h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There is a thread over here about alternate experiences of reality, that I've briefly visited. Now this is an area about which I have a lot to say, but I'm not comfortable saying it in a thread that is too public. The thing is, there are major problems here.

I have had, and still have, experiences and convictions that can be termed 'mystical'. On the one hand, I cannot deny them. On the other hand, I cannot just accept them either. These sort of things – for me – have to be considered critically.

Right now the world seems to be split between 'skeptics' and 'believers'. The hard-line skeptics are the ones who say we should only believe what can be scientifically proven; the all-out believers are ones who are fully committed to a particular 'faith' whether this might be a mainstream religion or a fringe group that believes in, for instance, aliens, ghosts, Bigfoot, or a lot of other things.

Now I don't think either of these extremes are at all good. First of all, one must understand what science is. I can't give that in a sentence or two over here, but basically science is a method for finding practical answers about reality. It cannot find all answers, all truths, by default. There will always be some truths that are beyond its reach. But also it keeps developing, so some truths that are unknown by science today, might be known by science in the future. And much of what science thinks is true today, might be proven incorrect (not quite correct – not perhaps entirely incorrect) in the future. Again, I am stating it extremely simply here. The topic deserves a book or few.

Personally, understanding what science is, I embrace it. Science gives us a way of rigorously testing theories. It gives us a way in which to share knowledge where other people don't just have to take our word, but can try and see for themselves by running their own experiments and seeing whether that confirms or refutes what we are saying.

But again, science should understand its limits. No 'final' pronouncements about ultimate truths can be given by way of science. There are questions, problems, that are quite beyond the scope of conventional scientific investigation. For instance, science cannot answer fundamental questions like these: what is existence? What is matter? What is energy? What is force? What is space? What is time? Science can make models of those things and give predictions but cannot answer the 'deep' questions. No scientist who understands the philosophic basis of science could claim otherwise. But many skeptic-types may wish to avoid the questions altogether, saying it is meaningless to ask things like those. They would say that the best we can do is to have theories and equations describing things like forces and fields and that these give the best answers that we can get as to what the nature of reality is.

There used to be a movement called 'logical positivism' that tried to take this stance to the logical limit. But this sort of died out because people, including scientists and philosophers, realized it was absurd … nevertheless, many skeptics today still embody the 'positivist' spirit.

My problem with that is that we are using in our lives all the time a plethora of non-scientific beliefs. What we believe about ourselves, our friends, our countries, humanity itself … our goals and values in life … those are all stuff beyond the sphere of science. We can use certain bits of science to inform those beliefs, but still there will be much that has nothing at all to do with science. Science cannot tell me how much I should love my cat or my friends and family or all people or all living things, or what music I should listen to (or even what music is), or if human rights really exist, or which of communism or capitalism is better.

Sometimes people will claim certain beliefs or even belief systems to be grounded in science. Most of the time this isn't really true. The scope of verified science is quite narrow. Much of for instance medicine, technology and economics go beyond 'pure' science.

Science should be humble, and for its own good! By recognizing what we DO NOT YET KNOW we understand where future growth is possible. Two things are bad. The first is insisting that a bit of scientific knowledge is perfect and final. For instance Einstein's idea that nothing material could move faster than light. For all we know this IS true. For instance there was a recent experiment where neutrinos appeared to have traveled faster than light. My brother-in-law, an engineer, insisted to me that the experiment was properly conducted and the findings true. I said I was willing to bet that there was a mistake, because Einstein's laws are SO entrenched in our current view of science that an upset of them would overthrow almost everything we think we know. In the event it proved that there WAS a mistake in the experiment; the neutrinos did NOT go faster than light. Einstein's laws and our current view of science therefore are still safe. Score one for conservative, entrenched science.

But this doesn't mean that there might NOT some day prove to be a way for 'something' to go faster than light. But our current understanding of reality seems to be so solid that it would have be something that in itself is really far-out that would prove to be able to go faster than light. Not regular, humdrum things like neutrinos. Our category of 'things' might need to be expanded before we could encounter 'things' that go faster than light.

So on that account we need to leave an 'escape clause' into our current laws of science. We must not insist that what we know now would remain absolutely true and unchanged forever.

The other thing we must not do is to insist that something that is currently not known, could never be known. I mean, things that must have some sort of 'reality' but nevertheless seem to be beyond current methods of scientific investigation. Here are two examples. At one time it was declared that it was impossible to know what stars were made of. It was believed we could never go to other stars, and even if we could we could never survive landing on their surfaces, and therefore never collect samples of their material to analyze. The science of spectroscopy made this view obsolete, and we can now indeed investigate the composition of stars, gas clouds, planets and lots of other things out there in space, by examining the light they are shining, transmitting or reflecting. And also there might still be a way for us to travel to other stars also. This therefore also covers the question of whether there exists extraterrestrial life or intelligence. We have not yet detected life or intelligent societies around other stars, but this doesn't mean that they're not there, or that we'll never know.

Another example of what was considered impossible but is becoming possible is the question of what colour dinosaurs and other long-extinct creatures were. The conventional answer was that we could never know because skin, fur, feathers turned to stone lose their colours. But now we are already able to investigate, using powerful microscopes, the very pigment particles preserved in fossils, and we are indeed starting to learn what colour schemes ancient dinosaurs, birds and other things had.

So: we must be very, very wary of saying 'we will never know' when it comes to some great existential question. Maybe someday we will have a way of finding out. Insisting that we will never know only closes our minds against thinking of possible answers and possible ways of getting them.

In the above I'm of course thinking of questions such as 'is there a God?' and 'is there life after death?'

Questions that fall more on the scientific side are for instance 'what came before the Big Bang?' I want to note that saying 'nothing came before the Big Bang because Time itself started with it' is a cop-out. There might very well be a kind of time and/or space 'outside' of the Big Bang. It is almost impossible to think of the Big Bang coming from literally nothing, and in itself containing truly 'all that is'. That would mean that it really was its own cause and this is logically ludicrous (maybe I'll write more about this sometime). Even scientists tend to think, it seems to me, that there was some kind of 'situation', some kind of reality, from which the Big Bang came into being. It contains all of 'our' Time and Space as far as we know … but might there not be 'something else', also, and if so, what the heck was it and where did IT come from? What CAUSED the Big Bang? How did such a thing happen? Was there a 'time' when there was nothing including no time, and 'suddenly' something happened and became everything that exists, including space and time? Ponder this for a while. Some scientists might say 'we can never know what existed before the Big Bang', or, 'we can never know what caused the Big Bang', but again I say, we cannot validly say this because some day we MIGHT find a way to find out.

Other similar questions: what happens at the singularity of a black hole? What is the ultimate fate of the Universe? What lies beyond the visually-observable limits of the Universe? Are there 'parallel' realities, other Universes?

Then there are still the myriads of 'hard' scientific questions we are still working on answering. We do not yet have the 'theory of everything' that physicist have been believing to be close at hand since the nineties and possibly even the eighties. These are questions scientists believe and have been believing we could answer and would soon answer. Some of them may prove to be much harder and much more elusive than we had thought, and in THAT we might learn some really unexpected things.

But I want to come to the real topic: the human mind. That is truly still unexplored territory. We do not know what mind is and we still have only a rudimentary understanding of the ways in which it works. This is where mysticism comes in.

Mystical experiences go beyond the mere perceptions of things that science has so far investigated. Regarding how we see and hear, we already know a lot, scientifically. We sort of know how neurons work during thinking, perceiving and so on. But make no mistake – the remaining questions are HUGE. This is why when it comes to the human mind we should really be keeping an open … mind! We still don't know what awareness really is. There is a huge philosophical dimension to this that I won't go into right now.

But basically, we still don't really know how perception works. Just speaking of vision: we know there is a shipload of processing starting inside the eye already, and then continuing in a huge diversity of groups of neurons, whenever we look at something. But somehow when we perceive something we are not aware of all this processing, only of the end result. And ultimately we do not perceive things as collections of elements, we perceive them as meaningful wholes. We also don't all perceive in the same way. We've been speaking here, some of us (no names!) do not recognise human faces the way that most of us do. I see things that many people can't see. Also as an artist I can force myself to break my perceptions down into those 'elements', so as to enable myself to reproduce them in sketches, paintings and so forth.

It has been said that our minds only perceive about a billionth of what is really out there to perceive. Some of these limits are biological, others cultural. All kinds of tricks and optical illusions are possible because of this. Some of these work the same for most people, while there are 'differently-perceivers' that will be able to penetrate some of them better than 'normal' people could.

As an artist I target my art at people whose perception falls mostly under 'normal'. People who deviate from this too much will literally not see what I'm trying to show.

But anyways. Now, knowing that something as seemingly straightforward as vision, is actually nothing of the sort, what about mystical experiences?

What ARE mystical experiences?

I can't speak for other people, but for me, they're experiences where one seems to perceive 'truths' or real things that are beyond the limits of the senses. They might even seem to be beyond the limits of the human mind itself, if we think of the mind as merely something that gets stimuli from outside and then processes them. Mystical experiences include perceiving oneself outside one's physical body, outside time and/or space, unifying with other things and entities – ultimately becoming One with the Universe. They can include things that ordinary people cannot even imagine, like colours outside of the normal spectrum. (I haven't ever experienced that, by the way.) Some such experiences can be induced with drug use, but others come spontaneously.

In my case I've been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which to scientifically minded folks can be an 'explanation'. OK it might be an explanation but it still doesn't detract from the fact that those experiences really happened and do happen. Since they also happen in many people who are not schizophrenics, they cannot just be dismissed as crazy. And whatever their cause, the real question is, what do they mean? Is there some kind of 'real' thing or situation or truth that is being 'perceived' here?

In my own case: my own mystical experiences suggest to me that there is truly an overall unity to everything that exists. We are part of the Universe and the Universe is a part of us. Some of this could be argued philosophically. Every one of us is aware of the Universe through his or her senses, and in the end our 'reality' is an impression in our minds. Going by materialism therefore, our 'idea' of reality is a model inside our own brains. We can only know this. For me, you, and everyone else, every animal, every plant, every city, the whole Earth, the other planets, the sun, the stars, the whole Universe … and its entire past and future … all of that are only concepts in our minds, that came into our brains through our sense organs. So strict materialism must insist we do not have direct knowledge or experience of reality. Everything is merely knowledge that entered our brains and now exists in our neural networks. We do not perceive external reality directly. So the Universe is inside of us.

Ironically the very same materialism insists that the Universe is also only outside of us. The internal Universe which we know of (subjective) is something entirely separate and different from the external Universe (objective) where all the sense impressions that entered into our brains through our eyes and ears and everything else came from. So materialism which seems to insist that only matter is real, also eternally separates us from material reality!

To insist that the 'outside' Universe and the 'inside' Universe is one and the same is something that NECESSITATES a kind of mystical awareness. Also a kind of mystical holism. (Caution: it is still possible that our 'idea' of the Universe differs from the 'real' Universe. Much, much more could be said about this.)

OK back to my mystical visions. I perceive everything as being a single whole. I also perceive time as being a whole with the divisions between past, present and future not being absolute. I perceive mind as being everywhere. Our minds are not separate from external reality. I speculate that in some way everything in the Universe must be both mind and matter. Lastly I perceive an ethical dimension to everything. Things do not simply exist, they have some kind of value. This value IS subjective, but that doesn't mean it isn't real. The essence of this to me is Love with a capital L. Love is REAL. The mind attaches itself to reality, to other entities and beings, the mind grows and extends itself, through love. Science at the moment knows nothing at all about this. But to me it is utterly real. The mind that has Love as its foundation reaches out to everything, tries to embrace everything, and this is where the potential for spiritual growth lies. This spiritual growth is accessible to an individual but also to groups. Love can bond individuals into groups. It may be … in fact I think it is … where the potential for the survival and the future wellbeing for our whole species lies. With Love, we might become gods, in a very real way; without it, we might wipe ourselves out and lay waste to this planet. In this sense: nothing could be more important, nothing could make a greater difference when it comes to our future and everything that matters to us. Without Love we truly have nothing; with it we can have everything. That is really the essence of my mysticism, and the essence of my own religious conviction.

But I want to make a very important point. This is not a simple touchy-feely-warm-and-fuzzy-woolly-headed sort of love. Properly understood it is immensely challenging. There are myriads of profound problems about existence, about ourselves. Our mystical visions MIGHT give us access to higher truths but they have almost infinite potential for giving us delusions also. Higher reality might be extremely complex and our minds are very limited. This is why it is crucial that we train ourselves in critical thinking. I have spent and continue to spend huge amounts of time thinking and investigating accepted science, and also psychology and philosophy. Testing our beliefs, our perceptions, is absolutely vital. When we are too credulous we miss out on real Truth. We might end up deceiving or alienating others. We cannot afford to do that. If we have true Love in us this Love cannot but force us to be almost merciless with ourselves when it comes to trying to establish what is truly true. True Truth really shall set us free. But Truth doesn't come free … finding it might come at a very high price. But proper understanding should convince us that true Truth is beyond any price.

Hey, thanks for delivering my Sunday sermon, Willem.

Where I come from, when you find the sermon inspiring, you say 'Amen.'

AMEN.

I agree. Yep. Love is not a fuzzy emotion. Mind is more than matter. The truth is out there. Science is a sort of ad-hoc model. (They taught me that in school.) There are more things in heaven and earth...all dichotomies are false ones...

You might enjoy Konrad Lorenz's book, called in English 'Behind the Mirror'. In German, it's 'Die Rückseite des Spiegels'. You can understand why they couldn't translate it as 'The Backside of the Mirror'

Back in 1973, we were fascinated by the idea of 'hypothetical realism'. Another working model, see where it goes.

I'm not meant to be here. . That's not a weird existential statement, , it means I am supposed to be preparing for a busy week ahead of me, and not on my laptop checking hootoo. . But, now I read your journal, Willem, I had to check in, and add my amen.

Thanks Willem, and I really appreciate you sharing the fruits your enquiring mind.



I'm not really very good at debates with things like this. I wish I could debate. hmm. I used to try to debate with my Dad, he was a very spiritual, yet down to earth man, a farmer, an environmentalist, a Christian, yet he studied all kinds of aspects, Teilhard de Chardin, James Lovelock, Buddhism, in fact all the world religions, and you name it, he checked it all out. heheh.

He was really into Teilhard de Chardin, and used to read me things. Teilhard did some great writings on Love. Also something called the noosphere, which I haven't yet quite figured. .

The Noosphere. What is the noosphere?



I get my funny not very intelligent girlie insights, heheh, go off and write flaky poems, have a love affair with chant and mantra, and the muse of mystery.

I did have a couple of my visitations when reading your piece. Not a moth in sight. .

Here's what came to me.

I love the diversity of thought around these matters. All the different routes. And all so very personal. I want to celebrate diversity. Everyone blessed with a different access route. That's cool, I think. . And mysterious. Considering we are all the same species. Kind of like different facets of the same diamond.

. Where does that come from? I know it from an Incredible String Band song. .

I also just had a weird, yet rather breathtaking and extraordinary feeling, kinda personal (so no teasing please wink wink), but I will share it, because it came to me whilst reading your piece ....

which is that when it comes to mysteries like life after death, or not, and or not-, and things, for me the unknown and known just appeared here together in the same moment!! This moment!! Like now. Can't really explain, not adept enough with words, or maybe there aren't any. . As if the opposities are indivisible, one contains the other. One is the other. The known and the unknown.

hmm.

I just this minute felt that the or not- situation isn't a vast mystery out there in outer space, like black holes or something, that I can't access because I'm not clever enough. The mystery and the not-mystery are one of the same, and they are all right here, within me, as daft and as awesome as the coffee table. Or the TV. Or the carpet. And my own idiotic, yet heartfelt absurdity. .



I just wrote that out spontaneously, haven't the faintest idea what it means, heheh, 'cept it makes me feel good, an inner sort of energy, bit of a love vibe, , so thanks for the inspiration, Willem.

I have a busy week ahead, but might try to write a flaky poem or two, , and see you further down the line.

cc

Okay, and what you made me think of was Shakers. Why? Because I'm fond of practical mysticism myself.

So a long search ensued to find *somebody* who would just sing 'Simple Gifts', durnit, without trying to make it *not* simple. I liked this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_g4rEPXkyI&feature=related

I wish I could get in the tardis and go watch the Shakers dance.

Here's another version, with furniture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwH6-QmvM5c

And while I was looking for that song, I found this dance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnVfU1EL0G8&feature=related

'as daft and awesome as the coffee table...'

S'cuse me, misters, could you stop being so interesting? . I am trying to leave this realm. Oh, what the heck. . Anyway, this realm is that realm, and the other way round, , and this will inspire my week.

, made me cry, in fact. Shakers. I don't know about Shakers. Simplicity. Simplicity always makes me . Like, I always used to think I wasn't intelligent enough for all this sort of thing, but then I realised there might just be a seat for me on the cosmic train after all. What cosmic train? Leaves Paddington at 3.40 hahah. hmm.

What about the Noosphere then? If I was someone else entirely, like if I knew how, I would write a Guide Entry on it, in memory of my Dad if nothing else. grr. hint hint. Give you forty two bars of chocolate if you write a Guide Entry on the Noosphere for me.

I think it's kind of amazing, from the Greek word noos or nous meaning mind. Like a layer of the world made of thought, maybe kind of like the collective unconscious? Maybe this is what people mean when they say that consciousness survives after death.

Must be kinda complex in the Noosphere. Probably as complex as being here on Earth. (or wherever we are). .

Wonder if there are any cafes in the Noosphere.

hmm

I believe there to be good cafes in the noosphere.

I will work on that guide entry, but only after I finish the one I just started.

Which is on the day the sun went dark in New England, and the Shakers had visions, and everybody thought the world was ending, until the Quakers pointed out that the sun was shining *just fine* in Pennsylvania, thank you...

I've just found out about this. It was in 1780. I get all the news late.

. ,You get your news late, I never get my news at all, because I never heard of any of it! So looking foward to that Entry also. You are my News. You are my News! Good last words. .

See what you started here, Willem.... .

Serious, if you have the time, Noosphere writings would be soo cool. Thanks. T'would mean a lot.

If there's a seeming time lapse delay in my responses, I really will be offline for a few days as from now, but I will return for my ... for my .... News!!

h

The noosphere turns out to be a big topic...I may be some time.

But in the meantime, all of you who are interested in the music of the noosphere should check out the Global Consciousness Project in Princeton, New Jersey.

They are using the data, among other things, to write music.

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

(If you don't go directly to 'Music', click on it.)

Hello Dmitri and Cactuscafe, thank you very much for the comments and the videos/music! Now please give me some time, and I'll write a proper long posting speaking specifically about some of the things you mention there. Still very busy over here and it's almost bedtime here in South Africa.

Okely dokely (to quote Ned Flanders as I often do). Cactuscafe, thanks for telling me about your father. Now that is the right kind of spirituality. My own father was very religious, and a conservative Christian, but openminded. He himself did not do much reading outside of the accepted creeds, but he allowed me to do it. Heck we even have a copy of the Quran in the house, and the Bhagavad Gita, and lots of wikkid Afrikaans books banned by the Apartheid Government such as the works of Etienne Leroux which have lots of evul mysticism and occultism in them. I am sad that my father never really understood how openminded he himself was.

So I've done lots of reading also, Buddhism, Hinduism, all sorts of New-Agey stuff, done lots of my own thinking and philosophizing and mind-travelling (not chemically aided) to get where I am today.

I grew up thinking I was a fundamentalist when in fact I wasn't, and I think my parents didn't realise that they weren't either. The main problem with fundamentalism that I have is that it thinks it has the ultimate final answers. And that is a very wrong sort of thing because it means what we have now is the ultimate ... but are we so perfect? If we're honest then we must admit we have almost infinite room for growth, for learning and knowing better. But we can't achieve any of that if we think the knowledge we have is final. But still, we must have some bits of knowledge that ARE trustworthy enough to be of value. But which ones are they? And do they have to be ultimately true to be of value?

There's a contradiction for you right there, cactuscafe. I really think the truth has many contradictory aspects. Really folks, I wish I had more time to write about this philosophical sort of stuff, there's so much that I can share. But really cactuscafe, there are contradictions at the heart of almost everything.

Teilhard de Chardin, now ... I'll have to speak about his ideas sometime. Not now, not enough time or space here. But his idea of the Noosphere ... also, simplicity at the heart of it, 'a realm of mind'. But as to what that is ... what it could become? And what about the Omega Point? I hope I'll get time to speak about that! I'd also like your take on the Noosphere Dmitri.

Simplicity and complexity now! To me they are two sides of the same coin. Complexity can be embodies in simplicity and vice versa. Take for instance fractals. Knowing some mathematics, I can tell you that the equation that defines the Mandelbrot set is extremely simple (if you don't understand it then of course it won't seem so for you, but trust me, it is.) But that equation produces something that is literally infinitely complex. If you have time (just over five minutes) watch this video, zooming in on the set and finishing on a small part of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jGaio87u3A&feature=related

This is just a picture of a kind of mathematical structure. Now this is somehow part of the Universe in which we live. If the equation 'one plus one equals two' represents a kind of reality, then so does this. But what is its nature? Is it a real 'thing'? It is in our Universe, and yet ... the Mandelbrot figure is INFINITELY BIGGER than the material universe. It literally goes on forever. You could continue the process of 'zooming in' on it that you see in that video, forever - if you have a computer powerful enough to keep on calculating it for ever and ever.

And think of this: that five minute animation finishes at a portion of the set at a level of 'zoom' (ten to the two hundred and seventy fifth power), that, if you were to see the entire set at the same size, it would be ridiculously bigger than the entire known Universe. The visible Universe is 'only' on the order of 10 to the 30th power PIXELS in diameter (if you have a screen as high res as mine). That means the Mandelbrot set at this level of zoom would be ten to the two hundred and forty fifth power times bigger (in diameter) than the visible Universe. It's ridiculous. And yet, it's somehow a part of our Universe, and just a small part at that. There might be a great many more 'ifninitely big and complex' parts of the Universe that in themselves are defined by some very simple parameters.

To come back to mathematics: the core concepts of mathematics are all very simple and build upon each other to amazing compexity. And yet there are some of those simple concepts that many people simply cannot grasp. Maybe one thing that prevents us from understanding the complexity of reality is our inability to understand something that is essentially very simple.

Well, that and the fact that we don't sit still long enough.

I think the formation of the noosphere needs to be postponed until the planet's sentient beings get the kinks out of their heads, but that's just my opinion. (I do wonder whether crop circles are a sign of early noetic growth, but you all know I wear a tinfoil hat...)

I haven't managed to make sense on the subject yet, but watch next week's Post for a visual...

hah! I see you interesting peoples are still weaving your magic! ... from fractals to contradiction via many other deepsoul wonderthoughts, and I will consider and absorb all in the next few days, with cool clear water and sugar .. , no, tis sweeter than sugar, more thirst quenching that water, 'tis the essence of the wellspring, and thankyou.

I love the thought of a wellspring, beyond words, but could, on poetic days, be described as a laser beam of pure energy, that appears from within the soul, that never fades or dies because it is neither life nor death but contains both.

uh oh, here I go again . Had to be soo practical this week , but all this keeps me alive, and I am so inspired, and will return...

...and also have to write about the giant green letters of a supermarket logo, a scruffy palm tree, the shape of contradiction in the form of a multi faceted crystal vision floating through my inner space, chocolate, cormorants, and a faith healer who keeps visiting me in my dreams ...

the way one does ... ...

speak soon

cc

Wow guys, this is totally mystical!!. I am sitting here eating a giant apple, , considering the music of the noosphere!!(what an amazing quote from Teilhard on that link) and simplicity and complexity, and that fractal video and thinking about these things, so great to talk to you guys, and thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts.

What about those fractals then, infinite patterns, on and on, totally awesome, simplicity and complexity. Wowzum. Awesome!!

I used to wonder about that, you know, the mathematics of the universe, and even though I'm not a mathematician, I felt it all ran through my veins anyway, the pattern. Simple, yet complex.

One of my favourite films is Pi. (Dir Darren Aronovsky)Amazing film.
A paranoid mathematician, Max Cohen, searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature. Bit dark in places, but great ending, like ... won't tell you. . There's the bit though, when Max finds the key numher, and how its all about the spaces between the numbers, and the syntax.

(chomps apple) (nice apple). I'm not that intelligent tonight.

I never did get the bit about syntax. What does syntax mean? It kind of haunts me.

(chomp chomp)

I've decided that sleep is one of the ultimate mystical experiences. Imagine describing outselves to a species that doesn't know sleep. Like, every twelve hours or so we have to go into a completely altered state of consciousness for eight hours or so, the brain makes bizarre movies that we can't ever totally describe, our bodies are out for the count, our eyes are rolling in our heads, and we are totally gone, , but when we awaken we are restored.

And then we eat cornflakes. Or toast.

But I digress. .

The Big Peaceful Lovebrain. Where did I see that, was it something to do with William Burroughs, or some people meditating, and they met this kindly entity or vibration which they described as the Big Peaceful Lovebrain, or something like that. .

What about Spirit Guides then? Remind me to go on about Spirit Guides, but not now. .

(eats apple core)

And goodnight.

cc

We liked that 'Pi' movie, too.

Have you seen yet?

Just got there. . Awesome graphic. Mammamia. . Genius. I love it. . This'll get me and Willem dancing around in our sparklies. .

That graphic is awesome though. It looks like the Big Peaceful Lovebrain.

It's just a different way of looking at Earth.

That's it!! She says, about a week late. Just a different way of looking at things!! I think this could have a lot to do with mystical inspiration.

I love to see the small details of life in a new way. It tends to happen naturally, if I slow down and just be for a while. Watch it all go by, not holding onto it. Like, the creases in velvet can look like the Grand Canyon, the shine on a kingfisher's wing can look like the the bluest blue I ever saw, beyond the word blue. The silvershine pepperpot can look like a space tower, or just shining with the is-ness of a pepperpot, a bowl of sugar cubes can look like a cluster of pure sparkling diamonds. Or even sugar cubes, , more practical if I want sweet coffee.

My page format went funny since I was last on hootoo. Looks good, kinda pale blue with cool lettering. Just a different way of looking at things. hahah. You computer people are very clever. I think understanding computers must be kinda mystical. I offer you strawberries , and fragments of my fractured absurdity.

hey guys

Hey yourself.

That is a wonderful insight about mysticism, CC. Often what people think is a far-out, hard-to-reach place is really just being quiet.

Do you remember Elijah in the cave? Elijah was on a magical journey - he'd been given food and water by an angel, Castaneda would have approved. Then he walked for 40 days and nights and slept in a cave. Then this happened:

'The Lord said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"' 1 Kings 19:11-13

The King James calls the 'gentle whisper' a 'still, small voice'. Too many people looking for the earthquake, not enough hearing the still, small voice.

Which may come from a pepperpot.

By the way, dear, if you click on 'Preferences' on your blue page (top right), you will see a page with settings. Go down to Skin, use the pulldown menu to choose from Pliny, Alabaster, Brunel, or Classic (Goo), then hit the update button. You will now be in your favourite skin.

This, too, is a mystical experience.

Hey

Awesome!!! Elijah on the shamanic journey!! I never saw it like that. Now I can make some sense of things.'Course its the same thing, just a different cultural language. And I know people who are yearning burning seekers, who have done their time living in a cave, or the equivalent, and have had the same experience.

The still, small voice, the gentle whisper. There for everyone. Nothing fancy. That's it!! That is totally it. That is the it-ness of it. Now I am going to think of 300 obscure poetic ways of saying it in my own way. . You can't really beat the gentle whisper, the still, small voice though, can you, as a way of saying it. hmm.

Perhaps I will go read instead. heheh.

So I went back to my old skin Brunel, that's cool, now I am missing my new skin, Pliny the Elder so I might change back. Changing skins, just like that, a healing experience, sorta like a lizard.

I would like to be a lizard. I think I would be better as a lizard than trying to be a human who can figure out computers. I guess I could be a lizard with a laptop. Oh no wait!! Lizards lose their tails, it is snakes that shed their skins. .

I feel secure about the gentle whisper, the still, small voice. I think this must be the essence of the mystical experience??

Thankyou.

Yes, I think it is, whether you're Elijah or Lobsang Rampa, who wrote about the fellas in the caves with the tea flavoured with yak butter...

Yep, ain't Pliny fun? You can go there with a couple of mouseclicks.