Lesson 7: Soul 2

Most of what I know about the mind & brain comes from Dr. Oliver Sacks. This is especially true of the little science knows about the brain and music. Sacks's influence is sprinkled across these lessons.

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.

albionspeak: a draught of language

Lesson 7: Soul (Part 2)

1. "Consider the alternative…"

            First, a correction or an apology: I'm sorry that I whine. Our guide told me in our first year to "lose [my] bitterness," which seemed quite bizarre at the time, as bitterness was wholly unknown to me. But I know it well now, and I'm ashamed to be bitter, ashamed to be ashamed. I know how incredibly blessed I am, both in & out of life. I know the sorrows of others. How dare I feel self-pity! I complain about my 22 years of hard apprenticeship (following years of work before that); yet I know thousands, if not millions of people would give their eyeteeth to carry my cross, my millstone—my gilded escalator to eternity. Why do I allow myself such petty & juvenile thoughts? If I am to put away such childish things, I must face this wound.
            I remember Scribe's anecdote from his Nine Men days, when he was six or seven men in, and, feeling the weight of his own workload, he unloaded a bit on a friend. The friend's wise response, "Consider the alternative…" For Scribe, the alternative to the daily exhaustion of writing—years of immersion prep & mind-shifting & physical recovery—was not writing, something inconceivable to him. The alternative to my pushing myself to exhaustion for the last 22 years would be to give less than my best—that is, to identify my best course and then choose a worse one instead because it's easier. Really? That was why (btw) I had to give up soccer in my early forties. I was incapable of slowing down, mellowing my style, or easing my shredded muscles. Might as well ask me to shoot on my own goal or head the very Earth itself  into the back of the net. Free will at its freest does not consider dumb alternatives.
            I unload my emotions here to document fully my experience. In the previous lesson I ask what kind of training might we take on, here in Charybdis, to ready ourselves for Scylla Infinity. The Nine Men is the perfect answer to my prayers. I chose to be a parent and knew from the outset that raising kids would prolong any training I undertook by 25 years. Yet somehow despite parenting & teaching I still managed, step by step, to learn & accomplish a great deal (so far). Without the pressure of the Nine Men pushing me, no way I would have pressed as hard. My tasks, in fact, have all been things I've wanted to try or do. No, I've accomplished nothing at all on any grand stage, nothing compared to many in the Jewel Net, all flyers, with half or more born to flight. But comparisons are silly. I should be overjoyed that I've got six more challenging mountains to overview. I love mountains. Still, in the middle of a marathon often all one knows is pain, and I fully expect to collapse at the finish line.

                        "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of

a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:24)

            I don't think Jesus is concerned here with money or socio-economic inequality, nor do I believe He refers to divine judgment at all. I think this is His way of saying, "If you're not fighting the current, you're going down." A rich man is a baby under a Christmas tree, blissfully immersed in Charybdis. Another old saying in the karass: "Happiness is an ill." Thus, suffering does have value if and only if it helps one see past the glitter & seductions of life, but like any strong medicine, it's over-prescribed and leads to both tolerance & dependence.
            Why do I whine? The wounded child within me feels my 22+ years of largely solitary hard labor to be "unfair," since no other Jewel member we know ever waited "nearly so long" to reach flight. And note, to the child fairness names that middle school distortion of my declared "best talent" (ma'at, balance, etc.). The boy sees unequal stairways only, not the purpose of stairs or that hard training is a gift. Meanwhile, I know the child Albion is wrong, that fairness itself is a myth both in & out of time, but I, the child, whine nonetheless, and I whine precisely where I tied on my first knots of declared identity. My bitterness points to my origin, one core knot begging to be untied.
            Suffering my Nine Men then—rather than waltzing lightly through them—has been my choice all along. Like it or  knot, Albion reminds me via this nagging complaint—a subliminal whimper central to my self—that I'm alive and still navigating this dangerous vortex. And make no mistake, Albion marked the spot for me with a nail driven into the mainmast, a bleeding scar so I'd never lose track: "Wake up or you're going to die!"[1]

            So thanks, Albion, even if "learning the lesson" doesn't lessen this existential pain. Parents often are helpless to soothe a sobbing child.

2. Review

  Let's summarize the major points from Lesson 5, starting from the four "properties" of a soul that I list early on. From there I add a small host of other facts about human souls also discussed (or at least implied). Were this a classroom course, I'd fill up a couple of whiteboards with this list and promise a quiz tomorrow. That is, I need all my ducks in a row before moving forward. Note, however, a row of ducks implies no set sequence.

            a) Souls have absolute, thus infinite value.
            b) Souls are irreducible & elemental.
            c) Souls are eternal.
            d) We are absolutely incomprehensible to ourselves.

            e) This beautiful & endangered Planet Earth 2017 is our point of origin, our home port, where we literally form our identities. No matter how high we fly in our kite, we always must retain our origin.

            f) A soul chooses while living to build his/her eternal identity upon & around a particular life. (I chose at age 11, though I remember nothing.) Life, of course, in the context of eternity, is but a blip, a point. In life we extend this blip to 80 years of memories, let's say, but it's really just a single moment of choice. Yes or No? (The default choice is "no.") Note: It is the soul who chooses, not the person in time, though our actions in life certainly inform the soul.

            g) The eternal choice we make is to enter a karass, an eternal structure of souls & non-humans, which—since it exists along many timelines, as well as outside time altogether—is simply too large for us to comprehend. Thus, human souls are essential components of an organic union. Though tiny in the galaxy of our nets, each soul remains vital nonetheless: I am loved. I am needed at my best. I choose my karass, as it chooses me.

   h) Karasses serve the Good. The Good is our telos. Eternity without purpose is random blipping, which equals non-existence. The Good is my ultimate pursuit, but it's so distant I can't presume to know its will. I am fallible. All I can do is affect what's in front of me now, where I dwell, my tasks in life, and I try not to waste my limited attention on distractions.

            i) In our karasses, we are both students & eternal teachers. But in life knowledge of our eternal soul is blocked from consciousness so as to preserve the free will of the person in time. We all willingly agree to this. Just as we shouldn't "determine" what our children must grow into, we have to allow our own infant souls to experiment & grow & screw up, perhaps to fail existence altogether. Our choices must be our own.

   j) This Planet Earth 2017 is a soul hatchery, a port of origin hugely important to the cultures & civilizations who dwell here. But it's not as important as the souls for whom it was created. The individual human soul is the absolute center of value on this planet.
On Earth, in the absence of certainty, I regard each living person as eternal. Potentially then, we have as many as 7.4 billion irreplaceable souls. Each gets a voice & a chance regardless. While the math here seems simple, I can't begin to fathom a social paradigm that might emerge from this understanding, were it global.

k) This Planet Earth 2017 should be rescued & cherished. We come into our purpose with a global mass extinction event already upon us. We will face the challenges together or perish. For many generations, an age or more of history, restoring Planet Earth must be the defined mission of Homo sapiens, the Human Condition, which will create, in effect, a new origin, a beginning beyond recognition. This is not my opinion or utopian ideal: It's survival only. Leaving the details & their devils to the career scientists, I offer overview. Here's my mission statement as a citizen of Planet Earth:

            I devote my life to the children & future children of our Planet. I aim to…
a) restore this planet to beauty,
                    b) create a "safe & healthy environment" where infant souls can thrive,
                 c) and return our lives to conscious purpose in time.

            I don't stoop to nuance here and can't foresee how my "citizen's mission" might be thought controversial.   Still, language is always twisting, and I accept the irony: If ever I write well enough that my words outlast me, then surely they will be misused.

3. The Fallacy of Motion

            Now let's review the homework from Lesson 5, my sonnet, which I'll offer again:

  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.

            Not a love poem, my iambic measures ponder the fallacy of motion, as first proposed by Zeno in his nine Paradoxes—and where, for poetic argument, I combine two.

            For more than twenty centuries every schoolboy in Western Civ was expected to tackle these perfect mind-fucks as a rite of passage, particularly the colorful Achilles & the Tortoise. In terms of instruction, Zeno's paradoxes usually introduced a lesson on logical contradiction (reductio ad absurdum), and so most teachers & their students regarded these "puzzles" as fun abstractions only, formal games without solution or genuine content (and therefore, harmless). But some boys, generally dreaming on their own, grasped something missing (never there), a thread of absence among Zeno's knots, and found they couldn't look away. For there it was, for all who looked: a hairline fracture—not a mistake, not explained away—a real crack in the universe.
            A quest begins for him who asks: Is this crack, then, to be located among our imperfect mental filters, a blind spot in our neural processing? Or does it lie outside our biology entirely, a mote or floater in the mind's eye? For if it's not the camera lens through which we gawk, is reality itself what's cracked?

            Proposed solutions to Zeno muddled in metaphysics for two millennia, until the invention of calculus in the late 1600's, when pundits abruptly put the puzzle to rest. Isaac Newton's mathematical trick—which allowed him to count up to & around infinity (and which is physically impossible)—enabled us to compute infinitesimals anyway. Now we could add convergent infinite sums, for example. So,

1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16… + 1/∞ = 1 (which moves/proves Zeno's arrow, right?)

Newton contrived his trick, and then went on to calculate: the fall of an apple, the orbit of the moon, the tolerances of an iron bridge, and the means to fire a cannonball with deadly accuracy. Who can argue success? But this mathematical model reflects our mental model of reality only, not reality itself. In reality there are no infinitesimals. Newton's equations miraculously solve for infinities that don't actually exist. It's funny then, as well as wrong, that calculus is still offered (by Wikipedia & others) to refute Zeno's claims about reality, even though Newtonian physics has been so thoroughly undercut & replaced. But because we've long accepted calculus as "final," few after Newton doubted the flight of an arrow. Obviously motion exists.
Now fast-forward a few centuries for quantum physics finally to put the illusion to rest. Surprisingly, there's nothing deceptive about Zeno's scenarios. Zeno, in fact, through reason alone figured out what it took physics 2400 years to confirm: Motion (as we think of it) not only doesn't exist in our physical universe; it can't exist in any human

universe.[2]
As the poem states, motion conflates Finity with Infinity. Reality has no infinitesimals. We define motion as a change in location that corresponds to a change in time: An object moves from A to B. And we assume that it covers all the points between A and B, an infinite number, for we see & assume that time & space are continuous. But they aren't. In math you can go on halving distances indefinitely. In reality there's a limit, and while it might take 120 division calculations (not zillions) to reach the Planck Length, in time it takes only the flight of an arrow.

The problem boils down to the nature of existence itself, which

foremost is a shared creation. That is, existence is not objectively real, but

is rather constructed from thought: All existence then, wherever you plant

your flag, is finite, for it's not possible to think/project something infinite.

This means that all human realities are necessarily discontinuous &

incomplete.

We see the illusion of continuous motion, which means we see continuous space & continuous time; but there is no such thing. At the smallest distances—that is, smaller than the limits of physical space, the Planck Length—spacetime doesn't exist. So how can something move through nothing? (Of course, this echoes an old physics question, but with a new twist.)
            But objects do move. Real arrows strike real targets. How do we resolve this? Actually it's simple, just very counterintuitive to our perception: Motion is discontinuous. We go from A to B, and we skip over the gaps. How many gaps? As many gaps as there are Planck Lengths from A to B. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

On most ports outside our origin it's not hard to make out the cracks. Whole categories of experience go unscripted, though you still have to look to miss them. Earth, our hatchery, is huge, of course, and far more explicit: The limits of physical time & space exceed all our perceptions. We see neither the Planck Length nor the end of the universe.[3] Nevertheless, the more we look, the more we find. And most physicists, like mathematicians, are Platonists: They believe they are discovering the pre-existing secrets of the universe—gravitons & Higgs bosons, for example. And maybe they are. But if all existence is a projection, then maybe the physicists, merely by observing the universe in minute detail, literally create the very substrata of reality that no one's looked at (projected) before. (Now consider, is this more or less amazing than conjuring a four-leaf clover from nothing?)
            That's the punch line, incidentally, to my "dream kitchen cabinets" puzzle, Albion's two-cent rant back in Lesson 2. Most dreams are tiny worlds. If in a dream you're standing in your kitchen, your dream bedroom (& walk-in closet & master bath, etc.) won't exist at all unless you travel there. Otherwise, there's no reason to consider the rest of your house, and no higher mind (i.e., the dream-maker) would project dream settings & props of no purpose. In other words, until the dreamer, grounded in his kitchen, makes the choice to open a dream cabinet, whatever reality lies behind that door remains undetermined. But once you do choose, it's seek and ye shall find!
            Now consider how hard it is in a dream to make a conscious choice. We do stuff in dreams all the time. We act; we emote; we travel, but our actions seem more to be reactions to the imposed scenarios. Shit happens. The mind that can intentionally step forward in a dream and choose—which means to alter the default course of a dream by means of a fiber—is precisely the mind needed to choose eternity. To be clear, this does not require lucidity, which indeed marks an important dream threshold, but is neither necessary nor sufficient to choosing. Our conscious choice strangely may not feel like the product of deliberation at all, when it arises from one's true soul, the serpent. Flying doesn't feel self-aware, but we choose nonetheless. And we don't consider dumb alternatives.

4. Firefishes: Elemental Geometry

When Scribe & I were finally introduced at the board to the

auroras (Session 27, Ch. 4.1), we didn't recognize ourselves. Scribe,

in fact, during his sent vision looked right through them initially—they

were so ineffable & inconsequential. Eventually, as I pulled our flying

ship Falcon ever deeper through Anand's green seas, past where

Albion's sunlight could penetrate, then their density & subtle

luminescence came to Scribe's attention, soon surrounding him, a

glowing nebula, an unformed galaxy of unformed will, photoplankton.

            I read what I just finished writing, the short paragraph immediately above, and I am at once amused & horrified: What kind of mock-occult bullshit is this?   As a writer, what I absolutely don't want to do is follow Blake's example. I love his art and some of his poetry, but most of his writing sadly is babble, inaccessible even to those of us trained in his world. Not even Scribe can make sense of Blake.
            So how much do I relate? Already what I describe is more occult than most Hollywood horror films tolerate. But these films rarely have coherence, and, of course, no one cares. Few seem to care that the world's major religions are holy-riddled with inconsistencies. I aim otherwise.

            So let me connect some dots, literally.   First, the auroras Scribe saw were not a representation. They were real—as real as if he saw my body in his very visual mind, as, in fact, Blake did. All ways of seeing, all objective realities, are myth. Auroras are what auroras look like to themselves. That we can see them at all shows our essential bond with them. They dwell in an elemental spacetime geometry that we can follow because we arise from them. That's what we were-and-still-are in eternity, further down the kite, our pre-origin existence (where pre & post are meaningless). Theirs is a simple universe, of course, because auroras are simple. They go with the flow, since they don't know how not to—no locomotion, mere glimmering identity.

            Thus, we find ourselves at Step 1: Auroras, the threshold of individual identity.

       Step 2:
  Step 1: Auroras = first self-awareness & individuality, awareness as choice
            Step 0: Diffuse mind, the primordial consciousness soup

            Like planets in a nascent solar system, auroras accrete from the auroral soup around them, and with growing self-awareness they accelerate this coalescing process. Just as important, they begin also to reject many elements they encounter: This is me, but that is not. Thus identity forms by creating a space of absence around itself, where rejection is crucial to this choosing process, for otherwise, if one accumulates randomly, one becomes chaos itself. And where in this image does identity lie? Where is the soul? Not in the things themselves—neither in these auroral accretions nor in their lump sum, which, like Funes's memories, means little as a defined clump. Rather, the soul lies with the chooser, the inaudible voice who brings order out of chaos. Persons are gods, so says our guide.
            Scribe & I first heard of auroras a year or two prior to his vision. They were introduced to us as "the young of the firefishes" and came otherwise unexplained, as a riddle, an obvious foreshadowing. Firefishes? And I smile ironically at my brutal, naturalistic speculations in the commentary following Scribe's vision. Either many die young (as, in Yeats's words, "frog spawn in a fecund ditch"), or the auroral fog squeezes itself down to a point, which ignites a sun. In fact, I think both readings are correct.
            I said I would connect literal dots. I can only do so visually, however, in this very real metaphor of auroras & their elders, for motion is a metaphor auroras can relate to. A firefish is a point that in a flash of pure intent moves as a streak, a shooting star, to another point, presumably then to fade. Scribe did not witness these (they're rare), but the description is easy visualized even by me: This is flight, what human souls do. And the auroras? That's what humans do, too—most living humans certainly—living in a state of suspense, test-tasting reality before biting down. To be or not to be…?

            Let me repeat: There is no objective reality; all realities are myths or metaphors, which, to be emphatically clear, are not "lies."   A good myth is one that allows souls to interact fluidly and thus share deeply, a reality that leads to other myths.   The visual metaphor at our human core, of spacetime & meteoric locomotion, is our primal perception of attention, perhaps our first human awareness of anything. Remember, spacetime—even auroral spacetime—is a "category" of experience we are not bound to in eternity. When humans shift their attentions, we often "see" this as two points in spacetime. And then we draw a line, which is the "myth" (i.e., fallacy) of the metaphor, for there actually is no line, no continuity at all. The Planck Length is a limit of physical reality. In eternity the limit of our minds is our finite attention.

            In short, the fallacy of motion in physical space & time applies, or is analogous, to the same human myth outside of spacetime. We think/we project ourselves from A to B, but it's not remotely possible to think all the points between. Thus, since we speak at our human core in an existential language of geometry—connecting two points of attention—let us define ourselves so: Human souls behave as vectors. We are directional, one-dimensional choosers of finite intent, where intent can be defined as the magnitude of applied attention and is "pictured" as distance. We behave as vectors; yet we are actually discontinuous beings who "blip" directly from point to point, port to port, collision to collision. The line behind us, albeit fiction, is memory; the path ahead is caring.

            This one-dimensional geometry also explains, almost as an aside, our human ontological & cognitive constraint which compels us to think largely in binary terms: Yes or No?, forward/backward, true/false, right/wrong, past/future, cause/effect, on/off, in/out, +/-, etc. Polar opposites define the ends of a single line that we install with our minds, creating a continuum. Also consider how when we add (for example) a series of numbers, at any given "moment" (= distinct thought) we combine exactly two at a time. All our operations are binary. Sex. This is how we think, because this is what we are. And the very universe itself reflects our dualistic minds, since this universe indeed is a human projection.
            Now imagine Scribe's & my wonder/confusion when told (again, in Session 10) that "outside life is no ob or sub." The line we had long drawn (thanks to culture, science, etc.) connecting "objectivity" at one pole to "subjectivity" at the other was simply myth. What could possibly lie outside this line?

JOY KNOWLEDG UNDERSTANDING

5. Trumpland among Others

            I cannot move on from the auroras in this lesson until I first highlight one non-trivial side effect of identity. Again, auroras coalesce by choosing from the auroral fog around them, and our true soul lies with the chooser, not what he or she selects specifically. Choosing randomly, or choosing everything, embodies all the entropy of Scribe's wispy vision, resulting not in individual identity, but chaos. So the choosing is what matters; it's where we start: This is me. That is not.
            Now consider this process as it manifests here in life, Planet Earth 2017. That is, take these auroral humans and step into their projections in space & time. What we see clearly are the seeds of tribalism, one of the most destructive patterns in the modern world. We know tribalism is cultural, and we know its biological roots as well, woven into our DNA. Tribes of Homo sapiens who competed together to overwhelm more welcoming & hospitable groups survived: We are the bitter fruit thereof. But tribalism runs deeper than natural selection. It's how many infant souls struggle, and often fail, to form distinct, individual identities here in our global soul hatchery. They clump rather in groups, pledging allegiance to the clump and not the chooser. They know not why they choose nor what the choices are. They chant only, "These are my tribe. Those others are not."

            I could frame my moral lesson here as a rejection of tribalism, but such a tired abstraction won't save anybody. Calling Trump what he is changes neither him nor his base base. Rather, let me assert that Earth is not everything in eternity (it's just a dot) and that to embrace all people & all life on this Earth isn't random choosing. Earth by all rights should be beautiful, and beauty is the antithesis of chaos. We are one tribe, one people, one planet, and I choose beauty. I choose the Good.

6.   The Paradox of Otherness

            Existence must be shared. Recall my call for exploration & adventure, which for human souls is an existential necessity: If we don't push ourselves, "to seek out new life" and new kinds of experience, then we fall—which means non-eternal people settle in for a terminal tour around our Charybdis origin, until they no longer can escape this very real dream, and they end. For the record, when Scribe & I have asked directly, our teachers refuse to offer us any statistics about humanity as a whole: "Business is with individuals not mankind." So I don't know what percent of living humans are saved vs. lost vs. undecided, nor fundamentally does it matter: It's not a poll, not democracy. The individual soul is all that matters, and no one—neither enlightened master nor assembled pantheon of devoted devas—can save someone who does not choose to save himself.
            So we have to move from this Point A, our origin or indeed any point, to somewhere else, B. That's how we share, by connecting with others on ports of our shared creation. As already discussed, this "motion" is discontinuous. It is rather a leap of mind, from one mind to another, where much of Scribe's & my training concerns learning how to frame one's mind accordingly. There are steps & disciplines, most of which involve too much to present in this website.
            But where do we go? Most points within our purview lie entirely within the vortex walls of Charybdis, most everything we see & know in life. To move to these points is simply to sightsee the swirling multiplicity of our own mental reflections as we go down. This is not new, and it won't save us. So we have to aim for something outside this hole, a point that is essentially unknown to us, a point of otherness. If we pursue the Good, we may be guided by its distant star, but even a clear azimuth can't pinpoint the precise dot to which we must next jump, and in pulling precision is everything. There are an infinite number of points between us & the Good. So again, which one?
The real question here, originally offered by Plato—and sometimes referred to as Meno's Paradox—concerns knowledge. How can you know where to go if you haven't been there yet? Let's be clear: There are an infinite number of points outside our vortex, and nearly all of them are so utterly new & different & strange that we can't make any sense of them if we do go there.  Once Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly. I once dreamt I was a puddle of slime. I looked & felt like some mollusk spun a few seconds in a blender then left on a beach to bake. It was a fascinating & disturbing dream, but little more. I was completely unequipped to do anything there other than stew. Undoubtedly all of us have visited ports of even less commonality (lacking spacetime, for instance), but because we can't make any sense of the experience there, there's no way to retain anything in memory. So again, how can we know where to go?
            The fact is, we can't, and yet we do. This is the paradox. To be clear, we cannot achieve our goal (eternity) through random jumping. There is infinitely more that is alien & incomprehensible than we can understand. We really do need a specific target. Imagine going to a city, for example, to meet unawares your future spouse for the first time. This kind of basic human event cannot occur randomly. Our overseers & karass friends need to work all sorts of magic behind the scenes, beneath consciousness, to ensure such a connection can happen at all. The same is true of any point in eternity.

            The resolution to this paradox for Plato is his doctrine of anamnesis, the process of remembering our true eternal selves. Plato asserted our eternal natures: We exist before our births and continue our existence after death, where we dwell in full awareness of eternal truths like the Good. But somehow, according to Plato, life itself just fucks up everything. We arrive in life naked, afraid, and lacking all memory of our eternal natures. During our lives then, if we're lucky, we start to recall our eternal soul & identity & values & processes (like a soap opera amnesiac maybe?); and as we remember, we reorient ourselves and pull toward the Good.
            And I think Plato is mostly right on this. We know where to aim ourselves, because in eternity we've always known. Meeting one's spouse for the first time may or may not be perceived as a major event at the time (it wasn't for me), but outside of time what transpires has happened already, so we go where we go because that's who we are.[4]
            My only disagreement with Plato, not entirely trivial, concerns life itself: First, when we're alive and bumping around our origin in ignorance, our souls don't actually exit eternity. For all souls who choose, the kite tail's knots remain firmly attached to the rainbow ("no cloven souls"). Where Plato falls flat entirely is the function of life. For him, life is just a fuck up, something we need to fix. In my teachers' metaphysics, of course, life is our origin, where nearly all of us, flyers included, live in mitigated, but necessary ignorance. Free will is sacred.

7. Wish You Were Here

         Having offered my #2 most profound mystical "experience" in Lesson 4, my Boy on the Bubble event (which completely kicked my ass), I'll balance this lesson with my #1 all-time mystical experience, although you, dear Reader, might be disappointed. While what follows here is, indeed, the single most remarkable "moment" in my life, no one else—no scientist certainly—will want to call it "miraculous" or even "exceptional." It's a very basic life experience, one anybody might have. For me it was an instant life-changer:

From To My Guide - On Music
July 1996 [twenty years after]

            Guide, daimon, dear working partner, do you recall my first real music? I suspect you were there: June 15, 1976 [age 16], two days after I graduated from high school. While most of my rich classmates were celebrating the occasion with new cars or trips to Hawaii, I scraped together just enough cash to buy a single record album, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. This was a milestone for me—buying a record before I’d ever heard it. In fact, up to that point my entire library consisted of fewer than ten albums, and these I treasured more as emblems of identity than as recorded music. I had no stereo to play them on.
            Nor did I need one, of course. All my friends had great stereos, especially Jim, my roommate at school, who, thanks to older siblings, kept up with the music scene and frequented concerts in the city. Jim’s prized collection comprised my first universe of contemporary music, and his tastes laid down the template from which my own would later emerge: AM pop, classic sixties, Led Zepplin—that’s about it, though at the time I assumed this assortment exhausted the possibilities. Of course, beyond my adoption of Jim’s correct music preferences, I knew also it was my duty to hate certain artists, including, for example, the entire genre of disco. I remember my cognitive dissonance each time I enjoyed disco dancing. How could bad music be so much fun? Surely, [dear Guide], you must have been laughing.
            Thanks to Jim I became a die-hard Led Zepplin fan, screaming for their unique blend of metal-rage & Dionysian ecstasy as one might cheer for a favorite football team. I bought Physical Graffiti as soon as it came out (sans stereo); and like millions of other teenagers, I would mimic every Jimmy Page guitar solo, matching his furious stage antics to my own outrageous moves & facial contortions. Having confessed this rebel-love however, I must emphasize—because it seems rather strange in retrospect—that my zeal for Zepplin never amounted to more than an æsthetic lust; the relationship was purely Platonic. Never did I embrace (nor reject, for that matter) the finger-flipping defiance & generation dialectics so common to American dinner tables during this post-Vietnam/Watergate era (even if my parents perceived my tastes in these terms). I just loved the music, the raw power & creative energy. Nor did Led Zepplin turn me on to drugs, lead to my moral ruin, or hurt my GPA; and, to my father’s certain relief, my appreciation for J.S. Bach remained undiminished.
            I remember a month or so before graduation, driving with Jim in crazy Hossein’s Camaro, going about 100 mph down an empty midnight freeway. Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend” was cranked all the way up, and being the smallest, I was stuck (as usual) on the wheel-well in the back, catching the full impact between the speakers. After the song, and in a particularly receptive mood, I abruptly asked Jim what music, in forty years time (i.e., eternity), he expected to be listening to… Would it be Led Zepplin? Not likely, he said, probably Pink Floyd. Pink what? Somehow I’d missed Pink Floyd.
            And suddenly school was out. Jim was lost to the navy (alas, lost forever), and gone with him were his stereo & music library. I didn’t bemoan these losses though; that’s not my nature. In fact, I didn’t even notice—so caught up was I in my short transition to college. I just wanted a record. I’d done well in school; and if I couldn’t have Hawaii, I still felt entitled to some sort of treat. Even so, part of me (the part I have in you) recognized that in purchasing this album I was, for the first time, taking charge over at least one source of inspiration in my life—that I was spiritually, as well as literally, choosing my own music—and, significantly, my first choice was an album reputed to have eternal value. Of course, none of this could I have articulated for you at the time. Even as I walked the two miles from my house down the steep hill into town, I felt this whole album-buying affair to be rather silly and histrionic. And I still recall my almost total self-disgust when, after finding out it would take two weeks to order Dark Side of the Moon, I impulsively settled on another album about which I’d heard absolutely nothing: Floyd’s newest release, Wish You Were Here.

            And what part, [dear Guide], did you have in that moment when I first put it on? And why, more than twenty years later, do I point the finger at you?

            Returning from the store after the unremarkable uphill trudge—again, contemptuous of my own weak nature—I tried to put an air of adventure & exploration on the fiasco—me, the eternal optimist; but the bottom line was I’d taken a month to debate the purchase of one album, and in a single frail instant I bought another. Upon arriving home, I may or may not have grunted the obligatory greetings at my mother, played briefly with the dog, or used the toilet before shutting myself in my undecorated room, where, on the carpeted floor next to the dresser, sat my 1965 record player. I remember setting down the dull needle and waiting through the thick, spiraling silence. Then, the single extended chord, barely audible at the start,  building to a slow flutter of chimes… In that instant, [dear Guide], and with the certainty of my entire being, I knew Led Zepplin was nothing—indeed, that no music prior to this moment had ever been real music. Only this was real; in Pink Floyd I was touching eternity.
            And the rest of the album was just as good, is still just as good; every second of Wish You Were Here was better than any second of music I’d ever heard before. How could I know from the very first note? There & then I became a different being, someone with unquenchable thirst, an unstoppable drive to return to that eternal place: my first full-bodied ache of anamnesis. To my credit I also recognized that this momentary insight far exceeded any experience of music, that Pink Floyd had simply been the delivery vehicle for a truth as big as the universe & far more important. My Grail quest began there & then, and I blame you, [dear Guide]. Thank you for my very soul.

            Today, of course, we have a language for such an experience: We’d say in Wish You Were Here I discovered a clue, a jigsaw piece that fit perfectly into my ultimate identity puzzle, giving me a profound glimpse of my higher Albion(s) beyond time. This is me. Note, the very definition of clue implies a private revelation, not a public, shared event, which would be a "sign" or "portent," although the difference between clues and signs is not about numbers: A clue is a fiber that directs a person in time toward his/her unique soul in eternity. A sign is a public message posted on a projected reality, where living people gawk & chatter, and where there's no such thing as a "group soul." I make no claim, therefore, that Wish You Were Here is intrinsically superior to other great music; it's not a sign. I just personally love it more, and I love it up & down my whole kite spine. I wish I were there….
            Most clues are subtle and rarely involve so profound a paradigm shift. I tend to receive clues as divine "wink wink nudge nudges" (in the language of Monty Python), secret synchronicities which come as quiet confirmation: Yes, you're on the right track. Keep going. But Anand, in his Fable of the Shrine, implies more: Beyond acting as mere signposts or trail marks—which indeed offer a vital service on a long journey—these clues are the very objects out of which we create our shrine. (From Session 31, Ch. 4.3)

21.        A (Anand):           A FABLE OF FINDING –

                        ONCE A MAN SET OUT ON A LONG JOURNEY
22.                   IT WAS TO VISIT A SHRINE AND ON THE WAY
                   HE FOUND SMALL OBJECTS THAT OTHERS HAD DROPPD

ON [THE] WAY UP TO [THE] MOUNTAINZ

23.                   THERE WAS NO SHRINE TO BE FOUND
                   SO HE MADE ONE OUT OF [THE] OBJECTS

                        QUESTION FOR YOU

24.       Q:        Yes?
            A:        WERE THE OBJECTS LEFT FOR [THE] TRAVELLER? [5]

25.       Q:        [Only the traveller would take the time to pick up the objects.]
                        Question for you: Did he pick up every object or only some?
  A: ONLY [THE] ONES THAT FELL ALONG [THE] MOUNTAIN PATH

26.       Q:        "Fell?" Or "where dropped" [like breadcrumbs]?
            A:       I AM PLEASED YOU ASK…

            At the risk of appearing to patronize please let me offer a middle school reading of this ancient fable. Consider my model also to be an approach to dream interpretation or, indeed, a reading of my Boy on the Bubble event in the last lesson, which offers a remarkably precise projection of symbols—every detail intentional, even to the actual name of my cat, Sophie, for instance. Albion is so much smarter than I am.

1) We have clear symbols:
"objects" = "clues" = synchronicities left from eternity by eternity for a

person in time
"the mountain path" = the life of a soul ascending, a long pilgrimage, long

enough to be transformative (months, years, decades!)
"the shrine" = is it the meaning of life? eternity? (how can you seek what

you don't yet know = the paradox of otherness)
"the traveller" = a pilgrim seeking purpose, transformation, you!

2) This is a long journey on foot, a non-flyer's journey, long enough that you

personally must carry all your needed supplies (implied by the pre-modern

age of the story—no mules, no oversized pickups). You cannot bring more

than you can carry.

3) Every object, therefore, carries a burden, deadweight. And yet the clues are

gathered & carried anyway, some for a very long time. What value?

4) There is no shrine. That is, there is no institution, constitution, religion,

karmic algorithm, or easy app gleaming from the mountaintop that

works for everyone or, indeed, anyone.

5) You have to build your own shrine, and you do so out of the clues eternity

has left you. After all, these represent what you truly value in eternity.

6) But the shrine itself is just a thing, deadweight, and "you can't take it

with you." (And you're sure as hell not going to bear it down any

fucking mountain.) When you die, this structure remains. It was never

more than a shell.

7) The traveller, however, still takes away something vital: in Don's words,

A LIGHTNESS / A LEVITY A LEAVENING

The traveller captures the ideal of the shrine, its essence as Platonic

form, or, as I tend to say in my own calling, "the lesson" of the shrine.

8) You build the shrine. You build yourself. And the form of the shrine—the

leavening that leaves the shrine like a shroud behind—is the soul.

Your soul is the idea of yourself. It starts with the substance of your life,

but ends without substance at all. You take nothing with you but your

free will. Think well.

Wish You Were Here marks the "Biggest Moment Ever" of my life, which is why I enshrine it with an altar plaque inscribed accordingly, "@ c. 15:47 PDT, 15 June 1976," even though the event continued to nail me years after the fact. Spawned from this one bombshell artifact, smaller clues emerged, many almost immediately, starting with Roger Waters' great lyrics. But other clues took time to reverberate, some hiding in plain sight for years before detonating. Timing is everything.

Yes, I still melt in this echo: "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," my prime

example here, still haunts me like a glove, like one glove clapping. And yes of

course I know this song pays homage to poor Syd Barrett, the band's co-founder,

lost to mental illness. He, like me, "reached for the secret too soon." But I am not

a tragic figure. I survived my Icarus fall—only consider now for the record, it

came six years after I first found my soul in this music. That is, I grew in time to

become the clue. And yes, while I heard these very lyrics as I mangled my

Germania, that wasn't my game plan. I did not consciously conspire to become

a crazy diamond. The choice came from somewhere else, from eternity of course,

where Albion always has embraced this song, so six years earlier, before my

manic episode, he released the soundtrack to my flight.[6]

Like Blake in life I've tried to be honest with people about my occult experiences, but as a public school teacher, I couldn't risk crazy exposure. Free speech has limits in America. No, nobody beat me for my beliefs, but many, including me at times, quietly questioned my sanity (but not my competence). I know these doubts—theirs, mine, and yours, no doubt—knowing that as I grow, these nagging gaps in thought will widen as well. We are our thoughts & doubts & warts & all, so we need to learn the measures by which we think. The world is a creation we project, the reflections & distortions of our infant mental machinery, where the war & waste & evil we witness are the byproducts of ignorant thinking. No one wants the world to end.
Learn your machinery. Know thyself.

Many clues blossom, I suspect, beneath our conscious awareness and remain unheeded by us in time. These gems we trample underfoot, as pilgrims goose-stepping to the shrine, which in outcome is no different from forgetting a sent dream. "No matter," we shrug, shifting our load, and we press on, absent the beauty, the flowers in bloom.

Going forward then, I do find clues with increasing frequency, first because I know better how to notice them, but also because Albion knows I know, so he & others cue me with clues more often. Eventually these clues, like dream symbols & motifs, can become dialogues, provided you pick up the language. Still, some are discovered & pursued almost in spite of consciousness, and thankfully so, since our imperfect minds so often prove to be our greatest obstacle to well being. If we’re lucky, we follow these hidden clues anyway, as we might follow breadcrumbs through a dark forest—not because they show us the way out—but because we are hungry.
Now consider how I've hung my cross, Wish You Were Here, my shiny object & Christmas ornament, once I picked it up at age 16, then lugged it 40+ years further up the barren mountain slope. My shrine, of course, is filled with music, as I personally am so filled: Pink Floyd, Genesis, Jean-Michel Jarre, Bach above all, who knew above all that music belongs in sacred space. But music, too, is just a thing, an acoustic thing. Or is it? Is music just noise? Is it pitch, timbre, tempo, and determined formal structure? Or is it, like a human soul, an idea of itself? Where does music really lie? Roger Waters might chuckle at the irony here: I offer my clue, Wish You Were Here, and publicly cement it into my shrine to illustrate the ascent of a soul. This is my lesson, the lightness I aim to take. And yet at the concrete & tangible level of this fable, the fashioned shrine & its clue components, it's just "another brick in the wall."

8. Absence

Now let me offer something practical in life, something anyone can do to enhance his or her creative process. Our teachers, in fact, introduced absence to Scribe & me—not in the context of the greater soul, as I do here—but merely as a tip for better work efficiency in life. As Albion the teacher, I present "the Great Leap Outward," the one that takes us from the black hole of our origin to eternal life outside. But within Charybdis we're busy bumping around all the time, tiny jumps within the vortex every time we choose. These small leaps still involve two points though, A & B, and no matter how "close" they may appear to each other, it remains impossible for us to hit all the points in between. So when a task appears "easy" to us then, it merely means that we can see/conceive/imagine our destination easily, and we jump with confidence. But many tasks are "hard," so somehow we have to imagine a target that we can't see (again, the paradox of otherness). This requires preparation.

            As a paid manager of my college dorm, I found it funny during finals week that the building's shared vacuum cleaner, normally stuffed in a closet corner, would suddenly hit peak demand, wave upon wave of dire requests. I'd mark the calendar in advance. Students who had happily wallowed a semester in a hygiene-free pigsty would, without prior word or warning—and when it was absolutely necessary to get studying—immerse themselves in a full, top-to-bottom bedroom scouring. This phenomenon I learned was psychological, not a meme or a fad or seasonal tradition, for each person had come to an independent epiphany.
            Today I know strangely that procrastination in this form is probably a good strategy, time permitting, for before one begins a serious new task, like cracking a text for the first time, it's important to clear a space of absence in one's mind. Otherwise, the mind is a clutter, its own pigsty, and there's no room for creativity to enter. In this case, often the best way to accomplish something in one's mind is to act out the analogous process in the physical world—the world, of course, being myth, as is every thing we know. Vacuuming one's room, therefore, is a symbolic assertion of intent, which, on the deeper mental level (i.e., eternity) helps to form the real thing. The very act in life is, in fact, an act of choice on the auroral plane, a clearing of space which condenses the fog to a point: room to think.
            Now consider Scribe's sent vision of our "pure place of absence." This is a port, the tiniest possible: a dry, barren, and intimate space of direct sunlight. When we go there, we take on its dry & barren mind, and we put away our childish things, as well as nearly everything else, so that we might be receptive to what must come. Most successful people instinctively know this, because they know we can't focus ourselves among a mental mess. Scribe was nonetheless surprised by his absent place. He had believed for good reason his Earth to be a fertile world. Jane, however, helped us understand that a thriving mind needs fallow fields, for "fertility… can be an obstacle to receiving."

            Absence, then, is a proactive clearing of space, which is also an inherent acknowledgement of our discontinuous being. We exist at one point, and we are directed to another, but we cannot slide ourselves between. To project ourselves to another point we must "see" it clearly (however we sense it), in focus. Points A & B must be distinct. So we take A & B and squeeze each down to precise aleph points—which means that somewhere between A  & B we create a gap, the gap we must leap over. We identify with A (here), and must we see as distant or other Point B (there). If we don't do this, we can't jump with specificity, and further we will get lost in all the increments along the way, potentially infinite. Even the simplest task can be incrementalized indefinitely.[7] Zeno's arrow fails to move.

In my mind I picture absence as the Grand Canyon: On one side is me, looking across a bottomless void to the other side: me again, or rather my overseer Albion looking back. Perhaps Albion is waving or trying to send me instructions. At such a distance, in fact, he appears much older, a serious father, while I'm just a boy trying to get across. It might take years, or arrive anytime, but somewhere the canyon narrows: I grow up a bit; maybe I give up a knot I no longer need, deadweight. Meanwhile, Albion my brother seems younger now, approachable. Then—l'll never put my finger on it—I'm on the other side, the side I'm on. Albion & I are one, and I'm staring back at the young man opposite, still stuck there, still stymied.

Many are the measures to bridge the canyon: To fly like a bird across this vast void seems rather obvious. But bringing the canyon walls together works quite well, too.[8] As an albion, I have a propensity for crossing the gap through perspective, Albion's overview. That is, I shift my attention to a separate plane altogether outside or over the grand face-off described. I step into a place of abstraction to alter the very scale of my soul graph. This, I've only recently discovered, is one reason why Albion specifically is sometimes called "the Giant Albion" (a moniker I resist, not being large). Viewed from one scale, two points are separated by an infinite number and are seen as an unbridgeable distance. On a different scale, though—equally valid & existentially real—the same two points are neighboring dots, practically touching. The Giant just steps across. Such a perspective, to be clear, need not be spiritual, metaphysical, or intellectual in nature. For me humor is another, joyful place of overview. To laugh at a joke requires us to solve an inherent, but unspoken comic puzzle (wink wink) that expects us to step outside the particulars of its given scenario, to find new light or absurdity in the juxtapositions & realignments (nudge nudge). Tragedy, too, can expand one's gaze or shrink it to a focal dot. Either way eternity is just outside.

Meanwhile, Albion the boy, whether stranded on his bubble or knotted to the mainmast by his men, bites back a whimper, "I need the eggs!"[9]

9. Toccata & Hajj in D-Minor

            Now consider The Nine Men curriculum in light of human discontinuity. Each of our 81 steps marks a distinct & distant mind, far enough away as to lie beyond our horizon, an unseen target reachable by flight only. That's why our ascent is a stairway, not a mountain slope or inclined plane. Absence is built in to the very topography of our pyramid, where each step makes a perch or rest, and the apprentice, upon reaching this step, must stop to "digest" the mind just adopted. This abrupt & temporary nest then requires us to clear a space for the next step up, time to kill before the next full-court press. But this is not like staring expectantly at a blank sheet of paper or naked canvas. It's not a game. We must embody personally the emptiness that cleaves us from our goal. Before we envision our target, we neither close our eyes nor snuff the candles. We suffer blindness.
            And Scribe hated his absent waits. The only thing more painful for him than writing was not writing, where these required delays—which roughly equaled the time of his actual composing, 1-2 weeks of nothing—proved routinely excruciating, poetry withdrawal. Even during his final four men, when an extra interval, of several weeks' prep-work between absence & writing, exploded to baroque complexity—involving precise dreams, major research, even content-channeling via a third party[10]—even then, what Scribe dreaded/feared most was absence.
            Both Scribe & I are impatient men who perceive waiting as pain, but in fairness, that's not how I've operated in practice. O yes, in overview moments I anguish for my missions: My next Everest, please! But in point of fact I've needed these downtimes to stew & recover, to let dead men languish, and balance my training with the very real commitments of normal (insane) American life. In time I was always a parent first, a husband second, a teacher third, and alas, a sorcerer's apprentice last, which I accepted as my indentured service & nailed cross. If I missed out on flight during the prime of my life—daring to live among suburban American humans as one of them—may this long-term investment at least buy me the maturity to teach well. Free will means failure is always an option. I don't know the future, but in the absence of such knowing we have a new "old saying" in the karass: "If the shoe fits, fuck it."[11]   Yes, I confirm, I'd do it again.

Some years before, my teachers warned me of my epic absence—

don't call it "prodigal," but don't think "heroic" either—which began in

earnest in 2005, once I left the ouija board. Josef foretold a "desert" I

someday would cross. What provisions would I carry? Of course, until

those busiest-years-in-my-waking-life these metaphors meant dust to

me—only that I would be isolated from my karass friends & masters for

a prolonged dry spell and "not all [would] be fun." Now I'll attest to the

well of a hajj, a deep desert exile designed to sandblast its supplicants to

purity & piety, where time & toil are the prime corrosives. Whether it's

trekking to Mecca or navigating a middle school cafeteria lunch five

thousand times, this trial-by-erosion makes for a soul reduction, a

pruning of attention needed by those of us bleeding many-mindedness—

having too many interests & distractions at once (a modern affliction).

Weighed down & grounded by the knots we've tied on to everything, we

choose a hajj to loosen & release all but our most essential anchors.

True, knots can be severed (violently), and lives change forever suddenly

all the time. But for any leavening to be preserved, untying a knot

is favored over cutting. And this takes time, the drifting sands of

memory, forgetting by attrition. Knots deprived of attention disgorge

& disengage, and thus emptied, eventually come undone, as all knots

come free in the fourth dimension. Before filling a cup, empty it.
There are (at least) two basic strategies for untying knots over

extended time: The first is the traditional desert-absence trek (conceived

before Ramadan traffic clogged Mecca's airports). This reduction is

straightforward: You give up all in life except the daily essentials & forward

progress. And because your immediate needs, like food & water, are

provided, you are free while you walk Arabian sands to seek God's eternal

essence in absent places: under a rock escaping the sun, among the cracks

in lakebeds & mirages, in the dung of dung beetles, or in the feel of your own skin

stretched over your ribcage. God is everywhere. Preparing for a hajj takes

longer than the pilgrimage itself. The second method, conspicuous among

unconscious America, achieves much the same result, but by opposite

measure: a reductio ad absurdum, a life so busy with legitimate concerns

& commitments & competing values that mere existence becomes a

centrifuge for enrichment.
For me, middle school teaching served as my hajj—one of several

hero-myths I indulged & carried with me on my busy rounds (such

melodrama)—but not merely because I worked so hard. The shoe fit:

Like desert winds, children are forces of nature, and there's no bullshit in a

middle school classroom (as there is in high school and adult society).

The social masks have yet to harden. Needs are real & in-your-face. Kids

this age just start to think for themselves—their first auroral sparks—and

they blurt out whatever-the-fuck they think with neither malice nor filters.

Children deserve unconditional answers to their often-awkward

searching questions. For each child has infinite value, and every parent

knows it's true. Teachers are exposed targets for a zillion heat-seeking

human missiles, where even “good” & “positive” interactions extract

attention, a limited resource. I taught 28 years in the same middle school.
And parenting is another haboob, a whole-world storm we are

charged to cherish, but in many ways are helpless to affect. In Arabic

“islam” means “to submit,” meaning to bow to the one god Allah. I have

two daughters, my prime concern in life, but I did not bow to them per se.

Rather I subsumed my personal agenda to a superior & abstract cause:

to give the two eternal souls in my care the greatest possible chance

to grow & thrive, an absolute good. Parenting is sacred duty, where

every parent ego must accept freely its humble perch, which often hurts:

I recall one April evening reviewing the calendar and finding not a single

day between Spring Break and Memorial Day Weekend without some

"special event" or extracurricular dread, no free hour that didn't come

straight from sleep. It's amazing how efficiently a married team—& soon

the whole family—can work together to divide a decade’s labor, how

smoothly the logistics flow when you give up everything else. I don't

regret a minute of it, though I don't choose to remember most. I love my

daughters, but my personal history of parenting now, thankfully, is just a

blur. I cemented so many bricks into my American dream & shrine I lost

count ages ago!

These knots, now done, are nearly sand. My children are beautifully

grown, and I haven’t set foot on school grounds for over a year, which

seems like a century (following Trump’s metastasis). Twenty-plus years

of endless thankless child-collisions later, I stand stripped of my childish

ways & means, winnowed to my hollow core. I know now what I truly

value, because I couldn’t juggle more. Soon the minarets of Mecca will

  perforate the skyline.   Shall I smile at these sandcastles?

            O yes, I whine again, but allow me the interlude. That's my soul crying to wake me up: the boy on the bubble, the hero of this story tied to his mast, the giant standing in the sun… Thank you, dear Sirs. May I have another? I choose this pain to remember my existential risk, the dire need to exit Charybdis, but I also use my pain for how I measure progress. For if I'm not in pain,  shouldn't I be making a better effort? How hard should I try? How hard is hard?

            Wait a minute… This isn't an intellectual exercise. If I'm not fighting the current, I'm going down. How hard do I try to save my own existence? Seriously?

            And how much harder might I work, then, to save my dear family? How hard should I struggle to save everyone, the whole Planet, and all future generations? Am I fighting hard enough then, on this very paragraph? If I burst a blood vessel composing this page or martyr myself in the public square, will that prove effort enough to certify my progress? What does the soul ask of the life?

Let's pause briefly on these happy thoughts while I assign the homework:

I ask the reader to consider a question, as I will myself right now: How do you measure your own progress? Notice I do not phrase this spiritually per se. I am a spiritual person, but most people probably aren't, not foremost. I don't ask this as a moral task either (which it might later become after the data is analyzed). Rather, I ask you to approach this task as a scientist and consider descriptively, factually, how you measure progress in your life. Consider the following questions as well:

a) Does your life have a forward motion (not just aging)?
b) If so, toward what are you moving (not just death)?
c) Is there a specific target or merely a direction?
d) Can you reasonably expect to reach what you aim for

(as Scribe & I could), or is it an unattainable ideal only?
e) Do you have to die in order to reach your goal?
f) Are your measures "objective," like Scribe's poems, or, like

me, do you trust more your subjective sensors—i.e., pain?
(Consider that society embraces both sets of measures:

Some people want fame & fortune; others want happiness.)
g) Do you care to progress at all?
h) Or could you progress without measure whatsoever? Many

flyers have no need of such measures, and saints measure only

in absolute terms: Yes or No?

There is certainly no one best answer, and I provide no answer here at all, just my own case study, quite incomplete, as well as embarrassingly convoluted. To begin, I find the assumption above that guides my life and how I've measured others is an error, pure bullshit; therefore, a deep knot. Never mind that my logic is completely messed up (—leave that for another lesson). Why do I connect pain & effort at all? And yet having demonstrated to myself that my logic is hopeless, I nonetheless still measure myself, as well as others, by this subjective yardstick (translated into familiar American terms):

"No pain, no gain."

I ask, is there no better measure?

            Let me end my introduction to the soul with a little ma'at, my talent for balance. I've spent most of this lesson asserting the discontinuous & dualistic nature of our human minds and of every universe our minds can project. This is us: every thing we know. But we're not the only minds in Infinity. Daimones, in fact, are continuous beings. Aliah is continuous, is perhaps continuity itself. The idea of a line is continuous, existing in its own continuity, even if my mind is unable to hold it. Perhaps the most important lesson that I can impart here then, is to train your mind, dear Reader, on this line. You are not the stuff of life—the myths, memories, & Christmas bullshit. You are the chooser who independently exists nowhere at all. The idea of a line, its Platonic form, is more actually you than the many dotted vectors we project & make myths of. You are the Platonic form of you. If you imagine yourself as continuous, despite the discontinuities of your mind, you are.

            The relatively new science of brain imaging offers a fun illustration here. I return to the profound mystery of music: Different aspects of music, we now know, are processed in different loci of the brain: Pitch, for example, has a precise center that is the same for almost everyone. Another center, for higher order processing, assembles the disparate elements of pitch, tempo, and harmony into whole music. When someone injures this center, which is a precise collection of neurons & synapses found in all of us, these elements of music remain unaffected, but the totality is perceived as noise only, like "breaking glass," as one victim described. Rhythm, on the other hand, seems to exist throughout the whole brain, maybe the whole body, as nearly every metabolic process is regulated in time to cycles great & small.
            Of these many new discoveries the one I find most intriguing concerns what might be called our affective response to a song. My college Zoo friends once created a "rock anthems" tape where the recording level was pre-raised & lowered to match the song's most dramatic moments—Jimmy Page's signature solo in "Stairway to Heaven," for example, or David Gilmour's twin visitations in "Comfortably Numb"—the point of which was to avoid having to get up out of your sunken chair or bean bag to crank up the volume (because you're too stoned to move). But actually that's not how our brains engage. Our brains are most focused—as measured by when we most light up the PET scan monitors—not during the loud climactic moments, but between songs, tracks, or movements, namely when there is silence—that is, absence.

Can you feel it? Know thyself: You are that deep longing to go on, to prolong the beauteous moment by hanging on to its anguished ache, arcing to span the distance—absence as pang.[12] There's a crack in the universe, a place we hold onto with our minds only, bridging the canyon. Music is no accident of nature. It's a biologically programmed wallow in eternity. To be human is to have music as an open door (though most of us linger at its threshold only).[13] To be clear, music has no scientific explanation and does not make sense as a concept at all outside an eternal context. Notes & formal pattern alone don't music make. The beauty of music is perceived directly as Platonic form. One hears each sounded note, and indeed the brain assembles the package and identifies the form, but the form itself exists outside of sound, where the spaces between musical notes & rests, like those between their constituent sound wave crests, are like Planck lengths in the mind's ear, gaps we cross with ease. Music is an idea of the continuity we seek, clues scattered like flower petals before our feet. How can an organized bunch of sounds equal the beauty of a symphony? How can a clump of memories equal an eternal being?

I offer Josef's closing words to the 2003 sessions, five nights which were largely devoted to a single theme, human discontinuity. Significantly, Josef's words arrived out-of-the-blue in our discussion, both in their content as well as tone, which was abrupt & jarring, especially since we weren't ready to end so early. His irony was not lost on us. This single response, incidentally, marks our longest single continuous response ever (without restarting the planchette at the central lozenge), a tiring affair!

SESSION 87: 5TH NIGHT, 8/8/03

34. Q: Josef, we missed that final word. [the previous response got cut off turning

the steno page]

ONLY A PIECE OF PUNCTUATION

CONTINUITY IS A DREAM YET A NECESSARY ONE

MUSIC IS [THE] IMAGE OF CONTINUITY BECAUSE IT TRAVERSES

WITH APPARENT EASE [THE] GAPS & ABYSSES OF MIND

& DISPLAYS [THE] FINAL ARC [THE] IMAGE OF [THE]

UNBROKEN CIRCUMFERENCE

◊ I & ANAND & ALL YOUR TEACHERS BID YOU PEACE

DEAR SONS

JOURNEY WELL

PASS ABOVE FEAR INTO [THE] RADIANCE TO WHICH YOU

WERE BORN

I JOSEF SPEAK

◊ ◊ ◊

12:18 AM

8 November, 2017

(one year after Trump's election, the pain of which launched this curriculum, much as the sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric's Visigoths marked the inspiration for Augustine's City of God)

Hail aliah

[12] A perfect exemplar of musical absence I've found in Bach's Violin Concerto No. 2, the second movement (adagio). Here, my attention is riveted on the two very long rests in the middle of the piece, where the first seems odd or off, an unresolved circuit, even a mistake, creating a deep question or anxiety in the listener, is it over?—while the second, understood now to be deliberate & supported by a master, suspends the listener in a space of rarest absence, resolving in music so beautiful I am brought to tears. Only beautiful music tears me up.

1933 - 2015

∞!

[7] This is what I briefly experienced following my Boy on the Bubble event, when I nearly lost myself in the minutia of cafeteria dining, thinking through every swallow.

Wish You Were Here

Before Zeno's arrow can hit the target, first it must travel half the distance. Then, upon reaching the halfway point, it still has half the distance to go.

But before it can travel that remaining distance, first it must travel half that distance, whereupon it will still have half the remaining distance to cover.

There's always half of some distance to travel, so the arrow never arrives.

[2] And thus, yes, it is reality itself which is cracked (because there is none).

[13] A mystical fact: While Josef, master of dreams, is indeed foremost in the karass, the music master may well be Number 2. In one analogy from the board, music is considered the subterranean counterpart to a sky-realm of dreams. Scribe & I have never spoken with our music master at the board.

[1] Twice within six months at age 19 I heard these exact words, loud & clear & disembodied,and they absolutely saved my life: Both instances involved my falling asleep, once while swimming, and the other while driving in freeway traffic. I fell much further than nodding off, past the point of no return, gone… Wake up or you're going to die! Someone (Albion) scared the shit out of me, jumping me out of my coma, to find myself still swimming in stroke, and not having veered in my lane. Dear God, when I consider how I survived childhood, I cringe in disbelief.

Egypt 2002

Newton by William Blake (1795)

[6] I think, in fact, the temporal discontinuities here firmly indicate the daimon's help, which is why "the brother I blame," as Waters might say, is my Guide, my working-partner. Blending disparate points in time in this way is more difficult, I think, for humans in my net, but daimones are basically made for such a task. It's their nature, their contribution to our symbiosis.

Zeno of Elea

c. 490 - c. 430 BCE

Lesson 7: Soul (Part II)
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. Zeno of Elea bust: http://www.massline.org/PhilosDog/Z/zenoelea2.jpg

3. Drawing of "Zeno"; D.C. Albion

4. Drawing of a Zeno-like paradox, "The Arrow & the Target." (sans calculus)

5. Drawing of a Zeno-like paradox, "The Arrow & the Target." (with calculus)

6. Newton by William Blake - William Blake Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=198284

7. Drawing of "Human souls as vectors"; D.C. Albion

8. Wish You Were Here album cover, by Pink Floyd, http://www.feelnumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/wish_you_were_here_pink_floyd_album_cover_warner_bros_lot_photo_location.jpg

9. Generic brick wall; https://23967982_Alt0

10. Drawing of Wish You Were Here plaque (which is pink only because of unintentional cell camera effects); D.C. Albion
11. (pathetic attempt) to illustrate the Giant Albion bridging the absence by way of altering the scale; D.C. Albion.

12. Camel train in Arabia: http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/08_334824_02WAYZATA021613_26106561.JPG

13. The Kaaba: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/A_Last_day_of_Hajj_-_all_pilgrims_leaving_Mina%2C_many_already_in_Mecca_for_farewell_circumambulation_of_Kaaba_-_Flickr_-_Al_Jazeera_English.jpg

14. Generic school cafeteria (not mine): http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/08_334824_02WAYZATA021613_ 26106561.JPG

15. (C. Family 2002, Dashur, Egypt) from framed trip collage on wall, thus also a reflection of family room hearth, etc.

16. Arabian dunes: https://destinationksa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/empty-quarter-desert-saudi-arabia_31529_600x450.jpg

17. Oliver Sacks on his book cover to Musicophilia: https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/oliver-sacks.jpg

Pink Floyd

1975

Human souls as vectors

[4] And yet I insist that the future is not determined. Neither is the past unalterable. Other outcomes remain possible, though decreasingly likely as one nears the gravity well of reality knotting.

So I must ask then for all Planet Earth, because we need to know: To what extent can a net be mended?

[11] Not my words, I quote Marjorie, Scribe's longtime housemate. I never met Marjorie and don't know her last name.

[8] I remember well—another major "clue" event in my life—when in second grade I first read Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Her description of "tesseract," which portrays travel in spacetime by means of bringing distant points together, completely blew my mind. The book even includes a drawing. Of course, in our karass curriculum language what L'Engle describes is pulling pure & simple.

[10] not a Jewel member, whereabouts unknown.

alert

[9] See Ch. 3.3, just before Section V, our karass joke.

[3] Indeed, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle shows us that this is not just a problem of eyesight. To see anything, especially something the size of the Planck Length, means it must be pinpointed in time as well as location. But these specific coordinates, time & location, at the quantum level are mutually contradictory. To know one is to lose the coordinates of the other unless energy is applied (like a light source). In actual fact, to see a Planck Length requires so much focused energy that the applied power would immediately open a black hole. Thus the universe safeguards its holes & discontinuities from observation. Of course, another way to say this: What doesn't exist can't be seen.

[5] "traveller" with two l's is our k-term (karass) for someone on a spiritual journey, a stranger on a strange (dream) world. This k-spelling convention also distinguishes vermilion, the red color, from vermillion, the Platonic colour that is Scribe or Scribe's.