Randomness, Once Again

Last week on X/Twitter a medical doctor excoriated someone for insinuating that our dreams mean something.  Clearly, she said, they are just a product of the random firing of brain synapses.  And of course she was excoriated in turn.  She would have to eat her words and renounce her materialist fundamentalism, you see, once the veil is torn away, as it soon will be.

I don't know what to think.  Last night was a total phantasmagoria from start to finish.  But first a young missionary gifted me a small marimba, sandlewood in color.  Unlike a real marimba, or a vibraphone for that matter, this did not lay out the bars like the keys of a piano; rather, there was just a straight line of uniform pieces of wood.  It could be played conventionally, with mallets, or, on "auto-play," it could be programmed to play many different tunes.  The missionary demonstrated it to me with great enthusiasm by having it play a short classical piece, one with which he was very enamored.

The gift made me uncomfortable on two levels.  First, it was disproportionate to the scale of our relationship, and that had me thinking that the missionary had a crush on me, one that was unwelcome and could never be reciprocated.  Second, while it was small for a marimba, it monopolized my tiny apartment physically.  I didn't know how I would be able to maneuver around it in my regular daily life.  And yet I did not want to appear ungrateful, so I feigned enthusiam for it, not very well I'm afraid.

At the end of the dream a young woman joined us in the room.  She too found the marimba fascinating, and she lit up when it did its thing.  Then I awoke.

This was all before 10PM, and the fun was just beginning.

And so, in between dreams, I wished once again that I could conjure Prof. Jung, to have him explain to me how this particular narrative might facilitate my integration with the collective consciousness, or maybe just forestall my general personal disintegration.

But perhaps the experience was not about the narrative at all, but the vividness of the details and the overall atmosphere of the dream, which were striking even for me, for whom intense dreams are a nightly phenomenon.

 

 

Our Failed Search for a Foundation

We can start, rather arbitrarily, with Aristotle and Democritus.  The way to come to an understanding of the world, they reasoned, is to tear it down and examine its individual constituent pieces.  Isn't it obvious?  They did not purport to "discover the atom."  Rather, the search for fundamental constituent pieces had to end somewhere, and, wherever that turned out to be, they would call the pieces "atoms," definitionally.  We can visualize the constituent pieces, even now, as perfect (and perfectly opaque) ball bearings.

This worked for a while, until we figured out that our "atoms" were not atomic, but rather made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, in configurations that we visualized as mini solar systems.

This worked for a while, until we figured out that there were myriad other particles, and also that matter could be converted to energy by splitting atoms.  Matter and energy are interchangeable.

Then came the quantum revolution, which convinced us that particles are not entirely particle-like; rather, they behave like waves in many respects.  Also, unlike ball bearings, particles do not occupy any particular place unless and until they are "observed" or "measured."  Observed or measured by what or whom?  That's hard to say.  If it is by a conscious observer, then that places consciousness at the center of things, which can't be right, because it sounds quasi-religious, and religion is the enemy of science.  So we've invented a new cosmology that posits that the particle is in every place that it could possibly be.  The "measurement effect" thereby is trivialized, or even said not to exist at all.

Meanwhile, information science has progressed so dramatically that we can use it to model all of this out.  In fact, our models are so powerful that our Chief Nerds of the Moment would have us believe that what is foundational is not what is represented, but the information itself that is reflected in our models.  We can leave all of the ball bearings behind for all practical purposes.  They are like Wittgenstein's ladder, that allowed us to climb to a new perch of philosophical perspicacity, at which point we could toss it away!

But can almighty information exist in a vacuum, without consciousness?  Who or what is in charge of the Information Field writ large?  Is it in charge of itself?  If so, is this Information Field "the Mind of God," in Stephen Hawking's phrase?

All of this effort, all of these centuries, and it seems that we stand in much the same place as where stood the Egyptians and the Polynesians who tried, mostly in vain, to placate the Sun God, the Source, the Great Animating Principle.

 

Is a Pointless Pointillism Even Possible?

The psychonaut and metaphysician Terence McKenna not long before he died predicted more or less in so many words that things would simply get more and more weird until a tipping point was reached, after which there would be wide public acknowledgement of the weirdness, followed by some kind of major cultural and spiritual transformation into a New Age.  We are not there yet, but in my own personal search, made more urgent with age, I continue to accumulate points of light, and also of darkness.  To my chagrin, the points do not cohere well.  One can't step back from the dots in order that the picture show itself in glory, like Notre Dame de Paris at sunset as it is depicted in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  I will nonetheless point to some of the points, in part with a practical goal of orienting myself as I come closer to teaching about all this in a formal way in the fall, which is, of course, intimidating.

• The work of certain psychic mediums continues to boggle the materialist mind.
• A highly-respected Stockholm astrophysicist, Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, has just released two papers for peer review suggesting that hundreds, if not thousands, of "transients" -- objects in the sky that look like stars but do not, in photo-imagery, remain "where they are supposed to be" -- passed into lower earth orbit in the years before Sputnik, and also that some of these waves of transients were correlated in statistically significant ways with nuclear testing and with major UFO sitings, like the wave that spooked Washington, D.C. to a fare-thee-well in 1952.
• The neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore has published a remarkable book on the workings of dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, called "Death by Astonishment."  With scholarly rigor, he explains what we know about how the brain processes normal sensory information and how that differs from dreams, hallucinations and DMT.  His highly controversial thesis is that the strange and disturbing world that DMT reveals to us is as real as our normal waking state, including its inhabitants, who, with remarkable consistency, show up as armies of "machine elves" that mock us with comical displays that are otherwise beyond imagination.  Given the ability of our bodies naturally to produce DMT when in extremis, this leads to speculation that what awaits us at death may not be a kindly and welcoming dead relative waving us forward through the tunnel, but rather these semi-sinister hordes of what we used to call djinn, genies, leprechauns, elves, the keepers of a world that rivals Alice's Wonderland in its infuriating whimsy.
• Matthew Lohmeier, our freshly confirmed Undersecretary of the Air Force, a former F-15 pilot and USAF lieutenant colonel, is happy to talk about the close encounter that he and a girlfriend had in his youth, and his own belief that it was tied to intelligent plasma fields that dominate the universe.
• Our most venerable media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, are beginning to open the door a crack, even as they continue to display their ignorance and arrogance with "not to worry" narratives that don't stand up to even superficial scrutiny.
• In a new documentary that is already in the can but awaiting a distribution deal acceptable to its producers --"Age of Disclosure" -- Jay Stratton, one of the seniormost officials who has ever been charged with investigating the phenomenon for the government sub rosa, says that he himself has had direct exposure to non-human craft and non-human intelligent beings.
• The so-called tridactyls of Peru, on further and further scientific examination, continue to defy prosaic explanation.  A less prosaic explanation is that they are suggestive of genetic interference, genetic manipulation, that took place around the time of Christ.  If so, manipulation by whom and to what end?

There is so much more, but to avoid the deep pitfalls of this psychic space, I need from time to time to step out of it; I need to attempt to get to the cheerful serenity on display in The Band's "When You Awake" --

I sat upon my grandpa's knee.

What do you think he said to me? --

"When you awake you will remember everything,

You will be hangin' on a string ...

You were born but to grow old and never know ..."

Wash my hands in lye water,

I got a date with the captain's daughter ...

Snow's gonna come and frost gonna bite,

My old car froze up last night.

Ain't no reason to hang my head,

I could wake up in the mornin' dead.

(And if I thought it would do any good

I'd stand on the rock where Moses stood ...)

 

Улу Панди Мониюм

Улу Панди Мониюм (b. 1884) was a Chechen mystic and self-styled "natural philosopher" who was best known for groundbreaking experiments with electromagnetism, and especially for experiments relating to the levitation of small metal objects.  He never was awarded any formal academic degree, but he conducted most of his work in close collaboration with Prof. Pavel Ivanovich Ustinov, then Chair of the Department of Natural Sciences at Moscow State University.  When Ustinov was liquidated in one of the last of Stalin's Great Purges, in 1936, he "self-exiled" almost immediately to the Far East, but survived for only about eighteen months thereafter.  In October of 1938, he and a traveling companion were ambushed and killed by Mongolian bandits on the shores of Lake Baikal.

At the urging of the German physicist Friiedrich Bolt, Element 115 in the Periodic Table initially was named for him, as "Pandemonium."  It is now known as "Muscovium."

 

These Days

I am drowning in metaphysics.  Hence the quietude.  

"Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent."

 

Dream Scapes

This one not two hours old as I write this.

I was down in Tennessee with my old college buddy Billy Evans.  It was about nightfall. We wanted to score some weed.  He handed me a wad of all-mixed-together bills, way more than the $100 that would be his share; he was fine with me hanging onto the whole wad until the deal was done.

The place to buy the weed was a Chinese restaurant that was about a mile walk from where we were.  We started off, soon to be joined by my sister Denise and a bunch of her friends/colleagues in a legal, medicinal marijuana thing that they had going.  Bringing up the rear with that group was a real down home Southern character, probably in his 60s, with a big moustache, horn-rimmed glasses and a ten-gallon hat.  Turns out he was the local sponsor/benefactor/investor that got Denise's business going.

There's more, about a near brush with a squad of young policemen on the porch of the house where the Chinese restaurant was situated, but before that, as we began to troop towards that locale, the benefactor stopped and asked me and Billy to look at his left eye.  Then he peeled back not his eyelid but the skin on the left of that eye.  On the usually unseen part of the eyeball there were thin blue and white stripes running up and down, about fifteen across and of varying lengths.  "Look at this!" he said.  "By the length of these stripes, going left to right, you can tell how rich a man has been over the course of his entire life!"  Clearly, he had been very rich indeed.

This all in the context of me trying for the first time in my life to do a deep dive into the remarkable work of Carl Jung.  In his celebrated "Red Book," which I am now reading, he more or less descends into Hades for a long spell.  (I almost said "a personal Hades" but clearly that is not right, coming from the man who popularized the idea that most of our insights bubble up out of a collective unconscious.)  When he returns, he is a more integrated and whole person.  Indeed, he would have us believe that in the absence of such a harrowing journey we ourselves cannot become integrated and whole.

But the journey to the Underworld and back is not a dream; it is accessed rather via a personal regimen that looks to one like me a lot like a particular form of deep meditation.

Still and all, for Jung dreams are an essential key to self-understanding.  And in this I feel that he must be on to something; he is a man of towering intellect and insight after all.  But it also seems to me beyond belief that the Cracker with the Metric Eyeball has a veiled life lesson for me.  Will a sudden synchronicity yet invade my space and prove me wrong in this?

 

Premonitions of Delirium at the Hour of the Wolf

In November of 1989, we were ensconced in a pleasant, rented apartment on the outskirts of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, awaiting the completion of all of the paperwork needed to support the adoption of Sam, our first child.  It felt rather like imprisonment, with outside daytime temperatures approaching 100 degs and no real access to transportation.  And so, for long periods between visits with the authorities, we were left with only a TV to keep us company.  There were soap operas, game shows and silly commercials on tap, and also a daily children's extravaganza hosted by a Brazilian former porn star known as "Xuxa" -- "Shoo-sha."

And at every break in the action, an imposing and sonorous voice, almost Darth Vader-ish, sounding to me a caricature of machismo, intoned the same phrase -- "Red Privada de Television!" -- "Private Television Network!", but also perhaps a multilingual play on words insofar as the ruling far-right party of the Paraguayan republic for decades had been the Colorado -- the "Reds."

Now as I lie sleepless at 3:33, the Hour of the Wolf, the phrase repeats itself in my head in the same sonorous voice, like waves booming off of a particular forlorn lighthouse.  And it occurs to me that I might come to repeat it aloud myself in a final delirium, without context for my caregivers, the repetition without context fitting the very definition of raving madness.