Lesson 5: Soul 1

Jorge Luis Borges

1899 - 1986

∞!

albionspeak: a draught of language

Lesson 5: Soul (Part I)

1. The Aleph Principle

In 1874 Georg Cantor proved that for all Real numbers on the Number Line, between any two points (from 0 to 1, let's say) there are not only an infinite number of points; this set is equal in size to the set that includes all the points along the entire line. It's also equal in number to all the points that occupy a Cartesian coordinate plane, or 3-d space, or hyperspace, or any space of any finite number of dimensions.
Now take this idea of expanding, radiating infinities and shoot it back in the opposite direction, like reverse-engineering the Big Bang: You have "the aleph principle," a single point that contains eternity. It can be a window or a door or a white hole that makes a new universe. Or it can be a human soul.

In Lesson 2 I asked, how big is an idea, a word, a god? And of course, speaking in overview mode from Albion’s peak, I have no answer to this, since these are abstract concepts and size is a physical measure only. So it is with a soul. Outside of space, size doesn’t matter. We can think of ourselves as “big” if we choose, as the swollen sum of our knowledges & experiences, or we can see ourselves as a tiny unitary mind bounded by its own limits & limitations, whether a circle or a bubble or a super-hypersphere. In infinity it makes no difference. For practical metaphysics, however—almost an oxymoron—I choose generally to reduce each soul or abstraction to a Euclidean point, a grain of sand, for my aim in this curriculum is to establish a language of eternity, one that in part extends Euclid’s geometrical metaphors (which don’t describe reality) to a functional geometry of souls, one with relevant revelations.
I postpone my analytics until Lesson 7, but I introduce its base unit here, the human soul, to give the reader time to digest this idea. Consider a human life: Are all lives equal? Is an aborted fetus equal to someone who lives a hundred years? Should we rather measure a life by its acts & accomplishments instead of its duration? Lots of centenarians, of course, live empty lives, while Anand “arrived” fully in his teens, then died at 21. And most major religions struggle hopelessly with such measures, mostly because they’re looking for objective ways to weigh a soul. But if there is no ob, there can be no ob measure. And if there is no objective measure of a soul, there likewise can be no objective measurer or weigher of souls, no judge nor Jesus nor higher justice dishing out punishments & party favors.
Recall when during Session 27 Scribe was sent by our teachers a vision of auroras, a visual perception of infant human souls: They appeared to him as a faint fog of undefined auto-luminescence, unfocused photoplankton. Later we learned that mature auroras, firefishes, depict humans able to intend locomotion. They move by focusing their minds & energies into a brilliant, targeted thought, a meteor that appears, in this visible primal metaphor, to shoot across (an image of) empty space before fading in a new location—which, of course, describes flight in perhaps its most elementary comprehensible form. A point thus moves in a straight line to another point, thereby redefining itself, becoming something/someone new.
It’s not hard then to apply simple geometry, especially that of spatial vectors, to this primal motion. But before I leave you to your single simple image, consider also our critical axiom, “existence must be shared.” The holosuite (another metaphor) travels nowhere. It can enhance a private experience perhaps, bloat one’s infant bubble a bit, but ultimately it does nothing. Even if a soul traverses a vast (finite) universe but never collides, it’s still just a point drifting. Human souls move; we collide with others by choice, choices gathered out of the fog of our minds into a singular focused act. If you can’t focus your mind, then you remain essentially nothing, ultimately soulless. These are the facts whether you’re dead or alive.
The point is, learn how to focus your mind. Lesson 5, then, attempts to describe a human soul’s measureless essence, while I also introduce how Scribe & I each trained. “Vastly unlike” each other, we received divergent trainings, which I offer as examples no reader should emulate. Perhaps, however, in seeing our examples, you might devise your own strategies & tasks for focus.

2. The Nine Men

I started writing albionspeak as a website on November 9, 2016, the single worst day of my life, that morning when I confirmed, oh God!, Donald Trump somehow had been elected president. I don’t say this as political theater or rhetoric, but simply as fact; I do not exaggerate. I was unprepared for my reaction, astonished by my apparent vulnerability. I felt my heart squeezed dangerously in my chest for at least three days; and I could not tame this physical effect (which I identified only later as my tiger). Let me be clear, I know how trivial this sounds. I know I’ve lived an incredibly blessed life, having suffered very little—especially compared to most people on this planet—but this particular traumatic event kick-started me into action. Of course, as I sit writing now in April 2020, from the comfort of my warm house & snug retirement—sheltering at home during this historic coronavirus pandemic—Trump has proved far worse than anything I could have imagined. The whole world is so much worse, with right-wing autocrats & fake news & the overt oppression of free thinking everywhere, violence against reason. It’s clear my own time & timing were no coincidence.
That is, I’ve known explicitly for nearly thirty years that I would be writing albionspeak at some point. Certainly by 1994 I understood that I’d been entrusted with one of the world’s great “received” revelations, equivalent in my mind to the Qur’an or Castaneda or the wisdom of Tibet. No way it was meant for me alone; surely I was charged to share it, to teach it to others. But in what form? I knew further that Scribe, as brilliant as he is—truly one of the world’s great minds—was not so charged. Rather, he’d stick largely to his poetry. Besides, I was always “the keeper” of this flame, the one who typed & commented on our session transcripts, the one who led the questioning and whose metaphysics dominate much of the dialogues. But I wasn’t qualified then for the task. Far from a flyer, I was neither a writer, nor even much of a reader, as I was too busy working my ass off just teaching & parenting. I had a very long road ahead.
Thus, on or just after November 9th I found myself writing differently, by which I mean I owned up to my duty. Yes, by 2016 I’d been working for years, practicing, writing letters & essays, piecing disparate jigsaw clues into any possible unity, and searching for my voice. In retrospect, I sense a tinge of irony here, because my voice had always been my strong suit, one that conveyed integrity. Indeed, I know deeply I’m not Scribe nor Don nor any of my other awesome associates; I’m surely no Josef. But I am me, and I’ve nearly always been able relate to people personally and express my deepest thoughts & feelings. Imagine, dear Reader, how many hard parent conferences I’ve conducted as a teacher, how many difficult messages. These conferences were regularly gut-wrenching & exhausting, and many were hopelessly unproductive; but I nearly always managed to say what needed to be said so that I was heard. I had my teaching expertise, and I had integrity.
What follows, then, I leave in its virgin form, as I wrote it for my albionspeak website in 2017, before I became a flyer. Yes, I went back later to Lessons 2 & 4 and rewrote & edited them extensively, while Lesson 9 today remains barely halfway started. But this lesson is better viewed in situ, in illo tempore—as I received it at the time—for it is autobiographical as a model, as I crawled my self-tortured mountain ascent, before I reached the shrine, before I knew I’d make it at all. Success for me was not foreordained, as my teachers made painfully clear in their own hard language, and I came very close to losing everything. I nearly lost my soul. So, dear Reader, please heed my dire warning.

July 2017

Every lesson in this website, as well as every letter, has had from its inception twin purposes:

a) Overtly, to offer one face or facet of the Jewel freely to the world

(because the world needs it), but also,
b) Most narrowly, to bring me, the knotted man trying to become

Albion, one step closer to flight, a means to a means.

            Each lesson I write here, then, counts for me personally as a step up, a measurable advance in my life, for the steps I speak of are defined & numbered, custom-designed by all eight of us in learning Circle Cup, each a teacher in the Jewel. The steps in sum constitute a formal curriculum, our "stairway to the sun," to flight. Named from a poem by Don, our flight of stairs is called The Nine Men, and before the awaited apprentice can summit, says the poem, a series of actions & events first must unfold, a sequence of conditions.

              "Before you come,
  an old monk will have to dream about an anchor;
                        a tiger in Sumatra will have to die;
  nine men must die in Borneo."

I want to steer clear of most intricacies of The Nine Men, which would simply confuse the reader. Some details, however, are unavoidable. Let me apply my overview to what's relevant:

Foremost, The Nine Men is a sequence of steps, 81 in all (9 x 9), that are designed to lead the apprentice in time—Scribe, me, probably Jane—to flight. While Anand may also have ascended such steps (I don't know), Advisor, a born flyer in Circle Sword, gets very different training. The nine men correspond to the eight members of Circle Cup plus the Jewel itself—even though, as Vilansit reminded us, "four are not male humans."
The mathematics of the Nine (I barely glimpse) are elegant, probably the closest thing to a "glass bead game" I can imagine. Instead of letters in an alphabet or elements in the Periodic Table, take nine eternal beings and counterweigh their identities & "vastly unlike" voices to create a structure of souls both in & out of time. I tend to picture a hanging mobile or atomic molecule—part organic skeleton, part art. From our perspectives in time, we see a two-dimensional matrix (pictured below), a set of nine names across the top with the same nine running down the left side, though in a different order. Importantly, Scribe & I share the same order of names down the left, the "presiders," while we have different "sequences" along the top.

Let me offer a little history here to hang flesh on this skeleton, even if the story is not my own.

            I don't recall exactly when Scribe gave up his PhD. I can't believe he was challenged by it, surely the opposite, staring at decades of repetitive graduate seminars and critics' polemics. Besides, he loved poetry too much, couldn't get enough of it, could see no higher calling. I speak in past tense, because something astonishing happened in 1994 that didn't change his life vector much—the die having already been cast—but changed profoundly how Scribe created his art.
            Scribe is by far the smartest, best-educated person I will ever know (scary). Here's a tidbit that illustrates how incomprehensible I find his brain: Before 1994—that is, for fifteen years or more—Scribe constructed or crafted all his poems—which, to be clear, is the exact opposite of flight. That is, he'd have the whole poem planned in advance, including concepts, layers of metaphors, classical allusions, contrasting philologies, etc. Each poem, therefore, proved a brilliant & tidy aesthetic argument, though rarely a surprise, rarely flight. Scribe scripted all his surprises.
            Now when I craft a poem, I get crap. I tend to learn something from the exercise, but the result is so bad it fools no one. I also know flight and can contrast an artifact of flight from a mere mortal effort. I certainly can't plan a poem. But Scribe's crap was so intelligent & intricate & deep in its allusions (to allusions to allusions) that it masqueraded as quality. Compared to other published poets, few of them flyers, Scribe was incredibly "smart & talented" (as Schopenhauer might lament). He published in the major journals, served on editorial boards, and, no doubt, amazed everyone around him with his overwhelming knowledge: He must be good. But Scribe could see the difference, the gap between his manufactured products and real flight—because he knew literature and because he himself had flown on occasion—and this ate at him, driving him harder. Scribe's genius overshadows another of his great gifts, his irresistible work ethic. He just kept pushing himself to improve, cranking out the verse, learning all the time.

            All that changed literally overnight. Scribe got up one afternoon per usual (night owl) and found himself composing a poem without the whole game plan in advance. Yes, he knew his poem's general tone & subject matter, the world he wished to draw upon, but little more. He just let it happen…
            Now up to this point Scribe's poems tended to run 25 to 30 lines, dense & focused. Suddenly he found himself wandering, both in his new world and in his approach to verse.   That first day he wrote a dozen lines (I believe), but he didn't finish the poem. In fact, I think he left it hanging in the middle of a thought. Then the next day, when he returned to his work, again without a plan, he picked up his unfinished thought right where it left off. This became his writing method for the next five years. All 81 steps of Scribe's Nine Men became poems composed in this manner: writing every day exactly the same number of lines (which later varied from poem to poem, 8-15 lines) and ending each day's work on an unfinished thought, often an incomplete sentence. Scribe also never went back to revise or edit. Each day's work was final.
            Non-poets won't appreciate the math: Twelve lines of poetry may not sound like an honest day's work, but twelve lines every day for months on end adds up like compound interest, like snowflakes forming a glacier. In just over a week Scribe wound up his first scribal poem, 96 lines, the longest, maybe the best he'd ever written. And there was something else, too: The whole time while Scribe was composing, he felt deeply connected to Anand, as if he were seeing through our fakir's eyes, thinking with his sensibility. While there is no tinge of Anand in the voice or content of this poem—nothing about India or rivers or ascetic enlightenment—Scribe nonetheless became convinced that he was working under Anand's aegis.
            Scribe's next poem drove home this new reception: Same  process—that is, no planning or next-day editing—except this time change the lens or mind through whom Scribe would see. Now it was Jane's turn to colour Scribe's art, the next link in his chain, where under her aegis & to his wonder Scribe found himself composing—not a new poem—but an extension of his collaboration with Anand, a second poem of identical form. These, in fact, would form two cantos of a single, much larger work, a "book" that eventually included (no surprise here) nine cantos in all.
            Still we didn't get it: That is, as Scribe methodically plowed his way through his 864 line poem, he knew he'd found a process, one that fundamentally altered his art. He also found it extremely helpful (i.e., pragmatic) to think of our circle's members as guiding influences; maybe there was even a true sharing of thoughts. Yes. But it wasn't until Scribe was nearly halfway into his next 864 line poem—indeed Book II of his eventual four-book book-length poem, 3456 lines in all!—that he found himself following exactly the same sequence of collaborators he had the first time around: Anand first, Jane second, Albion third, and so on, each of the Nine settling into precisely the same relative slot. I pointed out the probability of this occurring randomly—that is, of repeating the same sequence of nine items in the same order exactly—is 1/9! (factorial), or 1/362,880, not likely a coincidence.

            Thus Scribe discovered The Nine Men, both his own sequence, as well as the real, albeit non-physical existence of the curriculum itself (which is how I learned of it as well). Of course, Scribe didn't know it was a curriculum. He thought it was an aesthetic process, a way to write poetry using a spectrum of voices that matched the sensibility of his art. Imagine, he once told me, rearranging the "Roy G. Biv" rainbow colors in a different order, how that might feel.
            There was, however, one discrepancy—a "clue," we'd say—which gave Scribe pause: Josef is the last man in Scribe's sequence and thus marked the last canto to be written in each of the four books. But this particular canto did not fall last in the poem (at least not in Book I). The place, in fact, where it was ultimately inserted, Scribe intuited to leave blank. He skipped that canto, reserving the spot, knowing when he first arrived he wasn't ready yet. Then, maybe five weeks later, having progressed through a few more cantos and reaching Josef's final slot, then he was ready.   Strangely, this readiness had nothing to do with content knowledges (plot, for example). Scribe himself was simply not yet the being capable of producing that canto. The Nine Men sequence, therefore, didn't follow the poem itself. It followed what was difficult. Last in Scribe's sequence, Josef's spot is the most distant link in Scribe's chain and thus is hardest to reach.

            That next summer then (1995), when Scribe brought his discoveries to our teachers at the board, we learned that The Nine Men is not about writing poetry, even if Scribe most reasonably equated the two. It's about the mind of the apprentice who writes. (This is profound, so please pay close attention…) Yes, for Scribe The Nine Men became 81 poems, because he's a poet, and, yes, The Nine Men are perceived by each apprentice as tasks to be completed in time (or in my case, the Labors of Hercules). But what they really are—don't say "represent"—is distinct minds. The Nine Men are not things we do; they are minds we must become. Not symbolically, not figuratively. It is real transformation. Scribe made it look easy. God, it's not. It can't be. If it were easy, it wouldn't be a true step up.

3. Petite Morts

            When I first began writing this lesson on soul, taking on its necessary mind, I did so with strange trepidation, more trust than confidence. Of course, I start nearly every task so daunted. (And notice, my very language gives me away: What I call "task" Scribe called "poem.") The man in time who starts each task is not the man who can or will finish it. And I know it—which is a little suicidal, if you think about it. I fully recognize that I'm working for hours & eons, pushing the envelope of myself, my very ego identity, so that I might end my existence… in what? Someone else? For when we pass the baton of our human attention from a lower to a higher mind, how is that departed mind not extinguished? Nine men must die in Borneo.

            That's always the case, though—every step a new mind. Nevertheless, as I began here, I felt less confident about the subject matter itself. Which is silly, I said. I, a non-flyer, just finished a whole lesson on flight (with humble authority, I hope). I've known my eternal soul for my entire conscious life, an awareness which has propelled me on this active, life-long pursuit. With my teachers' gifts I have a body of knowledge that others do not possess. Why such dread?
            Quick examination revealed my gross error. I'd been comparing apples & absolutes. Flight is an event, a state of mind that connects a soul to the object of its intent, a discharge. —Which is pretty straightforward actually, reducible in theory to a single thought (or sentence) despite its being hard to enact. Souls are neither events nor objects. Souls are beings across many states of being, where each is a "unique and irreplaceable individual" (Vilansit). Here's a short list of a soul's eternal properties (which completely justifies my cowed temerity):

                        a) Each soul has absolute, thus infinite value. (A soul lost is

thus a real tragedy, absolute loss.)
b) Souls are elemental & irreducible. (No cloven souls.)
c) Souls are eternal, which means they open to Infinity and

are therefore incomprehensible.[2]
d) We are absolutely incomprehensible to ourselves.

Now let me also offer a factual comparison that I try hard to keep in mind, because it's so counter to our experience: The whole of the physical universe is finite. It consists of a finite amount of matter & energy (dark or otherwise). It has a finite volume, a measurable age since its birth, a lowest possible temperature, a highest speed, a smallest length, and an interval of time too brief to count. Space & time themselves are finite structures which have a beginning & end. Even the vacuum of space ends, and will end in time, presumably once cosmic expansion has torn its existential fabric so asunder there's no there there to bump against.

Souls, in contrast, have no beginning or end (except as lives in time). I am reluctant to declare us each "bigger than the universe," for the comparison seems incompatible, meaningless. Rather, I remember—as a cardinal point of knowledge, an anchor on reality—that the idea of a soul is greater than the idea of a universe, infinitely greater. I believe each soul literally houses stores of potential power vastly bigger than the Big Bang and its billowing aftermath. For just as eternity can be squeezed into an aleph point, so might that point escape containment.
Let us be grateful then, that this planetary port—this soul-nursery of 7.4 billion infant infinities—comes with built-in safeguards. It's a good thing that few people, if anyone, can access their full power. Imagine if someone—or maybe everyone—woke up tomorrow to find we each had the power of gods. What would Trump do?

4. A Disclaimer & Distinction, but no Definition

            Before we make an argument or reach agreement, before we roll out our axioms, like chains of paper dolls, to certify our experience via reason, before we can communicate anything at all, we need definitions. In math, words like point, line, and space come delivered from absolute nowhere—can be compared to God's separating the earth from the heavens and the seas from the land—because we have to start somewhere…
            But I can't begin to define the word soul. I know, for instance, that daimones like my guide do not meet the eternal OED definition. Daimones are "emissaries of eternity," many-minded & multi-present beings—nothing like us. Souls, in contrast, according to my guide, include both eternal & non-eternal humans, and people in life remain both until they choose one fate or the other. This is much like the path of an electron, which is virtual only (i.e., it doesn't exist) until someone observes it collide.
            Speaking from Albion's vantage of overview, however, I respectfully reject my guide's definition. For me, non-eternal people are not souls. Having always known eternity, I identify myself pretty exclusively with my soul, the mind behind & beyond my body. That is me. My flesh, which I much appreciate & take good care of, is a rented vehicle only, depreciating every year. But more, from my watch in eternity I see the existential fact, post virtual. Forever is my concern: A spark is not an eternal flame. Therefore, I grudgingly accept a person's right to self-annihilate, but a person who does this leaves no lasting trace, no more than an actress on celluloid or a name in a book. An eternal soul might recall a book, including the one that bears her own name, but a name on a page won't recall anything. To me, a seed that never germinates should not be called a tree.
            Throughout these lessons, then, I speak to eternal human souls only:

5. Attention, a Counterexample

So let's look at something fun, one of Scribe's & my favorite paragraphs in all of literature, which I unabashedly steal, like "the aleph principle" above, from Jorge Luis Borges. The following is from his short story Funes, His Memory, a portrait of a young man who is paralyzed in a riding accident, but is hardly bothered by his lost legs, for he awakens to a perfect mind.

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table;

Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the

stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the

southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them

in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen

only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on

the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple—every

visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so

on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had.

Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once

erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day.

"I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world

began," he said to me. And also: "My dreams are like other people's waking

hours." And again, toward dawn: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap."

A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus—all these forms

we can fully intuit; Ireneo [Funes] could do the same with the stormy mane

of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire

and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I

have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.

                                                                                    - translated by Andrew Hurley

            Each time I read this paragraph I chuckle out loud in awe of Borges. What amazing images, what prose! But what really makes me marvel is his Swiftian premise… This is no man. It's a joke, a "modest proposal" of a man. Please, dear Reader, step outside the fiction for a moment: Of course, no actual person Ireneo Funes lived. And no, we can safely assume, no one in human history has ever attained such insight. Jesus maybe? The Buddha? No, no one at all, neither in time nor outside of it, not even our most fully realized eternal souls. For Borges does not describe something human.
            Actually Borges contrives to conflate two different species of being, neither of which has a soul. The first we'll call Funes the Memorius (after an earlier translation), and we'll stipulate that this Funes can recall any memory, but always in an eidetic fashion, that the experience is so vivid he re-experiences it fully & exactly. As a result, Funes is unable to step back from his experiences and generalize from them. He is not a creator; he's a robot. Even abstract numbers (the narrator explains elsewhere) are perceived by Funes not as quantities and math, but as concrete & unique events, each time he encounters one.
            There is speculation that Borges (the author) actually read of such a person, for real people with "perfect" memory do pop up in history, people who remember seemingly everything—including being born, for example. A.R. Luria medically documents one such case study in his short book The Mnemonist, about a sad man whose perfect memory was surely a perfect curse.[3] Unable to forget anything, his very identity was atomized among the ever-growing "slagheap" of his memories, all equally lucent & palpable & flat, for, as most of us understand, the depth of a memory is less about external events than the intensity of our internal reaction to these events. The mnemonist was so absorbed by each & every detail he had no reaction at all, no way to sort or prioritize his memories. Within his beckoning jumble he could form no attachments, unable to distinguish value, social relationships, or simple truth from fiction. The mnemonist, therefore, was a simpleton, easily deceived, completely unable to direct his own life. All memories are potential lures; most should not be followed. Where is the center? Where's your origin?

            I'll return to Mr. Memorius in a moment, but let's quickly bring in the second Funes, Funes the Omniscient, a.k.a. Funes the Absurd. While Borges playfully focuses here on memories, which are directly-experienced subjective facts,[4] he lets slip, in many places, that Funes is a creator as well—not a repository only, but a god. In the first sentence above, for example, we can safely assume that no man has literally seen all the grapes & stalks & tendrils in a glass of wine, nor that any man could trace them through a press. Funes's perception, therefore, is greater than his direct experience, for here Funes perceives by imagination, by active creation—fiction, Borges would say—who then restates by exemplar his own aleph principle: A wineglass becomes the point to ply a portal.
            More subtle than these grapes—but just as infinite in implication—are the comparisons Funes makes (clouds-binding-spray), which are not themselves past memories, but newly minted connections between & among memories. To compare is to create. One might ask Funes, what is the basis for his comparison? What meaning does he give it, what value? Why compare at all? For what else might a god compare? (Or rather, ask the god to name two memories he won't compare.) One assumes, in this particular case, that the matched shapes share common geometries, but how common? A cloud and a marbled binding are not the same, and yet they're close enough that Funes recalls them together. But this implies that Funes has devised & defined criteria for his comparing, degrees of commonality that satisfy certain pairings of shapes, while failing to satisfy many more. How many shapes must cross his vast mental landscape before Funes foists up the highlighted pair? Borges implies these are special relationships, special enough to highlight, but he also implies that all possible pairings within such a mind are unique & special. Furthermore, Funes can't forget or ignore any of them.

            Now let's put Funes aside briefly to recall that normal, non-flying people routinely pull off such miracles. Our remembered sets of acquired facts—the palette of memories we work with—may be quite limited compared to Funes's, but we are creators nonetheless. We might not compare the morning cloud & marbled binding, since we'd probably miss associating them entirely. But a normal person could easily contrast them if they were laid side-by-side—discriminating geometrically, but also aesthetically, or from considerations of utility, history & culture, one's personal chemistry with said objects, or simply from vague abdominal sign. These comparisons—the kind we create spontaneously & use in vital discernments all the time—are far more impressive mental feats than the mere robo-recall of a Memorius. (Ask an AI engineer.) We also simply don't give our subconscious minds enough credit. Human brains are fucking amazing. Most of our mental heavy-lifting—the massive data-crunching necessary just to cross a street, let's say—is managed by our own inner Funes, the silent one who's constantly plotting vectors, solving quadratic equations (for gravity), and pulling muscle strings nearly everywhere beneath our conscious awareness just to keep us in stride. Most of us don't recall learning to walk or how incredibly difficult it is mentally to navigate space. Let us be grateful, then, that our personal-assistant, Funes the Unconscious, pays close attention to all our relevant piloting details (sorting out the irrelevant ones), so we don't have to.
            The fact is, humans are memory machines already, not memories gone awry. In Borges's story, the narrator samples Funes's memories like he's pointing out stars & constellations, but this isn't astrology. The fiction of the Memorius is that a person is no more than his memories, a finite sum however measured. (By definition souls are eternal.) The fiction of Funes the Omniscient is that someone could ever be Infinity itself. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but particularly because Infinity is precisely the chaos we each clawed our very minds from. Didn't we just arrive?[5] Tossed up & gasping on the shore of our new & autonomous identity, the last thing we want is to dive right back.

            Actually, when Funes penetrates the complete history of grapes or when he perceives the Platonic form of a stormy mane, these are well-described perceptions of flight, precisely what higher human minds do accomplish regularly. Non-flyers cannot make these leaps, which is why the descriptions seem rather fantastical here. But anyone of intuition will understand what Borges artfully intimates. Flight can instantly follow a fiber of thought wherever it leads.
            But that's one fiber, a single linear thread, not the entire fucking Loom at once—which is the immodest part about Borges's proposed man: What makes Funes O. so absurd? What prevents him from recalling & perceiving & comparing all these memories? Nothing. He can. People do. But no human mind can do all these things at once. This is a matter of attention. The human soul is eternal, potentially infinite. Attention is a finite portion of that, the part at any given moment that matters, the part that counts.

Human minds can gather many disparate "memories" (people, things, events, nouns) and bundle them together (via choosing, via verbs) into one thing, a single thought, an aleph. We also have the ability to intend & pull & connect two distant aleph points, Here & There. Once two points collide, momently to become one, we may then unpack such a point, immersing our minds within its infinite synthesis (since our aleph function comes with an inverse button). We can shift our attentions from point to point, moment to moment, zoom in to zoom out, but we can't divide our minds among many functions & foci at once.

6. Scylla & Charybdis

            What Borges presents as two poles of mind, the Infinite & the Finite, I will now characterize as two ancient eternal dangers, Scylla & Charybdis, because it is our task to pass "betwixt the twain"—to thread the needle in a haystack of our own mind-making—and there's no way through without cost. Odysseus gave up six men rather than lose all. Our own calculations should prove equally brutal. (I count nine.) On our left, we'll entertain, is Finity the Memorius, the sum of all one's "memories"—which equals literally zero, nothing, nonexistence itself—that is, when compared with Infinity on the right. If we pass too close to the left, we end—meaning, as soon as we stop pushing ourselves to grow & take risks & share our existence, we drift left and begin to collapse. Such a human collapse was pictured acutely by the Greeks as the whirlpool Charybdis. Today my circle has updated this image and call this death spiral a black hole—which (again) is not a soul, since souls are eternal. And yes, the world is full of such people.
            So yes, alas, you can lose your soul, if you ever had one. It happens all the time. Generally such an inward descent takes years in life to manifest, decades to submit to habit. Each person orbits his destiny many times before decay is irreversible.   At some point, though, the horizon is met & passed—not a big bang, but a whimper that makes no sound in the forest. We know such people. They're friends & family members we love but can't help. To say they're "lost" or "doomed" is to forget that we, in any karass, choose eternity, while they in their "real lives" chose exactly what they wanted, too. They chose & got life instead. Should we be saddened by this? But most of these people made their choice by default, by not choosing at all. And most do not enjoy their lives. To me, this is the very definition of hell itself, so free will aside, I advise nonetheless: Don't sail left.
            On our right, however, Scylla awaits, the ravenous many-headed monster, who also aptly relates a real danger, Infinity. Infinity can't be embraced, can't even be faced without filters & blinders, for humans are not many-minded  (as daimones are). Our attentions face one thing at a time. A human with many heads can't manage any of them, as each is & has a mind of its own. No wonder each brainless head is ravenous, starved for attention, for attention always seeks itself, feeds on itself. Scylla is what's left of a human mind before it divides & splinters completely into infinitesimals, each scintilla of attention lost where Infinity has pulled it. But Scylla, however nasty, is not a true villainess here, and might even prove a guardian. She's a dire warning of the rocks behind her, where sirens' songs and a zillion overwhelming temptations surely will send one swirling to annihilation. Don't sail right.

            Kiss the monster—Circe's advice to Odysseus. There's no other choice, no chance otherwise. And Circe spoke the truth, just not the whole of it. The hole of Charybdis, though an absolute end, yes, is rarely lethal the second you dip your toe in it. As relentless as time itself, it still takes years to imprint on most victims its hypnotic vortex & destiny. Therefore, with choice & effort & faith & deeds, it is possible to exit this whirlpool. Theoretically at least, that's how people still have free will right up to the end. And then they don't…
            So before you heed the witch—the temptress who (btw) changed your men to swine and caused you to forget yourself—you might consider a risk-fraught transit around Charybdis first: to scout the rocks ahead, of course, but more, for time on the wide wide whirl to ready yourself, years & years. No one said you had to dive into this fray ill prepared or still "dripping in your hair from sleep."[6] Charybdis is a dangerous eddy only, a wheel of life whose powerful currents might be employed to a higher end, if steered safely along higher, guided orbits. There are skills you can gather in life, strategies & maps. If you dare wait, you can prepare yourself for the "fearsome" narrow passage at a future date, but do weigh the cost carefully. You can't postpone forever.
            Indeed, the hole is not a choice. To risk its course takes on two challenges, not one, for Scylla looms flailing regardless. Charybdis at best is a chance to improve yourself, and thus better your odds against the strait. But time to prepare, of course, means more time to forget your course, the common fate. Years of wear & tear & fear of the unknown will stake claims on your mind, your limited attention, where every easy path through life is death. Just as you might pinch yourself in a dream, remember always while awake: If you're not fighting the current, you're going down.[7] At worst this circuit is an end before you start.
            And then what? How do you train? How do you track your life from within the hole—with care, with due diligence & vigilance, avoiding grave error? How do you recall the stars of Heaven from the bottom of a well? How do you navigate if you don't know what gravity feels like? (In a falling elevator, as Einstein noted, it feels like nothing.) What star might you steer by, since your fixed origin in eternity cannot be the same sun to which you next affix yourself?[8] You can train so fervently your whole life that you forget to get off this treadmill. You can miss your freeway exit and have no way to backtrack in traffic—except yet another fucking roundabout detour, maybe a decade or more of commuting this whirl—meanwhile, another roll of the dice. And even if you do manage to fall off the wheel in time, then come face to face to face to face with Scylla—the fragmentation of your projected nightmares—will you be better off for all your life's efforts? Or have just you misspent your years, exhausted yourself, lugged along useless baggage, bloated your mind into a mass of mangled memories & tangled knots but no more & not less? You could well test the straits in tatters, wasted before you enter, sinking in a leaky rubber life raft off Libya… Aging by itself, I will now attest, improves no one.

            So have you guessed the punch line? I can only circumscribe Charybdis so many times in this Homeric night-mirror & treasure map before you locate your busy life: X marks the spot.

YOU ARE HERE (I am also.)

You are Charybdis, as are we all. Charybdis is all around us, our portly planet of origin. For the non-eternal among us, it is the point of no-return as well. If we don't exit this nest, find a way to escape its overwhelming vortex & context—every thing we have & hold dear to be disavowed & tossed overboard—then we never existed. To be or not to be… It really does come down to this—not as a ponderous, adolescent rumination, one's ego dangling casually from some castle rampart—but as an immediate & awakened existential choice: Right here, right now. No pressure, right?
(This is what gravity feels like inside a black hole. It pulls from your center, not at your feet.)

7. Boy on the Bubble

[At this point Albion, my overseer, directs me to insert the following drug-induced mystical experience, what I regard as #2 in the canon of my all-time, most profound experiences. Without yet knowing how this event is to be connected to my Greek metaphor, I'll proceed:]

            I was 19. It was spring semester of my junior year, a sunny mid-afternoon, and, most strangely, I wasn't playing soccer. I had a free afternoon, undoubtedly the first in months. Why not join "the Zoo" (my stoner friends) at Maggie's place for a sample of her brand-new Maui Wowie? Would it live up to its hype? (This would be the first, though hardly the last time I'd find God via this legendary source.) Before relating the experience—which could have just as easily occurred at home, on a mountaintop, or on the moon, but which transpired in a crowded dorm room single—I want to insist that the mere two hits of marijuana I inhaled could not alone possibly account for my vision below. The experiment has been replicated many times, both before & after the event, with widely varying results, but I've never gotten anything else remotely like this:
            I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with my back against the dresser. Of course the window was closed, and the shade was down—thus, dim lighting. Three large friends took up the bed, Dave, even bigger, filling the chair, Jeff in the beanbag, while Maggie, bong-master & mistress of ceremonies without compare, occupied the central space between the bed & bong, still standing somehow when no one else could. I took my first bong hit and immediately knew I was more wasted-yet-lucid than I'd ever been. I felt buoyant, dazzled by the mental rush, not stunned by the smoke, which was unlike any rush I'd felt before—lighter, energizing. In my amazement I gasped these very words to myself, "If I have another hit, I'm going to lose it completely!" And upon catching myself in this utterance, noting then with joy that I had the afternoon completely free, I said in epiphany, "Why not? Why not have a second hit?"   That is, "Why not lose it completely?" I have no memory of that second hit. I know there was no third.

            It's Christmas, somehow as seen from under the decorated Christmas tree: presents, stockings, hanging ornaments—bright colors & shiny objects. I must be lying on, practically in, a plush carpet of pure pleasure. Sophie, my favorite pet, the Siamese cat who raised me from infancy, is here! I love her. There's Candyland, too, my favorite game! All my favorite childhood things are gathered together in a setting of perfect peace & contentment, which goes on forever & ever & ever. I dissolve in its bliss…

            Suddenly it's over, painfully, like being born: I'm myself, or so I think, sitting on a giant bubble in space, much like the final image in my favorite movie at the time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The bubble is not Planet Earth exactly, although the scale seems about the same. I'm aware of the scene below, a scene I know well, because it's the Christmas setting I describe above, my vision of infant bliss, only now I've been extracted, by the roots & branches, and I'm me, older, hovering above it.
            Do you want to go back? I do not hear words, but a higher mind—not me—offers a clear choice. Do you want perfect bliss? Mine if I want it.
            Oh shit. I know the problem immediately. I've been studying philosophy and know better to salute thinking over pleasure. "The unexamined life is not worth living." But this is a tough call. Perfect bliss in my hands. Sitting there on my bubble, I recall John Stuart Mill's rebuttal to his own theory of utilitarianism: A satisfied pig is not worth a dissatisfied Socrates. But to forego such absolute joy in search of what…? Surely joy itself has value. And isn't philosophy ultimately just narcissistic masturbation? I recall my VW bumper-sticker (my own creation): Philosophers make better loafers.
            An interval passes, thought-time on the bubble (but also time in the stale dorm room, of which I'm entirely unaware). Finally, with a heavy heart, though resolved in choosing right, I voice my considered decision firmly to the empty darkness: No, I do not want my greatest bliss. I reject it and choose otherwise.
            Whew! I breathe in relief, taking a mental step back from the heat of the spotlight. That was close! Then addressing no one, in particular the no one who gave me the choice, I ask, "What now?" That is, having voiced my preference for Door #2, I sit awaiting my reward.
            Nothing. Nothing at all, not even stars outside the bubble. Just me & my Socratic defiance, hardly satisfied. Another moment goes by… still nothing, and then it hits me: The choice is not something we make once and then stand by forever. It's not a one-time choice. It's a choice we face continually, for nothing prevents us from choosing differently just a moment later, any moment later. Oh shit.
            My last awareness, complete resignation: the knowledge that no one can face perpetual temptation without giving in. I could hold out for a day, sitting on that bubble in space, bored to shit with my self-exiled existence—not looking in, of course, avoiding all glances, for a glimpse is all it takes to get sucked right back to Santa Claus. I could resist a thousand years, ten thousand in theory, but never forever. At some point I'd fall, knowing well that once I lay again within that bubble bliss & plush carpet, I'd never want to climb back out. I'd never consider it.

            The blunt end of this journey came with a profoundly confused return to physical consciousness. (My friends played mind-fuck games with me, entirely at my expense.) From start to finish the whole event lasted just under three hours, though throughout the next day I felt like I'd reentered my mind wrong-side-up and I had to squirm around all night inside my dreams to rearrange myself. At first I had to resist a near-screaming existential fear that I couldn't manage the trivialities of life—the cafeteria dread, for example, the number of spoonfuls it takes to stuff a human face, the many mindful efforts to chew & swallow—that I'd get lost in the working minutia, trees & branches everywhere, and have to be "declared legally insane." But with time I realized I could at least "fake it" indefinitely. I could still read people quite well and could manage the coded animal exchanges, even as I was repulsed by the transparent motives of vacuous social displays. I would either take on a new arrangement of myself, or I'd remain fragmented. But I would never get all my pieces back where they once were. And just as emotional pain can actually feel like physical pain, this reentry process, without being either, felt like both.
            Within three days, though, I was fine by every measure, including my own. I was me. I was back. Wiser from the experience, I knew I'd been granted the deepest of blessings and remain grateful to this day. (Never mind the boy who died.)

8. Homework

            I end with a crafted sonnet, the only one I've written that I don't regard as pure crap. But that's because I don't really think of it as a poem. If a sonnet is an argument, then this is more a proof that happens to be poetical. This also marked for me, when I wrote it in 2014, one full step on my Nine Men stairway, by far the smallest step in terms of finished length and (along with my Letter to Phu) the fastest for me to accomplish—taking just over a week. That's fourteen lines of poetry in a week.
            I say this to compare my nine men with Scribe's. From first to last, Scribe knocked off his men with clockwork precision, about 12 lines per day—a goddam remarkable achievement. At my very fastest I never touched Scribe's pace. I also didn't write much poetry. In fact, only about 40% of my nine men steps so far have involved writing at all, even though I consider myself a writer. I want to be a good writer and put in all the requisite hours. I also consider myself a teacher and a parent, but not one of my steps ever came from these all-consuming activities directly. Scribe believed that I shouldn't "get credit" (my words, not his) for something I am innately good at, my daily bread of life. A step up must be a true challenge, difficult. Then again, Scribe already seemed fucking masterful at everything intellectual, especially poetry. (Nor can he conceive of the deep trials of parenting, good parenting included.)
            Can I whine a bit?   Let me express my epic frustration over the degree of difficulty set before me. Yes, I understand that for Scribe each poem marked truly a different mind, each a step up. But they were all poetry, consistently in his wheelhouse, in fact the focus of all he did (no wife, no kids, no salaried employment or commitments). Scribe's last four presiders, like the first four, completed another full book: 37 distinct poems that surveyed 37 distinct & impeccably-researched world cultures through 37 unique poetic forms (a masterpiece which will be well-known soon enough). And the whole time Scribe spent working on this he knew exactly where he stood on his Nine Men stairway. Not only did he have the map (i.e., his sequence, which, of course, he discovered), but he had the personal connection at every step, the human or non-human voice as a pure frequency of colour, who had guided him there in the first place.
            That's not my story. I'm not even sure where I am on my stairway today (the Jewel: Josef, Step 75?), as my steps are not always as distinct or divisible as Scribe's. I can't look up. I also jump around.[9] It took me twelve years to polish off but two of my 81 steps, a diptych (two-panel painting) that, fortunately, I'm quite proud of. At that rate, of course, it would take me nearly 500 years to reach whatever-the-fuck goal I was aiming for. The reason it took me so long is that when I "received it" as a task, I'd never painted or drawn anything ever before (not even doodles). Other steps, meanwhile, progressed parallel to this painting, 2 or 3 at a time, each at its own independent rate, though all painstakingly slow. Some turned out well, the painted living & dining rooms, for instance: 53 different colors + 6 months of rented scaffolding = 3 Steps. My sestina, on the other hand, while a rank embarrassment, certainly killed someone inside of me through the effort alone. And two gaping holes in my large backyard, full of decade's worth of branches, brambles, & blackberry rather than water, waterfalls, & carp, represent one of a couple of tasks not ever completed—maybe then replaced by other tasks—but I'm not sure. Other tasks included tiling the kids' bathroom floor and laying a (no-mortar) brick patio, activities completely outside my own wheelhouse. Somewhat easier to imagine for me, but no less ambitious: reaching a certain threshold in my beginner's piano lessons, as marked by a challenging Bach piece, or memorizing 76 of Shakespeare's sonnets, holding a full "metrical mile" (5280+ iambic feet) in my mind at once, learning each while running with my dog over roughly a year. (Then, like a house of cards that's been swatted by hurricane, I lost all but one of them in less than two weeks!)
            Aside from writing, the next-largest chunk of my Nine Men has come from something I am quite good at, travel, having traveled my whole life. Travel can always be made harder, by which I don't simply mean rougher or more unpleasant. (As my wife & I age, safe food & private bathrooms become ever more important.) The degree of difficulty comes from language & logistics & scope. All my trips are long, whole summers sometimes. Traveling in Europe or the U.S. with young children is one kind of challenge. Driving the length of South Africa or Patagonia is another. I push myself to my limits on every trip I take. In fact, as hard as I worked as a teacher for 32 years, I worked even harder on my trips—before, during, & generally after each one. I remember several times returning to teach school in the fall, just one or two days after extracting myself & family from somewhere remote, Luxor or Johannesburg, and feeling relieved only to be working. The stress of travel can be intense. After my wife & I took the 2014-2015 school year off and spent five months on the road in Argentina & Peru, I was so exhausted from the trip management that I was pretty useless outside my teaching for the whole next year.
            When it comes to researching a trip, I'm clearly a flyer. I can walk into a bookstore, spend maybe $200 on, let's say, five guidebooks & three maps, and have them all absorbed by midnight. I will have looked at every page that's possibly relevant to my plans, and I'll have read every word that matters at least once. I have no idea what I do, but for the next six months I'll carry all the information in my head. I recall once being in a mall and spontaneously heading to the bookstore shelves to consult one guidebook I chose not to buy. I didn't even know what I was doing except that I found myself looking up a specific bus route & schedule for Samaria, Crete still at least four months off. That is, my subconscious was aware of a gap in my developing itinerary, and it spontaneously confirmed the bus connection when the chance presented itself (remembering the route number for a single afternoon connection on a 10-week trip). Some of my itineraries are detailed to the point of crazy, particularly in places without infrastructure; some are scripted but open-ended. Never do I go anywhere without a thorough study of maps, history, culture, essential customs, health, safety, government, money & access, internet access, basic language vocabulary & phrases, etc. My cardinal rule in planning is to learn as much as possible before I go, so I know exactly how to hit the ground running when I arrive. Once I've paid thousands of dollars to get somewhere amazing, I don't want to waste a second. My research, of course, also saves me thousands of dollars, which is necessary if you're a teacher.
            I go into this detail not just to praise travel—which I do, and loudly proclaim that it's the best thing I ever did as a parent for my children, now both world travelers in their own right. I lay this out to show my biggest challenge in my Nine Men. I don't know how to count these steps. My trips are worthy challenges that I face & execute to the best of my ability, which are shareable, the only criteria for what counts as a "step." But I can't tell how to parse my trips. For me, research is often bigger than the trip itself, at least twice as long on time. Does that then count as its own man? If I spend 3 months running around Argentina, then fly to Lima and spend 2 months traveling Peru by utterly different means and with different goals & purposes, then is this 1 or 2 Men? Greece, Turkey, and Egypt (with young kids) in my mind was created as three very different, but linked excursions. How many men? I really didn't know. Josef had to tell me: just one.
            What "I really didn't know" means above all is that I lack Scribe's personal connection to his men, the visceral presence of each man in turn. Lacking this sense, which never developed, I have relied on content clues that are just not reliable. My first two tasks, my letters to Jane & Vilansit, started me off well, but soon I found trying to match the task to the man was/is often guesswork. In 2005 my teacher Don confirmed that I'd then "killed" four of my Nine Men, which marked, I think, two tasks more than I'd counted myself. That put me on target to finish all Nine in 22.5 years, and today, 21.5 years in, I'm no more than a few months off that pace.  So perhaps finally, with (I think) only six steps to go, I can declare "light at the end of the tunnel"—when there hasn't been for so long—but it's in the form of the Nine Men sequence only, the abstract tracking displayed above, not a form I can in any way see. (I feel only urgency.) I literally can't imagine the man I might become six tasks from now, six minds down the chain. I can't manage the next man yet.[10]
            Meanwhile, something strange:  At the same time Don was filling me in on my progress, he "incidentally" let slip that Scribe, who'd been a flyer already for six years, had actually killed only three of his men, despite having completed every task. It seems that while three were "killed," two more men were "evaded," and another four "enlisted help from others." Fascinating.
            Don never explained these distinctions, which, he assured us, are not arbitrary. So this remains, at least for me, a great unsolved riddle, one that someday distant I fully expect to develop. (I'll share  clues.) Meanwhile, more immediately, Scribe's many methods for managing his steps don't strike me as relevant to me & mine. Every man of my Nine I've murdered with my own bare hands.

9. Poem

Consider the following poem or equation as a preface to Part 2 of this lesson, Lesson 7—homework to mull over, if you will. The paradox I present, a simplified Zeno-like scenario, I feel is genuinely resolved, but more, I feel this apparent paradox profoundly illustrates a key aspect of human nature mirrored in the workings of nature itself. It's like discovering the creator's fingerprints all over creation, except they're our prints.

Paradox Lost

You know the scene: a tree, a target, a man,
A readied bow some measured distance hence.
An arrow flies, traversing said distance.
When will it strike? Never. Before it lands,
First it must cover half the given chasm,
Then half again of what's left, and so on,
With always a remainder, one small fraction
To cross. Zeno's arrow falls harmless,
Or does it move at all? Science tells us
Reality is finite, not like math.
There is, in fact, a smallest possible length,
The Planck length, which can't be further spliced.
Science says motion is false. No matter.
As one paradox falls, others gather.

Hail aliah

7/17

L2 L3 L5

alert

Homer ?

c. 800 B.C.E ?

black hole

not yet completed

[4] Wittgenstein points out that it is impossible to disprove or even discredit how something seems to another person, no matter how ridiculous the notion. (Consider Trumpland.) Subjective experiences are real to the subject.

[6] Wallace Stevens, "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle"

Albion's Nine Men Sequence [1]

Jane Vilansit Josef [Guide] the Jewel Scribe Anand Don Albion

Step # Presider
  1 -  9   Anand

10 - 18   Vilansit

19 - 27    Jane

28 - 36    [Guide]                                              In this form the sequence reads like a calendar.

37 - 45    Don                                                          (That is, time adds a third dimension.)

46 - 54   Albion

55 - 63   Scribe

64 - 72   Josef

73 - 81   the Jewel

(L7) (L8) (L6)

… … … … … …

"Funes" art all generated by CRAIYON

(above) Funes in the style of Van Gogh

(right) "the complete history of wine-making" x 2

(below) a glass of red wine as aleph

[8] Most astrophysicists believe there's a supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy.

[9] An old saying in the karass, The cricket leaps; the serpent swallows.

Georg Cantor

1845-1918

Lesson 7: Soul (Part I)

Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1. Banner: Rhiannon C. 2016
            a) Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
  b) Albion Glyph: William Blake, "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," c.1794
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/William_Blake_-_Albion_Rose-
   from_A_Large_Book_of_Designs_1793-6.jpg
2. Whirlpool: (image origin unknown)

3. Photo of Georg Cantor: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Georg_Cantor2.jpg

4. Photo of Jorge Luis Borges: http://cdn29.us1.fansshare.com/images/jorgeluisborges/jorge-bluis-bborges- 724124638.jpg

5. Ancient bust presumed to presume Homer: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/ Homer_British_Museum.jpg

6. NASA photo of the Strait of Messina: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/MessinaStrait.jpg
7. Whirlpool: (image origin unknown)

2.1 2.2 1.3

∞!

[5] Between 0 and ∞, we always feel closer to 0. That is, while we always should (must!) know our origin, we can never know the parts of ourselves that we haven't yet met, where we started vs. where we're headed. (And note that while every point actually is closer to 0 than ∞ in terms of distance, there are nevertheless just as many points separating any point from 0 as from ∞, an apparent paradox.)

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

[10] In fact, I finished in exactly 22.5 years.

[3] In addition to his famous memory, the Mnemonist also possessed rather full-blown visual synesthesia. Thus, beyond recalling every detail of a scene, he remembered each scene with vast arrays of colors & geometries invisible to the rest of us. Synesthesia is uncommonly common among people with prodigious memory.

The Strait of Messina (Italy, a NASA photograph), where scholars locate the narrow passage of Odysseus.

[1]Steps that appear as chapters in albionspeak are shown in red. (e.g., To Jane - On Contact, Ch. 2.1, marks my very first step.) Those in brown at the bottom came after this Lesson 5 was finished.

∞!

[2] There's not a difference of opinion here, but of vantage: Our guide sees humans as potential, a wave that might break upon eternity or not.

I see the fact.

[7] But also, if all you ever do is fight, you're also going down.