eigenvalues: influence of hyparchic folding via the backward arrow of time...,

parabola |  For thousands of years people have wondered about creative power. All this world around us was believed to have been made and did not just happen. Yet humans themselves make things. Are we then creators within a meta-Creation or mere “apes of god”? A primary realm of experience in which these and far more profound questions played out was in the making of words, or poetry. The authenticity of our poetry had to be granted us. This was the origin of the idea of the muse. The word itself has origins associated with mind, deriving from the proto-Indo-European root men “to think.” 

Mousika, from which we get our word “music,” was performed metrical speech. The speaking of verse was once the recognized form of intelligence and Plato had to argue it should be superseded by philosophical discourse (prose one might say) to open up to sceptical enquiry. This had vast implications since the very meters of verse were considered gods. (The secularization of language was completed only about five hundred years ago with the emergence of the form we call “sentence.”) Practically, for example in Norse poetry, there were different meters for different purposes, such as Fornyrðislag or “meter of ancient words” and Malahattr or “meter of speeches”.  By following and excelling in the forms, the bards were in tune, we could say, with the gods. The idea of intelligence and even “sacredness” residing in language itself rather than in people (capable only of temporary ableness) came down through the ages to Giambattista Vico and James Joyce and continues in modern commentators such as R. Calasso and George Steiner.

The making of verse and other manifestations of the Muses were expressions of making as such, including the making of the world and even evolution (in its various senses over the ages) once identified by the idea of the demiurge as in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The demiurge became the arch-villain in Gnostic writings because he was seen as tied to the material world and creating a “prison-reality” such as depicted in the film The Matrix.

In many cultures the role of the demiurge was symbolized by the potter. Pottery and its art were deeply revered and appear to go back at least to Palaeolithic times. The abstract idea of it is that the demiurge has to use already existing material to fashion a world in contrast to the higher creation of ex nihilo, “out of nothing.”

On a personal level, the early Greeks had the idea of the daimon. It is mentioned in the Symposium that Socrates had problems with his daimon because it would indicate dangers but never tell him what to do–which is rather as we picture the unconscious these days.

R.B. Onians, who comments extensively on the terminology of early Greek thought, avers that the daimon had a personal physical location in the head and was associated with sex. It was only later, around the time of Plato, that the idea of thought originating in the brain was entertained. It is possible then to see the daimon in the head as a placement of creativity beyond the conscious mind. Onians traces the image into later times and links it with the appearance of energy around the head that became the “halo” of sacred individuals. The daimon as sexual and creative was also considered “irrational” and then became the “evil” demon. There are a myriad of evolutes of the idea including its translation in Roman times into the term “genius.” This very multiplicity of meaning is essential to its meaning. Just consider that special people (such as Lamia the queen of Libya) could become a daimon. Philip Pullman turned daimons into animals in his novels.

The people we imagined around their camp fire look to their artificial blaze and cannot see the deeper light in the “black” that surrounds them. Creativity has to be beyond consciousness. Yet, only in the world of consciousness can we seem to have choice and will. In the practical world–such as in industry or in psychotherapy–we strive to find ways of co-operation between the conscious and trans-conscious realms.  Nobody knows what happens at the critical moment which makes a process creative; consciousness is always somewhat downstream from reality. When Christ said while on the Cross, “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” it was the declaration of the central human predicament.

Commonly, people have located higher intelligences in the atmosphere or inside the sun. A more interesting “location” is the future, or at least in some order of greater time than our own moment. Until quite recently these intelligences were located in the “far-past” as in the days of creation. Bennett places them in a special time he called the hyparchic future, a phrase which means what is ahead of us capable of altering present time. Such a quasi-scientific view carries a sense of dealing with the higher intelligence and ourselves as a system. 

There is an aspect of all this that is mathematical and technical with no particular stake in spirituality. This is to look into process or action when they are self-reflective. An action that feeds into itself is infinite and requires no entity to “do” it but will exhibit what are called eigenvalues that appear as entities (that can be named). Speculatively, then, higher order operations or actions will incur higher beings. One of the most intriguing speculations in modern physics is that the very existence of the universe requires a multitude of what are called “Boltzmann observers.” And, as far as the reality of “I” is concerned there is a parallel in the singularity at the heart of a black hole in that it remains uncertain whether it can ever be observed.

species final exams: dmitri orlov offers a prudent and scalable ebola mitigation strategy

cluborlov |  I have already mentioned that it may be a good idea to make arrangements through which survivors would be able to feed themselves, and provide them with the few other necessities for survival.

Beyond that, there are the basic mechanics of handling the pandemic. The current strategy treats it as a medical problem, best handled by doctors and nurses working in hospitals and clinics. This strategy only works for as long as the epidemic can be said to be under control; once it can be said to be out of control, the surviving doctors and nurses (medics are usually the first to be exposed—and to die) would be well advised to specifically refuse to handle Ebola patients.

In absence of any curative or preventive therapies, Ebola patients need shelter, hydration, hygiene, palliative care and, if and when they die, sanitary disposal of the remains. The goal is to do what is possible to give patients a chance to recover more or less on their own. To this end, it is very important to do all the things necessary to make sure that people are dying just from Ebola, and not from exposure, dehydration, or from any of the opportunistic diseases that thrive in disrupted circumstances, such as cholera and typhus. Sanitation is the most important aspect of the entire operation.

These services need not be provided by trained medics. The main two requirements for such service are: 1. psychological immunity to scenes of horrific suffering and death; and 2. immunity to Ebola. The first of these requirements comes down to natural talent; some have it, some don't. The second requirement is being provided free of charge by the Ebola virus itself, in cooperation with the survivors' immune systems.

English lacks a good word to describe this type of specialist, but we don't have to reach far to find one: the Russian word for it is “sanitar.” A popular Russian saying goes “wolves are sanitars of the forest” because they take care of disposing of the sick, the weak and the lame, thus giving those that survive a better chance. A sanitar need not be medically trained, but some training is needed: in diagnosis, palliative care, sanitation procedures and corpse disposal.

A third requirement is one that applies to the sanitation service as a whole: the number of sanitars has to scale with the rate of infection. Since the number of those infected is increasing exponentially, the number of sanitars assigned to serve them has to be able to increase exponentially as well. It seems outlandish to think that sufficient numbers of people will spontaneously volunteer for the job, and this means that they have to be press-ganged into service. And a super-obvious way to do just that is to simply never discharge Ebola survivors: once you are in, you are in until the pandemic is over, or until you die, whichever comes first. If you recover, you are given a bit of training, and then you go to work.

If you don't like the mitigation strategy I am proposing, please feel free to propose your own. Keep in mind, however, that what you propose has to automatically scale with the increase in the rate of infection, which is exponential. Sure, you can propose setting a public health budget, but then it has to double every couple of weeks—and keep doubling until the number of patients is in the billions.

secret people...,

If we think of Cordoba and Baghdad as magnetic poles we can see that the whole of Europe lay in the field which they subtended. Within this field much might yet be achieved. Within it, a required, foreordained rise in the specific gravity of human nature could still perhaps be contrived. Humanitarianism, science, art, techniques for man's individual as well as collective development might be induced.

A wholly new basis of human life was called for, utterly beyond the imagining of the men of AD 1000, and beyond the imagining of billions in AD 2012. Step by step, trend by trend, man and his institutions would be impelled or restrained along the preordained road. Over and over again, man would wander off the path and be guided back, or would step off the road, only to be halted and compelled to retrace his missteps and return to the road.

Institutions once regarded as fundamental verities of human experience would fall to the wayside, or be destroyed if necessary. Monarchy yielded to different modes of governance, the concept of the kingdom, yielded to that of the nation, and in turn, to that of the corporation. Man would be offered a glimpse of an expanding universe and his mind which could formerly only measure in leagues, would come to wrestle with light-years.

Within the past millenium, the specific gravity of human soul-stuff would be required to increase by an amount greater than had been achieved in all the previous eras of recorded human history. Within the force-field that was molding him, man would understand very little of this process, cooperate with one another very little, and with the process itself, hardly at all.

From within the viewpoint of his own present moment in any of the unfolding centuries, static men would see only change without pattern, quixotic ebb and flow, disruption, chaos, order lost, and order seemingly restored - over, and over again. Sacred standards would be cast down, and strange, seemingly arbitrary, and often as not incomprehensible new standards created.

From the present moment of his own temporal embedding, all would seem the whim of chance and accident, all without purpose or meaning. Yet from the present moment of human intelligence capable of containing the whole of human history as a single perception, all would seem structured, purposeful, law-conforming, and deliberate - almost - but never quite - inevitable.

If not quite inevitable then certainly necessary, for a great event lay ahead in man's temporal future. It existed already in eternity and was required to be actualized and normalized in time. The event toward which we have been impelled is the mutation which will yield a new organ of perception, an organ of liminal perception latent in some, alchemically activated in others, but here-to-date only intermittently active in a few exceptional individuals. What is inevitable is that man one day inherit it as part of his normal total experience, or else the experiment that is man will be terminated.

Many promising races of pre-men have been exterminated in the course of human existence. Many promising races of men have been exterminated in the course of the current historical era due to their inability to come to terms with intellect. What is expected of those who will inherit the future is an unmanageable and incomprehensible experience for most living today.

An organ of perception and experience giving rise to access to the four-dimensional world, will be as disastrous for intellect-based modern man, as the rise and normalization of western intellect has proven to be for many peoples during the span of the past millenium. A certain minimum cognitive standard and specific psychic gravity is required before such a radical new modality can be risked. Preparation for this was begun 1000 years ago as a deliberate operation.

The first steps involved a certain social tolerance, an expansion of intellect, and a degree of instinctual humanitarianism - which had to be established before Work on switching the new modality of consciousness could be enjoined in earnest. The presence and purpose of those who do this Work is mostly obscured from the view of the men and women on whom the operation is conducted. Exactly like the work of a farmer is mostly obscured from the comprehension and understanding of his flocks....,

the function of dreaming in the cycles of cognition

biogeneticstructuralism | In summary then, biogenetic structural theory holds (with Roffwarg et al. 1966, Robson 1988, and others) that the function of dreaming is essentially developmental. We have seen that the primary task of the higher brain centers is to construct a cognized environment from the nascent, neurognostic structures of the pre- and perinatal nervous system. The cognized environment is a vast system of models pertaining to the "real world," or operational environment, including him or herself as an organism. These models may be entrained to conscious network to produce our moment-by-moment flow of experience. The models mediating experience operate within the field of associations entrained in the dialogue between the prefrontal intentional processes and the sensorial processes, and become routinized in organization (form creodes) within cyclically recurring patterns of entrainment. These gross and recurring patterns of entrainment are recognized by their recurrent attributes, and are usually cognized as rucurrent by the individual, generally during enculturation by his or her society, and are experienced as phases of consciousness. Because our species has evolved as a diurnal primate phases of consciousness tend to take on a daily, or circadian rhythm of recurrence that alternates between those specialized to encounter and cognize events in the outer operational environment (we call these "being awake" in our culture) and those specialized to establish a transformative, reorganizational and homeomorphogenic interaction between models and other somatic processes (we call this "being asleep" in our culture).

Although the biological functions of sleep are manifold (Hobson 1988), the function of dreaming itself may be seen as the symbolic fulfilment or evocation within the sensorium of transformative processes occurring in the main outside the bounds of conscious network. The feedback relations (homeomorphogenesis) between the symbolic play of dreaming and extra-sensorial somatic processes is potentially a reciprocal one. But just how passive or active conscious network will be in intending the sensorial play will vary from dream to dream, from individual to individual, and from society to society.

The extent of awareness within dream phases varies enormously, and is the single most important variable in determining both (1) understanding in and of the dream, (2) and the locus of control of dream content. If awareness is hypointentional (weak involvement of prefrontal processes in conscious network), then the locus of control of dream experiences will lay with somatic processes largely outside the boundaries of conscious network. On the other extreme, if awareness is intentional (within the "normal" range of waking involvement of prefrontal processes in the conscious network mediating dreaming), then control of the dream experience may (but not necessarily) shift to conscious network. And, of course, entrainments mediating dreaming may range on a continuum of prefrontal involvement between these extremes.

In other words, hypointentional entrainment in a dream phase will produce little awareness, and the content may be relatively dull, unclear, confusing, perhaps producing little cross-phase influence or memory in a subsequent phase of consciousness. Increased intentionality will tend to produce the opposite experience, characterized by vividness of sensory content, active awareness of theme and continuity, lucidity (i.e., awareness of dreaming while within the dream), comprehension of meaning and perhaps active involvement of the "dream ego" in controlling the the dream content. Hyperintentionality (intense involvement of prefrontal processes) during dreaming may, for example, lead to the portalling experience (MacDonald, Cove, Laughlin and McManus 1989) in which intense concentration upon some element of a scene produces a "doorway" that "opens up" into an entirely different scene, a very common experience among meditators and dream yogis. Under hyperintentional entrainment, the dream ego ceases to be a passive point of view in the dream and becomes an active, questing locus of control (see Hillman 1987, LaBerge 1981) that may facilitate the capacity for advanced exploration of one's own unconscious processes (Malamud 1979).

The role of culture is enormous in preparing the individual to participate in and interpret experiences in multiple phases of consciousness (see e.g., Eggan 1955 on the Hopi). We have suggested that cultures may lie on a continuum from those tending to produce a monophasic orientation toward alternative phases to those that encourage transcendental exploration via alternative phases. Materialistic cultures tend to enculturate monophasic egos; that is, self-concepts informed primarily from memories accrued during waking phases of consciousness. Even when dream phases are not ignored as a source of experience, dreams are considered more like symbolic puzzles that must be decoded in terms comprehensible to the waking ego, than as experiences that are meaningful in their own right (James Hillman 1979). By contrast, more spiritually inclined cultures tend to enculturate polyphasic egos; i.e., those characterized by self-concepts informed from a variety of alternative phases of consciousness, including dream phases. In cultures that have developed advanced dream exploration as a means of verifying and vivifying their cosmology, experiences in the dream phase are meaningful to a polyphasic ego from within the dream itself, and may not require later interpretation in the waking phase for comprehension and integration into the ego complex.

this shock will rend the veil between the worlds as certainly as the veil was rent in the temple

UnknownCountry | It's worth asking what might happen if our visitors suddenly appear openly in our midst. For reasons that I detail in Solving the Communion Enigma, I consider this extremely unlikely, but not impossible. So, what if it did happen, what would it be like?

First, forget the fantasy that it would involve some sort of diplomatic mission from another planet. Our visitors are not like us. They will not be sending an ambassador or discussing hyperspace drives with Stephen Hawking. They are more different from us, almost, than it is possible to imagine.

My chief concern is that we may not just be behind them in terms of our knowledge and spiritual evolution, but that we may be organically incapable of seeing the world clearly enough to engage with them in any meaningful way. By comparison, while a chimpanzee can become used to human presence, as Jane Goodall has demonstrated, absolutely nothing you can say or do can ever explain even the simplest human artifact to one of these creatures. They will never read books, understand automobiles, know history, know science. They will never understand the greater world that they inhabit, nor the ways in which it threatens them, nor the ways in which they are dependent on it.

Let me assure you: we are in exactly the same position with our visitors. And they do not all have our best interests at heart, no more than everybody in Africa has the best interests of chimpanzees at heart. It should not be forgotten that there are butcher shops in London and Paris where bush meat is sold, albeit illegally, as a delicacy. I can assure you, as well, that there are things that are done with some of us that are as deletarious and incomprehensible to us as the notion that he might end up cooked over a gas ring in Montparnasse or Wapping would be to a chimp.

Those are hard words, I know, but also true ones, and true as well is that there are Jane Goodalls out there, and they have a notion that we will be able to evolve into higher realms, or they would not be here seeking communion with us. The extraordinary intimacy of our relationship with them simply would not be as it is if they did not know for certain that, on some level, we have the potential to be their equals.

They are already here. They are already among us. The world is filled with them and has been for generations. We filter our reality, though, just as the chimps do. A chimp can see a house or a car or a glorious painting and, quite simply, never integrate it into his reality. He simply does not see what is really there. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though, only that he cannot apprehend its existence.