Vulnerability and protection

"I’ve been checking out your blog from time to time.  Sometimes I’m staggered by the amount of personal disclosure you put out there.  I can’t help thinking that by making yourself so objectively discoverable, even in your uncertainties, you may isolate yourself from the intimacy with others that means so much to you.  The writer’s curse, I guess."

I am naked all the time.  Sometimes, if I am walking through a national park with a small group of beautiful people burning with the passion of life, I can get naked right there amongst the trees and tourists, dipping my body and myself into the water and stepping under the heavy piercing intensely charged waterfalls, screaming with the  exquisite vividity of being alive.  I can feel pride at the presence of my body in all its glory.  I can increase my sensitivity to the subtleties of the world and the forest and the possibilities of the moment, shared with myself, with my environment and with my radiant friends.  I can embrace the moment and cover my body in yellow ochre and spend the rest of the day as an angelic three-man Golden Mud Tribe.  Together we can not expose ourselves to the surprised passing walkers but the normality of their own humanity and the vehemence of their own shame.  When I feel encouraged and supported and loved by my companions I am powerful and open and able to expose myself to the world without danger or shame.  And thus the world is transforming around me.  The human race and the world as a whole opens up just a little more simply because my brothers and I have opened up together for all to see.  We have become so delighted with each other and with the natural world that people threaten to call the police, they smile at us, they turn away, they engage with us in an attempt to extract the conscious justification we must have made before getting naked and golden in public.  There is no reason.


In the real world my sensitivity tells me exactly where to draw the line and I am rarely wrong.  The internet, however, is vast and sprawling and inconceivably complex; it has little physical reality, little tangible vibrational frequency, no life force.  How am I supposed to know how far it is safe to open myself in this digital-intellectual dimension when here I am inherently alone, there are no friends present with me on my website despite the links connecting me to the interface of hundreds of people?  I have no fear of government monitoring of my details because I am not planning any terrorist attacks and they are powerless anyway.  But if all my thoughts and fears and loves and uncertainties are available for subscription to anyone on the planet, what is left for the delicate quiet moments when two individuals trust and love one another and intend to share their affection and sensitivity in an intimate moment?


I fell in love again the other day and I stared into this man's eyes and offered him everything.  He looked back and it seems to me we were relatively equal in our ability to be present in the devotion of the moment.  I guess there is only so deep either of us were willing to look and certainly as a result of this moment I felt no expectation of an extension of this intimacy.  It seems there is only so far any one entity allows you to move towards them and perhaps the degree is always mutual and it's only our conscious mind that undermines are certainty when we have decided we are in love with someone because we see their beauty.  Perhaps when we meet an entity, especially a human being forced to balance themselves between the art of life and the game of civilisation, who is willing and able to be beautiful we should merely accept and honour them in their vulnerability.  What more is there to demand?


I certainly make a lot of friends in being so objectively discoverable.  Everywhere I go there are people who want to talk to me, people who want to look me in the eyes, who want to be my friend or show me some kindness.  I am 26.6 years old, I am a man, I am vigorous and healthy and there is a part of me that wants to make love to the most magnificent humans I meet, by which I mean physical intimacy.  Are the presence of my masturbatory thoughts on the internet an impediment to the fulfillment of my desire?  Am I exposing the genitals of my soul to the faceless masses and therefore desensitising my physical genitals from the glory of exposure in a delightful moment to a single precious individual?  Communication is my job and intimacy is my inspiration and I don't know whether frustration is supposed to be a part of the manifestation of my intention in this life.


I am a human being and I am not ashamed.  I love you and I am not ashamed.  I am in love with you and I am ashamed because I'm not sure you want me to express my love in the ways my heart and my body desires.  I am ashamed that I want to touch you.  Perhaps there is some trauma-related reason why I am sitting alone in front of a computer, farting and drinking water, typing out my love, instead of holding my body against yours, advancing within each other from the cold and damp of the cave.  Perhaps the truth of the loving observation quoted above is not in the effect of my writing but in the intention.  It seems I would rather write about longing and frustration rather than fulfillment and acceptance.


I could also add to this story the simultaneous text message from another valuable person who wants to be gentle with me, who I do not desire sexually.  I tell myself it is better to give than to receive or if I give I will also receive so I should not deny the entities that desire me with their heart and body.  I should fulfill the possibilities of every friendship and say no only to the callous and jealous.  I should continue this dialogue wherever it takes me and delicately adjust the balance between vulnerability and protection for the rest of my life as I navigate through the loves and desires of this world.

I don't see anything to believe in

Help me to understand what I am doing in this world.  Every day I find good people to meet and good things to do and I wonder, does it add up to anything?

There is always the possibility that I could begin to believe in something, though this seems to be a far-fetched prospect.  I don't know how this believing in things business is done; no one can give me a straight answer, as if they don't know or aren't willing to face the truth.  Perhaps the truth is that they practice what George Orwell called double-think and they actually don't believe what they believe at all, but they do believe in it simultaneously.  This idea makes more sense than the one that suggests the world is full of stupid believers rather than beautiful lovers.  My experience of the people in this world, once the veil of abnormality is removed, is that they really are beautiful lovers rather than stupid believers.  Try it for yourself, it's real, it's scientific, it's repeatable, meet another person face-to-face with openness and honesty and acceptance and love and you will discover that essentially they do not believe in anything, they are beautiful and they are present; they are your lover and you could even say they are you, though we don't want to be metaphorical because that is only one step away from metaphysical which is too many steps away from science, which is the truth.

No, I'm being ironic now, I don't believe in science any more than I don't believe in original sin.  They're both human concepts that neither exist nor don't exist.  Of course one concept is considerably more useful than the other, but who am I to judge really, I am merely a thinker and a poet.  I have no legitimate or official authority handed down to me via a higher authority.  All I have is the integrity of being a living being, given life by God herself, birthed from the Gaian womb for 99 years of life on this planet before I too will rot back into the earth like everything else.  My authority is neither perpetual or omnipotent.

Some people claim some sort of official omnipotence.  They know they are as powerless as their children though they would never admit it to themselves, let alone someone they trust or the world they fear.  These people believe in their omnipotence because they think that the dominant ideology that legitimises national givernments and their gun-wielding agents is a universal ideology and that anyone who doesn't agree is wrong or at least insane or at least criminal or at least unpopular.  Their omnipotence is reinforced with law, with involuntary taxes, with professional gangs trained in systematic violence and intimidation and with a globe divided via national borders.  Yes, the planet, the largest physical object we can be certain we control, is defined and divided by which national government owns what, and every piece of land is owned by some government.  Even Antarctica is claimed as national territory by a number of governments, though it is uninhabitable.  I can only assume these omnipotence-delusional control-freaks are simultaneously aware of their powerlessness; surely, because they understand the convoluted mechanisms of politics.

Perhaps the beautiful loved-filled human being who is reading this thinks they believe in something.  Maybe they casually believe in something useful or maybe they definitely believe in some religion they must guiltily defend.  Maybe the more aware they are of the mental mechanism of double-think the more forcefully they must make a display of the absolute nature of the linguistic construct they use to define them as a person.

What if they could be honest?  (What if you could be honest?)  What if they could acknowledge that their religion, whether it be Islam, Mormonism or Consumer Democracy, is not true or untrue, that it is a beautiful useful myth for them, that it is so powerful already that it doesn't need to be defended, that its integrity is such that it is actually strengthened by the proximity of alternative myths, that although this myth preceded and will survive humanity our understanding of it can be enriched and complexified by open-minded discourse and diversity and therefore the truth is not under threat.

Just quietly, who but a person practicing double-think would feel the need to defend their ideology?  It is the same as a person or society full of fear feeling the need to defend their territory, rather than someone supported by confidence and strength.

I don't know what I am trying to say.  I don't believe in anything, yet I feel the need to write every day.  If you have discovered something worthy of my belief, please let me know immediately.  Look at the corner we've painted ourselves into, I don't see anything to believe in.  I just hope to have enough boots to be able to change them.

The power of consciousness to accept and the ineffectiveness of consciousness to control

"When we're unaware that we share the ability to co-create reality with the universe itself, that power slips away from us, causing our dream to become a nightmare."

I love self-help books that remind us we need their help cos we can't do it ourself.

I am a powerful person sometimes and sometimes I throw my weight around too much.  I know I am right most of the time but sometimes people assume this therefore means they are wrong and they are wrong in this assumption.  All our consciousness can do is maintain some sort of balance between the habitual and novel influences of the world.  If my presence has a novel effect on people I have to be careful how I place myself in relation to their sensitivity and the beauty inherent in it because I have no intention of threatening their vulnerability.

The most powerful thing consciousness can do is to merely accept.  I usually accept the life I have created for myself and the person I have become and I therefore would like to place myself in an environment that not only strengthens me but an environment that I strengthen as a result of my presence, because my presence is all I have to offer.  I do my best to be respectful by washing dishes and mowing lawns but if small things like this have become relevant then the power of my presence has become irrelevant and I am weak and pathetic and must move on.  I need only challenge myself with the profound and that which resounds deeply because my life is too empty and impermanent to worry about the small things that impact a more precarious equilibrium lifestyle.

The astonishing feat of maintaining our metabolism is, of course, entirely unconscious.  God is not doing it, it is not happening by chance, we are definitely doing it.  No amount of consciousness could possibly maintain this process, let alone improve upon it.  Our consciousness can merely choose where to place us - amongst microwaves and televisions or amongst trees and flowing water.

Why do we choose one and not another?  Is there a reason or is there no reason at all?  Do we eat randomly or do we choose precisely what we want to eat?  Do we eat the food that makes us feel the way we want to feel or do we choose to eat food that makes us feel something we choose not to feel?

I have to tell you that regardless of how developed your consciousness is, it cannot change the words I have chosen in composition and communication.  I have written these words whether you like it or not and your consciousness merely allows you to choose whether or not you continue reading them (not whether you have already read them).

Our consciousness is also sometimes called our ego.  For some reason one is separated as good, the other is separated as bad.  In this momentary linguistic model the two are inseparable.  Our consciousness is inherently insane (not bad) and chatters with itself incessantly and repetitively.  It defines us as the most unusual animal on this planet.  Calling it insane reflects little.  What our consciousness is largely doing, whether we ask it to or not, is creating meaning, telling stories, defining and refining myths for the purpose of externalising our interior world and containing it in symbols and metaphors.  This is our process, this is our purpose on this planet.  This is the intention on this planet whether we are conscious of it or not.  (The opening lines of John suggest this.)

Six months ago I took a ferry from Turku in Finland to Stockholm in Sweden.  I have friends in Stockholm who I intended to stay with.  However, I did not tell them I was coming.  I arrived in Stockholm without anyone knowing I was coming and made some phone calls for a place to stay only upon arrival.  These phone calls were ineffective for various banal reasons and therefore I had nowhere to stay.  When I had spent a lot of money making expensive cash calls on the public telephone I wandered around looking for somewhere to lay my head.  I slept in the park.  The following day I tried again on the public telephone and achieved an equally ineffective result, did not contact my friends and was therefore still alone and homeless.  By the end of the second day, after hours of rain, I did not want to be alone anymore, I did not want to sleep in the park in the rain, and I wandered off into the city looking for something I knew I wasn't going to find.  I finally had an emotional break-through and began to cry.  I acknowledged all the love and all the homes I have been blessed with in my life and felt intensely their lack in my present situation.  I shook and sobbed and stood feeling silly and bawled and wept.  It was a painful and powerful emotional catharsis and I of course survived it.  A few days later I was telling my friend Disa about this difficult beautiful experience.  She reminded me of something I had said a few days before I had left her to make this trip across the gulf.  "I never cry.  Even when I want to I can't do it.  I think crying is healthy.  I wish I could have a good cry."  Did my deliberate actions manifest this desired experience despite the fact that I never once considered it consciously?  You can consider this in the abstract if you like, but the effect the realisation had on me was physical.  It illuminated for me a constant process of unconscious manifestation in every moment of my life.  I might look at something and judge it bad, "this is not what I want in my life", but the reality is more real and the reality is that I created it, not through some mystical psychic manifestation process but through my actions.  I clearly intended it despite the fact that I didn't consciously anticipate and plan the consequences.

If this is a genuine personal mechanism that I have momentarily noticed, is this happening on a larger scale?  Are there some profound and disturbing implications in this model?

I spent 2005 obsessed with someone, "in love" I called it at the time, smoking a lot of marijuana, beginning to fail my degree and therefore my passion and focus in life and being depressed and taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (antidepressants).  I had no ideas about how to get myself out of this lifestyle and wasn't even considering that I need to get myself out of it.  But I am not in this lifestyle anymore, I got out of it.  My mother committed suicide and the shock and grief was so intense that it disrupted every aspect of my life, destroyed the linguistic constructs I was living by, and forced me to reinvent myself.  This was such a powerful process that I managed to create a completely different lifestyle that made me a completely different person and alerted me to the possibility and necessity of transforming myself periodically.

The possibility that this particular cathartic situation was intentional may be considered more difficult to accept than the previous example, but it seems to fit, if only on a mythical level.  It raised some significant and illogical implications about my mother and I making some sort of unconscious or higher-dimensional agreement that presumably also included others who were affected by this situation, such as my father and my siblings.  When thought through the situation raises many interesting possibilities about the interconnectedness of the universe.  Quickly the connections and implications become to complex and far-reaching to consciously think about, let alone contain within words.  Maybe I could communicate this experience to the face of a human being who is listening with a profound openness that taps into the depths of my unconscious understanding, rather than in this moment of sitting in front of a computer alone.

I have heard the concept that life is some sort of ladder-structure, a climb from unconsciousness at the bottom of the ladder to enlightenment at the top through the process of becoming aware of more and more things.  This doesn't equate so well with my experience.  You may decide I that I am implying that this concept is wrong, whereas I merely offer an alternative model.

My model is that life is a series of vicissitudes, fluctuations between novelty and habit (as Terence McKenna suggests), ups and downs.  Everybody is somewhere on this scale.  They are not above you or below you on some cosmic scale, but simply moving consistently along their own.  We are all either heading through habit into catharsis or through novelty into climax.  Those heading towards catharsis cannot be touched and cannot be helped, those heading towards climax will love and appreciate your input and your insight, absorbing as much as they can from a variety of sources.

I possess and arrogant and self-righteous tendency to interfere with people's lives.  I want to help them because I love them but all I'm doing is trying to change them when I should be accepting them.  I realised this when my friend was depressed.  The most beautiful man on Earth as far as I knew at the time and so I couldn't accept the fact that the joy in which I met him had become depression.  I tried to "cheer him up" until I realised that the most loving thing I could do is let him be depressed.  I honoured his depression and remained present with him in his depression, rather than trying to change it.  This actually made it easier to love him.  Thus we return to the power of consciousness to accept and the ineffectiveness of consciousness to control.

I noticed this vicissitude model when I got myself into a state of marijuana-fueled depression again in 2008 and this time actually felt the exact moment when I hit the bottom and started coming back up again.  It got to the point where I found myself stoned and curled up in a ball in the corner of the living room, whacking myself in the head in an effort to externalise some of the pain I felt within.  And then I felt a distinct shift in the vibrations of the room, felt a sudden surge of energy, stood up and began immediately to undertake the tasks that went on to transform my life powerfully and permanently.

So you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
A smile from veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Worst holiday ever

I was born in New Zealand and the first time I left the country, going "overseas" as we call it in these Pacific island nations, was seven years ago when my brothers flew me over to Gold Coast to spend ten days with them. This is not the most interesting holiday to write about because I mostly stayed at the house while my brothers were at work and when I did go out it was only to go shopping.  At this time my brother was young, more productive, and he drank out of joy, rather than depression.  He made his own home-brew so there was always copious amounts of beer and I drank with him every day.  Eventually it got to the point, at the height of the holiday, that I had my first beer with my breakfast cereal and drank all day.  When my brother got home we got into the bourbon and by the time we went out that night we tried playing pool upon arriving at the first club and I couldn't hit the white ball; then I took half an ecstasy tablet, having never tried the drug before.  My version of ecstasy at this time was slapping guys on the arse on the dancefloor of the club.  My brothers' friend didn't take it too seriously but some other drunk guy threatened to attack me if I continued and when I did continue he swung his fist at me and missed.  I swung my fist at him and missed and suddenly the bouncers were throwing us both onto the street where I, ravenous with aggression, wanted to violently attack this stranger who I had recently been sexually attracted to.  I spent the rest of the night bent over to the left and unable to stand up straight without the utmost concentration so we were not allowed into anymore clubs.  Having not yet got laid my brother attempted to accost men on the street to have sex with me, unsuccessfully.  When we got back to the house he went through the Yellow Pages looking for prostitutes.  He found two women but despite his efforts no male prostitute for me to have sex with.  Two women were ordered and when the first one arrived and turned out to be of Asian heritage, one brother said to the other, "This one's yours."  The second prostitute never turned up and so two of us went without sex that night.  I don't remember being frustrated enough to masturbate, but I do remember making an effort to make the prostitute feel comfortable, offering her a cup of tea upon her arrival.

I can write about these things freely because no one in my family take any interest in my writing.

Four years later one of my brothers, Brendon, was living with me in Auckland.  He had come to stay with me after our mother's death and fallen in love with my flatmate, Catriona.  They subsequently had a child together and the four of us were again invited back to Gold Coast by the remaining brother, Barry.  It was over new year and it was definitely the worst holiday ever.

South-east Queensland in the middle of summer is hot and this was a very hot holiday.  Barry went to a lot of effort and a lot of expense before we arrived, including installing a air-conditioning system in the living room of his not-yet-completed house, primarily for the comfort of 1.7-year-old Sakura.  Catriona subsequently spent much of her time laying on the couch in the living room with the air-conditioning on full, when I preferred to be in the shade outsde, in Sakura's blow-up paddling pool.

Because of the heat, or some other unimportant excuse, we spent most of our holiday laying around my brother's dusty house.  The idea that we do something with ourselves was generally agreed to be a good idea, but perhaps an overwhelming one.  So I found a couple of books in Barry's garage to read.  One was about a child who was systematically abused by his mother, which he describes in great detail and the other was about the careers of two English magicians.  I spent a great deal of time reading because for some reason, when the adults discussed what we should do with each day my ideas were completely ignored.  Whenever I suggested an activity it did not even justify a response; perhaps I would get a derisive stare in reply.  I was only ten days younger than the next-youngest adult.  I have spent the subsequent two years diverging greatly from my family's idea of fun but at this time, mostly, my ideas consisted of going to the beach, which I maintain is a good idea any day of the week.

Unlike my first Gold Coast holiday, my local brother took the whole holiday off work so we could have had fun every day.  We did go to the beach two or three times in ten days, though.  However, the mornings would turn to afternoons and quickly it would be too late in the day to spend an hour driving anywhere along those endless Queensland motorways.  I won't spend any of my present-day morning calculating what percentage of our trip was spent driving along the motorway.

The big day of the trip, somewhat more wholesome than the last due to 1.7-year-old Sakura being the heart of the holiday, was a long drive to Australia Zoo a few hundred kilometres up the coast.  Australia Zoo is a big place and there are a lot of imprisoned animals to look at and Catriona and I wanted to see as many as possible.  Brendon and Barry, however, after spending hours driving there, decided to wander around slowly, dawdling.  Hearing that the camel was being fed Catriona and I decided to run off together to see this once-a-day phenomenon.  The beautiful strange specter of the lone camel in his pen was the highlight of my day.  We figured out later, however, that this assertion of will by Catriona and I annoyed Barry.

I had salad for lunch and everyone else had fried food, which didn't seem appropriate to me in that weather.  My self-righteous self-respecting awareness of my bodies dietry needs may have contributed to the fact that by the end of the long hot day my anger had passed through me very quickly but the other four members of my family ruined each other's and their own days by marinading in their anger for hours.  Barry decided to be so angry that he did not speak to us for the remainder of the holiday, another few days, and once driving us home from Australia Zoo refused to drive us anywhere in the vehicle he had hired and he and Brendon had paid half-each for.

Every morning of this hot, boring holiday I would be woken up at 05.00 by the heat of the day.  The latest I ever slept was 06.00.  Sakura would also wake up early and somehow everyone else would sleep in for hours.  So the first few hours of every day was spent with my beautiful niece in peace, sitting outside in her paddling pool, Sakura usually naked and me in my underwear.

On the morning of new year's day the other adults slept in even longer than usual and so Sakura and I had the whole morning alone together.  We took a walk down to the supermarket which turned out to be very far with a 1.7-year-old.  It was a particularly hot morning and my beautiful little niece and I got hot and thirsty and very iritated with each other.  On the way back she was insolent and I was impatient and she was crying and I was swearing.  We decided to stop at the park halfway home and sit in the shade.  The best moment of the whole holiday was when Sakura sat on my lap, hungry, thirsty and hot, and stuffed her face with watermelon.  The poor desperate girl in haled this juicy watermelon and juice poured from her mouth all over my body as she quenched her thirst and raised her blood-sugar.  We walked the rest of the way home somewhat more calm and energised.

The last few days of our lame holiday in Gold Coast our brother and host did not say a word to us, even to tell us why he was angry.  We figured out that it was because of the events at Australia Zoo but he told me later that it was because Catriona is generally inconsiderate.  Brendon was justifiably annoyed about Barry's behaviour and considered packing our bags and going somewhere else for the last few days.  At this time of crisis, when no one else knew how to behave, I was able to step up and be listened to.  I calmly suggested that we leave our belongings at Barry's house and focus on enjoying our day.  The four of us took a bus into Surfers Paradise and we went to the beach, having the best outing of all at the low point of the whole holiday. We had a wonderful day and I realised that the heart of Gold Coast culture is the beach, the rest being vapid consumerism.

The only thing Barry allowed himself to do for us over those last few days is drive us to the airport when it was time to fly away.  We left early that morning, which was lucky because there was a massive traffic jam on the motorway and we had to wait on the tarmac in the sun for hours.  Catriona was apparently put off eating eggs from caged chickens because one of the vehicles next to us was full of hundreds of miserable imprisoned chickens.

We got to the airport just in time to rush through the procedures.  Barry always says "I love you" as a form of goodbye and I am sure he still loved me despite his wrathful frustration, however when we departed and I said "I love you" he did not answer.  I took my flight back to New Zealand glad to leave this socially and culturally impoverished over-developed area and relieved to end my holiday.

It's funny to look back on the fact that I was invited on this holiday involuntarily.  Brendon and Catriona and Sakura were planning to go together but Brendon and Catriona broke up and so I was offered her ticket.  When they got back together Catriona decided it was not fair that my ticket suddenly went back to her and she convinced Brendon, without consulting me, to buy me a ticket.  I would much preferred to have let this little family take their holiday alone together, but that's not how it turned out.  Otherwise I would have gone to Prada in Coromandel with Lauren and had a wonderful time, as she did, swimming naked on the beach and spending time with hundreds of beautiful open-hearted strangers.  Rather, I spent my holiday as described above.

That day

Inspired by Terence McKenna's Novelty Theory.  After watching a YouTube video of McKenna with Lauren in 2008 I wrote this from my notes in 2009.

 "...And on that day..."
 His voice trailed off because no mind could know but only speculate
 and speculation is as rain thrashing against and dripping down a window pane.
 Truth in the desired form was inconceivable
 and therefore useless to these brain worshippers;
 but in regards the past, comprehension could be achieved with great difficulty.

 The year begins in confusion and apprehension,
 fear continues to rise as the institutions of government and economy crumble into chaos.
 Fear becomes anger and anger becomes hatred and hatred becomes violence in the utmost throes of fear,
 and soon the the cracked streets are strewn with bodies;
 the survivors are those who stare death in the face and do not blink.
 After this mass bloodshed there can be no mourning
 because the world merely took a long overdue shower and washed away her musty stink.
 A new day is declared and the refreshing scent of global peace drifts idly through the air like pollen in early spring
 and life continues and beauty gives birth to itself exponentially;
 and the illusion of perfect is so strong that peace is complete and perfection approximated;
 and all the love of all life on Earth combines to transform their planet into a glowing orb of beauty incomprehensible and indescribable.
 The Earth rises, glowing more brightly than the sun and illuminating the whole barren universe
 and the entire universe glows with the illumination of the love of all life on Earth
 and water breaks forth from the depths of the most desolate planets and life and love spread throughout an infinite universe
 and the sun and all his fellow stars grow extra bright to accommodate this new life
 and as the stars grow brighter so does the light of love intensify and this beauty that can never again be corrupted by fear becomes a throbbing intensifying mass emanating light and love to every corner of the universe
 and soon the stars, in their utter folly, grow so hot, and the planets around them in unison,
 that matter cannot sustain what it has developed.

 For those who experienced this event it felt merely like an exponential brightening of a light that climaxed as a blinding glare that permeated every atom and obliterated the entire physical universe in one painless moment
 and it was as pleasant and unconscious as a drift into sleep
 and the night of this sleep was long and images appeared and shifted
 and all life experienced differently old images and emotions they thought had been forever lost
 and all that had died returned
 and no one thought it strange.
 In fact no one though much at all, they merely glided through their images and emotions, briefly touching each other and drifting away, as if in a dream;
 and at one moment, in the midst of dream, a single entity realised that this is a dream and we are all asleep together forever
 and from this entity, like the ripples in a pool of water, this awareness spread through everything
 and it was a dream and therefore they could do anything and so they took to the air and flew their fill
 and then they embraced
 and all life embraced all life
 and it was a dream and matter did not exist
 and form entered form and love possessed love fully and equally
 and love was generosity and abundance
 and universal harmony focussed and condensed and compressed to one tiny pinprick of consciousness
 and this point became smaller and denser until all existence was so intensely focussed in on itself that it imploded once, with such ferocity that all the surrounding nothingness was sucked into a void
 and for a moment there was stillness and silence.

 But there was a big bang from the depths of the void
 and that big bang let there be light
 and there was light.

Terence McKenna's Novelty Theory

A transcribed and abridged version of a 1997 Terence McKenna talk at the Esalen Institute.  From the wonderful Psychedelic Salon podcast.


The Timewave


The Timewave is a variable wave scaled against time.  What this is measuring is the ebb and flow of novelty and habit.

The basic assumption is, there is a quality to reality which science has overlooked.  Some people in the east have called it Tao.  I want to divorce myself from the freight of that tradition and call it novelty.  Novelty is the quality in nature that seeks complexity; and it's countervailing force is called habit.  I am proposing that we live in a universe ruled by two fundamental forces that are larger than physics and electromagnetism; habit and novelty.  In every situation, whether it lasts a millisecond or a billion years, the struggle between these two tendencies of the universe can be discerned.

Now, it's pretty self-explanatory what these terms mean but I'll run through it.  Habit means repetition of previously established patterns, continuation of an equilibrium situation, a tendency for a system to degrade entropically under the aegis of the second law of thermodynamics, a conservative tendency, a preservationist tendency.  What is novelty?  It is the new, the untried, levels of complexification previously unachieved, unusual connectivity, creativity, surprise.  These two things are locked in struggle over vast scales of time. They are not eternally locked in struggle because the good news is that novelty is winning.

If you get big enough chunks of time, though there may be vicissitudes, ups and downs, ultimately the situation ends up more novel than it started out.  Ilya Prigogine, who got the Nobel Prize for work in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, called this "the principle of order through perturbation".  A counter-intuitive phenomenon in physical chemistry because for a very long time, one of the strongest-held faiths in physics was that the universe is undergoing thermodynamic degradation.  In other words, everything is tending to fall apart.  Prigogine showed that this is not true, even in simple physical systems there can be spontaneous mutations to higher states of order.  So what's really going on in the universe is a struggle between these two tendencies.

The basic data comes out of the I Ching.  "So you want to make a revision in physics based on a Chinese occult divinitory system?  Are we getting this correct?"

First of all, let's look at the Western notion of time as we derive it from Newton.  The Western notion of time is called "pure duration".  The only thing time is in Western physics is the place where you put process so that it doesn't all happen at once.  Time has no quality, it is pure duration.  Think of it as a perfectly smooth surface.  The only modification to this doctrine over the past 500 years is Einstein came along 100 years ago and said, "In the presence of massive gravitational fields this perfect smoothness is slightly distorted over very large scales."  So we go from perfectly smooth, pure duration, to slightly curved space-time.

This adherence to the idea that time is perfectly smooth is a sentimental notion left over from our obsession with perfect geometrical shapes when Greek science kicked off about 2500 years ago.  It took Kepler and Copernicus to demonstrate the orbits of the planets were not perfect circles and one by one the perfect objects of Greek mathematical and geometric theorising have been laid aside; except this idea of pure duration.

The reason the idea of pure duration has been hung on to is because modern science does its business through a series of hat tricks called "probability theory".  The unexamined assumption is that time is completely uniform, that it does not matter when the measurement was made.  Is there any reason to assume that?  Looking at nature there is no reason to assume that; however, you cannot do science unless you assume that.  Science depends on what is called the "experimental method" and basic to the idea of experiment is what is called the "restoration of initial conditions".  If time is not uniform, then you cannot restore initial conditions.  If you cannot restore initial conditions you cannot make sense of probabilistic data.  If we were intellectually honest about what's going on, we should say, probability theory and modern science is the study of those natural phenomena so course-grained that an assumption of a restoration of initial conditions does not destroy the integrity of the phenomena.  In other words, a lens that can be focused only to a certain depth.

What we're interested in are love affairs, dynastic transitions, corporate takeovers, political revolutions and family feuds.  The interesting thing about these things is that they never happen the same way twice, we would never even expect such a thing.  We understand that the complexity of those phenomena ensures their uniqueness.

This theory has probably not stormed the intellectual battlements of Western Civilisation because it poses so fundamental a challenge.  Science cannot swallow the Timewave.  You have to choose one or the other.  The Timewave is not occult, but it is not science as we have done it for the past 500 years.  Because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is true.  The intuition that every moment is unique.  It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysic of being.

Now why the I Ching?  For the same reason that Western culture evolved a maniacal obsession with matter that ends with atomic fusion, sequencing of the DNA, room-temperature super-conductors and all that, in the East people were interested in time, the other great mystery given to us in this dimension.  The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward into metabolism.  The human body is a knot in time.  It is a non-thermal dynamic state of equilibrium maintained by the miricle of metabolism.  Metabolism is a slow controlled chemical burning of organic material.  A so subtle form of burning that the energy is trapped in various membranes and cytochrome cascades and put to the work of organism.

If you imagine then, at some time thousands of years in the past, a people possessing techniques that today we would call yogic; noticeable breathing, noticeable heartbeat, noticeable pulse, techniques for stilling all this.  As noise leaves the physiological circuits, the mind falls inward into a world of interiorised phenomena for which we have no language, because this is not our cultural obsession.  We say it's dream, it's hallucination, but in other cultures complex vocabularies were developed to study these things, vocabularies as complex as our scientific vocabulary.

Out of 110 basic elements the entire world of material phenomena emerges.  Similarly, in the inspection of time, it was realised, that time too comes in flavours, 64.  They not only saw that time is made out of these elements but they saw that they occurred in certain patterns of fixed occurance, at different levels, at different speeds.  That from the point of view of this I Ching philosphy, a given moment in being, at some locus of space and time, is a kind of interference pattern created by moving levels of influence and these influences interpenetrate each other on many levels.  And all of this can in fact be quantified and mathematecised and portrayed in the universal language of mathematics and that's what I've tried to do.

When the wave moves up, habit is increasing, when the wave moves down, novelty is increasing.  And you can feel these things in your own life.  100 million years of radiation into all sorts of niches across the planet, then suddenly a planetary cooling and a mass extinction, the novel forms disappear.  But over long periods of time, as I said, habit is vanquished and novelty is concentrated.  The other half of the story is that this process of movement into deeper novelty is speeding up, always has been speeding up.  Once life appears, the pace quickens.  Once life leaves the ocean the thing is practically a direct descent into novelty.

It's telling us that 4500 BC a descent into novelty is underway; Sumer, Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, Egypt, a series of civilizations, each leaping beyond the accomplishments of the other until we reach the pyramid-building phase of Egypt, the Old Kingdom, something that was not surpassed in novelty until early Roman times.  This up-swing back into habit is characterised by brutal civilisations; the Hittites, the Mitanni, Imperial Assyria; motorcycle gangs with chariots.  The turning point is up here when Homer sings his song.  That's what set the last phase in motion.  Homer sings his song and it begins an almost unbroken cascade into modernity.

There is an aspect of this theory that I find very appealing that I haven't touched on yet.  I showed you a screen where I said that at the top of a certain mountain Homer sang his song, this is that same shape.  But now we're not looking at thousands of years, we're only looking at 52 years.  If this is a span of time from 1944 to 1996 it is, on another level, a span of time from roughly late Egyptian time to Umayyad Caliphate, with Homer singing his song up here.  On the short scale, the 52 year scale, this is 1967.  Now these two things are, according to this theory, in a situation of resonance or geometrical relationship to each other. 

In other words, orthodox theories of history and time would tell you that the most important moment shaping this moment is the moment which just preceded this moment.  It was, as it were, the conduit for the wave of causal necessity to arrive at this moment; but I'm saying something different.  I'm saying that every moment in time is an interference pattern made by other moments in time that are related to each other not through linear seriality but through this much more complex schema of relations.

If the theory has any utility, if this idea of habit and novelty has any instructive value at all, then we should find novel events clustered in these troughs and we should find periods of constipated recidivism on these up-sweeps.  So now we have two data fields with which to play, the mathematically defined wave and the admittedly messy data of natural and human history, and you can seek a best-fit between them.  When you impartially get them lined up so that it seems that most major episodes of novelty that historians or people who care about these things agree on and most low points in the wave line up with each other, then you simply go to the end of the wave and look at the end-point and it kicks out a date.


Every theory has a hard swallow.  The hard swallow in ordinary science is the Big Bang.  If you can believe that the whole universe sprang from nothing in a single instant for no reason, what would you resist as a hypothesis?  Science says, "Give us one free miracle and we can then go from there and never ask the favor again."  So apparently you get one free miracle in your system building.  The secret of universal architectonics has been handed over to an Irishman by a mushroom for the edification of mankind.  I mean, that is too much.  So we have this peculiar three-pronged situation.  We have a pattern in the King Wen Sequence of the I Ching, taken by an Irishman, and contorted into a mathematical wave which gives a prediction for the apotheosis of the world which matches the expectations of a vanished Mesoamerican civilization.

You see, if the last cycle from 1945 to 2012 is real then in a sense all larger cycles are compacted into it.  In a sense, from 1945 to 2012, we're reliving the entire history of the world.  Consequently there's this feeling of things moving faster and faster.  In a universe that was actually built on this type of architecture, imagine this, a universe that actually had this kind of closure, where each time cycle was 1/64 the size of the one that preceded it.

Apparently, as far as I can tell, what will happen is that as novelty asymptotically increases in the final months, hours, minutes, milliseconds, boundaries will dissolve, all boundaries.  We see the nation state dissolving, but wait until the atomic field dissolves.  Everything is apparently crunching together in some kind of meltdown.  It's the equivalent of a black hole, but it's not a gravitational collapse, it's a novelty collapse.  We are collapsing into a black hole of novelty.  And I've tried to imagine how this could happen.

The way it was revealed was very odd, because it never let me see where I was going, I couldn't figure out what I was doing.  It said, "Go buy graph paper.  Go get your I Ching.  Look at the King Wen Sequence.  Graph the first order of difference."  I would try and guess, "What are we doing?  Are we discovering an ancient Chinese calendar?  Why are we doing this?"  "No, no, don't worry about that.  Next step."  And it always hid from me where I was headed.  It still hides from me, where I'm headed.  The software has been written, the controversy rages on the internet, I even now have critics.  I'm not sure about the wisdom of all of this, but I figure, let the meme fight for its life in the jungle of competing models of reality.

Death

I did talk earlier in the weekend about this model of the hyper-dimensional object intruding into three-dimensional space-time and through the miracle of metabolism wrapping matter around itself for a few years and then when the hyper-dimensional form retracts out of this lower-dimensional matrix the matter that it's organised simply falls apart.  I like that model.

The thing about DMT is that it is an inhabited space.  A huge percentage of the people who take it encounter entities of some sort, entities with intelligence, with language.  Some people, including myself,  wanted to leap to the conclusion that these must be the aliens, we've finally found their hive.  It isn't under the Atlantic trench, it isn't inside Mount Everest, they're hiding inside this organic molecule.  But, I think, in service of the principle of parsimony, preferring the simplest explanation, these things must be human souls.  It's easier for me to believe in the human soul than to believe in a colony of extraterrestrials camped inside an alkaloid.  It's not that easy for me to believe in human souls, but still, the feeling you have from these things is one of immense affection for humanity.

In other words, if you were to actually die, rather than smoke DMT, then - if we follow this model - you would be in that place but there would be no going back to this world after five minutes.  It appears like, once out of the body this incredibly enfolded and compacted field called the soul begins to unfold into its death rite, and quickly one would become incomprehensible to this world.  And all that is retained is the affection for us in our limited situation.

Any situation can be looked at from a point-of-view that reveals the whole fractal.  In other words, experience is holographic on one level, but linearly sequential on another level.  It says, the most novel and amazing thing that will ever happen to you is the last thing that will ever happen to you; we gather our experiences, we become wiser, we meet people, life becomes more novel, we have children, they have children, we have success, we have failure.  If you're living right your life should just get more and more baroque, beautiful, complicated, mysterious and then you die and then it really gets interesting.  That's what this all seems to want us to believe.  "But if the world is fractal, then is it not true that the evolution of an individual could be extrapolated to be the evolution of the whole system?"  That leads to the mildly unsettling possibility that this great transition we are moving toward is not T1 for everybody but D1 for everybody.  In other words, death. 

Death is the thing that really stirs us; we don't know what it is.  I've looked a lot at asteroid impactors because the people who study these things know that this is not an act of god or a miracle, this happens.  It has happened, it will happen; and it happens on different scales.  A meteor crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago and everything within 800 miles of that impact died instantly.  65 million years ago an object the size of Manhatten impacted in the gulf of Campaychay and nothing on this planet larger than a chicken walked away from that.  You talk about ecological disaster, there's never been one like that in the history of the planet.  Thousands, tens of thousands of species died, entire orders of animals were wiped out, the continents were rearranged.  But the flowering plants of which we are so fond, and our own dear selves, of which we are even more fond, would never have had the chance to insinuate themselves into the evolutionary life of this planet had there not been that clearing out of the reptilian climax.

So you look at this thing and then you say, "Was this the greatest mass extinction in history, or the greatest leap forward for biology in the history of the planet?"  And the answer is, it was both.  Out of enormous death comes an enormous surge in the domain of organic novelty.

Novelty

Now we're working from the notebooks.  In other words, this is not prepared for public consumption, this is something I meditate on in the bath.

I can't help but notice that as novelty increases in time - according to this model - that the spatial domain of its focus narrows.  So for instance, in the early phase of the Timewave the stars are condensing and the galaxies are forming.  We could say that the entire universe is moving toward novelty.  But once carbon chemistry appears the cycles of fusion in stars and production of heavy elements and things like this are stabilized and the domain of novelty becomes biology and for a billion and a half years biology evolves and adumbrates its forms and moves from the prokaryotes to the eukaryotes to the multicellular, the conquest of the land begins.  But then, with the emergence of language-using and tool-using higher primates, novelty leaves the domain of organic life and organic life becomes metastable and evolution and mutation happens, but where the action has moved is into the epigenetic domain entirely defined, on this planet, by human activity.

And so the human beings are the carriers of novelty.  And that has gone on until about, pick a number, about 3000 to 2500 years ago.  And then the novelty seems to concentrate itself in Southern Europe.  The Greeks take some kind of step that no other people had ever taken.  The Greek mind crossed an invisible boundary and somebody said, "Let's take a block of marble or some clay and let's not symbolise a human being, let's make a perfect topological simulacrum of a human being.  A face that looks like a face, flesh that looks like flesh."  It was like the Greek consciousness rose to the surface and left the unconscious behind.  The eyes were open and no longer saw through symbolic filters but instead said, "Nature, in and of itself."  This is the foundation for science and art as we know it.  So the novelty then was largely in the hands, I'm rushing here, exceptions are obvious, in the hands of what we call the Greco-Roman mind.  And so it has been for a couple of thousand years.

Well then, pick a number, a hundred years or so ago, it further contracted the novelty into the high-tech industrial democracy.  And now it has further retracted.  One of the problems we're having is that there's a bifurcation going on in our society.  Part of us are going with the new novel technologies that knit us together and make us dimensional telepathic creatures through the internet and some people are digging in their heels and saying, "Oh no no beyond newspapers I can't go."  And so those people are being left behind.  They are practicing old-style culture in an equilibrium state.

So now it isn't even all of the high-tech populations of the industrial democracies.  As we get closer to 2012, if this process proceeds, then the source of novelty will constrict even further and I guess it may eventually come down to one or two people, or a group of people.  And maybe those people will make a machine and then the machine will be the source of the novelty and all of us will be put out to the pasture of equilibrium and maintain the rest of the world as it was.  But the novelty would have focused to some incredibly intense point.  And looking at it from that model it's hard to see how it could be an asteroid impact or something like that because that would affect all biology, all geology, it would completely violate this long-standing tendency of the novelty to concentrate itself. 

Well now the Buddhists have an interesting perspective that maybe has something to do with this.  There are many schools of Buddhism and I don't want to get into that.  But there are schools which hold the following doctrine.  That if a single person could attain enlightenment then all sentient beings in the cosmos would attain enlightenment instantly.  In other words, that only one person, or one being, has to break through the boundary for the entire state system to collapse and rearrange itself. 

The future

It is 2012-12-21 and through the worldwide VRML hookup of the internet everybody with an IQ above ten has gathered in the great collective space to witness the first attempt to send a human being through time.  At the World Temporal Studies Institute at Lochaera in the Amazon the president of so-and-so makes a speech, the lady time traveller makes a speech, she straps on her helmet, she steps into the machine, the "Fanfare for the Common Man" is played, a button is pushed, and off she goes into the future. 

Now, what has always been put against time travel is what's called the Grandfather Paradox.  If time travel were possible I could travel back in time and kill my grandfather.  If I did that I wouldn't exist, therefore I couldn't do it, therefore there is a closed loop of paradox, therefore time travel isn't possible.  I put this to the mushroom and it said, "Well, time travel is possible but you can only travel as far back in time as the moment of the invention of the first time machine.  You can't travel further back in time than that because there were no time machines before that."

So here is my model of what would happen when the lady temponaut sails off into the future.  Let's forget about her and ask the question, What happens next in our world?  And my first guess was, what happens next is thousands and thousands of time machines arrive from all points in the future.  They have come back through time to witness the first time machine take off.  And then I said, "Well, but wait a minute.  We haven't dealt with the grandfather paradox.  One of these time machines from the distant future, on its way to the first time flight, could stop off and kill the grandfather of the driver of that time machine and we haven't got anywhere at all."  So then I built a slightly more complicated model, because the future is not what we think it is. 

What happens when the lady temponaut goes into the future is not that time machines arrive from all over the future.  What happens is that the entire rest of the history of the universe happens instantly; evolutionary developments, conquests of the galaxy, vast technologies that allow star-flight and wormhole travel and all that.  The fruits of all that are delivered instantly to our doorstep in 2012.  I call it the God Whistle Model.  In other words, we end the whole thing.  We collapse the state vector and everything goes into a state of novelty.  And what happens then, I think, is the universe becomes entirely made of light.

Parity is conserved

There is something in physics called the Principle of Parity.  This is that particles can appear out of nothingness as long as they appear in pairs such that after a certain period of time the members of the pair encounter and annihilate each other.  When this happens, physicists say, parity is conserved.  Now it's known in quantum physics that there is a phenomenon called vacuum fluctuation.  Vacuum fluctuation is a situation where in absolutely empty space, suddenly out of the quantum sub-space particles jump into existence, they follow trajectories, they encounter each other, they annihilate each other, parity is conserved.  So you talk to these quantum physicists and you ask, "How large can one of these vacuum fluctuations be?"  And they say, "Most of them, they last milliseconds, nanoseconds."  You say, "Well, is there a theoretical upper-limit on the size of a vacuum fluctuation dictated by theory?"  And they say, "No, no no.  It's simply that the longer the fluctuation lasts, the rarer it is."  So, in other words, the longer a vacuum fluctuation occurs, the less likely you are to encounter one.  Well then you say, "Is it possible that this entire universe is such a vacuum fluctuation?"  They say, "Yes, but that would be very rare to have such a long one."  You say, "Hell, you only need one!"  Calculating the probability of a unicate event is a fool's game, it's either 100% sure or zero sure. 

So here is a model, and I took this from the Swedish physicist Hannes Alfven, who hasn't gotten enough credit but who's a very interesting thinker.  Imagine that the universe is this kind of vacuum fluctuation, a 17 billion-year-long vacuum fluctuation.  Well, what it means then is that at the Big Bang, not one universe was born, but two.  And they sailed off into superspace and they have no connectivity with each other, or they have Bell's non-local connectivity or something.  But anyway, they are distinctly separate.  But they are, unbeknown to each other, on a collision course.  Parity must be conserved, eventually.  And a model like this holds open the possibility of the instantaneous transformation of the entire cosmos because the collision of these two universes would not occur in three-dimensional space, it would occur in a higher-dimensional space.  So this cosmological model holds out the possibility that all matter in the universe could be instantaneously cancelled in this encounter with the antimatter twin that was born at the beginning of the cosmos. 

Every particle known to physics possesses an anti-particle which is locked into this parity-conserving thing played out for you with one exception, one astonishing and amazing exception.  The photon has no anti-particle.  There is no anti-photon.  So this universe is on a collision-course with itself in hyperspace, at the moment of the conservation of parity, all matter vanishes, and what is left is a universe made entirely of light.  And we have no model, I have no model, for a universe made of light.

What would happen to forms?  What would happen to your body, my body, this planet?  The answer is, no one can know.  But it is very interesting that the esoteric traditions of nearly every religion talk about light a great deal.  Talk about ascent to the light, cultivation of the light, the after-death vehicle as a thing made of light.  So, I just put this out here because it occurred to me.  My imagination, my effort to make the assumptions of novelty theory congruent with the known laws of physics, you know.  This sounds like wild-hair stuff, but no violation of the known laws of physics is involved in this scenario.  So perhaps enlightenment is when an entire universe drops its matter and antimatter out of its structure and it becomes entirely made of light.  That would certainly fulfill the novelty theory.  Anyway, that's enough of that malarkey.

Zero Point

Well, you see the way the novelty theory is structured is you have this wave and it is iterated on different scales.  And if you have a given level, let's call it A, above A is a larger level that is A times 64.  Below A is a smaller level that is one sixtyfourth of A.  And wherever you go in the hierarchy this is true; levels above, 64 times larger, levels below, 64 times smaller.

The Timewave had the largest cycle I found necessary a 72 billion year cycle.  So let's call that the top cycle, the A level.  A 72 billion year cycle, plenty of time for the universe to evolve to its present state.  Below that is a level one sixtyfourth that size, roughly 1.2 billion years.  At the initiation of that cycle some dramatic thing happens in biology.  Below it is another cycle, if the B level is 1.2 billion years then the next level is one sixtyfourth of that, roughly 275 million years.  Next cycle, divided by 64, 750,000 years.  You see where I'm going. 

Eventually you get to a cycle that is 4306 years in duration.  That is basically the cycle of late history.  The next cycle down is only 67 years long, from 1945 to 2012.  Each cycle begins with a bang, literally.  Below the 67 year cycle there is a 384 day cycle and that will run from late-2011 to the end of 2012.  And I call that the Year of the Jackpot, it's a 13 month year, but the entire history of the universe will be reprised in that 384 day period.  Then comes a six day cycle.  By this time either I will have gently bowed out or the entire world will be aware of what is happening because the novelty will be so intense.  Imagine a six day cycle in which the entire previous 67 year, 4306 year, up to the top level, are all being compressed and replayed in six days.  Then comes the 95 minutes cycle.  Then comes the minute and a half cycle.  Then comes the 1.3 second cycle.

Now, at that point, 1.3 seconds, if we assume that the cycles cannot be iterated beyond the level of Planck's Constant, you still have 13 cycles to go through and you have come through 13 cycles.  So the universe is only half done 1.3 seconds before its end.  That's why asking what will happen in 2012 is preposterous; the mind fails.  Half of the universe's evolutionary unfolding will occur in the last few milliseconds of its existence because of the asymptotic expression of the acceleration of novelty.  So it's this thing that began very gently, very stately; the march of the atom, the condensation of the stars in the galaxies, the emergence of biology, the emergence of higher animals and into a screeching photo finish where all the stuff is bundled together, squeezed together, connected, transformed, lifted into higher dimensions.  And this is not a process we can take responsibility for and discuss our guilt or innocence, this is the cosmos itself tearing loose from its previous constraints and moving ever-faster toward ever-greater freedom with ever-more appetite and momentum until it achieves its goal, which is infinite novelty throughout all space and time; holographic connectedness, god-mindedness, you know, whatever your vocabulary is.

It's mind-boggling to think of this in human scales of time, that half of the universe's becoming occurred in a few milliseconds; but dig, that is the position of orthodox physics as we sit here.  It's just that they say it happened at the beginning, I say it'll happen at the end.  The Big Bang occurred and then a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang there was this thing called the inflationary-expansion phase.  It lasted a few nanoseconds and in those few nanoseconds the universe became tens of orders of magnitude larger than it was.  So it's a legitimate move in physics, however counter-intuitive it may seem on the human scale.

Once beyond the zero point novelty must mean the simultaneous realisation of bifurcations of all sorts.  In other words, what ultimate novelty must mean is anything we say it means.  There are no limitations when novelty soars to infinity.  The universe is a series of impediments to the expression of novelty and when it has overcome all those impediments there is a flawless higher-dimensional matrix throughout all being, I guess is how you put it.

Models

Let me try to sum this up, certainly not to sum up the ideas because the ideas are really not that important.  They may be true, they may be untrue, they may reside in a domain where those rules don't apply.

Maybe you don't understand ten-dimensional vector calculus, then don't use that tool to understand.  Hone the tools that you have and try to create models.  Understand that all models are provisional.  This is the antidote to the idea of ideology.  Ideology is when you believe something passionately.  Models are when you dispassionately attempt to define the operation of a system.  The word model implies that you are perfectly willing to discard the model when a better model comes along.

I mean, get a grip people, where is it written in adamantane that talking monkeys should be able to understand the universe?  If you met a termite who told you that he was on a quest to understand the universe, a certain lip-curling cynicism would ensue.  Do you think you're better positioned than that termite to undertake that?  To understand what one understands and then to build outward from that.  The tools are mathematics, drugs, attention to phenomena, intuition, community and inspiration.  These things may not solve your marital problems or increase your earning power, but they will put you in touch with the larger dynamic of being.

I think being is most appreciated when it is understood, that is why worship raises my hackles.  True religiosity is signified by honest intellectual efforts to model and understand and it's by that process that we increase our connectivity to the universe and the depth and richness of our connectivity to our community.

That's what it's really all about.  That's our glory; to understand, to model, to describe, to explore, to appreciate.  So, meet me at the waterfall at the top of the river.

The terrifying simplicity of the world we call real

Every day is like an eternity these days.  I don't wear a wrist-watch and so am always precisely on time.  Time manages to encompass vast quantities and qualities of life, and yet the days rush by like leaves that have fallen on a rushing river.  Sometimes people ask me what I have done today and I honestly can't remember.  The last two hours have demanded my attention to such an extent that the preceding ten hours have become like a dream barely remembered.

I woke up with a dream this morning.  I woke up via cellphone alarm during the REM stage of my sleep-cycle and what I had completely accepted as real was readjusted by my logical brain into a distinct, seperate non-reality as the surprising nature of my real reality flooded back.  Yesterday morning I woke up in a soggy tent on the sand and this morning I was suprised to find myself in a warm dry bed in a house with my family.  The fluctuations of time are as dramatic as the drastic and repetitive shifts from day to night to day.

Life is a funny prospect and I don't always believe in it.  Yesterday I saw my beautiful sister and her beautiful children for the first time in 18 months and I thought about all I have experienced and changed since then.  The last home in which I visited my sister was not only 20 months ago but in a different country, across a vast and desolate ocean and yet thanks to the immense power of global connectivity I am sitting in literally the same chair I was there.  Time and space have not impeded my family's ability to retain the same furniture.  So what are these cavernous distances in time or space I have crossed since our last meeting?

I travelled to the other side of the planet and back in that time, fell in love a few times, discovered new and wonderful aspects of myself and my world I could not have conceived of back then.  The world is infinitely more complex and vast and exciting than my previous self would have hoped for.  Now, today, as I attempt to contain the expanse of this simple feeling in my stomach within a series of words, I know for sure that the world is at my feet and beyond my imagination.  Oh well, I'll only contain as much as I can within the collection of words I compose today.  I will try again tomorrow and either encompass more with less words or simply multiply and complexify the collected works of me, my life's work in literature.  If I have anything to offer the world it is my attempt to experience as much as possible and share it in as few words as possible.  If I succeed in this I will assist the universe's task of expanding and contracting all information to a single point, which, I presume, is the end-point of this wonderful thing called the internet.

My sophistication and intelligence are, of course, improving and yet I am still here, my body is as dense as ever though more toned and strong than it was and I am not sure whether I have reached enlightenment yet.  I will keep typing until the voice in my head tells me to stop and choose a title that sums up all the distances my creative mind has taken my fingertips over the last hour I have been writing.  Until then I will accept the strangeness and beauty of my expression and trust that there is someone in the world who will benefit from me being as honest and present as I can and seeking to express the overwhleming complexity of experience of the terrifying simplicity of this world we call real.

When we can say goodnight and stay together

Only once in my life have I fantasized about someone in their absence and then returned to them and discovered that they are actually more beautiful than I had remembered and even more beautiful than I can imagine.  I try to hold his image in my head now and all I experience is a yearning in my gut.  I try to love him from the other side of the planet but I need to hold him in my arms all night.

I remember the first time I met him, sitting on a rock talking to my friend.  He spoke to me so quietly and he was saying things that were interesting and I wanted to hear, so I was forced to move closer and closer to his body until I was beside him and I could hear fine.

What I wanted was to become so close that my desire was physically impossible.

I was so surprised to discover after a month away that he is more beautiful than I had remembered.  I didn't think this was possible.  Now, after three months away, I can't even imagine the beauty I will be confronted with upon my return.  I can't imagine what it will feel like to discover those arms and eyes like the first moment when all I wanted was to hear the clear stream of his voice.

We shared three weeks of casual delight and one infinite night without a future and I guess this is a lot.  I look forward to the possibility that there is somewhere I know that I can go where a beauty profound beyond description may be there to welcome me, but I also appreciate my precious memories and realise that everything else is fantasy until I am back and the door is swinging open in front of me.