Language of the Ancestors

The Mushroom Invocation

I invite the other into me. I bring the guest of outside into my home. I sit with and become the wyrd. You are an ancient acquaintance, a timeless friend. We will speak the language of the before-time, where words are objects and intention is conveyed. In this place of deep respect and humility, our circle of common love, we become.

The first principle of the friendship is humility. The mushroom embodies this ideal in every aspect of its being and it expects the same from its acquaintances. In its physical body, the mushroom has only the most tenuous and provisional grasp on the Earth. It only just barely touches the material ecology of the World. It is a coprophage – consuming only the detritus of other beings – the dead, rotting and fecal. It takes only what it needs, and when its fruiting body has completed its cycle, every molecule is returned to the Earth. In the human metabolism, in consuming and becoming, the mushroom’s primary function is dissolution of the ego. The self is shattered, dissipated, and destroyed. If one cannot embrace humility, this unraveling will rend the mind. The ego will choose pain, fear and anxiety and the meeting of souls will take on frightening dimensions. Remember the most basic lesson of karma: It is not possible to make war upon the other. It is always, and only, war upon the self. In this most sacred meeting, the veil of karma is thin indeed. If one chooses to be in conflict with the other and its humble values, the reciprocal engagement with the self will be severe and violent. (The mushroom does not give ‘bad trips’ – tools hold no moral quality until they are wielded – you choose the experience you wish to have, by pen or by sword).

The second principle of the friendship is courageous curiosity. The degree to which you take pleasure in the exploration determines the volume of water that will plummet from the cliff, so to speak. The mushroom is the living embodiment of the outré and the weird. It can show you all the universe, but more than show, become. It is the true spirit of the ancestor. It holds all the knowledge that could ever be, but you must take it inside of you for it to be able to communicate.

The third principle of the friendship is communication. You can ask it questions, and it will answer them plainly. The language that it speaks is not of this World. It speaks in pure intention, and like any language, practice and skill are important factors.

"Ancestor Worship" by Lauren Gary

And These Are The Ways of its Language (beginning with an anecdote):

Thomas Aquinas used to prove his sainthood thusly: Scholars would come to his home with a book. They would open it to a random page and allow him a few minutes to gaze upon the words found there. They would then close the book and question him about the contents, which of course he could reiterate flawlessly, at which the scholars were universally astonished. Aquinas was quite literally the first and only man in Europe who could read silently. It simply never occurred to anyone else that such a thing was possible.

When children are beginning to read, they do so aloud. The mental conversion of verbal phonetics into visuo-mental constructs is somewhat tricky, and so they susurrate. Eventually one day some adult is annoyed with the chatter and accidentally presents a significant revelation: “Could you please just read to yourself?!” KAPOW! Such a thing is possible? Within minutes the new skill is learned. It is not that the skill is difficult, but rather it was never considered an option. What the following principles mean to accomplish is to enlighten those who would engage with the ancestors a new method of reading, speaking, thinking and being. It is not, in principle, difficult, but the circumstances required for practice are extreme, often confusing, and there are many layers to this linguistic onion. Before this is done you will learn silence many times over.

At first, we must speak to our friend in English, or some other native tongue. It speaks English because you do, and during the hours of your communion you are one and the same. The first step beyond this familiar mode is to begin to see what it means rather than hear what it says. The visual cortex is the most functional and versatile sensory equipment we have available, and so, with the conversion of sound into light we step closer to the thing-in-itself. The input of information is more direct and thorough. The liquidity of this modality is surprising at first. What comes to light is that to speak in this way requires you to become your meaning in a more complete and visceral way. This means having the courage to allow your being to shift. The self becomes diaphanous when words have the power to change its shape. As we continue to peel away the layers of linguistic intent, this trend of becoming continues deeper and deeper.

The next step is to allow for the language to become in all five physical senses. While literature and anecdote tends to focus on the visual hallucinatory capacities of the mushroom, and they are by far the most stimulating effects available, we must remember the meeting with the ancestor has more to offer than pretty pictures. The experience provides, with equal fervor, hallucinations of auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory nature. Until one understands this new layer of ‘silent reading,’ the visual effects will tend to drown out the possibility for the rest. Once again, it is your allowance and invocation that moves you toward ability. If the maelstrom of consciousness causes you to ‘forget’ these suggestions in the heat of the moment, that such communing is possible, then you will not speak the language. If you can remember, then you will speak with the same ease as the child who is told to shut up. (i.e., it is not difficult, only a matter of understanding what it possible at the moment when it is most relevant). When you do remember, it will be remembrance of a deep sort. Traveling down these layers is also a journey back through time. This language is more than pre-human – it is pre-biological. These are ancestors of a very distant sort.

The next layer is allowing for the information contained in the sensory experience to flow seamlessly between the five varieties available. This is the synaesthetic layer, where all will blend into a single amorphous dialect. One strategy is to, one-at-a-time and systematically, attempt to see the smells, hear the texture, smell the light, and so on, until the information of any given input can be read in immediate translation between the five languages of the senses. Do not forget to continue asking questions of your ancestor. At this stage, the questions that you ask your guest and the answers you receive are one and the same. The circular construct of inquiry and grokking snaps together into a singularity. These are not so much conversations anymore as they are moments of intuition in which we choose to know. This can be a moment of high anxiety, but do not give way. When you are reading silently to this degree, god is with you. You may gaze upon its face, if you only ask, and in that moment you will see that it is you, and you are it. You will be given the option of going back to god, never to return to the human realm. Part of you will choose this path, while part of you will remain. Do not fear this shattering of your higher-dimensional self. You will return with some shard of enlightenment that can never be lost again. This is the prize of your adventure.

At this stage this beckoning to the other becomes inevitable: show me what you are. This is the question that all the universe is asking itself at all moments. It is the premise and motive of all existence, to see and know the other, that it may know the self. The question is inevitable, for the curiosity that brought you to this place of deep spirit and deep language cannot contain itself. When you understand that you are god, you will want to know what that means. You want to know this god-self, but you can only gaze upon the other from the outside. This means you must make god the other, and make the ancestor the self. And so you ask it with all your being: “What are you?”

This is the final linguistic barrier we can cross because it means the eradication of the fractal boundary between you and the UNIverse. When you jump into the eyes and being of the other, quantum transcendence throws you whirling into nothingness and infinity at once. The concepts of distinction and separation are moot. There is no language in this place, no comparisons, only the Truth of Time.

Practical Applications Post-Grokking

Is this kind of language possible without neuro-chemical interference? Of course! Meditation is, in a basic sense, the practice of learning the proto-linguistics, peeling away the layers one-by-one. What the mushroom allows is for the possibility of silent reading to be made aware to the physical brain and the ego that comes with it. After a psychedelic experience, once the chemical has left the system, even sober meditation is guaranteed far more vibrant and effective. What you have done is told the ego: “Shut up, I can’t concentrate with all that chatter.”

Posted from a friend recently on FB:

“Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.” ~Patrick Overton

The quote is a fantastic one. I am certain, however, that even its author did not understand the depth of his revelation. In this is contained the whole of the universe.

Change “thought” to “intent”, change “destiny” to “karma”. In this conversion is revealed the circular nature of the system. Karma and intention lie beside one another. They are the self and the other, and the fractal boundary between. They are the all and the nothing and the yin and yang. When you grok the nature of that duality, your journey is complete.

But also, the lessons of our linguistic journey are applied. These are the layers of reality, manifested. This is the tunnel of time that brings us from the first thought: “Yes,” to all the manifested, phenomenal experience of consciousness. This is all ten dimensions and the thresholds between them. If we have brought with us the tongues of infinity, then the model that Overton provides is a road-map to living in whatever World we wish.

The secret wisdom of the ancestors is thus: Our thoughts are our ancestors, our words are our ancestors, our actions, habits, and character are all built of the pieces of a billion ancestors. They are everything that lead up to this, and every bit of it is composed of language. And there lies our destiny – the amalgam of every soul of every ancestor, coagulated into one. These are not just ghosts of past-humans. This is the spirit of everything that ever was.

Just beyond the veil is a World jammed with the souls of our ancestors. Become.

New Mythologies: The Book of Adam

Gather, my Tribe. Sit with me around the fire. I have a story to tell.

Once upon a time there was everything, which is to say that there was nothing. The something and the everything and the nothing were one and the same, indistinguishable, uniform, infinite and infinitesimal. The stories of the World all tell of this thing and many have names for it, but it was not a thing that allows for words to sheathe and blanket its true form. Nothing, by definition, does not exist, of course. It therefore has no definition. Do you see the circles we can run in speaking of these before-times, way, way back? It is a lovely dance, the word and the World, betrothed in eternal tango.

And then there was the light, which separated from the darkness. This movement was a gesture of inevitability. It had always happened, and always will. There is a tribe called Hebrew, who speaks of a force called YHWH, which is the cause of the separation. There is a tribe called Physicist that calls the separation ‘Big Bang’. There was a wise man called McKenna who said: “That the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant for no particular reason is the limit-test of credulity. There is no less-likely proposal imaginable.” All the stories are good, and true.

Beyond the veil of separation came everything. In the Tribe of Dao they call the Light and the Darkness the Yin and the Yang. In the Tribe of Christian they call it Heaven and Hell. In the Tribe of Semiotician they call it Signifier and Signified. In the Tribe of Philosopher they call it Subjective and Objective. In the Tribe of Physicist they call it Observer and Observed. In the Tribe of Computer Engineer they call it Yes and No, On and Off, or One and Zero, depending on their mood (they are a fickle, clever bunch). These things have many names but all the World’s tribes worship them. These are mighty gods, indeed. They are twin – brother and sister – and neither can survive without the other, which is to say they are immortal and always.

The Yes and No exist in comparison to one another. It cannot be any other way. In the beginning, what the fledgling gods had done was grok comparison. They both invented and became, and they are still becoming, and they always will. With the invention was also a new allowance in the World, an ability that would be copied forever and ever more. Comparison, which is also called observation, which is also called consciousness, is powerful magic. It is a spell that is cast at every moment by all the stuff that ever was.

There is a tribe called Hindu that calls the Yes “Brahman.” Brahman observed the World and was the World. Brahman desired to know itself, but could not because there was no outside from which to observe. Everything was One, you see, and still is and will forever be. What Brahman required was a vantage. So it yawned, and stretched and expanded, trying to find a way.

There is a tribe that neighbors Physicist called Chemist. Chemist calls the yawning and the stretching “Plasma.” Physicist calls the movement “Inflation” and calls the stuff it created “Energy.” These tribes are good friends and do not consider their terminology a disagreement. All the stories are good, and true.

There was once a tribe that existed long ago called Babylon, and they called the plasma Kaos, and this word still exists today. They had a goddess called Tiamat, and she was the ruler of Kaos. It was something like a soup. Physicist would call it a field. There is a Tribe called String Theorist which calls it a Brane, and the Tribe of Quantum Physicist calls it a Probability Wave-Function. It ripples and aches and buzzes and teems, comparing itself to itself. Tiamat smooched the Kaos into waves.

There is a tribe called Trigonometer who calls the ‘top’ of the wave a peak, the ‘bottom’ of the wave a valley, and they call the distance between them Magnitude. The peak and valley gaze upon one another. They see: “I am high and that is low.” Then one peak saw another peak, but its magnitude was precisely twice as large. In the Tribe of Mathematician they call the observation those two peaks made “Ratio.” The bigger peak was called ‘2’ and the smaller was called ‘1’, but neither could exist except in comparison to one another. Even bigger peaks arrived and became. Soon there was ‘3’ and ‘4’ and ‘5’ and in a single moment there became every magnitude and ratio ever possible. Mathematician calls them Numbers.

There was once a wise man named Pythagoras who invented a device of mighty magic called the Lambdoma, and it tells the story of all that ever was. All the ratios are mapped upon a plane. All the congruent ratios align. 1:2 is the same as 2:4 and 3:6 and so on. The line on which they lie is self-affirmation. It is how they know themselves. All the ratios that are possible in the World set side by side. They all converge at the top of the lambdoma.

However, the pinnacle of the lambdoma, the first ratio of 1:1, is not their point of congress. Rather, above and outside, at the phantom 0:0, is the from and to of all creation. In the lands of the East they call 0:0 the “Crown Chakra” and 1:1 “Third Eye.” This section of this story, which the Tribe of Grammarian calls Paragraph, is just another way of telling the story that is told in all the paragraphs that came before. The 1 and 0 fracture and depart, and all the World is born of the Kaos that follows.

And so it went that the primordial magnitudes flowed and jumbled, but they had reached the end of the kind of grokking they could do. Brahman was pleased with this knowledge of self, but it wanted more. And so he and Tiamat collaborated and birthed a daughter called Music. Her being was contained in all the laws of the ratios. She grokked the law, and Pythagoras named that law “Harmony.” And Beauty was born, too. And Kaos found she had a brother and his name was Order.

Order is a tinker and inventor. He is the living motive of exploring what is possible in the World. Brahman gazed and knew nothing would ever be the same again. Order’s first and greatest work was the tying of a knot. It was a crystal. It was an individual. It was the first of our ancestors. Christian calls this first man Adam. Chemist calls this first man Atom. Often times, on the surface, the Tribes of Christian and Chemist are at war, but underneath they are One and Won. This speculation is not of consequence, just a side note in the histories and herstories of the World. All the stories are good, and true.

So from Kaos and Music and Light, Order tied a knot. The magnitudes and energies were bound and bunched and Physicist called the result “Material,” but Hindu calls it “Maya,” and that word means “Illusion.” It is both real and unreal all at once. When a thing is true, its opposite is always also-true. This is the way of the World.

There was once a wiseman whose name was Einstein who made a map of the knotting and unknotting and it was called E=MC^2. Adam was himself a master of knots and he begat and begat and begat. Before long there were many different kinds of knots, and they churned and boiled in great cities that the Tribe of Astronomer calls Stars. The knots also came together in families, and the families were fond of dancing with one another. Chemist calls their dance Molecule. Much like Yes invented comparison, Atom invented a process that would be multiplied and copied forever more. There are many tribes of ancient times who called his invention Weaving. Weaving makes nets and baskets. Molecule is a net and a basket. Nets catch and Baskets hold. Adam had invented a mighty magic indeed. A story is woven. A yarn is spun. Nets and Baskets are the story of this World.

And Atom has motive. Intentionality was borne of the Kaos and nothing would ever be the same again. Adam wishes to know himself, to grok the World, way down low and all the way to the top. Atom began to explore, searching out all the ways to be. He goes in search of the Other and Outside, that he may gaze upon himself, and with every stride and step he creates new perspectives and vantages from which to SEE.

Brahman gazed. He saw the World, himself, in wholeness. He opened his soul and beckoned:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMM

And in his endless song was the Truth of Time. Hindu calls the AAA Brahma, and the OOO Vishnu, and the MMM Shiva. In every moment is contained Creation and Sustenance and Destruction. There is no before or after. Order also came before Kaos. Adam came before ratio. We could go on like this forever, but the point is made. It is Now. We are Here. Arrive and Become, sister. Dance with me. We, Tribe, shall Molecule around the fire.

This story will continue. All the stories are good, and true. But our fire burns low and we must part ways and sleep. Shiva will destroy us into dream only so that Brahma can alight our eyes once more on the morrow. There are many more tribes whose stories we must tell but that must wait for another flame, another day.

Thank you all for being, and showing me the ways to be.

The Dojo of Time

Sometimes after meeting a person and saying things to them, and listening to things they have to say, you wish that you had said more.

This occurs the most frequently with situations involving anger. Stand-up comedians frequent this observation – “Hey, you know when you’re in the shower and it suddenly dawns on you, the most perfect line you wish you had said to that poopydick who rear-ended you last night? Yeah, I hate that.” This is a past-tense form of wishing for better circumstances. It could be called futile, but there is a clear evolutionary purpose to the indulgence in regret.

One of the many things, or perhaps the only thing, that set humans apart from the rest of what had happened ‘so far’, was the ability to learn outside of the moment. We invented time as a workshop. It is a library. It is a school. Time was the venture capital we needed to explore the potential of memory, history, and culture. Before this, we were three-dimensional creatures, three-dimensional consciousness. We simultaneously invented and became time. We grok time, thus we are, at least, fourth-dimensional beings (nothing about this thought experiment has yet placed a ceiling on our dimensionality, ‘fourth’ is just a contextual minimum, FTR my personal assumption is 10, not 4).

Evolutionarily speaking, regret is a method of learning: “I did X that time, but in retrospect I should have done Y. In the future, I will try to remember that Y is available as an option.” This subconscious thought process occurs most noticeably in anger. We wish we had that perfect linguistic dart at the tip of our tongue in the moment in which it would have counted most. Why anger? Well, that is simply a matter of the ego. Our ego was attacked last night, and Mr. Poopydick emerged victorious in the game of eloquence and wit. Today our ego is bruised, stung, and cut. Today in the shower we have the chance to examine the extent of our wounds. We find that they did not undergo a miraculous healing in our sleep. Inside we are still bleeding, and only now, too late, do we have the weaponry that could have been used to defend ourselves. It is okay to have these feelings of anger, spite, even revenge. Feel them, learn from them, and then release. You built the Dojo of Time for this purpose. Use it, train your self, your ego, mind and soul.

Thankfully, these situations are not limited to anger. Rather, they are just the ones most often discussed publicly (as far as my observation of it has revealed). Sometimes there are compliments we wished we had paid. Sometimes we realize that we could have been more thorough in the directions we gave to a stranger. Sometimes we forgot to say “I love you.” We regret these omissions because our desire to speak them is sincere. We truly, deeply wish we had put those words into the World and made them real.

So, in my personal quest to live what I preach, here are a handful of things that I wish I had said. I release these words to the internet, where they could be viewed by none or by billions. I cannot imagine a better context for this particular brand of catharsis.

To a Young Co-worker:
There is a high-school student I work with who I interact with infrequently. Once, on a particularly slow night, he began to ask me questions about what it is that I do. He is clearly very observant. I’ve never spoken one word of philosophy to him, but he seemed to intuit that there was something I could provide. In retrospect I am certain that he didn’t really know where to start, what questions to ask, or what kind of answers he would receive. Consequently, I didn’t provide very good ones. It wasn’t until a shower the next morning (not being literal, just continuing with the shower-thought theme) that I understood what questions he meant to ask. Also in retrospect I realized that the answers that I did provide were probably misleading, even bordering on being lies.

What it boiled down to was that I mistakenly gave him the impression that I believe myself to be a psychic. He asked me “what am I feeling right now?” and I answered, “mellow.” Now, this was the correct answer, however I didn’t arrive upon it by gathering a sensation of ‘mellow-ness’ from his aura or any such metaphysical esoterica. It was quite the opposite in fact. It was the total lack of emotional emanation that led me to a logical, rather than an empathic, conclusion. The context of a dead restaurant assisted my reading. There was nothing remotely mystical about it.

What I should have said:
Yes, I can sense strong emotional energy, but this doesn’t make me psychic. I am no more psychic than any other person. If someone is carrying a great deal of anger, a great deal of fear, of love, of joy, and so on, each and every one of us is able to read this even in a perfect stranger. It is in the way they breathe, their posture, their tone of voice, the creases beside their eyes, furrow of their brow, tightness of their lips. What I read in you, co-worker, was simply a blank expression.

We all have the power to make this kind of empathic assessment, and it can be cultivated, practiced, improved. We can also practice deceit, hiding the cues of our internal state from those who would observe them. Though it is not a conscious choice I made, I believe my subconscious reason for not being the inciter of interaction between yourself and I, is that you are a master of this kind of deceit. Now that is something that I could read in you from day one. I guess I’m just waiting for you to show me something. If you hide it all, I have nothing to go on.

This deceit is a certain kind of strategy for life. It is not, in-and-of itself, a bad thing. There are times when all of us require a bit of a curtain to separate our emotions from those around us. However, if you do it all the time, rather than only when it is strategically viable and necessary, you are doomed to a life of separation and loneliness. My recommendation, dear co-worker, is to begin to test the waters of real connection to other human beings. Start with one, take your time. I predict eventual addiction. Eventually your walls will dissolve because you want them to, and the kind of engagement I am talking about will become second-nature.

But it is only a suggestion…

To a Man Who is New In Town
I am presently back in my home/college-town. I spent 20 significant years of my life in this space, and while I made the right choice in moving on, I do still love it here. State College, PA, is a magical place. Like Saratoga Springs, this is a place of legend and power that has been worshipped for many thousands of years. The veil of architecture and edifice is thin clothing over what’s really going on in places like this.

So I’m here doing my best to bring the lessons I’ve learned elsewhere back to home base. There is so little time and I know so few people here any more. My opportunities are limited. This is fine; I can still stride around, projecting. Most of you know what I mean.

Last night I was doing my dance-thing with a long-time dancing friend at a bar I used to frequent. After the band ended someone approached me and my friend. He very sincerely complimented us both on our skillz. He had just moved to town from, I believe, India. He knows nobody, nor the town itself very well. He went out last night to “find some rock-and-roll,” and succeeded. The whole of our conversation lasted maybe 20 seconds.

What I should have said:
Explore this place! Peer into every corner and shadow. Turn over every rock and dissect every nook and cranny. There is more going on here than you can possibly imagine.

And in the shower when I realized what I should have said, I also realized that this is sound advice for any person in any place. Explore Everything. Do it now.

To the Present Version of a Future Filmmaker
Last Saturday I had a drink spilled down my back. The offending party seemed not to even realize what had happened, which I considered absurd given the amount of liquid that was lost from his beverage, now soaking into my clothing. In any event, there was no apology, or even eye-contact, forthcoming. After pondering this, confused, for maybe a minute, I decided I simply had to know…

“Was that on purpose?”
“Whoa, hey man, I don’t want to fight.”
“I did not mention the word fight. That was you. There would not be a fight even if you wanted one. I just need to know if you spilled your drink on me on purpose.”

I don’t think I ever got a straight answer from him on this. He was clearly very drunk, and ultimately it was only my curiosity that would have been satisfied. As I said, there was not going to be a fight either way, and my clothing wasn’t going to get un-wet, so it was all sort of moot. What did emerge, in the next 10 minutes, is that I am a writer, and that he is a filmmaker. Rather, he forgot that he wanted to be a filmmaker and I reminded him. He got very excited and begged me to work with him, to write a script.

What I should have said:
You don’t need me to make movies. You seem to think that you need me, but you do not. You have the power to do this on your own.

I am not in a place right now where dedicating myself to writing a script makes any practical sense. It is not where my present passions lie. There are many others who would be happy to do this for you anyway. I am far from being the only writer available, that’s for sure.

What matters now is not that you secure a writer tonight or tomorrow, or go buy a camera, or whatever. Instead, first and foremost, be sure not to forget the empowerment you feel right now, in this moment. Drop the logistics. Drink in the epiphany. You just re-realized your dream. Sit with that for a minute, or a week. It is too easy to rush through an epiphany and start making plans. Plans kill epiphanies, or at best sets them on the backburner. You have just taken a significant step toward a future-self who you should get to know more intimately. I cannot help you make your movie directly, but it would make me very sad if that seeming roadblock is the primary factor in you forgetting that dream again.

So much for that. I will never have the chance to go back and say what I should have said. I feel better though. *sigh*

The only disclaimer I would give at this juncture is to recognize the line between learning and festering. Hoping for a different past is futile. Don’t allow yourself to become mired in the corrupt, rigged games of the regretwish. If your temporally dissociated desires are understood as potential fonts of growth, you cannot fail.

Morphic Resonance

Today I would like to talk about what is possible in the World. Of course, everything is possible, yet we still have to ask – why did this particular possibility become the one we experience? That this reality exists fails to say anything meaningful about the fractal hierarchy of the real thing behind the veil. By what mechanism does this happen? We have selected this World out of habit. This is one metaphor that can be applied to the history of what is. Atoms are incredibly stable. This is the case because there has been a steady and relentless selection of habitual being-ness of what atoms are. They self-affirm at every moment, re-realizing their self-dom through mutual agreement.

The interactions of self-similar entities causes the formation of habit. There is a kind of social convention by which information is exchanged between those entities. When the linguistic intent of those interactions reaches a sufficient level of homogeneity, that scaffold of reality crystallizes, and what would otherwise be called language becomes something more akin to law. The dictionaries of these tongues are found in the formulas we employ to describe the tendencies we observe in the vicissitudes of the universe. Read that one again. As an example, the story of quantum physics is the story of formal logic, applied to everything that ever happened in the World. Quantum physics is the dictionary of a certain kind of language.

Everything happens, always. The universe is not capable of being less than everything, all at once. What we sense to be the phenomenal ‘facts’ of what is, is just a method for the universe to become to know itself. It uses the contrivance of ‘individuality’ to invent perspectives. From these vantages, it is better able to approach the ideal of ‘objectivity’. Objectivity is not a thing that actually exists. We are always inside the system, as are all forms of consciousness. Rather, objectivity is the conceptual state of ‘outside-ness’. We can conceive of ‘outside’ in the same way we can conceive nothingness. These are only words to wrap around the things, like throwing water at the Invisible Man so we can attempt to divine his outline. We understand instinctively that our perception of nothingness, and outside, are a feeble representation of what the thing must actually be. Nothingness, by definition, does not exist. There is no amount of water nor words that can allow us to observe it.

So, the story of complexity of consciousness, of which thus far we, human, are legend and champion, is the story of approaching objectivity. We were literally built for this purpose. It is our charge to take the whirling, gurgling jar of all that is possible and draw from it a single moment. This is it. The lottery results are in. We are here now.

This is the story of habit. This story was told far more scientifically by “A New Science of Life,” a book first published in 1974, written by a man named Rupert Sheldrake. At the time he was the head of the department of Biology at Cambridge. It was, at the time, nominated “The best candidate for burning there has been in many years” by Nature magazine. In the intervening 36 years, not a single logical and effective refutation of its basic philosophy has been offered.

I want to preface what I am about to write by disclaiming that I have not read this book. My understanding of it derives completely from discussions about the book that I have heard or read. (Mostly heard – Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake were best of friends, and Terence speaks of him often in recordings of his lectures).

Sheldrake uses a mythological category of assessment of “X” (which can be applied to any “X” you could ever imagine). In his terminology, everything that is, is built upon a hierarchy of “Morphic Resonance”. Morpho-genetic fields are the descriptors of habit. Habit is synonymous with gravity. Read that sentence again.

When any particular variety of information exchange is repeated ad-infinitum, these actions create runnels in time-space. Canyons and valleys are cut into the fabric of reality by the same thing happening over and over and over and over again. The deeper the river, the more immutable it becomes. Gushing floods of habit, waterfalls and oceans, become things like atoms. Those flows cannot be drained or redirected. They are bigger than us. They are more powerful than us. They are playing a whole different game. We are not even in the same league. Humans can split some handful of atoms, with a great deal of effort, but to eliminate the scaffold of reality on which atoms reside is so far beyond our ken that it is impossible to even consider. Of course, to do so would also eliminate everything that came after atoms as well. All structure in the universe that is subsequent to the atomic scaffold is dependent upon the stability of their morphic resonance, i.e. habit. Another analogy to this can be made in the language of ecology. It is relatively easy to eradicate a species (much as we can unknot the energy of an atom through fusion and fission), but to eliminate the ecological niche in which that species made its own habitual kind of lifestyle is far more difficult. New species will emerge to fill the gap every time. The niches are, in a relative sense, less mutable than the species that exploit them. Translating back to morphic resonance, their canyons of habit are deeper.

Imagine those canyons as wells of gravity. It is the from which and to which all the water flows. Habit sinks down to its state of lowest energy. Entropy is the tendency of habit to form, of structure to coalesce, of crystals, of solidity, complexity, and order. Teeming just above that order are the chaotic engines of novelty that drive the evolution of the universe. Occasionally a new kind of intelligence emerges (a tributary cuts new branches). When this occurs, there is a paradigm shift in which the universe invents and becomes a clever brand of consciousness composed of the 'atoms' of the brand just below it.

For instance, Economy is an intelligent system, a consciousness unto itself, and humans are the atoms that compose its physical body. Just as with humans, the 'mind' of economy lies outside the physical structure. The material brain is an antenna, the receiver of consciousness. Though it is not often discussed on network news financial analysis, I don't think it is difficult for even the least economically-versed person to recognize that the movements of the economy are far beyond the ken of the atoms that comprise its existence. Put more simply, economy is a creature with a brain far larger and more powerful than us, and we are utterly incapable of understanding and effectively predicting the 'thoughts' it will have.

We humans are organizing, coalescing, crystallizing, preparing to become the substrate upon which the next mind is born. Economy is just one of many examples of a kind of test. The universe is playing with what is possible. Gravity pulls us toward this transcendental object. The morphic resonance of the kaleidoscopic chrysanthemum at the end of time speaks in booming whispers. The call of its habits is a gentle roar, so ubiquitous it is indistinguishable from the seeming solidity of this World we stride. We would do well to tune our ears back to that music.

At the bottom, reality is composed of information. Once this is realized, it is only a tiny leap of logic to understand that it can also be hacked. There are loopholes and back-doors. Our investigations bring us further every day to making the program open-source. The instruction manuals are surfacing at an accelerating rate. “A New Science of Life” is one of importance. I can name you fifty others off the top of my head. Everything you need is available.

Everything in the World is possible, and true, so choose your habits wisely…