What can be said? My body-as-you-perceive-it certainly exists in the-world-as-you-conceive-it. But the body-in-itself is quite different than you-in-your-world de-magine it to be. Self-remembering of anyself is in a densification of the time. Linear-time is not in remembering, as Brentano taught and Husserl supposed, but in forgetting. Densification of the time is behind linear-time, where self-remembering is. This is not so mysterious! My body, at this very moment, is in Los Angeles, in California, in North America, on planet Earth, in the solar system, in the Milky Way Galaxy -- according to one of the myriad choosable spatial reference frameworks. At the subsequent moment, it is still in that same location -- which has relocated. The relocation of the location located is according to how I choose to regard the moment used for locating locations. If my I-ness time-lapses the moment, not by remembering one unlapsed moment after another, sequentially, but by bringing more and more linear-time into the moment through increased cognitive capacity (SatChit, or “consciousness force”, as Aurobindo chose to translate it), thus expanding the duration of the present moment, the location located less and less locates -- though the body remains located at the less and less located location. In the heuristically idealized limit of pure-duration, due to biogravitational collapse under exponentially increased SatChit, though the body remains located, the location it is located at is unlocalizable -- except to other bodies similarly located in forgetfulness. If, on the other hand, my I-ness chooses the moment as small as it likes by increasing the baud rate of consciousness, the body is less and less located at the more and more located location it is located at. Approaching the heuristically idealized limit in velocity of cognition of percepts (baud rate of consciousness), linear-time more and more stops and the body has less and less length in the direction of movement of the more and more located location it is located at. What can be said, then, regarding this body of learned behavior?

In working oneself through projective identification, through the transference on its various levels -- intrapsychic, man-woman, subject-(perceptual)object, cosmogenic -- a psychological dead zone is eventually reached, variously characterized according to the path and level of approach: affective (and even physical) anesthesia, sexual disinterest, no-self/no-object state, high indifference. Not that these can truly be separated, as the dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell always involves them all in varying proportion. This remote realm, this void is not a final resting place-state there under ebon shades, but a reentry portal. It is a hiatus not because there is a gap, a misty emptiness of gloom and doom, but because there is a strange hypertwist in topology of transference: inside and outside, across all levels of projective identification, are non-orientable. Cosmological identity transparency is so startling to the separated mind it appears a void, a book of the dead, a state of relation in acausal connection mandating high indifference. Stepping from this cinerarium into the logically multivalued is freefall without a chute to jerk open. One might say, from this dead zone, that the cinema verité of romantic love is the worst thing Christendom has inflicted on the human species. People are upset by this assertion. They believe romantic love a given of human experience, a near universal: people have always fallen in love! There can be no denying this proposition before entry into the dead zone; while there, the notion is laughable, a matter of indifference. Freefalling out of the zone into the m-logically-valued non-orientable is to experience no call to romance in identity transparency. Passionate love is dependent upon a condition-of-being in (psycho)logical separateness and resultant projective identification animistic peoples never had the misfortune to know.

I agree in detail with the content of your message and was particularly interested in the notion of the “breaking of the reference wave” relative to origins of the subject-object distinction. If you have subsequently looked further into our website, particularly at the Ithaca Papers, you may have discovered that I co-authored a paper published in 1979 in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry (printed in Uppsalla, not so far from you, perhaps) which offers an account of the radiation exchange processes associated with DNA replication. The mathematical model describes the genetic molecule as producing a propagating coherent acoustic wave phenomenon (a “sound hologram”) in response to impinging radiation and presents an account of a means by which the information contained in the nucleotide sequences could be encoded into the propagating coherent waves. We believe that quantum properties of these waves (temperature oscillation rates of the p-electron parcels composing the free electron gas enveloping the molecule, frequency response window, waveform, and so on) are the submolecular basis of biological clocks and immune system signifiers -- and that this coherent DNA wave phenomenon is a complementary factor to the molecular stereochemistry, the former being primarily responsible for cellular functional integration, the latter primarily for functional specificity.

The existence of this paper, which described several experimental tests of its mathematical formulations, has been ignored for many reasons, two of which are prominent. The technical ideas for the mathematical model arose in course of studies of infrasound waves produced by severe local storms such as thunderstorms and tornadoes. Air parcel trajectories into the tornadic environment at the critical phase, just as the rotating horizontal column tilts into the vertical plane, follow a double-helical flow pattern. Numerical simulation of these double-helical flows on computers in the early 1970s led to formulation of a mathematical model descriptive of the generation of coherent acoustic waves, the varying signatures of which were experimentally correlated on a one-to-one basis with specific (highly convoluted) topologies of constant entropy surfaces associated with severe storm genesis. (That is, relative to the Vedic conception to which you refer -- if it is allowed that the “objects” referred to by the Vedas are “general entities” rather than the specific entities of Maya-type perception -- the “word” [infrasound signature] and its “object” [the abstract surface topology].) This was extremely disturbing to the field of meteorology because the underlying physics involved applications of Einstein's relativity theory and quantum mechanics to the Earth's atmosphere, which is considered an area where only the principles of Newtonian physics apply. Instead of moving in this quantum-relativity direction, meteorology has increasingly gone with chaos theory approaches.

The other reason why the DNA paper was ignored is that it came to be written in course of attempts to model “autogenic brain discharge phenomena” in human brain. I was then engaged in a long correspondence with Wolfgang Luthe, M.D., the leading practitioner of the neuropsychiatric discipline called Autogenic Training (later designated Autogenic Therapy). AT had its origins in the neurological studies of Oscar Vogt in turn of 19th-20th century Germany. The “standard exercises” of AT involve the patient internally verbalizing “training formulas” in a mantra-like fashion. When properly done, the brain shifts from the ergotropic to the trophotropic mode and begins to engage in “autogenic discharges” (designated in TM as “stress release phenomena”). In AT, these autogenic discharges where studied with electrophysiologic measurements, beginning in the early 1930s -- with some clinical controls running as long as 30 years. I began imagining DNA molecules in neural and perineural tissue which generated coherent acoustic waves as a hypothesis for modeling origins of the psychophysiologic shifts to higher levels of functional integration lavishly documented in the clinical and experimental data associated with practice of AT. It was in this context that the notion arose of quantum wave properties of DNA being the bottom line on biological clocks and immune system signification. This was about a decade before the field of psychoneuroimmunology was named. AT continues to be regarded as a “fringe” area of medical practice and the technical nature of the ideas I was elaborating concerning the physiological basis of autogenic discharges has remained alien to most clinical practitioners.

In the 1970s, Lawrence Domash was a physicist prominently associated with the TM movement. As far as I know, he was the first to raise the issue of long-range phase correlation between cortical neurons as possibly underlying phenomenology of TM. I found that this notion fit very well with implications of the ideas I was working with. I made several attempts to communicate with him concerning the data and theory of AT and how it relates to his concepts concerning TM. He apparently was not interested, as I never received a reply. Part of the problem may have been that the “training formulas” of AT are not Sanskrit phrases, and, therefore, according to TM, should have no effect whatsoever. There are many perspectives on this matter that could provide an account as to why there is no real contradiction here, but in the 70s there was not much willingness to undertake exploratory approaches. The other factor that may have been involved in Domash's lack of interest in AT is that there was at the time a fairly large number of long-term Transcendental Meditators appearing at Dr. Luthe's office in Montreal seeking treatment for severe problems they associated with their TM practice, hysterical paralysis of right or left upper extremity being prominent, persistent hormonal imbalances, and so on. Dr. Luthe ultimately concluded that these problems were arising because, in making TM into a mass movement, “checkers” were being mass produced to apply rules of thumb to modulation of the meditator's practice -- and that mistakes were being made. In the history of AT, similar problems had given rise to complex notions of contraindication and/or very close supervision of at-risk patients, e.g., diabetics. This was most especially the case in the use of what AT calls “organ-specific (verbal) formulas”.

Many Westerners are unable to think in a new way unless the thoughts are cloaked in exotic garb. But this means that they are not thinking at all; they are only exchanging one intellectual compador for another, one authority figure for another. Derek was once told by a person who had thoroughly read MOON that the novel would be much improved if the material on Autogenic Therapy were taken out of it. In that case, the book would have no thematic coherency, no integration, indeed, no real connectivity -- as its whole structure, down to the last sentence, is modeled on the dynamics of “autogenic abreaction”. The march of “autogenic neutralization” as it occurs in the abreaction process is used as a model to connect the disconnected quantum bursts in which the MOON story-line fragments appear -- and is done so in exactly the fashion that the “centrencephalic safety-discharge mechanism” orchestrates in ever tightening spiral circles of near repetition thematic contents appearing in the practitioner's awareness upon discharge of cortical neurons during elaborate abreactive processes associated with onset of the long-range neuronal phase coherency Lawrence Domash proposes as an explanation of the spiritual phenomenologies many Westerners so closely attend to only if cloaked in exotic garb. Moreover, most of the stylistic devices readers of MOON have complained about were directly adapted from the style of “autogenic verbalization” recorded on tape in midst of extended autogenic abreactions, wherein long-range neuronal phase coherency develops. There is a huge body of such verbal material in the clinical archives of Autogenic Therapy. That the authors were consciously using this material to inform stylistic choices was intimated to the reader in Kim Lien's rebirth sequence which is written virtually verbatim as if it were a recorded clinical “autogenic verbalization”. In Joycean fashion, many other “intimations” are there to be discovered. For instance, Malraux's The Royal Way is in m-stylistic ways a metaphor for the path leading him to his most profound Cubist-quantum superpositional on-the-slant poetic percepts-insights. This “royal way” is in the form of the abreactive process by which 2-logically-valued cognition transits to m-logically-valued cognition (and cortical function). There is an extended passage in The Royal Way which summarizes its central stylistic metaphor. In MOON, this long passage is re-stated in exact inversion word-by-word (if the dog comes in, the cat goes out: after Tang style poetry, as cultivated by peoples living along The Royal Way) by way of intimating to the reader what the overall structural algorithm is determining MOON's synoptic form.

Thank you very much for this website referral. “We illustrated through the analysis of a snowflake the idea that there is no such thing as 'chaos theory' within the existence of matter-energy. One must know the conditions of existence of a particular spacetime/movement event; period.” (See the beautiful drawings illustrating this thesis at: http://www.earthmatrix.com/snowflake/snowflak.htm as well as the passage from which the quotation is taken.) Import of the content of this quotation from Charles William Johnson is very GREAT. He pinpoints the exact relativity theory origins of the cascade computer model of thunderstorm and tornado genesis: i.e., that turbulence is relative to the space and time scales of the observer. If you are viewing a process through a grid length and time step not in coherent phase relationship with that of the process being viewed, it will appear turbulent. The deeper reality of this involves the order of logical-value of the process being viewed relative to order of logical-value of the cognition of the observer. Rojas' chapter on Aymara, “The Trivalent Logic of Aymara” (See: http://www.aymara.org/ which takes you to the chapter by clicking on “bibliography” and then on “Logical and Linguistic Problems”) is SOOOOO important, as nothing like it has ever before been demonstrated. It means that the PHYSIOLOGY of cortical neurons of persons thinking in 3-valued-logic language cultures has to be different from the physiology of cortical neurons of persons thinking in 2-valued-logic language cultures: vistas concerning m-logically-valued properties of intraneuronal and intraperineural DNA coherent waves begin to open right up. The fact that Rojas treats the third logical-value in Aymara as a linguistic “temporal operator” is of no small significance relative to the mathematics of the atmospheric cascade model and associated concept of operator-time. I possibly will have some reflections on that at some later date, but I must first find the time to study the available material on linguistic temporal operators. In William Sullivan's book on the Incas -- subtitled “the war against time” -- (see the click links at the end of the “General Process” paper in the Ithaca Papers on our website) he quotes from Aymara on the nature of time (a pre-Spanish-conquest quote translated by a Spanish priest). The content of the quote very much evoked for me the notion of operator-time. This quotation lead me to think that the notion of operator-time is one route into further insight into the Inca cosmology Sullivan so brilliantly describes. Rojas' chapter on the 3-valued logic of Aymara surely is another route. Of course, my guess is that m-valued logic (not just a 3-valued logic) is the logic of animistic identity transparency and that this is the real route of entry -- though recognition of 3-valued logic in Aymara speech is a very great leap forward.

I have wanted to ask you if you have read Ignacio Matte Blanco's The Unconscious As Infinite Sets (London: Duckworth, 1975). This is the best exposition yet written of what I have called “identity transparency”. I read the book in 1975 when it first came out and am now re-reading it because of the recent discovery that Aymara is based on a 3-valued logic. Matte Blanco was a psychoanalyst from Chile specialized in treatment of schizophrenia. His exposition is rooted in the following statement from Freud (1932, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 73): “The logical laws of thought do not apply to the id, and this is true above all of the law of contradiction.” Actually, this is the law of non-contradiction. Violations of this law are fallacies which exhibit one or another form of contradiction.

Matte Blanco shows how “displacement” (and all the phenomenology of the transference) is based on violation of the law of non-contradiction (i.e., no A is not A). The violation posits that A is absolutely not-A. He then shows how the definition of a denumerable transfinite set (any set that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with one of its proper subsets) violates the law of non-contradiction: the part is identical (has the same cardinality) to the whole. What is so valuable is that he illustrates all of this lavishly with clinical observations of patients. If each part is identical to the whole, each part is identical to every other part, as is the case with cardinality of subsets of a denumerable transfinite set. He then shows how the principle of logical symmetry underlies this identity such that “the arm is part of the body” is identical to its converse “the body is part of the arm” -- which is a commonplace principle of schizophrenic thought processes. This, of course, relates to my statement in “Roof-Brain Chatter” that “the body is learned behavior”. Matte Blanco maintains that the law of logical symmetry is a fundamental of the “unrepressed unconsciousness” and the basic explanation for why unconscious processes are not referenced to time or space -- both of which cannot exist under the law of logical symmetry.

At the end of the book, Matte Blanco attempts to save the day by showing that the law of logical symmetry does not violate the law of non-contradiction in multidimensional space. I personally went in the direction of m-valued logic and operator-time, but the two divergent paths may not be mutually exclusive -- particularly so if the treatment of multidimensional space is made on a multi-sheeted Riemann surface with m-valued logics. The law of logical symmetry nullifies the lower dimension of space in presence of the next higher dimension (by “displacement”) in a manner similar to how Gödel's theorem implies that consistency and completeness of a given-valued calculus can be demonstrated only by utilization of the next-higher-valued logic. All the points on a line orthogonal to a point [m,n] on a sheet in 3-space, Matte Blanco treats as not-[m,n], as “representants” of [m,n] in the next higher dimension. Therefore, to his way of thinking: [m,n] and not-[m,n] -- which violates the law of non-contradiction. In standard binary logic, [m,n] and not-[m,n] is an empty set; in Matte Blanco's conception, [m,n] and not-[m.n] is an infinite set of numbers in the next higher dimension of space. What he calls “representants”, I regard on a Riemann surface by stacking m-logical-values on a point on the most dense sheet.

i/I

Your i will die
It is once borned
Our I never dies
It are ever unborn

I'm sorry, sir, but please do not talk to me about the wonders of American higher education. I was a walkout and have never returned. I see, for instance, no scientific research in America, only technology search in service to war -- future wars, imaginary wars. Virtually all the fundamental scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century (largely concentrated into the first three decades) were made in Europe by Europeans. When those same Europeans came to America, fleeing the Cartesian-Newtonian back-reaction, their creative thought processes dried up; they were impressed into the American way of science: technosearch. Many of them died in deep states of depression. In terms of truly fundamental insights into the nature of Nature, what has happened since the mid-1920s? The discovery of the stereochemical structure of DNA? But even that has been largely falsified by American technosearch in service to the needs of war: the superconductant quantum wave functions of the molecule continue to be denied because of their at-a-distance fingerprinting and anti-personnel EMP-weapons applications -- thus allowing unfettered development of a recombinant technology, absent knowledge of the role those wave functions play in determining environmental fit of genetically-modified organisms. Indeed, technosearch has not even arrived at a viable notion of environmental fit! This is paradoxical, given that contemporary American critiques of American higher education inevitably call for increased attention to the primary function of universal education: enculturation, the mechanism of social environmental fit. This, when in point of fact, there is no higher education in America, only higher enculturation, higher potty training. In American universities there are trainees, not students. No American university hires people, people to pursue their interests and share their activities and discoveries with students. Administrators design a program of higher enculturation in conformance to the changing fixations of the public-choice oligarchs running the monolithic Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state and the free-choice free-trade oligopolists, set it up so as to ease the burden on the administrators, and find compliers to fit the slots in their program: trainers and trainees. Where is a person to be found in all this? One reason there is so much intercultural conflict on the planet these days is because American universities have become universities to the world: the whole species has bought into higher enculturation and technopsychothumbsucking. What started out as a Cold War subversion strategy -- bring foreign students to America and transform them into agents of influence -- has, status post Cold War, become a paradigm for global cognitive monocropping and associated neural pruning. Eventually, these monocropped, neurally-pruned brains will be hypermyelinated with megadoses of mimetic estrogens, and cloned.

Upon encountering the notions of “identity transparency” and “m-valued cognition”, people ask me for further explanation as to what I mean by these terms. Generally, I give them a few paragraphs comparing the single-valued variables in Newton’s laws of motion with the m-valued variables in Schrödinger’s wave equation. “So,” they say, “it’s like the difference between particles and waves.” I agree that this is what most physicists appear to believe, but go on to say that, no, this cannot be so, because the notion of nonlocality did not arise at the time Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field were written or from classical equations describing fluid waves. Any good surfer knows that at a given point in time the wave he is trying to catch is not spread out over the whole universe. “Well, what is it then?” they ask in frustration. The physicists will distinguish between a macroscopic wave and a quantal wave. Is a quantal wave a wave or a wave metaphor? is a good question.

I start out offering a conceptual approach to understanding as opposed to a perceptual approach because it is very much easier -- and safer -- to get the gist of it in this fashion. I personally had a wealth of perceptual experience first and only turned to physics in desperation, hoping to find comprehension of the percepts coming in on my me. “Percepts coming in on my me.” See, with the first phrase, there are all sorts of difficulties. There is immediate suspicion. These ideas are just drug-related notions. This person is borderline schizophrenic. Here is someone suffering petit mal epilepsy who has no insight into his condition. Apoplexy, I say, the follow is simply apoplectically apoplectic. Neuropsychiatric terms always first come to mind.

Indeed, The Moon of Hoa Binh provides a multitude of direct phenomenological descriptions of m-valued, identity transparent “percepts coming in on my me” which are ordered as a discrete series of petit mal epiphanies (autogenic discharges) set off in italic, generally written in free verse, and used to establish the large-scale macroscopic rhythm of the prose narrative/discourse. This is experientially accurate prose because the novel as a whole is structured as an extended autogenic abreaction employing narrative sentences, inner monologue, and prose designs drawn directly from clinical histories of Autogenic Training patients. In order to make this perfectly clear to the attentive reader, at several points in the narrative, the sentences become totally unmanipulated abreactive word salad. At other points, literary devices, say figures of speech -- praeteritio, ploce, paradiastole, polyptoton, polysyndeton, pleonasm, periphrasis, the polys and other “p”-words being preferred and most apropos of the multivalued -- are manipulated by the conventions of abreative word salad as a way of ridiculing the hubris attached to bon-ton literary stylistics, a hubris arising from psychological inflation at the seizure of creative inflow, and identification therewith, which melts the possibility of actually maintaining identity transparent, m-valued modes of cognition. Mental automatisms dominate human mental function even in high art fiction -- so MOON makes a great display of mental automatism, all the while essaying on its origins and a means of escape.

Ever notice how, when your hand is numb, everything feels thin? Even a solid block of wood lacks depth and texture. You can’t feel the wood; your limb just encounters the interrupting surface. Well, numb is to the soul as thin is to a mediated world. Our guiding metaphor.

Thomas de Zengotita has here (“The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic,” Harper’s, April 2002) provided us with a direct phenomenological description of a percept coming in on his me, a percept he undoubtedly attained as a result of long-practiced introspective engagement with the perceptual surround of the self-observational proprioceptive envelope. This article is a rare and brilliant piece of work, not the least because it is chock full of direct accounts of specific instances of petit mal epiphanies, seizures of recognition, jolts of anamnesis. But I will not dwell on its brilliance, for it is an experiential springboard for vaulting oneself into direct apprehension of the m-valued percept.

He talks about the attention demanding flood of trivia slamming into a limit, this limit being the sum total a person can register at a given instant of time. Unfortunately, this notion of a limit is that notion associated with classical Special Relativity, not that Special Relativity associated with recent experimental verification that the speed of light is m-valued. If absolute limits like the speed of light were absolutely limited, and not relative absolutes, then consciousness could have only one baud rate, because scurrying electrons in neural networks could have only one inertial reference frame, that associated with the normal state of consciousness. We now know this is not so. And the fact that it is not so can be directly experienced: electrons operate in a nested set of state-specific inertial reference frames, each one of which is like a closed box or blackbody. Subjective assessment of the motion of consciousness within any such given black box is a meaningless self-referential monologue, as only relative motions of consciousness across black boxes have meaning. No given black box can be actually at rest, i.e., in Nirvana. Only a relative measurement of at-restness is truly Nirvana. Relative to what? Relative to all the m-inertial-frames associated with the absolute limiting baud rates of consciousness in the Cantorian sets of blackbodies existing at… what?

As the baud rate of consciousness speeds up, time rate perception speeds up, and the rate of processing of percepts speeds up -- speeds up within any given black box, mediated world, or inertial reference frame. What is the characteristic property of direct phenomenological experience of such speeding up? Everything in the perceptual field appears to slow down. Speed up the rate of cognition of percepts and the rate of percept flow appears to slow down. The object process in a mediated world perceptually moves slower and slower, though one is cognitively aware that its rate of flow is unchanged. In experiencing an alteration in the baud rate of consciousness, one is suddenly, spontaneously, making relative measurements between inertial frames, whereas, always before, one made measurements only within the inertial frame of the normal state of consciousness. How did this happen? It happened by acceleration, acceleration of electrons associated with the nested set of inertial reference frames associated with the neural networks of the brain. Relative motion. “Associated with”, instead of “in”, because such electrons are not localizable, not simply identifiable: they “come in on my me”. Each reference frame has its own set of limiting values, its own relative absolute limiting velocity, its own “light”: one value of the m-valued velocity of light.

To repeat: “existing at… what?” At “any given point in time” has no singular meaning except for measurements (instances of recognition) within a given black box, a given inertial reference frame. To be within that box, to remain in the box, to be a boxman is to sustain, unchanged, a given baud rate of consciousness. A change in velocity of cognition of percepts is an acceleration or a deceleration -- which is to have exited from that to which there is no exit. The crazy one making it out of the “Cube”. Why? Because to accelerate is to become free, not only of gravity, but of “any given point in time”. Each such given point has its correspondent given points in each inertial reference frame, but there is no absolute given point except under relative measurement: that is, the absolute given point is relative, therefore, not absolute. Relative-state of inertial reference frames, of boxmen: this is m-valued identity transparency. One can have the direct phenomenological experience of this. How?

Look at the superimpositions of a Cubist painting. In accelerating baud rates of consciousness, the percepts given directly to awareness are Cubist images in relative motion. This is not beyond the capacities of the human mind to process, because there are m-baud-rates of consciousness available to the human mind. This is a matter of depth, just as Zengotita says: “Depth asks you to stop.” What is this stop? Any point in time can stop. This stop is accelerating to the limit, to any relative absolute limit, because at any such state-specific limit in velocity of cognition of percepts, time stops, as Einstein has taught us, as experiment has demonstrated. Speeding the rate of cognition of percepts slows evermore the apparent motion of the object process, until, in the limit, the given point in time becomes a hole Alice fell down (leading to another class of inertial reference frames, another class of identity states). There is no “dimension of the present moment” (as maintained by Miroslav Holub; see: The Dimension of the Present Moment, London: Faber & Faber, 1990), as such a dimension would depend on there being only one baud rate of consciousness, a pre-Relativity-theory notion, a notion rooted in a lack of self-observational depth. Time must have a stop, as Huxley said, in the vivid womb of cleansed doors of perception. As Zengotita so well describes, however, the opposite has happened in the numb paw which is contemporary America: cognition has maintained the same baud rate as the flood of inputs has accelerated.

The (absence of) sensation that is physical numbness is constituted by a multitude of thrills and tingles at a frequency beyond which you feel nothing.

But this frequency threshold Zengotita identifies is a function of: (1) the baud rate of consciousness; (2) the attribution of enculturated meanings to bare percepts. This attribution is the automatization, the making automatic through repetition, of brain mechanisms at learning. Practice makes perfect. Practice makes facts. Fact is restriction of m-valued to one-valued, collapse of Schrödinger's wave function, which is to say the restriction of electrons in neural networks to one of the available nested inertial reference frames. Vividness of sensation returns only by reinvesting attention to the cognitive function made automatic by habituation. Self-observation is required to overcome the enculturation effect. This can be accomplished in numerous ways, one of which is decontextualization: painting Campbell’s soup cans, for instance, or redirecting the aural attention for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, or whatever the length of inertial reference frame time John Cage chose for his particular act of demonstrating deautomatization.

The trouble is, even acts against habituation become habituating. Artists knew that this is so soon after the 1913 Armory show, when the first “readymade”, a urinal, was decontextualized in being shown at an art exhibition. Any object in any mediated object world is readymade by the enculturation effect. But artists recoiled from the dissociative demands of self-observation in baud-rate acceleration to consciousness of m-valued Cubist percepts, embraced the alternative logic of art business, and fled into the meaning vacuum of finite empty play -- many of whom, to this day, disparage Cage's 4'33" without having the slightest notion of how directly this “piece” addresses this issue at the core of assumptions in all present-day music systems, pentatonic, diatonic, modal, chromatic, atonal, 12-tone, and so on. They even regard 4'33" as intellectualization of music, when it is utterly obviously an attack on intellectualization of music. Increased baud-rate of consciousness can be used for access to m-valued percepts by staying away from the aporia of culture, or it can be used merely to process and effuse on ever increasing aporia.

What parades under the rubric of “mental clarity” is actually a psychological defense mechanism related to the existential anxiety incumbent upon the false tacit claim to absolute separateness. The pompous insistence on syllogistic thought and simplicity of explication -- to complete exclusion of the diffuse modes underlying acts of creation -- at the foundation of every discipline taught in America's institutions of higher enculturation is the transmission not only of a mental illness, but also of brain disease. The enculturation of neurological deficit begins in the womb with the first idiopathic “neural pruning” due to imposition of linear-time-bound states; has, by adolescence, with further neural prunings, completely eradicated the inherent neural network plasticity required for animistic m-logically-valued cognition; and, by Ph.D. time, has imposed the cortical lacunae underlying the present collective phobia for all but purified identity.

Your observation that the Buddhist notion of “dependent origination” is incompatible with the idea of individual karma is very well taken. I would also suggest that it is incompatible with the idea of individual enlightenment. Aurobindo’s extensive discussions in Letters on Yoga of the psychological induction that pulls back from the heights every spiritual Hercules is relevant here, as is the Great Renunciation of Mahayana Buddhism: the renunciation is no great sacrifice, only the acknowledgement of a framework law: the last stage of Buddhahood cannot be achieved by any until achieved by all. Everyone of the great religions, to my mind, is bogus on this very point: their exoteric hagiographic propaganda accounts of origin are all based on the falsehood of individual enlightenment. Enlightenment is a collective occasion of experience; it is not available to absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct individuals. These hagiographies arose as human cognition was collapsing to 2-logically-valued modes of comprehension -- hence the need for, and possibility of, the falsehood of individual enlightenment. The issue of non-self-identical entities is wholly esoteric and has noting to do with such hagiographies.

The current global situation, it seems to me, is related to this, and much more epochal than merely incipient collapse of the political, economic, and social institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm as it has been globally imposed over the past 300 years. I believe it is epochal relative to the last ice age, and the matrisystem social orders preceding and transiting it, for several reasons, the easiest to cite being discovery of m-valued logics which have not ordered human cognition since “breakdown of the bicameral mind”. The recent demonstration that Aymara, the ancient language of the Andes, is based on a 3-valued logic is very important to this thesis, but I regard this 3-logically-valued verbal language a late development in breakdown of the bicameral mind, the full collapse of cognitive capacity being tied to emergence of 2-valued logic some 2500 years ago in India, China, and the Levant.

From various dimensions of experience, including altered states of consciousness on the battlefield, I believe that the fundamental cause of human warfare is denial of access to identity transparency (a fundamental property of all matter, as quantum physics has discovered -- and therefore an “internal necessity”) in ordinary life. All prevailing social orders deny access to identity transparency, push it to the margins of society, whereas warfare provides elaborate, but bogus, experience of identity transparency, and this is how man has become addicted to it. Woman, however, by virtue of her biological endowment (childbearing; sexual response repertoire, if unmolested) has far easier access to this state of consciousness than does the male -- which, when fully elaborated, is m-logically-valued and the origin of the Buddhist notion of “dependent origination” (which, to my mind is a mistranslation because the implication of linear-time carried in the word “origination” does not conform to the actual time-ordering principle, which is directly experiential, associated with identity transparency.)

The rise of the specialized shamaness was the beginning of the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the first step in the rise of patriarchy. When any female member of the population corpus could be a shamaness-of-the-day, could, that is, take a trance-reading of the collective need, role stratification had not yet begun to emerge, identity transparency was fully elaborated, and the collective occasion of experience was m-logically-valued. Specialization and resultant role stratification requires continuous molestation of woman. Her inherent capacity for identity transparency must be restricted if role stratification is to be psychologically tolerated by the group -- otherwise, all would experience it a heinous violation of the quality of experience. The quickest way to restrict the woman’s capacity to experience identity transparency is to impose limitations on her sexual response repertoire. This is why clitoridectomy and other such abominations are associated with the most elaborately dictatorial patriarchal societies, while fetishization is sufficient for the run-of-the-mill constitutional democracy. Patriarchy may first have become a visible social order with domestication of the horse, but it was there by implication when the first specialized shamaness distinguished herself from the group. More and more elaborate patterns of role stratification are psychologically incumbent upon more and more orders of logical-value dropping cognitively out of view. Suppression of woman was the necessary prerequisite for rise of the state. Rise of the hyperstate will require not only restriction of the female sexual response repertoire, but removal of her childbearing capacity through cloning and incubators.

Cognitive consequences of continuous molestation of woman is recorded in brain processes and transmitted generation to generation, the resultant neurological lacunae being, essentially, equivalent to the modern state and its supranational agglomerations -- given that the state is simply an exteriorization of internal psychological processes. “Ontogeny replicates phylogeny” applies here. Over the last decade, neuroscientists have discovered that there are at least three enormous neural network wipeouts before post-adolescence. One just prior to birth; another, in the second to third year; and the last, just prior to or during adolescence. Plasticity of the brain is reduced substantially by each of these wipeouts which are accompanied by myelination, until the brain is capable of mediating cognition of only 2-valued-logic-type comprehension. We now know that learning of verbal language begins in the womb. I believe that learning of linear-time reference and simply-connected spatial reference both begin in the womb, and that the “learning” of all three of these (verbal language, linear-time, and isotropic space) is a function of the loss of neural plasticity required to mediate higher and higher orders of logical-value in cognition. A month prior to birth, before the first neural network wipeout, is the last time the modern human has complete access to full-blown m-logically-valued modes of cognition. This first wipeout is a result of continuous molestation of woman, in that the mother has been induced into linear-time-bound modes of cognition, and this is communicated to the fetus by her hormonal output, brain discharge phenomena, and psychoneuroimmunological impress. Infantile onset idiopathic epilepsy, for instance, I believe, in many cases is the result of such impositions on the brainwaves of a fetus who wills herself or himself not to be so unnaturally bound. By immediate post-adolescence, all capacity for cognition involving logical values greater than two has been “educated” out, with exception of those few people who maintain eidetic imagery capacity into adulthood, people like William Blake, who had an extremely empathic piamater (soft mother).

The explosions of autoimmune disease we are seeing today, and the human attack on its own genetic constitution with biotechnology (a technology wrongfully assuming no biological role for quantum-level attributes of the genome) and a human-engineered planetary microwave oven, along with the discovery of m-valued logics, signify a cusp point in both ontogeny and phylogeny: a very major species phase transition is underway. Not only is there increasing incidence of infantile onset idiopathic “illness” (biological refusal to submit to lateral mental cleavage), but there is emerging evermore elaborate forms of autoimmune disease as an expression of this cusp point having been reached. It appears the planetary collective unconscious is engineering through projective identification a large-scale solution to the humanity problem, wherein collective behaviors and biological forcing functions are becoming the primary vectors.

I would agree with you that no description of the phenomenological content of the state of unknowing-knowing was provided. Provided, however, was a very astute account of the meanings attributed or imputed to the state -- meanings likely attributed under two conditions: [1] during the state when it was in relative ebb; [2] after the state had subsided. I believe I can shed some light on the individual-collective/particular-general issue raised.

If, while identified with the state of unknowing-knowing, recognition is entertained that a spiritual experience is transpiring, then the phenomenological concomitants (inner light, time dilation, spatial contraction, auditory phenomena) begin to subside as the state ebbs. Such entertaining is attribution or imputation of meaning -- which is to “finitize” what cannot be made finite. The consciousness may “catch” the ebb by noting the subsiding concomitants. This may be followed by an apprehension of ever so subtle a tensing of the “condition”, which is simultaneous with the imputation of finite meaning. Catching the ebb and the tension early enough allows a release of the tension and of the claim to finite meaning. This release restores full measure of the unknowing-knowing state. Generally, this flow and ebb will oscillate for some period until magnitude of the “consciousness-force” (to use Aurobindo’s term) falls below threshold of the state.

What is this “finitizing” I refer to? Entertaining that a spiritual experience is transpiring while unknowing-knowing subtly introduces into awareness the glimmer of a knower -- a finite knower, a simple-identity-type knower. “Unknowing” in unknowing-knowing signifies absence of finite knower and known. What unknowing-knowing knows is pure being-in-itself, not any self-being. If any glimmer of self-being is entertained, being-in-itself ebbs. Entertainment to awareness that experience of any sort is transpiring distinguishes being-in-itself into nascent self-being states, and unknowing-knowing transits to knower-knowing. Pure unknowing-knowing has no proprioceptive component (no body awareness) and does not entertain any such whatnot as action or actor.

When consciousness “catches” the ebb and the concomitants intensify, this intensification is retraction of the properties of the reference framework for knower and known -- simple-identity, time, space (in that order of ontological precedence). Pure unknowing-knowing is effortless, so long as the magnitude of the consciousness-force remains above the effortlessness threshold. Transits into ebb and back, however, are arenas for “remembering” (Platonic “learning”) properties of the cosmic egg and its cracks. The very subtle tension apprehended at imputation of finite meaning is nascent awareness of physical body and reveals a great deal about the nature of finite consciousness.

Given that as awareness of pure being-in-itself ebbs, it transforms into nascent self-being states, it is clear that the inverse transpires in onset of unknowing-knowing. Direct phenomenology of this onset depends upon set and context: if reading, for instance, multiple languages may appear in the visual field while reading and comprehension continue -- even if one does not know the involved languages. If recognition is entertained that multiple languages have appeared with singular comprehension, the state ebbs. If sitting amongst a crowd of people, for instance, Cubist-like superimpositions and distortions of their facial expressions may appear in freeze-frame, the exact pattern of the distortions capturing the essential properties of the involved person's inner states. These “psycho-ideographic stoppages” are a perception of the archetypal general in the particular, and a transit in the direction from perceiving self-being states to that of being in being-in-itself.

It is clearly possible to “carry” unknowing-knowing as if it were a mantra, while simultaneously being in multiple self-being states. This would involve voluntary dissociation and m-logically-valued cognition, which is being in the bicameral mind. It would also involve identity transparency, as the multiple self-being states decomposed from pure being-in-itself with ebb of unknowing-knowing are the self-being states of “others” and physical “objects”. Self-being states are the identity states of an m-logically-valued proposition. Pure being-in-itself incorporates all such “finitized” propositions.

While all enculturation we know about subverts m-logically-valued cognition, some cultures in the past seem to have done so to far lesser extent than those of the present era. Creating cultures -- modes of collective life -- that richly support carrying unknowing-knowing as a mantra may be carried may require the lifting of all self-being states to some critical threshold.

Medea is a great reference in the context of this discussion. I recently read an essay on her by Miriam Robbins Dexter (ReVision, 25:1, Summer 2002) where she argues that Euripides' version was a re-write of earlier versions, such as that by Hesiod, where wise woman and herbalist, Medea, is transformed by Euripides into a mother who murders her brother and her children. The question addressed by Dexter is what purpose Euripides had in thus changing the story. Her answer is:

…the death of the brother is the death of the matrilineal line and a marker of the onset of patriarchy and patriliny. And, since Medea leaves, or is abducted from [by Jason], her ancestral home, this act marks the onset of patrilocality as well. (page 5)

And I like your designation: “mother-valued-logics”. I had thought of “ma-valued logics” relative to the maternal and to the Japanese word ma which means sacred space, and which Huynh Sanh Thong has argued is the onomatopoeic root homonym from which all words in all verbal languages derive.

Why the transition Medea mediated (according to Euripides)? I believe the answer is brain damage. The “kundabuffer” that limited the ability of the brain to mediate m-logically-valued, generative empathic cognition. And where was Medea abducted from by Jason and his Argonauts? Colchia, which is contemporary trans-Caucasus Georgia, Gurdjieff's home ground. Dexter's article was entitled: “Colchian Medea and her Circumpontic Sisters”.

Why the brain damage? Gurdjieff says the origin of warfare is extra-terrestrial influences. Extra-terrestrial influences like cosmic rays, microwaves, and so on? Could well be, if intra-neuronal and perineural DNA have the quantum wave properties I think they do.

Here is a quotation from Christopher Bache (Dark Night, Early Dawn, Albany: State U. of N.Y., 2000) which illustrates extremely well why I have difficulty with his perspective, indeed, the perspective adopted by mainstream transpersonal psychology in general:

If one never was a separate entity to begin with, then there never was such a thing as a private spiritual agenda. What we may have thought of as our soul's private spiritual hunger was the registering in our localized awareness of a broader spiritual hunger that is stirring in humanity as a whole, pushing it to shake off its sleepy past and to awaken as one. Every step each of us has taken toward our individual awakening has been, at a deeper level, part of humanity's journey toward collective realization. (page 217)

The only part of this I can agree with is the recognition that one never was a separate entity. But then Bache goes on to treat the collective unconscious of humanity as if it were, itself, somehow a separate entity subject to the laws applicable to separate entities. The collective unconscious is regarded as evolving in linear-time, an exoteric Judeo-Christian interpretation. This is an egoic perspective on the collective unconscious. There is nothing in my inner or outer experience, or studies in science, which leads me to believe that linear-time has any extra-egoic reality. I have to agree with Julian Barbour on this subject (except that, with regards to his thesis, I do not see any need for a probability haze floating over what he calls Platonia). The notion of re-birth or re-incarnation is a making linear of identity transparency and a subjecting of it to passing time. The reality is more like simultaneous incarnations, but even this is a reductionistic notion, in that it does not capture the temporal and spatial holographies certainly involved. Bache earlier gives the example of a fold in a seamless garment as being analogous to the egoic self, which is to treat identity transparency simply as one fold continuous with the next fold, neither being separate from the garment. This is a bad analogy, because the reality is far more holographic than that: any particular fold is the whole “non-particularizable” garment of which it is a part (and there is a similar relation with the animistic ancestor, only temporally, by virtue of the holographic part-whole nature of denumerable transfinite sets applied to temporal “instants” of the continuous time line, and segments thereof). Normative egoic logic simply doesn't apply. The particular unconscious of humanity is the whole “non-particularizable” unconscious of all-that-is. And this is not even holographic enough, as not only part and whole are non-orientable, but so are conscious and unconscious, subject and physical-object (this non-orientability being what projective identification and the transference are all about). I also find books like this are a very big struggle to read, as the medium and the message, the content and the form, are so glaringly at odds with one another, thereby greatly undermining my ability to credit veracity to what is being said. Chapters, themes, [a] to [b] to [c] logic used to argue against linear reductionistic science and to convince the reader to abandon an [a] to [b] to [c] view of the world. Why hasn't an appropriate form, an apropos medium, been created to convey the content and message? The reason is that, in actuality, the message remains an [a] to [b] to [c] message.

I've only read forty-five pages of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby (N.Y.: Tarcher/Putnum, 1998), and already I've got shivers and running skin tingles. I'm learning things about our novel, THE MOON OF HOA BINH, I never knew before. It is strange how I chose the name Liana for Derek's inner woman, his anima, and applied the name to all women Derek was in transference with throughout his life -- and chose not to explain to the reader this use of the same name for multiple women, the multiwoman: H. Rider Haggard's She-who-must-be-believed -- for the collective woman, for the female principle, for the earth mother. The introductory statement to “Studies for Liana”, that portion of Derek's journals that deals with the various levels of projective identification, from the most concrete to the most abstract levels of animistic “identity transparency”, quotes a most extraordinary book about tribal Vietnam and the flora of its mountains regarding the “man-seed liane of Annam” and how Derek's unconscious is entwined with liana vines. Later, regarding Toussaint's experiences of identity transparency in “high combat” there is a discussion of how liana always appear at places in the triple-canopy forest where ebony grow. My mother's maiden name was Baumgardener: tree gardener, my maternal ancestral profession, and my profession as a Japanese garden designer and nurseryman. My meditative practice was centered around cultivating voluntary dissociation in the act of digging trees piecework for years most of the time alone in the nursery: flat-out, as fast as I could move, while getting into an “observer state” relative to my physical activities in the act of digging, repetitively moving my attention through the muscle groups in the systematic manner of Jacobson's “progressive relaxation”, which I practiced an hour a day for six years. My “hands on” understanding of deautomatization came in this context. Much of this work was root pruning -- niizashi -- in the old Japanese way, preparing large trees three years, two years, and one year in advance for transplanting without loss of a season's growth -- something complex to do properly, as each variety requires a different technique, something rarely done these days, but an ancient practice in Japan which I learned from the old gardener trained during the late-Meiji period. I developed empathic interlock with the trees I worked with and did this work with great attention and concern for the welfare of the trees I transplanted. I did this for eight to ten hours a day, then read Jung's and Aurobindo's collected works at night, practicing voluntary dissociation from the mental processes of reading. Except for my cats, I was living alone, celibate, throughout virtually the whole period in one cottage of a group set in the northern Virginia woods, the oldest cottage in the place, a cottage going back to pre-civil war times, that was at one time a stopover point on the underground railway for runaway slaves, ebony hands from the tobacco fields. When I worked with anyone in the nursery digging trees, it was with blacks from South Carolina and Georgia. Toward the end of this six-year period, through my 25th to 27th years of age, was when the most elaborate altered states, when the “reading” and understanding of multiple languages flashing on the pages, languages I didn't know even what they were, and when the gran mal seizure came. It was also during this period when the initial non-mathematical ideas for the superconductant DNA model came. But I never made a conscious connection between liana and DNA. And I never knew that the active ingredients of ayahuasca come from liana.

I think I am going to write my reactions to this book piecemeal as the thoughts come. I now have read sixty pages. Narby talks about defocusing. This is truly a key factor, which I can elaborate upon. In “Roofbrain Chatter”, I describe how I wrote an article on “eye movement reprogramming” used to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome and submitted it to the Journal of the American Psychological Association. It was rejected without review because it did not conform to the Association's style requirements. I told them I was very familiar with their style requirements, but I would not rewrite it in their style because that would mean the content could not actually be conveyed. If their style was the most important issue to them, so be it. I already understood the content of the article and it was clear their specialists understood little about what they call “eye movement reprogramming”. Let them remain ignorant. No skin off my back. I got onto this area in Special Forces weapons training. In “Strategic Assessment”, toward the end, is a piece about the state of consciousness of SF troops when they arrived in Vietnam in the early years, and why this state of consciousness required a movie like Apocalypse Now to dissimulate it as “the horror, the horror”. Defocusing is, in fact, this horror, the most acute of threats to the institutionalization of the Newtonian paradigm. The piece on our website about Apocalypse Now discusses the origin of methods in training elite military units in tribal rites of passage.

If you observe your peripheral vision processes closely over a fairly long period of time (best done in walking meditation) you will notice that anything “picked up” in peripheral vision not immediately identified, named, given ontic significance, elicits an electrical surge in the neuromuscular system starting with the extraocular muscles. This will instantly be an anxiety-ridden attentional focus until ontic significance is established. Establishing this significance is how the consensual reality is maintained in an automatized state. John Cage's “composition” 4'33" is an essay on this issue relative to the auditory faculty: what is regarded music as distinct from noise is a matter of assigning significance relative to a cosmological analogue, in this case the diatonic music system.

My best friend at Training Group, call him S, was the son of a National Match marksman. S had test fired the AR15 for the Armalite Corporation before its release and before coming into the army, and was better with the weapon than any of the SF instructors. We started going to the range at night on our own and I worked with S where he taught me a lot about night vision acuity. In order to see the target, especially a moving target, unaided by night vision goggles, you have to NOT look at it. You have to learn to use peripheral vision, and how to not attempt to bring the target into focus. “Going diffuse” in just the right way doesn't so much allow you to see the target as to hit it without seeing it in the normal sense of seeing it. S's father sent us two Browning Hi-Power Automatic pistols with Bianchi shoulder holsters, the pistols having been reworked (hair triggers) in the lab and tested in a bench brace. He also sent hand-loaded ammo, which S showed me the proper way to do. Standard issue NATO ammo was bad. Using this handgun well in daylight also requires “going diffuse”. Rapid sequences of moving targets cannot be focused upon if you are to become very good at placing your shots. It is not just a matter of seeing, but of eye-hand coordination. The normal eye and the normal hand cannot become highly coordinated. You have to breakdown all the normal ways of relating the eye to the hand and ALLOW them to find a new relation. The visual nervous system's relation to the neuromuscular system has to be deautomatized and re-metaprogrammed (you cognitively circumscribe an “area” of performance and allow the program to oscillate until it settles into its own chosen new automatized state) into a different inter-systemic relation from that which has evolved in early childhood learning. (Use of this terminology was something I arrived at later, after studies in Autogenic Training.) I had done this once before in high school in learning to shoot the basketball ambidextrously from awkward positions without looking at the basket. I experimented and discovered various methods to disrupt my normal attention patterns so as to disturb my automated reflex motions: taping fingers together, wearing one eye patch, bracing an ankle to force a limp, and so on. I did this six hours a day at Eielson AFB gym through one summer scrimmaging with SAC and U-2 pilots. Repetition is an essential. It is necessary to change technique periodically because the “phylactery” would become automatized and after habituation would no longer sufficiently disturb tacit proprioceptive attention.

In the weapons training, I learned that this involved creating a diffuse mental state and a very relaxed physical condition. Later, in the field in Vietnam, I learned more about this from observing the manner of buffalo boys in the Mekong delta. I went on night missions in the Delta as the token American. Sleeping on hard side-rolling boat decks gave me quite a backache. One day I noticed boys sleeping on the back of ambling water buffalos in the fields. They seemed to have melted into the backs of the buffalos. So I practiced melting into the boat decks. It was a koan. You had to be alert and asleep, because of the possibility of coming under fire, and tense and relaxed because of the side-rolling motion and the hardness of the deck. It called for what I later came to know as “differential relaxation” (a term coined by Edmund Jacobson, student of William James, co-inventor of the EEG, and creator of “progressive relaxation”). To some extent I solved this koan experientially in the Delta where I saw the people of the Delta psychologically and physically entrained to the rhythms of the river, as described in several long passages of MOON, but I didn't understand it too well until later.

A girl I lived with in 1969 and '70 was the profound trigger to real understanding of the “diffuse state”. She was for me a most traumatic event that backed me into a transference cul de sac from which there was no normal means of escape -- except to learn how to become really defocused, really diffuse. “Studies for Liana” were mostly written as letters to her between 1970 and '74. Over the two-year period of our involvement, I slowly learned that she did not think in any way remotely like I did. This involved an enormous conflicted struggle, but in due course I came to acknowledge how profoundly different the manners of thinking actually were. She had maintained eidetic imagery capacity into adulthood. The only time she thought in words was when forced to by some institutional constraint; when she thought her own thoughts for herself, she always thought without the use of words. She played a violin in a symphony orchestra without being able to read music. By the end of this relationship, I had come to conceptually accept that she thought in feeling-tones, connected sequences of feeling-tones. What this was, I did not really know, but it seemed plausible. After we broke up in an enormous emotional suicidal conundrum, I went out and bought the full set of Jung's collected works and began systematically working my way through them. The first major clue to understanding came upon reading his essay entitled “Abstraction and Empathy”. But more important, really, was the cats she had left behind. I sat in the back yard all that summer surrounded by the cats trying to be diffuse at some level never before experienced, while periodically reading Jung. Eventually, the cats got my attention -- especially a female who was an incredible hunter, to the point of occasionally catching squirrels high up in the big old pin oak tree I was sitting under. She melted into a branch far more than the buffalo boys I had seen in the Mekong delta and could stay that way for hours at a time, apparently sleeping, none the less continuously extremely alert because she could pounce in an instant, the right instant. I could not understand this capability.

After I had seen this enough times, however, understanding suddenly dawned. Diffuse awareness was not just defocused, not just diffuse; there are levels of concentration of the diffuse! With that recognition, lots of stuff came into proper articulation. I finally understood the real difference between “identification” and “empathy”: and it was just the opposite of what I had always assumed. I had thought that empathy was spontaneous, something that just happened to you; identification a matter of the energy of intentionality. I now understood that empathy was something one did, not something that merely happened to you; it was an act of intentionality carried out by a highly concentrated diffuse awareness, whereas identification was an object-capturing: the object actively captures a subject in a low level of concentration, be that concentration focused or diffuse.

“Focus” and level of concentration were different, and there were different kinds of concentration, active and passive. Concentration in the diffuse required “passive concentration” (a term I later encountered in the literature of Autogenic Training), while focused concentration required active concentration. I knew from past experience (as mentioned above) that the processes of vision and visualization were critical to this distinction. Moreover, observing the cat, whenever she was in concentration of the diffuse, it appeared as if her eyes were closed, and yet she obviously was observing her prey.

I began attending to my eyes, trying to be in an observer state in regards to them, while going diffuse, began, that is, trying to “see” my eyes in the act of NOT looking at what I was trying to see, like in night vision -- trying to “see the seeing”, as Derek says in MOON -- rather than just simply seeing. I was not yet working as a gardener, but I was beginning to have empathy experiences with the pin oak in my backyard. Standing on the porch one sunset looking at the tree, its branch pattern seemed suddenly different than it had ever appeared before. Simultaneous with noticing this, there was a rush of “emotion”. The tree was no longer just a tree but a personality expressing a state of wistfulness, and it was a rush of wistfulness that I experienced in noting its apparently changed shape. With this awareness, I thought of a painting by Van Gogh of an old pair of shoes, shoes that were imbued with a sense of animation, not shoes as mere objects cast randomly into a corner. The shoes in this painting were living beings, not things. From my readings of Jung came another insight immediately after thinking of the Van Gogh shoes: I had misused the term “emotion”. It was “feeling”, not “emotion”, I had experienced a rush of. I had never before really understood the distinction Jung makes between “feeling-tones” and “affect charge”. Affect charge is emotion, the rush of fight-flight hormones, while feeling is another kind of rush altogether. Now I understood. And I also understood something of what Kandinsky meant by “pure feeling”. This gave me an intimation of what it must mean to think in connected sequences of feeling-tones. What an enormous passive concentration in the diffuse this must require! No wonder I never understood what that girl, that Liana, was trying to convey; no matter what the subject, I had never understood. Couldn't. No possible way. Not with my word-dominated ratiocination.

A paper I had read in college by an Edmund Jacobson, M.D., came to mind: “On Meaning and Understanding”, American Journal of Psychology, 1911. In this paper he described the methods of autosensory observation taught to the “fair witnesses” used in his Titchenerian electrophysiological lab studies. I searched out this paper again and ran across the series of seven papers he published in 1930 and '31 in the American Journal of Physiology entitled “Electrical Measurements of Neuromuscular States During Mental Activities”, parts 1 to 7. I also learned of his “progressive relaxation” technique developed in the 1920s -- which I began to practice. He maintained that there was no experimental evidence relative to the intact organism that the peripheral nervous system is subordinate to the central nervous system. All information in the nervous system, he maintained, is distributed over the whole system, the whole organism, the integrated totality. But there are elements of specificity: mental images are correlated on a one-to-one basis with specific patterns of “residual” neuromuscular tension. With visual images, this correlation is greatest with the small extraocular muscles; with elements of speech, the correlation is with the laryngeal muscles. By “residual tension” he meant flutters on the electromyograph just above zero action-potential. A person cannot relax his neuromusculature to this degree without special training, Jacobson maintained. At the National Library of Medicine, I found a copy of the original edition of his book Progressive Relaxation. There was a photograph there, taken in the 1920s, of him demonstrating differential relaxation (relaxing chosen muscle groups while leaving others in normal tonus). The flesh on his face hung off the bones as if he were a cadaver. About a year later, when the 21-volume raw silk bound edition of Aurobindo's collected works were published, I acquired a copy and there was a picture of Aurobindo there taken, it was claimed, when he was in a Samadhi state: the flesh hung on his face just as it had hung on Jacobson's. This was a major confirmation of what I had already suspected: contentless awareness required neuromuscular relaxation to zero action-potential, because mental contents are associated by sequences of residual tension patterns, largely localized to the extraocular and laryngeal muscles. But my god! what is involved in learning to allow those muscles groups to relax to zero action-potential. It was not surprising that Jacobson had taught himself all this, as the central debate between the Tichenerians and the Pragmatists had been about whether or not contentless awareness was possible, and even whether autosensory observation (self observation) was possible. Because of his position on these issues, Jacobson was never credited with being a co-inventor of the EEG.

The usefulness of “eye movement reprogramming” in treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome is explained by Jacobson's experimental findings: the correlation between visual images and speech elements with residual tension patterns in the extraocular and laryngeal muscles; how mental associations -- roof-brain chatter -- is conveyed by habituated residual tension patterns, the basis of what in the psychoanalytic structural theory became automatization. Reprogramming is only possible with deautomatization: reinvesting attention into automatized functions. A structure is an automatized function (recorded as residual tension pattern). Going diffuse requires living to some extent in a state of deautomatization; developing higher and higher levels of passive concentration in the diffuse -- preliminary to thinking in connected sequences of feeling-tones -- requires facilitation of deautomatization of certain muscle groups while others continue to be automatized. The total syndrome of psychophysiologic automatized functions is the structure of a life-world, a consensus reality. ”Stopping the world” involves differential deautomatization of the syndrome of automatized psychophysiological functions associated with a given life-world.

Later, I took up studies in music composition -- avant-garde 20th century art music -- and drawing from the nude model, because I came to experience colored-hearing in association with empathic feeling-tone rush -- which I knew must somehow be correlated with how, for instance, the changing appearance of a tree can elicit a feeling-tone corresponding to its perceived shape. I attempted to explore this by using Nicoliades' method of teaching the “gesture sketch”. Line drawing was another arena of concentrated eye-hand coordination work from which I was able to verify to my own satisfaction many of Jacobson's experimental conclusions. I was never able to gain access to an electromyograph to use in such practices. Still haven't.

Chapter Six, of course, is where The Cosmic Serpent really begins to soar: “…directing visions with songs”. The kind of music I was listening to during that period of colored-hearing experience -- when I was studying composition under a vocalist who had the rare voice required to sing Schoenberg's atonal works -- was George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children and Takemitsu's Asterism. These were the two I listened to most, over and over. I spent several years painting this music -- and when I got out of this activity what I wanted, I threw all the paintings away. I almost did that with MOON, given that the real purpose of the book was inner work, not really communication, as with the paintings and the drawings. But MOON was more about communication than were the paintings and it was a co-authored work, and a friend stepped in and saw that it got printed. What I was trying to paint was the FORM of the music, not merely its motives or themes. By then I was working with the old Japanese gardener digging trees and simultaneously studying Ikebana -- Ikenobo school, the most traditional form of Japanese flower arranging -- under direction of a Japanese woman, the then current President of the American Ikebana Society, and a close friend of the old gardener. She had me in another cul de sac, the classic aspidistra arrangement: seven long, ribbed leaves folding around one another in a spiral configuration. I struggled with it for months, but never met with her approval. No explanations, just no. At the same time, I was being instructed by the old gardener in how to recognize gei, an obscure Zen aesthetic concept one learned to recognize by “inner taste”, but which could not be described in words. It related to shape, or more accurately was a property of form. This was done by pruning full-sized trees and bonsai, and by the setting of stones. I was given exercises and I was to observe his work. Rarely, in completing these exercises would I get a yes from him, but I could not then see why one received a yes and another a no. The stones would be set and then the arrangement destroyed, and try again and again. It was following a particularly long and intense session with colored-hearing painting that the grand mal seizure transpired, as described in MOON. After that, I was obsessively in the medical library and eventually ran across references to Autogenic Training, autogenic brain discharges, and so on. I was absorbing all this neuropsychiatric material about autogenic discharges when I took up again the issues about how a state of deep rage could trigger a week-long delirium and an extreme prolonged raging fever requiring icing and a very high sustained inflated WBC count -- which had occurred after I was wounded in Vietnam. This, along with the seizure, put me in a place where I clearly formulated, for the first time, what I considered the fundamental question: What could be the mechanism of highest-level integration, not just in the CNS, but in the whole organism. Nothing less than an answer to this question seemed capable of explaining my experience and the clinical data of Autogenic Training.

The answer came almost as soon as the question was well formed: DNA had to be superconductant. Superconductant DNA in the nucleus of the neuron cell seemed to be the only possible mechanism of highest-level integration the organism could have.

And then, of course, I met the atmospheric physicist and the mathematical model of this idea began to grow. The fundamentals of the mathematics had already been worked out by this physicist before we met -- not with regard to DNA, but the double-helical flow pattern of air parcels entering a developing tornadic vortex. What we had to figure out together was how this mathematical description of the helical feeder bands applied to the DNA molecule. This was done between 1975 and early 1978. The superconductant DNA paper was published in 1979. At the time of its writing, I was working part-time for a metal sculptor who taught at Ithaca College and supplemented his income by doing complex custom constructions for builders. I helped him build exquisite spiral staircases and railings using the very involved jigs he designed to hold everything in place. The physicist and I commented at the time on the symbolism of the axis mundi, most particularly because the mathematical model is all about the quantum nature of twisting axes of spin, and rotating reference frames or coordinate systems.

I would suggest that the hexagonal quartz crystal that guides the giant cosmic anaconda in the Desana image given on page 64 of Narby's book is representative of what I call the “multivalued reference space” or what Barbour calls “Platonia”. The hexagonal cells of the laminated modular hyperspace or configuration space (a kind of liquid crystal or superconducting mirror) decompose into equilateral triangles. This whole idea of Narby is not just about DNA alone (though the added complexities are required to describe how DNA can be superconductant at physiological temperatures). More fundamentally, it is about the spacetime double helix. (Papers have been written demonstrating that a spacetime double helix is impossible, that it would dissipate into a probability fog under the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. The superconductant DNA paper does not assume this standard interpretation.) If you look at the “Toward a General Theory of Process” paper (the 1977 prelude to the writing of the superconductant DNA paper), you will see that what we call the “first order temporal curl” is depicted as a double helix. This double helix is the representation of the topological twisting of space by active operator-time. The anaconda represents operator-time. The framework within which these twists are referenced is the “multivalued reference space”, a nested Cantorian fractal space, which can be symbolically characterized by equilateral triangles nested inside of equilateral triangles, nested inside of equilateral triangles, and so on. This nest can also be viewed as a stack of hexagonally marked grid sheets (which is also the structure of Szentagothai's cellular model of the cerebral cortex). The quartz crystal represents this notion, just as do the nested equilateral triangles and double helices cast into the tympanum of the ancient Dong Son bronze drum, which I found in Museum Pusat Jakarta, and called The Moon of Hoa Binh.

Narby says: “…the peoples who practice what we call 'shamanism' communicate with DNA.” (Page 68.) In the credits to MOON, we thank “Lili Townsend for her vital psychological work with the quantum wave properties of DNA”. I met Lili in 1993 at John C. Lilly's house in Hawaii (John being the neuroscientist, dolphin researcher, and Esalen guru). Lili, no relation to John, was providing adjunctive therapy to cancer patients by teaching them how to communicate directly with their DNA using various visualization exercises she had evolved. I do not think origins of this had to do with use of ayahuasca, though, while at Dr. Lilly's house for about a week, I was shown a copy of the book Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. Comments were made about the biomorphic nature of the images, but I don't remember the discussion becoming more elaborate than that. And I certainly never made any connection between ayahuasca and DNA.

I again quote Narby: “…the visual music projected by the spirits in front of the shaman's eyes: It is made up of three-dimensional images that coalesce into sound and that the shaman imitates by emitting corresponding melodies. I should check whether DNA emits sound or not.” (Page 68.) We believe the answer is yes. The superconductant DNA model describes the quantum mechanisms by which DNA emits acoustic holograms (“sounded forms” as Derek says in MOON). This is discussed in most easily accessible terms in the “Illustrated Glossary to the Autogenic Discharge Paper”. My whole corpus of colored-hearing experiences -- described at many locations in MOON, and, indeed, the whole discussion in MOON comes to focus upon this -- the physicist and I came to call music-sculpture or Musculpt, and I have regarded this as being equivalent to what Noam Chomsky calls the “universal grammar” and argues is encoded into the DNA molecule, Chomsky's recursive generative supposition implying that this encoding is contained in the nucleotide pair sequences. In MOON, it is argued that the universal grammar is encoded in the higher-order temporal properties of the emitted acoustic holograms (think of the topological configurations of the interlaced anacondas within the reference space), not the nucleotide sequences, which we regard as encoding only the surface structure of the genetic language. We do not believe DNA encoding is based on a single-level cipher. Narby gets close to this notion of the universal grammar when he later says: “The spirits one sees in hallucinations are three-dimensional, sound emitting images, and they speak a language of three-dimensional, sound emitting images. In other words, they are made of their own language, like DNA.” (Page 71.) A language that languages are made of is the notion of a universal grammar. There is a lot said about this in the click links at the end of the “Toward a General Theory of Process” paper, some of which is in comments concerning Bill Sullivan's book on the Inca's war against time. Gematric and Cabalistic explorations of ideas about Hebrew and Sanskrit being languages of cosmogenesis are highly relevant to the idea Narby is arguing. In MOON, it is argued that interspecies communication once took place in this sounded-form universal grammar, that it was a language based upon m-valued logics, and that the human brain progressively lost the neuronal plasticity required to mediate m-logically-valued processing. This loss occurred when intra-neuronal nuclear DNA stopped being superconductant due to the effects of verbal-language-induced enculturation.

Concerning correspondence between ayahuasquero cosmogenesis and Francis Crick's thesis of “directed panspermia”, i.e., that DNA was not synthesized in the cosmic soup of the early Earth, but was transported here from outer space, I would argue that the stereochemical molecular structure itself did not so travel. What the emitted quantum wave properties are, are coherent waves, that is acoustically-modified waves, waves that are all in-step as they come off the DNA ladder, in step like sound waves are all in step. In the case of the superconductant DNA molecule, there is reason (in the equations) to suspect that the emitted waves are acoustically-modified gravity waves: the acoustic hologram would be a gravitational hologram. What traveled into the cosmic soup of planet Earth was the acoustically-modified gravity wave signature of DNA, its sounded-form. The sound emitted a gravitational image which impressed itself on the soup: sound can emit an image just as an image can emit a sound. Another way to say this is: the elements of the universal grammar are acoustic wave signatures of constant entropy surfaces in particular topological configurations. But the reality of panspermia is probably actually more profound than this. DNA did not have to travel through outer space to arrive at planet Earth; spacetime itself became life through becoming DNA. Operator-time, the anaconda, actively twisted the quantum reference space into the spacetime double helix of a coherent gravity wave train, which formed the acoustic hologram of DNA, which, in turn, imprinted the cosmic soup as a standing wave so as to form the stereochemical surface structure of the DNA molecule, with its nucleotide-pair codons. This is how the gods speak. Or so it may well be, if DNA is a superconductor.

I have broken off again after Chapter Eight, before Narby launches into his discussion of “Receptors and Transmitters”. I have no bones to pick with his central thesis or the correspondences he identifies. I find I do not wish to comment on his account of consensus views of the molecular biology of the gene, except to mention that I do not agree that DNA is the same from one species to the next, one cell type to the next. This is correct only on the molecular level; on the quantum level, collagen DNA, for instance, is different from muscle cell DNA, in that they have different frequency response windows. This has been well documented from the 1980s. As the “Illustrated Glossary” describes, we believe these frequency response windows are the bottom line relative to immunological identity and that these signatures arise from temperature oscillations of free electron parcels in the superconductant core of the molecule -- the temperature oscillations being the bottom line on biological clocks. The equations of the superconductant model prescribe an exact relation between this oscillation rate and the transcription rate of the molecule. Much is said in that glossary about disturbances in these quantum properties and the origins of degenerative disease. Chronic stress is defined in relation to these disturbances. The function of autogenic brain discharges, it is said, is to normalize such disturbances. It is also argued that prescriptive enculturation is fundamentally involved in creating these disturbances.

Narby begins to abandon the consensus view in molecular biology with statements like the following about his ayahuasca experience: “…I saw in a dizzying visual parade the superimposing of the veins of a human hand on those of a green leaf. The message was clear: We are made of the same fabric as the vegetal world.” (Page 112.) This is the identity construct of the “vegetalistas”. I would refer you to the articles entitled “Object and Subject” and “For the Mirror is Not the Glass” for an exploration of possible meanings of this. Narby is here obviously moving toward what I use the term “identity transparency” to denote. In the molecular biology of immune system function, there is no notion of identity transparency. Identity for contemporary immunologists is single-valued: the function of the immune system is to distinguish between the self and the not-self and to remove not-self elements. According to this view, autoimmune disease arises when there is a confusion of the self with the not-self. Diseases like SLE carry this to the point of creating anti-DNA antibodies. This molecular immunological notion of identity has its parallel in the psychiatric profession's attitude toward the hysteric's multiple personality formation. Narby's “being made of the same fabric”, however, is not quite the same as identity transparency, which is a logical property, not only a structural one.

His discussion of Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, does not very directly tie this mythical creature to DNA: he leaves the connection vague. Ouroboros is a visual statement about a property of identity that does not fit well with contemporary molecular immunology. In the superconductant DNA model, a quantum model, the Ouroboros is related to the issue of rates, particularly transcription rates: Ouroboros is mathematically a “Klein bottle”, a topological configuration which has to do with the re-entry and “self-reference” occurring at certain limiting time rates of change. Self-reference, relative to a language, a language like that of the genome, indicates the presence of self-referential statements. Self-referential statements are propositions that do not conform to the rules of ordinary 2-valued logic. This is why I regard the quartz crystal which guides the cosmic anaconda as a cell in the tiling pattern of the “multivalued reference space”: the genome carries self-referential statements which are related to the Ouroboros. The single-level cipher system that consensus genetics has mapped onto DNA sequences to arrive at the notion of there being only 3-nucleotide-pair codons is dependent upon the consensus notion of identity as being single-valued, an either/or situation. Since molecular biology is interested only in the synthesis of macromolecules, it has arrived at a definition of a codon only on that basis, and has thereby defined the difference between introns and an exons. This difference is based on the notion that there are only 3-nucleotide-pair codons in a single-level cipher system. There is quite a bit of discussion of Ouroboros properties in the latter sections of the “Toward a General Theory of Process” paper. The notion of active operator-time is involved in this. As I said before, the “first order temporal curl” is a double helix. The third order temporal curl is a Klien bottle, an Ouroboros. The second order temporal curl is a Mobius strip. These rate-limit-determined topologies, I believe, have to do with logical properties of the higher levels of the genetic language, which are mirrored in the 3-dimensional entwining array, or folding patterns, of the molecule in, for instance, the nucleus of the cell.

One possible meaning of the superimposition of the hand on the leaf is that "junk DNA", in [3, 4, 5, 6…n]-nucleotide-pair codons, self-referentially enciphers in each genome all genomes existing under 3-fold operator-time (what we, from our linear-time-bound perspective regard as future evolution). This enfoldment of genomes is mapped on the quartz crystal cellular-tiling as a covering of the “multivalued reference space”, or frequency domain. It is not that I am of the same fabric as the leaf, I am the leaf, just as it is me. This is the sense in which I regard all DNA as being the same.

Ah, Chapter Nine. As you know, I have read some of the literature on biophoton emission by DNA. I have not had the opportunity to acquire the bulk of these papers. I do not know how the findings of this research relate to our superconductant DNA model. I have sent our articles to both Popp and Ho, but have received no comments. I assume they do not take seriously the idea that DNA can be superconductant at physiological temperatures and/or they assume validity of the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, which our paper does not conform to. Our model attempts to describe how the DNA molecule responds to impinging radiation. The model describes the molecule as generating coherent radiation in response to the impinging radiation. Coherent radiation, as Narby discovered, has its wave trains in step, in coherent phase relation. This is a defining property of sound waves, hence it can be called “acoustically-modified”. This can happen to light; it can happen to gravitational waves. In this case, it is like a soliton, a solitary wave that is autocatalytic, feeds on itself like soldiers marching in step on a rope bridge amplifies motion of the bridge. Infrasound in the Earth's atmosphere is acoustically-modified gravity wave modes, which may be the basis of what the Australian aborigines call “song lines”. Prominent geographical features create infrasound signatures, which migratory birds use for local homing. This was experimentally demonstrated at Cornell by the atmospheric physicist's instigation. The shamans who gave ayahuasca to Narby also talked about “visual music”, which he does not mention in this chapter. Colored-hearing may not be merely a matter of cross-modal neurological correlations of sensory dimensions, as Narby recognizes, but a matter of acoustic holograms -- or there is some combination thereof, i.e., neural holograms are acoustically-modified. In 1979, I wrote to Pribram suggesting that the reference beam for neural holograms was generated by intraneuronal DNA, and sent him a copy of the superconductant DNA paper and the paper on autogenic discharges containing the initial sketch of the superconductant DNA model. He responded with a reply of polite dismissal. The DNA molecule may not actually be producing biophoton emissions. This has not been demonstrated with “naked DNA”, as Narby points out, only with in vivo DNA. It may be that the photons are a breakdown product of the radiation emitted by the DNA molecule, breakdown products, like those depicted in cloud chamber particle scattering, due to interactions of the emitted radiation with other cellular structures, including the intracellular water itself. What happens between stimulated emission at the neurotransmitter receptor sites and reception by the DNA molecule, as well as in the reverse direction on emission by DNA, greatly depends on the properties of the intervening structured intracellular water. Popp is well aware of this, as his papers on homeopathy indicate. Ling's model of structured intracellular water surely will be very important to further understanding. This is discussed at length in “Peerless Reviewings” and “More Roof-brain Chatter” and in a click link to the "General Process" paper.

I would suggest, however, that the superconductant state is a very capable signal amplifier, and that the base-pair ladder is like the screen grid in a beam power tube -- as discussed in MOON. Narby's account of photon emission/reception suggests that the “junk DNA” repeating nucleotide sequences may be crystalline photon absorbers, because of the regular atomic arrays. The superconductant DNA model gives this absorptive role to the free electrons in the electron gas enveloping the molecule. The radiation absorbed is only that resonant with the natural frequency of the molecule: the incoming radiation is beat down by a frequency cone into that natural frequency, the frequency response window of the molecule. This incoming radiation provides the energy required to cause formation of electron parcels. Temperature oscillations of these parcels are responsible for generation of the emitted radiation. Another major difference between the superconductant model and the photon emission/reception thesis is that the superconductant DNA model maintains that all the information in the nucleotide pairs is carried by the emitted radiation. A mechanism for this is described in the “Illustrated Glossary”.

I would be inclined to think that the quartz crystal that guides the cosmic anaconda refers to the structured intracellular water itself, not so much the DNA molecule. That is why I see the crystal as referring to a tiling pattern cell. Structured water is quite literally a liquid crystal medium. In my argument to Ling, discussed in “Peerless Reviewings” and “More Roof-brain Chatter” and the "General Process" click link, I attempted to outline how I thought my ideas about a “multivalued reference space”, a frequency domain, could be brought together with his multi-layer model of structured intracellular water.

I certainly agree with Narby's notion of a “…global network of DNA-based life… as more or less a fully interlinked unit”. (Page 131.) But I would go further and suggest that the DNA-mediated case is but a special case of a network that transcends the distinction between organic and inorganic. After all, we are talking about the quantum scale level, which is subatomic, submolecular, and subcellular. Not only are there double-helical feeder bands to tornadoes, comets, and galaxies, but there very likely is a spacetime double helix. DNA may be the language of life, with hundreds of millions, even billions, of years of stability, only because it is one “crystallization” of the language of spacetime. This may be the reason why it is so stable.

I'd say there is much more than a mere “blind spot” in biology. Derek-in-MOON says “Science is dead” and means it literally, not only as a parody of Nietzsche, and not merely as a result of politico-military-industrial corruption and ethical prolapse. Physics degee zero! Biology degree zero! Materialist-objectivist-positivist science is science; take those attributes away and it is something else, not science. There is no science that is not “cowboy science”; science began as a prescriptive worldview construct and has remained so: historically, it has always shot first and asked questions later, as that is the nature of cosmological prescription, propoundment of paradigms, indeed, hypothesizing, axiomitizing on the basis of any given order of logical-value. Derek uses the term “post-science” and maintains he cannot come up with a better word until what will replace science actually replaces it. The Cosmic Serpent gives some detail to intimations as to what is likely to replace science. I do not even believe in the scientific method, as distinct from science. With Plato, I believe all learning is remembering. Objectivist observation is one of the least interesting forms of remembering. But I must point out that Narby's attack on “participant observation” is identical in form and motivation to deconstructionist attacks on self-observation. I don't want to talk about deconstructionism, but it is clear from the content of their arguments saying self-observation is impossible that they have never experienced in the realm of time anything but linear-time, and have no understanding of how self-observation induced deautomatization is related to time dilation. For me, there is very little importance given to facts, which always change, or can be changed by challenging an axiom, designing a new experiment, separating data from noise according to criteria not accepted by the prevailing paradigm. Facts are best treated as useful reference points and mnemonic devices. Ayahuasquero post-scientific method is a higher-order level of remembering. Stopping the world and changing a reality is, on the other hand, a very high-order level of collective forgetting of what has been collectively remembered (depending on constitution of your ontology, “forgetting” and “remembered” can exchange positions in this sentence). Narby's thesis is quite relevant to this issue, as it implies that mankind knew molecular biology two-thousand and more years ago and is only now remembering what was once known, if only to a few shamans.

But the translators got Plato wrong. All learning is not remembering; it is self-remembering. Narby's thesis does not really explain how taking ayahuasca from Liana conveyed biomolecular knowledge about how to prepare curare, unless the plants used in preparation of curare described the method to Liana, who in turn described it to ayahuasquero by means of ayahuasca hallucination. Maybe, in the homeopathic manner, ayahuasquero cooked curare plants with liana such that the received hallucinations explicated biomolecular properties of curare rather than liana. How this would work when curare is not a hallucinogen is not exactly clear, particularly if curare does not have a receptor on CNS neuron cells, only on neuromuscular cells. Nor does it explain how ayahuasquero learned to make the ayahuasca potion from two plants, one containing dimethltryptamine, the other containing the required monoamine oxidase inhibitor, before ayahuasquero had established contact with the maninkari spirits (i.e., DNA) through use of ayahuasca. Perhaps this was done with another hallucinogen, and with another before that, and another before that into infinite regress. This is the tortoise and hare issue having to do with some of the paradoxes associated with the notion of passing linear-time. I wish to address this and show why Narby's thesis is unlikely without a “multivalued reference space” (MVRS). Even the other alternative explanation -- i.e., that some meditative, dreamtime, non-hallucinogen-facilitated method of establishing contact with the maninkari spirits (i.e., DNA) was employed to gain first knowledge of how to prepare ayahuasca from liana, the mechanisms of which Narby does not explain -- is best understood with the notion of a MVRS. But given Narby's predilection for Pierre Bourdieu, whose work he mentions several times, it is unlikely he would get into this way of thinking. MOON ridicules Bourdieu's theory of practice for its myopia about the highly complex nature of time, and its insistence on being linear-time bound. This insistence is typical of post-modernism, but I do not wish to get off here on why I feel that became the case.

Without detailing the reasons why, my trajectory on the notions of evolution and linear-time transpired like this: [1] doubting validity of natural selection by seeing the necessity of systematic systemic mutations for interspecies leaps; [2] believing in conscious evolution via systematic mutations induced by electromagnetic properties of autogenic brain discharges interacting with electron-transport properties of DNA; [3] rejecting neo-Darwinian catastrophic evolution as well as conscious evolution in the process of contemplating the superconductant DNA model, because of gathering insight into the involved higher-order, non-linear aspects of temporal ordering, and also because of the lack of evidence that interspecies evolutionary leaps have ever actually transpired. I stopped believing in any kind of evolution of species whatsoever at the same moment I stopped believing in an objective passing linear-time unmodified by nonlinearities. Now it is becoming accepted writ, as Narby notes, that all the creatures on Noah's Ark came into being during six Cambrian days, and thus could not have evolved one out of another. But I don't much give faith to any of the dating methods because validity of all of them depends on validity of various physics fundamentals, which in turn depend upon assumptions about the nature of time I no longer accept.

The rationale behind the notion of a multivalued reference space (MVRS) is discussed in detail in the material related to Ling's thesis on intracellular water and the discussion of the nested equilateral-triangular multi-sheet model given in “Peerless Reviewings” and “More Roof-brain Chatter” and in the click link to the "General Process" paper, as well as in the discussion of the geometric iconography on the Don Son bronze drum (including double helices) given in the Kabuki Dancer's Bar scene in MOON. In these discussions, I distinguish this idea of an MVRS from quantum vacuum, zero-point energy field, Hilbert space, and so on. In MOON, Derek suggests the MVRS may be composed of a “maze of nested Platonic regular polyhedra made of Fermi surfaces and Brillouin holes”. Without talking about Riemann surface maps and all that, the idea actually is rather simple: therefore easy to dismiss. To wit: “Nothing ever changes” and “Everything is nothing but changes” are equivalent statements. All apparent change is decomposition of the static m-logically-valued into the lesser-than-m-logically-valued. This is cosmological forgetting, which was represented in the Platonic tradition with a maze of regular polyhedra (incorporating, for instance, an Icosahedron inscribed within a hexagon)and their involutory decomposition (Abfall of a functionally-integrated, “centered” structure, which is anathema to the anti-Hegelian, Marxist-inspired, de-centering of deconstructionism). The appearance of finiteness out of infinitude is the dropping out of cosmological view of something already there. Infinitude is ontologically prior to the finite, even if the case is reversed in logical precedence under two-valued logic. The agent of forgetfulness is time in its various orders, nonlinear and linear. This is opposite in more ways than one of Brentano's notion, embraced by Husserl, that passing time has its origins in egoic remembering. All change, all movement, all finite identity, all material existence is the result of topological operations on the MVRS by one or another order of forgetting, all forms of forgetfulness being forms of operator-time. All change is forgetting. The more we forget, the more locked into ego consciousness we are, and the more it appears to us that “Everything is nothing but changes”. The more we remember not to forget, the more “Nothing ever changes”. To forget is to lose awareness of orders of logical-value, is to not be able to cogitate or perceive within the frame established by tacitly given propositions of higher-order logical-value. The fully-composed MVRS may be regarded the base-state of Tzog-Chen.

How is the cosmic anaconda guided by the quartz crystal? The anaconda (DNA) metabolizes “food”, i.e., “vibrations”, which it receives from the collection of quartz crystal tiling cells constituting the MVRS. A referencing frequency domain, that is infinitely deep in Cantorian fractal nests of tiling-cell sheets and m-orders of logical-value, contains always, not only all possibilities, but all impossibilities, for what distinguishes the possible from the impossible is order of logical-value of the propositions employed. Everything in orders of logical-value not remembered is impossible. If, for instance, one remembers (with whatever aid, hallucinogen or not) to not forget a sufficient amount of forgetfulness, one will have unforgotten the tacitly given logical-value-determined rules mandating distinction between inside and outside, so the question as to whether ayahuasquero is receiving biomolecular knowledge from his own brain or from maninkari spirits (DNA) in plants outside his brain is nonsensical: there is simply no logical category by which inside can be distinguished from outside (like on a Mobius strip, which case is a marker of the temporal ordering associated with the topological operation called “second order temporal curl”). Anaconda as Mobius strip is the snake twisting its head over 180-degrees and reaching around to bite its own tail: both sides become one side in the act of twisting and biting. Such acts are acts of cosmological Platonic remembering (Afhebung). The snake eating its own tail is another operation altogether: formation of a Klein bottle. In this case, the temporal operation of remembering to unforget not only reinstates nonorientability (second order operator-time), but also self-reference through re-entry (third order operator-time). Here, under this third-order operation, the tacitly given logical-value-determined rules mandating distinction between the hand and the leaf, which came about by forgetting orders of logical-value, simply do not exist because they have been cosmogenetically unforgotten. The hand is not only of the same fabric as the leaf; it is the leaf. The cosmic anaconda (DNA) can mine quartz crystals in any of these logical-value modalities (first-, second-, and third-order operator-time) depending on its time rates of change and associated twisting behaviors. All possible and all impossible information is always available to the maninkari spirits (DNA) as they metabolize “food”, i.e., “vibrations”, from the MVRS and communicate with the vegetalistas, ayahuasquero or not. Platonic remembering, therefore, is self-remembering in ever increasing degree as the fully m-logically-valued case is approached. The self, referred to in this case, being that Only-One-Real-I-am that is the Is-ness-Itself.

I am starting to work my way through Narby’s sixty pages of notes, which are very interesting. Most interesting is the 1975 McKenna et McKenna speculation about a DMT-mediated DNA superconductivity and signal generation -- as their basic idea is similar to that in our 1979 superconductant DNA model, i.e., quoting the McKenna's “…opening the ionic shutter mechanism and, simultaneously, entering into superconductive charge transfer with its resulting modulated ESR [electron spin resonance] signal…” (Narby, pages 202-03.) The source of the radiation impinging on the DNA molecule is not addressed in our 1979 paper; clearly, there could be a number of sources, endogenous and exogenous. Of utmost importance to onset of the superconductant core about which the helices coil, according to our model, is perfectly resonant phase match and canceling effect between the radiational input and the entropy generation in the free-electron gas environment of the molecule: another element of complementarity in the helix-coil transition process. I am very interested to see how McKenna et McKenna imagined tryptamine intercalation of DNA was involved in inducing a superconductant state. They say: “We speculated that information stored in the neural-genetic material might be made available to consciousness through a modulated ESR absorption phenomenon, originating in superconducting charge-transfer complexes formed by intercalation of tryptamines and beta carbolines into the genetic material.” (Narby, page 202.) I will have to make efforts to find the original references: Dennis J. Mckenna and Terrence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I-Ching, N.Y.: Seabury, 1975; and Terrence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise, S.F.: HarperCollins, 1993. Next to Charles Muses' speculation in the early 1960s, this is the earliest I've seen anyone suggest that DNA can be a superconductor at physiological temperatures. And somehow, in a dozen or so discussions of DNA superconductivity with John C. Lilly, he never mentioned these ideas of McKenna et McKenna, which certainly he must have known about.

Next to the literature on recombinant DNA, this book Zen and the Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998) by James Austin, Emeritus Professor of Neurology, University of Colorado, who participated, according to the acknowledgements, in several long Buddhist retreats and interactions with Zen masters at Kyoto's Ryoko-in and at the Zen Center in London while on sabbatical years at various departments of pharmacology and histology, and who is obviously well read in the contemporary secondary literature of Buddhism, is the most disturbing, infuriating, depressing thing I have read. Not only are the great saviors from genetic disease already trashing one genome after another -- on the basis of many false assumptions, such as the notion that the quantum biochemistry of DNA plays no significant role in genetics, and also via the commercial imperative -- soon the great neuroenhancers will be graduating from lobotomy and neuronal incineration via electroconvulsive “therapy” to selective chemical induction of neuron cell necrosis -- on the basis of many false assumptions, such as the notion that the quantum biochemistry of intraneuronal nuclear and mitochondrial DNA plays no significant role in neurology and neuroimmunology, and also via the commercial imperative -- justified by, in the neuromancer case, an appeal to Buddhism, the need for pre-emptive strikes on potential criminals, and furthering of the evolution of consciousness. Within two decades after discovering DNA, our great saviors convinced themselves that they knew every fundamental principle of biological inheritance, and on the basis of that twenty years in the lab felt themselves fully competent to take to hand and reorganize what they consider to be the results of billions of years of evolution. In a mere twenty years they understood it all! Now, barely twenty years after the discovery of neurotransmitters, our cognitive reprogrammers are convincing themselves they know enough about brain function to begin “highly localized ‘etching’ away within certain vital regions” to remove “dysfunctional, overemotionalized behavior” (page 656). Of course, this book, in plausible denial fashion, is about how this neuroleptic chemical “etching” is achieved via Zen meditation, ZaaaaaaaaaaaaaaughughZen, not about how it is that “Even after researchers inject the excitotoxins at a far-distant site subcutaneously, these chemical messengers still get into the circulation, hone in on the arcuate target, stimulate it, and destroy it” (page 654-55).

But lets back up a bit. When did prefrontal lobotomy -- leucotomy -- come into vogue? Soon after dementia praecox -- schizophrenia, with its non-ordinary-logic word salad -- was first designated a mental disease. This was in the run-up to World War One, at the very instant the Axiom of Choice, with its non-ordinary implications for the logic beloved of Bertrand Russell, was being dissimulated. When did electroconvulsive “therapy” -- in the days before plausibly deniable unilateral, non-dominant ECT -- come into vogue? Soon after the discovery of multivalued logics, which was quickly followed by the discovery of Schrödinger’s m-logically-valued quantum wave function, which, in turn, was dissimulated by Max Born as superposed probability amplitudes. This was in the run-up to World War Two, when certain Germans decided that the non-ordinary social logic of polymorphous perverse Weimar Berlin required the autogenic brain discharges associated with Autogenic Training, then being widely practiced in Berlin, be replaced with the externally induced seizures of ECT. If prefrontal leucotomy had always been reserved for the most unrepentant of mystics -- can’t allow the thalamus to communicate with all of the cortex! -- and ECT was reserved for the milder and intermittent forms of mysticism, then when was neuroleptic drug treatment of behavioral problems supplanted by the vogue of selective chemical neuronecrosis? Soon after information technologies, developed on basis of the functioning of m-logically-valued electrons, began to visibly undermine the social, political, and economic institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview construct, that is, of constitutional democracy and capitalism. This was in the run-up to World War Three, when certain Americans decided to pre-emptively “etch” the global socius, so as to remove structural impediments to continued functional dominance of outmoded Cartesian-Newtonian habituations: a major behavioral problem, the solution to which certainly will involve application of the basic principles of behavioral neurology.

Ever wonder why MSG (monosodium glutamate) has never been subjected to truth-in-labeling laws, why the U.S. Government has legalized the spraying of free glutamic acid on all American food crops, why only the most wealthy can maintain an MSG-free diet in the land of the free? Could there be a question of behavioral neurology involved? Let us ask Professor Austin (page 654):

…recent research suggests that the glutamate receptors on the next nerve cell are its vulnerable Achilles’ heel. Indeed, when excess glutamate overactivates this postsynaptic nerve cell, it causes it to die. [Austin’s emphasis.] So, could excitatory amino acids act to 'etch' away certain parts of the brain?…Monosodium glutamate provided the first striking evidence that excitotoxins do cause selective [Austin’s emphasis] nerve cell death in the brain… excess MSG destroys, selectively, 80 percent of the nerve cells in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus… This key nucleus is the site in the young brain most vulnerable to the excitotoxic effect of excitatory amino acids.

Austin also notes that “… in the key suprachiasmatic nucleus -- glutamate can phase-advance the circadian clock by stimulating the synthesis of nitric oxide” (page 619). He does not mention the effects of excess MSG on the bones of the inner ear, on the retina, on sex hormone output, and on many other non-neurological anatomic structures and physiologic functions. He does discuss the link between excess glutamate and two neurological diseases, but does not go into the positive correlations with incidence of various other degenerative diseases, as essayed in the large corpus of scientific literature on effects of MSG consumption. One is forced to ask whether the exclusion of MSG from truth-in-labeling laws is a fortuitous accident, or whether the Age of Selective Chemical Neuronecrosis is already upon us. As Austin states: “… cumulatively, each well-placed [Austin’s emphasis] tiny lesion could contribute to those much larger patterns of disconnections which could finally become the effective agencies of change” (page 657).

How does this “selective etching” of the brain relate to the several “neural prunings” developmental neurologists have recently discovered occur in preadolescent “maturation” of the brain -- maturation in quotes, as this may be a tacit value judgment on part of the neurologist. Austin gives us more detail on neural “etching” (page 655):

What causes the nerve cell to die an excitotoxic death? The following sequences unfold. First, excess glutamate is released from local nerve terminals. It then activates one or more kinds of its amino acid receptors on the next cell. These receptors depolarize the next nerve cell, open up its membrane channels so that more sodium and calcium flow in, and start a cascade of other changes. This affected nerve cell now fires excessively fast, in a burst of speed. At first it looks healthy. By the next day after the surge, however, the cell is obviously breaking down. This occurs because the excess calcium which leaks into it is setting off another round of toxic-metabolic and structural changes. Nitric oxide may be a collaborator, actively participating in this local process of delayed cell death.

This is very much like how Agent Orange kills plants: dioxin is a fertilizer gone wild, a dyscrasic growth factor hormone that speeds up metabolism so much that plant cells die in the delirium of such speeds, such manipulation of their biological clocks. MSG is a kind of neuronal Agent Orange, an agent that literally makes sheep eat straw as if it were hay. Is this how preadolescent neural prunings mature the brain?

But Austin is describing this unfolded sequence “… to explain how the brain of an enlightened sage could become structurally different [Austin’s emphasis] from before, not be merely thinking a few different thoughts” (page 654). He is not overtly recommending chemical induction of enlightenment through selective brain cell death, or mass behavior modification via saltpetering the food supply with MSG. But how plausible is this notion that Satori is the result of selective excitotoxic nerve cell death due to hyperstimulatory doses of “… repeated, [Austin’s emphasis] deep extraordinary states of consciousness” (page 656)? This is certainly a very similar notion to Sat Prem’s social-neuro-Darwinian interpretation of Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga: one must submit oneself to near lethal doses of Sri Aurobindo’s Light in order to make the cells repent of their tamas, their inconscient inertias, in order that they can be made to existentially recant and become vehicles for evolutionary emergence of Supermind. The target sites of particular interest to Austin are deep in the “archaic core” of the old brain, the limbic system, where the “vital functions of self-preservation” are localized, from whence the egoic self presumably emerges, as well as their prefrontal association areas: the foci of ECT and leucotomy. As Austin notes: “Someone, perhaps Hakuin, said that it will take five major awakenings before one finally pulls out the last roots of the self” (page 659). Be aware, here, that Austin is thinking in binary-logic terms: archaic wolf, enlightened no-wolf; old brain, new brain; self, no-self. No m-logical-values about it! Just like in the run-up to the first two world wars.

And, like everyone else in neurology, Austin is very concerned to root out non-adaptive pathways, uh, inadequately socialized behaviors, uh, non-conformance to the laws as construed by the secular medical rabbinate (or, for that matter, the institutionalized Buddhist patriarchy). As he says (page 658):

Some burnt-out human brains, legacies of the spaced-out drug culture starting from the 1960s, may have been 'etched' more at random, and in maladaptive ways. In contrast, the Zen meditative way presents several potential advantages. It proceeds very slowly, voluntarily, legally.

Austin, of course, does not explain how it is that excitotoxins, injected legally at a distant site subcutaneously by a medical doctor, hone in on the target cell, stimulate it, destroy it; while, illegally assimilated excitotoxins act randomly. No-wolf, wolf: two-valued logic of the binary mind. One does not wish to argue for the efficacy of psychotropic drugs in bringing about an enduring state of enlightenment, but one also does not want, off hand, to discount millennia of accumulated shamanistic pharmacopoeia and its traditions of practice. Since the patriarchic neurology establishment has played a major role in preventing systematic investigation of this pharmacopoeia, thus forcing it onto the street, it is a bit ingenuous for a mandarin of this establishment to castigate the resultant unexplained attributed randomized action of that which he has played a role in deeming illegal and not to be investigated. Certainly, one does not wish to argue against Austin's thesis that metanoia, change of mind, can alter brain morphology by altering brain chemistry: a reversal of the materialistic reductionism of the cognitive sciences, but one also does not want to buy into the full package he offers. Especially, one does not wish to adopt the anti-animistic bias of institutionalized Buddhism (“participation mystique” and “attachment” do have a great deal in common) and the genocidal counter-the-spirits preemptive strikes associated with evolutionary development of Judeo-Christian religious institutions, their dogmas, and their disparagement of behaviors associated with “the magic mushroom and the cross” as being the height of heresy.

We are told that “Yes, some dysfunctional circuits might seem to require a total uprooting. Others will benefit more from selective cutting and pruning” (page 659). So, what is behind this idea that the cells are the human stumbling blocks, that the animal in us is the adversary, that the archaic brainstem and its association areas in the new brain are to be etched, cut, pruned -- if the enlightenment of the Zen patriarch is to be stabilized? First of all, we are told that enlightenment is sort of like a sub-clinical degenerative disease (page 657):

Current studies, still in a preliminary stage, are already attempting to link excess glutamate with such obvious disease states as Huntington's chorea and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis… In the sages, the shrinkage and fragmentation of individual nerve cells could be much more subtle and selective than in the patients who die from these diseases.

One cannot rule out, of course, that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis could be caused, for instance, by an archaic-brain self-preservation-induced excitotoxic brain-cell-necrosis effect of the fear-for-ones-ego-sphere inculcated in a graduate student by the entropy-generating chaos of black-hole physics. One cannot rule this out, given that the identification with two-valued-logic-type Newtonian perspectives has been so intense that the notion of a “classical limit” has been compulsively maintained for a century in face of the onslaught by m-logically-valued quantum-relativistic perspectives (and has already been accompanied by two world wars!). But is the Zen patriarch's enlightenment just a mild form of this? Perhaps so. And if so, it would be understandable if some of us decided to look somewhere other than at one hand clapping for inspiration concerning the inner work of spiritual development.

Why does behavioral neurology believe that behaviorally-induced chemical induction of nerve cell death is the royal road to higher states of consciousness, if expertly done, and the path to degenerative disease, if carried out in a heavy-handed fashion? This thesis has not been verified. As Austin points out, this is merely a testable hypothesis (page 657). Surely there are many reasons for this belief. Could it be that all such reasons resolve to the tonic, to the fundamental tone of contemporary theories of brain function: the digital computer analogy? Maybe believing that the brain is a binary Boolean cellular-molecular processor, and not an m-logically-valued quantum processor, requires that states of functional integration other than the normative -- higher or lower, enlightenment or disease -- involve chemically-induced nerve cell death. And maybe believing that the brain is an m-logically-valued quantum processor, and not a binary Boolean cellular-molecular processor, requires that states of functional integration other than the normative… Whoopse! In this case, enlightenment and disease would not involve the same morphogenetic mechanisms. Cell death would be an expression of organic growth and repair processes or pathogenesis (be the pathology that of disease or that of aging) and enlightenment would involve activation of higher and higher orders of logical-value (affecting quantum properties of molecular and cellular function, such as semiconductant to superconductant transitions in nuclear and mitochondrial neuronal DNA, onset of Bose-Einstein condensation in multilayer polarized intracellular water, and transitions to higher-order microprocessing at the liquid-crystal interface constituting the cell membrane [better terminology, following Derek Dillon and Geoffrey Ling, for cell membrane: the “autopoy's Plasmahaut”]. In this quantum behavioral neurology, preadolescent neural prunings would not be marking stages of cognitive maturation, but would signify the effects of prescriptive enculturation (beginning in the womb) in stripping away the neuronal plasticity required to mediate processing on orders of logical-value greater than two. The brain makes several attempts to retain this inherent capacity, but, under prescriptive enculturation, at critical states, succumbs, and, in catharsis, engages in orgies of chemically-induced neuronal wipeout.

If this was an effect of prescriptive enculturation, why would preadolescent neural pruning be transcultural? Because prevailing and recent (last thousand years or so) cultural differentiations are not sufficiently deep as to touch cognitive processing in orders of logical-value greater than two. It appears, for instance, that not since lapsing of the ancient language of the Andes, Aymara, has there been a human language based on a 3-valued logic. And perhaps not since the rise of patriarchy has the human species had ready access to cognitive processing in orders of logical-value substantially higher than two -- except in the most isolated of animistic aboriginal communities. Consider Austin's treatment of the Buddhist karuna, frequently translated as selfless compassion. Compassion is described in the section of his book immediately prior to that devoted to neuronal etching. It is treated as an elaboration of natural human empathy, which reflects “the way we start with our own subjective state, and then project it out into some other person or object” (page 650). What distinguishes this from compassion, according to Austin, is that empathy carries no responsibility to act, whereas compassion does call upon the sage to “reach out selflessly to respond in the most sensitive, appropriate way” (page 651). This is no artifice or mere altruism “because the process is automatic” (page 651). In other words, as Austin says (page 652-3):

…self = other. The once isolated human being has finally entered into the ultimate human equation… Once compassion issues from the ground level of being, the whole person becomes free to relate, ecologically, to the entire environment… all beings are, in fact, Buddha beings… they are all part of the whole.

This is the binary mind's take on karuna, a take rooted in 2-valued-logical processing. In “selfless compassion” -- a very poor rendering of the involved state -- self does not equal other, self is other. But “self is other” violates a rule of 2-valued logic: no A is not-A. So the binary mind must conclude that “self is other” really means that “self equals other”: they are equivalent. But that is not the case in the state as actually experienced. It is not that Buddha beings are “all part of the whole”. Any given Buddha being is the whole! Just as a small piece of a hologram contains all the information of the whole, not merely a part thereof. Just as the elements of any proper subset (the part) of a denumerable transfinite set can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the elements of the whole transfinite set (the whole). Not “no A is not-A” but “A is absolutely not-A”. This absolute absolutely requires the mth-order of logical-value. Selfless compassion does, as Austin says, impart a sense of profound responsibility, but not of the mundane sort usually described in devotional discourse. If, when sitting upon the floor, one realizes the profound responsibility one has to keep the floor down, one is entering upon a state of selfless compassion. Anyone who has studied a traditional Japanese art form knows that the student is presented with a long list of kata (rule, recipe, algorithm) to which he must conform, while at the same time he is told to be absolutely spontaneous. If in selfless compassion “the process is automatic”, as Austin says, then the involved “automatic” is very far from the everyday meaning of the word “automatic”. Compassion is not something that happens to you, like falling in love -- nor is empathy. If empathy is projecting subjective states onto the other or the object, what is identification? And how is identification different from empathy? Identification, attachment, empathy, possession, contagion, participation mystique, compassion: all of these are highly related states, but profoundly differing. Deciding upon a strategy of neuronal “etching” without deeply penetrating the involved relatings and differings is surely not a good idea.

Great! Maybe you will, after all, get a handle on political prefiguration through film. But in order to actually do so you've got to formalistically transform the medium of cinema -- otherwise, there will only be a pretense to prefiguration. New realism suffers all the limitations of socialist realism through neglect of the actual psychological forcing functions on collective behaviors.

The screen has to split, recover, split again, spring into multi-dimensions, implode from freeze-frame realism to Cubist superposition to pure abstraction of the visual space perspective referents. You have to visually attack the notion that events are connected syllogistically via binary logic, via antecedent-consequent relations. Historical connectivity is not single-termed, not simple cause and effect; it is multiple, a multi-valued relation operating through thematic synchronisity. The identification induced in the viewer with the protagonist or heroine, with the interviewee or interviewer must become a multiple: this can only be accomplished by splitting the screen. Visual white-noise results only if the viewer is not led into the experience of multi-awareness with expert modulation. It is about personal and impersonal, individual and collective in the historical process: political prefiguration tilts these historical equations. The personal-individual viewer must be subtly shifted into a viewing-point dislocation: from the sequential vantage of a single point into simultaneous multi-point lensing. The viewer's horopter curves must converge, but not gratuitously. The multiple foci each must relate to a dimension of historical causality and their associated sensory modalities (history is a human-created gestalt) -- the total nested cinematic presentation (at any freeze-frame/sound-stop) being a synaesthetic capture of a historical conjuncture. Slowly, by repeated exposure, the ego-focus identification induced in the viewer by linear-time sequencing is modulated to the multi-track self of the actual historical actor, embedded as he is in the collective unconscious.

The score has to have its own Kandinsky-window on the screen, bleed in and bleed out of the docu-drama, this Kandinsky providing a read on the subliminal underlay of all historical junctures and conjunctures: the concretely real in history being unfoldment of the enfolded intersections, abstractly, archetypally held in the unknowing of the human collectivity. Prefiguring the viewer means giving him direct access to this realm of unknowing: musical form, in its native abstraction, seen on the big silver screen (exploded out of the psyche of the actor portraying participation in historical event). Visual white-noise of multiple-tracking is white-noise because the ear is not adequately helping the eye; auditory white-noise of simultaneous stacked motifs is white-noise because the eye is not adequately helping the ear. Historical thematic superpositioning (i.e., conjuncture) is not consciously readable, and is therefore an autonomous complex, because of the separation of sensory modalities: ear-eye dis-coordination. Cinematic prefiguration can only proceed by corrective lensing and by hearing aids.

Time we have been taught is in remembering. History makes memory; memory makes history. If cinema is to prefigure, it must transform not history, not memory, but the memory/history :: history/memory equation. Time is not in remembering; it is in forgetting. By forgetting simultaneous multi-tracking through induced identification-as-viewer, we construct time for history as we conceive it. Prefiguration in cinema deconstructs conception in history as time. By un-identification of the viewer -- slowly, non-traumatically -- historical unfoldment under preconception is returned to its enfolded bud. Docu-drama, newsreel file footage window bleedover, scored Kandinsky-window, decomposing the concretely real to its enfolded abstract properties presented sequentially and in overlay, and so on and so on.

The century of genocide transpired because all of this started with discovery of multi-valued functions in the 1820s, wildly entered the arts with Wagner's Tristan chords and Impressionistic timelessness, induced an enormous, fear-driven schizoid back-reaction after having constellated a massive cultural transformation that was stopped dead in its tracks. Prefiguration in cinema is the only way to pick up the cultural fragments, put them into synaesthetic semblance, get the ear to help the eye, the eye to help the ear.

I read about 70 pages of Mahesh Bhatt's book, U. G. Krishnamurti, A Life (N.Y.: Penguin, 1992, 2001), including the 40 pages you directed my attention to. My honest spontaneous response is that I intensely dislike accounts like this because of the manipulative intent built into the book's writing style and the manner and tone of U. G. Krishnamurti's discourse. His account of the “calamity”, given on pages 92 and 93, involving psychophysiologic aftermath of emotional insight into the questions “How do I know that I am in that state?” and “How do I know that this is that state?” is almost identical to realization that “I am nothing but the intersection of Prakriti and Purusha” Derek Dillon describes as the immediate precursor to his gran mal seizure, itself similar to U. G.'s “explosion” in “every cell, every nerve, every gland”. The phenomenologies U. G. describes as occurring on the immediately succeeding days are all described in detail in MOON, to include the cross-modal translation of sensory dimensions, implosion/extrojection of the visual object, dissolution of body image, the rather mundane viewing point dislocation involving the dancer preceding the “calamity” (given on page 82). The difference being that Derek, as a result of repeated experience, close observation, and phenomenological analysis, gives cogent explanations as to how these phenomenologies transpired.

There is also a big difference between U. G.'s answer to his questions, i.e., “Suddenly the question disappeared. Nothing happened -- the question just disappeared” (page 93), and Derek's realization, i.e., “I am nothing but the intersection of Prakriti and Purusha”. This difference is why I would fully agree with U. G.'s statement given on page 113: “I did not know what was happening to me. I had no reference point at all.” This, I think, is a completely accurate statement, but a statement manipulated, by the context within which it is set, with intent toward its audience. There is an axe to grind against certain aspects of Indian culture (religion and family). This axe is apparent in the manner U. G. conducted his life in the period prior to his “calamity”. And the content of his experience -- which seems to me as indicating the presence of lateral mental cleavage -- is significantly influenced by the fact that he had for a long period not been gainfully employed and was living off the gratis provided by the woman then in his life. Absence of livelihood establishes a distorted relationship with nature and this, inevitably, will be reflected in inner experience. I would also say that U. G. clearly entertained expectations similar in effect to Aurobindo's penchant for “spiritual Darwinism” which preprogrammed his experience. He describes a lot of pain, headaches, and discomfort; there was induction of dis-ease on the part of others around him (the subtle suggestion being given to the reader by Bhatt that this inductive effect is an indication of U. G.'s spiritual status). U. G. maintains that there was no bliss, that all the talk about bliss is just crap. Pain. Changing the cells, changing “every cell, every nerve, every gland”, is a superhuman process. Pain, man. Such a superlative achievement has got to hurt because the cells are going to resist at every juncture. This is conscious evolution, man, just as Aurobindo says. Blissing is just a bunch of promotional hype. “And that is the miracle. It cannot be used as a model and duplicated by others” as U. G. says on page 113. It cannot be used by others because this was One Step for Mankind made by yours truly, U. G. Krishnamurti.

And I have no doubt that U. G.'s state has persisted, given the phenomenology of its onset. This is a state, however, that Derek Dillon would never wish to experience. He would wish to skirt such a state. Derek Dillon, who does not suffer from lateral mental cleavage, as reflected in the difference between “I am nothing but the intersection of Prakriti and Purusha” (Prakriti and Purusha being somewhats or whatnots beyond Derek Dillon's nothingness) and “Nothing happened -- the question just disappeared”. In the aftermath period, U. G. revels in no-mind as absence of mind, while Derek Dillon maintains that “no-mind is not absence of mind, but the presence of the multivalue.” Major difference in the identified semantic import.

U. G.'s attitude and tone, developed long before the “calamity”, as described by Bhatt, is one of mystical pejorative nihilism. This was the mental set he cultivated and carried to the setting and setup of his “calamity”. Such an attitude contrasts greatly with the mental set leading to Derek Dillon's gran mal seizure. Derek was gainfully employed ten hours a day, six days a week, working closely with trees and other plants, often in states of deep empathic interlock. This was after four years of daily walking meditation and using the digging of trees as a form of self-observation of his “moving center” throughout the day, after quite a few years of inner work (mental, emotional, and moving center purification) as set out most specifically in Maurice Nicoll's six volumes, and long practice of Edmund Jacobson's techniques of progressive relaxation. The physical labor was grueling, brutal even, often in hour after hour of cold rain or day after day of 95-degree heat and the humidity of Washington, D.C. Throughout this whole interregnum, Derek, employed by a Japanese nursery, was eating a Japanese diet almost exclusively: brown rice, miso, shoyu, seaweed, vegetables, pickles, raw and cooked fish, some chicken. Green tea and rice crackers or yokan on “coffee breaks”. He was celibate throughout most of the period. At this time, following a medical examination for employee health insurance, the doctor asked him if he had been a professional athlete, as only professional athletes have such physical exam results.

Yet, even with this physical constitution, mental and emotional set, Derek still had a major seizure -- which cannot, obviously, be viewed unreservedly as a positive outcome. This can be explained as follows, and all of what follows, it appears, will also apply to U. G. When, by whatever means of all-the-more increasing concentration and rhythm entrainment -- to include total comprehension of some fundamental metaphysical insight into the order of things -- one is able to get ones “internal processes” into the requisite phase correlation, however momentarily, a semiconductant to superconductant transition will take place in cellular mitochondrial DNA. This probably will first occur in some subset of the corpus of cellular perineural DNA molecules, but could also involve mitochondrial DNA of any other cell type -- neuronal, collagen, muscle, and so on -- simultaneously or in subsequent elaborations. Onset of phase correlation permits the semiconductant to superconductant transition (which would spontaneously occur were it not being blocked in various ways: neutralization antagonizing forms of resistance, forced indoctrination, chronic stress, miasms, toxins, impressed ambient fields and other environmental forcing functions, and so on) by allowing resonant coupling with ambient radiation of the correct frequency, waveform, intensity, and orientation. This radiation is beat down through a frequency cone in a manner analogous to that which occurs via the antenna and “tank” of a superheterodyne radio receiver. Details of the microphysics are described in the superconductant DNA paper.

This transition in conductivity status will begin with a single perineural cell and then spread to other perineural cells by resonant coupling and long-range phase correlation. As mitochondrial DNA transits to superconductivity, its electron transport processes are able to receive by resonant exchange greater and greater energy density from the ambient radiational field. Mitochondrial clocks are reset via changes in electron temperature oscillation rates. The ATP factories shift into high gear and energy throughput increases. Protein synthesis and all the rest becomes far more efficient. Osmotic transfer of nutrients across cell membranes speeds up by changes in the rate-limiting processes governing the electrons involved in the active transport mechanism. Transmembrane ion currents are enlivened. There are multiple cascade effects through metabolic pathways that spread out to affect the whole body -- to affect the whole body, that is, if there are no obstructions to the cascade effects initiated by the semiconductant to superconductant transition. Free electrons associated with the DNA molecule form parcels and move in bands as intra-molecular and intermolecular electron transport chains. This transition will be impeded or minimized if there are, for instance, metalointercolators of DNA. Heavy metal toxins. These obstruct phase coherent flow of free electrons. The same applies to RNA, neuropeptides, enzymes, and other molecules involved in transcription, synthesis, and metabolic pathways. Toxic substances of many types can obstruct or slow down phase coherent propagation, thus disturbing, for instance, correlation of internal clocks timing pathway cycles relative to each other. If receptor sites are filled with mimetic ligands, this too will impede cascade effects of the increased energy made available to the ATP factories, preventing, for instance, faster osmotic nutrient transfer across cell membranes. In the presence of toxins, many of the membrane receptor sites simply won't function in optimal coordination with the other receptors. De-phased clocks, presence of too many oxidative free-radicals, improper pH balances within various organs, inadequate buffering substance at the right place at the right time, and all the other failures in meeting the demand for a higher level of functional integration.

If, because of a lack of purity, because of the presence of toxins -- of exogenous or endogenous origins: biochemical effects of environmental pollution, emotional pollution, mental pollution, chronic stress effects -- the organism's cells cannot meet the demand for increased efficiency established by the semiconductant to superconductant transition, the experiential spin off of this circumstance will depend on the magnitude of the disparity of the demand and the response. At a minimal disparity between demand and response, as the semiconductant to superconductant transition in perineural mitochondrial DNA transpires and the ATP factories supercharge, endorphins flood the brain and the rest of the organism yielding an ecstatic, orgasmic whole-body rush. But, as the cellular response cannot meet the demand for increased efficiency, subjectively the individual feels the whole body, in seemingly every cell, go into a tension-type vibratory ambivalency lockdown that rejects the ecstasy as too, too intense, something that cannot possibly be withstood. The cascade effects of the increased energy density simply can't move through all the cellular, molecular, and submolecular obstacles.

If disparity between the new demand and its answering response is greater, there will be a reflex response in the CNS. If the initiating phase correlation is great, there will be bleed-over from the perineural cell system to the neuron cells, with onset of long-range phase correlation between neurons (onset, that is, of superconductivity in nuclear neuronal DNA), this onset marching from cell to cell across the cortex. This march will be associated with a very great flood of endorphins. If, under this circumstance, the organism's cellular corpus cannot meet the very large demand in cascade effects, there is a reflex response -- probably by neuropeptide reflux back to the brainstem Reticular Activating System (RAS) -- which stops dead in its tracks the march of long-range phase correlation across the cortex, initiating onset of a seizure, the magnitude of which depends upon the disparity between the initiating demand and the failed response. The orderly march of long-range phase correlation -- a superconductant quantum tunneling effect -- disintegrates into random spread of action-potential -- a non-quantum effect -- across the cortex: onset of a seizure.

If the load of impurities in all their various forms carried by the body is very great, the cascade effects initiated by the semiconductant to superconductant transition will be rapidly quenched, so rapidly quenched that there will be no answering response and no endorphin rush. Pain, rather than ecstasy, will be the hallmark of the experience, of the state. I see no reason why this condition could not persist for a long period if something were not done to “purify the receptacle”.

My understanding of the central message of Joseph Chilton Pearce's book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg -- related to the decision I was at that time so long ago, the 1970s, procrastinating upon -- was essentially that “culturally redeeming activities” are a form of entrapment. I understood that this is true, yet I also knew that, using current terminology, the enantiodromia, the between-ness, the non-orientability, the circular relation, the interplay between collective and individual, impersonal and personal, abstract and concrete, general and particular mandate as a framework condition that whole is holographic part, that there always is an indisposable distributed middle establishing a graded transparency between the poles of any set of opposites. One way to understand the import of this is to posit an imperative to always stay “between”, always choose the middle way. Another is to recognize in the framework condition the fact that the collective state is the individual state, and that resolution of the individual dilemma is resolution of the collective dilemma: any separation between the two is artifice. There is no real resolution of the individual dilemma that is not simultaneously a resolution of the collective dilemma. These two interrelated recognitions -- between-ness and identity transparency -- are not necessarily contradictory, but if both are accepted, between-ness is relegated to a strategic decision, as opposed to a fundamental principle. Another available strategic decision upon reaching such recognition is "voluntary dissociation", which can be regarded a hard form of Richard Rose's “between-ness”. Merrell-Wolf's “High Indifference” ignores the inescapability of identity transparency, whereas “voluntary dissociation” makes the attempt to embrace it without reservation. Voluntary dissociation means making the attempt to maintain conscious presence simultaneously on all degrees of between-ness, on all shades of the distributed middle. The prevailing rule structure, the prescriptive boundaries codified as culture, set the terms of the collective dilemma, which, by identity transparency, are simultaneously -- in analogical form -- the terms of the individual dilemma writ small in a nested hierarchy spanning the continuum abstract to concrete. The attempt to maintain simultaneous presence, or observer state, as an ontological multiple -- in the “vertical”, not as a “laterally”-fragmented existential entity -- mandates a struggle with the elements of the collective dilemma which preclude the individual from maintaining the state of being an ontological multiple. Most of these elements are factors constellated in the collective unconscious. Though constellated in the collective unconscious, these elements, nonetheless, map onto concrete cultures as collective imperatives, unassailable beliefs, and so on. There is nothing collective that is not individual and nothing individual that is not collective.

Sometime during the 70s, without a specific act of decision, I adopted the strategy of voluntary ontological dissociation. Gravitation to this decision was occasioned by much dream imagery, such as finding myself washing vast quantities of dirty underwear, and the like. I have pretty much held to this strategic decision over the intervening years -- until recently. This strategy involved concealment, a focus on comprehending origins of the filth in cultural underwear, not engaging in any inner-work practice I could not envision as potentially being generalizable into some type of learned collective behavior, wrapping every potential pearl in a pack of mud sufficiently foul smelling as to alienate prospective interested vermin, finding ways to be in proximity to cultural institutions and activities without being a part of them, making small provocative probes on people and institutions to help get their measure, making small positive initiatives and backing off when it became clear no opening existed where one had appeared possible. Not all cultural boundaries are equally suppressive of the possibility of maintaining voluntary ontological dissociation. Part and whole exist in infinite nesting such that, given identity transparency, any particular failure is every general failure -- and vise versa. My focus on penetrating collective events was maintained at the level of intensity it was because I experienced those collective events as personal events, and because I knew equally well that personal events are collective events. This is not necessarily schizophrenia; it may be authentic identity transparency. It becomes schizophrenia only if mediated by personification, only if personification produces hallucinations-without-insight. Kazantzakis understood this profoundly in making his statement that “Man must save God!”. What is a happening “down here” is a structure “up there”. No matter how man or God-man might shift his focus of consciousness from level to level, the responsibility for reciprocal maintenance is an inescapable framework condition. God exists only by virtue of this inescapability.

After 30 years of pursuing this strategy, however, it has increasingly become obvious that it is no longer viable. So I am once more in a place where a strategic decision is required, and have again been procrastinating. Though it is certainly possible to make a leap on the cliff face, grab a branch far up, one can never hope to stay there if the prevailing collective dilemma precludes it: the psychological induction of identity transparency guarantees that, no matter how resolute one might be in the attempt to maintain High Indifference. Moreover, what would be achieved in making such a leap? It's all a matter of strategy rather than application of principles, whatever their refinement -- how most effectively to fulfill the requirements of reciprocal maintenance. If one finds one of oneselves in this world, this circumstance is not for no reason. Whatever that reason may be, it is related to the happenings “down here” which are structures “up there”. Given the pass to which the presently prevailing circumstance on this planet has come, it is very difficult to ascertain what strategy is required to fulfill reciprocal maintenance requirements of the prevailing conjuncture. To me it looks dire, so dire that only the worst cases may open up any possibility whatsoever of positive movement. I am edging toward the judgment that cooling my heels completely and working only on what may be required after the cusp has been passed is the responsible course to follow.

I don't understand what you mean. Getting paid for doing something significant? I've never heard of such a thing. If you got paid for it, it's insignificant. I find increasingly I can't give credence to the “built environment” -- be it physical, cognitive, or however human. I do what I can, however failingly, to live present to the universe, not to the “built environment”.

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