Bandwidth
Something is suddenly eating all my 2GB monthly bandwidth limit and it's probably spam bots. If I go offline, this is why.
Edit: Oops, I think it's fallout from my previous worm. Not happy. Hopefully it's contained now, but I can't be sure.
A Path to Mystery
I'm trying again to gather together a core set of materials that I think most clearly lay out a single coherent mystical Christian theology, or at least seem to converge for me:
* Mary Baker Eddy's 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures', 1875-1910
* Frances Bird's 'The New Dispensation', circa 1915
* Agnes Sanford's 'The Healing Light', 1947
* Thomas Merton's 'New Seeds of Contemplation', 1949-1961
* Helen Schucman's 'A Course in Miracles', 1965-1972
* Rick Joyner's 'The Harvest', 1989
* Regina Dawn Akers' The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament, 2006
ACIM and NTI are very closely linked, and Science & Health predates both. The Harvest and The New Dispensation, though nearly over seventy years apart, also are linked by language and metaphor. Science & Health, ACIM and The Healing Light all deal directly with healing miracles.
To which I might add:
* The writings of Julian of Norwich, late 14th century
* The writings of St Teresa of Avila, 1515-1582 and St John of the Cross, 1542-1591
* The Zodiac messages (1921-1957)
* The Stephen experience (1973-1980)
* The Medjugorje messages
* The Quaker and Anabaptist movements
* The 'Emerging Church' movement
There's a common thread here, through Christian Science, Christian Spiritualism, Roman Catholic (Trappist/Cistercian/Benedictine and Carmelite) monasticism, Latter Rain Pentecostalism, Charismatic Anglicanism, and no formal religious alignment at all (ACIM, which paradoxically is the writing which most strongly asserts itself as being the actual voice of Jesus), and it intrigues me the more because it crosses such steep denominational boundaries.
It also challenges me deeply because there's a very high standard of life, thought and conduct set which I'm not sure how to live up to.
Upgraded to WordPress 2.6.2
Because I just got hacked by something nasty. I guess staying on 2.0 was a bit of a gamble.
Seriously, guys -- and I'm talking to everyone who writes any kind of web facing software here -- if you can't release a provably 100% secure web application on day one, please do the entire Net a favour and DON'T RELEASE IT AT ALL.
That's too hard? Your tools won't allow you to prove whether your app is hackable or not? Sorry, but the bad guys don't care. They can security-test your software - why can't you?
'Apply patches' is the wrong answer. Try again.
Poem: Sideways
Time is an orange
Curls up at the edges -
So
There you see
Vacuum isn't
Kilometres
At all
It's skin
Space is an egg
Sunny side, scrambled
Boiling over the city
Any way you want it
And you could pour
Light from a jug
Onto grids of crisp
Houses
The trick
Is to wake up
Sideways
Conflicted
In my pack today:
A book called 'How To Be Good'.
A game called 'How To Host A Murder'.
Because The World Is Round
Hmm, it's been a while since I posted.
The Internet makes me smile.
First this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgA2aqGYnt4
Then this:
(though you probably have to have read most of the xkcd archive; sorry, it's geek humour)
http://xkcd.com/442/
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY
And finally some Morcheeba:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdxyQo3IvRc
It occurs to me that we are now actually in a new wave of spiritual revival, actually and not just wishful-thinkingly. I think I'll pick the sudden appearance of the TV show 'Sensing Murder' here in NZ this last two years as a marker. It's the first time I think I've ever seen credible non-fictional psychics doing readings on mainstream TV, repeatedly, pragmatically and with a minimum of fuss. There's still a 'woo woo' showbiz aura to the whole proceedings, but it doesn't come from the psychics themselves; they're the practical ones. We've moved from the paranormal paranoia of the X-Files '90s onto the doorstep of a quietly mindblowing sense of at-home-with-the-paranormal normality and we've not yet quite stepped over the threshold, and that first step is going to be a doozy. But we're actually there. We've somehow moved from denial to awareness-with-fear to acceptance-with-trust and the next steps are understanding and exploration and practice. It's a moment I never thought I'd see (and more importantly, didn't think I *wanted* to see for a long time). It's a small moment, but it's the start of a wind shift. Hang onto your socks. It's going to be a big one.
This revival is going to be real, it's going to be permanent, it's going to be an actual paradigm shift and not just a set of words, and it's going to overturn a lot of our expectations about what is and is not physically and cognitively possible. When the world stops shifting it is going to be something we can't yet imagine. And it's going to be *good*.
And how we are going to navigate the transition is not going to be clear-cut at all, but somehow I think we'll get through okay.
There's a reason why so many people are looking back at the steampunk era with nostalgia. I'm thinking particularly of the 'psychic boom years' from say 1850-1930, but also of the UFO and free energy hackers and the remote viewers and the many homebrewed alternative 'ether theories' of physics which are slowly looming out of the murk on the 'net, and the recent sudden flurry of books on ESP, 'The Field', peace, social justice, compassion, kindness, whole-systems views, environmental awareness, altruism, community, responsibility, 'Oneness', and most especially all the ones of a mystical character, and most most especially all the *practical* mystics.
There's like this vortex drawing our eyes back to the 1960s, the 1950s, even the 1930s and beyond back to the nineteenth century. All at once, not picking a single era to focus on, but just a general sense of 'look around, look back, think again, end of the line, this is the wrong way, there is another future, perhaps you can think differently and cross over to it'. A sense of lost things, rediscovery, old surprising treasures.
When a wave of retro happens I think it's because there's something there in the past that we have forgotten and that we need; but the reason we realise we need it is that we're *already* looking in that direction again.
This isn't just retro and it isn't just nostalgia. It's pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which have been lost for nearly a century starting to come together and slide around and go *click*. New fundamental ideas about human cognition and the nature of basic physics. The potential for absolutely exhilarating, unprecedented new discoveries, not just tweaking the current status quo. Science and religion giving birth to experimental theology.
And no, I'm not talking about religion as a retreat from knowledge into a new dark age. That's religion's bad cousin who you're right to have a creepy feeling about when he comes round. I'm talking about religion as an understanding of where old pre-modern concepts like 'God' and 'the soul' fit into the total map of human knowledge, and things long held to be inexpressible mysteries or really silly freshman logic mistakes suddenly starting to make sense and turn out to be tangible and actually just kind of ordinary.
Like if you've lived all your life believing the sun to be a myth, and suddenly the sky opens and above the grey fluffy mass of Heaven there appears this weird blue thing and a white ball that stabs and burns you in the eyes. So the ancient legends were true! It isn't really yellow and made of crayon and doesn't really have little lines coming down from it and a smiley face, but you can see that you're looking at the original of the crumpled drawing you had that was handed down. Your ancestors *did* know something you've never seen and they *were* telling the truth as far as they could convey it, and here it is right in front of you.
And that impossible sun rises and you realise that other than that now you can see a lot better, life goes on much as before. There are struggles and confusions and cheques to be paid and sometimes it still hurts really bad. But you still remember the years of darkness and every time you see that big ball of fire steaming over the horizon you just have to giggle inside.
Because it's there, and you thought it was lost forever, and it's all true.
There *is* a way to gain the world without losing anyone's soul in the process.
We didn't think it was possible, all our equations told us that misery+happiness == zero. That the cosmic scales had to balance and the wages of carbon-based life were eternal death.
But the universe isn't zero-sum after all. The vacuum is alive. It's made of mind. It likes us. That's a whole lot more than we were counting on.
What's going to happen next is anyone's guess, but whatever it is, it's *already* happening.
So Radiate
So radiate
I can't see you
You're just too far from me
-- Carly Binding
I can't be near you
The light just radiates
-- Courtney Love
A thought experiment:
Imagine that underneath everything we know, underneath thought and physics and soul, there's a... substrate, a field, a waveform, a signal, an energy source.
(Energy not as physicists would think of it, but more like the philosophers who predated physics, and who gave us the word energeia which we borrowed and restricted into its modern technical meaning. Energy as in power, creativity, intelligence, Life. Something much more fundamental and more interesting than mere heat and motion and all the other separated, chaotic energies that we know which contradict and destroy each other. This Energy has no analog and no opposite. A single millivolt of it can move suns. It is the Light which has no darkness in it.)
Imagine that people are like little antennas, or pumps, which can dig into this field and pour out that energy into the world. Radiate it out with every thought, every breath.
Imagine that perhaps that is what soul is: what existence is, and personality, and all the other things we think of that make an 'is'. Little loops of antenna-stuff radiating energy.
Imagine that all the people you see every day walking down the street are glowing like this, lit up with the energy of God, all the time and don't even know it.
Except some of them, perhaps, become dimly aware, of that energy radiating through them; that light and power, that love, that peace, that sense of connectedness with a single Personality that floods through the whole universe and from which it is formed (or radiated). And as they become aware, they start to act with more love, more kindness, more simplicity, more abandonment, a deeper sense of being exactly where they need to be and being supported and guided at every step.
And still not everyone knows or can see how that energy lights them up and lights others up. And the more they see, the more frustrating it becomes for them, the moments when they can't see, and the people who they can't feel that light flowing out. But they know it's there all the same, in the same way that we've learned to know that electricity is there when we turn a switch even if we can't see an arc zapping.
What would it mean, to live in a universe like that?
Is that the universe we live in?
How could we tell?
What would it mean, for how we live and work and play and relate with each other, to think for just a moment that everyone on the street is a filament in the electric chandelier of God?
May The Force Be With You
Kid, I've travelled from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of crazy stuff. But I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful force controlling my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
-- Han Solo, Star Wars
1. Is God a person, or a natural force?
2. What possible significance can ideas about the self and cosmology which desert-dwelling tribes held in the Bronze Age have for us today in the 21st century, surrounded by marvels which our own mastery of science and knowledge has wrought?
3. When we can land a probe on Mars and watch it sift soil in near-real-time, and realise that possibly this is the first time in millions of years that an intelligently-operated entity has touched that piece of soil - what faith can we possibly have in any kind of 'sky god' or 'Father in Heaven'? Look out there, says science, look what WE have done. WE own Mars. We made this thing fly. We made it land. We send a signal, and soil is dug. We stop sending, and soil is not dug. If there's any kind of being out there in space, guiding and controlling the life of planets, it's us, and apart from us is blackness, emptiness, and vacuum.
4. And beyond the vacuum, in what unthinkable chaos of dimensions might exist in subspace or hyperspace or any other configuration of metaverses out of which our universe is born - why should we have any confidence that any order prevails in the universe which is at all unsympathetic to humans, to mind, or to life itself? Or is the ultimate reality random chance self-selecting through replication, evolving chaos being sculpted into ever-changing forms; evolution of species in response to blind immediate survival needs, somehow producing short-lived burns of bright intelligence and warlike culture, but undirected, unguided, ultimately alone even at the cellular level, and all destined for death?
5. What does the word 'God' have to do with any of this, with science, with space, with genetics, with the future? Why should we even tolerate in our language a word matching a concept which cannot exist in reality, except as a horror and a warning, a sort of 'here be contradictions' flag?
One of the reasons why intelligent people find it hard to stomach religion is the idea that believing in a personal God means believing in a 'little old man in the sky': that personality implies all the necessary flaws, limitations and contradictions that we see in each other as humans. The universe manifestly shows both order of a far greater regularity (and dullness) than human mind could hold without getting distracted, and inherent contradictions that seem to undermine the whole project of life and mind before it even starts; in both cases, it seems like the universe is more like some kind of shining but utterly alien artifact, its purpose examinable but ultimately inscrutable, creating and obeying its own rules, but probably not expressing anything at the large scale than a jumbled mess. A pretty, doomed, bit of cosmic junk. Possibly valuable in itself, as a sort of ethical rebellion against the night; possibly not. On the long scale, the choice itself may be meaningless.
And carbon-based life (at least as a platform for consciousness) seems remarkably poorly engineered. The whole death thing is a pretty horrible bug that should have been solved trillions of years ago. If consciousness boils down to the interplay of atoms in the brain, then that ought to boil down to the shuffling of bits in an algorithm, and there seem to be any number of much better ways of organising data than to encode it into proteins that denature at a low temperature, in a brain that can't stand extremes of pressure or be without blood circulation for more than a couple of minutes, that has nothing remotely like a backup mechanism or removable storage. When Microsoft builds software this shoddy, we campaign against it, we build open-source software that is safer, patchable, proof from death, free of security exploits, we duplicate and triplicate our data stores; what kind of evil idiot, then, is the Designer of the human mind, that would package such an infinitely precious irreplacable thing as consciousness in the most fragile of eggshells?
None of this seems to be what we would expect if there were some kind of overall infinite Mind controlling the universe. Therefore, in accordance with Occam's Razor, we should accept the most likely explanation, which is that 'things just are what they are and there's no explaining them'. Or at least, there are no simple folk explanations which can possibly be true, and the more 'intuitive' and emotionally appealing an explanation seems and the more all-embracing it is, the more likely it is to be wrong. 'God' and 'gods' are one of the oldest, simplest, most primitive explanations for stuff; therefore they're the most wrong, and the people who promote them are either mindless parrots or cunning tricksters promoting known falsehoods to gain power and keep others ignorant.
And yet.
There are more words to be said on God's behalf.
Reading channelled material, several concepts come through strongly from multiple sources:
1. There is a 'spiritual world', which is actually more real than the 'physical' world of our senses.
2. The spiritual world appears to be composed of intention. Thoughts and dreams and will appear to be almost like actual substances. What we choose to think or believe, exists in some form and stays with us. Deeds remain with their doer, but it is the intention of the deed rather than the physical form of the act that has the reality. (All this is terrifying, given how randomly we dismiss intention and private thoughts as 'nonphysical' and therefore having no meaning or ethical claim upon our lives.)
In terms of physics, this is like our everyday room-temperature physics turned inside out, but in information theory and some views of quantum physics we start to approach similar (though not identical) ideas of connectedness without distance.
3. There is a single unifying guiding principle for everything, and it is Love. Everything that 'actually Is', exists to serve and create Love of one being for another and the gentle welfare of all beings. No beings can in fact exist without being an incarnation of Love; nothing that hates or destroys anything else for its survival has reality.
In terms of biology, psychology and sociology, this is almost the inverse of what we currently believe in the best of our sciences. Darwin saw species as constantly competing, Dawkins extended this to the meme; Marx saw the classes as locked in economic struggle, and Rand inverted this into the heroic egoism of individuals competing through the market, a worldview still influential long after ts use-by date; Freud saw the mind as hopelessly caught in a double-bind between self-expression and social conformity. (Jung took a different, more psychic-friendly route to psychotherapy, but I believe he still saw the mind as divided into archetypes with no single unifying theme.)
4. There is both a ground and a purpose to all that Is; it is the mind of the Father, the One Infinite Intelligence which both underlies the universe and waits for the emergence of mind in its likeness, and pervades all spaces between.
How then can we conceptualise something which is both mind-like and law-like? Something which is utterly free and yet self-organising? We have no decent human categories to describe a Mind which could hold the universe in a blink and not waver. The closest we can come at the moment is 'machine'. Something made of steel, or diamond, or granite, or vacuum, or crystal; something cold; something big; that does not denature, does not bend; rigidity, permanence, endurance. And yet such a thing as sentient Mind is not a machine, not cold, not rigid; to describe the flashes of human warmth and intelligence in us, we think of metaphors like light, heat, wind, fire; things describing speed, change, attractiveness, environments that sustain physical life; smallness, 'human-ness', nearness. Breath, blood, touch.
Somehow, the concept of 'God' combines and transcends both of these. It is not a contradiction; but our language and even our physical experience betrays us. We call such a God 'indescribable' not because the concept is unthinkable (though we do not yet think it correctly) but because all the hints and glimmers that we see come down to our waking consciousness broken and incomplete. And yet there is a sense (and this is where intuition cuts in, or 'faith', where words break in our mouth and leave us frustrated) that there is really something there, a concept that could be grasped -- a living concept, even, which reaches out to grasp us as we struggle towards it.
5. The universe is big. Bigger than we currently imagine. A whole lot bigger. The dead cold empty sea of space that we see... is not at all the whole picture. There is life teeming beyond the picture frame, but we are not currently able to understand how and in what fashion it exists. The best scientific images we have at present of 'alien life' are probably unhelpful, in that they project terrestrial life into space; but not only is life 'out there' not alien (since we are all linked by the one Father-Mind), it may not actually be in the 'there' where we're looking for it.
We joke about 'why would aliens cross light-years of space' as if that clinches the fact that aliens are impossible, but even our concept of 'light-year' may be wrong. The spiritual universe described by psychics is one that fundamentally has no distance in it, either in space or time: or rather, distance is determined by mental affiliation (in a similar way to, I suppose, how a Google search page is constructed of 'similar ideas' and we don't make people 'walk through the Web' to find places like bad early 1990s science fiction thought we might). So if instantaneous travel is a way of life 'out there' or 'up there', in the higher reaches that we're currently exiled (or self-exiled) from, something as easy as Googling a blog or texting - then why wouldn't 'aliens' come visit whenever they wanted?
And in what form might they come? If the wider universe is primarily mental (like a well-ordered Internet), might they appear to us primarily as mental influences rather than physical? Might the best of them, in fact, not be tangible to us at all - just felt as a sort of quietness, a peace, a cessation of trouble? Or as unexplained surges of creative energy, or inspiration? Artists are familiar with the phenomenon of 'the muse', where connecting with one's unconscious produces a surge of ideas that can often feel like a different personality. What is interesting is that many scientists in history who have produced key breakthroughs seem to have had their own muses as well: inspiration through dreams and other altered states.
Is it possible that the 'muses' are real entities, and that some of the strange 'conspiracy theory' ideas about 'alien derived technology' are in fact true statements about the process by which technological ideas are 'given to' us by the Father, but which we often fail to recognise?
And is it possible that bioforms can 'download' information from the spirit world (the 'real world' of which this physical world is but a shadow, as Plato tried to describe) in a similar way, and is this how DNA mutates? How God creates? How God heals?
Phoenix
The NASA Phoenix Mars lander, aiming for a polar landing with probably the best chance so far of detecting Martian life, is about to hit reentry in the next half hour. I'm watching live on NASA TV.
I love living in the future.
Edit: And it landed just fine.
The Secret History of Star Wars
The Secret History of Star Wars is a fan-written e-book that documents, in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail, the process by which the Star Wars film saga evolved over the last 30 years. At 533 pages, it's a bit of a doorstop, but there's a lot of material which is fascinating to someone like me (the frustrated artist/historian type) who loves listening to DVD commentaries, looking behind the stage sets and seeing how art is *really* made.
It turns out the answer is: with a great deal of hard work, a fair bit of brute-force copying, much misguided fannish enthusiasm, heaping helpings of pure luck, and above all it really helps if you have a circle of friends who can complement your weaknesses and add their own colour to the mix. Also, that there really aren't that many in the way of rules for making art except perhaps 'don't let your vision get in the way of your friendships.'
The original Star Wars, it seems, is proof that the best art really can emerge from a committee, and the prequels are proof that sometimes 'seeing a story in your head' can actually be a barrier to telling it.
Edit: Huh, I really didn't realise it's actually Star Wars Day today. Neat.