TRANCHE 6

Reading Peter Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time (Norton, 2003) in juxtaposition with Thongchai Winichakul's Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (University of Hawaii Press, 1994) is truly an edifying experience. Galison's characterization of Poincaré's world, activities, and mathematical creations during the 1890's provides global contextualization of the “Crisis of 1893” wherein the geo-body of Siam came into being, as so expertly described by Winichakul. My interest and insight into this area began in 1967 in Vietnam as an intelligence analyst studying the bureaucratic organization of the Vietcong political infrastructure (VCI). In the Area Analysis Section of the Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam (CICV) there was a gazetteer of maps cataloging Vietcong boundary changes from military region to village level, country-wide. Upon first coming across this then-neglected gazetteer and pouring over it, I was staggered. These boundaries were in a constant state of flux. I had never before seen anything like it. The implications were hard to phantom, as no Western bureaucracy I had heard of could possibly function with its boundaries of administrative responsibility changing on a nearly continuous basis. As administrative boundaries change, given that the function of the demarcated area relative to the total system thereby changes, all the other administrative variables must also change: manpower, resource, and financial allocations; job descriptions; recruitment strategies; taxation schemes; echelon definitions; information flow channels; chains of command; and so on to a very long list. How could they do it? Why would they do it? Was this a standard practice of subversive organizations generally or of clandestine communist organizations specifically? Had this been done during the Viet Minh period in the war against the French? Was this something that emerged in the South alone? Was this practice used only in the war with the Americans and not before? I had a thousand questions and every analyst I voiced these questions to had only simplistic answers: It is a stratagem to confuse the South Vietnamese government; it is a result of manpower shortage; they do it because they have no modern organizational experience and this is one reason why they are so ineffective. These were not plausible answers. Moreover, the map gazetteer had been thrown together in such a way that there was little built-in historical memory and it contained no portrait of the “world-line” of the boundary changes. Maps were just stuck into the folder, picked up from wherever, and there was no organization of them suggesting that they had been subjected to systematic analysis.

As described in great detail in MOON, over the next year it became apparent that I had inadvertently stumbled upon the royal road to understanding Vietcong administrative practice. At Strategic Research and Analysis Section of MACV-J2, we began studying the VCI in a way it had never been done before, studying it as a multiscale dynamical process -- and the world-line of the boundary changes was found to be the critical variable to which all other bureaucratic variables correlated. This was heady stuff! Exciting. Daily discoveries. We couldn't wait to get back to the office for the next 14-hour day of pouring over captured enemy documents. Some of us took to sleeping on our desks so as not to waste time traveling back and forth to billets. I never stopped studying the implications of this, and after getting out of the Army continued to pursue implications through general systems theory, neuroscience, the physics of multiscale severe storm genesis, quantum and relativity theory. In that office in 1968, people were reading Watson and Crick on DNA and seeing parallels in the clandestine organization we were studying. Mentions of parallels with quantum and relativity theory were made. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, massive document hauls were brought in from over-run Vietcong headquarters facilities which contained historical memory all the way back to the early 1950s. A dynamical portrait began to emerge that was truly amazing. As far as any of us could tell, nothing like this had ever existed before, not in the bureaucratic history of the world. None of us were historians of bureaucracy, but some of us were very well read in political science and public administration, with degrees from the London School of Economics, Harvard Law School, Amherst, and so on. Some of us had graduate mathematics training in statistical analysis. But none of us had ever seen anything like this before.

We had no access to French-era bureaucratic nuts-and-bolts documents (personnel transfer orders, for instance, documents on that level of specificity, the level of specificity required to correlate between the myriad bureaucratic variables at play in an organizational dynamic) from the northern part of Vietnam, so we could not really answer the question as to whether or not constant boundary changes and the correlations we were seeing had transpired under the Viet Minh in the north of the country. We suspected not, that what we were seeing had emerged uniquely in the south during the 1930s. This seemed to us to be the case for many reasons, not the least of which was that northern cadre were set against the local autonomies that facilitated such bureaucratic dynamism, and did everything they could to quench it at whatever opportunity. A real essay on this subject is not the purpose of this brief note, so I must jump to the conclusion we increasingly settled upon. We searched the literature for clues as to whether or not other communist insurgent apparats had employed flux of boundaries (correlated with other bureaucratic variables) to a similar degree and could not convince ourselves that there was any evidence of this. What we were seeing appeared to be totally unique. The conclusion we reached was that this continuous boundary flux, and ongoing state of bureaucratic re-organization in response, was not derived from the communist attributes of the VCI bureaucracy, but had emerged out of the traditional forms of organization intact at the village level as the village voluntary associations were subverted and transformed into a national front organization. Village animistic practice had subverted the subversion process, and this was the origin of the constant boundary flux! In 1963, while a student, I had written a long analysis of the Strategic Hamlets Program, compared with the Briggs Plan in Malaya, from an anthropological and sociological perspective. In so doing, I had assimilated a lot of the existing anthropological literature on Southeast Asia. So, when in 1968 I began interrogating the captured Vietcong and ralliers who had penned the captured documents I was analyzing (often I had with me during the interrogations the exact documents the person I was interrogating had personally written), I began using the term "identity transparency" as a way of characterizing to myself the state of mind of people who could have come up with the sort of bureaucratic process I was studying. The transparency in borders, so critical to fluid bureaucratic response to a changing combat environment, was an expression of the animistic transparency in identity traditional with these people. That's what I came to believe. It was, therefore, no surprise to any of us from SRA when, after the war ended, the communist bureaucracy of the SRV locked into a rigid un-dynamic format that prevented adaptation to changing circumstances. The northern cadre had achieved their goal of quenching local autonomy and the dynamic responses associated with it, those responses that largely had been responsible for communist victory in a war fought under conditions of massive imbalance of forces.

The coordination of clocks being implemented globally during the 1890s, in association with increasingly accurate fixes on longitude, described by Galison, was the context within which the 1893 cusp of conflict transpired between the French and the Siamese over a fixed eastern border for Siam, as described by Winichakul. Poincaré was sitting in Paris coordinating clocks with Hanoi at that very time. Einstein's 1905 Special Relativity massively generalized the involved notions into every aspect of the globalizing civilization and became a driving force behind evolution of planetary monoculture, attendant uniformizations, and progressive removal of local autonomies. My argument is that Einstein's failure to factor variable baud rates of consciousness into calculations for coordination of clocks (as discussed in earlier messages: see TRANCHE 5) prevented, not only the insights required for comprehension of the measurement problem in quantum theory, but also prevented insight into the orders of m-valued quantum logics which underlie the “non-simple identity” giving rise to the constant boundary flux seen everywhere in multiscale natural systems, and which is the source of the animistic states of identity transparency which were generalized into traditional Buddhological notions of space.

The present gathering global insurgency against the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system cannot be expected to remain bound by the Islamic ethno-religious border because the fundamental issues driving the assault are not confined to Islamic concern and increasingly hysterical Islamic back-reaction. Everywhere on the planet, other nascent back-reactions are to be found, back-reactions directly related to the larger forcing functions at play. The notion that these back-reactions will remain unconnected with each other as the index of duress heightens is simply not plausible. Classical relativity theory, unleavened by factors such as variable baud rates of consciousness, extended the cultural steamroller initiated by the industrial revolution founded on Newtonian science. Classical relativity theory was the end of something old, not the beginning of something new. The presently needed something new is to be found through studies of how variations in baud rates of consciousness underlie Luneburg's non-Euclidian “psychometric distance functions” for binocular visual space, and how these functions impinge upon distance measurement and coordination of clocks within clocks within clocks. Luneburg's experimentally demonstrated metric-geometry account of binocular visual space has associated with it an absolute limiting velocity and a Lorentz contraction in the direction of movement. There is no mistaking the fact that these experimental findings are of considerable consequence to fine coordination of clocks and the recent experimental demonstration of apparent variations in the speed of light. Such investigations of baud rates of consciousness in relation to “psychometric distance functions” will demonstrate that Buddhological notions of space were founded upon profound insight into natural material processes, insight having its origins in animistic engagement with the natural surround and proprioceptive engagement with the depths of conscious awareness. The involved notions of space, clearly give rise to highly sophisticated organizational processes, as the VCI case demonstrates. In order to arrive at the presently required something new, it is necessary to look more closely at the nearly forgotten something old.

Actually, what I consider to be the initial precursor of my Plexiglas wall experiences came, I believe, at age three. This is the first fully intact memory I have. Much later, while in my senior year of high school, I asked my mother to help me count all the schools I had gone to -- something like 23. During that afternoon-long conversation, I gathered background information which helps explain this first fully intact memory. As an infant, I had shared a stroller with the daughter of close childhood friends of my parents, and had become very attached to this girl child. I had already moved quite a number of times by age three and had periodically crossed paths with this girl. Her father had gone into the Army Air Corps along with my father during WWII and, like my father, was also an Air Force pilot after the war. The time of this first memory would have been 1948 when we left San Antonio for a new assignment. I apparently refused to say goodbye to this girl and made quite a scene at departure time. I remember sitting in the backseat of the car thinking about the girl, knowing I would never see her again. We had moved quite a few times before and the friends I had had I had never seen again. This seemed to me like dying, which I couldn't understand, but I knew it had something to do with how people felt about one another. When you moved, the other person died. This girl was dead. At the very instant that thought came, an image of the girl sitting in her backyard thinking about me appeared in my awareness. She knew I was dead! So, this is what being dead is? I thought. I do not have a memory of the perceptions I had at that moment, but I remember that I was dead for most of that afternoon in the backseat of that car, and that memories of that afternoon haunted me for a long time thereafter. In fact, I never did see that girl again. I strongly suspect this was my first precursor to the Plexiglas wall experiences.

My seventh year was spent in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, a small farming market town, at that time of 5,000 persons, in the south central part of the state where my parents had grown up. My father had gone to Japan. There was no concurrent travel, so the family had stayed behind for the first year of his posting there. When not in school, I played predominantly with one of my cousins and another boy. This cousin was an extravagant sleepwalker notorious amongst the town's residents. He was periodically picked up in the wee hours at spots all over town. For whatever reasons of psychological induction, both myself and the other boy, midway through this year, 1952, also began sleepwalking, but rarely did either of the two of us leave our houses. The farthermost I wandered from my bed was into the expansive grounds around my grandmother's house, in which we were living -- and then into the yard only once. I remember my mother awakening me as I walked through the yard. When being awakened from sleepwalking, and particularly on this occasion, there was a very strong sensation of being removed from everything in the surrounding space, everything appeared distant -- and this “feeling”, or whatever it was, could persist for a long time thereafter. It was only in high school that I looked back on this and realized that there was a similarity between this removal sensation and the Plexiglas wall experiences I later had. Some years after leaving Greencastle, I learned that the boy who was not my cousin moved away from the town sometime following that sleepwalking year. I never again sleepwalked after moving away from Greencastle. One of the strange things about this sleepwalking was discovered only many years later: all three of us, unbeknownst to each other, went through Special Forces medic training in the early 1960s.

My mother, two younger sisters, the cocker spaniel, and I left Greencastle by car in May of 1953, drove to Seattle, placed the car in the hold of the USS Randalt, a troop carrier, and departed for Japan. We were supposed to stop in Hawaii and Guam. The trip was to take almost a month. Mike, the dog, had to stay in a cage way down in the hold. It was my job to feed him, clean the cage daily, and check him out three times a day. This was a lot of work. Being officer's dependents, we stayed on the upper passenger deck and I had to make my way down through all the troop billet levels to get to where the dog was. I spent a lot of each day with the troops while making these trips. About the time we were to reach Hawaii, the sea became stormy and we were told there would be no stop in Hawaii or Guam, that a typhoon had developed and we were to follow a new route to Yokohama that would keep us away from danger. Nonetheless, every movable thing on the ship was tied down, all the outer walkways were made off limits, and the sea became rough enough that eating at a table had become nearly impossible. Everybody became seasick and the smell of vomit reeked throughout the ship. Some people got broken bones from being thrown into bulkheads. Mike, the dog, was horribly sick and getting down and back from attending to him was quite a task. I got sea sick. It stayed like this for two-and-a-half-weeks and everybody was in a real state. At the height of it all, one of the officer's wives who was pregnant gave premature birth. The baby was born dead. Everyone received this news not only as horrible, but as a horrible omen. There was a lot of crying and near hysteria amongst some of the women. As we approached Japan, the storm abated somewhat and it was decided that there would be a burial at sea for the stillborn child. I was told I could not attend this burial. For whatever reason, I simply would not hear that. I threw a fit and my mother relented. The funeral was conducted on a lower deck and not many people came because the sea was still rough. My mother knew the woman whose child it was, so we attended together. It was done as a full military burial, but with a tiny coffin sliding off the board under an American flag. I stood there looking through the rail as the little coffin plunged to the sea, splashed, and disappeared. But as the coffin plunged and was swept away, I was not there on the deck; I was pulled out of myself, removed from the event, pushed way back away, yet somehow at the same time had the sensation of riding the coffin into the sea. The altered perceptions of space, of depth, of identity, later became characteristic of my Plexiglas wall experiences. During the three years in Japan, and very occasionally later, I had dreams of dying in a sea at storm, going down in a foundering ship. Later yet, these dreams were accompanied by Rachmaninoff.

There were no Plexiglas wall experiences during the period I lived in Japan. It is far too long a story to describe concretely what I experienced there, but some of it is relevant to the Plexiglas wall experiences that developed soon after leaving Japan. We lived in a little dozen-farm-house hamlet called Asahigaoka (verdant hills) located on the southern-most main island -- the most conservative area of Japan. We were the only foreigners and occupied a remodeled rich-farmer's farm house. The hamlet was half an hour's drive from a small Air Force base located on the edge of a small fishing village at the mouth of a river pouring into the Sea of Japan. All the families in the hamlet where we lived worked the rice fields that covered the small valley. All the roads in the valley were dirt roads. Human ordure was spread over the fields for manure. There was a Shinto shrine on the hill above my house, and a Buddhist pagoda on the top of the higher hill above that. All the vegetable gardens were terraced into the hillsides which were overgrown with wild camellia and other broad-leafed evergreens. This was one of the last places in Japan where the old planting rituals were still intact. When not in school on the base, I played with the Japanese kids in the hamlet and came to speak Japanese as they did. I was there from summer of 1953 to summer of 1956, from soon after my eighth birthday until soon after my eleventh birthday. Given my age, I was inducted into the life of the hamlet, much more so than any of the other members of my family. A local teenaged girl became my ama. We formed a close bond and I often snuck out of my house at night to go sleep in the common room of her house with all her siblings. An old grandmother took a liking to me and I spent a lot of time with her. She filled me with all sorts of Shinto lore about the land and the spirits. I ran through the rice fields and climbed the hills everyday with the other kids and my dog, Mike. By the time I left there, I knew every inch of the valley and surrounding hills and had worked, at one time or another, as a kid would, in every rice field and vegetable plot. I didn't understand it at the time, of course, but I was living with people deeply tied to the land who experienced a sense of identity very different from anything I would later experience with other people -- a sense of identity that was being lost. A decade and a half later, I would see echoes of it in the Mekong delta, and later yet see traces in the rural tribal areas of north Thailand. -- but it was no longer fully intact, even in those places: war, assimilation, modernization.

I can't resurrect memory of a first Plexiglas wall experience after leaving Japan. I don't think it came on like that as one major defining instance. I remember having more and more frequent and elaborate instances of light-headedness that eventually developed into the sensation of almost blacking out. At first, just sitting down for a moment would be enough the make it go away. Later, I would have to put my head between my knees to prevent myself from blacking out. I have no memory of any instance where I actually fully lost consciousness. Had that happened, it would have become an issue with others, and that never transpired. This began sometime during my eleventh year and progressed through the age of about thirteen. Around the age of fourteen, I began noticing a distinct sense of separation from the objects about me that preceded the light-headedness and the movement toward blacking out. I was aware that this was not normal, that it wasn't happening to others around me. I was very introverted, had no real friends. We were moving a lot, sometimes every six months. I read a lot: progressed from Hardy Boys to popular fiction, to less popular fiction. Kids stayed away from me, because they sensed something was “weird” about me. I didn't talk much and when I did it was usually from somewhere else than where they were. I'd be there amongst a conversation saying nothing, then I'd abruptly make some spiel which I felt was a good relevant observation. There would be silence all around. I'd turn and leave. I always walked home alone. There was a progressive development in the dynamics of the “blackout experiences”, as I designated them to myself at the time, that came to a cusp in my sixteenth year. As time passed and it happened over and over, I began to anticipate “blackouts” before they came upon me. This was partly due to noticing regularities of external circumstance and partly due to some sort of proprioceptive awareness. There was no aura, like in epilepsy, but a peculiar kind of affective-tone, I would now designate it, which I came to recognize as a precursor to onset. Technically, that could still be an aura, a petit mal aura, but frankly, I do not believe it was actually an aura.

Just before I turned fifteen, we moved to a SAC base in the interior of Alaska. This was the summer of 1960. I was sick of being a loner and a smart guy. I decided to make this move a radical departure in my personality. I would force myself to walk up to the first person I saw my own age and introduce myself. This was an enormous thing for me at that time. I would discipline myself not to say anything different from what they said. I would learn to be a copycat. I would find the right person and secretly become their apprentice. I also decided I would get no grade higher than a C. I would be a popular person, be outgoing, play sports. This was precisely what I did. The motivation was not to get rid of the “blackouts”; it was simply because I was sick of being the way I was. The “blackouts” were a curiosity. I didn't really have an attitude toward them. They were just something I dealt with, something I concealed, something I observed and tried to understand. For whatever reason, they were part of me. I introduced myself to the first person I saw, who turned out to be the best basketball player in the school. He practiced at the base gym six hours a day throughout the summer. I did the same. This was totally new to me. I was a complete klutz. But the two of us had made a pact right at the beginning. He was a natural athlete, but had nearly drown as a child and hadn't learned to swim. I was a good swimmer. I would teach him how to swim; he would teach me how to play basketball. Once I got him over his fear of the water, he learned to swim in about two days. He kept at me all summer, refused to allow me to give up trying to become a basketball player. By the time school started, I was good enough to make junior varsity. I was still having “blackouts” throughout the summer. They would sometimes occur on the basketball floor. He noticed this, asked me what was wrong. I told him the truth. He felt it was nothing to worry about. Just keep getting on down the floor. We never talked about it again. He frequently got cramps; I frequently got “blackouts”. No big deal.

Something strange, though, happened that summer practicing basketball. I was trying to learn how to dribble and shoot; he was frequently scrimmaging with the GIs. Some of the GIs, the ones who were in Special Services and ran the gym, had been professional basketball players before entering the service, others had played college ball. They were very good. One had played for the Harlem Magicians, a professional team similar to the Harlem Globetrotters. This fellow was utterly amazing and often showed my friend a thing or two. Mostly, this was how to teach yourself how to do something. I watched this going on over the summer. My friend was told to wear an eye patch for awhile, to tape two fingers together, to tie one hand behind his back, to wear a headband. He was told that you have to keep changing these things, that after awhile they would no longer work. You choose the thing according to what you are trying to learn. If you are trying to learn to shoot with the wrong hand, tape the fingers of that hand together. I tried all these things myself and kept feeling that each thing taught had a common factor with every other thing taught. But I didn't know what that common thing was. I also noticed that when I first started doing one or another of these things that the “blackouts” seemed to come on with greater intensity than normal, but then, as time passed, they wouldn't come on so much or more strongly than normal. More strongly at this point meant a greater sense of removal from everything around me, a greater distancing like everything was farther away than it actually was, than you knew it was -- not more light-headedness or a more deep movement toward blackout. I couldn't understand any of this; I couldn't understand what the common factor was. Trying to understand it became a major focus. I kept changing from eye patches to taped fingers to a wad of paper in my tennis shoe, to headbands, to any other… then it suddenly hit me: “disturbance”. What the common factor in all this was was a disturbance in my ATTENTION to some part of my body! Why it worked for learning things, I didn't have the faintest idea, but what it was I now knew.

My friend was learning things, but as I practiced like this, the time the distancing sensation lasted became longer and longer. This was horrible! I was by now getting to be a better shot, but when the distancing thing happened the ball would always overshoot, sometimes over the backboard. I tried to compensate. I would think it was a perfect shot and it would fall a foot short! Or I would jump into somebody thinking I was farther away than I actually was. As the season started, I sat on the bench much of the time. Occasionally, I would get into the game and most of the time I did okay, but if the distancing thing happened I was horrible. Sometimes it would last for five minutes before the light-headedness came and I would have to stop like I was catching my breath and put my head down for a second or two to get rid of the “blackout” sensation. Then I would be back to normal. After the game, people would come up to me and comment on how erratic my playing was. They'd say they had never seen anything like it before. I was beginning to think I was going to have to quit. I had found a girl friend during the summer, but suddenly she bolted and took up with another fellow, someone who wasn't making an ass out of himself in front of everybody.

Once school had started, I had stopped going to the base gym and only went to basketball practice at the high school gym. I now started to go to the base gym on the weekends during off hours so I could practice alone. I knew I had to understand this thing or I would eventually have to give up. I sensed that if I did give it up, that would mean I would go back into being my old self. The prospect of that really scared me. I thought I might get into trouble, that the blackouts might get worse, or something else, something worse, would happen. I longed for the weekends to come so I could work on this. I didn't know how to work on it. All I knew was that there was this common thing: changing my attention to some part of my body, by presenting it with an obstruction, had an effect on the distancing thing associated with the “blackouts”. I started doing all the things I did before, but nothing new happened. I did them more and more. I couldn't think of anything else to do. The basketball season was now more than half over and I had made little improvement. I started to get frantic with these weekend practice sessions. Sunday mornings were best. No one was there for hours. I would work myself into a fever pitch practicing with taped fingers and eye patches or shooting from the wrong foot, anything I could think of. Nothing worked. I couldn't discover anything beyond what I already knew. I would become so worked up, so emotional, I started throwing up after the sessions. No matter what I did, everything went just as before, except for one little difference, a difference that hardly mattered. Somewhere during these weekend workouts -- I couldn't even pinpoint it, as I only noticed the change after it was already happening -- the period of the distancing sensation shifted from being before onset of the light-headedness and movement-toward-blackout to afterwards. Even though it now came afterwards, the length of time the distancing lasted was about the same as before. Not much help.

It was at this point that the Plexiglas wall appeared for the first time. It was toward the end of a close game. I took a rebound at the opponent's end of the floor. As I hit the floor and spun to throw the ball down court, the light-headedness and “blackout” came on. I recovered momentarily and made the throw which was bad, out of bounds, a turnover at an important moment. Suddenly there was an intense distancing, a deep removal from the space around me and everything seemed unreal, so unreal it was like a Plexiglas wall had appeared separating me from the rest of the world. I was looking through a tunnel, through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. It happened only for a few seconds, with a kind of in-and-out thing, an oscillation in depth perception that settled into the normal distancing sensation I had experienced so many times before. This distancing lasted a few minutes and then was gone. We lost the game, but not only because of my turnover. No one said anything about it. After that, the Plexiglas wall was a regular part of the onset of the distancing sensation. It had all gotten worse. I kept up the weekend practices, if anything, more frantically then ever. Nothing changed. The Plexiglas wall had become a regular fixture of the distancing sensation -- on and off the basketball court. Sometimes, I hung around on Sunday afternoons when the GI's played. Just to watch. They were far too good for me to play with. Once they were short a man for a scrimmage. They insisted I play. I tried to beg off, but they insisted. They needed another man, so I agreed to join them. It went on for a couple of hours. Every time I got the ball, it would be taken from me or my jump shot would be blocked before the ball got out of my hands. They didn't give me any leeway; they played me like I was one of them. They were far rougher than anything I'd been around before. I kept getting elbows in the face, but I was determined that I wouldn't quit. They weren't roughing me up; it was their normal way of playing. It was all man-on-man, no zone defense, very tight and very fast. Far faster than any playing I'd ever been a part of. About three-quarters of the way through the scrimmage, the light-headedness, the near “blackout”, the Plexiglas wall came up just as I received an unexpected pass. The pass was hard thrown and I spun with it. Everything seemed to slow way down. I wasn't thinking, kind of outside myself moving in slow motion, and as I spun just kind of automatically went up for a long hook shot, something I had never done before in the midst of play, and certainly not from that distance. I hadn't even looked at the basket, but it snapped the net. For the rest of the scrimmage, I was in the distanced state, everything seemed removed, but it was very different than before because everything seemed to be happening slow, even though I knew it was happening just as fast as always. I made two more such hook shots before the scrimmage was over.

Something had happened. Something important had happened and I didn't know exactly what it was. I kept replaying the whole thing over and over, racking my brain trying to identify what actually had happened. When everything seemed to be in slow motion, the distancing sensation was not a problem. More than not a problem, it was like I just somehow “knew” where I was on the floor. I didn't even have to look at the basket to make the shot. I “knew” where the basket was. I felt like I couldn't miss, that it would somehow be impossible to miss. It was like I was a puppet on strings, that some kind of string guided the ball. I couldn't figure it out, but I certainly welcomed it. Whenever the Plexiglas wall appeared, it was now accompanied by the slow-motion effect. I was always ahead of everything by a fraction of a second. And I made my shots; I virtually never missed a shot when in the Plexiglas wall state. My game improved immensely overnight. Instead of normal to bad, it went normal to very good, very good whenever the Plexiglas wall appeared. I kept trying to understand what I had done different to make the change, but I couldn't figure it out. I kind of stopped trying to figure it out. It just worked. By the end of the season, I was playing varsity ball and not sitting on the bench much at all.

I practiced hard during the coming summer and got better and better, playing with the GI's more and more frequently. I was now sixteen. I wanted to find a way to bring on the Plexiglas wall, not just wait for it to come whenever it wanted. The only thing I understood about it was that somehow I seemed not to be in myself, to be out of myself, to be different from myself -- almost how I had changed my personality when I moved to Alaska. Except here I hadn't decided anything, or at least I didn't know of any decision I had made, or if I did make a decision what that decision might have been. And also this wasn't a change in personality; it was a change in, well, I didn't know what… how I felt about how I was in myself, maybe. Whatever that might be! There was a different feeling of being in myself, but I could not grasp it and I couldn't find a way to make the shift when I wanted it. Nonetheless, the Plexiglas wall came periodically, sometimes during games, sometimes not, and basketball season started off very well for me. Then another extraordinary thing happened, in English class. We had to read an excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There was a term in that excerpt that almost knocked me off the chair: “my other I am”. I was stunned. Did the Plexiglas wall bring on another “I am”? The whole idea of it was staggering. No one asked the teacher about the meaning of that term, and I wasn't about to ask. I went to the base library, got a copy of the whole book, and read it cover to cover. There was no mistaking it. He was talking about just what I thought he was talking about. What is this Plexiglas wall stuff, anyway?

I never learned to call on the Plexiglas wall at will. It came and went of its own accord. I had a superb year of basketball and learned something about the Plexiglas wall as a result -- or, rather, learned it through noting contrast to what happened the following year, my last year of high school. We moved to Ohio the summer before my senior year. That year, the Plexiglas wall was gone, simply never came while I was on the basketball court, and came less frequently at other times. I was well into this last year of basketball playing before some understanding came. The last year in Alaska, we had been a very short team who compensated for the height problem by playing race-horse style: man-on-man, full-court press from the first bell to the end of the game, fast-break down the floor every time. We were always behind at half time, and broke away in the fourth quarter as we ran the other team into the ground. We won virtually every game that season, and the Plexiglas wall came on most frequently toward the end of these games when the intensity, speed of play, and emotional high was at its peak. We were “clutch players”: at the crisis, the cusp, under pressure, we excelled. Somehow this peak would trigger a shift to “my other I am”, as I started calling it to myself. But I only fully registered this later, during the next year in Ohio when the Plexiglas wall didn't appear during play. I didn't know why, didn't understand what I had done to push it away. But, eventually, I understood that this was because the style of ball played there at that school in Ohio (zone defense, set up and run plays, very controlled, promptings by signal from the coach) simply precluded development of the emotional state required to bring on the Plexiglas wall in midst of a basketball game. An emotional shift of some sort seemed to be required to bring on “my other I am”, the one with the different perceptions of space and motion. I had long since stopped taping my fingers and wearing eye patches. This “emotional shift”, whatever it actually involved, which I was unable to identify, clearly was another kind of change in attention, but different somehow. The attention changed was not the attention to some part of the body, as before with the tape or the patch, but to something about, well, my “I am”, if I was to believe Whitman -- whatever that “I am” might specifically be. It certainly wasn't like the taped two fingers or the eye covered with a patch. You couldn't get at it, touch it, even know exactly what it was. It seemed to go away every time you thought you were getting up close.

The Plexiglas wall appeared intermittently, less problematically, until my 26th year when I had a fully-conscious gran mal seizure which occurred while practicing certain forms of self-observation meditation I had evolved over the years of extending the principle of taped fingers and eye-patches into other, less concrete, spheres of application. After that seizure, I never had another Plexiglas wall experience. The extension into other spheres was, in part, catalyzed by a six-week visit with friends of my parents during the summer after my senior year of high school. The couple lived in Lexington, Kentucky. The husband was retired Air Force and taught Military Science; the wife was a psychologist specialized in using children's art as a diagnostic tool. She worked at the psychiatric hospital in Lexington. I spent those six weeks pouring over children's art with her and reading into her library. The culmination was my attempt to read Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. I did not really understand the book, but struggled with it and asked many questions. The book used the term “deautomatization”, which I knew had something to do with taped fingers and eye patches. The question one might now ask is to what degree any of this may relate to neural network wipeouts under the pressures of struggle with prescriptive enculturation.

I-why and Me-lie

Your last message on Nash provides a very interesting retrograde of Benoit (Let Go, the Theory and Practice of Detachment According to Zen, N.Y.: Samuel Weiser, 1975):

If self is the ability to take oneself as object, then it is clear that in the actual now in which the I can appear only by ceasing to be the subject of a me, the I as subject cannot appear. Because the I can appear only in memory, the I as subject in the present moment can be only a presupposition. But the I now actually speaking to you, this unpredictable, creative I, this now actually unobjectifiable so-called subject of me, this I who might just stop speaking, throw away the script, bolt for the door, this I who cannot now actually be present to itself, certainly is not absent. This non-presentable I who clearly has not absented itself this afternoon -- this ghastly reality now actually speaking -- is surely something more than a presupposition and it is the purpose of modernity from Descartes to Husserl to clarify consciousness, to eliminate presuppositions -- to get to things themselves! If this I I now am is not to be in consciousness a final bit of unclarity, like the infinite a priori of Husserl, a last piece of suppositional thinking, and if, at the same time, this I is not to be expelled from the pure transparency of consciousness as a thing out of place, like the infinite a posteriori of Sartre, then there is nothing for it but to get beyond altogether the category of presence and absence when it comes to understanding the I. If the I is never a self in the actual now; if, in the now, there is no ability to take oneself as object now; if, in the now, here is no actual self which is not a presupposition -- then, now, and it is always now, thinking clearly, there is no ground for the notion of self. If the subject of self-actualization is always now a presupposition, then there is no subject-object distinction actually relevant to understanding the I now speaking and there is properly speaking no I now as subject. But the I I now am, neither self-present nor absent nor just a presupposition, must therefore be of the quality of an absolutely pure consciousness and, should it be distinguished from the now, a transparency within a transparency…

Benoit, who gives one of the best treatments of detachment I've seen, regards self-observation as an infinite regress, and more or less leaves it at that. With the beginning of your above-given statement, you reverse the regress in Benoit's perspective, which raises very interesting issues you go on to address. I will address these issues in a somewhat different way and in one paragraph (because to enter the gap I will speak of one must allow no breaks in ones awareness, which is not an experiential contradiction, if a ₁T₂ logic contradiction). The second best thing I've seen on self-observation, except the Gurdjieff material, which is very good on the “how to” level, is a book by Richard Rose entitled (The Psychology of the Observer, Wheeling: Pyramid Press, 1979). He gives what I consider a very accurate account of the death of the “I” through prolonged deep practice of self-observation. In a book about Rose I've recently received (After the Absolute by David Gold, no publisher, no date), there is a statement attributed to Rose that points, I believe, to the issues your retrograde treatment raises. He says (p. 249): “There's thoughts -- which are not yours, but come from elsewhere -- and there [are] gaps between thoughts. When you get into that gap between thoughts…” From here he goes off into a discourse on will, which I think is a lower order take. And I would point out that no thoughts ever are “yours”, that all thoughts come from elsewhere, which Rose probably knew. He phrased his statement the way he did because of the prevailing state of the person he was talking to. Aurobindo's account, given in Letters on Yoga, of his first experience of Nirvana is virtually word for word exactly stepping into the gap Rose refers to. Aurobindo, not so incidentally, recommended self-observation over meditation and contemplation. There are things to be learned by deductive reasoning about self-observation, and there is a great deal more to be learned by radical induction as the actual practice of concentration in self-observation: some of what is learned in the latter fashion contravenes what is learned in the former. The gap Rose speaks of emerges due to onset of perceptual time-slow-down (exterior objects and interior objects [such as photisms] appear to be in slow motion) as the baud rate of consciousness increases with deep entry upon infinite regress in the selfhood. This is described at multiple places in MOON. As the baud rate's limiting velocity is approached, the stream of consciousness breaks down (deautomatizes); it fragments into discrete (psychological) identifications with the slowed-down and dilated instants of passing time, between which there are bigger and bigger gaps the closer the limiting velocity is approached. Fall between identifications into the gap (like Alice) and you are definitely in the Land of Oz, Wonderland, or maybe even Never Never Land. Now, regarding the issues your treatment raises. When you get into the gap between thoughts from elsewhere, the actual case is more like a retrograde inversion of Benoit's treatment. When you invert the road that goes both directions, you are into nonorientability, as the Möebius strip so clearly illustrates when regarded a mathematical metaphor, where presence and/or absence is moot. Even a 3-valued logic is of no use here. But actually, time-slow-down cannot have its onset only through entry into infinite regress in the selfhood, be that regress forward looking or retrograde, or even in retrograde inversion, and hence Rose's gap cannot be opened, because there are exterior object relations as well as interior object relations, and baud rate of consciousness is an exponentiated function of both. Focus on one to the exclusion of the other and the baud rate remains unchanged. Attention cathexis is an object-capture, a being captured by the object, exterior and/or interior. One must pull back in (from projection) ones cathexes, from both exterior and interior capture, and one must do this simultaneously, which involves going in at least two “directions” at once and being in more than one “place” at a time. Robert Brumbaugh provides a wonderful description of this in his book Plato's Mathematical Imagination (Indiana U. Press, 1954): “effect of reversed intellectual vision”, “effect of inverted intellectual vision”, “effect of oblique intellectual vision”. Exterior and interior are retrogrades of each other, and this relation itself needs to be inverted through direct perceptual-proprioceptive outsight-insight into projective identification generally, in the collective case, and concretely in the personal case. One must actually visualize the pulling back in of ones cathexes. Jung's eight-fold treatment of the alchemical conjunctio is one account of these intersecting retrograde inversions. You employ, in your above-given statement, the notion of memory to develop the retrograde treatment. Memory and forgetfulness assume a passing-time reference, which, in the inductive case, progressively evaporates with entry upon the involved regresses. My belief is that this is “local” time itself (the synoptic master clock always being stopped), not merely time rate perception (discussed in MOON, for instance, relative to the old chronomantic sitting in Cholon's An Dong Market). The fundamental nonorientability resident in the case -- self-referential reflexivity at the root of m-valued logics -- is why in descriptions of the actual experience of the gap there is never any mention of “I”, even what Gurdjieff referred to as “Real I”. All that is mentioned is “being” or “beingness” -- sometimes “Is-ness” or “That-ness”, “Such-ness” or “Thus-ness”. There is no I-quality without orientability. But there is still (.^.^.); no word from any “natural” language fits, as all such languages are rooted in orientable reference. Musculpt can non-reductively signify (.^.^.) because Musculpt handles nonorientability well. Musculpt is not a natural language. But simple nonorientability (the aperspectival) is not the be all and end all of (.^.^.), as the various levels of Samadhi indicate. Nonorientability has many “forms”. When you look at the ways in which the various levels of Samadhi are characterized, you see, I believe, essays on different forms of nonorientability in self-referential reflexivity. These characterizations are generally given with color fields, musical tones, (Gordon)Belson-esque forms: Musculpt, essentially. Some people, apparently, just hang on the nonorientable loop they first encounter, but as Aurobindo so insistently pointed out, there is oh so much more (having to do, at the very least, with topological transformations occurring at absolute limiting accelerations and absolute limiting time rates of change of acceleration in baud rate of consciousness). Comprehension seems to be required (in part dependent on deductive processes). Nash's “hallucinations” were incomprehension manifest through personification. Personification is an attempt to establish presence of “will” when/where no will resides. Will, like I-quality, requires orientability. In the Japanese cosmogenesis myth, “Emperor” signifies an absolute decision-free empty-center (something like a naked singularity or a strange attractor). “Emperor” is absolutely without will. So long as this is the case, harmony reigns (as all things will spontaneously self-organize relative to the strange attractor). Will enters the picture as the “leech child's return” (Ebisu), which brings disorder and suffering in its wake. Presence of a material world does not require orientability; such orientability is a corruption of the case, i.e., a take on things which is willful. Power is powerless without direction. No will-powered source is any UNIverse. The god with a will must surely be a lesser god.

We have to identify the level of comprehension within which we intend to speak, if we are to have a meaningful interchange on these sorts of subjects. On a certain level of comprehension, I do not believe in any type of biological evolution, genes, memes, ontologically lateral transmission of information, persistence of matter, laws of nature, probabilities, causality, propensities, forces of history, forces and fields in nature, passing time, occurrences, processes, events, individual identities of any sort, solipsism that is not universal consciousness, physical body as more than learned behavior, objective objects that are not collectively-induced hallucinations. On that level of comprehension, there is no possible world and no modal logic available through which any such notions as these could be the case. Choose the right levels of comprehension, however, and each of these, indeed, all of them, appear reasonable accounts of some whatnots -- whatnots possible, probable, or all but certain. Every order of m-valued logic has its corresponding modal logic of the involved collectively consensuated projection screen (possible, probable, all but certain world). The code-script of genes, according to the initial level of comprehension spoken of above, does not contain a fraction of the information carried by the non-local quantum waves decomposing to localized genes, the stability aspects of which are purely statistical, the genome being as changeable as water in an agitated bowl: genes or their constituents do not generate quantal waves; quantal waves decompose as genes and their constituents. Memes and counter-memes (pathological back-reactions against authentic memes which always facilitate functional integration) appear in conscious awareness out of the collective unconscious, out of archetypal lattice overlays constellated on the psychological complex-matrix; it is an illusion when they appear to be transmitted directly from conscious mind to conscious mind, the “transmission” simply being amplified group receptivity to collective unconscious promptings: no direct transmission ever transpires or is ever required, and no effort at transmission will ever “speed up” a meme's or counter-meme's codification of a corpus of behaviors. Ontologically lateral information transmission of any variety, including evolution of species, does not exist because matter has zero persistence due to there being no passing time. What is called “evolution” is sequential pattern imposition upon de novo involutory mathematical decomposition products: m-valued to one-valued identity. This identity decomposition appears to the binary mind (a decomposition product caught in a non-orientable strange loop) as movement, as propagation of information through a ponderable space, when, in fact, it is no more than a change of focus within the spectrum of the orders of identity transparency m-valued logics codify. Matter comes into and goes out of existence, via ontological decomposition and re-composition, on a nearly instantaneous basis and at very small distances set by Planck's limiting time and distance scales, the presence of which is based on the tacit assumption that a self-reentrant system is not fundamentally different from a closed system or a finite collection of open systems, that such a self-reentrant system abides by all the conservation laws applicable to closed and open systems. Different orders of self-reentrant systems (describable with m-valued logics), however, contrary to this tacit assumption, are transfinite collections of open systems, collections of different orders of infinitude. In such systems there can be no limiting time or distance, for instance. This is the full catastrophe, the full Cantorian universe. What, seen through the Planck filtering grid as matter in motion, or information in ontologically lateral transfer, is, seen through infinite orders of infinitude, nothing doing nothing in its identity transparency. “Everything is nothing but changes” is “nothing ever changes”; chaotic motion is perfectly static equanimity; single-valued information propagation is m-logically-valued identity transparency seen through the mind limited to employment of a ₁T₂ logic. The grid chosen by the baud rate of consciousness employed determines the laws of nature encountered, or the lack thereof. The second law of thermodynamics is meaningless relative to self-reentrant systems, which are non-orientable relative to passing time and ponderable space. Order or the lack thereof is relative to the absolutes defined as terms of reference. Any given system is simultaneously closed, open, and self-reentrant, depending upon how it is partitioned for measurement, manipulation, and study. The set-theoretic construct to which it is subjected determines the laws of nature it obeys. History all “happens” nascently, is enfolded in the implicate structure of the collective unconscious, ontologically “before” it unfolds explicitly into an apparent antecedent-consequent sequence. The words in quotes signify that a different level of comprehension has been entered upon. Recursive replicants are artifacts of declaratives and performatives. Historical actors act on trivia, on effects; they are themselves trivial effects due to their states of psychological identification, identification with role attributions, for instance. Kairos: historical “causation” is ontologically vertical, not ontologically lateral. History is “prepared” completely before historical actors are inducted into states of identification. Determination of the archetypal lattice overlay is where history is prepared completely. Those who function on that level only rarely become historical actors and certainly have nothing to gain and nothing to produce by becoming great communicators. What is important to them is to successfully engage in whatever is required to become sufficiently empty as to be imprinted with the overlay, the act of receiving such imprinting being what is required to potentiate and facilitate the involved archetypal lattice (hidden dimension of the meme).

If, say, a person uses the word “evolution”, that use indubitably establishes the level of comprehension the given discussion will transpire on. Such use is a form of speech-act, an act making a word into a performative, wherein previously established conventions are brought into play. Assumptions about time, causality, identity, and so on, at once set and derive from, hence reflexively activate, the terms of reference. If the term “historical Jesus” is used, another level of comprehension is invoked. Level, because the array of involved assumptions are more or less complex, more or less fundamental ontologically, logically, and epistemologically. Cross-cutting levels involves suppressing overt terms of reference. So, actually, that being the case, I think there are to be found quite a lot of Christian ideas in MOON, other than that of the apocalyptic forecast. We just didn't go out of our way to make this explicit, and so name these ideas according to the conventional terms of reference. The notion of m-logically-valued monetary units is not only derived from signification of identity transparency in animisitc ritual gift exchange; "relative-state" in quantum theory; Buddhist "dependent origination"; Southeast Asian human chess which can be analyzed with Everett algorithms and Nash game theory; the borderless borders of old Southeast Asia maintained by bronze drums situated under waterfalls, in much the same manner as fractal drums with their Koch-curve-type boundaries-of-holes engage in a fractal-entrapment-type bandpass filtering of energy cascades; m-logically-valued electron transport processes in superconductant DNA and associated part-equals-whole holographic processing; but also by the identity transparency signified by the Christian Eucharist. Identity transparency underlies market reflexivities and is the root of all self-production and self-organization in nature. Theorists of autopoiesis deny this because of prior commitments, political and otherwise, and maintain their denial by focusing upon cellular-level and molecular-level biology, thus turning a blind eye to quantum-level and sub-quantum-level biology. I spent years studying and applying Maurice Nicoll's take on Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which was a take filtered through his New Testament biblical scholarship and his Jungian analytical training. His interpretation of the Parables, for instance, was highly psychological, and I more or less assumed the same orientation. Per Jung, anything said in MOON about the transference is also a statement about alchemy, which was a form of Christian practice, practice sanctioned by the Church or heretical. Any observation made in MOON about walking meditation, and the inductive discoveries derived from this practice (such as the expressed non-ordinary view of time), is related to Christianity, as this practice, as I did it, had more in common with that described in the Philokalia, as Derek points out in one of his journal entries, than with sadhipadhana. I even, in the early 70s, spent a fair amount of time discussing the Philokalia with some Eastern Orthodox monks in a Virginia monastery. I was also aware that Kazantzakis intensively practiced this form of meditation for years at a monastery in Greece. The Christian notion of Kairos (discussed by the Japanese Swedenborgians in MOON and informing Derek's assessments of political action) is a kind of time very close to the notion of operator-time. Granted, the Christian references utilized in MOON are more Platonic, more Mediterranean, more Spanish than French Catholic, very much less Protestant (except for mystics like Swedenborg), but Christian nonetheless. Medieval Christianity, even of the non-heretical, non-Gnostic, non-Catharist variety, was intensely Platonic, as is today the Our Lady of Guadalupe variety and that of Unamuno. Thus, most Platonic observations made in MOON (virtually anything to do with the theoretical content of the book) have distinct Christian overtones.

The truth is, though, just as I believe compulsory education, institutional science, prescriptive fundamental social units, coercion-based political orders (including democratic forms where force is divided against itself) are pathological, so I believe any type of organized religion -- Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Judaic, pagan cult, whatever -- is pathological. The only question is how pathological. Per my youthful exposure to tent evangelism, I joined Fundamentalists Anonymous and swore off the opiate of the people. At the same time, I firmly believe in the positive values of direct immediate religious experience, the more phenomenologically internalized the more positive the values and the more universal in nature because rooted in nature as opposed to culture. But when this experience is made into a tool of social manipulation, however high the intent of the practitioner, however small the involved group, the positive values are immediately lost by virtue of having been transformed into one or another type of coercion, not the least of which is coercive influence upon neural and perineural processes. I do not believe it is possible to teach direct immediate religious experience, and I do not believe it is possible to transmit it. What is transmitted is bogus, in my view, however big the “grace” or sidhi involved; and this is why we rarely see people who experience a wealth of direct immediate religious experience as having come up through the ranks. The exceptions, like St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, had their wealth of direct immediate religious experience not because of the spiritual help they received, but in spite of it.

In my view, the social utility of this direct immediate religious experience is not to be found in the founding of an order, a religion, a church -- any such foundling is pathology -- but to draw social attention cathexes toward the prerequisites that must be fulfilled if spontaneous social order is to emerge, which is what the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units attempts to accomplish. I do not think either Christ or Buddha, for instance, founded a church -- though each founded a small group which later became a bigger group and eventually a church, and later yet a global religion. The first little step into pathology led directly to all the rest of the steps into greater and greater pathology. One could say the same thing about Mao: when he finally realized his mistake in creating a Leninist party, came to understand the down side of that act of creation, how what, early on, appeared necessary for national liberation became, in the end, the main obstacle to fulfillment of the initiating informative vision for social transformation, he made a valiant attempt to repent of his original sin, that attempt being the Cultural Revolution. This is likely how Mao understood it, as this is certainly how many southern VCI cadres understood the Cultural Revolution's implications for the conjuncture in Vietnam (and this understanding was clearly part of the reason so many of them were purged by the party during the 1968 Tet offensive and its aftermath). It may well be that Christ paid for his own sin, not for those of the “they know not what they do” variety.

I'm sorry, but I just have to laugh about stuff like that: “MAG-SOG”. Even the great IRAN-CONTRA luminary Vietnam Vets write such nonsense. Heh-heh-heh! There was no MAG. There was a MAAG. But MAAG discorporated before advent of SOG from the 5th, and cessation of mission-specific, team-integrity assignment from Okinawa. During the timeframe of MAAG there was STRATDET which was created and advised by CIA and sheep-dipped SF receiving per diem from CIA budget. By the time of SOG, SF was paid by DoA. Unless, of course, I am mistaken, and there was a brief paper overlap. Heh-heh-heh. At least that's how it read at the SWC Library in early-1967. In my personal highly non-expert opinion, one cannot find a thing done wrong in Viet Nam not being done wrong today on a global scale. There are so many classes of cusp catastrophe waiting in the wings they can hardly be counted. What kind of person remains with the failing institutional base of a dead paradigm? And I don't think the last helicopter off the roof of planet Earth will hold many people.

No, let me assure you that what you suggest is just simply not in the cards; ideas such as m-logically-valued monetary units will not be implemented any time prior to incendiary collapse of the prevailing forms of order and the mega-death which will accompany that collapse. Human mind is utterly paralyzed: the dart received in the forehead was saturated with curare. Putting a book like MOON into the social nexus is largely a fishing expedition. Without throwing a hook into the sea, it's hard to discover what's going on beneath the surface. For instance, people keep telling me I just simply have to read the Bloom books, those of Allan and Howard, that their books, The Closing of the American Mind and The Lucifer Principle, contain so many ideas similar to those expressed in MOON. Such urgings indicate how superficially people read, how little they actually think beyond evoked categories or the level of polemical game. Sure, since the 1960s, by implication in what I have said, I have been arguing that the American mind is closed -- but not in the way Allan Bloom believes it is closed. Indeed, I regard Bloom as a pristine example of the closed American mind. Howard Bloom's book is a monument to how thoroughly American science is indentured to American political ideology. These days, I would sooner believe Elmer Gantry's rant on American snake oil than the discourse of an American scientist on anything but the latest piece of nature destroying technology. Yes, I know that was an oxymoron! Just because MOON and The Lucifer Principle both speak of collective behaviors and animal societies does not mean the two books say the same thing. In terms of thematic content, Jewish literature in America -- of which The Lucifer Principle is exemplary -- is increasingly indistinguishable from proto-Nazi ideological cant and postures assumed during the Weimar period. MOON ridicules the Cartesian cognitive anthropomorphism informing ethologic theorizing, neo-Darwinian notions of natural selection, latter day social Darwinism, prevailing molecular biology concepts of genetic stability, consensus theories of autopoiesis, neocon notions of market self-organizing mechanisms, American “explanations” of collective behavior, history as force, African genesis, and so on: notions Bloom embraces uncritically from the American body of scientific literature built up to justify American political ideology. Bloom's take on collective behavior was the Nazi take on collective behavior -- both takes, which are the same take, being motivated by reaction to the same factors, historical factors prevailing in the early 20th century and still prevailing. Bloom says, for instance (p. 117, The Lucifer Principle, Atlantic Monthly Press paperback, 1997 edition), “…greater freedom -- and hence degree of control…” In Bloom's view freedom equals control. Amazing! The essence of the Nazi take on collective behavior. This is a pure rabbinism if I've ever seen one. Derek Dillon is not anti-Semitic; he is pro-Cabala (thinks Stan Tenen's work is highly relevant to monetary theory) and anti-rabbinate -- rabbinate sacred or secular, Jewish or otherwise. George Soros' writings, for instance, illustrate what is being discussed here. According to his account, while studying under Karl Popper, Soros came across self-referential propositions such as “This statement is a lie”: the so-called “liar paradox”. It was Soros' understanding at the time that such statements were regarded as meaningless by the authorities in mathematics and physics (which may actually have merely been Popper's personal interpretation). Soros disagreed with the idea that such statements are meaningless. He saw these statements as indicating our inherent inability to know certain aspects of the real world. He applied this interpretation to an analysis of the role of expectations in determining market behaviors, and thus came up with the notion of market reflexivity -- which became a cornerstone of his monetary speculation methodology. In spite of the fact that Karl Popper and Soros after him have in part been known for their anti-totalitarian advocacies, this interpretation of self-referential propositions is a Nazi interpretation. Why Nazi? Because this interpretation, along with Popper's notion of quantum “propensities”, is a back-reaction against the unvarnished implications of quantum mechanics in just the same way as the whole Nazification process was in large measure a back-reaction against implications of the new physics and its analogical expressions in the fine and performing arts, in sexual behaviors, and so on. Self-referential statements are the basis of m-valued logic, which is the one and only correct interpretation of Schrödinger's wave-function. Such logic is anything but an indication of our inherent inability to know. Via the involved suppression of m-logically-valued geometries, m-logically-valued skew-parallel figures, and m-logically-valued lines of force skew-perpendicular to equipotential surfaces, Heisenberg indeterminacy popped out of the falsification of Schrödinger's wave-function, a function conceived during a period when Schrödinger was having group sex while practicing Tantric yoga. The fundamental breakaway idea of quantum mechanics was midwifed by two women (even now, most contemporary mentions of this suppress the ménage à trois), just as the birth of Special Relativity was mediated by Einstein's first wife. Though these facts of creation were not then widely known, the import of the demons thus created was understood amongst the academic elite familiar with the history of higher mathematics during the 19th century, and was felt as a strong subliminal shock wave coursing through the body politick of the period. The Nazi back-reaction was… everything happening today in America: anti-, anti-, anti-. So, Soros, following Popper down the road of anti-totalitarianism, valiantly mounts an assault on George Bush's bid for re-election, a totally trivial activity, as, given the nature of the actual historical factors involved (e.g., under ideological impress, misrepresentation of self-referential propositions as indicative of inherent inability to know), who does and who does not sit in the American White House will have negligible influence on the flow of collective-pathology-determined events. Everywhere one looks the situation is exactly the same: if there is a person situated to accomplish something real relative to the current conundrum, that person has a piece of personal history preventing the action he is situated to take and predisposing him to trivial pursuits. Not only Soros! Everywhere one looks one sees the same phenomenon, particularly in academia. Cognitive gridlock. This is the forth time around (Franco-Prussian War, WWI, WWII, the presently evolving global war) on all the same involved fundamental issues, exactly the same issues in each case, so how could one expect anything but paralysis? No, what you suggest is just simply not in the cards. Look at the order of magnitude of increases in mega-kill between the first three cases and you will arrive at a good impression of what to expect in the present case.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do, indeed, know MOON appears to be saying something similar to what Bloom argues. For another for-instance, consider the fact that MOON maintains men do not use ideas, ideas use men, that ideas have greater substantiality than do men. This (which is actually a reduced Everyman version of what MOON has to say on the subject, as Derek argues against Franklin Merrell-Wolff's notion that “substantiality is inversely proportional to ponderability”, that the relation is, in fact, non-orientable due to m-valued logics, and that M-W reached his over-simplified notion based on uncritical acceptance of Sankara's acquiescence to the idea that infinite regress is a logical fallacy) is superficially similar to Bloom's argument from Dawkins about ontologically-lateral transmission of selfish genes and incorrigible memes. The difference between MOON and Bloom, however, is likely to be responsible for the deaths of an unimagined number of Americans in the coming global war and associated genetic dyscrasias, biotech-engineered neurological meltdowns (manipulating, under the assumption that DNA is not superconductant and therefore does not control all endogenous clocks, the ASPM gene on human chromosome #1 which supposedly, in and of itself alone, regulates the number of times neuronal stem cells divide inside the embryonic brain and during several other occasions up through adolescence following neural network wipeouts, a major focus of Allan Schore's book on affect regulation via neural meltdowns, a subject of great interest to counter-terror gurus intent on intervention prophylaxis, and a considerable improvement on the electroconvulsive therapy pioneered in Germany during that particular Nazification process), and quantum-biochemistry-level-induced immuno-pandemics. Not only is a billion new rural-urban migrant inductees to squatter settlements in Third World mega-conurbations a unique recruitment circumstance in world history, the disparity in net worth between Bill Gates and the average 10-hour-a-day 7-day-a-week computer parts assembler in Bangladesh is an unprecedented call to people's war. The only thing that could possibly prevent the presently emergent exacerbation from coming to fruition as a full-blown fulmination is implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units, which clearly will not transpire on a timely basis. Kaput! (in lieu of Seig Heil!).

How to understand the paragraph given immediately above or even credit sanity to its author? Consider Bloom's use of the word “entelechy”. In notes to The Lucifer Principle, p. 336, he says: “Both Hofstadter and I have chosen to use 'entelechy' instead of the currently popular alternative phrase 'emergent property'.” Though Bloom discovered that this word “entelechy” was introduced by a German embryologist before WWII, he apparently either never bothered to look it up in a good dictionary or helped write the lousy ones. What is apparent and what is actual are certainly two different things. Bloom, and Hofstadter before him, undoubtedly studied the dictionaries very carefully before choosing to use and dissimulate the word “entelechy”. By conflating ”entelechy” to “emergent property” they sow intellectual cornfusion in the halls of academy, which is the foremost job of any postmodernist black propagandist (uh, any operative for PRE, Public Relations Executive, with its Home Office on Madison Avenue). “Entelechy” has meaning exactly opposite to that of “emergent property” and this is precisely why Hofstadter and Bloom chose to use it for “emergent property”. “Entelechy” is the vitalist teleological condition “before”, which intelligently pulls form to itself, such as, perhaps, a morphogenetic field, which 19th century vitalists maintained science would never be able to experimentally demonstrate; while “emergent property” is the reductionist pushed condition “after”, which is the result of mechanical iteration of causes or the random plink of probabilities, with a 50% agreement over cause-versus-chance amongst the staff on good days in the lab. Now, why would Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, and Bach), whose main postmodernist assignment was to dissimulate Musculpt by reducing Bach's mode of thought to recursive iteration, and Bloom, whose assignment was to popularize justifications developed by American scientists for initiation of the global holocaust prerequisite to accomplishment of the global-monoculture-under-American-guidance required for Peace on Earth (because we'll all be dead), need to falsify in the public mind meaning of the word “entelechy”, if they were to fulfill their assignments? Yes, I do know that PRE does not exist to give out assignments (which is exactly my bone to pick with Bloom who believes in ontologically-lateral information transmission in dispersal of memes: get that, and you don't have to read the rest of this); what actually gives out such assignments is more akin to what Wolfgang Luthe called the brain's CSDM, the Centrencephalic Safety Discharge Mechanism, only in this case, since we are dealing with counter-meme creation, which is pathological, the CSDM is post-structurally impaired, deconstructed, that is, under the deleterious influence of NAFRs, Neutralization Antagonizing Forms of Resistance (those same dispositions that nailed Nash at Princeton and MIT). Fact is, there are no memes operating in America today, only counter-memes.

“Entelechy” is a word inextricably entangled with the rise of Nazism and Japanese militarism. Weimar youth and those who hung out at Tokyo's Hongo YMCA during the Taisho Democracy movement (like, years later, the tattooed and pierced San Francisco ketamine, virtual reality, rave-ecstasy crowd) were the vanguard who craved the animistic identity transparency which democracy-under-duress denied them. Since they could not have authentic identity transparency, they settled for the “entelechy of the state”, just as young Americans in droves -- under ministrations of Hofstadter, Bloom, and the like, whatever the plausible denials and last-paragraph disclaimers -- are presently embracing the entelechy of the state as a form of nondenominational fundamentalist religion. Hofstadter and Bloom are not causes, of course, only synchronistic symptomatic reflections of the presence of massive NAFRs. Direct immediate experience of identity transparency, which is never person-person and always person-nature-person, provides complete access to the teleological property of entelechy which conveys an infusion of profound enveloping meaning. Deny identity transparency, once craving for it has been constellated, and a collective psychological displacement transpires: person-nature-person to person-state-person, the entelechy of nature's embryogenesis is transferred to the entelechy of the state. Wipe out enough neural networks with NAFRs in individual brains of the population corpus and the collectivity compensates by displacement to the entelechy of the state. Of course, add the selective postsynaptic nerve cell death-inducing capacity of excitotoxic monosodium glutamate (MSG) to the action of NAFRs and you have a highly facilitated mechanism of collective psychological displacement. If you want a dominant political state, democratic or otherwise, MSG in the diets of pregnant women, infants, children, and adolescents, so as to induce excess MSG in their brains, is a highly valuable tool to that end. MSG is quite specific for this form of use, but mimetic estrogens in general are also very facilitative. Hofstadter and Bloom chose to conflate the word “entelechy” to “emergent property” because of fear, fear of the psychological state of identity transparency underlying the m-logically-valued teleology of natural entelechy, its implied m-logically-valued “panphrenia”, and the polymorphous perversity of a Tantric Schrödinger group-fornicating his way to the demonic wave-function only iterative recursion or probability amplitudes could de-demonize -- and what this identity transparency would mean, were it permitted, and, god forbid, transmitted ontologically-laterally as a meme, for every aspect of human life on this planet. It is easy enough to understand why Weimar and Taisho youth should have craved identity transparency: their highly animistic societies were destroyed under Napoleon's sword and threats conveyed by the American dreadnaught's cannon bore. (See what's right now, this year of OUR Lord 1853, being done to China? Transform your whole way of life so as to trade with us on our terms in your own country or else… we'll drop a goddamned atomic bomb on your heads! According to Bloom, this is exemplary behavior, an expression of the Lucifer Principle, The Magic Backhand, one of the laws of nature which lead to higher forms of organization, all progress, and the good of all -- all those left alive.) What had always been readily available was now, era of Taisho and Weimar, disallowed by the forced democracy of modern statehood. Cross-cousin marriages were dead, the extended family system was being destroyed by the capitalist need for mobility of labor, and soon so would the nuclear family be on life support devices -- indeed, a time would come when there would be no basic social unit at all. The biological family system would be a corpse and it would be against the law of the state to create viable alternatives. Literature describing these likelihoods was the daily bowl of rice at the Hongo YMCA. Rise of the entelechy of the state during the Weimar period and the Taisho democracy movement was an attempt to get the modern democratic state to provide the teleological meaning it denies to its population corpus, all meaning sanctioned by the modern secular state being confined to one or another form of gorging and shitting.

Why the San Francisco youth vanguard of the early 1990s should have craved the identity transparency underlying the teleology of natural entelechy is a deeper question, as most of them should never even have suspected its existence. But such matters have very little to do with individual conscious awareness and everything to do with the collective unconscious. This generation rejected the overt hairy countercultural communalism of its parents, choosing instead a bald conformist techno projection of military-pioneered telepresence and virtuality. Where Sixties' youth culture toyed with resurrections of the Twenties and its aftermath (Dadaist street theater, Surrealist happenings, yet another coronation of the “pig”, LSD for opium, rebirth of Hesse, folksong lyrics thematically indistinguishable from Weimar folksong, rock concert as soft-Nuremburg, Charles Manson as soft-Hitler, and so on), the Nineties generation went for hardcore designer-labeled projective identification and full-blown displacement of psychic functions to technological artifacts: flight simulator autopilot become the solipsism of the wired virtual reality fighting machine; cyberian ketamine dream with its general anesthesia and complete dissolution of separate self-existence, a kind of snuff film which inspired Hollywood to move this marginal genre into the mainstream as prefiguration of forthcoming corporate behaviors of the democratic state; collective catharsis of no-one-partner ecstasy, raves, and house music; embrace of a coercive-we “We are the World” global monoculture modeled on Wilhelminian cultural monism; cultivation of amoral social-Darwinian approaches to livelihood, lifestyle, and lovers; no balking for an instant at all the nefarious graduate research thrown its way (genetic engineering, “defensive” bio-weapons research, euthanasia, and so on). When the long-awaited and longed-for triggering event finally arrived, the displacement to person-state-person was made effortlessly. One must remember that a technological Tower of Babel is not constructed in the ontological vertical. The craving for identity transparency was present in the Nineties because there is a recurrent cycle of constellation related to ontologically-vertical promptings concerning the leitmotif of the presently persisting Wagnerian drama set into motion by Niels Henrik Abel's receptive registration in the 1820s of particularly potent contents of the collective unconscious, the subliminal histrionic public reaction to which being recorded in the 1850s by automatic writing of the Tristan chords. Few were happy to see Caliban reborn.

M-logically-valued monetary units are the key, but why this is so cannot be comprehended solely on the basis of an understanding of the collapse of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and the currently disintegrating institutionalization of that paradigm. It is my belief, boldly and uncompromisingly stated, perhaps a bit overdrawn, but overdrawn for the sake of clarity, that the human species has one chance and one chance only to survive, and that chance is m-logically-valued monetary units. That statement sounds crazy, but only if evaluated through the lens of recent history, the history of the last 5000 years. M-valued logic is unprecedented in human experience over the period since the last Ice Age. No mode of thought, West or East, engaged in by the human mind since the last Ice Age has been authentically m-logically-valued. Mankind is in collective amnesia. All forms of thought cultivated during this period of millennia are without foundation by appeal to nature, for all real intents and creative purposes utterly dead, as are all institutions and behavioral conventions associated with them. Their endgames are playing themselves out at this very moment, and have been playing themselves out for the better part of 200 years. In the early period following the last Ice Age there were remnants of modes of thought and socio-politico-economic behaviors expressive of m-logically-valued identity transparency. These survived the last Ice Age, and whatever other catastrophic events there may have been, in highly deteriorated form as animism, until a huge wave of repression developed. This repression took the form of the world's great religions: all such religions, including Confucianism, Capitalism, and Marxism, have been dead set against animism. This is the factor they all most clearly have in common. Anti-animism is a cognitive stance against the psychological state of identity transparency which is formalizable only under m-valued logics. Science, in large measure yet one more great religion, extended and intensified the anti-animism of the other great religions and set in motion the most elaborate period of massive holocausts of animistic peoples globally. But, beginning with Niels Henrik Abel and culminating in the 1920's, mathematics and science rediscovered the fundamental reality underlying animistic identity transparency: m-valued logics. This took place not only in higher mathematics, but also in physics: Schrödinger's wave-function. In both disciplines, however, the results were dissimulated, falsified, hidden from. Yet, in spite of this falsification, experiment has more and more verified existence of the fundamental reality underlying identity transparency, and that reality has more and more become embodied in the evolving techno-base. The technology itself has become an adversary of its creators, virtually every one of which is vehemently opposed to direct experience of even the slightest tinge of authentic animistic identity transparency (unless mediated by recreational drug use, wherein ego control is maintained because the experience is merely an artificially-inseminated reversible state of short duration). This discovery, this falsification, this experimental verification, this evolution of technology has set in motion enormous forces of back-reaction and collective clinging behaviors. Mass warfare developed in tandem with evolution of this back-reaction. Two world wars have been fought over the issues involved. All the world's great religions, science included, have converted to fundamentalist hysterias and, through introjective psychological “eating” of the animistic adversary in projective identification, have reverted to one or another type of “headhunting”. The human species is not currently going through some millennial shift; it has come to the end of a great age, and the appearance of m-valued logics is the clear marker of that end. Closure, complete wiping of the slate. The cat is out of the bag and there is no putting it back in: nature on every level is m-logically-valued. The human mind is not about to cope with this discovery it has made. That mind, instead, has set itself to the task of changing nature's fundamentals, which -- that mind itself being part of nature -- is a form of autoimmunity, an internal movement manifesting itself in a gathering storm of physical immune competency and autoimmune disorders. Like the Inca's war against time several centuries ago, humanity as a whole has now declared war on nature, which is a war against its own forms of cognition as projected onto nature. This is a war not winnable, a war based on a self-defeating proposition. The human mind is dreadfully ill, perhaps terminally so. It has lashed out like an insolent willful psychopath intent on killing anything and everything crossing its path. And the killing cannot and will not stop; it can only become more elaborate because the human mind is terrified of the direct experience of identity transparency, and thousands of years of prescriptive enculturation have structured the human brain such that capacity for m-logically-valued processing is electro-chemically suppressed. Nothing has appeared on the scene in the past 200 years suggesting that the human species is going to make it through this cusp. To the contrary, all the indicators are negative. The cusp surface has been forming since the 1820s. Every potential opening is hamstrung by a multitude of interwoven factors. The human species, if it is to survive, must learn to enter identity transparent states of consciousness and to think with un-dissimulated m-valued logics. And it must do so soon -- otherwise, it surely will not survive. The only possible way this learning can transpire is through money, the foremost obsession of this species. M-logically-valued monetary units: nothing else has the slightest chance of reaching people in the abysmal state to which the human species has presently sunk. There are, of course, all sorts of caveats and modifications that must be made to this boldly stated thesis, but, in the main, this is what I have come to believe are the figural outlines of the present human crisis.

I've been closely studying Stephen Wolfram's 1200-page book A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media, Inc., 2002), which is largely about cellular automata, for some time now and have discovered a very interesting thing. I disagree with everything he says 180-degrees. The disagreements are not random or at acute angles. Any approach he takes, any conclusion he reaches, I am in 100-percent disagreement with. This is very interesting. It took a lot of discipline to force myself to stay with the book long enough to arrive at this observation, but once I did all sorts of insights started to pour in upon me. I now think I see a concrete path to technical realization of what I have been calling Musculpt. My orientation to natural systems is virtually the exact obverse of his and this means that his technical discoveries can be reversed in such a way as to provide insight into how Musculpt can be created. He takes (for the most part and in the simplest cases, but the basic principle applies throughout) the square Cartesian pixel grid, writes simple programs yielding black and white coloring sequences for blocks, beginning with one block and expanding according to the coloring algorithm, runs the programs through many steps of generation, and then studies the categories of complex patterns that emerge. He believes that nature produces complex forms in this atomistic generative manner from very simple algorithms. This is an anti-Cabalistic notion similar in orientation to Chomsky's ideas about linguistic grammars. I asked Chomsky once, while he was visiting Cornell, about grammars of form language and he said he doesn't believe in them. I asked him what role he thinks Jung's archetypes play in establishing the elements of the universal grammar he postulates. He said he can't read Jung's writings. I asked him why he hasn't applied his generative grammarian conceptualization to development of a theoretical perspective on political self-organization and his answer was not an answer to the question. He chooses dissipation in moral upbraiding instead. The anti-Cabalistic orientation prevents any viable theory of generative universal semantics because semantics, most elaborately, is decompositional in nature. Grammar and syntax run simultaneously in opposition to semantics: they ontologically move in opposing directions. There are all sorts of deep-structural non-orientabilities even in natural languages.

Wolfram has done some things with representing the generated patterns in sound. The primary way he has done this is by taking two adjoining rows of blocks in the sequence of black and white blocks generated by the given simple algorithm and treating these rows as a waveform which a synthesizer then translates into sound. But he finds that only uninteresting sounds emerge; even highly complex nested patterns are heard by the (binary-logic-habituated and diatonically-enculturated) ear largely as white noise. So his primary focus remains on the visual output. It is all based on ₁T₂ logic and he more or less dismisses the relevance of m-valued logics (which are discussed in a few paragraphs of his book). Even what Digibio Corporation is presently doing with recording the digital acoustic signature of drugs, digital pharmacology, which it says, à la homeopathy, produces the same therapeutic effect as taking the actual chemical drug, without the side effects, is in Wolfram mode: “block pattern” to acoustic signature. I believe nature functions, as a first approximation, in the opposite direction, by decomposing from the m-logically-valued to the single-logically-valued (the Bohmian unfolding “downward cascade”) and that the form (effect of Luneburg's “psychometric distance functions” for binocular visual space on the parallel distance alleys: i.e., J. G. Bennett's skew-parallelism) of the reference grid changes (not only a square Cartesian grid) at every decomposition step (in much the same manner as the “downward” atmospheric cascade process in severe storm genesis transpires via constant entropy [acoustically-modified] surface topologies); more accurately approximated, there is also a re-composition process (the enfolding and spontaneously-fusing “upward cascade”); more accurately approximated yet, the two cascades are simultaneous in a reference frame that is linear-time independent (as Julian Barbour has begun to explore in his The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics). And we could go on from here to more complex approximations involving the notion of non-linear operator-time, the changing reference grids being numbered by primes and stacked non-self-identical primes, lattice patterns decomposed on these numbered grids being Gödel-numbered propositions, and so on. This is the actual domain of universal semantics, the domain which superconductant DNA processes within, a domain Chomsky by implication in the answers he gave to my questions denies the existence of. Wolfram does develop some categories of algorithm that are decompositional in character (analogs of the Cantor set) and in varying block sizes (substitutions and substitutions with disappearing elements, for instance), but this does not alter his fundamental orientation.

Per my orientation, I don't want to use the black and white block patterns to generate sound; I want to use sound to generate the “block patterns” -- which is an analogical correlate of the “downward” cascade. I want the “block patterns” to be the notation of the heard sound: no extraneous notational system standing between me and emergent sounded-form. This is how I believe nature herself perceives: knowledge through identity. Were I a composer, I would want my relation to the sounded-form to be nature's relation to the sounded-form. In the two years before I moved up to Ithaca, at George Mason University, I studied the 12-tone composition techniques employed by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Boulez, et cetera. The instructor wanted me to commit myself to such composition. I toyed with the idea, but had already begun visualizing music composition with Musculpt, a possible medium I felt capable of non-reductively exploring issues of interest to me, which I judged 12-tone techniques incapable of considering except by abject reductionism. I refused to commit and soon thereafter appeared at the Velikovsky symposium in Hamilton and eventually moved up to Ithaca. 12-tone composition is done on a matrix, a square Cartesian pixel grid, if you will. I think I can use Wolfram's techniques in reverse to map the 12-tone composition matrix to 2-dimensional visual output with a synthesizer and digital-analog converter (i.e., without writing Wolfram's simple programs). Doing this properly would involve finding the right correlations through which the conversion is to transpire, how to define an element of sound in relation to an element of the visual display field, or maybe starting with a musical motive correlated with a module of a visual pattern. The way to do this, I think, is on the machine, experimenting with all sorts of definitions and correlations, and analyzing the outcomes. Experimentally determining a set of elemental definitions and correlations where both the visual and auditory readout is visually and musically interesting is prerequisite to translating the waveforms generated by the biofeedback devices into sounded-forms that could play like a composition. But it can't be done properly just by playing with definitions and correlations: that was how Scriabin, Kandinsky, and Yannis Xenakis (see his book from the 1970s: Formalized Music) proceeded, and failed to produce a non-abjectly-reductive replacement for the conventions of signification in post-Renaissance plastic art and the diatonic system of music composition. There needs to be a correlation in nature as the basis of the Musculpt definitions and correlations. One such natural correlation has been identified and studied: the unique one-to-one correlation between constant entropy surface topologies and acoustically-modified gravity wave signatures in severe storm genesis. A second such natural correlation has been mathematically implicated in our superconductant DNA paper: the topological configurations of the DNA molecule and its immunologically-signifying coherent-wave-output signatures.

With the generative algorithms and conversion engines in place, one could start from any or all of four places to create a composition: generative and/or decompositional algorithm, sound generation, visual pattern generation, or biofeedback output. Continuing analysis of newly discovered possible elemental definitions and correlations and their readout patterns under varying inputs would begin to generate the syntax of the Musculpt language, the system within which Musculpt compositions can be carried out. And given the four routes of entry, the subject matter analogically explored by a given composition could be scientific and/or artistic in orientation: Kuntswissenshaft. Once this is done, using optical fiber arrays (analog of the pixel grid), surgical mini lasers, and multiplexing, it can be taken to holographic three dimensional output. Wolfram and others are working on the higher dimensional aspect by building up sheets of nested structures represented via projections. I would, of course, unfold the enfolded downward sheet-to-sheet from the m-logically-valued to the binary, projecting to a most-dense sheet as a spontaneously-fused quantum composite, each point with m-logical-values stacked upon it representing a non-self-identical number (i.e., a numbered Gödel number), this referencing most-dense sheet being the MVRS (m-logically-valued reference space). The technology required to do much of this is now available and on the open market, as it wasn't 30 years ago when I first started visualizing nested multi-sheeted triangular grids mapped on Riemann surfaces; the components are just not put together for this purpose. From there it will become possible to work with the full spectrum of interests: Gödel-numbered proposition as leitmotif of musical composition; Musculpt-generated and prime-numbered constant entropy surface cascades; using Karpenko's maps between the primes and m-valued logics to establish correlations between constant entropy surface cascades and orders of logical-value; and so on, all as the subject matter of a new type of “program music” or music-drama that bridges the gap between music and sculpture. If reverse-Wolfram-type algorithms (unfolding decomposition algorithms) are then introduced, the Musculpt can become mathematical notation for a form of scientific exploration employing knowledge through identity.

Let me quote your complete response before making a few short observations:

That is a very, very interesting reversal of the Wolfram approach. The sophistication of what gets packed into each sonic wave packet, and then the way the medium itself provides many niches for their eventual absorption to alter the lay of the constant entropy landscape… it still boggles my mind. But I couldn't agree with you more, this is so far beyond what the likes of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Stephen Wolfram seem capable of imagining! New metaphors have sprung to mind that will undoubtedly help understanding. One most germane to your efforts with Musculpt is the parallel of the role played by compression in enabling large quantities of data to be passed from one computer to another (the niches of the medium I referred to a moment ago). Without compression, the information would remain forever trapped and be unavailable for effective communication, identical to the way that the essentials of ongoing change in a media governed by gravity would be locked away and left unable to inform media driven by chemical changes, changes in electromagnetic fields, et cetera. Yet, quanta only compress what is essential to ongoing evolutionary changes, whereas we humans often use compression as an excuse for sending non-essential information. We do, though, extract this information from the material plane and put it into light packets, the way changes in the mass field cleverly go forth as massless entities (relatively speaking). Compression, coherence, encoding to insure the message will be read by the appropriate medium, all of it quantized to avoid the pitfalls of classical physics and thermodynamical principles where degradation of information is assumed… like I say, it boggles the mind until the mind itself rises to the occasion and becomes superconductant. A spiritual principle of purification now seen as an essential ingredient to the new metaphysics (there being no way that physics under the tutelage of the ego could ever come to grips with this realm!). The intellect, as a very limited aspect of mind, is like a damp combustible, the intuition continually sparking the fuel that too often only leads to acrid smoke (the ego's one and only function in all of this?).

Last night I began reading Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of Barbara McClintock (A Feeling for the Organism, Henry Holt, 1983). It's largely about how she discovered jumping genes (transposition) on the scale-level of the chromosome, and was ignored for 20 years until the same phenomenon was again discovered via molecular-scale biology. Huge irreconcilable conflicts and brawls over a mere difference in scale-level perspective. The main reason why she was ignored is that her discovery violated the “central dogma” that information flows only from DNA to RNA to protein, not also in reverse (“downward” cascade only, not also “upward” cascade). The “central dogma” rules out inheritance of acquired characteristics, so McClintock's discovery was a major violation of the reigning biological paradigm. The secondary reason she was ignored is that jumping genes, also known as transposons, are often reinserted in reverse order, thus changing the codon relationships, which has tacit echos of identity transparency -- which is subliminally a completely verboten factor raising the issue sitting behind the dissimulation of Schrödinger's wave-function. In genetics, this codon reversal is called “inversion”. The same reversal is called “retrograde” in 12-tone music. A 12-tone retrograde inversion is upsidedown running backwards. The superconductant DNA model says that all codons have a uniquely identifying acoustic wave signature. So running a codon in retrograde or retrograde inversion is to change its identity, invoke identity transparency of codons. This is handled via allusion in MOON as the central clue to a murder mystery: a Vietnamese language poem that contains, when read in tonal retrograde inversion, a hidden algorithm of multi-identity of the murder victim. Contemporary geneticists treat transposition as being governed by signals from other parts of DNA (operons and regulator genes) and the immediate chemical environment of DNA. I don't dispute either of these findings, but I believe that operons operate in response not only to signals moving within DNA and from the immediate chemical environment of DNA, but also via the processes described in our superconductant DNA paper. It is via operons that the RATES of protein production are controlled in relation to availability of relevant chemicals in the immediate chemical environment of DNA. The superconductant DNA paper, of course, is about nothing if not about RATES. The process of beating down the environmental signal through the frequency cone is the data compression you speak of, and the given operon is one of the “niches” you speak of. The operon operates through induced changes in its electron transport processes. These induced changes have their origin in signals from multiple sources that are fused into a coherent signal via Fourier transforms while being beaten down through the frequency cone the superconducant DNA paper provides a mathematical model of. But people have enormous difficulty getting this idea in their heads. That paper has been in the literature since 1979 and as far as I know it has never appeared in Science Citation Index. Even someone like Mae-Wan Ho, in her three books (the Rainbow and the Worm, World Scientific, 1998; Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare?, Third World Network, 1998; and Living with the Fluid Genome, Institute of Science in Society, 2003) throws up insufferable obstacles to full understanding of transposition by maintaining allegiance to the probability amplitude interpretation of quantum mechanics. Multi-valued environmental forcing of transposition cannot be understood so long as the multi-valued Schrödinger wave-function is interpreted in terms of probability amplitudes. But, according to my themes, this is not surprising in a Western-educated academic from what was once a traditional Asian culture. With very few exceptions, such people are hyper-reactive to anything in the least suggestive of identity transparency: that most decisive factor they turned their backs upon in becoming Western educated (and thus in becoming willing or tacit agents of influence for global monoculture). The Korean language even has a single word -- Hananim -- for identity transparency, essayed upon brilliantly by Betsy U. Chang (Industry of Identity Deficit and Cannibalization of Time Matrices, Trafford, 2001). Should not the Koreans find it interesting that Hananim is a faculty of intraneuronal and perineural DNA?

Now, Wolfram in displaying his graphics of repetitiously generated fractal patterns compresses the output by omitting in the printout those areas where the pattern does not change, so that the resulting image displays only the pattern of changes -- otherwise the printout would run for meter upon meter, instead of being displayable in a manageable format. When dealing with substitution algorithms, he goes to a decompositional presentation for the same display reasons: reduce the size of the output image. Decomposition does not have a major place in his mode of thought; he presents it as an alternative means of display format. In reverse-Wolfram-decomposition algorithm, the compression he employs is an exact analog of the data compression that happens in the frequency cone feeding environmental data to the DNA molecule.

I note, incidentally, that the characteristic property of a ketamine trip, as described over and over in the isolation/flotation “tank logs” of John C. Lilly I surveyed within his personal scientific archive for acquisition by Stanford University Library, is a Whomf, Whomf, Whomf of proprioceptive nesting “jerks” (third-order temporal curl, occurring at the absolute limiting time rate of change of acceleration in baud rate of consciousness) affecting all perceptual modalities as one experiences a movement from total selfless identification with All-That-Is to re-entry (unfolding “downward” cascade) into the infinite regress of selfhood and, ultimately, single-valued existence in the material world. This “spontaneous localization” happens in every such trip and is so characteristic it even made it into the film “Lawnmower Man”. Ketamine's mechanism of action is via modification of electron transport processes in neuropeptides. That much is pretty well known.

The other association running in my mind on this concerns the exchange, earlier described, I had in L.A. about p-adic numbers. P-adic numbers are somehow (I do not yet fully understand them) related to primes and a truncation procedure, a form of filtering or approximation applied, for instance, in quantum matrix algebras. I relate to this idea almost like I relate to Wolfram. What I think p-adic numbers actually represent is a veiled insight into how one order of logical-value decomposes into another such order. The lower logical-order is a truncation of the next higher order, such that all of m-valued logic is equivalent to the frequency cone through which data compression transpires. I was on to this in L.A., as I then began thinking of p-adic numbers being involved in the processes of spontaneous localization and fusion. But the existing picture is collapsed because the prevailing practitioners are only looking at one order of logical-value and treating the compression transitions as if they were probability amplitudes. These practitioners compress the whole data stream (which they take to be ₁T₂-logically-valued) in a single compression, not in a cascade through a funnel (white hole). Though this would be disputed because the prevailing view is through the lens of probability amplitudes: what I see as being made into a single compression is because of the prevailing use of a ₁T₂ logical framework; I, of course, speak from perspective of m-valued-logic, which is not currently seen as germane to this area of research.

Why is Stan Tenen's work relevant to monetary theory? All right! Now there is truly a generative question. In order to answer this, I have to go back to 1975 or 1976 when I had the interchange with Chomsky at Cornell, described above. The questions I asked Chomsky were not idle questions; they were loaded questions. And I was then very much in a position to ask those questions of Chomsky -- and to assess his answers. Then, as now, I had/have absolutely no respect, no respect for the class of all scientists or the class of all their activities. Scientists are one of the lower castes and their activities do not even constitute a “high game” as Robert DeRopp would have it. So, I never lightly enter into a dialogue with any of them. Why get sucked down their cognitive black hole? I make probes on them and if they pass the test, then I may talk with them. I am constantly in protection mode, constantly nurturing what I have accumulated, constantly slithering point across the paddy dikes through the gloaming, the token American moving with rice-burners, ear cocked to the breeze that comes at dusk, constantly watching for first appearance of the dwarf barking white deer in the tree line. Hakushika! Dance for your messenger. I am your servant. Not an easy assignment to fulfill in these days and times.

Yesterday
In our youth
We set our hearts to run
And turned our bodies
To follow the setting sun.

David Richard Simons, son of a Swedenborgian Minister
1945-1968
One-time member of Special Operations Group, serving directly under Bo Gritz
(Written at Special Forces Training Group, 1967)

Not just about a single life in a single war; not just about a single people; maybe about a whole species. Only fools forget. Beginning in early 1975, I was riding a huge high of gathering insight in relation to Sir John Woodroffe. I had made my first read through his books The World as Power (Manipal: Ganesh, 1974) based largely on the Agama Sastra and The Garland of Letters: Studies in the Mantra-Sastra (Madras: Ganesh, 1969). Things were truly falling into place. I had discovered Emil Post's 1921 paper on m-valued logics in the Cornell mathematics library and was processing it daily in relation to the content of Woodroffe's books. First pass on the notion of the possibility of creating a new idea of monetary units had appeared in my mind in high school, while simultaneously taking honors economics and honors PSSC physics classes, and struggling with the theory of multiple bank credit expansion, with ideas fresh in my head from independent study courses the previous year in symbolic logic, topology, and foundations of mathematics. I was looking for topological ways to represent a unit of monetary exchange. This later period, 1975-'76, remember, was soon after the end of the Vietnam war and I was still in contact with some of my old Special Forces buddies, those who later would be instrumental in the formation of Delta Force; indeed, one of my best friends from Training Group became NCOIC of that unit. Coming off what I had learned at MACV Headquarters and listening to SF's “Radio Catinat” (rumor mill), I was not about to be drawn into any kind of political naïveté, no matter how far back into theoretical realms it might be pushed. Moral upbraiding was hardly my cup of tea -- though I certainly would have been very interested in a generative grammar of political self-organization. The superconductant DNA model was already finding its way onto the blackboards of Cornell's Atmospheric Science Department via analogical modeling between double-helical air parcel feeder bands into the severe local storm environment associated with tornado genesis and the sugar-phosphate backbone of the genetic molecule. We were looking at ozone transport holes punched in the tropopause boundary by acoustically-modified gravity waves and comparing them with the processes of data compression in the frequency-cone funnel that feeds environmental information to superconductant DNA (which does have something to do with the behavior of transposons). This was transpiring directly across the quad from where Barbara McClintock had earlier worked on the chromosomal scale level. Of course, none of this was to Carl Sagan's liking and he tried to scuttle it by manipulating the students. I knew Chomsky thought that a universal grammar was carried by DNA, and I knew that it was not carried in the “code script”, as Schrödinger called it, of that molecule. The Garland of Letters is a book about the universal grammar, indeed, about the universal semiotic. But my reading of Woodroffe was not so naive that I came away from it believing that Sanskrit was once a universal language, was itself once the universal grammar. My earliest interest in John C. Lilly was because of his work with dolphins, the interspecies communications research. But I thought Margaret Mead's husband's program at Lilly's research center was ludicrous. Teach dolphins to speak human? My God! I believed and still believe that dolphins, in their sonic-imaging capacities, “speak” a variant of the universal grammar Chomsky postulates: Musculpt. One of the chapter titles in The Garland of Letters is “Sabda as Language”: dolphins “speak” this language the Mantra Sastra refers to. Sabda is coherent phase relationship, the defining property of sound (and acoustically-modified gravity waves). Humans, likely, before the last Ice Age, spoke this language with dolphins, and migratory birds use part of it in homing (as was in 1975-'76 being studied in collaboration between elements of Cornell's Neurobiological Behavior Laboratories and elements of Cornell's Atmospheric Science Department). In Saigon, I learned that creative work gets done when you do the absolute minimum required to maintain your position in the formal bureaucracy and foment informal coalitions, which you keep concealed, through which the real work gets done; that's how it transpired at Cornell. Some Andean priests, apparently, still “speak” some variant of this universal-grammar language. If this pushes your button, fine. No concern of mine. Who reads this, who doesn't is their business, not mine. And I was filtering the gathering insights of this period through those of an earlier period of tutelage: in 1963-'65 at American University in Washington, D.C., I Cabalistically apprenticed myself to a girl who hung out nights in the library. She was totally obsessed with the Cabala and I was able to ease my way into her obsession. But not so far as to believe that Hebrew (like Sanskrit) was itself a universal language! My meager high school studies of topology were enough to dispel that notion. The universal-grammar language had to be a language of sounded-forms lying behind the grammars of all concrete natural languages. Montague's grammar. This whole swirl of ideas spun in my head as the superconductant DNA model expanded across the blackboards at Cornell and the National Weather Service teletype machines clattered in the next room as tornado season fell upon the land.

Had Chomsky in 1975-'76 not been anti-Cabalistic (though reputed to be Platonistic, which is a contradiction in terms), Musculpt might already exist -- and a recombinant biotechnology industry based on the false assumption that quantum biochemistry has no relevance to the biochemistry of gene function might never have come into existence. Stan Tenen's topological maps of the first Hebrew sentences of Genesis (which do have something to do with genetics) are all there in the macroscopic topological configurations assumed by the DNA molecule as it undergoes its braiding articulations when receiving environmental information beat down and compressed in the frequency-cone funnel feeding it from all the way back to the sun and beyond. Extraterrestrial influences, as Carl Sagan and Fred Hoyle might have said for different reasons. I will share with you some of my 1975-'76 margin notes and underlined passages from The Garland of Letters and The World as Power (both books were originally written before WWI as papers), just to provide a sense of one aspect of my mode of thought at the time. Though I have dumped thousands of books along the way, I always keep these two with me in the two suitcases of possessions I maintain. First, a few examples from The Garland of Letters:

Passage (p. 21): “Even Sabda-Pramana or Veda here fails. Because Brahman as It is in Iself (Svarupa) is never an object.” Note: Known through identity, but there is a language (multi-valued and nonlinear) of the domain of knowledge-through-identity.

Passage (p.27): “The five Kosas are therefore only five broad landmarks in a series consisting of innumerable gradations as are the seven colours of the rainbow. Hiranyagarbha and Virat are also the types corresponding cosmically to our experiences of certain distinctive forms… Isvara, Hiranyagarbha, and Virat are three forms of creative manifestation corresponding cosmically to the Susputi, Svapna and Jagrat.” Note: Orders of temporal curl or corresponding topological forms of decomposition.

Passage (p. 27): “As Hiranyagarbha, He apprehends directly the second and third (Svapna, Jagrat), and as Virat he apprehends the third (Jagrat).” Note: Nested character of orders of nonlinear time and their associated topological operations.

Passage (p.28): “The Sabda of Prajna is Parasabda-Visesa. This is no sound to him but that 'part' of the causal stress which is the causal body of the particular Jiva.” Note: Sound of no-sound hidden inside the sound! Acoustically-modified gravity waves propagating via the metric elasticity of relativistic spacetime.

Passage (p. 32): “Parasabda or Paravak is Bindu… Bindu which is the causal body of Sabda. From this arises the subtle body of Sabda which is Tanmatra and Matrika which evolves into the gross body of sound, which is the letters…” Note: Bindu = c". Tanmatra = c'. Matrika = c. Time differentiated against itself. Absolute limiting time rate of change of acceleration; absolute limiting acceleration; absolute limiting velocity. The topological operations named Susputi, Svapna, and Jagrat occur only at these absolute limiting values, but nested according to Isvara, Hiranyagarbha, and Virat, such that all absolute limiting values are relative to the limited spacetime domain under consideration within the laminated body of Akasa.

Passage (p.32): “Sabda-Tanmatra or Apanci-krta Akasa is Apanci-krta-Tanmatra. This is sound as such, that is, ideal sound… In the case of Sabda-Tanmatra, sound is known as an object to the higher mind… Sabda-Tanmatra is sound not conditional…” Note: Second sound at c'.

Passage (p.32): “Rupa-Tanmatra is form unconditional, as seen by the Absolute Eye.” Note: Coherent electromagnetic standing waves at c'.

Passage (p. 33): “The stress by which a thing is generated and sustained is the basis of all the five Tanmatras.” Note: Spanda-Tanmatra: gravitational hologram at c'.

Now examples from The World as Power:

Passage (p. 35): “In Sakta doctrine, as Siva and Sakti are one, it follows that the world is evolved from and by one Reality, Siva-Sakti, that is by a Reality which in one aspect does not change and in another aspect is the Cause of Change and Change itself.” Note: M-valued reference space and time as topological operator.

Passage (footnote: p. 82): “…Ma as in this the 'Sun' of letters…” Note: Ma in Japanese = sacred space. A(ma)terasu = the Sun Goddess.

Passage (pp. 82-3): “Vyana should be (as is in fact the case) the grossest of the five Vayus… Vyana had four forms of movement…” Note: Quadripolar waves, each wave phase corresponding to one of the four nucleotide pairs.

Passage (p. 83): “There are thus 49 forms of vibration in which the Vital Force exhibits itself and the Letters are Life-forces revealed to us by gross sound.” Note: Universal semiotic in quantum wave properties of DNA.

Passage (p. 86): “…Tapas… is not… material Heat…” Note: Non-material heat: hyper-temperature as temporal spin resonance at c", c', and c.

Passage (p.93): “But Prana in the ordinary sense is not the ultimate ground -- the Purna itself… Prana is the radix of a particular stress-system… how does Pranasya Pranah appear as Prana?” Note: Bindu = appearance of singularity in the wormhole mesh (Indra's net). Pranasya = multi-valued reference space (Hyle). Prana = decomposed single-valued sheets (superspace).

Passage (p. 94): “…Cit never really loses Its nature (anyathabhava), it appears by reason of the OPERATION [emphasis added] of the Stress-system (i.e., Sattva, Rajah, Tamah) in it… Since, however, the Stress-system is really one with the Cit Itself, we may say that the latter has two aspects, viz., static (Siva) and moving or kinetic (Sakti); that is, Cit is kinetic… without ever ceasing to be static…” Note: Sattva, Rajah, Tamah = classes of topological decomposition operations on Cidakasa, the multi-valued reference space.

Passage (p. 96): “…a Principle of Control evolves and maintains a special rupa and nama… we call each definite Principle of Control (in the sense of a Form of Citsakti) a Devata… The sabdic means whereby a special Principle of Control may be introduced (or invoked) is Mantra. The visual representation or optical diagram of the actual disposition of stress (Power) which constitutes a given Principle of Control, is its Yantra. And the Kriya in general (including Mantra and Yantra) whereby a Principle of Control may be brought about, or called into play, is Tantra.” Note then: Three stars in the margin. Present note: “Control” was the word used by Arthur Young to designate time rate of change of acceleration as he engineered the rotor for the first Bell helicopter, the physics of rotors having something to do with the physics of tornadoes and the biophysics of DNA helix-coil transitions.

Passage: (p. 97): “… adhikara (jurisdiction or competence)…” Note: Adhikara = limited spacetime domain.

Passage (p. 115): “The first primary LOGICAL OPERATION [emphasis added] by which Cit becomes so disposed as to remain Cit in one part and appear to cease to be Cit in another part is Srsti…” Note: Srsti is Hyparxis, third-order temporal curl, c". Consciousness in its active aspect is the set of all topological operators on space; consciousness in its passive aspect is the space acted upon.

Passage (pp. 128-9): “Manas… appear subsequently by an analytic operation upon an alogical whole of experience which intuition already has given… a tendency to mono-valued attention…” Note: The “analytical operation” is topological decomposition operation on Citsakti yielding single-valued objects of perception.

Passage (pp. 132-3): “… the First Standard Paramanu, that is, extremely small points of substance… classes of minima are the differing Adrstas.” Note: Paramanu = orders of power points (Bindu Sakti) or singularities or Whyte's point-centers-of-action. Adrstas = classes of positions in the lattice.

Passage (pp. 132 and 134, note on p. 135, and p. 136): “Tanmatra or Generals of sense-particulars… The nature of Tanmatra is little understood… The Tanmatras are seen by Yogis by that form of Yoga-drsti which is called Savicara Samprajnata-Samadhi… the sound universal or Sabda-Tanmatra means an hierarchy of generic sounds…” Note: Tanmatra = lattice structure of Paramanus, i.e., the Regge lattice of the relativistic spacetime stress-system curvature configuration. Sabda-Tanmatra = acoustically-modified gravity wave used by pigeons in local homing.

Passage (p. 138): “An essential difference between the Paramanu and Tanmatra consists in the fact that the former is eternal… but the Tanmatra… is not eternal but a product of the individualizing principle of consciousness (asmita)…” Note: The archetypes develop as a result of the dropping out of view of some of the Paramanus. Tanmatra (formation of Regge lattices) is an early stage in taking the multi-valued reference space to its stack of single-valued sheets.

Passage (p. 139-40): “Experience is of two kinds. It is either the pure experience of the Purusa dissociated from Prakrti, or the limited experience of the Purusa in association with Prakrti…” Note: Last words in the mind during meditation experience leading to blinding light and the epileptiform seizure: “I am nothing but the intersection of Purusa and Prakrti.”

Passage (p. 155): “Negation is the function of Power.” Note: Dropping of Paramanus out of view.

Passage (p. 201): “Aditi… that which cannot be divided or cut… Let Indra represent here Cit-sakti by which the undivided continuum in movement is divided into a number of 'components' of the movement… The single continuum in movement thus evolves, under the action of Cit-sakti, a series of moving continua which are the Marud-gana.” Note: Indra as operator on Aditi, i.e., active time as topological and logical operator. Marud-gana = the stack of single-valued sheets decomposed from the multi-valued reference space by the operations of Indra in forming his net.

Passage (p. 205): “The Points are also non-spatial, that is to say they cannot occupy space or localized position.” Note: Quantum nonlocality in the period before WWI.

Passage (p. 221): “… strain-form in 'non-matter'… The first undirected condition of the stress-system is called, in the Mantra-Sastra, Nada, which passes into that which is called Bindu… Buddhi (i.e., stress-system)…” Note: Nada = “naked” Bindu. Bindu = point center on the multi-valued reference space in lattice articulation. Paramanu = point center on a single-valued sheet. No explanation for change of connectivity is given within the framework of differential geometry.

Passage (p. 227): “Spiritual action is a miracle to Her, because She still makes Matter and Spirit two; but if they be one, then the action of the former is really the action of the latter, and then there is either no miracle or all is then miracle…” Note: This has to do with change of connectivity to nonorientability.

Passage (p. 229): “And so the Veda says 'Time leads me in time'… Kala is neither 'Time' nor the temporal relations, distributively or collectively.” Note: Time differentiated against itself: c", c', c. Kala is that which changes curvature of space, i.e., time as topological operator on space.

Passage (p. 234): “Are Paramanus of the same class absolutely identical? Vaisesika says -- No, each Paramanu has its generic or class characteristics… each Paramanu by virtue of its position alone in the universal configuration…” Note: Position in the Regge lattice or Tanmatra.

Passage (p. 234): “According to Indian notions all form is coloured…” Note: Theories of modern painting.

Passage (p. 244): “The Tanmatra… is the unit, or standard, or archetype.” Note: All right!

Passage (p. 245): “… Rupa-points… Sabda-points… Gandha-points, et cetera…” Note: The Tanmatra is a lattice of Rupa-points, Sabda-points, et cetera.

Passage (p. 246): “Tanmatras and their permutations and combinations… Whilst a Sabda-Tanmatra may exist singly, a Sparsa-Tanmatra is commonly a compound of Sparsa + Sabda; so a Rupa-Tanmatra is = Rupa T. + Sparsa T. + Sabda T.…” Note: Each lattice is an infinite set. Combinatorial topology and non-Cantorian set theory (maybe even Cantorian set theory).

Passage (p. 286): “It tells us how the Devatas begin to Dance in the cosmic all-pervasive Water; and how grains or particles (symbolized as dust) are formed…” Note: Borel set, “warm golden dust of Supermind”, Novikov dust.

This should give you some idea of one aspect of my mode of thought in 1975-'76, and provide some insight into the ultimate meanings of Thanh Tri's painting “The Time Hammock” and Doan Phu Tu's poem “The Color of Time”. Now, back to Stan Tenen. What Tenen has worked out, yogis “see” in Savicara Samprajnata-Samadhi. How do I know this? As described in MOON, in that 1972 meditation session involving Derek's concentration in self-observation upon the act of reading, which transpired immediately preceding the gran mal seizure, he experienced an instance of what can be called “polygrapholexia”. “Glossolalia” is a neuropsychiatric term meaning speech in an unknown or imaginary language, not exactly schizophrenic word-salad, but put into a similar category: gibberish. In Derek's case, we have an instance relative to reading. “Graphorrhea” is an instance relative to writing: writing long (apparently) meaningless and unconnected strings of words. Derek saw the words on the page transform from one language to another, modern and ancient, and forms of writing he had never seen before, yet he continued reading the text without loss of comprehension. Indeed, his rate of reading sped up enormously, accelerated, with no loss of comprehension until the words disappeared (at the absolute limiting acceleration or time rate of change of acceleration in baud rate of consciousness?) into the inner sounds of no-sound. The page was blank, the mind was absolutely still. At some point in the acceleration process, he was no longer registering English words of the inner voice, but fully comprehending nonetheless. We can call this form of reading “polygrapholexia”. Instead of a “gift of tongues”, a gift of written languages: a form of “polyesthesia”. Why? “Polyesthesia” is another pathologic term of neuropsychiary designating two forms of “dysesthesia”: when a single object is felt to be in different places, a kind of tactile nonlocality; when there is a lapse of time before an impression is received, a kind of time-speed-up where everything appears to be happening slower and slower (Remak's symptom, sometimes seen in a form of neurosyphilis ). Brain chemistry is obviously undergoing changes, with associated deautomatization of proprioceptive and perceptual functions. In Derek's case, the changes in brain biochemistry at meditation led to a fully-conscious gran mal seizure (which neurologists claim is not possible). Onset of polygrapholexia transpired by one language on the page emerging out of the one before, almost as if nested, so that two or more were available simultaneously, somewhat like double- or multi-vision of the same graphic object being in different places at the same time and undergoing transformation in the process of displacement, the transformation transpiring from the inside out (a similar phenomenon is described in MOON with regard to the multi-self images seen in the mirror). Though Derek was reading faster and faster, the changing of the languages on the page appeared to be happening in slower and slower motion until the page became a blank page; this corresponds to the second form of dysesthesia mentioned above.

Per Woodroffe, as given above, it is Derek's thesis that when changing baud rates of consciousness approach the absolute limiting values of c, c', and c" different types of Samadhi are entered upon wherein distinguishing classes of contents are presented to conscious awareness in form, color, movement, and tone. Each type of Samadhi is distinguished from the others by the class of contents presented, these classes corresponding to different aspects of what Woodroffe describes. As intraneuronal and perineural DNA helix-coil transition rates approach DNA's c, c', and c" in response to changes in impinging radiation (including radiation from other parts of the central nervous system and the remainder of the body), the DNA molecule assumes a macroscopic topological configuration (the knot pattern in which the molecule lies, within the nucleus and mitochondria) determined by the continuously changing dynamics of the transition process undergone. Every such topological configuration, by virtue of the molecule's emitted coherent waves, is uniquely correlated with a given sound and color: the “49 forms of vibration” Woodroffe refers to. These same sorts of non-equilibrium phase transitions are taking place not only on the scale level of molecular DNA, but also on many other scale levels in nature as well: spiral-banded hurricanes and galaxies, double-helical feeder bands to comets and tornadoes, the whole realm of “Sensitive Chaos” in nature. In the various states of Samadhi, the yogi “sees-hears” one or another aspect of this “sounded-form language” as it unfolds from the m-logically-valued reference space to the zero-point energy field, and all the way back to the molecular-scale lattices: form, color, sound, movement: Musculpt. The phonemes, and later morphemes, of a given natural language, according to this thesis, were extracted from the corpus of no-sounds (Sabda) presented the yogi, the shaman, the “awakened one” while in some Samadhi state or its equivalent, the initial choice being determined by onomatopoetic considerations, such that this first choice became the root homonym for generation of a family of languages. Huynh Sanh Thong makes an argument that “ma”, as in A(ma)terasu, is such a root homonym. Similarly, some alphabets and ideographic corpora were created in approximately the way Stan Tenen works: the topological shapes he identifies as the “primitives” of the elements of the Hebrew alphabet were extracted by the yogi, the shaman, the “awakened one” while in some Samadhi state or its equivalent from the Musculpt topologies assumed by DNA during Genesis (replicative DNA helix-coil transition) -- biological genesis being only one part of the universal genesis (and un-genesis) transpiring with an oscillatory frequency set to the time step of the Planck minimum time (depending on the level of consideration engaged in), but which, due to c, c', and c" in baud rates of consciousness, can be “seen” in time-slow-down while in states of Samadhi or their equivalents. What I am describing here is not science, because the scientific method is not employed; it is metascience (for lack of a better word), the method of which is knowledge through identity. The process of extracting the primitive elements of a spoken, and later written, natural language from the universal grammar (semiotic, actually) of Musculpt is a matter of involutive decomposition, not recursive generation. This does not mean that syntactical structures of such languages do not emerge through recursive generation, as Chomsky describes, but it suggests that semantics must always retain deep connection with Musculpt, which cannot be accomplished via recursive generation. Jeremy Narby's depiction, in The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (N.Y.: Tarcher/Putnum, 1998), of ayahuasquero communication with the DNA of various medicinal plants parallels the notion given above of the origins of “natural” language in the “Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. For a discussion of Narby, see the mid-section of Real “Good Work” on the MOON website.

Stan Tenen, if I am not mistaken, has found one route into the universal grammar of Musculpt. So how does all this relate to m-logically-valued monetary units? Such units, when fully elaborated, would have m-logical-value weights stacked on a currency base, each of which is tagged to an alternative economic or sustainable development indicator. The tag system employed would be quite different from the tag systems Wolfram explores, which involve displacement of elements from one location to another during generative iteration of the given algorithm. Relative to m-logically-valued monetary units, the number of weights would have to be chosen, the weights used would have to be chosen, and the indicators to which the weights are tagged would have to be chosen. This could be handled via an electronic commons using a computer game developed on the basis of multiple-scenarios strategic planning, as I have already outlined. But even using this method, the involved choices could become politicized. This is most critical when the system initially goes online. After that, the existing variables will, in part, change according to variations in the indicators, which will be measurables. Nonetheless, quasi-real-time modulation of the weights, in order to further minimize politicization, should, in part, be accomplished by analogical modeling upon principles of how natural systems function. The required set of principles, I believe, is the universal grammar of Musculpt which Stan Tenen has found a route into.

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