As Above, So Below

Science Daily: "Brain Waves Pattern Themselves After Rhythms of Nature."
Math dude: Consciousness = chaos...hallucination is to "reality" as branch is to root.

Online Dreammachine:

yours truly has been fantasizing about this since I first got a personal computer, back in the day of the 286. Fractint became WinFract became Fractal eXtreme, and lo, still there was no virtual Dreammachine...until now. And it works...you do have to sit close to the monitor, and other details of set and setting doubtless apply (I first used it while blasting The Who By Numbers and sipping absinthe; think, rather, Out of Stillness, yogic breathing, and incense...).

One morning in my youth I was riding a train, had been up all night on ginkgo and gotu kola, reading Nicole Brossard (talk about set and setting!) and I closed my eyes in exhaustion just in time for the train to enter a forest and the sun to fragment itself into limitless flashing daggers speeding between the trees...the light-play resolved itself variously into sea-waves and peacock feathers--an entire visual field of Krishna's peacock feathers elaborating themselves into flames of thought footnoting Nicole's Lovhers... it was Her, calling...

At Last--a Fractal Approach to Evolution

This interview is very exciting, and it's followed by some good links.

Sample quotes: "Scientists usually study natural selection at a single level, such as genes or individuals or even a population...but it takes place at all these levels simultaneously, and what happens at each scale resonates through the web of life..."

"Neo-Darwinian evolution isn't fixated at one level. It's being applied at different levels -- but in a given study, only at one level. There's been arguments: Dawkins argues that it happens at the gene, others at the level of individuals, and others at the level of species -- but there's now more of a growing consensus that it happens at all these different levels, and we don't understand how that comes about."

"When you get into the notion of different levels, you deal with problem of selection at different time scales -- for instance, when you talk about a particular individual, it's about what happens during their lifetime. They either make or don't make children. When you talk about human populations and human dynamics ... what's the time scale over which selection is happening there? It's not individual anymore. It's a longer scale altogether.... What time scales are relevant? It seems you end up with lots of different possible time scales. How do you unify all these different mechanisms taking place? And why are there all these different levels? That's the fundamental thing that makes life complex. And those points aren't accounted for by Darwinian evolution."

I've said before on this blog that, in my Crackpot Theory of Everything, evolution is the primary spiritual and physical mode of expression, the Divine Mother's signature in four-dimensional space. I remember fondly and with only a little embarrassment talking with one of my co-workers about creationism, and my talking turned into a mini-rant and I spurted out something like "So you have these chemical processes that give rise to amino acids that resolve themselves into photosynthetic organisms which, over countless millennia, become thinking entities that are able to uncover and reflect upon their own ultimate origins. That is the greatest story ever told!"

Ancient seers told this story, too; is it naive to think that the quantitative and visionary accounts are two groping hands each with their peculiar purchase on the elephant?

The Drab, Euclidean Underpinnings of Atheist Thought

Richard Dawkins writes: "Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it."

Two problems:

1. Why say that anyOne went to the trouble of "designing it"? Replace this Attic notion of agency with a more cybernetic, self-organizing framework and all watchmaker quibbles evaporate.

2. Who says complexity must arise from complexity? Here the venerable don sounds like a creationist! Kali's secret name is z² + c.

Milton's Muse

From a very nice hosanna to Milton in the Guardian:

In the second and third personal interventions in Paradise Lost, he talks of how he has fallen on "evil days" and "evil tongues" and is surrounded by dangers, but in spite of this is able to receive his "celestial patroness" or, as he called her, his Christian muse, Urania. She comes to him sometimes early in the morning, sometimes in the night, when she "dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires / Easy my unpremeditated verse."

The extraordinary claim that he takes his verses as dictation from a celestial being establishes his unshakable belief in himself against the disparagement of his enemies. Singled out from above in this way, he was all the same sensible enough to edit his heavenly Muse. After dictating what she had given him, and he had memorised, to one of the friends or assistants who came to write for him, he set about cutting extensively, and revising. Did he really believe in Urania and her night-time visits? No doubt he believed with one part of his mind. She may have hovered between allegory and symbol, among other inhabitants of his imagination, bright seraphim with angel trumpets, gloomy Dis who ruled the underworld, wood and mountain nymphs, Pan, Apollo and Robin Goodfellow.

Beautiful Blog Post

From Patricia Bralley... "God is peering through right now... In this moment."

My Crackpot Theory of Everything

I don't have the whole thing yet, elaborated fully into all its geometrical, ethical, world-historical, metaphysical, and nutritional aspects...but I'm workin' on it. Not workin' all that hard, I'll admit, but...I think about it once in a while.

The Crackpot Theory of Everything seems to be a stage each of us must go through at some point, in some incarnation or other, as we walk the spiritual path. It's even part of certain systems, like the A.A. is part of the long slog towards the B.S., so to speak. I certainly haven't the slightest wish to be "the leader of a school of thought" and I must not be all that far towards my own mystical B.S. degree since I have no "proposals for [the Universe's] welfare and progress"...it seems to be progressing just fine on its own (this progress, in fact, which my CTE conflates with evolution and divine entelechy, is central to the forthcoming Kalibhakta Explains Everything [Llewellyn Press, 2012]).

These musings are prompted by a skim of a summary of Yeats's A Vision, the poet's CTE and considered by him his finest work, all those lake isles and rough beasts notwithstanding. Do you have to have hallucinations of grandeur to concoct a CTE? Well, get this, from the mouth of the bard: "I send you the introduction of a book which will, when finished, proclaim a new divinity." (Imagine how he'd brag if he'd just written Chess for Dummies!) Admittedly, Yeats is writing at a remove from himself; he cloaked A Vision within a frame tale in which a white male (of course) travels to The East (of course) to uncover a complex (of course) system of hidden (of course) knowledge. Kalibhakta (of course) is interested in it because a) it's weird and b) it involves Yeats's own theory of the Holy Guardian Angel--that Being of psychological or spiritual or archetypal origin Who hath appear'd in many guises throughout time, from Sumerian spirit guides to WiHW's dynamic co-star, Laura (artist's conception above).

I'm sure I can be more, er, scientifique than Yeats, right? I mean, it's 2008! Vive la pocket protector! You got your Supreme Architect of the Universe, Who reveals Herself in Her unfolding (creation + how we perceive/imagine it), becoming, for those who recognize Her, the Source of Love and Joy-- the very love and joy She uses to call us to consciousness of Her and awaken our inner light, thus mirroring on the micro scale the evolution of the entire species, Universe, Multiverse... each positron and "random" event actually a point in Her Mandelbrot Set of self-revelation... well, that's a little abstract, but... OK, how about this: everything you see around you manifests divine Intelligence and Will, but none of it makes sense until you put it together for yourself-- assemble the pieces into your personal catechism or CTE...but you lose the game if you get too attached to your theory...you want the game you're playing with Deep Black to be an Evergreen.

So lemme see... the Goddess! Angels! The Grail! Eastern tantra! Western tantra! Isis! Eleusis! Chaos! Self-organization! Hypnagogia... paranomasia... elephantoplasty...! A dollop of Engelbreitian Splenda! A smattering of dark elegance!

That's the blurb-in-progress...

My God (dess)...I Am a Total Failure

The last post was when? October??? Nobody's still reading this thing, are they???????

And not only does no one read it and I never post, but I'm writing this on somewhere between a 5th- and 7th-grade level????

I am a total failure.

iamatotalfailure.blogspot.com

Sophia, kindly, sez: Well, I'm sure the grade-level software is picking up on the fact that you use "I" a lot, and all those ellipses... and you use not entirely conventional sentence structure, too, like intentional fragments...

Yeah, but there's a clear pattern in the syllabic stats in the graph above (provided by the Juicy Studio readability test): whoooole bunch o' one-syllable words, fewer (a lot fewer) two-syllable, fewer still three-syllable, etc. My semi-literacy is a damn pre-algebra problem, it's so easy to graph!

But wait... one-syllable words are good! I remember an interview where Galway Kinnell rhapsodized about Whitman's Anglo-Saxon vocabulary...slough of boot-soles, the blab of the pave... let's run Leaves of Grass through the old Flesch-Kincaid, shall we???? There's some ellipses for ya, buddy! Hey, what's the average number of syllables in the name "Flesch-Kincaid"? 1.5! Same...as...my...blog!!!!!!!!!!!

[But seriously, folks: I apologize for my absence. I hope you are well and happy. Keep those cards and letters coming... someone said McCartney's solo stuff wasn't as good as Lennon's because Paul was happy, and to make great art one must be miserable. Judging from many of the blogs out there (oh, god, even mine when it first erupted, in all its monosyllabic glory, into the troubled logo-geography of Planet Blog) there may be a grain of truth in this. But on the other hand... not only am I deliriously happy right now, but I really like McCartney's solo stuff! Not that horrific "simply having a wonderful Christmastime" song, but..."Let 'Em In" and "Silly Love Songs" are genius!!! And Mac did the only good James Bond movie theme song, ever!!! And it's reeeeeeeeeeeaaaally good. So is "Band on the Run"! And (readability experts: do not dog me about the sentences starting with "And." I'd like you to check out a little something called...the King James Bible!!!!) how about "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey"??? Does readability software check punctuation?]

Chaotic Beauty

Traces of the sea in sand...they remind me of Wallace Stevens's "fire-fangled feathers"... a Cherish'd Reader implored me to post something so she didn't have to look at "that hideous picture of Mother Teresa" every time she checked my seemingly moribund blog... I apologize on both counts... :)

My life has been filled with chaotic beauty lately--this beach you see above, as the sun sank and Sophia in her white dress waded in the tidal pools...Sophia herself, so long a friend and now infinitely more...the chaos isn't wreck or disorder, but change, the unveiling of beauty...chaos in the creative, Mandelbrot sense...

one reason I haven't been blogging a lot recently is that I don't want this to turn into a romance blog...but Sophia is all I want to talk about! But as much as I'd like to write about Sophia and me, it's more fun to be me with her, to live who we are...and then there are the invasion of privacy concerns... right, Sophia? (It's probably bad blog manners to indulge in what, in radio jargon, is called "point to point communication," but Sophia still loyally reads this so-called blog and I doubt, honey, that you want all that mushy, ♥-y dovey stuff spilling over here... ☺)

Anyway...it's time to leave work and I may have succeeded in kicking the future saint below the fold...