Lesson 2: Existence 1

from Visions of the Daughters of Albion - William Blake

Lesson 2: Existence-An Overview

Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1. Banner: Rhiannon C. 2016
            a) Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
            b) Albion Glyph: "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," William Blake, c.1794
            https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/William_Blake_-_Albion_Rose_- _from_A_Large_Book_of_Designs_1793-6.jpg
            c) Jewel Ouija Board (2): D.C. Albion 1994
2. (small) Jewel Glyph (Vilansit's Triangle) taken from Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
3. "Visions of the Daughters of Albion - Plate 4," William Blake, 1793
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N03/N03374_10.jpg
4. (small) Jewel Glyph (Vilansit's Triangle) taken from Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
5. "Jerusalem - Frontispiece," William Blake William Blake Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29617991
6. Photo of transcript page, (Guide speaking: Session 10, 1992): D.C. Albion 2017
7. Portrait of Renee Descartes by Frans Hals
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.jpg
8. Photo of hand-drawn blank Cartesian coordinate plane: D.C. Albion 2017
9. Photo of Albert Einstein   https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Albert_Einstein_Head.jpg
10. (small) Jewel Glyph (Vilansit's Triangle) taken from Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
11. (a & b) Two photos of hand-drawn unorthodox coordinateless planes: D.C. Albion 2017
12. Two photos of hand-drawn examples of bad scaling
a) Jesus at center: D.C. Albion 2017
b) Trumpland (goal posts keep moving): D.C. Albion 2017
13. (small) Jewel Glyph (Vilansit's Triangle) taken from Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
14. Photo of Kurt Gödel By unknown -

http://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/en/events/285, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43426215
15. Photo of hand-drawn parabola of Albion's life in time (ages 10-60): D.C. Albion 2017
16. Faces/cup illusion (3 colours added) https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1426245/rubins-vase.jpg

3. Paradigm Lost

“A glorious accident’’: That’s how paleontologist Stephen J. Gould famously described life on our planet, including modern civilization—meaning, he believed in science & statistics over divine intervention. 4.6 billion years of planetary cooling and plate tectonics is plenty enough time, he said, to account for all the plants and animals and genetic diversity on Earth, as well as human thought. Do the math: Life is rare, extremely lucky; thus, over protracted geologic eons, practically inevitable. The life we see today, he smugly observed, could well have evolved differently—the human brain seems especially unlikely. But even our art and dreams and the meanings we attach to them can be explained through acquired random mutations, natural selection, and “deep time." Gould also liked to note that in many respects humans are not the dominant life form on Earth right now: Today there are more bacteria on our planet than ever before, partly because all multicellular organisms are themselves full of bacteria.
Existence then, according to scientists, began with the Big Bang on a particular calendar date & time some 13.8 billion years ago. Existence in this sense is defined as “matter and energy interacting in spacetime,” where most, if not all, interactions are just the continuing action of that Big first movement in time. Remarkably, scientists believe they now know much about the thermodynamics just after the first microseconds of existence; they also have constructed a general timeline of the existence that followed. But they have no idea what was going on “before the Big Bang,” a phrase scientists dismiss as nonsensical. Now recall, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." So even when we shrink the universe backwards down to zero time and zero volume, we still can’t assume there was nothing. First, it’s not logical to say so: There might have been nothing, though we can’t ever know for sure. But second, it’s also a false statement. Obviously something happened to kick-start the Big Bang, albeit outside of time and space. Nothing alone can’t start a universe. Does that make it an accident?

For my entire life I have lived with/in eternity, consciously with certainty, knowing also quite well what modern society thought. As I describe in detail in Lesson 6, I have always had the ability to descend deep within myself and listen to an acoustic universe of music and dialogue. And because cognition blossomed very early in me, along with great curiosity and a healthy bullshit-meter, I was smart enough to study in myself what other children with similar childhood experiences probably dismiss: Infinity. I pursued my inner acoustics rigorously, concluding that neither I nor anyone alive was smart enough to conjure up spontaneously all I heard, that I was directly tapped into eternity, albeit with little control. Beyond any quantitative analysis, I knew well my constant teachers. Wise beyond living humans, they taught me unconditionally.
A more traditional way to express my beliefs would be to say something like “Heaven watches over us”—if by “Heaven” we mean “deceased people” and not angels or Jesus or God. Yes, I concluded, dead people do watch over us and often guide us subliminally, through simple suggestions smuggled among our personal thoughts. I witnessed this in action every time I “went down” to my acoustic plane, hundreds of times. I didn’t know then who my people were—nor did I expect to connect to them through life—but I loved them in eternity. And since I understood firsthand that eternity lies outside space and time, not on some planet far away, I reasoned further that some of my teachers likely came from the future, as well as from the past, and that my own eternal soul (Albion) probably likewise served in eternity, as a teacher to the people I love, aiding my benefactors in their respective lives. That is, I already believed in karasses in some detail before I ever picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

Suffice it to say, Science, which claims to be able to describe the complete universe, is very wrong or silent about much in the world, and I’ve known this all my life. It’s not just wrong about karasses and dead people; science is terribly inadequate at describing some of our most basic human experiences, such as love or music. Science has no idea what love is. Science is also completely wrong about existence itself. Existence (or being) is not the stuff of existence, the movement of molecules and collisions of planets. To exist is entirely abstract: It’s a process of self-choosing and accretion; how each mind, enabled by the metaphors at hand, defines and organizes itself, a mental reshaping of our shape-shifting minds, which we enact and act out via existence.
Suffice it to say that most religions are bullshit, too—which is hardly news to most 21st century thinkers. I’m not going to rail here against the religious institutions, many of which (despite the genocides) have aided billions over the centuries. But I am going to address the core mission of most religions, which is to “save” humans and humankind. Let me state this as clearly as I can: Heaven is not gained by following rules and keeping one’s nose clean. We don’t get to Heaven by being “good." We become eternal only if our soul chooses eternity. That is, when a soul outside of time surveys their life and “sees that it is good,” then that person’s life-consciousness becomes their soul’s origin for all eternity, the foundation for all that follows. If, on the other hand, the soul finds their life empty or malignant, or thinks they can do better with a different origin, well, that first life is forgotten, deleted, and the soul gives the wheel of life another spin. While there’s no limit to the lifetimes a soul might try on for wear, only one life is remembered and eternally revisited. Is this the one?

The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons,you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.

6. Caesar’s Palace

Suppose you’re a god in eternity. You can do anything you think: You can create any world and populate it. You can take any form and inhabit it. You can alter history; you can unmake facts and minds. There are only two limiting forces in your existence:

1) You can create only what you think, which means in eternity you

will exhaust your limited range of thoughts (roughly) immediately.
2) Your thoughts are inchoate & incoherent, inherently contradictory,

unable to sustain a projected world even for the duration of a dream.

What do you do?
Your first thought might be for your survival, if you understand that #1 above means existential death. No matter how much you expand your existence/your mind/your awareness of everything, Infinity is always Bigger, infinitely bigger. For a trillion years perhaps you might inflate and engorge your omnipotent ego-bubble, maintaining some (grotesque) vestige of your post-human identity, but the end is always nigh; no center holds forever: If you open yourself to the infinity outside your mind, it threatens with its beauty alone instantly to overwhelm your bubble, and your identity would pop. But if you retreat to the familiar projections of your self-made identity—itself a random flotsam among competing truths and tales—you spiral into tighter & tighter circles of repeated history, a shrinking mind-loop, a snake swallowing its own tail. What happens when a god accidentally contemplates suicide?

Once upon a time in Infinity, where all possible universes either exist or await existence, one particular world quite identical to ours “must have arisen”—with the following initial difference: For no apparent reason other than manifest cosmic fuck-up—one morning President Donald Trump wakes up in his White House master bedroom (alone) to find himself transformed into a god—indeed beyond all law, God Himself. Any executive order President Trump tweets instantly comes true.
What God lacks in this universe, we note, is a deity's owner's manual (not that he'd read it). In fact, on that first day The Donald goes about his routine executive business—yelling at cable news, not-really-firing cabinet officers, and threatening civil rights—not even realizing he's God until a 3:00 AM tweet angrily orders the "immediate construction" of the Mexican wall (despite a lack of funding or Republican support), and bingo! The mile-high adamantine barrier instantly stretches from coast to coast, its gold plate easily visible from outer space.
It's about time, barks the President to his cowering yes-men. Now I can do whatever the People elected me to do. And because he's Donald Trump, on his second day of divinity he tweets into existence all sorts of great things for America, among them:

1) In his first nine tweets Manhattan doubles in size, rerouting the

Hudson through Hoboken and Jersey City. (That's for celebrating

the murders of thousands of Americans on 9-11!) Exclusive title is

transferred to Trump Properties, along with the White House and

St. Peter's Basilica, both of which are relocated to Central Park,

the future site of the "best golf club ever." Rents across the island

triple, and the FBI shifts all its resources into managing the evictions.

(No one at the White House could spell "Versailles" or "Louvre,"

so those would be included in a future tweet.)
2) All U.S.-born females suddenly find themselves with Barbie-doll

body proportions and maxed-out libidos. (Five hours later this would

be amended to exclude girls under 12. Who'd have thought?)
3) Cigarette smokers don't have to worry anymore about cancer.

Now cigars are as healthy as energy drinks. Smoking is great for

America's health and American tobacco.
4) An indestructible dome instantly covers all of North Korea, "even

better than a wall." And just in time! Five hours after the "seismic

incident," White House press secretary Sean Spicer reports the

North didn't actually run out of oxygen, but had enough air to last

days, "even a week." Therefore, Kim Jong-un reacted hastily and

aggressively and, too bad for him, underestimated the strength of

the dome, so that all those nukes detonated harmlessly within it.

The dome did its job!
5) So wow, says Spicer without actually lying; it’s amazing what you

can achieve in one day that you couldn't in 100, when you don't

have to go through Congress. But then—wouldn't you know it—

the fake media chimes in. Polls show voters are still unhappy.

What woman doesn't want a 44" bust size? Liberals just want

“equality for men." Fine then, proclaims the Dealmaker-in-chief

before his first full day is done: We'll set a generous male cap—

with only one exemption for “executive privilege"—and now

everyone’s happy. Am I right?

Some say it was Stephen Miller's idea to bypass Twitter altogether, that verbal decree alone “should be good enough” to issue an executive order. A real god—Zeus or, well, God Himself—would never be chained to a hand-held device, which is a vulnerability, Apple kryptonite for anyone plotting your undoing. Putin's hackers could lock you out of your cell, leaving the nation defenseless. So for national security, then, the change seemed just—and just think how fast you could respond to legal challenges… But the Divine Donald thought one step further. Why wait for words at all? Why not just think an order? So President God tweeted his very thoughts into executive action, and the results, alas!, recalled all those fabled warnings and old-wives tales the President never read (having skipped the kindergarten briefings)…
The first public gaff came at that evening's state dinner for the new Liberian President, when she and all other attending women suddenly found themselves stark naked. We know now, of course, that the President might have been distracted: An hour earlier he had turned daughter Ivanka and most of her private bathroom to solid gold, and he still hadn't figured out how to monetize her new look. But this insight came to light only in the aftermath of the "more unfortunate" event, which, indeed, very few at the dinner actually witnessed. It took but a moment: The chilled and exasperated Madam President, forgetting her place and turn, faced then her omnipotent U.S. counterpart—and with no hint of accusation in her voice—asked God in wonder, “What-on-Earth stops you from concocting killer typhoons in Calcutta?”
Let the Weather Channel point out that typhoons are Pacific storms, not cyclones, which describe their Indian Ocean counterparts. The chagrined President was nonetheless proud he knew (within 2500 miles) where Kolkata once was, and we know—from piecing together the satellite data—what the President thought an Indian typhoon might look like. For 2.75 seconds (his entire attention span) it swallowed the subcontinent whole and scraped it as clean as a freshly poured hotel foundation, right down to the golf course sand traps. ("Oops!" recalled the Secretary of Energy.)
After the President rescinded his executive order, calling for a return to the fail-safe protocol of 140 characters, once again the world seemed safe from democracy. But then there remained the no-small problem of putting India back together (and Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as parts of Armenia, Uzbekistan, Lombok, and Patagonia). You wouldn't believe how complex Indian civilization could be! Jared would lead the rebuilding efforts (along with Mideast peace and ending racism), though, as the President soon admitted, it was hard enough just getting Ivanka back into her flesh. Her statue, though ravishing, wasn't “suitable” for the network censors, so of little value. Actually Ivanka's flesh was the easy part for God to visualize—the personality, well, there's a challenge.
“You have to know the person's very soul,” the President confided later to Sean Hannity over ice cream sundaes, wiser from the event. "I gave it two, maybe three of my toughest personal hours—an eternity. In the end I think I actually made Ivanka probably better than she was before. I used to see her unhappy sometimes—with me or some of the big decisions I made—but now she's happy all the time. Maybe I should make everybody happy."
President Trump soon liked his new daughter so much, in fact, he decided to make a dozen Ivankas to manage his affairs more efficiently. And he was about to make a whole living terra cotta army of Ivankas (for a consortium of infatuated Chinese business leaders), but all this had to be walked back once the 12 Ivankas and 12 Jareds got into legal disputes over family real estate.

So being a god proved a bit of a learning curve after all. No matter what the President tried, his polling numbers never got above 40%. He tried to please his base and eliminated the National Debt, a perennial Republican platform grievance. To forgive is divine… right? His advisors would later try to show him how 20 trillion dollars forgiveness might, unintentionally, contribute to global inflation and financial meltdown. It's natural law, laughed Steve Bannon: "Not even God can make people rich without making others poor." God, however, was strongly opposed to any laws that might regulate his authority, natural or otherwise. (And it was only after Bannon's abrupt disappearance that the President finally acknowledged he didn't know "if 'the cornfield' was real." Is it even possible to send someone to an unreal place? I don't know.)
So God finally tried wooing the left: He saw on CNN that elephants were going extinct, so he instantly quadrupled the size of all herds everywhere. Was CNN grateful? They spent all their time reporting on drawbacks and "unintended consequences," like how the limited vegetation couldn't support such populations, or the overcrowded zoos and stampedes killing people in Thailand, whatever! If the Chinese hadn't cornered the market so quickly, Fox News could have run for weeks with positive stories on the resurgence of the global ivory trade.
And then there was the problem of weather… Always the People's President, God started granting petitions and prayers from loyal donors right off the internet. Random acts of kindness—that is, gifting perfect strangers with undeserved miracles and medals of valor—he knew from his TV days generates far bigger audiences than any meaningful strategy for the poor: shock & optics. (Though to be fair, when he resurrected celebrity Jeffery Epstein and made him maharajah of New New Delhi during the ratings sweep, ad revenues likewise shot through the roof.) Most citizen prayers, however, were too boring for CSPAN—simple farmers mostly, facing trade-war bankruptcy and whining for assistance—and not even asking for money, which would be easier. No, they want rain in California, snow in Greenland (now part of Alaska), even more rain in Oklahoma after they just got a boost last week. They like me down there. Even the earth is red in Oklahoma. I'll give 'em a few extra inches.
—OK,sorry, so you can't send all the rain at once. (Blame the Democrats!) You have to rain it over time, and then you have to spread it around, keeping track where you rained just three days before or snowed a month before that, like redistributing the wealth (which God is loathe to do). And that's the problem: No CEO has the time to watch all the world's weather while also staying on top of cable news and FBI leaks. And not even Jared seems smart enough to manage the new U.S. Department of Climate Comfort. Why can't the whole world's weather run like like the lawn sprinklers at Mar-a-Lago (i.e., on undocumented labor)? Who'd ever think weather was so unpredictable? Take your eye off Africa just for a second, and the drought relief you send to Ethiopia (to save the ex-dictator's coffee plantations) two weeks later scours New Brunswick and Nova Scotia as a category 9 hurricane. Thank goodness the President diverted it away from the mainland, so no Americans got hurt.
That's when the President vowed, btw, to his eternal annoyance, that no major storm would ever threaten American soil, so that pretty soon all the President's energy would get eaten up watching the Weather Channel.

Why is there never any good help in this shit-hole? White House staffers would hear the President yell and scatter during those Final Days, as another tumbler of Diet Coke shattered against the bullet-proof TV monitor (on which the bundled meteorologist, reporting the latest Hawaiian ice storm, was still blaming the President for weather tweets enacted last week). Why won't they cut away to the cute snowmen on the beach? Why won't they acknowledge that global warming is a hoax? At this point Jared 9 speaks up, having little left to lose, now that the courts have ruled the Trump dynasty "royal" (so inheritance follows strict primogeniture).
"If it's a problem of having a divided divine attention, Dad," 9 ventures brazenly, while his clones prop up the wall in jaded horror, "why not just create 100 copies of yourself, each with your stable-genius mind and executive intervention authority, and let each manage the affairs of a separate world district? The caesars did it. You, the Supreme God, could just sit back then and enjoy reruns of MSNBC choking on your 2016 electoral victory."
Was #9 drunk? Did he think that divine proliferation—spreading absolute power around like Halloween candy—would improve his own situation? What power can check absolute power? You can't have deterrence without warring factions. And you can't have factions within a monotheistic totalitarian planet. Was this his logic? The caesars did divide the Roman Empire, finally admitting its administration was beyond one emperor’s capacity. Surely no Jared held nostalgia for republic, not unless it could be bought. Most of his clones assumed, of course, that this was just 9's version of "god-packing." 1 out of 12 Jareds means you're extraneous, but if there are 100 President Gods competing for the services of 12 apostles, your stock goes way up. Even if each god then makes twelve Jareds of his own, well, 9 would still be first among his new set of equals.
The President, of course, wasn't fooled. He knew the caesars didn't watch MSNBC, and he certainly wasn't about to create a pantheon bureaucracy of rival gods. But before Jared 9 could be delivered to the cornfield, God had an almost-epiphany: He didn't need good people (i.e., ones who could pass a loyalty oath under enhanced interrogation). He needed smart people, and he needed as many as he could make. Happy people couldn't fix the weather.
Watching the pair of Ivankas offering caviar (once hoarded by Putin) to the fawning Chinese generals, then looking to the corner at Putin himself, wearing forever his pink taffeta and Gotham-red lipstick to cover the lobotomy, God the father winced. Even the best NOAA scientists insisted the weather was beyond their pay scale. No, another 100 Ivankas and Jareds together couldn't help. Later, Hope Hicks would testify she found the President prostrate before the Nixon portrait nursing a 2-liter Diet Coke, “crying and whimpering” to no one if not the Heavens, “What would Obama doooo?”
That's when President Trump made the fateful decision that ended the world.

The result, of course, is the paradise we now live in, created over time from the moment the world ended. Yes, one can find continuity in the stones and some plants; the White House lawn is the same. But the seas are certainly different, thank Trump, and even the clouds have whiter shades not seen since the Stone Age. The world is healthy again, and all it took was 140 characters:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP DECLARES BY EXECUTIVE

ORDER: HENCEFORTH ALL HUMANS ON EARTH SHALL

HAVE AN IQ OF 300, EXCEPT ME MINE SHALL BE 500!

GOD

We say the world was reborn, but most births have a parent, or at least an antecedent. To say that anyone on Earth before The Tweet was still alive a minute after, we all recognize, would be absurd. Yes, we have our same bodies, the memories we started with. But no one could ever be the same again. The statesman, the football hero, the prostitute, the murderer on death row: No one would recognize themself except by these relics of memories, especially when every new moment and memory in life immediately overwhelmed in richness all that came before. Within two weeks 82% of humanity had taken new names, 56% of married couples had divorced, and nearly 40% of all businesses and jobs were abandoned or transformed into agencies designed to undo that business's past errors, especially regarding pollution.

Donald Trump immediately resigned, cast off his wealth and clothing, and became an ascetic who wanders New India, restoring it one tweet at a time: a river, an insect, a bowl of ash floating down the Ganges. Everyone knows who he is, what he did, and what he does. Nobody gets in his way.

1Some say alba originally meant "white" (like snow). From his research Scribe believes this to be incorrect.

2. Note from the Overseer§

I am an  albion. That’s not my name. It’s my chosen role in eternity, how I perceive and interpret existence. Not surprisingly, it’s also my natural inclination and talent. “Albion” (like its cognate “Alps”) means “high place,” and while one might debate the relative inclines of English altitudes, my perch atop the highest peak is clear.1 I have overview, the Big Picture. That’s how albions think and what we spend all our time thinking about. I see the forest from the trees.
            Scribes, in contrast—and Blake was also a scribe— perceive by immersion. They follow the trees. Upon entering a new world (through whatever door) they describe their world as one might consider a room, in delicious detail, where one room implies many, and many means others most extraordinary. Scribes often wander from room to room, and the Jewel Net allows for more scribes in its number than albions, for we albions remain fixed to our peak, fixated on the horizon, only one watch needed at a time.

Blake famously offered a scribe’s perspective: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand…”
  Albions see each world as a grain of sand. This is how I ponder existence in this lesson.

9. The Good

SESSION 15: 7/1/93

11:22 PM
25.   Q:   [Guide], just as c (the speed of light) is considered absolute in our
4-dimensional universe, is there an absolute Good?
A:   [YES] I AM HAPPY TO SAY THERE IS
JEWEL SERVES IT

26.   Q:   Can this [Platonic] Form be quantified in a value analogous to
measuring c?
A:   FORM HAS NO FORM IN YOUR SENSE

Long before our Guide confirmed both the existence of the Good and that it is, indeed, our raison d’être and Holy Grail, I already called it “the Good,” as did Scribe back when we first met in college and often discussed Plato. (Even then Scribe knew all the dialogues intimately.) For me the Good was the ideal I needed to be true; all my metaphysics pointed to it, but, well, how can we know for sure? That is, I tried to design my life from early on to aim myself toward the Good. I believed in it, and I bet my life on it—foregoing the normal careers and incomes commensurate with my education, for example—often laughing at my Pascalian wager in self-pity and mockery, though I really had no alternative. Can there be another telos? Many words name the same ideal.
The Good, like the eternal Tao, cannot be told. There is no ob Good. Nevertheless, like Lao-tzu at his city gates for the last time, I, too, shall relate what I am able. Lots of people believe in God or gods, and nearly all who do would insist their gods are “good”; yet, for reasons I’m still not clear on, I remain uneasy with most people’s faiths. Do I find them shallow and incoherent? Anthropomorphized? Self-centered, idolatrous, and tribal as a rule? As a rule, yes; but I sense a deeper qualm. I am not fearful of people per se, not their wrath; I fear misinterpretation, casual smug “knowledge” leading to sleep. I aim to unbalance human complacency.
So what bothers me about the word God? Nothing technically. I know with certainty that countless human souls have found themselves through religion, both in its beliefs and practices. I know also of a fellow karass-member, our “fourth living member” as described elsewhere in this book—though now deceased—who was a model soul in life, an amazing man, but remained a serious atheist unaware of the Jewel (not knowing in time of Scribe or me). The point is, there are many paths to eternity, and each must find their own. For it’s not about “the path” per se, but rather how one follows it—with what degree of presence and devotion. Souls, regardless of path, take their path seriously, making consistent efforts to improve themselves and their surroundings. They take charge of their lives.
So while “God” for serious souls everywhere means much the same thing as the Good (which is just a word), most people tend to use “God” in a broader sense, to mean almost anything outside the self without clear cause or attribution, any mystery beyond one’s ken, control, or concern. “God,” then, becomes an excuse for incapacity, for ignorance and stupidity, a disavowal of responsibility: Sorry! I can’t do anything; I’m a victim of God (or the government or climate change or social media). Or perceived a slightly different way: God is Big & Smart, indeed so much bigger & smarter than me that I fall fetal before Him and put my brain in a box. Tell me what to do and think. As Socrates rightly points out, gods don’t need our obedience; and they surely don’t need our worship: Gods need nothing from us.
While God is Big, the Good sends us seeking something specific, probably difficult, a flickering light in darkness, distant. It is not human, not comprehensible; it sports no beard. God breathes and radiates love; we drop to our knees. The Good surely also is love, but the Good requires us to stand up and find out for ourselves what it means to be good. The Good abhors passivity and obedience, which are sleep, and calls us to motion, to step forward. Souls move. How should a good man navigate a complicated fucked-up world? How best might I serve? Why is it so hard for me to be good, while it’s completely unthinkable to be anything else?

So now let me add another fact I take as axiomatic, though I have explicit confirmation and provide so here, from Session 22 in 1994, which follows this lesson in its entirety:

11.    Q:    When viewed as a unity, is the Good ever a singularity? [i.e., a
black hole]
12.   A (Vilansit):   IDENTITY INCREASES AS WE APPROACH
— AN OLD RULE

This “old rule,” one of many cataloged over the years, reminds us (profoundly) that in the Good we become ourselves. Consider what this implies fully: Somehow we become “more” who we are than we are right now (or once were as newborns, for that matter, before being “contaminated” by culture). It’s no surprise, of course, that we can’t yet understand what “more” could mean in this sense (not quantity), though it’s fair to assert we don’t “merge our mind” with the Good, to drown like Ophelia in its fluid embrace; neither do we “return to innocence” or some native state of imbecility: In the Good we are evermore who we choose to become, sharper and more certain as we follow, able to take on bigger dreams and challenges, more responsibility, learning and transforming ourselves into our better-selves…. In fact, from a slightly different vantage one finds that the Good, indeed, names the driving theme of our personal narrative, the very thread we trace.
The imbedded corollary or flip-side to “identity increases as we approach” concerns the nature of identity itself. Here I again quote Vilansit, this time from Session 49 three years later:

15.   Q:   How does one know how much to care?
A (Vilansit):   I THINK A GOOD RULE IS THAT ONE CARES

ENOUGH WHEN ONE SEES [THE] OTHER AS A

PERFECTLY DISTINCT AND IRREPLACEABLE

INDIVIDUAL

As an albion, I am fascinated by Vilansit’s response for all sorts of reasons that probably don’t matter to most people. My first thoughts actually are historical: No one today regards individuality as strange, though this is very much a modern vision, assumed by the secular scientific paradigm and more central to it than math. That is, unlike our ancestors modern thinkers tend to see themselves as the independent protagonists of their own narrative—which, say the experts, is perhaps best reflected in the modern novel and most movies. In contrast, none of Pharaoh’s servants, for example, who were sacrificed to join him in the afterlife, could begin to think of themselves like this—as independent free-willing actors. So, too, was a woman bound to her husband; so, too, was Socrates to Athens. Indeed, the “rise of individuality” as the defining POV of our time I regard as one big measure of past & future history, a sure sign of the collective soul-solution reaching saturation, time ripening. I leave the details for Volume Two.
My next thoughts, then, slightly in the same vein, turn utopian: Take my assertion here—that a single infinite soul has greater value to the Good than any finite creation—a life, a world, any universe—and now make that idea a global reality. That is, imagine a future world where everyone cares and understands that the value of each soul is literally infinite: It’s a beautiful presumption, of course. But how-on-Earth would human society transform itself to meet this vision? I ask not after the means or technologies which must arise for ecological survival, nor do I seek political and/or economic models per se. I’m trying to imagine a society that values children and their potential above all else, even the world itself. I can only see so far.
But the real questions that arise for me concerning individuality all stem from free will, that which seems the essence of my identity. If “identity increases as we approach,” and our identity derives from our “choice moments in time,” then our path to the Good is measured by our choosing “better” or “more wisely”—where wisdom by definition is directed toward the Good. A fool, then, may feel he has a million options before him and the freedom to choose any, whereas a wise woman will find folly in most options and reject most immediately. In fact, the wiser a person gets, the faster they grasp their situation and choose the single, best option (or path) in any given moment. Ergo, buddhas and saints who have knowledge of the best path always choose to follow it, behaving exactly as if they had no free will. Any other choice, they know, would simply prove worse. Did Jesus have free will when He chose to be crucified? “Do [children] do wrong for the sake of their father?” (Josef)

One key threshold of cognition is the ability to ask questions—not merely to phrase a structured verbal query, but to conceive of an open thought, a “blank space” waiting for a value. People without language (neglected deaf children, for instance) know only what they have personally experienced. Lacking any verbal internal dialogue they can’t consider what they can’t compare personally side-by-side. Therefore, they cannot form or make sense of open questions—namely, absence. Which means further they cannot conceive of the empty future as a space to be filled and can’t place themselves within that future space. What space in my mind need I make open for the Good?
I close this lesson with a fun riddle I hope never to solve.

SESSION 7: 1ST NIGHT, 3/23/91

31.   Q:   Explain free will.
A ([Guide]):   YOU DONT BEGIN TO L…
32.   LOSE IT
BEFORE IT LOSES YOU…

While Scribe and I and our teachers always focused on “business”—which meant serious, necessary, sometimes even “dark” lessons—I found nearly every moment doing ouija incredibly fun, a word that doesn’t normally drive my life, reserved more for soccer and outdoor activity. Indeed, few things I’ve done in my life have proved as much pure fun as sitting with Scribe and learning from our amazing teachers. Which tells me a lot, I think, about how we should approach the Good: It should be fun.
And yes, thank you, everyone. I know quite well how lucky I am.

§ Hail aliah

1/1/20

7. Of Riverness

I need to express something I take for granted, but which goes largely unreported outside of psychedelics and shamanism, both what Infinity feels like and what that fact implies. Now I’ve done my share of drugs, mostly long ago, but Infinity I’ve known since childhood. Infinity is chaos.

My first awareness of Infinity arrives as metaphor: a river of rushing consciousness—voices, ideas, music—all part of a roiling sentient liquid flowing downhill fast; I am fluid within it. I am overwhelmed and struggle to be me among so many ideas and identities, to raise my mind above the din. But I find no thought-rock, no island to cling to in the torrent, no nouns; I don’t know my name. If I casually (unselfconsciously) wonder or curiously ask after something, I am instantly rewarded with answers, angels, anybody. But when I become self-aware and realize my state—and know I should ask after valuable knowledge, eternal truths for humanity!—I have no idea what to ask. I’m lost in wonder, a zillion radio stations. Or sometimes I do get a profound answer—outta nowhere from creation itself—which I treasure desperately, like some deep-sea life form bottled in short-term memory, trying to speak the word to my mind. As Douglas Adams once divined in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “42” could indeed prove to be the answer to “life, the universe, and everything." But when I exit this river, I have no idea what “42” means. I come away with nothing palpable at all, except the certainty of riverness itself, that Infinity exists. —Which is Big, by the way, as that knowledge shaped my whole life: The medium is the message.
So content aside, Infinity is full of content. That is, I have never seriously contemplated the kind of existential death that atheists face. For me existential death is not nothingness; it means dissolving among Infinity, never to reintegrate. It means, in fact, to abandon forever this existential project I call my soul.
—Listen: I know whence I come; I was just rushing there a second ago before time. This project of my soul-creation can always deconstruct; it’s nothing to return to fluid, my void and default state. Existence, therefore, is my dire choice. I choose to defy and postpone this fate—Infinity = chaos—to hold my mind together by sheer will and confirm my task—at least for now, if not all time. Let Infinity wait. I know where I’ve been, so I aim myself forward, because I’m not going back, not yet.
Forward in Infinity? Toward what then, and does that give direction? How far? Measured how? Why? (Why build fucking Pyramids in the Sahara?!) I feel the river pulling me down, all around me drawn by gravity: What accounts for gravity in Infinity?

Now I come to the heart of the lesson, and I do so only after a comic interlude to let my antithesis sink in and fester: Surely, we object, existence is not like that, like chaos! But if there is no objective reality—that is, if we suppose for argument that we live among a zillion different unreal dreams, including all the ones an idiot god might generate—what’s the point of existence?
Science, let’s be clear, believes in a “real” universe and calls existence “an accident”; thus there is no point to existence, no meaning or purpose at all. Life evolved through natural selection or “survival of the fittest” = luckiest. So perhaps it’s lucky, despite this brutal fact, that good scientists still tend to be good (moral) people for many good (valid) reasons—practical like Aristotle, believing in common sense statistics, not absolutes and eternal forms. Why shouldn’t you kill your neighbor and steal his wife? Not because it’s wrong, of course—because there is no right or wrong. There’s just “good policy,” which for Aristotle and every other Greek meant how you act among your polis and tribe. A polis can’t endure such bad behavior, so that’s why. We constrain ourselves for a common good, because we care about people in our existence—namely, we’re aware of others and value our relations.
But we are not beholden to them, at least not for Science: In fact, one might ask today, without a polis is there still reason for loyalty, for self-sacrifice, even for decent behavior? Fair laws that derive from historical accident only can be changed. Genocides can be justified. A good scientist probably sees the whole world as a single integrated community, the polis of life, and is willing to devote their life to its health. But most in the world today don’t know the science and don’t see connections. They owe the polis nothing, since it, like all the history they missed, is myth. The ideal is gone; only the tribalism remains….
Of course, it’s not enough for me here merely to punch holes in the current paradigm—while desperately trying to shout alarm. Nor do I mean to sound strictly negative: I see my grown daughters and their smart friends and am proud of the next generation; I see stars. But Gaia’s out of time. So to be clear, the updated paradigm I present here must be more than just plausible or ideal or useful, more than academic exercise. It must be undeniably necessary and cannot be otherwise. That’s what a paradigm is and does. Once imagined it can’t be undone: Like climate change, ice-nine cometh.
Spoiler alert: You know already I follow the Good, that I think it’s the only answer, my absolute telos. But it’s much harder to prove this. Above I offer my Donald Trump spoof to illustrate some of the challenges of being eternal. Just recall, I insist I myself am eternal, as are countless other souls throughout our world. In eternity we’re all wise & foolish virgins; no one is a master—except perhaps of themself.

So I know then—because I’m honest and observant—that there is much to master in myself. I’m so far from perfect: I want to correct errors, for example, especially my errors of judgment. I want to be smarter and more efficient, more loving. Of course, it makes sense that I work to enrich myself, both to expand my thinking but also to purge myself of operational bugs. I should also purge myself of distractions, vices, addictions, cricket repetitions….
What I find, of course, is that in streamlining my own best practices I am moving in a clear direction, a path of self-improvement—or so it seems from my eternal reflection. But I also know my thinking is circular. “Improvement” is a vague value-ladened ideal Infinity doesn’t respect (and science knows nothing of love). There are surely many other ideas and definitions of “improved,” and the more I organize my mind around language and cognition, the more isolated and self-confirming I become. Am I just self-winding prophecy?

Let us now formally reject the empty premise that there is no point to existence. For without any “higher” purpose (outside), all value devolves to the self by default. That you care about others (from this solipsistic narrative) matters only to the degree that they stroke your ego. Aside from being vile, this is not a viable existence for the following critical reason: The ego is unstable; it changes with every stroke. On Monday my favorite food was ice cream; but by Friday it’s Brussel sprouts—who knows? Not the ego, who feeds where it goes—which over eternal “time” sends the self in certain preferred directions initially, but then, after boredom sets in, shifts the focus elsewhere, wherever attention drifts, random aimless plankton never to return. That is, on Monday you were yourself; but by Friday you’re not just somebody else—you’re anybody. Whoever you were no longer persists. A millennium later, you’ve transformed so many times all your names are used passwords. “Your mind” rushes onward in Infinity, water in invisible water.
Or consider a scene at St. Peter’s Gate. First, forget about Purgatory: Heaven awaits you directly. But before you can cross, St. Pete’s got to clean you up a bit from your soiled state, both in mind & ethereal body: Poof! You get back your young legs and feel great; in fact, if you were morbidly obese your whole life, you get to lose all that weight and diabetes, along with your baldness and the gap in your teeth. You look better than you. Then Pete performs the same magic trick on your sickly soul. That is, all those sin-spots and ink-dark thoughts, all your petty quirks and cavities—poof! Thank God you’re somebody else now, transformed like an insect, like a butterfly—so much better than human! In fact, everybody is so much better they immediately shed their stupid lifetimes’ memory-scars like crumpled eggshell chrysalises. Then, upon attaining their perfected state, each newborn monarch marches through the sacred gate forever young & perfect, with nothing further to strive for and nowhere to look but down.

In quick succession I provide two very different illustrations of the same ontological event, proving (to me) that ego—ergo “self-improvement” however self-defined—cannot be sufficient grounds for existing, for defying Infinity and choosing myself alive. On the simplest level “survival of the ego” is not sustainable because soul changes. My illustrations pose contrasting time frames—one over eons, the other instantaneous—and both spell the annihilation of the self. This gives us a vital clue to the nature of being: In eternity time is a POV, and there is no difference between a zillion compiled incremental changes and one Big change. Both take one away from oneself. And yet change is necessary; “perfection” in this image is stagnation is death.
So, dear Reader, here’s some homework god-worthy of eternal thought: How do we grow and change in eternity yet still remain ourselves? Be sure to consider this question on two levels—abstractly as metaphysics, but very much personally/practically as well. That is, look at your own life: Is this the life I wish to be stuck with eternally? You can spin again anytime you like—but if you do, you won’t be you.

Jerusalem - Frontispiece

William Blake

albionspeak: a draught of language

Lesson 2: Existence (Part 1)

1. Childhood’s End

I don’t say the Pyramids are overrated, although I do ask why. Why were they built? What kind of mind would find it necessary to create them? I’ve seen them myself and have even journeyed with my family to the center of the third largest, the Red Pyramid at Dahshur, which preceded those at Giza by a generation. (The burial chamber and sarcophagus stink sharply of urine dating back to Napoleon’s lost army, as do all in Egypt.) I like the Pyramids, and not just because they’re “mysterious desert monuments to death,” the tallest human structures for 3800 years. Were they built today, in Vegas or Doha or Abu Dhabi, I’d be disgusted by the waste of resources. But no one today judges the billions of man-hours toiled then to raise granite & limestone pentahedrons of no apparent function. No longer do we presuppose them to be crafted by slave labor, which could never have managed the scale. No, these man-hours were willingly devoted, during the downtime of the Nile floods, when farming was put on hold for months. It must be the case then, we casually conclude—what with all that extended Bronze Age leisure time—that people just got bored and needed a community project to fill their days, something bigger than a swimming pool.…
So we explain the Pyramids by calling them “tombs,” a word that doesn’t normally require billions of man-hours, and we conjure up an image of Egyptian “religion,” citing the Book of the Dead and the myths of its Ennead—the high pantheon we fashion after the Greco-Roman traditions. But this is a flawed image of what ancients really believed, including the Greeks and Romans. Egyptians, like people everywhere before history, were ancestor-worshippers foremost, which defined their identity & world paradigm. More important than any national gods who propped up the cosmos were one’s personal family deities, your daily dead ancestors, whose souls remained forever with their bones in the family tomb—your own future home—on the same family farm where you were born and where, centuries before, the clan’s founder first built his altar. In practice then, in antiquity “all religion was local,” varying enormously from family to family. The famous Nile gods were the family gods of Egypt’s first family, Pharaoh in name—which was fine & divine for pharaonic business. But for grain-to-grow and water-to-drink and peace-among-one’s-kin, one prayed daily & often to one’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on down the names, which were memorized and sung because writing didn’t exist. These were the gods who gave you life, governed your daily affairs from birth, and shared your every secret—the ones to whom you owed everything. To recite the names at the daily feast gave breath to those loved in death, maintaining the critical, umbilical link to the underworld. It was also vital for memory to repeat the names each day, to train all in the clan to speak them alive, lest the link be lost. You, too, will soon be a named ghost who needs breath and food from the hearth.
Consider now briefly the weight of such belief, its burdens by implication, how, for example, billions of animals thus were ritually slaughtered, with piled portions set ablaze to feed the dead, who sat hungry at the table though invisible, especially honored at festivals or in times of need. People gladly went hungry so dear-dead Granddad might feed greedily in flame and smoke. Better a few slaves or baby girls starve in life, which is short, than lose forever faith with the father-gods, who make famines and floods their routine sport.

I don’t say the Pyramids are overrated—I just don’t understand them. But Karnak, about ten hours’ train ride south upriver, stands as the world’s greatest archeological treasure by far. Nothing else compares in terms of age, longevity, breathtaking scale, and wealth of written history. Karnak marks the navel of all ancient knowledge, maintained by millions of priests and expanded by pharaohs continually for many centuries. I know of no better image of Western Civilization than Karnak.
—Which is more ironic than iconic, since it’s an African ruin, and I’m a suburban American drowning in crap. Historians trace us to Karnak, but not the Great Pyramids, as history traces and defines itself through written words & records, and Khufu’s stones are mute. The priests of Karnak themselves, however, despite their vast libraries still had no concept of history, which marks forward progress over time. Their ancient paradigm held the world to be eternal, going nowhere then returning. That is, in antiquity time was a circle, while we see a line.
Every Egyptian with a brain & memory saw it plainly; high priests saw it best: Nothing in the world ever changed, not really. Even the Great Cow’s milk-spatters circling the night sky all returned eventually to the same place. Pharaohs came and went—they were always building something. Some were cruel; others just; so, too, could the Nile bring both gifts and wrath. But anyone watching the centuries carefully—a priest tracking papyrus scrolls or a storyteller of a thousand songs—could see the cycles repeated for what they were: ma’at, the cosmic scales balancing all aspects of eternity, scales interlocking at every fractal scale, revealed on Earth as free play within lifetime role-plays, as farmer, as pharaoh, as wife, as slave. If a Nile Rip Van Winkle fell asleep in a delta wheat field and woke up 500 years removed from his life, his field would probably look and smell the same, as would the farmer’s wife, and he wouldn’t know whether he’d moved forward or backward in time.
Obviously we moderns can’t think that way, just as we can’t (seriously) see the sky as a cow. Today’s open field is tomorrow’s landfill. The future is spun & spit out in tech upgrades and fake-news cycles. The past now is so instantly past that it loses all precedent; thus, we can’t see ahead even 50 years, much less 500. This is not just perception; science has hold of the facts, and the facts themselves are changing, accelerating like the Big Bang. Karnak can never come back. And thanks to continued advances, our “enlightened” scientific paradigm has (finally) spread its alphabet soup to the very corners of the planet, reaching everyone like-it-or-not like a virus, burning down rainforests and stamping out the last vestiges of indigenous superstition everywhere.
Isn’t it great, we let the president tell us, to live in such civilized times!

This is the hardest lesson. This is where students get stuck right at the outset, because I aim to dislodge your current belief system, the modern scientific paradigm, which has guided you for most of your life. Why should you listen? What good can come from abandoning these world-held views, especially when the paradigm has produced so much—indeed, the modern world itself?
To persuade you, I could lapse into Barack Obama’s famous mistake on health care: He promised, “If you like the health plan you’ve already got, you won’t have to give it up." Recall, technically Obama may not have lied: He just didn’t account for all the sham health policies that people [thought they] liked—people who paid low premiums, but whose insurance didn’t cover basic needs, like catastrophic care. Fools “liked” these policies because they got lucky and never desperately needed them.
So perhaps you like your paradigm? It “makes sense”—that is, dollars & cents, and money makes the world go ‘round. And unless you’re a quantum physicist trying to explain all the big & little holes in reality, why [mess] things up? “Basic email works fine by me, thank you.”
No, I won’t take your paradigm from you, just as I won’t try to take your guns. You have the free-will right, both to your ignorance, as well as to defend yourself from my weird insights. Of course, it depends on which “affordable” paradigm you’ve chosen: If you’re a Science believer, who “follows the science” and finds our particular secular planet imperiled, we’re on the same page and team, despite my different vision. If, on the other hand, your world view makes no attempt to alter our suicide-in-progress and through willful neglect promotes further damage to our living/dying planet Gaia—all because God, in a Book, created the world 6000 years ago and commanded you forth to multiply indiscriminately and exponentially… well, I’m not sure how we’re gonna resolve this “difference of opinion”…

This is also the hardest lesson because the content is often counterintuitive and entirely abstract. Abstraction, in fact, beyond any specific content provides a master key to the doors of eternity, but it also raises new challenges simply as process. The first challenge concerns relevance. I recall my decades as a math teacher: How many times did I hear my students gripe about numbers and algorithms, “When are we ever going to use this [shit] in life?” And generally I replied in kind—a rhetorical quip to the cliche complaint, but a serious thoughtful answer to those who truly asked. I, too, ask, How can an abstract vision of existence save our real planet from physical harm? And to this question I must ask additionally for your patience: Let me show you over the course of this book just how our beliefs affect our actions and how different beliefs lead to different results. Just remember, the current paradigm spells doom. Eventually all must jump this ship.

The second challenge regarding abstraction is awkward, because it’s physiological and has profound historical ramifications, past and future: You, dear Reader, who come to read these words can probably manage abstract thinking to a high degree (though I shall push you). But most Homo sapiens, like our President-in-Tweet, don’t actually write and barely read for information or pleasure. (Facebook doesn’t count.) Most, therefore, lack the capacity—at this point in their brains—to reorganize and redirect their thinking, to detach from one paradigm and leap to the next, which requires significant play and practice early in life. That is, my hard lesson here may well be inaccessible to those who missed out on cognitive nurturing when they were young, pre-school—that critical age when our critical-thinking wires link up and first fire. No surprise, this cognitive deficiency results generally from impaired parents who themselves missed out as children. It takes a thinker to make a thinker. For those who missed and for the countless generations before them, it’s too late to grow these neurons.
So I address their children:

8. Caring

You are an idea, the idea of you. Some people have good ideas; most just talk without thinking. Examine your mind. My ouija experiences prove some people survive death, the loss of the body. And no one today thinks the spirit stays tied to its bones. So once you start to see yourself as an idea that can survive death, then you might also realize (in glimpses beyond deduction) that any idea which survives must already be present in you, strictly in your mind, your idea, so you don’t have to wait to die to be eternal. Most important, you can start in life right now to choose intentionally.
I feel a surge of urgency. I, too, wish desperately to start. I’ve been following this star my whole life, but every day I struggle with the first step.
Here’s what eternity is not: 1) a perfect “objective” record of our lives, archived in the great astral internet. Such an exact record (by definition) could never deviate or change; therefore, it’s dead, ever less relevant. 2) a perfect library of our “subjective” memories, eidetically returned to us in living color, re-experienced exactly—which is finite and dead as well, but also a lot of shit you don’t want to remember. How is that Heaven?
So if we keep neither our bodies nor our exact memories, how are we still ourselves after we die? What is it in us that persists, what core or center? For surely this center identifies and defines us, remaining constant while peripheral attachments slough away. And surely this surviving center forms the nucleus that remains me throughout eternity, despite my constant “self-improvement” and changing. Paradoxically, my image here depicts a single, personal point focused deep within me, a soul, but which names, in fact, an infinite place, my personal port and escape wormhole to anywhere.

Here’s a POV we often neglect, the overview of a life as seen from eternity (which, I fancy, is more how our Guide regards Scribe and me): As I am a middle-aged man, so am I in eternity (outside time) also still a boy, necessary to the man’s arrival. Recall Wordsworth: “The child is the father of the man." Perhaps the man is wiser, or the child is more curious and playful, or perhaps my even-older self attains nirvana. But even if he does, one child inside me will still cry at night (we’ll say), while another man will always fear he’s a failure, even as all along the line we—namely, me and all my many boys & men over my entire event-filled life—enter eternity as one, …having been there all along. That is, the child is not just the “rough draft” of the man, to be trashed upon completion; the child and man are inseparable, all of us.
And soon one locates many children and elders lurking within: How many? How do these different me’s divvy up my existence? What generates and measures out each self, then snips each one off cleanly like a sphincter to set him apart, giving each his discrete and unique voice? (I hear a lot of whining down there!)
The inescapable: When viewed from outside, life—i.e., all my boys and men from birth-to-grave—is not a static set of “dead” experiences or established facts. There is no ob. Every me along the way remains individually alive in “his” moment exercising his free will. And here we come to glimpse existence in dizzying essence: We find that each “me” (or figure) is defined by and inseparable from his place—which includes the time, location, and full context of the moment. Each figure along my line is thus framed by his place, and the moment itself boils down to an existential choice. Every self originates in a choice, an act of will, a Little Bang, and vice-versa. If no choice is made—which is an eternal, moral event, not like choosing menu options—then, in fact, no figure or place persists. If nothing happened, then nobody was. (You’ll need time to process this.)

Metaphysics, the game I play obsessively, will always think a bridge too far or kick an idea out-of-bounds. That’s part of the game and one of its primary challenges, setting the boundaries. One method I employ for the proper framing of certain infinite ideas or arguments I call “bracketing,” a military term for how artillery precisely targets people. If you’re a gunner, don’t try early for the perfect kill-shot; rather, shoot long first, then short. Once you’ve bracketed your target’s range, you can carve up the middle with simple math. We can’t grasp infinity, so we have to bite off discrete chunks, often as chunks of me.
The image I present above, then, the overview of a human life as seen from outside—seething with its self-absorbed boys in their bubbles of chosen time—is not really helpful to me in mine. It’s an overshoot, deliberately so. It’s not an image I can work with, even though it’s a vital and valid window on my human soul. It’s so busy I can’t do the math. That is, while peering through my inner telescope, I overshot my focus and curricular relevance, so now I dial back to refocus, knowing the path. The blurriness itself is my guardrail, which I use as a handrail when I’m driving blind. (Note: While mixing metaphors normally makes bad writing, in metaphysics such abstraction is necessary art & craft, as abstraction means releasing metaphorical tethers from one form or model and reattaching them elsewhere in new application.)
So what am I dialing back to? One me only? That would be a breath of relief, I think, but why? Of course, I should mention one overlooked component crucial to artillery bracketing: getting good feedback from a forward-posted spotter, someone who radios back where each shell has struck. That is, blurriness is feedback, but only if your eyes are open and functioning properly. Gunners often shell their friendly spotters.

The point is: It’s not about me, regardless how many. A soul, whose very existence is comprised of choices, cannot be their own creator of value. Value must come from outside of me, a source of value that remains constant in eternity: A beacon is direction is a purpose is identity.
Here’s a paradoxical corollary then: If we are not the creators of value, then how do we know to choose the Good (or any telos, if others exist)? Inescapably, the Good must choose us—or so it would seem, the outside coming in—alien by necessity, yet somehow utterly familiar and aligned with our best intent. “Aid from above,” we would learn, could mean virtually anything, but most commonly, in fact, comes from our own eternal selves in bubbles further down the line, choosing their framed moment in existence to connect to those (like us) still struggling behind. Yes, of course, outside time we are our teachers’ teachers, returning gifts of love and balancing choice symmetries. But our first duty is to ourselves. And here especially, in the intimacy between my overseer Albion and me, free will must be respected.
Before he saw the Jewel directly in life, Anand first glimpsed it in the Ganges “in a face [he] sometimes wore." So why am I surprised when I’m so called? Who’s that speaking with my voice? Can I trust myself?

In this way choosing the Good is like falling in love: When you’re young, you can believe in love, hope absolutely that it exists for you and awaits you in the future—in the form of a spouse and family, a career calling, an ideal heeded—but you can’t push it. You can’t decide to love a certain girl, for instance, just because she might check all the right boxes. Love is not a conscious choice; it’s an outside slap-in-the-face surprise, confused by many people and subject to endless misinterpretation. You have to ache irrationally, even to the point of physical pain, proving how easily reason and science can be defeated. Love is Big.
And for Love to come in time, there must be time before it comes, before the bang, to prepare for its arrival. We must be ready, actively waiting, building intent without inventing, opening a void to be filled from without. We dare not sleepwalk through our given moment, when Love arrives, lest we miss it. Neither can we leap too early, mistaken and thus distracted, losing track of our ache, thinking and acting hastily, rather than feeling and waiting in silence. This form of absence, this empty ache before love, we call caring. As Jane, my closest teacher and future charge, reminded us the first time, “caring is the future of memory,” “memory as seen in reverse.”

4. No Ob or Sub

When Scribe and I first sat down to ouija and succeeded, I was, of course, blown away—even though I stood (remarkably) confirmed in most of my original beliefs. I understood how lucky, how blessed we were—so lucky, in fact, I did not expect to repeat these miracles eighteen months later, nor then again the year after that. I knew the math, and I’ve long felt ambivalent about the many miracles in my life: I am so deeply grateful for each divine gift—I feel then reluctant to presume further gifts should follow. Haven’t I exceeded my share? How dare I plead for more! I must be a basket-case to need such help and prodding.

In those early years then (1989-93), ouija itself was the lead news, more than any specific content it spelled out. I felt the full weight of it: Ouija is fact. Or as I often quoted Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message." Imagine a man from the middle ages, he illustrated, who magically is transported across the centuries to a modern 1960s living-room where people are watching television. After the initial transport-shock wears off, this man out-of-water surely then would marvel at the altar “light-box” displaying living people and writing and metals—it talks as well. The man might walk up to the box or touch it for reaction, as one might poke a sleeping animal. What he would not do, however, is watch the program that’s on. That is, the projected content, even if rich in information, is not remotely relevant to the moment. The box, or medium, defines the experience.
But Session 10 changed all that. In this one session we got several responses that would profoundly alter my [understanding of] existence, both in the moment and over decades of revisitings and investigations. I chose Session 10 to follow Lesson 1 in this curriculum—the first ouija session presented here despite its fractured language—because it helped me then establish as fact some of the basic parameters of existence, human or otherwise. At the time, Scribe and I were excited to learn of our karass; and, no surprise, we focused on that news because we “grasped” the idea of karasses rather easily. We could wonder, for instance, about our futures among our karass, start playing with connections and scenarios (and worrying). Even if we couldn’t fathom the eternal structure or operations of a karass network, we still understood love and belonging as concepts from our lives. Family to me struck an immediate chord, a concrete analog, as I am first in life a family man.
Other concepts, though, especially those concerning ontology, have no easy anchorage. A mirror, we know, offers a reflection of a physical body in time and space. What mirror then can reveal our eternal natures? I often picture myself in eternity, somehow outside our spacetime universe, which has been reduced to a single tangible bubble (or aleph). Sitting on that bubble, looking in, I watch my life of 80+ years reel out like a TV show—a blip in eternity. “Is that it, then?” I ask, searching for reverse on my TV remote. “Is existence just ‘[life] happening,’ wheels set in motion…?” Surely I am more than the bag of my experiences. I am the mind who uses all this baggage to create myself. My gathered experiences, then, (mixing metaphors) make up “the hand I’ve been dealt” (or dealt myself), which, like playing cards, involve both given and hidden elements combined and revealed over time. Is existence a game, then? Or is it more like art, where quantum bubbles of living time comprise my artist’s palette, the chosen mix of colours I paint from? And if so, what existence should I paint?
I am also, at the very least, the observer watching—eternal, free-willed and free-wheeling—not chained to any bubble. That is, while eternity can be experienced, it cannot be consciously constructed or constricted in time. Language, too, fails us here: verb tenses, subjects and objects, the one-way flow of each sentence. Time is an arrow; eternity lies outside.

Here’s the response that sent my head spinning for years, as it still spins today, leading us inexorably past science, but toward what then?

13.   Q:    When we die, will we have a more objective understanding of our
lives?
A:    OUTSIDE OF LIFE IS [NO] OB OR SUB

At first glance, wrapped in our ouija bubble, Scribe and I didn’t struggle with these words. “Life is illusion” is a theme dominating most religions and philosophies, varying only by degree or emphasis. That is, it’s required of modern thinkers to question their own thoughts, necessary to good decision-making and mental health. We knew we knew nothing, but no doubt we were arrogant to think so. Scribe and I fully regarded, for example, that our perception of our world has little to do with “reality”: We gather sensory information via various neurochemical stimuli to construct a subjective experience. On top of the inaccuracies and gaps in our senses, we process our filtered data through a series of cognitive centrifuges—crafted from physics, configured by genetics, compounded in language and culture—where each repackaging of the data for enriched cognition removes us yet another step from the raw input. It’s a wonder we make sense of the world at all. Stranger still, we share what we think and sense with other beings—another fact, in fact, which is utterly miraculous.
Modern thinkers, then—like Descartes, like us—assume our very thoughts and facts are “false” or “wrong”—an assumption which allowed us in the ouija moment to continue our discussion, briefly sidestepping the bottomless rabbit-hole. But our thinking was flawed, forestalling the deeper investigation: “No ob or sub” does not imply our world is illusory. If there is no “true” reality, then neither can any reality be deemed “false” or “further from the mark." Truth, our compass needle, wasn’t broken; there’s just no north off planet Earth. Or, as our guide told us later in Session 10, baffling me for decades:

20.   Q:   In what way is geography a myth?
A:   NORTH SOUTH ARE [NO]T OPPOSITE
EAST WEST ONLY FICTION

I’ll add for the record, I never doubted from this knowledge whether the Good itself was real; it is. It’s just not objectively real, neither physically nor in any articulated form. And yet one finds Good happening everywhere around the world, in pure acts of charity & clarity & grace & sacrifice—in love, of course, and it’s real. Indeed these moments are the most real of our lives.

14 billion years ago (i.e., before the Big Bang) “2 + 2 = 4” was no less true than it is today. But no one was there to think it then; no one saw it happen.

§ Albion offers his two cents:

A world in a dream, we must assume, is incomplete. You see kitchen cabinets, let’s say, but as they are closed, you don’t assume that dream cups occupy the interior. In fact, you must assume the opposite. For otherwise, if you’re standing in your dream childhood home in California, let’s say, then a dream Florida would also have to exist 3000 dream miles away. Nevertheless, I also contend that if, in a dream kitchen, you choose to open the cabinet door, you will likely find something within, probably cups. What is harder to conceive, though perhaps not impossible, is opening a kitchen cabinet in a dream world to find nothing. What does nothing look like? Like nothing I’ve experienced.

5. God Is Persons

An aside: To help my reader understand, I must comment here on how I personally viewed and embraced the words of my teachers, invisible at my dinner table: I accepted their words and ideas at face value, but not blindly. I believe my masters and trust them—they are in a position to know. However, I still question everything they say, just as I question myself. And I do the metaphysics, in obsessive systematic fashion, living much of my life among thought experiments with infinity. I take each new big fact or axiom and reconcile it ruthlessly through its derivations and contradictions, spinning out contorted histories to mathematical exhaustion. I am an albion—that’s what I do.
As a result though, there are many other valuable lessons I have put off, the ones I am unable to accept personally, particularly those relating to sorcery, dreaming, and direct seeing. That is, I accept that such activities exist in the world among a few special people, including my friends. I even accept the concept that I might myself become such a being; my teachers encourage me directly. But I fear, and I resist from the core as though my very identity were at stake. I can work out the Big Picture, but I can’t place myself within it. Which demonstrates that I still can't believe much that my teachers say. And I’m getting old.…
Writing this very page then helps me organize my metaphysics, honing my thoughts and identity as I understand more why existence needs to be a certain way. But in writing I’m also utterly trapped in cognitive language, avoiding the silent greater part of my being. In the language of my teachers: I’m feeding the cricket, while my serpent remains asleep.

Let’s back up briefly almost to the beginning. Before I introduce more fully my own paradigm, I want to stretch the modern one thinner a bit, starting in philosophy and physics with some facts-of-life direct from our Guide. To be fair, these profound ideas do not approach “no ob or sub” in shattering implication—we weren’t ready for that yet. But this tidy bundle may, indeed, have been its designed precursor.

SESSION 5: 7/6/90

Always short on questions, I decided to ask [our Guide] about Kant’s four

categories of experience which cannot be learned, which come a priori: time,

space, God, and infinity. These are among our very best responses [much being

garbled in those days] and tell a great deal.

  46.   Q:    How do you perceive time?
A:   TIME 1 KNOW AS CATEGORY   NOT AS RESTRAINT

47.   Q:   How do you perceive space?
A:   YOU CANNOT ACT OUTSIDE IT
I CAN AND DO

48.   Q:   What is God?
A:   1 CAN SAY WHO NOT WHAT

49.   Q:   Who is God?
A:   PERSONS

50. Q: What can you tell us about infinity?
A: BE PATIENT AND DISCOVER UR FINITY

The date and session number show this to be one of our earliest exchanges, before we’d learned our Guide was ours. And credit my preparation—good questions matter—though, to be clear, most of our Guide’s responses came as confirmation only. I’d considered Kant’s categories carefully, of course (and Scribe, without straining a neuron, could carve up Kant with his own selective criticism): YES, I assert, ouija is a very physical process, at times quite exhausting, but NO, our “spirit guide” himself certainly wasn’t physical. Ouija thus defies both time and space. (Duh.) As to our Guide’s advice on infinity, to be sure, I found his words beautiful and somehow even tender. But at the time this question acted in my mind very much as an experimental control, necessary for ouija legitimacy in our early years. I knew no being can imagine Infinity. Not even God can do that.
But God is persons? I was surprised, even though this was what I already professed. My metaphysics implied this exactly, just as General Relativity predicted black holes though Einstein couldn't accept their existence. Did I actually believe we're gods? Literally?
I am a creator; I write down words I choose. A computer might beat me at chess, but I have free will, which, essentially, is all I am. Therefore I am a god, albeit one rather limited in time. Not all gods are equal: There are knowledges that any god can access—lottery numbers, let’s say—and there are knowledges that even gods must acquire and learn. Every god, in a sense, has a radius of thought. If any question you ask can be instantly answered, then a god is limited by their ability to ask. Some gods will stop asking questions after they’ve won the lottery. Others ask eternal questions, and they never stop asking.…
Bottom line, there is no difference in eternity between a maker of worlds and a writer of words who shapes original ideas. Creators and their creations vary enormously, but each generates from nothing a unique idea in eternity. How big is an idea then, even a single word? How big is a god? Size, power, scope, intelligence—none of these makes any difference in infinity which is absolute, just as persons regardless of wealth, character, or accomplishment all face the same death. But we generally don’t feel like gods. Being a god is much more like being a prisoner of one’s own mind. How would existence feel without guardrails, without laws?