Shadow Gnosis
The shadow knows it’s turtles all the way down
This is a box inside a box inside a … well, to put it urban simple, it’s turtles all the way down.
I moved to Medium to get away from Facebook. I didn’t know how this new social media world worked at first. I’m used to the model of publisher as a filter, because the limitation in the old model of publishing was getting distribution. That required controlling very limited space on paper printed and delivered as a physical product. Now everybody can distribute to everybody. I can distribute to people who open the email and say, “Why me, lord?”
I feel your pain, but like a saloon girl in a country song, I always show up again just when the wound is nearly closed
I brought along a friend, or she brought me along. Dr. Adelia Ritchie is a general practitioner in that she is practicing to be a general. She worked at the Pentagon, her daddy was brass, and she has brass, as well as food she grows on her own farm. I hope to meet her and Bruce this summer. He appears at the end of the series ignoring it all, watching the game and drinking a beer. I find that very funny, as the fictional story began with Amanda mad at her husband because he insulted her pink spade. She goes in the house and he asks her to get him a beer, my fictional contribution. The tension become palpable. This leaves out the entire imaginative interlude about Bdelians and tranformation.
This is my brain editing out the dream images in static time, and leaving in the surface story of a woman with a pink spade about which her husband has made disparaging remarks. She does not find this innocent. She says phuck him, and dips her pink spade in the moist earth. Foreshadowing? Don’t miss the first episode of a new series starring Shane McCutcheon as the new farm hand.
Dr. Ritchie told me about putting her writing into Medium publications, and it took me awhile to realize that we all have our Medium publication, but nobody reads it because it’s not promoted anywhere. We need exposure to people, anyway, to find people with whom we can have fun, and to especially pass along direct knowledge.
The priority for younger people who look at this as a career on ascent will be readership. For older people the fun of having other people reading things is because it was so much fun writing it, and it’s fun to share it with people who are like minded.
Dr. Ritchie and I, in collaboration with Science Duuude, did an experimental exchange of chapters around a theme, which came from a fiction writing contest. The main character would find a treasure chest in which there was a little black book, which would lead to a fortune in diamonds, banknotes and crypto currency. I don’t know who won the contest, but Adelia suggested we write a chapter novel, using the idea as the seed energy.
We began to modify the idea. In the first chapter her farm tractor started pulling up coaxial cable, so we had a hook for a story. What was it doing there?
The obvious idea is a mysterious communications center which was set up on the Washington coast during WWII and not detected. In the book she learns that the last Japanese spy had lived secretly under the field like a borrower, a secret sharer with Amanda’s father, a full bird colonel. The seed of a story.
The obvious narrows the mind down to the reality of coaxial cable and why it is likely to be there. But I was quite high and let images fly, using the words to sketch them as quick as I could catch them, travelers from outer space who have no mass because they have to be able to vanish there and appear here. They have to be energy which is already entangled here and there, through crystal receivers. The coaxial cable is a place where they take on form. An energy field which acts like a 3D printer.
And why did my mind go there? Because a very long time ago I asked a question and my mind has been working on it for that very long time. Before the question was an altered state in which I had to determine a purpose for living. I chose as the top priority moving in concert with evolution, which requires turning around from looking backward and focusing on flying the ship. Don Juan called this letting go of self-importance.
Then came the question. Given that space and time are relative, I can imagine them as field polarities at the extremes. At one polarity, where I find myself, I experience space as static, and time as moving across it. What will I experience at the opposite polarity, should they suddenly shift?
When I read ScienceDuuude’s piece on the origins of life I had to read slowly. It’s packed with information. What I focused in on was the evolutionary acceleration taking place as the nucleus became individual, and more complex, because nutrients had to be moved across chemical barriers by becoming clever. Not just everybody could cross the rope line.
For billions of years life had not been all that clever, because fitness was not prioritized. Once the interactions become complex, cleverness is prioritized. Blending into the background to escape the notice of a predator is clever. A predator’s eye that is a narrow slit, and can zoom in on movement, is clever.
I do not think of a creative center as true or not true, I think of it like software that facilitates communication across a barrier. Like the eye of the predator, we narrow down to hunt the ruminant, round-eyed, contemplative, whom we hear saying to a friend:
“I’ve had the most troubled dreams lately. This is gluten free isn’t it?”
There are always two polarities in a field and they move as I move. Extend toward one and the other extends equally out to maintain ego shadow balance. At one polarity Medium is some pretty good poetry and fiction. At another polarity there is the eye of the hawk. How can I sharpen my hunting skills and bring home the white whale?
“What happened to your leg, man?”
“What leg?”
So Dr. Ritchie and I explored a story and, as stories always do when they are spun with equal love for all thoughts and images, they opened a window into the process which is going on as the mind works on the question. And sometimes there are answers from physics, the calculation that in a black hole time does become static. Matter collapsed to nothing to speak of is a contraction of time. If there’s no distance between here and there there’s no experience of time. The faculty determining fitness becomes a facility with sorting out elements into a time line through an active creative process, which begins with the nucleus, or, archetypal core of the story.
The containing field of the black hole is the event horizon. It is a membrane between where time is expanding and where time is collapsing.
I think what Adelia and I have done is show a way to have more fun with writing. Compiling a helpful list of what to think about when starting a business is a useful tool, and I love good information. I even like to write about how to grind coffee or perform surgery on yourself.
Poems and fantasy fiction are useful tools, also. Active imagination unfurls dream images and we participate in the dreaming. By doing so, the two minds are aware of each other, and the clever person sees the abyss not just as a metaphor for the corpus callosum, but as a real abyss which must be crossed, which means brushing up on such esoteric knowledge as the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. “Questions? Anyone? Yes, Arthur.”
It’s in the interplay of words and images where we get energy, as we get energy whenever we operate as the nucleus of the containing field, with both polarities in one awareness. There’s a good reason why genius has in common a high tolerance for ambiguity, while black and white fundamentalism seldom produces more than adherence to rules such as gee and haw.
Count Bergamo’s keyboards create the emotional life of my fantasy fiction series, Ash Fork.
It is all an exploration of the central question that was asked.
So far as I can see, at this advanced age, the direction of evolution is simultaneous access to both left and right hemispheres from a self constructed objective center. My best guess is that when this is in place, question and answer becomes rather meaningless, as they will be comprehended as one thing. The difficulty in stabilizing in the state will be having enough people in it to facilitate direct communication. Once something necessary to make an evolutionary jump is proved possible everybody learns to do it or is left behind. Joining those who want to go backwards is suicide from evolution’s perspective. Straight is the gait and Darrow is the way.
Burroughs (in The Western Lands) said the medium by which this direct communication works is like holograms, but without the oppressive quality of something being faked. The box within a box is the flood of emails I got after making an email list and sending it out to people I hardly ever communicate with, and some people I always communicate with.
Thank you guys! It feels so good to come out from the quaranine. I added a couple of links to chapters from the experiment.