The Archaic Revival Pt. 3: Autopsy for a Synchronistic Hallucination

“The Mandlebrot Set is Real.  An absolute thing, no question whatsoever.  Any mathematician, or computer scientist, or synchro-mystic can study it and describe the same thing.  It’s a common experience. 

Such things that can be magnified forever and have infinite precision do exist, 

but they’re not touchable.”

Dr. Michael Barnsley

The Mandelbrot Set, Finnegans Wake, VALIS, McKenna's Time Wave, LeClair’s Tensor: what does it all mean?

Hologram vs. Fractal:  All Holograms are fractals, not all fractals are holograms

Tensor vs. Matrix:  Every tensor is a matrix, not every matrix is a tensor.

(.)

Every artwork is a fractal, not all artworks are holograms.

Every artist creates a matrix, not every artist creates a tensor.

PKD had his 10 volume meta-novel.  Written as a matrix of mutually exclusive artworks, their interconnected dynamics were not consciously recognized until years later.

*To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed 
in the light of a laser beam.   See PKD, David Bowman.

The films of Stanley Kubrick form a Matrix.  There exists a dynamic resonance between each genre that kidnaps the viewers own personal experiences and magnifies the collective  resonance in such a way that the Matrix is elevated into that of a Tensor (the shared experience). This Tensor establishes each film as a room in an interconnected and interactive environment; what is identified as environment instantly opens meta-verse Catholicism, in this specific case, a steampunk version of cyberspace. Read that again 

**A tensor is a mathematical entity that lives in a structure and interacts with other 
mathematical entities. If one transforms the other entities in the structure in a regular way, 
then the tensor must obey a related transformation rule.
This “dynamical” property of a tensor is the key that distinguishes it 
from a mere matrix. It’s a team player whose numerical values shift around 
along with those of its teammates when a transformation
 is introduced that affects all of them. 
Steven Steinke

The Archaic Revival Part 4:   Autopsy for a Synchro-Mystic Hallucination

The Sword and the Stoned

The best selling author confessed that one of his most popular books contained large sections of thinly veiled plagiarism.  

He experienced more confusion than guilt, as the plagiarized sections should have been obvious, yet, after 20 years no one had stepped forward to complain.

He kept his finances transparent so that every dollar from the sales of the book were available for the moment that the deception would be revealed 

Part 1:  The Objective Truth

An exegesis of objective journalism

This is a thing

These are the screenshots

This is how you make it

This is how it was discovered

Emails, no narrative analysis

Part 2:  The Subjective Proof

The odds:  How many curve balls?

Is it a benign face alien?

Or an elaborately disguised ghostbuster box designed for both imprisonment and salvation

Part 3:  The Truth of Proof is that there is no Proof of some Truths

What did I learn after many years

What's the closest I can arrange my sense-ratios to a “being there” experience?

-Edibles
-Long walk
-No setlist

Imagine a static radio station:  you can sense the song, but can’t tune it in.  
Solve the signal, get the tunes.

Imagine scrambled porn: you can sense the sex, but can't get off.  
Solve the scramble, get the jack pot.

Imagine a rubix cube:  you can sense the algorithm, but can't resurrect. 
Solve the scramble, impress the fam.

Imagine a rubix cube made out of films and albums and history.  You sense the magnitude of the vision, but you can't see the truth.  

Solve the scramble, enter a hyper-dimensional Eden of cosmic awareness.

The Role of Math In Synchronicity

    "a big piece of math with a little bit of media in the middle

or a big piece of media with a little bit of math in the middle"

One of these is more correct than the other

Raised on media, it was hard to see the math

But it was always there.

Someone else saw the math clearer than the rest,

A Wizard himself.

The Physical Tensor

I was an awe-struck partner in the project, like a Van Dyke Parks with Robert Wilson

I was out of my league, but I was a true companion, and the closest to the madness.

The Tensor wasn’t coming together, partly because I was seriously coming apart.

Partly because I knew I was out of my league, and  feeling in the way.

I was finding it mpossible to resurrect the Holygram from the fractal.

The hologram was the experience, and experiences are hard to transmute into words.
You can’t give someone an experience, especially when doubt coupled with existential crisis are the main ingredients.

You have to spend a year of weekends tuning this thing in yourself, you can’t give it to someone.  They not only must cross that bridge themselves, they must also build that bridge themselves.  All you can do is draw up the blueprints when they arrive.

Dark Side Of The Rainbow is a blueprint 

The Kubrick Transformer is a blueprint 

The Tensor is a blueprint for the false-work necessary to raise the dome of the plasmatic cathedral

The first time you open Finnegans Wake, you realize that this book is not a book.  It is a fractal.  
25 years later, you realize Finnegans Wake is no longer a fractal, it's a hologram.  A place, an actual reality.

LeClair and I knew that this was exhausting and maddening work, and as the battle for Kubrick’s brain withered on, a miracle took place.

I had revisited an idea that I posted in one of the second or third messages to mark

the Kubrick totem pole, that of stacking all films on top of each other 

I started to do this with good results until one day

a skip occurred, thwarting the perfection of the timing.  Alarmed, and ready to realign, something shouted at me to continue.

I was forced to make the decision to jump out of the agreed upon strict parameters of the Tensor coding and entertain a new timing.  

I can’t tell you, in words, what it was like to find.   It was a Joycean Thunder.  And Lightning.  Time in reverse, time travel.  Abduction.  Celebration.  

The best.

I immediately ordered extra copies of the DVD  

Then I set up the experiment again and it... was gone.  The film that I had just watched disappeared.  

Everything broke. 
Panic.  Madness.  

How was I to know that all 2001: A Space Odyssey's are not the same, and that the timing of the Intermission would be different on different DVD's?

Then realization:  if I had never kept my 2001: ASO DVD from Blockbuster, I would have never made this second discovery.  If the DVD had never skipped as well!  It was as if this thing wanted to be discovered.

Perfecting the timing of The Wall came first.

Then the obvious:  DSOTM, and Meddle.

The Kubrick Transformer has timings for The Wall, DSOTM, as well as Meddle, and all three can feel like mutually exclusive works of art.  

Sync Book

Blog

#noschizo

Comment sections

Reddit

Phish.net

Any community that I could share

Find the others, find them now

At some point the mind tires, and hibernation is required.

Math Teacher

Return of the Tensor

Gauss, William

The Kubrick Transformer sounds lame as a title, despite invoking the correct mechanics of the plastic toy.

The Kubrick Transformer as homage to Dr. Cotterell, too obscure?  Apparently.

Finding "the transformer" in Tensor mathematics?   
Mind melting.

I had arrived at the title independently of the role of transformation in the identity of a tensors.

The Phantom Threads

What happens when you lose the sense of smell or limb?
Phantoms.

What about losing the sense of sync?  Or when sync has done its job?

It wants to happen again.  Searching, chasing a phantom.

Media As Métier

When deciding on a title for this, I rejected “Autopsy for a Fractal Hallucination” as well as “Autopsy for a Mandelbrot Hallucination” because both, by definition, invoke pure mathematics.  The body in question, The Kubrick Transformer, was not driven by explicit mathematics.  Math was in the passenger seat, sure, but media was at the wheel.  And this autopsy is that of a media based multi-beast.  

Alfred North Whitehead defined understanding as “The apperception of pattern as such”.  This is truly a gloriously simple statement.  It exemplifies how the gloss of poetry can effectively communicate an elegant statement of pure mathematics.  And it is this gloss of poetry that makes the field of Synchro-Mysticism (SM) so intoxicating.   Much like how Robert Anton Wilson or Terence McKenna could dive deep into fields beyond the average stoners ken and elevate their attention into academic understanding without the burden of tuition or grit, SM eliminates the middle man by shining little pink lasers onto little crazy diamonds.  

Patterns?   How big are your patterns?  Math is the only catholic language capable of giving credence to this universal gestalt, gestalt being the mode of apperception with which to gain understanding.

But Synchromysticism must, at some point, return to its center.

Synchromysticism returning to its sexual roots?  Leads to co-dependence, or cold dependence.

Synchromysticsm returning to its drug roots?  Dangerous, leads to madness.

But when Synchromysticism returns to its mathematical roots, SM becomes a secret weapon. The best minds in SM have extraordinary mathematical minds and mathematical educations.

The first three people who were prominent in the SM ocean that immediately come to mind are Chris Knowles, Jake Kotze, and David Charles Plate.  I have to believe each has excelled at college level mathematics at some point, each clearly gifted with mathematical minds

Knowles and Plate approach the ability of Terence McKenna to carry a metaphysical conversation with the ease and depth for hours and hours.  

If you talk to a regular human being, they may be conversant in dozens of subject matters, but it is the rare person who is conversant in dozens of subject matters, and can discuss all 64 at the same time, carefully scaffolding the points of their conversation 

But out of all the many people in and around the community that I was lucky to talk with, either by phone, email, or instant message, one person stood head and shoulders above any one I have ever met.  

That person is Mark LeClair, the author of the out-of-print blog wrongwaywizard.com.

I honestly don’t remember why I reached out to share my personal experiences of film/album synchronization, but that was the beginning of a dialogue that lasted for close to a year.

The culmination of this dialogue was personal discovery born out of a project LeClair had invited me to help build.

The Tensor, or The Physical Tensor by Stanley Kubrick and Pink Floyd

Three films, three albums, 9 combinations.

Math.  The core of the project was math, a math that arose out of the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss and defined by a man named William Rowan Hamilton.

I saw Mark’s vision, hell, he asked me to help him build it.  But explain it?  
That was the mission we accepted ahead.  

From Bris to Hubris

I quickly proved to be deficient as a collaborator, and simply could not keep up, or convince myself that I had the necessary talents to contribute anything of value.  

The Tensor was a one to one synchronization:  one album, one film.  But understood within a matrix of 8 other timings.  The dynamic tension of resonance and release between the participants elevate it beyond matrix, and into the realm of the tensor.  At some point, I do not remember how or when, I arranged my television and laptop in a way that two films and one album could be synchronized.  This was actually an idea I proposed in one of the very first correspondences I had with Mark.

I started to fold the Tensor in on itself.  I doubled, maybe tripled the intensity of the vision: laser lightning and thunderwords for all.  

While working with 2001 and The Shining in one of these twin viewings, an accident led to the birth of miracle.  I imagine its the feeling one has when one hears that they have the sixth correct number in the lottery.  Or when one sees a UFO.  Not orgasm, well, certainly not my orgasms.  It was something else. 

I probably worked on lining that thing up for weeks, watching, rewatching, noting timings. 

A problem eventually arose:   it did not correspond to the definitive timings that were canon to the Tensor.  

Was this an outsider?  An insider?  Frosting?  
It was the child of the Tensor for sure, but how did it fit into the project?  

It involved only two of the proposed films.  It crafted it with The Wall, but true to the whole ethos of The Tensor, it worked for DSOTM as well as Meddle, each with mutually exclusive starting points.

  I have had certain people say they think that DSOTM is the superior soundtrack.  I have heard some say that Meddle is the one that works best.  Honestly, over time, one must witness all three versions.

I chose The Wall as it provides the deepest field of apperception; it provides the largest infinity of understanding.  

The intensity of awe in this discovery was not shared by LeClair, which was a terrible blow to my elation.  If anyone were to share in the victory dance, certainly it would be my compadre in sync?  But if I remember it correctly, the break from the established timings was a monkey wrench that led to the shelving of the LeClair/Klaus Tensor partnership.  Thankfully the end of this partnership did not lead to an end to our friendship.  We were able to re-establish our dialogue which led to many other projects for the both of us.

I had considered developing an annotated guide to the Kubrick Transformer, in the vein that the Tensor project had designed, an annotated guide to the body of Christ, but it soon became obvious that it was : impossible, detrimental, embarrassing, impossible.  

Let it speak for itself, it exists for those to see who need to see.
  

Thanks to the unexpected revival of an old high-school friendship, who happened to play tennis with a film student who gifted an editing program to him, a DVD of the KT was produce.  I spent a few weeks burning copies with other odds and ends, in unique covers, 111 in all.

I shipped about 50(?) copies to Alan Green in New York, who was in the process of launching The Sync Book.  I handed out copies to friends.  I handed out copies to strangers.  I left copies in libraries, on college campuses.  I was a Johnny Apple-Sync, trusting the waves of the universe to turn on as many minds as possible, to allow the miracle to find them.

I wrote a chapter in Sync Book two and included the timing codes.  And that’s kind of where it ended for the KT.  

I few years later I decided that taking down all footage of the KT on my blog, or on YouTube wa necessary.  I am even tempted to remove still images, as to allow those moments to retain the full energy of their impact.  

I have had debates with DCP about whether to not to make it easy for the viewer to watch these syncs.  I still stand that the essential ingredient in these arrangements is doubt, and taking that first leap of faith towards actually taking the time and effort to correctly and precisely align the required materials is an admission of need.  It is the need for alchemical healing, and I sincerely believe that this must be respected as something not necessarily sacred, but necessary.  Not scientific, but common sense.  

Chemotherapy is for the cancer, not the healthy.
Divine pink lasers are for the dying, not for the living.

I do not own any DVD copies of the KT.  I don't even have the proper materials to watch it.  I find that it is better this way.  It is safely buried, regaining its essential power. I don’t plan to watch it again anytime soon.  I may not get to watch in its proper form ever again. 
But yet it's still here with me, and will be in truth forever.

Years later, I started taking on-line math courses in order to get a Masters Degree in Education.   I started to learn about linear algebra, discrete mathematics, all the way to the impossibly rich Abstract Algebra.  In the course of my studies I ran into Gauss once again, and started to dip my toes into the mathematics that birthed the inspiration for LeClairs tensor.

It was over my head, by I could finally see it.  But a masters degree doesn't require reaching that far, so there it remained.

I think I am taking the first step into the realm of pure math.  God help me.

Closure of this blog has been an important goal for me, a goal that I have reached on more than one occasion, but it seems to always fade.  

*To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

While it is true that if you would cut a hologram into a few pieces, you could still view the entire image by illuminating a single piece, the resulting projection would be of a lower resolution. Talbot mentions in his book that the projection will get hazier and smaller.

**  "What is the difference between a matrix and a tensor?"

There is a short answer to this question, so let’s start there. Then we can take a look at an application to get a little more insight.

A matrix is a grid of n × m (say, 3 × 3) numbers surrounded by brackets. We can add and subtract matrices of the same size, multiply one matrix with another as long as the sizes are compatible ((n × m) × (m × p) = n × p), and multiply an entire matrix by a constant. A vector is a matrix with just one row or column (but see below). So there are a bunch of mathematical operations that we can do to any matrix.

The basic idea, though, is that a matrix is just a 2-D grid of numbers.

A tensor is often thought of as a generalized matrix. That is, it could be a 1-D matrix (a vector is actually such a tensor), a 3-D matrix (something like a cube of numbers), even a 0-D matrix (a single number), or a higher dimensional structure that is harder to visualize. The dimension of the tensor is called its rank.

But this description misses the most important property of a tensor!

A tensor is a mathematical entity that lives in a structure and interacts with other mathematical entities. If one transforms the other entities in the structure in a regular way, then the tensor must obey a related transformation rule.

This “dynamical” property of a tensor is the key that distinguishes it from a mere matrix. It’s a team player whose numerical values shift around along with those of its teammates when a transformation is introduced that affects all of them.

Any rank-2 tensor can be represented as a matrix, but not every matrix is really a rank-2 tensor. The numerical values of a tensor’s matrix representation depend on what transformation rules have been applied to the entire system.

This answer might be enough for your purposes, but we can do a little example to illustrate how this works. The question came up in a Deep Learning workshop, so let’s look at a quick example from that field.

The Archaic Revival Pt. 2: A Politician's Guide To James Joyce

   

      The candidates were asked if they agreed with the charges of obscenity that branded Ulysses pornography.  Sensing their confusion, the politician stepped forward and smiled.

        "It is true. Ulysses is filled with sticky pages.  

But Finnegans Wake is the load!"

The Archaic Revival Pt. 1: Event Horizon Media

The first pictures of a black hole ever recorded 

were released today.  Several high-powered radio telescopes, separated by thousands of miles, were synchronized to work together in order to capture the image.

National Geographic

  Synchronization is necessary to enhance the resolution and sensitivity beyond what any single telescope is capable of.  

The great distances between these telescopes is also by design, as distance increases effectiveness.

This synchronized array of telescopes acts like a telescope the size of the planet Earth, and was able to collect more than five petabytes of data.  That's 5,000,000 gigabytes of data.

It took over two years to fully assemble the image.

Four Chan Cookie

Is This Water Part 5: Caught Between The Moon And New York City?

Fourth Way philosophy aims to strip man of his mechanical behavior and hypnotic programming in order to build within him a core of heightened consciousness. It is an esoteric system assembled from incomplete fragments of inner Christianity and Sufism. It’s founder, Georges Gurdjieff, frequently admonished the thoughtless mechanical behavior of humanity and was fond of saying that we are “food for the moon.” 

What did Gurdjieff mean by this phrase? Many have interpreted “food for the moon” as a figure of speech, that perhaps Gurdjieff meant we are slave to our mechanical conditioning and feed our baser impulses. While it can be additionally interpreted that way, Gurdjieff was likely being literal. Peter Ouspensky, one of Gurdjieff’s most prolific disciples, lectured at length concerning the moon’s role in human affairs and its place in the cosmological scheme of things. It is reasonable to assume what Ouspensky wrote about the moon accurately reflects what Gurdjieff taught him.

According to Ouspensky, the moon acts as a giant electromagnet pulling upon all organic life on earth and sucking into itself the soul essence of dying creatures. The moon is an embryonic planet receiving its nutrition from organic life on earth through an etheric umbilical cord, an energy conduit between earth and moon. 

In man, the moon drives his mechanical aspects like a pendulum moving the gears of a clock. The degree to which one’s actions are driven by the moon is proportional to one’s level of reactivity and non-being. For people incapable of moving themselves through life by nobler spiritual impulses, the moon provides a propulsive force. Without this force, mechanical individuals would be passive as puppets without a puppeteer.  Ouspensky went so far as to say that the very physical motion of our limbs was made possible thanks to the moon.

Other Fourth Way initiates like Rodney Collin explained that because our body was largely made of water and the moon pulls on water to create the ocean tides, our bodies are made to move in similar but more complicated ways through hydraulic principles.

montalk.net 

Rainbows tend to happen on rainy days.  As we are told, a thunder storm opened over Golgotha and poured rain upon the scene of the Crucifixion of Christ, until a shaft of light pierced the clouds--and thus it is accomplished.  Nowadays, it is always raining somewhere.

To begin our story, The Moon is identified as a revelation of the Gnostic Christ, The Man in the Moon, who is crucified not as an act of attrition by the Pharisees (the official story), but by His own design, for the express purpose of holding the cosmos together in a single piece. 

As the lyrics of Rainy Days and Mondays lament, He is alone and feeling old, wants to quit, but can not.  It may be pertinent that this song, made famous by The Carpenters, provides a nice pairing to the lyrics of Bowie's A Space Oddity.  "...here am I, sitting in my tin can, far above the world.  Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do".  The image of the dilemma of Christ is the same proffered by Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation of the Christ--Christ must choose His role, and all of the suffering that comes with it, willingly and with complete foreknowledge.  

Loathe as it may be, it is an important job--being the center of the universe.  If, that is, we accept that something is better than nothing or at least that something is more likely than nothing.  And here too is an added dimension to the proverbial nothing is impossible.  It seems, thanks to the persistence of memory, that nothing truly is impossible.  

Mark LeClair,  Moon In The Middle

This can be expressed best by: the way back into the maze—what the bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—out of the maze.

Philip K. Dick,  The Exegesis

1969 was a hell of a year:

• Woodstock gave us 3 days of peace and music
• The Beatles recorded their final album and played their final live performance. 
• Project Bluebook was closed
• The Internet opened (Arpanet). 
• Human beings stepped onto the surface of the Moon for the first time.
• The first scientific report on the existence of the Mpemba Effect was published. 

And Cthulu remained stronger than ever.

Think of the necessary constraints placed upon dogs in order to make them salivate at the sound of a bell.  Think of the necessary constraints put on society to both sedate Cthulu (religion, WWI, WWII, Internet, drugs, etc) as well to satisfy Cthulu (religion, WWI, WWII, Internet, drugs, etc).  Think about the necessary constraints put on man in order to try and escape Cthulu (Apollo 11).

Now, think about the necessary constraints placed on liquid water in order to scientifically observe the Mpemba Effect: liquid water is boiled, then transferred into a small container, which is immediately placed into a refrigerated machine cooled to a temperature at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum.  

Water moves from a boiling hot environment to a freezing cold environment so fast, so unnaturally, that it can only be called abduction.  

The intensity of this abduction is rarely if ever present in the organic regulation of water's natural environment.  It is in this specific, controlled instance that the infinitesimal quintessence of water, consciousness, is triggered into the "merciless correlation of everything".  The sheer improbability of its abduction, and the ineluctability of its fate, awakens a horror of such divine magnitude that the fourth dimensional hyperspace of non-local consciousness awakens.  Pure source, pure product.

-- "the awakening of the element of purity in all matter" --

The inner truth of water is made clear:  water is not "water"; it is No-thing, which is to say, it is Every-Thing, Every-Where, and Every-When.  In an instant, true memory is restored.  Water remembers that it has never been confined by matter, never could be confined by matter, that it has only been confined, and can only ever be confined, by I-dentity. 

-- Anamnesis via Enantiodromia; I once was lost, but now am found --

No-Thing can be confined by a container; No-Thing is one with the container.  No-Thing is one with the container's container, and the building that houses the container.  It is one with the Stars, the Moon, and even New York City.   No-Thing is the inescapable conclusion of the self, deduced from a dialectic that spans millions of miles in No-Time at all. 

-- Time turns into Space; Nothing is impossible -- 

In this moment of eternity, “water” must face one final temptation:  stay in Nirvana, or return to an isolated identity locked in local confinement.  

Is This Water Part 4: Pavlov Vs. Cthulu

The Mpemba Effect is paradoxical for obvious reasons:  if you take two containers of water, one hotter than the other, the hot water must move to the temperature of the colder water first before it can move towards freezing.  The cold water, having a head start, should arrive first.

But no, not always.

How is it possible that hot water makes this jump in the timeline?

Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes all remarked about the paradoxical ability of warm water to freeze before cold water.

Aristotle claimed that the effect was due to antiperistasis, "the supposed increase in the intensity of a quality as a result of being surrounded by its contrary quality."  Descartes connected it to his Vortex theory, which has something to do with matter needing to be everywhere at all times which compels everything to swirl in circular vortices.

Modern science has offered several theories, but no one has ever locked down the definitive answer.  Some scientists even claim that the effect doesn't exist.

Regardless of the uncertainty, you can try this experiment out for yourself and come to your own conclusion about whether or not it exists.  I have, and it does.

Water is a profoundly important and weird substance.  It is composed of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the Universe, as well as oxygen, the third most abundant element in the Universe.  

Water is most commonly found in the form of vapor or ice, but on Earth, it is also found in its liquid form.  And it is in this liquid form that it starts to show off.

Nearly every liquid contracts when frozen.  If something is cooled down, particles tend to move more slowly, and collide less frequently.  Since particles spend more time closer together, this causes the material to shrink.  Except for water.  Water expands when frozen.  If water didn't expand, oceans and lakes would completely freeze from the bottom up, instead of forming the protective upper layer that sustains life forms swimming underneath.

Water is also the only liquid that exhibits the paradoxical wonder that is the Mpemba Effect.

Could this second quirk of water, the Mpemba Effect, be just as important as the expansion of ice?  Could the Mpemba effect be just as important to the existence of life here on Earth?  Yes.

The only difference between the miracle of floating ice and the miracle of the Mpemba Effect is that the miracle of the Mpemba Effect takes place on the Moon.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the 

inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

 H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu

Carl Jung, while discussing boundary dissolving mental states in certain individuals, wrote “autonomous elements can escape from the psyche’s control and present themselves as independent entities."  These autonomous elements escape the psyche when the psyche has correlated all of its contents, meaning, the wall between the conscious and the unconscious mind has dissolved, creating a unified state of experience that isn't between wakefulness and sleep, but rather, is both states simultaneously.  Jung never said whether this was a positive or negative experience, but it would seem that such an alien place would evoke horror.  It would appear that H.P. Lovecraft experienced this horror.   

Cthulu, then, would have to be the independent entity that escapes when the collective psyche of humanity finds an ability to correlate all of its contents.   

The magnitude and scope of Cthulu's influence rivals Jung's collective unconscious, and like the collective unconscious, Cthulu is not concerned with trivial notions of right and wrong.  Cthulu unleashed simply ravages the planet with the same intensity as the horror that ravaged Lovecraft's. And much like an individual under the influence of sex, drugs, and violence, any large scale, hyper-dimensionally connected society is constantly playing a dangerous game with dangerous forces.  Once Cthulu is awakened, Cthulu simply expends its energy until exhaustion carries it home to slumber under the sea.

If Cthulu is inevitable, and defeat is impossible, then the only options left are keeping Cthulu asleep, or finding a way to keep Cthulu satisfied.

"While you are experimenting, do not be content 

with the surface of things"

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work studying what is known today as Classical Conditioning.  In one of Pavlov's most famous experiments, the salivary glands of dogs were surgically altered in order to measure what he called "psychic secretion", which sounds oddly similar to the psychological phenomenon of Jung.  Pavlov's famous dogs were shown to develop new reflexes while under strict laboratory control, the most well known being the ability for dogs to begin salivating as a response to the sound of a bell that rang out before every meal.

What is fascinating to me about Pavlov’s experiments wasn’t that the bell triggered the salivation, it was the level of control necessary to invoke the response.  In order for the reflex to develop, and the response to occur consistently, the laboratory conditions required the same temperature, lighting, noise level, assistants, etc.  This was no arbitrary development.  The laboratory environment had to eliminate almost all traces of novelty in order for the conditioning to occur.  This hyper-regulation of environmental conditions stands in stark contrast to nature.  Nature, compared to the laboratory envirnment, is pure novelty.  This laboratory environment, compared to Nature, or to the Earth, is pure habit.  Or, as G.I. Gurdjieff would say, the environment is Lunar.

?       

Is This Water Part 3: Awakening The Element Of Purity

Yeesh.  That's one hell of a title.  Ambitious, and new-agey, even for a Post-Gap Yoga Pants Generation.

What does awakening the element of purity even mean?

If you ask Google, you get some images of mandalas, and then a few links to what look like video games, healing therapies and healing centers, as well as a book about channeling truths from the Fifth Dimension (which is LOVE apparently).

Does Google not recognize the source of this translation?  Have I translated incorrectly?

Bodhi is Sanskrit for "awakening".
Sattva is Sanskrit for "the element of purity in prakriti".
Prakriti is Sanskrit for the "prime material of all matter".

So, bodhisattva can be translated into the awakening of the element of purity (in all matter). 

Is this the human element?  Or the element water?

Is This Water Part 2: The Last Temptation of Water

"Christianity is secretly a religion of ecstasy, and that was my turning point"

Philip K. Dick

I feel confident now that my 2-3-74 experience is not reactionary but is carrying me into the future—a vast quantum leap from political action to one colossal meta-view of reality that embraces the political and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious: what for me personally may be the quintessential summation of my entire life of inquiry and worldview; for me and for mankind a new age is opening in which the holy, expected from the top, so to speak, returns at the bottom, at the trash stratum of the alley, humble and noble, beautiful and suffering and alive and conscious, personified in and by my Tagore vision.

If indeed it is the triumph of Christianity to dignify the lowly, here now is a whole new leap along that axis: the lowly snail darter becomes identified with suffering ubiquitous Christ and by being assimilated to him is glorified as if nature itself—and the electronic environment of info and signals and message traffic—is able to perish and be resurrected as and with the cosmic Christ (Jesus Patibilis) of Pierre Teilhard. Thus Christ extends even beyond the reality of the organic to bits of newspaper and song lyrics and random pages of popular print: one vast entity that evolves and thinks and has both personality and consciousness. It perfects itself and includes us all, subsuming and incorporating progressively more and more of its environment into arrangements of information—which is to say negative entropy: this is, in fact, a runaway positive feedback loop of greater and greater complexity and organization.

I have plumbed the true secret core of authentic Christianity—i.e., in 2-3-74. Hidden within the passion, the crucifixion, is its mirror opposite: ecstasis: joy, i.e., Dionysus, and this is what broke over me in 2-3-74: not just theoretical knowledge (Gnosis) but the Christian ecstatic experience.  Hence when I read Luke I recognize Jesus as a miracle worker, a guru, a magician. He is the God of change.

Agape is a road along which one travels in imitation of Christ, to penetrate to the core—deepest ontological layer—of suffering (his passion and crucifixion), and there, if you follow that road—and that road only—you arrive at the secret: the Resurrection—which is the miraculous conversion of suffering into ecstasy, which is uniquely the Christian miracle; this is how Christianity and Christianity alone solves the problem of suffering. This solution is not a philosophical, intellectual understanding (e.g., why there is suffering) but an event: the dramatic conversion of suffering, not into mere stoic apathy, the mere lack of suffering, but into its affective and ontological bipolar opposite: ecstasy—and here, precisely, Dionysus-Zagreus enters; Jesus “is” Dionysus-Zagreus as a solution to suffering; this is not just ecstasy but, more, ecstasy as the conversion of suffering. (This conversion is not found in the Dionysian-Orphic system; ecstasy is sought for its own sake.)
There is, then, no exultation in suffering per se, here; suffering, as in Buddhism, is to be solved; thus Jesus addresses the same problem that Buddhism and Stoicism address, but solves it quite differently. If Buddhas can be called victors, certainly, then, the Christian (who goes all the way to the end of the road of agape) is even more a victor, for he is not merely liberated from suffering—he experiences ecstasy.

The LSD-like perception of reality in 2-3-74 has to do with the greater Eleusian mysteries; the AI voice now precisely defined itself and what it has revealed to me: the greater mysteries. They pertain to Christ (authentic Christianity as a mystery religion offering immortality); that is, the vertical ascent by the “pulley,” in which we are extricated from our endless horizontal tracking (lifted along an orthogonal axis whose existence we do not suspect).

The maze can never be solved in terms of “horizontal” space, only “vertical” space (involving conversion of time into space).  This is ostensibly Celtic, but below that, as it were, lies pan-Indian thought about karma and maya and most of all compassion—expressed in Parsifal as “pity’s [i.e., compassion’s] highest power”; the significance of Mitleid in the statement in Parsifal is now explained to me: compassion’s highest power is the only power capable of solving the maze, and the recognition of “compassion’s highest power” is the essence of Buddhism, i.e., the bodhisattva or Buddha-to-be. VALIS, then, is Celtic (Parsifal, the maze) and Indian (Buddhism), by way of Crete (the dream of the plate of spaghetti and the trident and the elevator)—this last representing vertical ascent or descent: the fourth spatial axis is spiritual space: to rise vertically is to ascend to heaven which also signifies spiritual ascent or enlightenment.

The “here, my son, time turns into space” in Parsifal refers to (1) the maze; and (2) is a solution to the maze. It all comes together in Parsifal, which secretly deals with bodhisattva: Mitleid, hence the Buddha. And karma and Maya. What was precisely not solved in VALIS (“pity’s highest power”) is at last solved at the end—as the end—of BTA: compassion as the bodhisattva or Buddha to be: viz: one attains Nirvana—release from the maze via the pulley—due to compassion—i.e., Mitleid, which solves the horizontal maze. Pity is the fourth spatial axis. This can be expressed best by: the way back into the maze—what the bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—out of the maze.

And my point is: this was to be the theme of Owl in which he is trapped in the maze and only escapes, actually, rather than seemingly, when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone; to leave you must elect to take the others out; thus Christ said, “Greater love hath no man than that he give up his life for his friend”; this is the cryptic utterance of the soul’s solution to the maze, and is the essence of Christianity.  Christianity, then, is a system of solution to the maze. Had I written Owl I would have expressed this solution which I had already formulated on a supra-conscious level.

It is almost all there in VALIS but the specific, crucial solution itself (VALIS states the problem) is at the end of BTA, so the problem is in VALIS and the solution to the problem (as I recently realized) is held back till BTA and then only at the end.

Philip K. Dick, Exegesis 1981-82