Our psyches do not speak in the feeling-neutral and hyperrational language we have been programmed by our culture to speak in. It does not adorn itself in the neat and succinct categories and definitions of our logical analysis. Rather it always arises miraculously and by surprise. It sabotages our constant busy-ness and planning with sudden insights and epiphanies out of nowhere when we least expect them. It has to do this, otherwise its communications would be lost in all the noise and racket we have numbed ourselves by getting used to it. It has to distract, to interrupt, to punctuate, the largely unconscious and non-reflective "floating along" that is our minds' daily mode of operation. "Wake up" it keeps saying! "You are asleep at the wheel again! The here and now is all that is! And it is infinite!"
"Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle—for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.”---Virginia Woolf
It is apparent to me that we never really can be conscious of the present moment. What we think is the present is really just a fabrication or prop we make by projecting the fleeting memory of past happenedness as futural more happening. As if there is this infinitesimal sliver between memory and anticipation which never changes and contains our very existence. But such static present being is an illusion. This is not to say that the present isn't an a priori or necessary idea or principle that structures our very being-in-the-world. Just like the horizon that the traveler can never reach and isn't real but which continuously persists and makes possible his whole journey to elsewhere. It is the repeatability of the just fading moment, as the barren possibility of projected "againness", that creates the illusion of immediacy in which the repeated and its repetition get confused with each other and fuse together in one seemingly timeless and changeless moment. The present is the blurred affect or liminal zone that occurs where past touches future.
"The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
---Henri Bergson
edit: Contemplating this further, the past not only is projected in possibility as "againness" or repetition but also as "never againness" or finality. Relatively rare, it is a largely negative experience implying the futurally projected and absolute cessation of the present as non-existence or death. But this is paradoxical in that the present already entailed being an illusory state of staticity or non-change. How can this ideal state of non-change itself cease to be in itself? The answer is that the present was never really real or "in itself" to begin with and so it is inherently indistinguishable in its persistence and in its oblivion. It is roughly analogous to thinking we could kill a ghost. Or like trying to destroy energy. What never existed in itself thus can never not exist in itself. A lingering hint here of our immortality then? Only as we re-cognize ourselves not as static objects but as the inherent lunge of pastness into future becoming. We are, iow, transcendental in essence--the enablement of what is fading away to renew and encounter its return in the form of nascent and new possibility.
We will never properly understand matter and its antimony empty space until we synthesize them both together like Einstein did with energy and mass. Matter derives all its possibilities of structure and form from the underlying geometric order of pure space. And space in turn derives its own physicality and measurability and locality in relation to material objects. Together they constitute an indivisible unity, like body and mind. The essence of whatness is deeply entangled with the essence of whereness. There is only space-matter in the end, two seemingly opposite manifestations of some higher unknown thing. How can substance and form converge in the end? Opaqueness and transparence? Fullness and emptiness? Unit and universe? Locality and non-locality? Only thru the fundamental orchestrations, the implicate order, of symmetry and scale invariance demonstrated in fractal geometry.
Edit: The problem of the unity of gravity with the quantum nature of reality highlights the continued superficial polarity of space vs matter. But if space and matter are two aspects of the same thing, this is resolved as as the smoothness of space and the particality of matter fuse together as one underlying substrate. Exactly how different colored pixels on your old color TV could generate smooth homogeneous patches of colors on your screen. In the case of gravity vs the quantum substrate, this will only be solved by a higher dimensional unity as one phenomenon. One consciousness-generating metaphor. "As above, so below." The whole the sum and yet more than all it parts. Hofstadter's strange loop.
Due to the diffuse nature of reflected light, in which objects in a room can be illuminated on all sides by having just a window or two, it makes sense to ask where the real shadow of our body is located. It's certainly not around me or on the ground or wall. In fact it isn't visible at all due to the ambience of light all around me. Therefore the shadow of my body is located precisely inside my body. There is complete darkness in there, a darkness only intensified by the casting of all my shadows from every angle of illumination of my body into the same interior space. Even more amazing, this shadow inside my body is a 3 dimensional one, precisely identical in shape and size to my own body. You are thus one with your shadow, which lives and breathes and maybe even thinks its own thoughts under your skin! For not only is it a shadow of surrounding light, but it is a shadow of your consciousness as well, which forms the hinterside or negative form of your own observable body from all angles. Strange that consciousness would cast shadows like light does. But it makes sense, being the ever lurking and unconscious counterpart to your outwardly presented self.
Some things are almost impossible to explain or describe. Imagine trying to tell a jungle native what a cartoon is. Or describing the color blue to a blind person.This doesn't mean that cartoons and the color blue are all that mysterious or unknowable. It just means that like many other things, they can only be understood by experiencing them yourself.
It is the nature of all energy to go where it is not. Heat dissipates into coolness, electricity flows towards ground, light radiates out towards darkness, sounds echo out into the vastness of silence, air rushes to fill a vacuum, and force seeks what can most resist it. It is as if all energy needs its opposite to define itself--to reunify itself by merging with its split off self. Is not the same true for consciousness, always aiming for what is most unconscious, most real, most other to us? To restore the broken symmetry between what is known with what is unknowable.
The myth of a force propagated thru space lies in the fact that force only exists where there is some degree of resistance to it. With nothing to be against, power fades into impotence. Even an attractive force exists only as there is resistance to its pull. Gravity itself is exerting nothing until it encounters an inertia or momentum of resistance. And once the object is moving towards it at terminal velocity, the attracting force no longer exists. The drag of air resistance exactly cancels out the pull of gravity, resulting in free fall.
It is clear that we as humans have no idea what consciousness is. Taking apart the brain and reducing it to the finest particles reveals no property we can rightly call consciousness. Indeed, the same is true for matter as well, which also has the tendency to disappear the more we break it down into particles. The same uncertainties and indeterminacy we encounter in consciousness at the macro level also plagues particles of matter at the quantum level. And per Wheeler, there is a fundamental identity between what consciousness is and what matter is. He saw this as information--the it from the bit. Here again is that peculiar symmetry between inner and outer, top and bottom, where the seemingly most disrelated scales of concurrent and inverted events somehow recouple together in some sort of causally-interconnected if not quantum-entangled relationship.
Mirrors are funny things. Any attempt to take a picture of one only captures you taking a picture of yourself. Likewise with consciousness. Any attempt to understand it only exposes us as being outside of it attempting to understand it. Both the mirror and consciousness reveal only thru their act of disappearing. Both make us appear to ourselves but only by being the transparent medium of all appearance. How can we observe what only ever faithfully reflects our very act of observing it?
Live your life in such a way that when you look back on it in your older years it makes you wisely chuckle.
As a shy and budding youth, I was once traumatized by my college sociology class teacher, who was an ex-cop, when he actually came onto me in front of the whole class TWICE!. Not exactly the introduction to sociology I was hoping for!
But I got him back good. It just so happened that my sister Deborah had taken the same class with him and told me the answer to a question he liked to pose, which was "what is the number one factor influencing the growth of cities?" So one day he asks the same question to the class. As he stood there smugly smirking and shooting down all the students' answers one after another, I suddenly blurted out "wind direction?" You should've seen his face as he begrudgingly admitted that I was right!
It is incredibly sad to me that people who commit suicide often do so so as not make a huge mess for someone to have to clean up. So they do it in a bathtub or check into a hotel room. The lingering obligation not to impose on anyone-- to not be a "burden" to their loved ones--faithfully clutched to the very end.
How does one prompt the hive mind when it's all around us and in us? How does one send a message to the containing System that can basically sway it or even change it? Learn from the bees! When a bee needs to relay information or feedback to its hive as to where some pollen is , it encodes that information in the form of dancing. The hive becomes one big rave with bees translating each other's jostling movements as new data. It's a kind of uploading of one bee's experience into the bees' cloudlike collective consciousness--but only thru some mysterious kinaesthetically-transmitted and organically-choreographed language.
The lesson is clear--to alter the System we have only to interact authentically with those immediately around us, which exponentially propagates outward as a wave of new awareness--a GPS signal of hidden treasure-- thruout the whole System. Every one of us, wherever we are and however we do it, has the power to shake the whole world awake from the bottom up. Stop branding the splash. Just make waves!
It is the fundamental nature of the universe to evolve in such a way that there are increasing possibilities for what can happen in the next adjacent moment. There is thus over time not only more in the sense of another moment but also more in the sense of what can happen in that moment. This is how matter emerged, and then living matter emerged, and then conscious matter emerged, and then whatever is next will emerge. Such cosmic innovations only became possible after a period of time and with other things happening first. Which means they were impossible up UNTIL a certain moment. I call this "unfoldment"--the accelerating possibilization and "expansion" of eventhood itself.
So what COULD unfold next? I suspect the emergence of psychoid matter--a kind of monist being that is physical and ideational at the same time, and ultimately neither. Such is the implication of various anomalous phenomena like uaps, ghosts, psychic powers, synchronicities, mystical states, psychedelic experiences, magical manifestations, religious miracles, alien abductions, NDEs, and a vast array of thought forms including cryptids and various supernatural "tulpa-like" and archetypal beings:
"In his later work, Carl Jung introduced the concept of the psychoid to describe phenomena that appeared to operate at the threshold between psyche and matter. The psychoid was neither purely psychological nor fully physical, but occupied an intermediate domain where symbolic meaning and objective events seemed to coincide.
Jung developed the psychoid concept in response to observations that could not be adequately explained by psychological processes alone, including synchronistic events and anomalous correspondences between inner experience and external reality.
Crucially, the psychoid was not proposed as an explanatory model, but as a boundary marker — an acknowledgment that certain phenomena resisted reduction to established psychological or biological mechanisms."----- https://spiritidinstitute.org/jung-and-t...-boundary/
“We are all future butterflies who think, wrongly, that we are just slugs. And we are evolving, whether we admit it or not, into something else. Something with wings.”― Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
The scientists in plato's cave swear they have deduced the nature of all that is seeable as a system of relationships between the shadows and the light. They have even defined what they call the laws of how each shadow will interact with the other shadows. But try as they may the closer they look at the shadows the more they evaporate into nothing at all. Reaching for them they dissolve in their grasp. The reality remains far different in fact, a play of silhouettes put on by unknown puppeteers for the sheer entertainment of the imprisoned cave dwellers.
Reality is not just one hologram of 3D light images. It is an overlay of multiple holograms of sound and force and smell and taste and temperature and texture all precisely superimposed and synced up with each other as one seamless multisensory immersive movie. And what really seals the deal is that our own bodies are parts of this many-layered projected movie, moving about and feeling itself and hearing itself and seeing itself as a solid and sentient character in this movie. Thus everything appears to be real to our bodies, not because it IS real, but because the holographic movie is happening on many energy levels at the same time. Nothing about the movie is incidental, everything in it happening just as it is programmed to do. We are all sealed up inside a holographic sensorium! And the only thing real in it is whatever happens next!
"One night years ago in Paris trying to read myself to sleep, I discovered that Verlaine loved Rimbaud. And in his fashion Rimbaud loved Verlaine. Which led to a hip-hop farce in the rain at a train station. The Gare du Midi I think. The two poets exchanging angry words. And like flies to buttermilk a crowd attracted to the quarrel till Verlaine pulls a pistol. People scatter and Rimbaud, wounded before, hollers for a cop. Just about then, at the moment I begin mixing up their story with mine, with the little I recall of Verlaine’s poetry—Il pleure dans mon coeur/Comme plet sur la ville—lines I recited to impress you, lifetimes ago, didn’t I, the first time we met—just then with the poets on hold in the silence and rain buffeting the train station’s iron-roofed platform, I heard the music of the silence of Thelonious Monk. . . .
Thelonious Monk playing somewhere. So softly it might have been present all along as I read about the sorry-assed ending of the poets’ love affair—love offered, consumed, spit out, two people shocked, speechless, lurching away like drunks, like sleepwalkers, from the mess they’d made. Monk’s music just below my threshold of awareness, scoring the movie I was imagining, a soundtrack inseparable from what the actors were feeling, from what I felt watching them pantomime their melodrama.
Someone playing a Monk record in Paris in the middle of the night many years ago and the scratchy music seeping through ancient boardinghouse walls a kind of silence, a ground against which the figure of pitta-pattering rain was displayed, rain in the city, rain Verlaine claimed he could hear echoing in his heart, then background and ground reversed and Monk the only sound reaching me through night’s quiet.
Listening to Monk, I closed the book. Let the star-crossed poets rest in peace. Gave up on sleep. Decided to devote some quality time to feeling sorry for myself. Imagining unhappy ghosts, wondering which sad stories had trailed me across the ocean ready to barge into the space sleep definitely had no intention of filling. Then you arrived. Silently at first. You playing so faintly in the background it would have taken the surprise of someone whispering your name in my ear to alert me to your presence. But your name, once heard, I’d have to confess you’d been there all along."
John Edgar Wideman
"The Silence of Thelonious Monk"
Esquire
November 1997
Photograph: Thelonious Monk by Erich Auerbach
Jun 22, 2026 08:06 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 22, 2026 10:54 PM by Magical Realist.)
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