[1] An individualized education program: In American schools this defines an elaborate curricular plan, involving many people, required by federal law for all special ed children, obligating school districts as few state laws or guidelines do (or face lawsuits).

[2] Indeed, once in his training Scribe reached lucidity with frequency, he struggled with this recurring leitmotif—announcing himself to “people” he well knew to be props & furniture. (Fact: When you stick your hand into (most) dream persons, they don’t know what to say! :) This was perhaps Scribe’s first lure, a self-made delay he learned with practice to turn aside.

albionspeak: a draught of language

Lesson 4: Existence (Part 2)

1. Nine

            albionspeak, this curriculum and cup of language, does not purport to be original—quite the opposite. The “facts” & old sayings & illustrations introduced here I report descriptively, trying not to invent or embellish in any misleading way, though we all must move among metaphors (because there is no ob). Content aside, the curricular sequence of albionspeak I unabashedly “steal,” like any good teacher, from my own teachers at the ouija board—the nine-step epic sequence created in eternity for Scribe & me in life. While working through my own steps, 22.5 years of the hardest labor—and despite the fact that I’m a trained teacher long-immersed in hyperconscious pedagogy—I never considered any meta-purpose for exactly nine steps, believing my own nine were fashioned around the unique correspondences of my life and Scribe’s. I assumed the number nine itself was arbitrary, like the number of weeks in an academic quarter, which varies with holidays and foul-weather closures. Not until I completely finished my steps did I see the wisdom of integral number itself, if not necessity—nine steps makes human sense. Then again, it should. I have amazing human teachers, among them Albion, who better than any other in his circle knows his bullshit pedagogy. I will offer details of my training in Lesson 5, but here, at the opening of the second triad of this curriculum, it’s time I provide some overview, a roadmap.
            Most simply, albionspeak is divided into three “triads,” each consisting of three lessons:

                                    1. Lessons 1-3 = Home
                                    2. Lessons 4-6 = School
                                    3. Lessons 7-9 = Vocation

            People get stuck on names. There are many other threesomes & trinities that could prove equally mindful here, and this tripartite nomenclature strikes me as dated—from the guilded Renaissance perhaps?, though no earlier. Whatever the case, Scribe & I (smugly retired) construed our own lives accordingly. But the key is not the labels; it’s the space between the triads, the two absences. These are the gaps that must be crossed—not in time, not in accomplishment, but by transforming into something else, someone else, “increasing” one’s identity.
            I find it ironic, then—or audacious or questionable—that “Home” in this curriculum, namely Lessons 1-3, must already seem such a major departure from what most of my contemporaries call “home.” Rather I should name it “outpost,” for I feel I have already taken most readers to the very edge of what they can imagine, much less accept. So speaking as a goddam professional who has written countless curricula from scratch, I question going so far so fast with my scope & sequence. I cannot expect students to grasp in a few chapters what I took decades to piece together. —And yet there’s so much more! (There always is.) But I note further that this method has always been my own modus operandi as a teacher, to front-load & overpack & overwhelm my students (a bit) when introducing new concepts, to blow their minds, then to allow time & space for review & digestion—meanwhile, taking on parallel, generally easier concepts, never idle.
           That is, speaking as a teacher, I find I’ve asked a lot of you already, dear Friend, both as a cognitive reader and as someone opening to new ideas, willing to suspend defensive disbelief, if only for a moment. In fact, if you’ve managed to read this far, I’m guessing you’re an advanced thinker, independent & articulate, who may have considered much of this subject matter before, raising lots of internal questions you thought never could be answered.…  Our teachers once told Scribe & me that we would “nourish infants.” Knowing Scribe & his poetry, seeing what I myself describe and the leaps of language & concept that I expect from you—no, dear Reader, you are no infant in my eyes.

           So let’s briefly review the basic axioms of existence introduced in the first triad and see how these can help get us started in School, which, more than any “place of learning,” represents not-Home, or rather Away, our first port of otherness. Ceaselessly & fruitlessly did I strive to arrange these “facts” into some hierarchical or logical order. I cannot help but to aspire to Euclid’s model of mathematics laid out in his Elements, where he derived all of Geometry from but five initial axioms, all quite plausible if never proved. Rather than claim an exhaustive list (it’s not), I can insist only that I find each of the ideas below to be irreducible & foundational:

                  1) Infinite abstract consciousness exists, incomprehensible & annihilating.
                               (Nothing that is finite endures.) 
                     2) Outside life there is “no ob or sub.”
                     3) Sovereign Good exists and is our telos. 
                     4) “Identity increases as we approach” the Good.
                               (Thus is free will sacred, a prime directive.)

                    *5)        —- discussed later this lesson

                      6) Each soul is eternal and arises from infinity. 
                                (No one who is finite endures.)
                      7) Souls choose one life to be their eternal origin. (Most aren’t chosen.)
                      8) Souls also choose & are chosen by their karass, which serves the  

                                 Good.
                      9) As abstract infinite creative beings, persons are god.

            Now, as a game, take these axioms as fundamental principles/rules of existence and start spinning the wheel, the way a meteorologist might run a zillion computer simulations, applying different mathematical weather models, but all starting from the same physical data. As an albion obsessed with metaphysics, I do much the same thing: Tweak any axiom above and see what happens, retaining the rest as “controls”—i.e., run the simulation…  Take No. 7, say, “each soul has a single life origin,” and propose the opposite: “Souls have no origin” and/or “souls have multiple origins.” How would that alter existence? What kinds of universes, if any, would that produce? What further theorems or laws could thence be derived, and would these derivations mesh or would they contradict? That is, if my ground rules truly are necessary to existence, then negating any one of them negates existence itself. (I swear I do this in my sleep.)
            Note, these axioms shown above I do sort into two rough classes, which is reflected in the albionspeak curriculum, separating Lessons 2 & 4 from Lessons 5 & 7. The first four axioms apply, I believe, to existence in any form or universe. They define our Guide’s existence just as they govern Scribe’s & mine. But the second class are more specific, concerning one species in the multiverse in particular, human souls only. That is, I separate my axioms by place and figure, and it takes two full lessons to introduce each. (Axiom No. 5 is placed where it is largely because it rather bridges these two classes.)
            So why nine lessons? (Don’t say it’s “mystical.”) It’s actually good, common-sense teaching based on a clear understanding of human ontology, as described in detail in Lesson 7. Setting aside those details for now, here’s the pattern: Nine = 3 Triads, where the emphasis is neither on 9 nor 3, but rather on the 2 gaps or absences between triads. As already stated, the gaps are leaps of mind, and to grow beyond oneself first we must leap to our farthest horizon, however far we see. Then we leap again, to the limits of the next. One leap alone is not enough to mark growth, for the default path just snaps us right back, and the net result is a thought unheeded, forgotten—a spark, then dark. To grow as transformation one must exceed one’s horizons, two leaps at least, but in a controlled & focused manner, maintaining the thread back to zero.
            The principle of nine, then, is simply three expanded by a similar division, or 3 x 3, and the rationale for three triads—groups of three lessons within each triad—functionally resembles that which I describe above, built around its absences (although the exact application looks a bit different). That my own lessons here in albionspeak (except Lesson 1) each follows a nine-step mini-sequence is just this same pattern & rationale reflected on a micro-scale, while my assigned sorcerer’s apprenticeship, called The Nine Men, expanded this pattern to an exponential macro-scale (that I do not recommend). And strangely, all these 3’s and 9’s—along with more than a bit of “fuzzy” quantum logic—arise from a singular binary function, the human soul. 




2. Home vs. Away

            So welcome to School! Are you ready to leave? No? Of course not—you just arrived. There’s stuff to be learned, ground to be covered. It’s a new port, and it’s not even possible to reach the next horizon without first knowing where you’ve landed. That is, knowing the precise coordinates of your goal is useless if you can’t place yourself in relation to it. So you’ve got to get your own bearings first, which—for lack of any language or knowledge of this novel place—means locating yourself in relation to the only place you do know—where you just came from, Home. Take a look back, then, and retrace your line. Above all remember: You’re entering a jungle labyrinth of mind. Hold onto this thread that leads you back & don’t lose it.
            Thus, the first step after any leap of mind: Get your bearings by reviewing what you know already. Count your toes, and make sure you’ve arrived whole. (Nine?) You should be grounded now, though drained from your effort—even when the leap feels effortless. Now get some rest from this kind of thinking; go for a long run; sleep; replenish. Nine steps is a temporal structure (enacted in time) played out as discrete turns (which are choices). And consider the tautology: Choices & turns in time require time off (when it’s not your turn), absence. Mind the gap. You’ll need your energy soon enough. School is your new home.
            And let me reassure you, School is intended to be a safe environment, a place of focused discipline & open play and, above all, respect for each individual. Yes, accidents happen; mishaps of the soul occur even in a protected place. Free will implies mistakes & much darker fuck-ups still exist. Thus be forewarned: This safety is temporary anyway. Students either graduate or fail, but we don’t stay. We were made to fly for ourselves, after learning the risks, after grasping the gravity of the challenge. For failing in School is just as final as failing life, far more final than death. This is not football & frat parties.

            But it’s still a fun game, right? A simulation? We “create” a setting (called a port), and we name it School, because, after all, this is a professed “curriculum,” authored by a professional teacher fluent in bullshit. (While working toward his PhD, Scribe, too, taught literature for a number of years before leaping to full-time poetry, proving himself a gifted teacher, though without all the training & jargon.) So we’re pretending right now, right?
           And of course the answer is yes; we are indeed pretending & intending, activating our imagination, following a kind of role-play. There is, in fact, no secret to sorcery; it’s simply the ability to think outside and past the projections we see as “reality,” effecting realignments. Calling this School, then, sets up a certain structure of expectations, one enabling new content & connections—though patterned, I suspect, after old boarding schools, and thus notably different from American public schools today. Think rather Hogwarts from Harry Potter, especially as each teacher has unique, even signature expertise. The key is you’ve arrived at School expecting to learn & work hard, and you’re not going Home soon.
           For indeed the first function of School is precisely to get you away from Home for perspective. If you wish to improve yourself—which, recall, moves you toward the Good—you have to identify what aspects of yourself need improving. Thus, you have to look at your soul reflectively (not objectively) to know thyself, and you can do this only by stepping away from yourself. You create a separate reality, a place of mind to stand on, so to speak, so you might turn around to view yourself. In Lesson 6 I describe in detail how, as a child, I divided myself in this manner—not visually with a literal image as some do, but generally in a sparse Socratic darkness of one-on-one dialogue heard as language only. I say, “divided” because the separation of place, Home vs. School, of course, is itself a partition of identity; but while we inhabit & identify with our figure, place is perceived as “given.” School is a change in the ground rules, new games; and the student must run to keep up, becoming the simulation.
           A critical reader, of course, connecting the dots, should regard the “mechanics” described here with skepticism. Isn’t this some overly-complex task analysis of normal critical thinking? At what point does allegory get silly? Don’t we step outside ourselves all the time, particularly in social settings, to see how others see us? Some of this self-imaging amounts to mirror neurons firing; some is divine empathy, aliah leaping from soul to soul, point to point-of-view. But most of it comes down to survival, just navigating our modern convoluted lives, probably thousands of times each day. Indeed the very act of thinking in language requires us to execute abstract leaps with every utterance: It’s what domesticated humans do. (Though consider: Having a million mirrors is no different from shattering one big one.)
           Yes, modern thinkers leap all the time, though tiny, familiar leaps mostly—“bunny hops,” we might say, if authentic; “cricket chirping” when not—so I insist it’s not so hard, then, to consider what makes School different from other ports & places. First, while all ports are meeting places created by design, School is a deeper care—not an accident or an organic developmental phase like adolescence, for it’s never automatic. It’s a chosen place of serious business, where we meet & learn from our masters—whom we’ve known our whole lives on some level—but now that relationship is formalized precisely to gain perspective through separation.
           For among our beloved friends & teachers one voice (or face) arrives, in fact, as the primary focus of School itself: our overseer, who, though eternal, does not represent our total soul (which is impossible, since soul is infinite). The overseer—Albion, in my case—is that face or facet of the soul most directly responsible for the self in time, our first face “higher” in eternity (or in our circle’s private metaphor, the kite colour just above the knotted tail). Since infinity can’t be faced, we “bracket” off that chunk or range of our soul who best serves the student in time. Recall Don’s amazing list at the end of Session 23, hinting at the dizzying heights of soul? I speak with Albion, who looks & sounds like me, because speaking with my higher-soul “Mayan pyramid” or “Indian Ocean” could only prove “disruptive to instruction”—where introducing chaos into the classroom is generally bad pedagogy. For as a careful teacher, Albion not only is the principal creator of my School, the place, he also supplies his best teaching figure. Albion is indeed a master. But can I trust him?
           And the curriculum can go anywhere—every student has an IEP[1]—but in essence all teaching boils down to an extended trust-exercise. I’m pretending to have a conversation with Albion—who can sound like anyone & occasionally does—but not surprisingly tends to sound just like me. He’s been with me my whole life, of course, so I’m completely used to hearing him; but as a result I often find it hard to distinguish his voice from my own thoughts. That is, he sounds just like my own thoughts thinking, because he is.
           And of course I have scores of unwanted thoughts: stupid thoughts, evil thoughts, wasteful, masturbatory circles repeating all the time. Is it reasonable to suggest, then, that Albion isn’t these stupid thoughts, that my overseer is past all that shit, that I can be better than that?
           It is both reasonable & necessary to imagine ourselves this way. Our minds make binary comparisons; we weigh things side-by-side. We can only see where we need improvement by seeing ourselves both as we are and as we might be. School, we must remember, is a point between points, not the destination we seek, not the far horizon, which remains a big leap into the unknown.

           Now the hard part: I’ve provided the skeletal theory, but skeptics will still be shaking their heads. “For those who think well enough already,” they might ask, “why should we adopt this silly language game—a soul grammar of subjects reflexively pursuing projected objects—which, aside from having no utility, actually strives to divide a human soul, rather than integrate it?” Isn’t the goal holistic? “Identity increases as we approach” surely means more unity of purpose and less many-mindedness, does it not?

           I know well what skeptics think, because I myself am my own worst skeptic. I know that I’m pretending. I write of School—I’m working in my living room. Does that make it unreal? Scribe & I devoted many precious hours at the ouija board establishing elaborate pretend-settings on “ports in eternity”—accompanied by visions & pullings & travels—all while seated comfortably at my dinner table. We trusted our teachers would never waste our time “playing” if such a game held no value. Because there is no ob, nothing is neither real nor unreal. We play many games in life based on simple rules that take us to a million wonderful places: music, mathematics, market place agoras everywhere, each a cognitive network arising from organic sources. When we enter such a network, we are constantly surprised & amazed by where it takes us. Is math real? Is music? I understand, then, my capacity for delusion is equal to my ability to project myself wisely, all paths being projections. And albionspeak, even if inspired from the highest sources, remains a game only if so perceived.
           So it all comes down to trust, which opens doors. “Faith” is too broad & passive a word here. Faith generally means believing what others have told you, taking no ownership for understanding yourself. Trust is personal, bilateral, and earned. It’s one thing for a skeptic like me to play occasional off-world games, harmless simulations: Albion’s School has many classrooms, and I always loved school and games. But it’s a fucking giant quantum leap to believe the game is actually “real” or that the overseer-role truly lies outside of me, that I’m not just making it all up. (And I have my history with hubris, even a score to settle.) For where is the line between projection & self-deception? Or ultimately, if all is projection, where lies value? Thus, the second leap:
           Leap 1, from Home to School, marks a “change of scenery,” we might quip, once comfortably settled in to our campus & curriculum (which takes a step). The second leap, however, bigger than the first, is a change of figure, which must be believed to be seen—itself a strange reversal of POV. You have to own & become that figure, the face of the overseer, as daunting as that initially seems. I know well from decades: It’s one thing to channel one’s overseer to receive an amazing poem, say. It’s quite another to be the author of the poem, the confident mind who can frame the words. Delusion alone can’t cross this chasm, although there’s more than one way to shed one’s skin—not all good—and nothing is predetermined. The good news, however: This is School, where failing a simulation is rarely fatal. Which is why we practice.
           Thus, for me School is work, which takes time (in time) & energy. I’m someone who’s seen plenty of miracles, but, precisely because they’re miracles, I still regard these events as unique & unrepeatable—gifts given, not actions taken, not conscious sorcery, and certainly not “ownership.” That is, I have ample evidence for the multiverse I have personally experienced. I fully accept the global paradigm as such, but I have yet to step up to it personally, fully. There are many levels of belief & disbelief. I can play by new rules, but I’m not yet a rules-maker. (I dare not! cries the boy scarred by past trespasses.) Dear Reader, can you see how vast the chasm between POVs? No miracle alone seems sufficient to help make me believe. But I believe in work. That is, when I work hard enough, I learn; so that’s my path. Even as a flyer finally, late in life, that’s still my path, how I fool myself into believing I’m capable. I just work my ass off. Work, however, is not flight; it’s prep only. When you leap, you can’t bring your “work” with you, only what you’ve learned from it. And while preparation for flight itself requires a full step—in fact, the third step within each triad—work itself is not necessary.
           Scribe, too, works incredibly hard, but not so much because he has to. Vocation is his greatest joy.

3. Who’s on First?

           Before he started training, Scribe did not hear things. He also didn’t start out as much of a dreamer. In fact, before beginning his apprenticeship (roughly at age 33), Scribe’s entire lucid dream portfolio consisted of a single lucid image & verbal exchange. Twin brothers in time, whether working together or separately, Scribe & I shared master Josef’s custom-dream curriculum, and thus our dreams were intended always as common idioms. Scribe’s first l-dream is an absolute gem:

                      Scribe [who was about 20 at the time] is seated in a room, talking

           with Todd, his younger brother, when  ◊ ◊ ◊: Scribe realizes he's

           dreaming.

                      “Did you know,” he smugly informs his brother’s image, excited to

           announce the moment, “that you are just a figment of my imagination?”

                       The figment Todd is unimpressed. “So what does that make you?”

           If you’ve come already to lucid dreaming, you know what followed: The dream immediately broke up, and Scribe’s projected POV protagonist was sent flaming home to Mama, or Mr. Wizard, or thumb-sucking to nowhere at all—simulation cancelled—since the first obstacle to lucid dreaming is lucidity itself. Todd, the younger smarter figment, pulls back the veil of the dream far enough to reveal, and thus lose, the projection, which depends on the dreamer’s suspending disbelief & playing along literally to maintain the scene. Belief is what keeps the projector running. Thus, lucid practice is needed then to “stay in character,” which means adopting a new, proactive, lucid persona asap, lest the play & stage dissolve around you.[2]

           What is self-awareness? What defines, then refines an individual? Is there some definitive primal (auroral) threshold? I offer Scribe’s dream here, because dream lucidity we delimit sharply: Lucidity is the conscious knowledge that you’re dreaming—not some vague suspicion or moist feeling of unreality. That is, there’s surely a long continuum of pre-lucid states leading up to lucidity; and there’re many levels & continua beyond self-conscious dreaming, too. But lucidity itself marks a clear threshold, which is why I employ it here: You’re either lucid in a dream or not.





4. Stories

           It’s time for a story, one known to many like all of humanity’s best stories, which we repeat as memes & metaphors in school, in church, at the mall, as movie remakes everyone sees fifty times with friends. These stories frame & supply our private worlds with common reference points, neither fact nor fiction in our psyches, but strict milestone markers in the abstract—busy ports of traded artifacts from the local archipelago, remote to other islands. These consensus ports—where we teleport in thought more readily than one-touch redialing—allow us to speak & share & create culture, sometimes reaching into and manifesting in spacetime. It’s also true, then, that ports over time—like cities, like language—fall out of use, dependent on the people who populate them, while new ports burst into play. It’s funny how ideas, then, even infinite ones like mathematics, can have finite life spans. We don’t need to wonder, for example, whether geometry, that most Platonic of disciplines, existed before the Big Bang; we can assert it did not—not because, as Aristotle argued, Platonic forms don’t exist, but rather because no true (systematic, logical) geometer before Euclid was present to perceive it (c. 300 BCE). That is, no one prior to Euclid could have projected such a coherent place, and projected places can’t exist independent of the figures who project & populate them (no ob). Dreams must have dreamers. Figures, in turn, must live each chosen moment personally, framed within their POV just to perceive it, to experience anything at all. Similarly, no theater set, regardless of the stage design, can “play” without its actors; and ports, being meeting places, require at least two.
           Before I begin my story, then, first try to imagine a time—not long ago, the blink of an eye really—before writing existed, roughly 5000 years past: Forget technology for a moment. Which stories were told? Why? Our assumption, of course, is that without written records only the most important stories would be memorized & memorialized & delivered as ritual truth—ironically, the names of kings no one cares to remember, ozymandiases. Such litanies, in fact, predominate among the first written texts & tablets and likely represent the names & claims of long oral recitations. The remaining stories, in name at least, would be lost, though most of the best were actually passed on unconsciously—stories about threshing or weaving or getting stung by a scorpion. Of course, “family” stories like these passing down the generations underwent many transformations, winnowed through a “natural selection” process resembling the domestication of animals, and subject to many more variations than those transmitted consciously: growing new appendage spin-off stories, shedding vestige tales, losing especially names & proper nouns when memes jumped family lines & geography—including most notably, the wholesale substitution of the central figures or protagonists themselves, who, like modern superheroes, were accepted to be largely interchangeable, “the hero of a thousand faces”—that is, alas, until perhaps a century passes, and one such face gets refashioned by the tribal mass into icons & idols & babel & violence—oh well….
           To what degree were all these prehistoric psychic markers—far fewer in number & narrower in scale than we carry today—believed & scrutinized? (I speculate idly on an inverse relation—the fewer the ports & markers, the deeper one penetrates each—the assumption being one has a finite amount of mojo-attention, which, when quantitatively divided, maintains qualitative integrity, as in a dilation. But no, I don’t believe attention is a constant.) While there are advantages to tracking & trafficking in a million markers rather than one or two, our physical, hunter-gatherer brains evolved for no such complexity. If approaching the Good is revealed through our becoming ourselves, might it not be a whole lot easier to “find yourself” in a simpler world?
           And the answer is yes, of course, but only if you’re content with being a simple person. There is much, for instance, that I abhor about this modern world, chaos I might readily exchange for a farm along the old Nile, say. But I won’t give up Shakespeare or Bach or Plato to become a simpleton—and, please note, I refer to far more than just my own heroes’ vast corpuses: I mean I’m not willing to give up that part of my cognition & identity who is able to enjoy them, including the years of education needed just to reach them. And I go one step further with Euclid. Asking me to “give up” Euclid would carve up my core identity too  deeply—logical reasoning for me being a lifeline in eternity—I would fundamentally lose me. How might I feel about Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s, as both of my parents so piecemeal departed? How would I take to a brain transplant?
           When we compare the rise & fall of civilizations as successes & failures in history, we rarely acknowledge that the cultural advantages one tribe might have over another could largely be abstract, just a way of thinking, stories. We point to “guns, germs, and steel,” Marxist economic determinants, individual ingenuity, acts of God. But it’s neither these artifacts nor big moments in time that define a people per se: It’s how they relate to their experiences both before- & after-the-fact and how their stories are then further passed to the next generation. Take a “great war,” for instance, a defining, founding moment for an ancient tribe: One tribe might sing of this war as a god-delivered triumph, though costly, and become emboldened. Another, after a pyrrhic victory, might be humbled by the same physical facts & events and turn inward. The same initial data, but with a slightly different narrative, runs a very different simulation. Throw in trees & branches & butterfly effects over millennia, then spin: Everything changes.

           The point is: Stories aren’t facts; they’re functions. So I ask, what is the function of history?




5. One for the Road

           Before this course ends, I intend to go back much further, long before the birth of history, before language itself; but this lesson’s great epic necessarily arrives much later. And unlike most stories, which are contoured to the evolutionary mappings of our hunter-gatherer brains, my story has no human protagonist— 

                      Immediately half of humanity yawns….

           A story with no hero, no superhero even? How about a villain, an anti-hero, Richard III or Milton’s Lucifer? Donald Trump?! How can we care—meaning, how can we connect & relate to any story—if it has no figure to inhabit? How/where do we project ourselves into such a place or template? How can a story be about place only?
           Children, of course, have little trouble turning animals, fairies, and talking pumpkins into protagonists. Where is the line between free play & fuzzy belief? We take our hunter-brain narrative template and just shift the whole place on its axis a bit—another transformation retaining function—to play along with our familiar anthropomorphisms. That is, children pretend, and they just go with it.
           And adults do much the same thing with ideas & ideals, but adults have a harder time making the template shift. Not only is it harder for adults to pretend freely, we have a much harder time letting go. Namely, when we do manage to believe in our game or simulation, then we tend to double-down on our new attachments, tying on more knots, knots to nearby thoughts for additional anchorage, twisted threads knotting everything & everyone, turning our ideals into idols. How does one tie on to an idea without getting tied down?
           So let’s contemplate a meta-protagonist then, an intellectual abstraction in place of a talking pumpkin: Our hero is Geometry itself, the first of math’s branches, model for all the rest, which could not exist in projected form before Euclid in 300 BCE, but predates Euclid in evidence everywhere in antiquity, most archetypically in the Pyramids more than two millennia earlier. The Greeks never equalled the Egyptians in monumental scale; and, of course, pyramids require superb measurements and deep knowledge of geometrical alignments. But Egyptian knowledges, like those of Mesopotamia & the Indus, appear to have been largely technical, collected observations memorized from tables & tablets rather than understood. For what does is it mean to understand or know something then, if not to build a pyramid? (Why build Pyramids in the Sahara?!)

           So first, the Moral of the Story, which I displace from its familiar end-spot in most fables, for this is anything but trivial: Neither nation nor tribe nor church nor any corporate entity can survive the modern world without mathematics. If you, by some rare chance, did manage to grow up in an impoverished & imperiled indigenous Eden, ignorant of math’s algorithms & applications, then may God help you in the looming favela that awaits your forest children, surrounded by exponential effluent calculus. You are fucked. Modernity will kill you as sure as the common cold. No math = No future.
           So modern math is modern existential (one reason I taught it). Forget guns & steel; math is prerequisite. How did we get here, surrounded by this universal human language, mathematics, as trusted & accepted in North Korea, say, as it is, indeed, in primitive Nebraska, which still can’t fathom the metric system? (Backwards peoples everywhere prefer to link their measures to human body parts, rather than trust abstract “made-up” systems.) The collective effort then, by many contributing cultures, just to standardize our Hindu-Arabic base-ten decimal number system stands as one of humanity’s greatest achievements, spreading to global universality—indeed so thoroughly permeating our minds that most people tend to think math is “real”—which, let’s be crystal-clear, marks one false step toward idolatry. Most people, that is, who can readily add & multiply don’t see math as pure patterns in the abstract; rather they see numerals & equations, the symbols only. There are many ways to solve operations—as the ancients all achieved using completely different symbols & systems. Our current system, which takes years to master, is merely the best common story (= function = technology), the story that came out on top.
           Importantly, the winnowing of humanity’s many mathematical systems changed forever when math became “self-aware” as a formal process, circa 300 BCE, with the writing & dissemination of The Elements, Euclid’s singular achievement—why I regard him as our greatest mathematician, though there is no evidence he independently came up with any original theorems. Again, jaded moderns tend to think geometry is about circles & triangles & the formulas that apply to them. This is a deep error, confusing the function of a powerful story with its content, its input data. Euclid’s gift is logical thinking itself, of knowing something (i.e., geometric figures) not by practiced applications, but by necessity. Now recall Vilansit’s words: We care enough once we can see each individual as “distinct and irreplaceable.” This also is necessity.
           No stone mason like Socrates, we can assert, actually constructed their works & artifacts using Euclid’s strict methods & minimal tools (a compass, a pencil, & an unmarked straight-edge only). No builder cared whether his product could be “proved” from theorems & axioms or how many steps the proof might take. The Elements was always for classroom lessons only—indeed, the most successful curriculum in Civilization (so sings this admiring pedagogue)—intended from the outset for students at school, almost exactly as we think of School in albionspeak. For Euclid’s school was not just a place for rich-boys to learn skills or a trade; geometry transformed students into different beings, disciplined thinkers. Now consider the gap in the middle ages, for instance, between a nobleman or cleric, someone who’d studied Latin & logic, versus any among the harsh landscape’s illiterate, innumerate peasantry. Since we are how we think, such a gap represents the difference between trained & feral animals; and I think, in fact, this gap remains the greatest challenge of the modern age. Consider this fact, if everyone could think, we’d already be solving climate change.

           But wait: We live in a modern world that has Euclidean geometry. In fact, I taught it, one class per year for most of my career. And yet the facts are very clear: Most people don’t think; the President is proof. What happened?
           I keep referring to it: idolatry, so Biblical in its connotations, so fundamentally damning an error regardless of era. Euclid himself is reputed to have retorted best, when prodded by an impatient Ptolemy to “get to bottom of the goddam story” and sum up his geometry in simpler terms. (Pharaohs have little time for contemplating circles.) Euclid remarked:

                     Sire, there is no royal road to geometry. 

           I should probably mention that this anecdote w/ its punchline is also attributed to Archimedes, a later math superhero, and Hiero II, tyrant of his native Syracuse. I should also add that pharaohs & kings & tyrants all had their own literal royal roads, which meant merely a private road paid for by the ruler with people’s taxes. Most people travelled by shitty roads that no one paid for. (The westernmost branch of the Nile delta, for example, the entire royal Canopus, was reserved for pharaohs exclusively.) Thus, kings expected direct access, short-cuts, quick answers from viziers & advisors—thinking had been thoroughly delegated. And thus our story teaches, regardless of its hero, the most certain knowledge has no short-cuts. It’s not about results; it’s process.
           Just like existence. You’ve got to get past the symbols & physical content of your life, even the abstract stories cluttering your mind. Being a soul—it’s all process.

           Which brings us to modern Euclidean idolatry, the way it’s currently taught in most public high schools. Kids studying geometry today don’t need to think; the royal road has been paved with democracy and packed with commuters. Everyone starts their coursework with modern numbers & calculators, and they’re spoon-fed the so-called major algorithms—though generally in algebraic form, which is completely misguided pedagogy—equations which are memorized & drilled & tested, but rarely analyzed or thought through seriously. I taught otherwise, but only because I had the rare privilege of teaching high-school geometry to brilliant 8th graders, two years ahead of the “normal” math-track. It made no sense to me or my students’ parents to teach merely to the bland basic text, when I had such gifted students & the luxury of time for proofs & constructions. Nevertheless, I found that even among my high achievers, many of whom went on to the country’s “most selective” colleges, only about half could manage Euclid’s process, true logical reasoning, while the others, at 13 & 14 years old, probably were not developmentally ready for the task, their brains still not fully hardwired for such thinking. That is, even my highest achievers still found geometry hard.
           So we know the moral of the story—math is existential—but our culture, in dumbing-down the task to make it mass accessible (Disney math), has deprived the story of its function. All that’s left: “math facts” & truisms, non-thinking students. Which is exactly the same naked idolatry that leads to religious fundamentalism or “original” “strict constructions” of the law. This is how Donald Trump got elected, by voters who can’t think. What’s the cure for stupidity?
           Alas, for many, as I’ve awkwardly intimated, there is no cure; but I offer something far better for our children: a vaccine. No surprise, of course, it’s not an injection, not new technology; it’s process, a story to live by.

           The Elements, incidentally, is not often credited with political revolution, but consider our anecdote & its implications over centuries: Anyone who could understand Euclid’s Elements could be “smarter than a king”—and not in some trivial bullshit knowledge. For anyone who’d thoroughly grasped Euclid’s rules & process also knew the value of the treasure they possessed and understood further that no king could strip them of such thinking. Consider now this new POV in history, afforded by the certainty & necessity of geometry: Now you can know your king or local lord is a fool, that many or most kings are fools; that certain knowledges are better than others, and, best of all, you can prove it. With the spread of Euclidean geometry from the upper to the fast-expanding middle classes, how long could feudalism expect to thrive?




6. Ground Rules

           So here’s a real math game: Try to come up with your own full-fledged geometry using the fewest rules possible. This is, in fact, the very game that real geometers play, the meta-/rules-making game itself. Mere thinking-teachers like me learn to work our way through geometry, logically following rules, but geometers make the rules. Euclid had 23 definitions, 5 common notions, and 5 postulates (or axioms). That’s all. No one has done better in 2300 years, though many have tried and roughly equalled his efforts. This means that alternative rules have been proposed, but never where fewer (omitted) rules have presented a coherent system. Which implies further, of course, that Euclid’s postulates should be mutually underivable, though many have tried hard to prove otherwise. What’s interesting to me, as a teacher but no mathematician, is that the “starting five” postulates actually vary from textbook to textbook. I’ve taught geometry from multiple texts over decades, and the starting axioms are always slightly different. The differences seem to be semantic, cosmetic even—they tend to convey the same picture or idea—but math is precision, not tendency; and the differences matter to somebody, to geometers. So in pure ignorance I ask why? Why fuck with Euclid?
           For example, Euclid’s first postulate states that “every point can be connected by a straight line to every other.” I often stated in class, “two points determine a line,” which seems very close. Okay, but the fifth postulate, then, the so-called “parallels postulate,” varies perhaps a shade more. Only after years did I find that I was quoting as gospel not Euclid, but John Playfair’s 1795 substitution:

Postulate 5 (Playfair): Given a line and a point not on the line, there exists a unique line through that point which is parallel to the first.

           Euclid actually states:

Postulate 5: “That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.”
           - Translated (in subjunctive) by Sir Thomas L. Heath, Dover Press  



§§[twin figures depicting Playfair & Euclid]

           Now most geometry students readily see that both of these postulates generate the same extended image—two lines (l and m), which may or may not be parallel, and their shared transversal (p). More important, once you postulate either, you can derive the other; and the geometry that follows includes all you need for proving every subsequent theorem—for instance, “the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles.” With either postulate the proof is easy; without, the proof is not provable. Many mathematicians have made other suggestions; none has reduced Euclid.

           And so ranneth the story of Euclidean Geometry, woven into the grand tapestry of Western Civilization as though by Michelangelo or Cecil B. DeMille, just as it was woven into the intellect of Islam and the East. The key to its universality, ironically, was the false (yes, idolatrous) belief that geometry was real. People could not distinguish the results of geometry—whether technical achievements or smarter advisors & scribes—from the process itself, which, once institutionalized & subsumed within the paradigm, seemed of lesser importance, less conscious & conspicuous. And thus for 21 often-idle centuries even most mathematicians agreed: Euclid depicted the literal facts & workings of reality around us.
           But did he really? (No ob or sub.) Points, lines, and planes clearly do not exist except in our minds. Pyramids, we can assert, do not arise naturally from the Mayan jungle or Sahara desert. In fact, very few regular shapes other than circles exist in nature. Straight lines alone are rare enough that anyone studying a straight line on a satellite image assumes it’s manmade. Thus we have the new science of  “space archeology,” identifying buried pyramids & ruins from contours & vegetative growth patterns visible only from outer space—based entirely on the assumption that straight (rectilinear) phenomena are unnatural.
           Come to speak of it, let’s get more to the point: What is the meaning of the word “straight”?

Here’s Euclid’s Definition 4: “A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.”

           Uh… sure, Uncle Euke, if you say so… Perhaps for further bemusement, then, we should examine how Euclid’s effort improved on Plato’s earlier attempt:

(Plato’s definition:) Straight is “that of which the middle covers the ends.”

           Why do I laugh so freely at these hopeless efforts—by two of humanity’s all-time greatest brains— to make sense of something we sense so-blatantly-all-around-us, straightness? How might I myself dare define “straight”? Why isn’t it just “line of sight,” for instance, “as the photon flies”? Has anyone seen my photon?
           I accept it is I, not my heroes, who know nothing. That is, I understand enough to see how difficult the task is and acknowledge my ignorant state. And I take my ignorance gracefully, because I know the story of geometry is different from its math. Recall, Geometry is about thinking, not figures.

           Our well-worn story of Geometry then—which had stood for millennia in Western Civ as the iconic model for “deeper” (objective) truth, whether scientific or religious or both—took a strange & twisted turn starting in the early 1800’s, though most thinkers acquainted with the world missed the tectonics: The math was subtle, a curiosity to a genius like Carl Friedrich Gauss, already famous for his bell-shaped curve in probability theory, which was hot math among academics (along with applied calculus, both branches having been “invented” just over a century earlier). As an evening pastime Gauss, it seems, enjoyed tinkering with Euclid’s fifth postulate, recognizing formally—as no one had before perhaps—that the “straightness” of a line or given figure depends entirely on the curvature of the space around it (its place). Euclid’s lines existed in “flat” planes (2-d “straight”); but strangely curved lines following a similarly curved space could also wind up straight. Gauss’s fanciful proofs, though very different from Euclid’s results, seemed completely coherent & consistent within this system. Was this playful “geometry” a mere curiosity, or was it paradigm heresy?


§§[three figures depicting curved space with parallel & perpendicular lines following straight paths: a) flat Euclidean lines on a plane; b) a flat plane that has been distorted into rolling hills & valleys; c) a vortex tunnel in math, a distorted orifice]



           Gauss published little of his ideas, but he did tell others, colleagues & students—he was a prolific pedagogue—while still other contemporaries may have come to similar notions independently (Bolyai, Lobachevsky??). Before his death Gauss asked his student Bernhard Riemann to prepare lectures on possible “non-Euclidean” geometries, and soon two new contrasting systems would be highlighted: “hyperbolic geometry,” played with already by Gauss; also “elliptic,” which I illustrate roughly below. Riemann’s 1854 proposals modeled alternative mappings his trained peers could not dismiss theoretically—the new rules were made & obeyed rigorously—though neither could anyone take these mappings seriously, certainly not their implications, not the narrative plot-twist…. For many, Riemann’s assumptions proved only geometric fiction, as if he’d just derived the gravitational constant of Wonderland or mapped the complete genome of Dante’s demons.
           To demonstrate an example of non-Euclidean math for my classes—in this case elliptic geometry—I’d haul out my only classroom prop, a big blow-up balloon-ball of the world, a political globe one meter in diameter. This globe displayed the major lines of latitude, including the equator, the tropics, the arctic & antarctic circles—all of which (see below) appear straight & parallel. Lines of longitude, however—which appear the same as latitudes to anyone standing on the Earth’s surface—from an outside POV don’t follow the same pattern. They cross at the poles, where each defines a “great circle” of the planet (= max. circumference). So in fact, all the straight & “parallel” longitudes actually intersect—and not just once, but twice—while the North & South Poles, which name two distinct points on the map, are connected not by one unique straight line (as says Euclid’s first postulate); they are connected by all the north-south lines.




§§[twin “3-d” figures depicting lines of longitude & latitude, askew to viewer]




           Since lines of longitude run straight north-south, while latitudes run east-west, anywhere longitudes & latitudes meet, they’re always perpendicular—which makes it easy today to pinpoint your location on Earth using global-positioning satellites & geospatial coordinates (and marks another global universal sub-language). Prior to modern navigation, everywhere on Earth was on local time, sailing ships crossing big water especially, for time generally marked the measure of distance better than any cartographer’s mileage. “London is two days’ ride from Norsex,” one might say. Imagine how a map might look with steep hills, valleys, and uncrossable rivers, then, if you scaled the map’s distances accordingly, where a journey up & down the same hill would cover different distances on the map, since it’s faster to go down than up. Nor did such spotty chaos matter when information travels no faster than a ship or horse. Wherever you were, you were local; and if lost, the illiterate locals might not get you home, but they knew well their local time zone. (I have visited villages in Africa & New Guinea that still thought like this. Fifty miles from the ocean, I’ve met people who couldn’t tell you where or even what an ocean was.)
           Globe-ball math (i.e., elliptic geometry), however useful, is funky, not Euclidean: See the figure below showing both longitudes & latitudes, and note the right angles. Picking any two distinct points/locations on the same latitude (a and b) and then a third point at the North Pole, we can connect these dots to form a triangle. Now measure the angles. (Demonstrating in class, I’d have a student with a protractor literally measure the angles of my globe-ball at their desk.) I complete the simple, though unsettling equations at the side. —Uh, Uncle Euke,… hello?




§§[one figure: depicting both lines of longitude & latitude, askew toward the viewer; two points on the Tropic of Capricorn, forming a triangle with the North Pole. Next to this the proof: 90 + 90 + § > 180.]




           I often ask, not just in jest, “Is there a ‘higher porn’?” Is Vishnu perhaps enjoying his dreaming a little too much? I generally assume that if God did create the world—which means to divide His Absolute Unity into distinct & independent parts—it could only be to alleviate His infinite boredom of playing alone. A Hindu narrative would prove more direct: “One becomes Two—and then kama sutra.” And one could argue that Gauss’s evening games with a compass & ruler might also qualify as self-pleasing orgasms only, utterly purposeless to the world (which might explain his reluctance to publish). And it’s fair to regard my own metaphysics likewise—until, dare I say, you practice the process…. That is, I, for one, generally regard masturbation as fake sex, therefore as empty, partnerless & valueless, if not somewhat shamefully animal to someone seeking self-mastery. I know such shame is silly; I also know there’s nothing wrong with self-pleasing for its own sake (occasionally). Is this what mathematicians & philosophers & poets do shamelessly? What is the point, then, of pushing a cognitive-envelope past all practical application—so far, let’s say, it takes a lifetime for another, an acolyte or disciple, just to follow? It’s been said, for example, that it requires a whole lifetime just to categorize J.S. Bach’s humungous corpus—the vast majority he never published; and some of his works even, it’s been asserted, were never performed. What was Bach thinking?
           Fifty modern years would pass; all the principle players named above would pass & be replaced as well; modernity took hold. Mathematicians and their clever counting methods now permeated every industry; math had become super-practical, perfect for engineering, actuarial tables, usury enslavement, and artillery calculus. More important than the numbers, however, math implanted firmly in the Western psyche the idea of functionality. If you want to produce x, say, then a factory can be set up following a series of defined steps, transforming a, b, and c with clockwork precision into x. Entrepreneurs invented problems, often out of nothing, then solved them. Westerners generated questions no one thought to ask.
           One such thinker was Albert Einstein who published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, a seminal event in science, though still absent the key “field equations” he needed for his General Theory (eg., E = mc2). Einstein had come to his famous “falling elevator” thought-experiment directly, a blatant act of flight—where gravity was less an attractive force, as Newton described, than the effect of curves in spacetime created by objects of mass. Einstein had flown where no one had gone before, but now he needed a geometry that could accommodate four dimensions, where, significantly, space & time were both unified & variable. Compare: In Newton’s mind objects move through constant space along straight lines; in Einstein’s universe space & time can bend & even break, but objects move along straight lines regardless.
           In retrospect, in eternity, we can laugh at the cosmic irony of human math: Einstein’s theory as unanimous history was confirmed during the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, when, as predicted, light rays & their straight-line photons were observed to bend in close proximity to the sun. Euclidean geometry, perceived for centuries as fact, was thus proved fiction, while “Riemannian" geometry, once derided as fiction, now looked like fact. The nocturnal emissions of 19th Century academics, like Gauss, Riemann, and later David Hilbert, turned out to provide a better, more accurate description of our universe, albeit far more difficult to map & use practically. That is, in the relevant, special case of applied Earth-events, Newton’s defunct physics & Euclid’s ancient math still work great together—but only because everyone alive is riding the same blue moving object. If you’re standing on Earth’s surface, space & time appear constant—it’s the same all around you—so the tougher variables cancel and become unnecessary. Still it’s fun to think about: Newton’s elliptical orbits, then, when unwrapped by Riemannian math, simply describe straight lines in Einstein’s space, lines so warped by the mass of a nearby object that they curve back upon themselves.





§§[three figures showing straight lines flowing past three objects of different size; Goldilocks orbit is achieved after too small & too big]





           Now to be sure, Relativity was indeed a big paradigm shift among 20th century thinkers, bringing a new order to the physical universe and new rules for physicists & atom-bomb makers. But there was no such analogous shift in math. Riemannian geometry did not replace Euclidean, because it’s hard math; and beyond that, everyone like Einstein who could understand it—just a handful of people—was also smart enough to avoid math idolatry (though perhaps not in such terms). They knew better than anybody, both with doubts & humility, that equations approximate physical reality at best; thoughts aren’t physical.
           So many mathematicians felt empty: Change just one fucking postulate, and the entire paradigm turns upside-down! If geometry didn’t represent the facts of the universe, then what was math based on? To complicate matters, not long after Riemann another German professor, Georg Cantor, started spouting a different nonsense-math about different infinities, some, he said, ranking absolutely bigger than others. Cantor took a lot more venom than Riemann from his peers, the gatekeepers & Pharisees; and, like Riemann, his vindication would come only after his death, as different levels or hierarchies of infinities also eventually settled into math-paradigm consciousness.
           Philosophers were likewise disturbed. Most never believed geometry literally described reality—they knew otherwise—but many still hoped it might describe the abstract Platonic forms & “facts” of a higher, objective math—one of π & prime numbers & pristine operations, a thinking process that even an alien from a different dimension must agree with. Such a math, therefore, could not have a physical foundation. But what could be more fundamental than reality, if not math itself? What was math based on?
           A quick shout out, then, to Bertrand Russell & Alfred North Whitehead, who, after decades of bleeding their brains dry, published in 1910 the first volume of Principia Mathematica—two more would follow—where, step by step, they laid out hundreds of pages of proof, deriving all of the known math at the time from the basic rules of logic. Today we applaud their effort, their innovations in set theory, symbolic logic, and some of their notations & nomenclature—which are not trivial, as our Hindu-Arabic decimal system emphatically proves. However, in their ultimate quest—to uncover via logic the objective basis for mathematics at large—Principia marks in mathematics Man’s Final Folly, a master failure, a pyramid rising from the desert to last millennia, even if ultimately no pharaoh was reborn.

           Kurt Gödel was twenty-five in 1931 when he wrote the final chapter to our great math epic. For a start, using set theory, Gödel proved in his two Incompleteness Theorems that not only were Russell & Whitehead dead wrong, he showed that no such quest—for a “real” mathematics—could ever succeed. Math, as truth, is not based on anything at all, except its own rules—not now, not ever. Gödel took his proof much further than math & logic alone. No formal system (following axioms & rules) can ever claim to describe everything; there’s always an infinity the system can’t account for. Take, for example, our amazing Hindu-Arabic decimals: They can’t describe irrational numbers, which like π go on forever. We can only approximate them; the decimal must round somewhere. And, dare I say it? While there are an infinite number of rational numbers—numbers which can be represented as fractions or repeating decimals (provided you have the time to write them out)—the set of irrational numbers comprises a much much Bigger infinity.
           Math then marches on, doing mostly stuff I can’t begin to follow, as math is now big enough that no one can live long enough to learn but a fraction of it. The mood among professionals then is somber, humble, almost monastic now & forever. Math can no longer pretend to represent our real problems objectively: It can only fake it, approximate within certain probabilities, within brackets.

           But of course, all this history of Geometry still puts “the cart before the horse”: The real reason that unreal math can’t represent real-world problems exactly is because there’s no “reality” in the first place—no ob or sub period.

7. “The Play’s the Thing…”

           Suppose you attend a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Sitting there in the audience, you know it’s not a “history” like Henry V or Richard III—that it’s a “tragedy” & therefore fiction—though the difference between these classifications seems arbitrary & negligible, for as a fiction Hamlet still adheres to most of the axioms & rules of existence that Elizabethan Londoners followed in their daily, personal lives, ghosts notwithstanding. How does Shakespeare manage to express everyone’s best & worst thoughts so eloquently? While we identify with noble Hamlet, we likewise see ourselves in evil Claudius, helpless Gertrude, confused Ophelia, and bumbling, nagging Polonius. Thus Shakespeare holds a mirror before us, allowing us to find ourselves among his complex characters, both individually and as a society. You might insist that Hamlet, the hero, is not real, that your sitting among an audience watching an actor soliloquize is itself the real experience—which, of course, it is—especially when someone’s cell phone goes off or some child starts kicking the back of your seat. But if the play is well done, you won’t remember being seated there per se; and in fact, you really don’t want to remember your physical experience during the performance, as it would likely detract from the story and Shakespeare’s immaculate language. The immersed fiction is the intended & preferred experience.
           One might argue instead, then, that the “true” experience in this example lies with the beholder, your subjective perceptions as you sit there. And generally, ideally, you come away from the play with no trace of your digestive squabbles while you sat or of your stressed life outside the theater. On the other hand, I recall with joy once seeing King Lear in Ashland, Oregon, a production which intentionally cracked “the fourth wall” between the actors & audience: When the curtain went up on the opening scene, the entire cast were seated in a line of thrones along the edge of the stage, silent & frozen and staring directly at the audience for at least an eternal 30 seconds; and I, seated in the front row, found myself facing the actors mere inches away—which was, indeed, powerful & jarring, a superb feat of direction Shakespeare never described. The rest of the play was mesmerizing, too, though now, a quarter-century later, I remember only that opening moment clearly.
           “Outside life is no ob or sub” is unambiguous. Objective & subjective perceptions are nothing more than POVs within space & time, within the given rules of our place. When we exit life then—whether in death, before birth, or in abstract thought while alive—our experience is not filtered by perspective. When during Session 10 Scribe & I, stunned by our guide’s “no ob or sub” assertion, followed up in abject wonder with “what’s left?”—namely, after you subtract out your subjective perceptions & objective (given) facts—we got the beautiful reply:

                                 JOY    KNOWLEDG    UNDERSTANDING

           Thus were we appeased, for the moment at least, and able to continue, despite clearly not understanding. Joy, for instance, seems empty & useless if not attached to experience, to content; and it certainly need not be aligned with the Good.
           Knowledge and understanding, we can say, seem reasonable goals, but these targets themselves can’t be absolute or objective. Most geometry students know, for example, a triangle has 180o; far fewer can prove it. I myself can prove this, of course, but only by starting from someone else’s axioms. What constitutes knowing something then? How deep does one need to go, especially as geometry is infinite? And fundamentally this becomes an issue of ma’at, of choosing wisely among innumerable choices. For me, for example—but not for most Americans—any Shakespeare is simply superior to the TV series Game of Thrones, which, to be clear, is fantastic, addictive entertainment—beautifully produced & acted—but utterly devoid of redeeming value. What constitutes value then?
           I prefer, as an eternal student myself, to ask in the moment, “What is the lesson I’m supposed to learn here, now, in this projected 3-d experience I’m having?” I insist that every moment in our lives is chosen as a lesson, staged by our soul to teach the self in time, who may or may not then “learn the lesson.” Watching Hamlet is easy then: I’m filling myself with the greatest art I know. How better to learn Shakespeare than by watching Shakespeare live on stage as the Bard himself intended? Reading Hamlet is great, too, of course, but nowhere near as good as a live performance, shared with the audience & actors & all the crew behind the scenes—all of us together agreeing in eternity to project ourselves to that single physical place & time, so as to “learn the lesson” outside of space & time. To be clear, I do believe it’s possible just to “download” Shakespeare instantaneously; revelations are, in fact, quite common, though generally on a smaller scale than a four-hour play. But why would you want to download Shakespeare, in a single data-dump, when watching Hamlet play out in person is so much better? This is akin to preferring literal physical sex to abstract fantasizing, even though we know well not all sex is ideal.

           Now, as an aside, let’s briefly examine along these lines the difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy & comedy are both mirrors; we find ourselves therein. But the ground rules going in are quite different. Just the label, in fact, “tragedy” or “comedy” on a playbill, is enough to establish in the audience completely different expectations/assumptions. There are no spaceships in Hamlet, for instance. If there were, there would be no way for an audience to connect to the travails of the characters; it could not be tragic. Of course, there aren’t any spaceships in Shakespeare’s comedies either, but only because the technologies of 1600 AD prevented Shakespeare from perceiving spaceships at the time. Otherwise, so what? Miracles abound in Shakespeare’s comedies, outrageous coincidences & discontinuous dei ex machina if composed by a lesser playwright, but somehow okay when scripted & revealed by genius. In comedy, then, like children with talking pumpkins, we just pretend and go with it.
           Like everyone I learned in high school the classical difference between tragedy & comedy lies in the graph of the narrative timeline, the arc of the story. Tragedies go from good to bad, while comedies start with tension & fear for their future trajectory, but they then tend to resolve & end on a high note. Of course, Shakespeare’s final plays, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, defy this template. Rather, I would assert the real difference between tragedy & comedy lies more in the distance between the players and the audience. No tragedy can affect us from great distance, from truly outside. To care enough to hurt for Ophelia & Hamlet & even Polonius we have to come closer to their lives & events; we have to live their pain. When, on the other hand, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the character Bottom is turned into an ass, we don’t suffer with him; we laugh out loud at his folly like immortals gazing down from Olympus.

           Shakespeare, apparently omniscient, loved to insert plays within his plays, which is similar to juxtaposing a second mirror into a scene: One mirror, the play itself, offers a reflection; the audience locate themselves in the actors & story. Two mirrors offer not just a second reflection; they imply infinity and with it the awareness that existence plays out both everywhere & nowhere at once. We see ourselves seeing ourselves, and we see further, profoundly, there is no end to such perception, that whole universes can be imbedded in a single aleph point, universes within universes.
           In his own work, Don once characterized mirrors as “grotesque,” by which he meant that not all human animals can find themselves therein. When Scribe & I at our board reminded him of this and then asked how he might describe two mirrors face-to-face, he indulged us sumptuously, dismissing such ever-receding horizons as “a dialogue of idiots.”





8. A Dreamtask

           Stephen LaBerge, a Stanford researcher and lucid dreamer of great ability, was not the first person to study dreaming, but, thanks to his serious approach and an historic (lucky) laboratory breakthrough, he has elevated what once seemed the most subjective of private reveries—locked away within our unconscious craniums—to credible, “objective” science. I encourage strongly anyone with a passing interest in dreaming to pursue on their own LaBerge's lucid books, but this singular event I steal & summarize here, for I can imagine no better illustration:
           Like other sleep researchers LaBerge managed a sleep lab, where volunteers fitted with electrodes around their heads would sleep under controlled conditions, while others awake & seated in the next room monitored their movements and brainwaves. It had long been established, of course, that sleep is not a uniform state: There are distinct stages of sleep, where the brain, strangely, is intensely active, cycling through rhythms common to all Homo sapiens at predictable intervals throughout the night. About the so-called “deepest” stages of sleep—those furthest from waking consciousness—still very little is known, except that sleep is as essential to animal life as is food, that without sleep we die. But far more is known about sleep’s shallow states, especially REM sleep (rapid eye movement), because that’s when we dream, and when we awake we can often remember what we experienced. (It turns out we also dream in deeper states, but these are hard to remember and therefore much harder study.)
           LaBerge focused his studies on REM sleep, so named because people regularly move their eyes all over, even while much of the rest of the body undergoes literal physical paralysis. The evolutionary explanation for this paralysis, we believe, is pure survival; it would be incredibly dangerous if we physically acted out our dreams, as occasionally does happen. I know of one tragic case, alas, where a college student (my brother knew) was believed to have sleep-walked out the back of his parents’ camper as it traveled down the freeway and was killed. More than once I myself in college kicked myself awake in bed, acting out one of my countless soccer dreams. Fortunately, the vast majority of physical movements, while enacted in the mind, are neurologically blocked before descending the spinal cord to prevent such motions. But this sleep-induced paralysis does not include the eyes.
           Then the breakthrough: One night one of LaBerge’s lab-sleepers entered REM sleep, as indicated by the monitored electro-encephalograph, and their eyes began moving—but not all over. Instead, they were observed to move right, then left, then right again, over & over at regular intervals. A decision was made to wake up the test subject: What were you dreaming? Remarkably, the dreamer reported they had been watching a ping-pong match, and their eyes had been following the ball, right, then left, over & over. Wow. Our legs and arms may be paralyzed during REM sleep, but our physical eyes move in close correspondence to what their dreaming counterparts are seeing.
           Many experiments followed. The key is that these experiments employed a small army of lucid dreamers like LaBerge himself. Here’s one quick favorite: Put a lucid dreamer to bed in the sleep-lab and then wait for the sleeper to enter REM state and become lucid: ◊ ◊ ◊. Then, remembering their prearranged task within the dream, the dreamer signals the outside monitors in the sleep-lab by looking right, then left, then right, which takes place both in the dream as well as in the lab. At this point the dreamer then (in this experiment) counts to ten seconds within the dream before signaling a second time to the outside world, right-left-right. Apparently it takes roughly 13 seconds to count to 10 in a dream, about the same time it takes most people while awake. Thus, LaBerge concludes, dream-time roughly equals awake-time, despite how it might subjectively seem to us upon waking. Amazing.

           I leave it for LaBerge & those who follow him to enlighten us further in the science of oneirology adventuring, while I turn now sharply to a more sobering “bumper-sticker” fact about people and ma’at: Lucid dreamers have more fun. This is nearly a unanimous datum. Since their adventures take place during otherwise downtime, lucid dreamers have more time for life experiences; and they can do almost anything they want within a dream—except, most notably, read (beyond a few words). Advanced dreamers often fly and alter scenes and visit fantastic places, and they can have sex with anybody they want. LaBerge’s research shows, in fact, that most lucid dreamers spend the majority of their pure nighttime freedom having lots of sex, often several times per night with many partners. Great sex. Why not? (LaBerge’s lab research reports further, btw, that not all neural impulses south of the neck are blocked.…)
           Scribe & I refer to this statistical trend among lucid dreamers as a wallow in the “holosuites,” a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine version of a holographic brothel. No, there’s nothing wrong with 3-d porn; surely it’s safer & cleaner than literal prostitution or, more commonly, entangling oneself in a relationship based mostly on sex. Still, we marvel in disbelief: If you can regularly, reliably dream lucidly (as I cannot), why-on-Earth would you waste your time on sex? Can’t you think of something better to do—especially, of course, all those things that you can never do in physical life, flying being perhaps the easiest place to start? Aren’t you curious?
           That is, most lucid dreamers do not have a dreamtask, and they often squander their natural gifts just having fun. A dreamtask is any task assigned to a person in waking consciousness to be enacted within a dream, a predetermined mission. Counting to ten is an excellent example. Carlos Castaneda’s teacher Don Juan instructed novice Carlos to find his hands—i.e., to bring them to his face within a dream—which Carlos believed was the “proper” initiating practice. But Josef, our own dream master, made it clear that no particular task is necessary—which means that even having sex with, say, a predetermined Helen of Troy, could be perfectly fine. The point is, it must be consciously conceived in life then enacted in a dream.
            —Which, I’ll attest, is hard. I myself have had only a few lucid dreams, though I also have, indeed, accomplished assigned dreamtasks, but never at the same time. In one instance, for example, I spent several months trying to “summon the leopard,” a task assigned to me by Josef. And in one important dream, indeed, a circle of fire opened up in the air right in front of me, out of which leapt a jet black leopard. But I wasn’t lucid—one kind of success. Scribe & Advisor, on the other hand, devised whole curricula trying out different experiments with dream realities: flying, altering the size of rooms & mountains, changing temperature—even changing form, in Advisor’s case, a talent not recommended for all, as there are dangers. (Scribe is not a transformer.) The key, of course, is to move forward, to progress. Learn your medium.
           While no great dreamer, I do know ma’at, which is absolutely key to a soul in eternity. Again, there is no ob or sub. Physical reality, then, is just another dream, albeit a hardened, continuing one that most of us feel trapped within. Sure you can spend your life having sex, going to Disneyland, buying cars & toys, and bingeing on Game of Thrones—none of which alone can be considered “bad” or immoral. But if this is how you build your life, all you live for, why-on-Earth would your soul want such a masturbatory set of experiences to found & ground its eternal origin? Ma’at is wise choosing from an infinity of paths. How do you know, then, which tasks to choose? Not everyone needs Shakespeare & Plato, of course, which are hard; but I choose consciously to assign myself such challenging tasks, because in this particular dream, my wonderful life, I can think of few better ways to improve myself, to become Albion.

9. Existence No Myth

​            I call masturbation fake sex for two reasons that clearly don’t apply to everyone: 1) The climax of both sex & masturbation, no surprise, achieves the same physical result; and 2) I am personally unable to achieve that climax without fantasizing a sexual partner—that is, for me fantasy is requisite. (In contrast, I recall seeing on TV poet Allen Ginsberg recount a literal acoustic visitation in his life, one that occurred while he was masturbating to William Blake’s poetry—a physical act that would simply be impossible for me.) Awkwardly I reveal here my own private details, but only because they offer a perfect metaphor for existence, a ninth axiom of existence essential to my paradigm: Existence must be shared.

           And here, indeed, I need as a teacher a full paragraph to highlight this axiom: Aside from knowing that the absolute Good exists, I regard this as the most profound truth I can offer any student or reader. This is not just an issue of love versus orgasm, which could easily be mistaken for the moral of the story. Because the Good itself remains eternally alien & distant from us, “existence must be shared” becomes the most immediate & practical defining aspect of existence. It is our best rule to live by.

           Let me return once more to our milestone Session 10, finally having laid the groundwork for what I consider to be the single “biggest” reply we ever received at the ouija board—though it took me twenty-five years to understand so. After our Guide, measure for measure, shot down everything Scribe & I regarded in life as real (i.e., objective)—including time, space, biology, history, geography, and geology—we turned our questioning around:

22.      Q:           What in our conscious experience is not a myth?
           A (Guide):   EX1STENCE [NO] MYTH
                                I  AM HERE     YOU ARE ALSO

           To explain what my Guide says here so simply, so profoundly, let’s briefly recall the starting point of modern philosophy, René Descartes’s observation,

                                 I think; therefore I am.

           In his Discourse on the Method Descartes conducts a ground-breaking thought-experiment, where his subjective sensory perceptions don’t correspond to objective reality, but rather comprise a most convincing delusion: Suppose a demon is fucking with my brain,…  (Apparently Descartes’s insights, both philosophical & mathematical, came to him in three successive dreams in 1619 when he was 23, dreams he regarded as divine visions.) And thus he called into question the full content of his subjective experience. With a demon in charge, nothing he saw, heard, felt, smelled, or even thought could be trusted. Was anything reliable? Was there an article of knowledge, prior to content, that could be known with certainty?
           Yes, said Descartes. That I think at all implies I must exist. (If p, then q.)

           Now in many ways my own paradigm of existence & eternity couldn’t be further from Descartes’s (who “proved” his Christian faith, incidentally). Yet I like to start with his famous ontological origin, to use it as a means for framing my Guide’s formulation above. I also like to think of this mathematically, as Descartes himself very much did, since he simultaneously invented the coordinate graphing system & analytic geometry. “Cogito ergo sum” thus marked for him his Cartesian point of origin, GPST coordinates (0,0,0,0), in a divine geometry of souls.

           So let me now slow down this thinking process to its tiniest steps & increments, that I may reveal the depth of my Guide’s response.

                      1) There is no objective reality. It’s myth, projection. Session 10 tells us this

           explicitly. All worlds are creations and can be projected differently. By the rules

           of logic, Descartes said that thinking implies existence—and thus thinking is a

           subset of a larger set, existing. But I take thinking much further than Descartes. 

           I assert that thinking and existing are a logical identity, that they are exactly the

           same thing. (I think = I am: “I am that I am.” – Exodus. If p, then p.)

                      2) Strip away all metaphor. Strip away the physical flesh and the fabric of

           the universe which are but manifestations of thought. Strip away the masks and

           personalities attached to each individual at birth, which then pile on throughout

           life, one upon the rest. Strip away all extraneous crap from a soul’s personal résumé,

           the wheat chaff & white noise. What’s left? What is not a myth? Existence only. 

            (I am, p)

                       3) (Now the profound part:)  Existence must be shared. I offer an analogy:

           First, let’s remember Relativity and how, contrary to our common experience, the

           faster something travels (in space, generally), the slower time passes for it (relative

           to slow-moving objects). For proper grounding, let’s recall overtly that Einstein’s

           theory, at least in this regard, has been experimentally proved, with atomic clocks

           flying around on jumbo jets, for example, among other experiments. Strange as they

           might seem, Einstein's equations correspond well with observed reality, if you look

           hard enough. And of course the equations define an absolute limit, c, the speed of

           light, at which speed time stops completely.
                      Now let’s let a thought (or even a soul) be represented by a photon, a particle

           of  light speeding through empty space. Following the rules of Relativity, as long as

           this thought maintains its proper pace, c, no time passes. From Points A to B or

           from A to Z, a vast difference in spatial distance makes no difference in perception.

           At the speed of light all travel appears instantaneous, because for the traveler it is.

           Which means exactly nothing happens. And if this thought or soul manages to

           cross all the way to the farthest edge of the universe without colliding into anything,

           then it has no impact on the universe whatsoever. It never existed. 
                       To confirm the phantom photon’s non-existence, go grab a scientist and

           plant her on a well-placed planet to witness the photon flying past. She can’t. 

           Photons are completely undetectable until they hit something. They’re not simply

           invisible; they’re virtual only, undetermined potential. 

                       No collision = no observation = nothing. 

                       4) So when my Guide insists, “I am here,” he necessarily must also include,

           “You are also.” Otherwise there is no collision, no shared event, no existence. My

           Guide is stating a biconditional: I am here if and only if you are also. Here are some

           other ways to think of this, interesting corollaries if you will: 

                      a)  A soul alone does not exist. (“No man is an island.” - Donne)
                    b)  All actions are interactions.
                    c)  All we experience is our collisions. 
                    d)  All ports & worlds have at least two creators. (Some have

                          billions.)

           Most philosophies and religions believe that social interactions are important to existence. I insist that they are a condition of existence. Of course, one can live/exist alone in the Alaskan wilderness for a hundred years. I’m not talking about our lifetimes, which on this shared Earthly stage already mark shared events. I speak of a soul against Infinity. What is the sound of one hand clapping? (p iff q)

           And how does this look in Cartesian geometry? Consider mapping a soul (yours, mine, anyone’s) onto a spacetime representation—that is, locating a person’s life in time, using four-dimensional Cartesian coordinates. Since spacetime physically exists, the mapped soul must be assigned specific coordinates (a, b, c, d), not variables (x, y, z, t). —Except in this example, for representation on a 2-d book page, we’ll reduce our chosen soul to two dimensions only, (a, b). The math is no different. Nor does the math change if you choose completely different dimensions or a far greater number of them. But you have to choose.
           Now locate (a, b) on the graph. Wait. I’ll make it easier: Let a = 2 and b = -3. 

Thus, locate (2, -3).

           Nope, we can’t. No point, taken by itself, is graphable. The numbers mean nothing without a context (place). Two more pieces of information are needed before any point (here, a soul) can be located, before it exists (since location here determines the soul’s identity). We need an origin (that is, a reference point, a second soul), and we need a scale with measurable units. Most students assume that the center of any graph has the coordinates (0,0) and that the scored hash marks count off intervals of 1 unit. In my class they soon learned otherwise. Origins can be any determined point (which is important when speaking of eternity), and scales need not even follow arithmetic sequences (e.g., the Richter Scale is logarithmic). More important, by what units (if not by strict spatial coordinates) do we measure a soul?
           So whether we view existence through the looking glass of existential logic or via simple coordinate graphing, existence must be shared. But a rally of rabid Trump supporters, for example, doesn’t necessarily qualify as good “sharing,” nor does a miserable huddle of anxious Democrats. This is where scale comes in. Having an origin that’s too close to the given soul-point is not helpful and can lead to distortion. Most of us deride “the echo chamber” of politics today, where people listen to the media that agree with their own views only. The extremism that results is essentially a distortion of scale (perhaps value?). Points too distant are of little help either. Jesus has been dead for 2000 years. Can His soul prove relevant to those of us trying to save the planet? Can you define your own identity through Him? (Many do, or at least think they do.) One needs the right origin and the right scale. How to determine what’s right is the subject of my whole curriculum. Importantly, in no way will I try to determine what is right for you or anyone else. (Free will is sacred.) But I aim to help you in your self-determination.

           Here are two examples of bad scaling:




 

​
           Above, I list four quick corollaries to my “fifth postulate,” existence must be shared. Here are two more that stem from the graphical representation:

                        e) Each human soul needs an origin. (Souls originate in life.)
                      f) Souls who lose their origins lose all scale and eventually

                     themselves, while humans in life who lose their souls lose

                     eternity itself, ending in a singularity, a point, nothing. 

                          (This should terrify you, poor Reader.)

           Descartes has long been criticized for his dualism, his separation of mind & body, which some thinkers place at the root of our modern collective “psychic break” from Nature—a centrifugal scattering function, which isolates individuals & alienates everyone. Accordingly, separation then gets “blamed” for tribalism (which is ancient) and our devolving inevitably to Marxist estrangement & social psychosis. I confess my academic ignorance here, for I don’t see how Descartes’ division differs significantly from Jesus’s exhortation: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…” as I likewise cleave existence in twain: all that is finite versus Infinity. We are at our core binary beings.
           Still, I think there remain deeper problems in Cartesian thinking & representation, which, thanks to science and later philosophers, thoroughly pervade our modern paradigm. Many argue they’re at the root of our global crisis, for if all we think is all we are, then we all seem to be thinking ourselves along the same irrevocable trajectory. All rivers flush downhill.
           Here’s one such issue: Educated people tend to be so jaded by Descartes’s maxim (and conditioned by efficiencies in human language) that we take Descartes’s words I think actually to mean something. I don’t think they do. Despite grammatical nitpickings, despite what the OED might say, isn’t the verb “to think” strictly transitive? That is, in order to think don’t we have to think about something? Thinking can’t happen in isolation, without content. Content, in turn, can’t exist in isolation; it must relate to other content. We all know the problem of defining a word by using the word itself in the definition. Other words are needed, and they, in turn, need other words to define them, different words. Descartes was right to say that one’s thinking content might be demon fake news, but content can’t be omitted altogether. You can’t just think. Descartes replaced his delusional content with a meta-idea, a thought about thinking. Nevertheless, a meta-idea is still an idea and is probably just as delusional.
           And herein lies the existential rub: There is no “generic” or “random” or “standard” existence. To exist is to choose a specified projection of defined & exact form, starting with a unique place and figure—named coordinates, not variables. And in choosing one path, one unique existence, all others under consideration are so cancelled & lost to history, uncharted potential that never happens, never was. (President Hillary, alas!) Every choice we make thus cuts off & prunes a zillion trees & branches where outcomes might have been different, could have been otherwise. It is not uncommon, then, to feel such lost future-filaments untying as pain or release or grief, the death of caring. Indeed, most of us live with such pain.

           Once we understand that we are not what, but how we think, then we immediately must recognize that there are an infinite number of different ways to think, some better than others depending on the need and circumstance. Most ways of thinking, in fact, must be utterly alien to our own, completely incompatible with our human minds. Such minds who think in completely different ways would thus never connect with our own, just as skew lines never intersect. But other alien minds must, to varying degrees, overlap with our own in nature. In fact, some alien minds in eternity must exist that would prove quite compatible with our own, and as such, these minds could offer us insights otherwise unavailable to us, and vice-versa. One might see, in fact, that living in a global bubble of 7.6 billion human minds on a dying 3-d planet in the year 2020 is probably just as much an echo chamber (in eternity) as chanting hate slogans at a Trump rally. That is, as a condition of existence, we must get out of our bubble and encounter new minds. Existence must be shared, must be weighted as a mandate for daring new encounters. To remain in our bubble, sharing only what we already know & believe & are comfortable with is simply masturbatory, ultimately to lose existence itself.
           And so we do get out. That is, we connect with alien minds, a few distinct species, while we also train to avoid others, some quite dangerous. One alien species in particular is compatible with our own human minds to the point of symbiosis. We need each other. Thus, within the Jewel Net every member belongs to at least one learning circle, and every circle includes one such alien mind (who works with us on exchange from another karass). My own circle, we know, includes seven humans (in chronological order): Josef, Vilansit, Anand, Don, Albion, Scribe, and Jane, and we also have our Guide. Guide, first to make himself known to us, has no human name. We are told to think of him as a “butterfly” who flits from voice to voice to aid our communication, but this is a conceit. He is a daimon, a powerful force unlike anything we can conceive, but is as close to us as our personal thoughts & dreams, closer, in fact, than any other human to any of us. Other circles have their own daimones. Our Guide is ours alone.







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​​The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you move the cursor to hover over one of the Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.