paradise

Reading 4 books this week. One new (Danielle) and 3 re-reads.

Here are my favorite excerpts so far. I'm thinking if I comment on them I get to re-teach and re-learn. Totally a win-win. For me.

I had this awfully dark dream where I strangled and shinered some kid I had a crush on just to get him to notice me. I admitted this to him then he had me committed. Who needs TV when mental dramas are so cool?

Right, excerpts. I didn't forget, I just alighted for a pee break and came back to an open writing window.

It's almost impossible to find capsule quotes of Lewis Thomas because his longreads are just so brilliant, every paragraph being a shiny brick upon which another shiny brick is placed. Trying to find the capstone that holds the whole marvelous idea together is tough!

Oh, to ramble like Lewis Thomas or Oliver Sacks.

“Already there are no closed, two way conversations. Any word you speak this afternoon will radiate out in all directions, around town before tomorrow, out and around the world before Tuesday, accelerating to the speed of light, modulating s it goes, shaping new and unexpected messages, emerging at the end as an enormously funny Hungarian joke, a fluctuation in the money market, a poem, or simply a long pause in someone's conversation in Brazil.” — Lewis Thomas, “Computers”, The Lives of a Cell

Or in a monospace text box on Medium in 2017 or Write.as in 2019. (I remember investing in Medium in 2009, but that's a different story)

Reminds me that information is the building block of the universe, and that the brain is in constant creation of information.

This means that consciousness (brainpower, otherwise) needs to be observed, which then leads to information being distributed, meaning existence exists simply because it's observed. It's a circle. It's a torus!

So no thought/no utterance is ever done without witness. If it exists in your mind, someone hears it. (Even if that someone is you.)

“There are lots of possibilities here, but if you think about the construction of the hill by a colony of a million ants, each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the fastest notion of what is being constructed elsewhere, living out his fried life in a social enterprise that extends back into what is for him the deepest antiquity (ants die at the rate of 3-4% per day; in a month or so an entire generation vanishes, while the Hill can go on for 60 years or, given good years, forever) performing his work with infallible, undistracted skill in the midst of a confusion of others, all tumbling over each other to get the twigs and bits of warmth and ventilation of the eggs and larvae, but totally incapacitated by isolation, there is only now human activity like this and it is language.

“We have been working at it for what seems eternity, generation after articulate generation, and we still have no notion how it is done, nor what it will be like when finished, if it is ever to be finished. It is the most compulsively collective, genetically programmed, species specific, and autonomic of all the things we do, and we are infallible at it. It comes naturally. We have DNA for grammar, neurons for syntax. We can never let up; we scramble our way through one civilization after another, metamorphosing, sporting tools and cities everywhere, and all the time new words keep tumbling out.

“The words themselves are marvels, each one perfectly designed for its use. The older, more powerful ones are membranous, packed with layers of different meaning, like one word poems. “Articulated”, for instance, first indicated a division of small joints, then, effortlessly, signified the speaking of sentences. Some words are gradually altered while we have them in everyday use, without our being aware until the change has been completed: the ly in today's adverbs, such as ably and benignly, began to appear in place of “like” a few centuries ago, and “like” has since worn away to a mere suffix. By similar process, “love-did” changed itself into “loved”.”

— Lewis Thomas, “Living Language”, The Lives of a Cell (1974)

One of his earlier essays explores how our DNA is encoded for language. He refs it again here.

I could have just cut the whole three paragraphs and left you with what is bolded, but don't you like to know about ants?

“As Dee and Kelley were receiving and working with the items and concepts of heptarchic magicking, their minds and psychic bodies were, day by day, undergoing subtle yet profound evolutionary changes.

“Could the reason the practical Enochian material came so very late in the game that Dee and Kelley had to first complete their transformation into magicians who could appreciate and handle the advanced work? After all, isn't that way magicking is really about — changes in the magician? Could these changes have been brought about by the mere act of meticulously following the angels' complex directions, which filtered and distilled these magical concepts into material manifestation? If so, this would be a vital predatory step that modern Enochian magicians are omitting entirely.

“I grew intrigued with this idea. Given that GD/Crowly methods of Enochian magicking already work so well right out of the box, how much better would these same techniches work if the magician were first prepared and attuned in a matter similar to the way Dee and Kelley had been prepared and attuned. A magician so equipped would be picking up, as it were, where the two Elizabethans left off in 1584.”

— Lon DuQuette, Enochian Vision Magick (2008)

Don't you find it fascinating that John Dee (scribe), and Edward Kelley (receiver) were Queen Elizabeth's royal magicians, and that this was actually a thing in the 1500s?

And a thing now, mind.

And so, while some people get tripped up with the word “angels” because it triggers religious connotations, think of them otherwise as non-bodied, trans-dimensional entities you can have a conversation with, ask to be melted into you to take on their properties (as much as you can in this 3D world), ask for reality-bending tasks to be completed, and so on.

And so, preparing yourself psychically for this is simply preparing yourself to be aware and perceptive of energies that may seem out of reach or downright impossible to the normal, burger-eatin' layman.

Haha, and here I let Lewis Thomas step in again: “IF you hear the word, 'Impossible!' spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely.”

So one of my favorite movies — top 5 — is Interstellar. Favorite genre – space opera – top fav director, Nolan bros. I could care less about who acted in it. Anyway.

Like when Cooper is stuck in the tesseract playing “angel” (or in their terms: ghost) to his daughter Murph throughout her life, and how 5D entities (can't be said they're human, who knows!) are playing angel to him by building him a tesseract in a black hole.

It's honestly not that far fetched.

We don't know what's in a black hole because we can't observe it.

But it's entirely within the realm of possibility that a transdimensional being would totally be familiar with the fabric of the black hole, and even the building blocks, and so able to build a 4D object, a tesseract, into a dimensionless(?) void(?) to fit a 3D creature into a constructed place to manipulate his timeline, which is connected to earth's timeline by a bridge of Love.

Love and Consciousness.

Both can't be measured (can they? I'm sure the MRI isn't measuring consciousness. Nor is the EEG. At best the EEG is measuring your EYEBALLS moving, and you have to filter out the noise or else you'll be reading false positives and speaking them as gospel

Haha sounds so human.

Anyway,

both love and consciousness can't be measured, but they exist.

I don't remember where I'm going with that. I'm just type rambling in my layman, junior high way.

I've been writing like a junior high schooler my whole life, methinks.

Perhaps, like Dee/Kelley, to prepare myself for a time when my magician ways can be summoned (conversed?) by a trans-dimensional entity for some sort of MISSION. (it feels like I'm on it, so that's cool.)

Seeing that I didn't even get past 10th grade I figure its appropriate to seemingly always speak like a junior high schooler. This also makes my ramblings accessible to a junior high schooler, and those are the most malleable, intelligent creatures on earth next to a pre-kindergartener (obviously trumps all of us), however it is difficult to keep a pre-k engaged in a task for more than a few minutes at a time.

so if we had 4 year olds managing 12 year olds in a symphony of world-saving missions, I think the human race may be okay.

Maybe this is why the world needs moms. To keep these kids safe. Life depends on it. The millennials don't know this, nor do the boomers who wrecked the millennials' chances of owning a home and giving birth during their naturally fertile window (if at all), two requisites for, you know, being a pre-k or junior high schooler.

And dads. To keep the moms safe.

so maybe there needs to be a baby boom ii, but this time without the toxic narcissism that plagued the baby boom i as it reached adulthood.

I dunno, man, what do you think?

This discussion with myself if actually making it a bit easier to stomach my next (new) book, an excerpt of which I'm finding and will type now, and you'll see how curtlingly cringey it is at face value, but after we read this together I'll expand on some virtues as well. (But note, initially, I felt as grossed out as you might feel upon reading it.Or maybe it's me)

” 'Our Washington correspondent has found a very articulate [Ed note: whoa its that word again!] young protestor with something to say.”

” 'Miss, what are you protesting?' the correspondent asked.

”'American Apartheid,” Danielle replied.

”'Apartheid, really? What makes you say that?'

”' Well we have two classes of citizens. That's apartheid, just like South Africa had.' “' I'm not sure I can agree.' The interviewer leaned toward Danielle. 'We only have one class of citizens. And the immigrants want to become citizens. How is that two classes of citizens?'

”'Those are just words,' Danielle said. 'What's really going on is that we would never send all of the so called illegal immigrants back to where they came from. Our country would fall apart. They are part of our economy. So they get some things — like the doctor would see them in an ER and some kids get to go to school. But any one of them can be picked on and thrown out. They're called illegal but that's not really honest because we need them. They get some rights but not others. That's apartheid.'

”'Interesting, I had not looked at it that way before. So what do you think we should do about this?'

” 'Make them official citizens. The first class of citizen.'

” 'Well the demonstrators here apparently agree with you. People on the other side of this issue say that if we gave millions of undocumented immigrants the official rights of citizens we would have to pay them more and prices would go up.'

“Danielle looked surprised and confused. I had seen this face before when her ideas at Stern School would go awry. She was clearly thinking about what the correspondent had said.

” Finally, Danielle replied with a concerned look, 'Yeah, I think that's right. I hadn't thought of that.' There was another long pause, and just as the correspondent was about to break away, Danielle added, 'I guess that's just the price of being fair.'

”'Well said, miss. And how old are you?'

”'Five.'”

— Ray Kurzweil, Danielle, Chronicles of a Superheroine (2019)

You caught it, right?

Five years old?

Not gonna lie, this whole book has me cringing with envy, which is an emotion/reaction/symptom I totally hate feeling. I get where its stemming from, ugh, but it's not a fun one to embody.

Anyway. So I'm not done with the book, but I'm about 64 pages in, and this precocious AF Pasadena child has already organized a trip to Zambia to bring filtered water to 1000s of people, even fixed the generator, then came back home and got onstage at a country music festival, imitating male vices in perfect Harmonia.

I mean

Gimme a break, right?

Okay, but aside from being a dick, it's actually a good book to give young people, because it is imparting an “anything is possible from any age” attitude. Once you can break past the envy or the impossibility (HEY!) of it all.

Reading it the second time while typing it to you, I don't feel entirely too bad about it. The message must have gotten through. Just.. my first readthrough exposed this icky envy over their affluent waldorfian socal parenting style that gives rise and nurtures this annoyingly precocious kid, and how the book has no challenges, doesn't deal with sibling rivalry so far, just has me reactively scanning my environment for similar cues of success, turning up with less, and leaving a giant hole in my soul. A hole of longing. Ugh, we are all so simple and human.

Are the Silicon Valley kids this nurtured? AUGH, isolation. (as Joy Division songs start to fire up in my head.)

Anyway. I'm going to press pause here and rejoin society.

Wait, oh shit, did you catch this today?

We have to remember that what we think of as an interface is built on a metaphor. Take the general definition I found in a dictionary:

“a surface forming a common boundary of two bodies, spaces, or phases.”

This is usually associated with oil and water. It just so happens that we chose to extend the association to man's relation to machines. Now, interface design is the tinkering of that surface forming a common boundary between man and computer.

— CJ Eller, Metaphor Debt (2019)

That makes me want to talk about porous cell membranes but I'll refrain. I'm already at 2500 words, guaranteeing that no one has reached this far (except CJ and inquiry, you marathon readers, you).

Other days I guess I'll talk about conglomerated birthday candle creations and cell membranes, but for now, it's just

Another day in, Paradise

— .:~:..:~:..:~:..:~:..:~:..:~:..:~:..:~:..:~:..:~:. published not proofread. #NeverLookBackspace! Words, Ideas, Magic copyrighted by Zem in Paradise. this is confidential communication. Protected by US and International law.