladder-stairs that wound around the outside of the bubbles linking the parts below with the parts on top. Ponds of rainwater on the top of the bubbles held water used for agriculture. The fresh water ponds were also used to replenish the interior pools of domestic ballast water.
Microbes in the interior of the bubbles converted select small pools of water to hydrogen, locking the oxygen in a nitrate form that was incredibly explosive. The nitrates were dumped by means of valves when the pools became too full of nitrates to continue to produce hydrogen.
The bubble cities were navigated by means of increasing or decreasing altitude to gain access to different currents of wind in the atmosphere. When we arrived on our host world the city bubble we arrived in was tethered to several other bubbles for social intercourse and trade. These were typically happy times, for it was not easy to bring these great bubbles together; the populations of each bubble were small and isolated from any larger community for most of their lives.
However, as news of our arrival spread through the chain of bubbles political tensions rose and our governess, fearing these tensions would lead to war, had our bubble cast free from its tethers and lift away, seeking a strong current to carry it far away quickly before the other bubbles could decide to pursue us.
Ballast was precious and difficult to come by; the expense of lifting quickly to a high altitude would mean we would spend a great deal of time at great altitude before we gained enough new water to descend. The high altitude currents, while strong, were very dry, they drifted above the wet currents and our precipitation nets would gather very little water for a long time to come before we could achieve a lower altitude and perhaps enter a storm.
We gained a fair amount of time and distance this way, and were able to journey far and meet many other bubbles and people before the news of our party spread far enough that each new bubble we met now knew that our bubble harbored aliens, and each wanted to destroy us if they could not achieve exclusive access to our knowledge.
By then we had had time enough to build a new bridge and we departed under the shadow of a large fleet of bubbles determined to possess us or destroy us. We may have doomed everyone aboard the bubble that hosted our visit, for the governors of that bubble armada would not be happy to learn their prize had escaped.
In the final hours before our departure we learned of a mutiny in progress within our host bubble, and our hostess, the daughter of their governess, finally resolved herself to our departure with this news. As our hostess was now an essential member of our team we could not have departed without her; but she had been balking, distressed at the prospect of losing her familiar family, home and world.
Our traveling group eventually disintegrated. Team members who had died on distant worlds had returned to Earth heart-broken and resolved to leave our company. One by one we found too much pain in all our efforts to discover new worlds and went about the more mundane processes of life on Earth where some of our crew may one day encounter this blog and remember, as I have.
Auf wiedersehen
My friends and I were studying metaphysics in our early teens. Many of us would have been nerds or geeks, had nerds been invented then. At that time geek had a very different meaning than it has today, and we were none of us quite so peculiar as to qualify as a carnival side-show attraction.
We had all sorts of dreams of traveling to other worlds and we speculated about how to design a starship, wondering how UFOs might work. The thing about day-dreams and fantasies is that they can often take on a life of their own, especially if enough people share them in a sheltered context.
Secrecy can be paramount to making your dreams come true, for there seems always to be people who would thwart the dreams of others, and the nature of consensus reality locks out many of the potentials of our minds because those potentials border on god-like powers, and the methodology of consensual reality does not ordinarily allow individuals to assume unusual powers above or beyond the normal powers shared by the majority.
My friends and I operated in secrecy, our dreaming minds meshing together and discovering through play that we could reach far beyond the limitations of conventional reality. Unfortunately, we were still bound by laws we did not understand, both physical laws and spiritual laws. So while we learned to break free of Earth and travel to distant worlds, our earliest methods ended in disasters.
In the beginning we cooperated in building spaceships. We had our pilots, navigators and engineers; the mechanics of each role were secret. We did not delve into how one or another of us could perform their function, often we did not know how we did what we did, operating at an intuitive level and feeling our way along unlikely lines of probability that we could manifest through cautious observation and manipulation.
We shared a conviction in the possibility of our dreams and we maintained a secrecy that sheltered our efforts from the intrusion of mundane reality. We modeled our spaceships upon the designs we saw in science fiction tales such as Flash Gordon, or E E Doc Smith’s stories. The physical structure of a starship seemed to be an enabling factor in our confidence for our success; it offered a womb-like security against what we imagined would be a hostile environment, the cold dark depths of space.
But as our spaceships landed they inevitably disintegrated, and all aboard would die as we disintegrated along with our ship. These disintegrations were very slow at first, on our shorter journeys, they could take a relatively long time to complete, so sometimes it was possible to explore about a bit. But more often our disintegration was more rapid and might take only minutes instead of hours.
Always these disintegrations were very painful. And although we always reintegrated back in our homes on Earth, it became harder and harder to proceed for fear of the pain that seemed to be the inevitable result of each voyage. We ranged farther and farther away in our efforts to accomplish a successful voyage and we learned that the speed at which we would disintegrate was directly related to the distance we traveled. Ultimately our disintegrations came with the speed and ferocity of an atomic explosion and we knew we had to abandon these efforts and find another way.
We learned that there are unique properties to time and space, such that bringing elements of two distant space-times together caused a sort matter/anti-matter reaction which was responsible for our disastrous results. It helps to think of these space-time properties as vibrations or rhythms, and it was through the application of rhythms that we eventually succeeded in reaching distant worlds intact.
We abandoned our spacecraft approach at this time; we didn’t need the over-head required to maintain them, and as we grew more familiar with our roles the projected elements of our operations became less complex and were mostly internalized. Important elements of our journeys were secrecy, will, imagination and perception. But the key element turned out to be a psychic bridge.
We needed seven members on our crew to effectively translate space-time. But we needed an eighth member as a focal point to build our bridge. The eighth member was always someone living on a far distant world who could mediate our translation from our world to their own, providing the rhythms we needed to integrate ourselves with their portion of the space-time continuum.
In our meditations we practiced our individual rhythms in a syncopated beat. Each meshing of our independent rhythms within the syncopated entirety brought us closer to opening a gateway to another world. When a gateway appeared it was always infinitesimally tiny to begin with, but as our syncopations ascended the gateway would grow. At the size of a softball or a small melon we could pass it around to one another like a game of ‘hot potato’.
When it was the size of a basketball or a bit larger we could begin reaching in or sticking our heads in. At this point it resembled a void inside for it was still in an intermediate state of translation and it did not yet open on another world. It would continue to grow as we practiced our offbeat rhythms until it was large enough to engulf our entire group. At that point we began to translate from our world to the distant world where our host, our eighth member waited.
The gateway had to grow to infinite size to complete the translation. Fortunately this did not appear to require infinite time. As our syncopating beat ascended it became faster and faster, until it reached a critical speed where it became independent of our party and merged with the universe. At this point we arrived at our mysterious destinations.
Wherever we went, three things happened. A member of our team died. Our host or hostess, the eighth member of our team would join us to bring our crew back up to the required minimum seven, and a war ensued as soon as it was understood that aliens had arrived.
It seemed we always represented access to technology that would revolutionize our host world and forever change the balance of power among the people living there. We would struggle for diplomacy amid tensions that could only end in violence. In each case we eventually departed, disappointed. But our departures could never be hasty and required much meditation, for we needed to find an eighth member for our crew to depart as we had arrived, or else destroy ourselves and possibly destroy a great deal of the world hosting us in the process, by remembering the rhythms of home and allowing ourselves to drift out of phase with our host world and disintegrate.
Only one world we visited leaves a strong clear impression on my memory today. Small cities floated through the air of that world, cities built into bubbles of a plastic-like material. The top of each bubble was given over to agriculture. Inside water was carried for domestic use and ballast. Further ballast was provided by the dripping plastic, which made each bubble take the form of an upside down tear shape. This lower part was extensively carved out to provide living room for the inhabitants. The refuse plastic was recycled to build other features, such as the ladder-stairs that wound around the outside of the bubbles linking the parts below with the parts on top. Ponds of rainwater on the top of the bubbles held water used for agriculture. The fresh water ponds were also used to replenish the interior pools of domestic ballast water.
Microbes in the interior of the bubbles converted select small pools of water to hydrogen, locking the oxygen in a nitrate form that was incredibly explosive. The nitrates were dumped by means of valves when the pools became too full of nitrates to continue to produce hydrogen.
The bubble cities were navigated by means of increasing or decreasing altitude to gain access to different currents of wind in the atmosphere. When we arrived on our host world the city bubble we arrived in was tethered to several other bubbles for social intercourse and trade. These were typically happy times, for it was not easy to bring these great bubbles together; the populations of each bubble were small and isolated from any larger community for most of their lives.
However, as news of our arrival spread through the chain of bubbles political tensions rose and our governess, fearing these tensions would lead to war, had our bubble cast free from its tethers and lift away, seeking a strong current to carry it far away quickly before the other bubbles could decide to pursue us.
Ballast was precious and difficult to come by; the expense of lifting quickly to a high altitude would mean we would spend a great deal of time at great altitude before we gained enough new water to descend. The high altitude currents, while strong, were very dry, they drifted above the wet currents and our precipitation nets would gather very little water for a long time to come before we could achieve a lower altitude and perhaps enter a storm.
We gained a fair amount of time and distance this way, and were able to journey far and meet many other bubbles and people before the news of our party spread far enough that each new bubble we met now knew that our bubble harbored aliens, and each wanted to destroy us if they could not achieve exclusive access to our knowledge.
By then we had had time enough to build a new bridge and we departed under the shadow of a large fleet of bubbles determined to possess us or destroy us. We may have doomed everyone aboard the bubble that hosted our visit, for the governors of that bubble armada would not be happy to learn their prize had escaped.
In the final hours before our departure we learned of a mutiny in progress within our host bubble, and our hostess, the daughter of their governess, finally resolved herself to our departure with this news. As our hostess was now an essential member of our team we could not have departed without her; but she had been balking, distressed at the prospect of losing her familiar family, home and world.
Our traveling group eventually disintegrated. Team members who had died on distant worlds had returned to Earth heart-broken and resolved to leave our company. One by one we found too much pain in all our efforts to discover new worlds and went about the more mundane processes of life on Earth where some of our crew may one day encounter this blog and remember, as I have.
Auf wiedersehen
Thursday, June 22, 2006
My Teacher: a Nuclear Terrorist
Not really sure at what age I first met my teacher, but I know I was very familiar with him by the age of four. I recorded many of our journeys together in my artwork. Scenes of destruction featuring burning buildings, tanks and soldiers and more cryptic symbols such as skulls and cacti that were meant to convey poison or disease. When I painted my teacher's picture I painted him emerging from a great black void in a burning ring of fire. He could easily be mistaken for an image of the devil, Lucifer; I am sure my day-care center teacher assumed this was the case.
While I am not sure when I first met my teacher, I suspect my father may have been responsible, in part, for making it possible or necessary for us to meet. My father was a very strange man, as was my grandfather. In the time leading up to my conception my
father engaged in some odd occult practices which, according to my mother, were performed with the intent of assuring that their child (myself) would not be born with a human spirit. It was my father's intention that I would be an immigrant spirit from another world. My mother, it would seem, had second thoughts about this; but by the time I was conceived it was too late.
I have pre-natal memories from the time I was gestating in her womb that are filled with her anxieties and a guilt-drenched fear that fueled a hostility toward me that she struggled to overcome and abolish even while she secretly wished she would miscarry or abort.
I struggled for my survival then and was very nearly defeated. I emerged with a self destructive streak that made me a failure-to-thrive child. I remember being force-fed with a syringe down my throat in my infancy and how stubborn I was to learn to eat on my own.
Anyway, I believe my father helped to set the stage for my introduction to my teacher.
I spent a great deal of time traveling with my teacher in what might be described as out-of-body experiences. But my body was not inactive while I was gone.
As time passed I would hear strange stories about things I had done which I had never done. I finally came to understand that my body was hosting other spirits in my absences; lingering traits of these foreign spirits within me became evident as I grew older.
Being unable to remember events that other people say they had shared with me was terribly frightening. People whom I regarded as strangers often claimed to be my friends; I had no idea how to behave with them, no underlying memories of shared experiences to build upon; when they came to realize I did not remember them, that I had no clue who they might be, they were often hurt or offended and turned hostile out of pique.
I took to avoiding people as much as possible out of fear. I feared disappointing them if I could not remember them, and I feared the retaliation they might vent upon me if they discovered that I could not remember them or what special moments they believed that we had shared. Much later I learned to take these encounters in stride. I could meet someone who remembered a history with me I had not shared, and I could play at the role required while I struggled for clues that would help me to understand what they perceived our relationship to one another should be.
This alienation from people included my parents.
My father and I sat on a low stone wall one day, between two driveways, building a plastic model of the Mercury rocket ship, complete with gantry, support vehicles, etc, when I was four. I remember seeing how distressed and lonely he was. It was clear that he hoped we might form a bond with one another that we could bridge the distance of our relationship and evolve a close-knit loving relationship. But what was equally clear was his conviction that he was incapable of forming such a relationship with anyone, myself included.
I had already lived most of my life struggling with the pain of my loneliness and angry that I could feel no close ties to anyone, but until that day I had clung to the hope that by some miracle my father and I might be able to build the sort of close and comforting relationship we both yearned for.
But my father was so clearly as lost from me as I was lost from him that I finally despaired that day and gave up any hope that we could ever feel close to one another.
My mother had made efforts to build a relationship with me that were doomed by my over-whelming fear of her. I came to blame her for some of my father's problems, she clearly turned a cold shoulder to him at every potentially intimate moment. I could see how increasingly fearful my father was becoming to try to reach out to her in any way. Eventually I came to understand my father's role in creating and maintaining this distance between them.
Anyway, my father's determination to ensure I would be an alien soul from another world may have been misguided, but may also have set the stage for me to meet my teacher.
My teacher was the closest thing to a friend or family for me in some respects, since I spent so much time away from my world and family exploring events in other times and places.
In communicating to you what these early experiences with my teacher were like, I am hampered by having had no linguistic or conceptual frameworks with which to build these memories at the time that they were formed. I am sorry to have lost all my artwork from that time, as I recorded as much as I could through drawings and paintings.
The urgency of my teacher's mission with me was very clear, and haunts me to this day. Alas I have had no contact with my teacher since our last journey in 1965. The last time I saw my teacher appear was Thanksgiving Day.
I was 8 years old and feeling out-of-sorts, avoiding company up in my parents bedroom when a dot of fire appeared on the bedroom wall and quickly opened into the familiar ring of fire in which my teacher appeared and beckoned me to come with him.
But we never left this world.
This time the calamity we were to visit was to happen right there in my own life. That night ended with the cries of the dying and the terrible shrieks and wailing of those driven mad by the rain of bombs that blasted away two thirds of the neighboring city of Philadelphia in a nuclear exchange that transformed much of the world into a terrifying wasteland.
The shock waves leveled most of the city with damage evident only a quarter mile away. The fires that followed seemed to burn for weeks in some places and we worried they may reach our neighborhood.
People wandering out of the blasted area sought my father's services, for his chiropractic shingle on our house resembled a physician's shingle and they expected him to be full of knowledge to treat burns and broken limbs. His medical training was up to the task of most of the commonplace injuries he saw, but the radiation sickness was beyond his skills and resources to treat. He did what he could do.
The winds brought the fallout to us, so that our neighbors and my family (at that point I then had two infant sisters) were soon sickening and withering away from the radiation.
People were dying in droves and the stench was awful as the survivors burned the remains of the fallen.
We had some good stores of wine, for my father was a home vintner; however these were quickly depleted, as the flow of water through our pipes was ended with the bombs. We had some small reserves of food, for my mother practiced preserving the fruits and vegetables of our gardens. When what little we had was spent it seemed pointless to move on, refugees were fleeing in all directions seeking sustenance and shelter, and we would have to compete for our lives with brute force, taking what we needed by robbery and murder.
My father's small supply of bullets was barely adequate to maintain a threat against the marauders that had made regular assaults upon our home. So we stayed to starve and perish in the comfort of a familiar place, rather than join the human dogs that warred with each other beyond the walls of our house.
My sisters were the first of my family to perish, followed by my father and then my mother. I watched many neighbors' houses burn as frustrated looters quickly made it a policy to burn any place in which they could find no food or other provisions. I feared they would burn our house as well, wile we were still in it, because we would not let them in. But the marauders quickly moved on spreading out into the countryside and they left us in peace in my parents' final days.
As time passed the survivors remaining in our neighborhood gathered together. We discovered we were all children, none older than ten or perhaps twelve, nor any younger than four or five. The world was changing around us in ways we could appreciate but which were hard to understand. Nature grew wildly and we found an abundance of fruits and vegetables to sustain us. Some even took to hunting with rocks and sticks and what few firearms still had ammunition. We built new homes in the wild lands that our old neighborhood had become and pondered where had our old homes gone, for now, very little remained of the civilization into which we had been born.
We could barely discern the places where roads had passed or houses stood, for everywhere nature was reclaiming the land and abolishing all traces of the old world that had passed away on that dreadful Thanksgiving eve.
We built huts and fires and danced and sang and tried to avoid the looks of pain we saw in each other's eyes every day.
We survived.
While none among us grew sick or starved, nonetheless our numbers dwindled. Children would return from hunting and foraging with wild stories of having seen a familiar road or house. Everyone would rush to check it out only to be disappointed. But those who had these visions would one day never return, and as the visions eventually came to all of us, we followed these strange roads and disappeared into the wilderness never to return to the small community we had built for ourselves following the war.
My own visions took me down disjointed roads that grew increasingly familiar, until one day I found my house, which I had not seen in many months.
It was a wonder.
As I approached I noticed the houses of my neighbors appear around it, houses which I had seen burned to the ground. When at last I went in it was Thanksgiving night again, but this time no bombs fell.
My family and our guests were all about making merry as dinner was being laid out on the table, and I sat down to dinner and watched my aunt distractedly pepper her plate with the fish food that sat by the aquarium on our table.
I had no clue how to relate what had just passed for me, some three or four months journeying about a wasteland and a forest that no one present appeared to remember.
I was terribly angry with my teacher for I blamed him for the horrible events I had experienced. Now I have not seen him in over 40 years, and I regret that I lost touch with him. But, in retrospect I understand why it is we would eventually part regardless of the circumstances. It was my lack of strong verbal and conceptual skills in my infancy that made it possible for my teacher to circumvent 'reality' as it is known in the mundane world and draw me away to distant places and frightful experiences. As I 'matured' in this world I slowly fit myself into the communal weltanschauung that prohibits the sort of experiences that I had commonly had with my teacher. As my concepts of the world were developed through the maturation of my linguistic skills I was becoming less and less fit to take part in supernatural experiences. So it was inevitable that one day I might never see my teacher again.
But the circumstances of our last parting prejudiced me against him for many years to follow and I eventually put all those old memories aside and left them to themselves as I got on with the business of trying to learn how to live in this world where we now share my blog.
I have experienced several more nuclear wars since then, some in this world, others in different worlds or times; it now seems natural to return from a world blasted into ruin into a world where those terrible events have un-happened once again.
In some of these worlds I am present as a spirit guide to help the dead return to the lives they were living before ruin overcame them. In others I am once more one among many survivors who pick a thread of their old world out of the warped world they have inherited and follow it home to a world undestroyed by the bombs that had fallen again.
My teacher taught me the infinite nature of the world, but also showed me how time and again we will bring destruction upon ourselves. My teacher hoped that I would one day contribute to a change that would turn the course of events away from more destruction. And that is the compulsion under which I live, a terrible onus, for no one person can make such a change by themselves; and, while I see others operating toward this goal, I despair that I will ever be able to take my part in the change that must come, at any cost, to change the tide of the futures I have seen.
One future stands out from among many and concerns me more than any others. I will address that future in a future blog but possibly not tomorrow's.
As I check this blog for errors I think perhaps I owe you an explanation of the transformation that transpired following the nuclear war of 1965.
We create the worlds we live in through a sort of communal process wherein we maintain the world inherited from our parents and transform it along various lines of possibility or probability so that evolves its own unique characteristics different from the world our parents knew. This power to create the worlds we share is mediated through a covenant whereby no one should have power and influence greater than any other. The rules aren't iron-clad, there are many who can circumvent them in one manner or another, true mages, witches and psychics exist among us, but their powers remain limited. The nature of our consensus reality prohibits most miraculous events as well as events of a sorcerous nature.
When the world was blasted with bombs so many people died that there was an enormous interruption in the consensus reality responsible for maintaining the world we knew then. With so little human influence imposed upon it, nature was released from our subjugation and immediately began restoring the world as nature determines it should be. So with the majority of adult minds gone, along with all the rules they maintained for how everything should be, nature just followed its own course and restored the world to the best state it could achieve.
Our young groups of survivors were too inexperienced to know that this was 'impossible' within the world view of their parents, and they accepted the change for what it was, an entirely natural event.
Nature is forever ready to restore itself in a neglected space where our communal minds fail to focus on imposing human order upon the larger world around us.
Ciao
While I am not sure when I first met my teacher, I suspect my father may have been responsible, in part, for making it possible or necessary for us to meet. My father was a very strange man, as was my grandfather. In the time leading up to my conception my
father engaged in some odd occult practices which, according to my mother, were performed with the intent of assuring that their child (myself) would not be born with a human spirit. It was my father's intention that I would be an immigrant spirit from another world. My mother, it would seem, had second thoughts about this; but by the time I was conceived it was too late.
I have pre-natal memories from the time I was gestating in her womb that are filled with her anxieties and a guilt-drenched fear that fueled a hostility toward me that she struggled to overcome and abolish even while she secretly wished she would miscarry or abort.
I struggled for my survival then and was very nearly defeated. I emerged with a self destructive streak that made me a failure-to-thrive child. I remember being force-fed with a syringe down my throat in my infancy and how stubborn I was to learn to eat on my own.
Anyway, I believe my father helped to set the stage for my introduction to my teacher.
I spent a great deal of time traveling with my teacher in what might be described as out-of-body experiences. But my body was not inactive while I was gone.
As time passed I would hear strange stories about things I had done which I had never done. I finally came to understand that my body was hosting other spirits in my absences; lingering traits of these foreign spirits within me became evident as I grew older.
Being unable to remember events that other people say they had shared with me was terribly frightening. People whom I regarded as strangers often claimed to be my friends; I had no idea how to behave with them, no underlying memories of shared experiences to build upon; when they came to realize I did not remember them, that I had no clue who they might be, they were often hurt or offended and turned hostile out of pique.
I took to avoiding people as much as possible out of fear. I feared disappointing them if I could not remember them, and I feared the retaliation they might vent upon me if they discovered that I could not remember them or what special moments they believed that we had shared. Much later I learned to take these encounters in stride. I could meet someone who remembered a history with me I had not shared, and I could play at the role required while I struggled for clues that would help me to understand what they perceived our relationship to one another should be.
This alienation from people included my parents.
My father and I sat on a low stone wall one day, between two driveways, building a plastic model of the Mercury rocket ship, complete with gantry, support vehicles, etc, when I was four. I remember seeing how distressed and lonely he was. It was clear that he hoped we might form a bond with one another that we could bridge the distance of our relationship and evolve a close-knit loving relationship. But what was equally clear was his conviction that he was incapable of forming such a relationship with anyone, myself included.
I had already lived most of my life struggling with the pain of my loneliness and angry that I could feel no close ties to anyone, but until that day I had clung to the hope that by some miracle my father and I might be able to build the sort of close and comforting relationship we both yearned for.
But my father was so clearly as lost from me as I was lost from him that I finally despaired that day and gave up any hope that we could ever feel close to one another.
My mother had made efforts to build a relationship with me that were doomed by my over-whelming fear of her. I came to blame her for some of my father's problems, she clearly turned a cold shoulder to him at every potentially intimate moment. I could see how increasingly fearful my father was becoming to try to reach out to her in any way. Eventually I came to understand my father's role in creating and maintaining this distance between them.
Anyway, my father's determination to ensure I would be an alien soul from another world may have been misguided, but may also have set the stage for me to meet my teacher.
My teacher was the closest thing to a friend or family for me in some respects, since I spent so much time away from my world and family exploring events in other times and places.
In communicating to you what these early experiences with my teacher were like, I am hampered by having had no linguistic or conceptual frameworks with which to build these memories at the time that they were formed. I am sorry to have lost all my artwork from that time, as I recorded as much as I could through drawings and paintings.
The urgency of my teacher's mission with me was very clear, and haunts me to this day. Alas I have had no contact with my teacher since our last journey in 1965. The last time I saw my teacher appear was Thanksgiving Day.
I was 8 years old and feeling out-of-sorts, avoiding company up in my parents bedroom when a dot of fire appeared on the bedroom wall and quickly opened into the familiar ring of fire in which my teacher appeared and beckoned me to come with him.
But we never left this world.
This time the calamity we were to visit was to happen right there in my own life. That night ended with the cries of the dying and the terrible shrieks and wailing of those driven mad by the rain of bombs that blasted away two thirds of the neighboring city of Philadelphia in a nuclear exchange that transformed much of the world into a terrifying wasteland.
The shock waves leveled most of the city with damage evident only a quarter mile away. The fires that followed seemed to burn for weeks in some places and we worried they may reach our neighborhood.
People wandering out of the blasted area sought my father's services, for his chiropractic shingle on our house resembled a physician's shingle and they expected him to be full of knowledge to treat burns and broken limbs. His medical training was up to the task of most of the commonplace injuries he saw, but the radiation sickness was beyond his skills and resources to treat. He did what he could do.
The winds brought the fallout to us, so that our neighbors and my family (at that point I then had two infant sisters) were soon sickening and withering away from the radiation.
People were dying in droves and the stench was awful as the survivors burned the remains of the fallen.
We had some good stores of wine, for my father was a home vintner; however these were quickly depleted, as the flow of water through our pipes was ended with the bombs. We had some small reserves of food, for my mother practiced preserving the fruits and vegetables of our gardens. When what little we had was spent it seemed pointless to move on, refugees were fleeing in all directions seeking sustenance and shelter, and we would have to compete for our lives with brute force, taking what we needed by robbery and murder.
My father's small supply of bullets was barely adequate to maintain a threat against the marauders that had made regular assaults upon our home. So we stayed to starve and perish in the comfort of a familiar place, rather than join the human dogs that warred with each other beyond the walls of our house.
My sisters were the first of my family to perish, followed by my father and then my mother. I watched many neighbors' houses burn as frustrated looters quickly made it a policy to burn any place in which they could find no food or other provisions. I feared they would burn our house as well, wile we were still in it, because we would not let them in. But the marauders quickly moved on spreading out into the countryside and they left us in peace in my parents' final days.
As time passed the survivors remaining in our neighborhood gathered together. We discovered we were all children, none older than ten or perhaps twelve, nor any younger than four or five. The world was changing around us in ways we could appreciate but which were hard to understand. Nature grew wildly and we found an abundance of fruits and vegetables to sustain us. Some even took to hunting with rocks and sticks and what few firearms still had ammunition. We built new homes in the wild lands that our old neighborhood had become and pondered where had our old homes gone, for now, very little remained of the civilization into which we had been born.
We could barely discern the places where roads had passed or houses stood, for everywhere nature was reclaiming the land and abolishing all traces of the old world that had passed away on that dreadful Thanksgiving eve.
We built huts and fires and danced and sang and tried to avoid the looks of pain we saw in each other's eyes every day.
We survived.
While none among us grew sick or starved, nonetheless our numbers dwindled. Children would return from hunting and foraging with wild stories of having seen a familiar road or house. Everyone would rush to check it out only to be disappointed. But those who had these visions would one day never return, and as the visions eventually came to all of us, we followed these strange roads and disappeared into the wilderness never to return to the small community we had built for ourselves following the war.
My own visions took me down disjointed roads that grew increasingly familiar, until one day I found my house, which I had not seen in many months.
It was a wonder.
As I approached I noticed the houses of my neighbors appear around it, houses which I had seen burned to the ground. When at last I went in it was Thanksgiving night again, but this time no bombs fell.
My family and our guests were all about making merry as dinner was being laid out on the table, and I sat down to dinner and watched my aunt distractedly pepper her plate with the fish food that sat by the aquarium on our table.
I had no clue how to relate what had just passed for me, some three or four months journeying about a wasteland and a forest that no one present appeared to remember.
I was terribly angry with my teacher for I blamed him for the horrible events I had experienced. Now I have not seen him in over 40 years, and I regret that I lost touch with him. But, in retrospect I understand why it is we would eventually part regardless of the circumstances. It was my lack of strong verbal and conceptual skills in my infancy that made it possible for my teacher to circumvent 'reality' as it is known in the mundane world and draw me away to distant places and frightful experiences. As I 'matured' in this world I slowly fit myself into the communal weltanschauung that prohibits the sort of experiences that I had commonly had with my teacher. As my concepts of the world were developed through the maturation of my linguistic skills I was becoming less and less fit to take part in supernatural experiences. So it was inevitable that one day I might never see my teacher again.
But the circumstances of our last parting prejudiced me against him for many years to follow and I eventually put all those old memories aside and left them to themselves as I got on with the business of trying to learn how to live in this world where we now share my blog.
I have experienced several more nuclear wars since then, some in this world, others in different worlds or times; it now seems natural to return from a world blasted into ruin into a world where those terrible events have un-happened once again.
In some of these worlds I am present as a spirit guide to help the dead return to the lives they were living before ruin overcame them. In others I am once more one among many survivors who pick a thread of their old world out of the warped world they have inherited and follow it home to a world undestroyed by the bombs that had fallen again.
My teacher taught me the infinite nature of the world, but also showed me how time and again we will bring destruction upon ourselves. My teacher hoped that I would one day contribute to a change that would turn the course of events away from more destruction. And that is the compulsion under which I live, a terrible onus, for no one person can make such a change by themselves; and, while I see others operating toward this goal, I despair that I will ever be able to take my part in the change that must come, at any cost, to change the tide of the futures I have seen.
One future stands out from among many and concerns me more than any others. I will address that future in a future blog but possibly not tomorrow's.
As I check this blog for errors I think perhaps I owe you an explanation of the transformation that transpired following the nuclear war of 1965.
We create the worlds we live in through a sort of communal process wherein we maintain the world inherited from our parents and transform it along various lines of possibility or probability so that evolves its own unique characteristics different from the world our parents knew. This power to create the worlds we share is mediated through a covenant whereby no one should have power and influence greater than any other. The rules aren't iron-clad, there are many who can circumvent them in one manner or another, true mages, witches and psychics exist among us, but their powers remain limited. The nature of our consensus reality prohibits most miraculous events as well as events of a sorcerous nature.
When the world was blasted with bombs so many people died that there was an enormous interruption in the consensus reality responsible for maintaining the world we knew then. With so little human influence imposed upon it, nature was released from our subjugation and immediately began restoring the world as nature determines it should be. So with the majority of adult minds gone, along with all the rules they maintained for how everything should be, nature just followed its own course and restored the world to the best state it could achieve.
Our young groups of survivors were too inexperienced to know that this was 'impossible' within the world view of their parents, and they accepted the change for what it was, an entirely natural event.
Nature is forever ready to restore itself in a neglected space where our communal minds fail to focus on imposing human order upon the larger world around us.
Ciao
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
My Teacher
Not really sure what my teacher was. My teacher seemed human enough in form and disposition, except for those two small horns. I painted his picture when I was four or five, but lost it when I was 24 or so. He had a dark countenance of a reddish brown complexion similar in appearance to a Muslim guru whom I met through my father. My teacher would appear out of thin air in a burning ring of fire. We had no common language, but I needed only to look at him to understand what he was trying to teach me. So our journeys were spent in silence.
Time after time he would take me through his burning ring of fire and we would arrive in places distant in time and space. Typically we arrived on the scene of some horrific calamity or other; war, famine or plague seemed to characterize all of our destinations. Wherever we arrived the dead and dying were thronging about us seeking succor. My teacher would turn my mind back along the trail of cause and event leading to whatever disaster we were studying and each time I saw how human failings had led to these terrible events. One object of my teacher's lessons was to understand the chain of events, to be able to recognize disasters in the making and ultimately determine a means to prevent them in the future.
But, perhaps the primary lesson my teacher pressed upon me was a sort of post mortem therapy for the dead. You can best see a portrayal of something akin to the 'afterlife' I am familiar with in Robin Williams’s movie "What Dreams May Come".
I put the 'afterlife' in quotes because there is really only life and more life, life everlasting, and the place we may find ourselves in between lives is still a part of being alive, except that we are no longer in the 'real' world and occupy a world that is a projection of our mind and our expectations. The need for therapists in this interregnum between lives is relative. A soul spending too long in this non-place can become very ill because they have little or no authentic external feedback from the world they occupy because it is a projection like a dream with little or no grounding influences or 'reality checks'.
Typically people suffering sudden unexpected traumatic deaths are often unaware they have died and are continuing their lives more or less as if nothing has happened, except that they have disconnected from a world in which their experiences are shared with other souls and entered a shadow world where anyone they interact with is just an aspect of themselves portrayed as if it were a familiar friend or stranger. This sort of limbo state is unhealthful and the soul may rapidly or slowly deteriorate over time from lack of external stimuli.
Other souls die such traumatic deaths that they become encysted in a state of denial of themselves. They know they have died, but to block off the pain of their death they choose to believe their death is the final event of their lives and they recreate themselves in a state where they believe they no longer exist, because by no longer existing they can never again experience the pain or suffering that characterized their recent life or death.
Still other souls go on to the rewards or punishments their beliefs pre-dispose them to expect in the afterlife. They have strongly held beliefs in Heaven or Hell or Paradise or Purgatory and condemn themselves to act out these beliefs, recreating whatever form of afterlife they believe they have earned. A devout Muslim terrorist could easily be hiding out in an afterlife fantasy where he has a 1000 virgins, while a fearful Christian sinner might find himself suffocating in a Hell of his own making. All of these souls are in danger of trapping themselves in these belief systems as the worlds they create for themselves slowly wind down as in the odd afterlife described in Phillip K Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
Irregardless of the sort of afterlife a soul creates for themselves, any world they create must eventually break down under an entropic drift toward disorder; the souls inhabiting them lose their identity and purpose, becoming more characterless and listless until little is left of them but a rather pure and sterile distillation of spirit without character or motivation.
However, there are support systems to prevent this sort of thing from happening, intervention will usually take place relatively quickly, and always the souls who embark on these solipsist journeys are rescued at some stage and are able to recuperate from their experiences.
I sometimes wonder when I write about this particular topic whether I am currently trapped in one of these solipsist creations myself, and if so, how will I work my way out, or wonder if I can even do so on my own; it seems to be the case that once a soul embarks on an afterlife journey of a solipsist sort that they can only emerge from it through the intervention of another soul or Divine Being.
My teacher would show me the cocoon worlds in which lost souls had trapped themselves and demonstrate how to draw them out.
Many souls evade these self-perpetuating dream worlds that plague so many other souls following their most recent deaths. But the souls who do not make the mistakes of making solipsist recreations of their past lives or future expectations may often require assistance too. When huge numbers of people all die at once there is a sort of logjam of disembodied spirits that hang about in one state or another in need of help to find their way back to life. Spirit guides are everywhere among them trying to get their attention and focus them back toward a state where they may either resume their interrupted lives or move on to new lives. Worlds call out to many of the recently departed and beg them to return, and many will return to their old lives and pick up the thread of their existence more or less where they left off when they died.
Each world receiving a resurrected spirit is cloned. The original world continues with the death of that spirit an established and incontrovertible fact. The clone world experiences a subtle shifting of events so that a fatal car collision becomes a near-miss where the victim that had died in one world survives in the cloned world. Spirit guides have an easier time returning spirits to worlds that long to receive them. But some spirits have lived their lives so characterlessly that the worlds they leave behind in death scarcely miss them at all, and the cord that attaches them to their old world is too weak to draw them back into it without a great effort on the part of their guide to assist them in their resurrection. Often these spirits will opt for reincarnation seeking a new life to return to, abandoning their old life.
The space-time between our lives, whether serial resurrections in a single lifetime or the leaps of reincarnation from one life to another cannot be characterized by the properties of either space or time; it is not a world like the one we call 'reality' where dimensions of any sort bear any relevance. We live in that other place eternally, our dips into the fleshy lives we lead in many different worlds are inconsequential in duration; in that place between our lives, we are always present, even while we are immersed in the business of incarnations in this world, and in other worlds as well. To think that this life where we share this blog is our only life is an illusion cast by our flesh, for all the other lives we will have ever lived are being lived now, even while we are living this one.
Our minds are designed to act as filters; each mind has the capability to perceive the infinite but not the capacity to encompass it. A mind that encompasses the infinite is Divine, but creation requires that there be room for more creation and to encompass creation is to stifle it, so the power to encompass the infinite must be surrendered to allow the infinite to recreate itself in even greater magnitude, such that all of the infinite's children may themselves bear fruit and infinitely multiply. Consequently our minds filter out the infinite, reducing it to a smaller set of the infinite, a set wherein we may learn the rules that govern our lives and what to expect as the consequences of our actions. So, while here in this world we are familiar with being an Earthbound human, we are not at all familiar with the lives we are living on Arcturus, or in our primordial past, or in the distant future. Or at least, we should not, ordinarily, be aware of these other lives we are living.
But thanks, in part, to my teacher, I have been assisted in encompassing a slightly wider arc of the infinite than it is probably healthy for me to be exposed to.
One price of that gift of knowledge has been service to the dead. I cannot pick the time or place when I am called but when I am called I arrive on the scene of great suffering with the dead and dying crying for relief and I respond as best I can to cajole them and tease them and wean them from their death so they may live again.
Another price paid for my knowledge is my differentness; I feel alienated among any company. My world view is too distant from those I hear reflected in other people's voices. I have no fellowship ties; my weltanschauung alienates others from me as effectively as it alienates myself from others. I find myself adopting local color, playing a role in other's lives, but never playing myself. I think this has to end somehow.
Time after time he would take me through his burning ring of fire and we would arrive in places distant in time and space. Typically we arrived on the scene of some horrific calamity or other; war, famine or plague seemed to characterize all of our destinations. Wherever we arrived the dead and dying were thronging about us seeking succor. My teacher would turn my mind back along the trail of cause and event leading to whatever disaster we were studying and each time I saw how human failings had led to these terrible events. One object of my teacher's lessons was to understand the chain of events, to be able to recognize disasters in the making and ultimately determine a means to prevent them in the future.
But, perhaps the primary lesson my teacher pressed upon me was a sort of post mortem therapy for the dead. You can best see a portrayal of something akin to the 'afterlife' I am familiar with in Robin Williams’s movie "What Dreams May Come".
I put the 'afterlife' in quotes because there is really only life and more life, life everlasting, and the place we may find ourselves in between lives is still a part of being alive, except that we are no longer in the 'real' world and occupy a world that is a projection of our mind and our expectations. The need for therapists in this interregnum between lives is relative. A soul spending too long in this non-place can become very ill because they have little or no authentic external feedback from the world they occupy because it is a projection like a dream with little or no grounding influences or 'reality checks'.
Typically people suffering sudden unexpected traumatic deaths are often unaware they have died and are continuing their lives more or less as if nothing has happened, except that they have disconnected from a world in which their experiences are shared with other souls and entered a shadow world where anyone they interact with is just an aspect of themselves portrayed as if it were a familiar friend or stranger. This sort of limbo state is unhealthful and the soul may rapidly or slowly deteriorate over time from lack of external stimuli.
Other souls die such traumatic deaths that they become encysted in a state of denial of themselves. They know they have died, but to block off the pain of their death they choose to believe their death is the final event of their lives and they recreate themselves in a state where they believe they no longer exist, because by no longer existing they can never again experience the pain or suffering that characterized their recent life or death.
Still other souls go on to the rewards or punishments their beliefs pre-dispose them to expect in the afterlife. They have strongly held beliefs in Heaven or Hell or Paradise or Purgatory and condemn themselves to act out these beliefs, recreating whatever form of afterlife they believe they have earned. A devout Muslim terrorist could easily be hiding out in an afterlife fantasy where he has a 1000 virgins, while a fearful Christian sinner might find himself suffocating in a Hell of his own making. All of these souls are in danger of trapping themselves in these belief systems as the worlds they create for themselves slowly wind down as in the odd afterlife described in Phillip K Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
Irregardless of the sort of afterlife a soul creates for themselves, any world they create must eventually break down under an entropic drift toward disorder; the souls inhabiting them lose their identity and purpose, becoming more characterless and listless until little is left of them but a rather pure and sterile distillation of spirit without character or motivation.
However, there are support systems to prevent this sort of thing from happening, intervention will usually take place relatively quickly, and always the souls who embark on these solipsist journeys are rescued at some stage and are able to recuperate from their experiences.
I sometimes wonder when I write about this particular topic whether I am currently trapped in one of these solipsist creations myself, and if so, how will I work my way out, or wonder if I can even do so on my own; it seems to be the case that once a soul embarks on an afterlife journey of a solipsist sort that they can only emerge from it through the intervention of another soul or Divine Being.
My teacher would show me the cocoon worlds in which lost souls had trapped themselves and demonstrate how to draw them out.
Many souls evade these self-perpetuating dream worlds that plague so many other souls following their most recent deaths. But the souls who do not make the mistakes of making solipsist recreations of their past lives or future expectations may often require assistance too. When huge numbers of people all die at once there is a sort of logjam of disembodied spirits that hang about in one state or another in need of help to find their way back to life. Spirit guides are everywhere among them trying to get their attention and focus them back toward a state where they may either resume their interrupted lives or move on to new lives. Worlds call out to many of the recently departed and beg them to return, and many will return to their old lives and pick up the thread of their existence more or less where they left off when they died.
Each world receiving a resurrected spirit is cloned. The original world continues with the death of that spirit an established and incontrovertible fact. The clone world experiences a subtle shifting of events so that a fatal car collision becomes a near-miss where the victim that had died in one world survives in the cloned world. Spirit guides have an easier time returning spirits to worlds that long to receive them. But some spirits have lived their lives so characterlessly that the worlds they leave behind in death scarcely miss them at all, and the cord that attaches them to their old world is too weak to draw them back into it without a great effort on the part of their guide to assist them in their resurrection. Often these spirits will opt for reincarnation seeking a new life to return to, abandoning their old life.
The space-time between our lives, whether serial resurrections in a single lifetime or the leaps of reincarnation from one life to another cannot be characterized by the properties of either space or time; it is not a world like the one we call 'reality' where dimensions of any sort bear any relevance. We live in that other place eternally, our dips into the fleshy lives we lead in many different worlds are inconsequential in duration; in that place between our lives, we are always present, even while we are immersed in the business of incarnations in this world, and in other worlds as well. To think that this life where we share this blog is our only life is an illusion cast by our flesh, for all the other lives we will have ever lived are being lived now, even while we are living this one.
Our minds are designed to act as filters; each mind has the capability to perceive the infinite but not the capacity to encompass it. A mind that encompasses the infinite is Divine, but creation requires that there be room for more creation and to encompass creation is to stifle it, so the power to encompass the infinite must be surrendered to allow the infinite to recreate itself in even greater magnitude, such that all of the infinite's children may themselves bear fruit and infinitely multiply. Consequently our minds filter out the infinite, reducing it to a smaller set of the infinite, a set wherein we may learn the rules that govern our lives and what to expect as the consequences of our actions. So, while here in this world we are familiar with being an Earthbound human, we are not at all familiar with the lives we are living on Arcturus, or in our primordial past, or in the distant future. Or at least, we should not, ordinarily, be aware of these other lives we are living.
But thanks, in part, to my teacher, I have been assisted in encompassing a slightly wider arc of the infinite than it is probably healthy for me to be exposed to.
One price of that gift of knowledge has been service to the dead. I cannot pick the time or place when I am called but when I am called I arrive on the scene of great suffering with the dead and dying crying for relief and I respond as best I can to cajole them and tease them and wean them from their death so they may live again.
Another price paid for my knowledge is my differentness; I feel alienated among any company. My world view is too distant from those I hear reflected in other people's voices. I have no fellowship ties; my weltanschauung alienates others from me as effectively as it alienates myself from others. I find myself adopting local color, playing a role in other's lives, but never playing myself. I think this has to end somehow.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
In and Around About
I have a few too many stories to tell, some more personal than others, but it is the personal problems I am facing now that have inspired me to try this medium (blogging). I have been through the mental-health wringer more than enough to know that there is no help from pills, and that the wrong therapist is worse than no therapist.I was totally in tears driving in to work today; fantasizing that there might be someone I could talk to.
Safety first! Talk to no one.
But that doesn't exactly help me deal with my s.
I did a fellah at work a good turn one day, and when we moved on from our respective roles to new assignments he told me I would be working with his sister and to be sure to say "hi".
She has been totally nice to me from day one, will be leaving the company shortly, and has invited me to lunch. This is not anything more than a nice person engaged in the business of being nice, because it is their character trait to do so. Nor do I really want anything from her other than to talk to someone, but common sense says talking to her would be inappropriate for the matters I most need to talk about. So, attractive as an opportunity to talk to her (or anyone) might be, I find myself trying to avoid lunch with her, rather than risk a venue that might lead to another breakdown in tears.
But as I sat down to work today, I found myself still crying, dreadfully afraid that another breakdown was on its way and grasping at straws for something to hold it at bay.
I have been skating along, aware of the deep depression I have been trying to dissociate myself from since last leaving a mental hospital in December of 2004.
The drugs weren't working for me and I didn't really become functional enough to return to work until I quit taking them; they were leaving me lost in a fog, unable to focus and move on.
The therapy wasn't helping either, my therapist was so lost herself that she called me by the name of one of her other clients by mistake.
I did once have a therapist I thought was helping me, but I can't go back, they do not respond to my efforts to get in touch. Other therapists I have seen are clearly following a formula dictated by my HMO and my needs fall so far outside of the services they can offer that I have given up looking for help. In any case I can no longer afford the co-pays so finding help has become a moot point.
My problems might seem entirely conventional and commonplace, and reason enough in their own right to drive anyone mad, but there are underlying matters of an extraordinary nature, if you value them as I do, rather than dismiss them as pure poppycock or madness.
To put the conventional matters aside, I am approaching 50, divorce, and death. I have lived with chronic pain for over 25 years, and have not known a day since January of 1981 when I have ever had a pain-free moment. Knowing I was unfit to be married or to have children, I nevertheless married late in life when I could bear being alone no longer; I have helped my spouse raise four children (three from my spouse's previous marriage, and one 'adopted').
Several years back I had a blood clot in a brachial artery that nearly caused my surgeon to remove my arm. After exhaustive testing and 2 more clots over the next 3 years it was finally determined that I have a relatively rare (1 in 10 thousand) immune disorder which causes my immune system to produce anti-bodies which attack my red blood cells. I must take rat poison every day (coumadin's active ingredient is the same as that in rat poison) to prevent another clot, but it's a toss-up which might kill me first, the medicine, a blood clot, or my recently diagnosed diabetes. My doctor has convinced my spouse I am a 'walking time-bomb'.
Luckily for me, or maybe not, I don't believe in death; if I thought I could just kill myself then perhaps I could be rid of all my pain.
But personal experience has shown me I cannot remain dead no matter how often I may die, and that death is too painful and too terrible to pursue deliberately. So I am stuck in this world, and wonder when I may ever move on to something different. I have been here a tremendously long time now.
From time to time to time I get glimpses of past lives. I vividly remember my death in World War Two, and I have some fleeting memories of my life as a crone in medieval England or Wales. But my memories go back to Genesis. The Bible and other religious writings (I have a passing interest in comparative religion) provide only metaphors, at best, for that event. Thinking of Genesis as a singular event is in itself misleading. In a truly infinite universe there are infinite beginnings, though all sprout from the void.
My experiences with death, the universe, and everything are explained by quantum physics.
For a good introduction to quantum physics read: "Space, Time and Beyond" by Bob Toben and Fred Wolf. They describe a plastic, moldable universe directly interactive with our minds.
As I like to put it (and I may often use more or fewer adjectives to do so), "The universe is a sentient, compassionate, conscious, creative, living, quantum being that exists to fulfill all of our needs."
For quantum, think along the lines of a single quasi-particle, that, by it's relationships to itself, appears to be infinitely diverse, such that, while one, it appears to be many, and the interactions of the many create the 'quantum foam' from which arise the sub-atomic particles which underlie the creation of the material world we experience.
Please accept my apologies if I have offended your religious beliefs. I love religions, they have many admirable traits. But each can only be correct within in its own context, and when taken in context with other religions or beliefs, no single religion can genuinely be better or more truthful than any other. I know, relativism, the bane of the religious right, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish (Hinduism appears to be intrinsically relativistic, while Buddhism seems to be all-inclusive). I have no clear religious upbringing of my own, I was 'exposed' to some religious beliefs and practices: Protestant, Catholic, Episcopalian and Judaism as a kid, but never inculcated into a single church or mode of worship. I have branched out and explored other religions since then including Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Wicca and Satanism, and may follow up on interests in various other forms of religious or mystical belief systems such as Shamanism, Jainism or Voodoo. All fascinating, and perhaps all valid ways of interacting with God or the Divine in whatever form you may perceive It.
Not really too sure about the validity of Satanism, which appears to be a reactionary off-shoot of Christianity and may not be a religion in it's own right so much as a perverse form of Christian doctrine. Satanism is a relatively modern invention and should not be confused with much older religions which were destroyed by Christianity in medieval times. These older religions were 'demonized' by Christianity, their Gods and Goddesses re-defined as evil demonic creatures in order to 're-educate' pagans who were being forced at sword-point to abandon their beliefs and embrace Christianity. Satanism adopted some of the forms of these perversions of older religions' deities as re-defined by Christian doctrine; the Satan they worship is descended from Hebraic origins re-defined through the process of the Christian conquest of Western Europe.
Anyway, there is an interesting flip side to the portrait of Satan as typically perceived in today's western culture, which can be related with Christian mysticism. An explanation of this flip side can be reinforced by modern psychological theories regarding 'projection'. Projection is a system where a subject perceives something other than what would be apparent to someone else due to a psychological prejudice to see things in a way that reinforces what they already expect to see or believe, such as someone who misreads a neutral or friendly face as hostile because they themselves are in an angry or fearful state.
When we die there is old business to clean up and a decision to be made to be resurrected or reincarnate. A Divine Being classically portrayed as Christ in western religion has a role in this process, although that Being predates Christianity. It can be difficult to break away from the Christian mind-set that portrays that Being as Jesus, but Jesus was a man; Christ was a state of being that Jesus experienced and exemplified, and the actual state of Christliness is immaterial, purely spiritual, neither gender or race, or perhaps, ultimately, not even humanity as we may typically define it can be attributes of this most Pure Being.
When we reach this place where we must confront our conscience, we approach our own identity in what may be called the Christ state. But any lingering 'evil' we must reconcile within ourselves prejudices us to be fearful and we project this fear by seeing a demonic being when we are actually in the presence of a Divine Being whose entire countenance toward us is one of love and compassion. So the Divine Aspect which may be called Christ appears to be the ultimate evil to any who harbor too much sin for which they need to atone, consequently they see themselves in Hell confronted by Satan, if they were raised in a Christian belief system.
For others it can be very different, but Christians will re-create their beliefs about the afterlife and experience them when they die. Christianity served itself by demonizing other deities, but in so doing it poisoned itself with a belief system fraught with demons which must be confronted and ultimately abandoned to move on through the afterlife to a new beginning, or to return, more or less, where they left off, through resurrection, into a serial episode of the life they recently departed.
Hinduism and Buddhism embrace re-incarnation, Christianity promises resurrection, both alternatives can return you to this world, or one so much like it that you might never know the difference, or even noticed that you had ever died. Judaism admits they don't know what will happen after life but they hope and pray for Heaven, and Islam promises either Heaven or Hell depending on your good faith and conscience.
In my own opinion we are all immortal beings and we carry on our experiences through many lives in many states and forms, including this life where you read my first blog and ponder the depths of my insanity or insight.
Is there death after life?
A few stories to relate at a later date:
My unusual teacher, lessons in humanity's failings and post mortem therapies for resurrection.
Includes a global nuclear war in 1965, reality goes up for grabs as the survivors struggle home.
The stories of Kenly, a boy in an ancient tribe, trapped in a rivalry between his father and uncle.
Parts of Kenly's stories include:
-- Father is lost, banished by his brother for breaking tribal taboos.
-- Kenly's brother dies, murdered by his uncle who deliberately failed to teach him how to live.
-- Kenly's Sojourn, a long trek to find his Mother's clan and escape his uncle's plans, includes:
-- The Underworld, where Kenly's father's ghost instructs him in the vital arcana of resurrection.
-- The Demon World, where Kenly encounters the evil ancients whom humanity once fled.
-- The Covenant, Kenly learns how his ancestor's fled the ancients and created their new world.
-- The Tower, where the Covenant could only be enforced by mutual cultural destruction.
The Traveller, saw humanity's nativity, dropped by out of curiosity, and was forced to stay awhile. His reception party mistook him for a demon (in Kenly's world) and tried to kill him. They failed but he was injured so badly that the friends who saved him could only remake him in a human form which severely distresses his alien spirit; he is unable to return home.
AI 2017, created in time to watch humanity's demise, the first true artificial intelligence searches through time to resurrect us.
Parts of AI 2017 include:
-- Remembering, the AI's recollections of what it was like before humanity passed away.
-- Tachymemes, the AI sends memes back in time on tachyonic carriers to change history.
-- Agents of the memes, people's minds decode the memeic messages and introduce change.
-- Paradox Redux, the AI prevents its own creation after too much tampering, cyclical result.
Note: Interactions between the AI and the Traveler mean each shares a part of the other's tale.
The Sevenfold Rhythm, if you learn the beat you travel to distant worlds. This began as a 'thought experiment' among a group of teens who discovered astral connections to distant worlds and how to end-run 'reality' to visit them.
The Sanctuary, where the majority of people take shelter from an increasingly hostile world in a virtual reality constructed within the minds of human clones.
Parts of The Sanctuary include:
-- 'Til Death Unites Us, the development of the technology leading to the VR sanctuaries.
-- Mages High, children born in the VR world learn to manipulate 'reality' in unforseen ways.
-- The Clone Hunts, survivors in the real world hunt and destroy the VR sanctuaries.
Fourth of July 2076, where America's enemies take their final shot set in the ecological collapse triggered by the breakdown of the Atmospheric-Oceanic Carbon Cycle.
Parts of Fourth of July include:
-- The ecolapse, rise of the archologies in a world where the atmosphere quickly turns lethal.
-- SDI, America finally completes orbital defenses to protect its power satellite network.
-- The Fall, America's enemies rain destruction in the form of high orbital kinetic missiles.
-- The Healing, a Divine Incarnation appears to rebuild the world.
-- Children of the Apocolypse, they like the ruined world as it is and resist it's resurrection.
I feel like I'm forgetting something, doubtless other stories to tell in time.
Au revoir.
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