Addington Space (Mark IV)
An all-new look Addington Space website is up! Yay!
About four years ago I first tried setting up a neighbourhood website, based on pmwiki. It sort of worked but not so much. The frameworks just weren't there to do a full Social Network site, which is what I wanted. And I wasn't in the mood to write my own from scratch in PHP, even using Drupal/Joomla/et al. So I figured I ought to try simplifying it as a blog. When that didn't work, I figured I needed to give in and try a fully hosted cloud solution. But I wanted to stay in New Zealand.... but no.
Attempt 1: Pmwiki. Attempt 2: WordPress. Attempt 3: PeoplesTimes.com. Attempt 4: Ning.com
And finally it looks like we might have a workable platform. Yay! The downsides are Google ads and being hosted in the States. The upsides are really easy setup, automatic self-serve registration, single sign-on across multiple Ning sites, users can post content (the most important bit).
If you live in Addington - or anywhere in Christchurch and interested in social work or community development - try the site out. It's possible we could set up a network of related Ning sites if this works.
Ultimately I still want to find a local, free software, OpenSocial compliant, self-maintaining, 100% organic solution, but getting something that works even as a demo is one small step forward.
Wtf, Maggie?
2009. 20 years after the biggest political event of my life.
Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? Remember how pushing the Soviets for German reunification was one of the top planks of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher Cold War policy axis?
Remember how happy everyone was when the impossible happened and the Wall fell?
Yeah now it turns out - not so much actually, at least if you were that bastion of freedom and democracy, Margaret Thatcher.
"The Prime Minister's view is... we do not want to wake up one morning and find that events have moved entirely beyond our control and that German reunification is to all intents and purposes on us"
Wtf, Maggie. Just wtf.
With the Velocity of Thought
Oh! could I take you with me, and with the velocity of thought wend our way through space, looking down on worlds moving in their orbits, filled with spirits whose only thought is onward and upward! To point out to your ken the source of those things, the manifestations of which only, you are permitted to behold. Together to learn from the observation of his works, the nature and attributes of the Creator. Together to develop the germs of our own characters, and together to strive onward toward that sphere where the full conception of our yearnings shall be gratified.
When we should have at last arrived at the place of eternal rest, can you conceive the sensation which would pervade our spirits, freed from materiality, when in daily and hourly communion with the millions of millions of souls liberated from every thing which partakes of earth, we enter forever into the real joys of our eternal existence ?
No human heart can realize, no human mind grasp the thought which now fills my nature, and lifts my spirit even beyond the barriers of this world.
Oh! 'tis then I feel that there is in all the works and laws of God this one eternal principle of love. For what can exceed the love of that being who has prepared a heaven where mind can grasp the every thought of life and death! Yes, even you, toiling and laboring to obtain that which will satisfy your minds on earth, can you realize what that joy must be when there is no obstacle to the fulfillment of that desire?
'Francis Bacon', Spiritualism Volume 1, Edmonds/Dexter/Tallmage, 1853.
A Horror of Great Darkness
And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.
-- Genesis 15
Monday finds you like a bomb
That's been left ticking there too long
You're bleeding
Somedays there's nothing left to learn
From the point of no return
You're leaving
-- Eurythmics, "I Saved The World Today"
Sustainability workshop today at work.
The Shorter Millennium Ecosystem Assesment: We're all screwed.
Five years ago, we had ten years to save the Earth. Assuming we had the political and economic will to even begin to try to do what is necessary - and assuming we agreed in the first place on just what *is* necessary - none of which we have.
Now it's 2009, we haven't fixed any of the big problems, we didn't succeed in stopping the war in Iraq, electing Obama didn't drawdown the military in Afghanistan, Peak Oil is upon us, we've heard two clicks from the Russian Roulette revolver of pandemic flu and we're still spinning the barrel, and deep ocean fish stocks are still being depleted. We're *really* screwed.
And I'm personally, physically and emotionally, exhausted just from trying to do the tiny, ineffectual things I've tried to do for the past two decades to try to fight this planetary death machine - or at least even just to acknowledge its existence and stay sane.
The magnitudes of the global problems we seem by any reasonable interpretation of science to face here at the dawn of the 21st century are so huge that it's really hard to even fit them into my brain. Except as a series of Dante-esque images: mass extinction, mass starvation, a world reduced to smoking desert. The drought in Australia feels like the harbinger of the dragon's breath, coming ever closer.
Visiting Brazil in January-February brought the depression further home. How the rest of the world lives is intolerable by Western standards, and yet still over the carrying capacity of the Earth by ecological standards.
The equations are simple. The world has a finite amount of stuff. The human race is on an exponential growth curve. Something has to give. We might be able to change, but it's probably too late and things have already broken beyond repair in the basement. We're locked into the internal combustion engine, into fossil fuels, sprawling suburbia, electric grids, fertiliser and pesticide dependent farming, strip mining and deforestation, a global food transport grid.
Compared with the ecological crisis, nuclear war seems trivial. At least to stop that we just had to get two superpowers to agree to not pull the trigger. To stop the death of the planet... we have to change our way of life. We have to choose to destroy everything we've spent the last century building. In the face of an economic system which rewards cutthroat competition and mercilessly slaughters anyone who achieves less than total productivity. At the same time as the entire Third World is climbing aboard, and we're trying to get off, but we don't want to lose our place in the sun either.
Common sense says it can't be done. We've built a death machine. What is there left except to decide the manner of our planet's burial?
How can you build any kind of movement on the assumption that our civilisation and probably our whole biosphere is already doomed and all we can do is accept our fate?
And yet. Against this is the spiritual view which says 'this world is actually only a shadow of a much more real world in which there is no limitation'.
How do these two apparent irreducible truths - the absoluteness of finite planetary resources, and the reality of an unlimited dimension of mind and spirit - go together?
How can we possibly fix things when we still don't agree as a society that they're broken? But if we do agree that they're broken - how do we bear the guilt, pain and anger?
How can I get up and go to work in the morning knowing that just by living, I'm bringing the Apocalypse one step closer?
How do you un-fuck a planet?
Beyond the Singing Flame
or, Monsters Are Not Going To Come Out Of The Sky And Eat You.
BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION
-- Kryptos
For I am persuaded neither life nor death
Nor angels nor powers nor things yet to be
Can separate us from our Father's love
There's nothing no nothing can come in between
No walls can be builded to fence in the soul
No cavern of darkness can hide me away
I'm sure that He loves me, He lives in my heart
For I am persuaded that He is the way
-- hymn
I've had my head in strange spaces recently.
On the one hand: my life as a mid-level IT geek and a member of a small Anglican church and a neighbourhood association.
On the other hand: involvement in web forums to do with an enigmatic physicist at the heart of the UFO mythos and the intersection of spirituality and the paranormal.
On the third hand: ideas I'm playing with for an experimental programming language which might or not ever be useful, but for the moment is a fun mental toy.
On the fourth hand: my involvement in the Interactive Fiction gaming subculture.
This journey of mine is largely what this blog is about - because I think it's important to document, even if for my own future reference - but sometimes the path gets more emotionally intense than I can put into words on screen. And sometimes I have to rethink what I am trying to do and how I am trying to go about it.
The two 'spooky' boxes that I have opened up - the psychic communities which for want of a better name I'll call the Townsend Brown cluster and the Stephen cluster - are familiar to me because I first came across them back in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unresolved emotional baggage associated with both of them.
Stephen has been called a demon, for instance, and it's not quite clear just what kind of machine Townsend Brown was building in the 1950s but there were claims that interdimensional... something... was involved. Both are the sort of people who have been accused of being the Antichrist, summoning the devil, causing the end of the world, etc, etc. Or else - with a sigh of relief - they were both safely frauds and everything said about them is utter lies.
Except that I now personally know people involved with both of these mystical gentlemen and they don't seem to be either liars or demon-summoners, and last I checked my delicious soul was still safely uneaten. For now.
Most (though not all) of my gamer friends consider everything to do with the paranormal or the soul safely nonexistent (as Science teaches, praised be Science), and happily play and write games set in H P Lovecraft's bleak nihilistic universe of cosmic terror and scientific rigour where mad alien gods eat the Earth when the stars are right.
Which is all good clean fun except that it's now becoming obvious that there really, truly is stuff out there that we don't know what it is.
You can see, perhaps, how this sort of thing can get complicated. There's fiction. There's reality. And the two... sometimes get confused.
Like, for instance, reading Clark Ashton Smith and going 'hmm, he's cribbed that from actual psychic accounts of the next dimension, because I recognise what he's talking about'.
It was as if we no longer existed, except as one divine, indivisible entity, soaring beyond the trammels of matter, beyond the limits of time and space, to attain undreamable shores. Unspeakable was the joy, and infinite the freedom of that ascent, in which we seemed to overpass the zenith of the highest star. Then, as if we had risen with the Flame to its culmination, had reached its very apex, we emerged and came to a pause.
My senses were faint with exaltation, my eyes blind with the glory of the fire; and the world on which I now gazed was a vast arabesque of unfamiliar forms and bewildering hues from another spectrum than the one to which our eyes are habituated. It swirled before my dizzy eyes like a labyrinth of gigantic jewels, with interweaving rays and tangled lustres, and only by slow degrees was I able to establish order and distinguish detail in the surging riot of my perceptions.
All about me were endless avenues of super-prismatic opal and jacinth; arches and pillars of ultra-violet gems, of transcendent sapphire, of unearthly ruby and amethyst, all suffused with a multi-tinted splendor. I appeared to be treading on jewels, and above me was a jeweled sky.
Presently, with recovered equilibrium, with eyes adjusted to a new range of cognition, I began to perceive the actual features of the landscape. With the two moth-like beings still beside me, I was standing on a million-flowered grass, among trees of a paradisal vegetation, with fruit, foliage, blossoms and trunks whose very forms were beyond the conception of tridimensional life. The grace of their drooping boughs, of their fretted fronds, was inexpressible in terms of earthly line and contour, and they seemed to be wrought of pure, ethereal substance, half-translucent to the empyrean light, which accounted for the gem-like impression I had first received.
Translucent, gem-like vegetation. Check. Sights which can't quite be translated into 'three-dimensional' language. Check.
Except Smith's tale is just a 'weird fiction' story from the 1930s.
Except if you read that review, it's more than that - it was actually born from a personal spiritual experience of the writer, it had a huge impact on his life, and as a story it's a wonderful allegory of the imaginative or spiritual life (and are they the same thing or two quite different things?), and the fear and wonder of facing that inward journey. Which suggests it's something more than 'just' a story.
There's more to be said, I think, about how the explosion of 'mediumship' in the late 1800s and early 1900s fed into first Theosophy in its multiple cults and factions and then the 'weird fiction' and then 'science fiction' scene and then the original somehow vanished, so that what we're left now in a lot of fantasy and speculative fiction is actually the fossils of preserved ideas from a former era. All washed up on a beach without cultural context and polished up as fictional tropes.
Take superheroes, for instance. Most superpowers from, say, the X-Men make no scientific sense whatsoever as 'physical mutations' - say Storm's ability to control the weather, or Wolverine's magic 'healing factor' which can withstand a bullet. But they make perfect sense from the 'mind over matter' perspective of a monistic-idealistic philosophy like Christian Science. If the mind creates the body, then of course it can repair it - that's how psychic healing works. So it looks to me like the ideas that fed into the 'superhero' fictional trope - now just a tiny petting zoo for growth-stunted American national gods like Superman and Batman - arose from a wider body of thought swirling around in a whole soup of mystical/scientific dreaming a hundred years ago.
And see, the wider point is that some of these very much out-there ideas, like monism and idealism, weren't fiction then and aren't fiction now. Any more than the things which Project Sign looked at in 1947 and concluded weren't any kind of illusion. Even though they got the Hollywood treatment, even though most of the truth has been wrung out of them. We don't know what these things are, but we know that they exist. Even though we've spent much of the last century denying it - to the point that we're still confused about exactly what went down.
So what kind of world does that put us into, here in the 21st century? One with wonders in it and a lot of fear... and what happens to the firmly materialist science we thought we had, which was going to save us from our nightmares of spirituality, but seems to be opening the doors to everything again?
Weird fiction isn't as fun if you know for a fact that there are actually are shadows in the dark. You tend to be always looking over your shoulder, even inside your own mind. But on the upside: shadows don't necessarily mean danger. They might be friends you've already met coming to say hello.
What we need is a new genre of 'weird fiction' which isn't weird, but points out that yes, we live on the shores of a vast sea, but it's actually a lot happier and more friendly out there than it is here.
The Epworth Phenomena
Okay, here's one thing to investigate. The Epworth Phenomena by Dudley Wright.
This is the 1917 book I found digging through references to John Wesley's journals, about Wesley's documentation of various psychic phenomena, including the haunting of his childhood home. Wesley seems to lie somewhere at the core of this space, at the intersection between spiritualism, German Mysticism and the Evangelical Church.
I do not understand this, and am hardly prepared to say that I believe it; though in any ordinary matter I should accept the word of these two men without hesitation. But, as John Wesley says, "What is it which I do comprehend, even of the things which I see daily? Truly not
"'The smallest grain of sand nor spire of grass,"'
and incomprehensibility therefore is no logical ground for disbelief. Psychologically, it is; for we must know the modus, or, in other words, must link up the new facts with others already accepted. And this is now coming about, through the work of many investigators. Myers said that in Consequence, of the corroborations of psychical research, everyone a century hence will believe in the Resurrection of Christ; whereas, without those corroborations, a century hence no one would have believed it. It may be that something of the sort way be true with regard to many now only half-believed historical narratives of the kind presented in this volume.
God Stories
Well, I'm back.
Where do I go from here? I'm not sure. For the moment, this is the website of a book I'm reading: http://godstories.com/
Brazil
From next week I will be travelling for a month to Brazil. Since I'm not entirely convinced of the stability of this site, I'll be blogging the trip at natecull.wordpress.com.
Theologica Germanica
A biography of John Wesley that I've just read noted some of the German Pietist influences of Wesley, which led me to Meister Eckhart and the Theologica Germanica (author unknown). Both of which I find very interesting, very modern, and hugely relevant to our times. There's a direct line in terms of theological flavour from Course in Miracles, through Mary Baker Eddy, back to Eckhart. (To list just one of the many lines of faith which criss-cross over this landscape, but the Course in Miracles one is particularly close to my heart at the moment.)
Wesley, famously impressed by the quiet mystical spirituality of Count Zinzendorf's Moravians, later broke with them because he could not accept their quietism. It seems he had similar issues with the Theologica Germanica.
Wesley accomplished many great things in setting the template for Evangelical Christianity as an active social justice force for the next three centuries -- and as a movement-builder I think he did many things right, particularly his eclecticism -- but I also think his suspicion and dismissal of contemplative Christianity was a great loss for the set of movements he started. Wesley's model led the 18th century sea-change that turned the church from an aristocracy to an enterprise, but the worst-case scenario of that model is the Wal-Mart-isation of the church. Industrial mega-churches, like suburbia, can be hubs of religious activity and yet death-traps for the soul (and for the earth). We cannot act for justice without peace in our soul; if we try we merely create more noise, and that's what a lot of church activity right now is doing. The art of contemplation is something we will need to recover in this century, and quickly.
The good news is that all this material exists - it hasn't been lost, just ignored. And now we can access it more easily than ever.
Three Wishes
1. I wish that I lived in a world where everyone could literally see and know God; where that God existed, and that the nature of that God was pure love, was no more strange or confusing than that there is a sun in the sky.
2. I wish that I lived in a world where everyone looked after each other; where our life and work and economy and industry the geometry of our cities was structured toward the goal of doing meaningful things to help each other.
3. I wish that I would live as if I lived in such a world right now.
The thing about going through the archives of old, forbidden occult tomes from places like Spiritwritings.com - or reading some of the Christian mystics - or reading accounts of Near Death Experiences - is that after a while, a picture starts to emerge of a realm where such things really do exist.
A realm where the word 'God' doesn't mean a kind of abstract, outdated philosophical concept with a slightly musty smell of ether and phlogiston, but a literal everyday presence; one that everyone there relies on as naturally as breathing. A realm where synchronicity is taken for granted, coincidences 'just happen', if you want something it's already been planned for, and everything shines (literally) with its own inner light, which is also the light of God. As if we here in this Earth-dimension were like sleeping children who after a long illness, one day wake up to a glorious sunlit day, and laugh at our fever dreams of being in dark scary places, while at the same time marvelling at how close we came to true harm, and the skill that healed us.
It is a realm where everyone you've met is there, and they remember you fondly, and people who you've never met before walk up to you with a smile and explain how they already know you. It's like there's a secret smile on everyone's face, and sometimes it bursts out loud because nobody can keep the joy in for long.
You always knew the universe was a joke, but you thought it was a cruel one. Now you get to hear the punchline.
It is a realm where the skies are not dark, the space between the stars is not a vacuum, there is life and activity and civilisation for millions of light-years, everyone speaks with a form of telepathy, you can fly if you want (though you see the scenery better if you walk), and shaping matter with a thought is no more remarkable than downloading the latest Linux build from the Net.
It's basically one of Cory Doctorow's brightest post-cyberpunk fantasies. The world runs on adhocracy, we've got instant-access data retrieval of every shape, colour and feeling from all of inhabited history, and people are making more stuff - and more space to put it in - every day. And it's all meaningful, and all the work is voluntary.
Did I mention the glowing trees? So many people talk about those. It's often the first thing that catches your eye. The plants glow. Like they're on fire. The colours are brighter than any we have here; more frequencies, less dense matter, something. It's literally indescribable. And that's just in the first tenth of a second.
The closest thing on Earth is where you walk into a city park or square at night, and there are spotlights positioned under the trees. Green fire, in your face. Wham. For a moment, you remember.
Or you're playing an '80s videogame, one of the early abstract ones, and you've hit that zen groove, mastering the pattern, and suddenly everything's made of light, and the whole world's translucent.
Or you just put on your polarised glasses for a Dolby Digital 3-D movie, and the stereoscopic vision hits you in the face and suddenly you're in the frame of the movie. And there were dimensions you never knew existed.
It's like that.
You wake up and you're living on a friggin' Dyson Sphere inside a Matrioshka Brain sitting in hyperspace around Earth orbit and there's this whole Star Trek Federation and Prime Directive setup which has been secretly doing a Second Foundation on human history. You're living in a galaxy-size sci-fi convention and A E Van Vogt was right all along.
Light bubbles in little fountains around people, like one of those retro fiber-optic sculptures. It's like an always-on mood ring and somehow it never goes out of fashion.
People pray like they breathe. A laser-beam kind of thing comes out of the sky and... the laugh behind the universe is inside your heart and... and there are no ellipses big enough.
Because, God.
He spoke to me, and whilst doing so, he leaned over me, looking into my face intently, as if he wished to impress every syllable on my memory for ever. I shall never forget his words; they are engraved on my mind, and nothing can ever eradicate them.
He said: "You are only here for a little while. Try to hold and remember all I am telling you. Do not trouble to remember the details of the scenery or anything else, beautiful as it is, but remember every word I am telling you, because time is short.
"Tell everybody-everybody that will listen -that there is this Other Life. It is a real life in a real world. It is an active, interesting world. We are happy in it. All is well with us on this plane.
"God is here.
"We are nearer Him. All the best and most hopeful ideas that Christian religion on the earth has ever held out about a future life are poor compared to this wonderful reality.
"Tell everybody. It's true."
-- Gladys Osborne Leonard, "The Last Crossing"