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tinycartridge · 5 years

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Approaching Infinity ⊟

[Guest writer Caroline Delbert brings us a fully unexpected article that manages to be both philosophical exploration and interview-based journalism, at the same time. I couldn’t be happier to share this piece! Find more from Caroline at her Twitter and Medium. -jc]

We live in a golden age of computing power. Our games are filled with giant procgen worlds and RNGs and thousands of ticking background variables. The math is surpassing human ability far faster than we can grasp, and we’ve, I think correctly, put it to work making the grass in Stardew Valley so fun to swoosh through with a sword. But the idea of infinity horrifies people more than almost anything else and remains as confusing and terrifying as ever. As our games get closer to endlessly detailed, I chose four designers who’ve worked on four of my favorite games of the last few years, all with totally different ways of using space, time, and more to give the feeling of an infinite playspace. I’ve also been spelunking the idea of infinity itself and why it makes us feel so uncomfortable and intrigued.

We Contain Multitudes

What is infinity? We aren’t born with an understanding of the idea of something that never ends. Psychology researcher Ruma Falk put together existing studies about infinity. “[C]hildren of ages 8-9 and on seem to understand that numbers do not end, but it takes quite a few more years to fully conceive, not only the infinity of numbers, but also the infinite difference between the set of numbers and any finite set.” You could spend your entire life counting out loud and get to 2 billion. But in calculus, which is all about approaching infinity, a billion is rounded down to zero. An average 2019 computer could count to a billion in about two seconds, depending on the code you wrote. That’s how tiny a billion still is. Falk calls the distance between our human billions and the idea of infinity an “abyssal gap.”

When I talked with Immortal Rogue developer Kyle Barrett about this project, he mentioned Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagined an infinite-seeming library of books filled with random combinations of letters and punctuation. He sets out 25 total characters and 410 pages. I averaged a few lines from David Foster Wallace’s primer on infinity, Everything and More, which had 57.5 characters per line. For just two lines of, say, 50 characters each, there are over six googol possible versions: that’s a 6 with 100 zeroes after it, for just two lines of a book of 410 pages. The largest math Excel let me do was for about four lines total, which became 3 with 300 zeroes after it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has spent decades writing about how humans think about problems and ideas. His 2013 book Intuition Pumps is filled with helpful analogies, including a spin on the Library of Babel. “Since it is estimated that there are only 10040 particles in the region of the universe we can observe, the Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object,” Dennett explained. But despite containing far more books than the possible volume of our entire region of space, that number of books is still a real number, not infinite! The takeaway from all this, and then I swear I’ll stop talking about math, is that nothing we can measure in real life is truly infinite. Infinity is a pure concept reserved for mathematicians and philosophers.

Playing with Time: Immortal Rogue

In Kyle Barrett’s 2019 mobile game Immortal Rogue, you begin in prehistory and fight your way through progressive eras in chunks of 100 years. But time is a flat circle, and eventually your progress is bombed back into preagricultural oblivion. The mechanics of Barrett’s game are fun and satisfying and I can’t recommend Immortal Rogue strongly enough, but the framework of endless time is what got my attention.

“It’s not really infinite,” Barrett explained. “It’s a matrix that loops every time you reach the end of it. There’s an x-axis that’s based on time, basically—it goes from agricultural to pre-industrial to the industrial era to the computational era and space age, so time based on human technological development, and if you get too far into the space era you’re gonna destroy the world and go back to the preagricultural era. Then there’s a y-axis that is based on authoritarian control in the world, so at the bottom you have anarchy, at the top you have fascism, and if you go too far into fascism you’ll get anarchy because people will rebel.”

I said I wouldn’t talk about math again, but Barrett brought it up this time. A matrix is just a grid. The Matrix is something else, but if you’ve ever done a “Sally has a blue hat and wasn’t born in March”-style logic puzzle, you’ve used a matrix. There’s also a proper math definition of a matrix and a whole field of operations we do to those matrices, collectively called abstract algebra.

Barrett’s matrix of time and authority determines the overall feel of the levels, but each one is procedurally generated after that. His day job is in mainstream game development, and he originally shopped the idea for Immortal Rogue as the system to power an AAA game. “You can imagine any AAA game with that kind of variety in environment would cost just too much money to make,” Barrett says. “It was a game concept that I had pitched to studios earlier as a sort of introduction piece—not necessarily to make the game, because I know that doesn’t happen, but as far as getting into the industry.”

The way Barrett combined his basic variables means Immortal Rogue does feel endless. My longest life so far is 800 years, and Barrett says a complete cycle in which you beat the game can take anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 years. I’d love to tell you I believe I’ll beat the game at some point and see that full cycle. I’ll keep trying, at least.

Immortality and Endless Time

Would you want to live forever? This is one of the major philosophical questions that underpins western thought and especially the Christian form of the afterlife. Heaven and hell are each presented as an eternity, but again we run into Dr. Ruma Falk’s findings about how humans conceive of an infinite period of time. “One does not get closer to infinity by advancing the counting sequence because there is no way to approach infinity. Nowhere does the very big merge into the infinite.” If the lifetime of the planet Earth were condensed to one year, humans have lived for less than 30 minutes. We balk at the length of lives of record-setting elders who were born just a few years after the 19th century: imagine living that entire time and then living it again and again for literally forever. Our earthly understanding of time, and how our earthly brains process information, just isn’t compatible with thinking about living forever.

For many people, God or another higher power is the only way that infinity can make sense. In turn, a much longer afterlife helps to also make sense of how tiny and fleeting our earthly lives can feel. In the potentially infinite scale of time, our lives are the meager billions. They round down to zero, and it definitely feels that way sometimes. Falk cites 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, himself a late-in-life convert to Christianity and the trope namer of Pascal’s Wager. During Pascal’s lifetime, infinity was still a scandalous idea and a wedge issue for mathematicians and theologians. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified,” Pascal wrote. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

In her memoir Living with a Wild God, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich describes grappling with the same problems as an isolated teenager in the 1950s. “I didn’t think much about the future when I was a child—who does?” she writes. “But to the extent that I did imagine a future, it held an ever-widening range for my explorations—more hills and valleys, shorelines and dunes. […] The idea that there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, was slow to dawn on me.”

Randomizing Infinity: Alphabear & Alphabear 2

Game designer Pat Kemp worked on both 2015’s Alphabear and 2018’s Alphabear 2 at Spry Fox. Both have the same core word game, a fresh take on the classic Bookworm where you have to spell words from rapidly deteriorating letter tiles. Unlike in Scrabble and its knockoffs, rare letters don’t have higher point values. And into the mix you throw dozens of different collectible bears, each with a total score multiplier and a specific boost like a bonus for 5-letter words or preventing all Xs and Zs. Both games are free to play with in-app purchases. In Alphabear 2, Spry Fox took the mechanic of the first game and added a linear story, multiple difficulty levels, and a host of other features. Playing the game feels like getting an upgrade at the rental-car place and realizing you have heated side mirrors. I didn’t ask for them, but I love them and now I need them. But why did the second Alphabear get so much bigger?

“I hope this answer isn’t disappointing to you, but the first Alphabear, although it’s a lovely game we’re very proud of and was critically well received and we got lots of features and good reviews, wasn’t much of a financial success for us,” Kemp told me. So Spry Fox went into development of Alphabear 2 with goals to convert more users into purchasers and more purchasers into multiple-purchasers. “The decision-making around making it into a world, and a linear campaign, and building out all the different features […] was creating this rich, interwoven progression system that players can feel invested in and value. Basically how you monetize a free-to-play game is, people play your game for weeks and months and come to really value things in the game.”

In the first Alphabear, each chapter had a set of collectible bears that quickly eclipsed the power of the previous chapter’s bears. “And you would almost never go back and use bears from earlier chapters, just because of the way it was set up,” Kemp says. “So you had this weird ‘disposable’ feel to bears. It was cool when you unlocked them, but the game was telling you, ‘You’re done with that bear, here’s some new bears.’” Now, the bears accumulate over time as one big group, and you can continue to level them up as high as you want, but your progress is paced by how quickly you regenerate in-game energy in the form of honey.

After a certain chapter in the Normal campaign, players can begin again on Hard mode, and then after a later chapter, they can begin Master mode. I don’t know the full length of the basic campaign, but I’m probably 100 levels in and somewhere in chapter 9 on Normal mode. The scope of the whole thing including all three difficulties is staggering, and the game had been out for just seven months when I talked with Kemp. “Have people finished the amount of content you’ve made so far?” I asked. “We know of at least one person who’s completed the master-level campaign,” he said. When I said I was surprised, Kemp said, “Every game developer I know has this experience where they’re surprised by some small portion of their fanbase that is just so into it that it defies all expectations.”

In this case, the fastest player ended up lapping the development team. “It was so far off that we had planned to build whatever happened when you did that later on,” Kemp said. “They sent us a picture of their screen of the campaign board, and all it was was just a black screen, because it was trying to load the next campaign board, which doesn’t exist. We were like, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t even put anything in there, and it looks kinda like you’re in purgatory or something.’” Spry Fox plans to replace the Sopranos non-ending.

Purgatory or Something

Earlier this year, I talked with my friend Tristan about his existential dread. He’s pretty fresh out of college and still figuring it all out. “I was going to write about games,” he said, “and as I entered my last year or so, I was going to write about movies. I don’t know if I’m still going to do that, so that’s a large part of the dread. Not knowing what I was actually doing.” Humans can’t conceive of infinity using numbers, but we can use our pessimistic imaginations. Our set of plausible options is no match for what we dream or panic about.

Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard wrote about dread and fear of the unknown in his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, where the Danish word angest could be translated as “anxiety” or “dread”. Using the story of Adam and Eve, Kierkegaard posits that anxiety dates back to a fraction of a second after original sin. “The terror here is simply anxiety,” Kierkegaard writes, “since Adam has not understood what was said.” In other words, like a pet in trouble, Adam didn’t know what was being told to him, but he understood it was bad from the tone of voice.

“Anxiety can be compared with dizziness,” Kierkegaard goes on. “He whose eye happens to look into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.” Those who think about Dr. Ruma Falk’s “abyssal gap” between the finite and infinity may be dizzy forever with the uncertainty of what they’re pondering. “A persistent pursuit of the infinite may bring the individual to a blind alley, both emotionally and intellectually,” Falk writes. His analogy isn’t an accident. A blind alley is like another famous philosophical idea, Schrodinger’s cat: without shining a light, we can never know if the alley is empty or full, terrible or fine. And we can never shine that light.

Infinite Reality: Telling Lies & Her Story

At 2018’s E3 conference, Sam Barlow appeared on a panel about the future of narrative. “People will write to me and say, ‘I haven’t played a game in twenty years, and I played Her Story,’” Barlow said. “Or ‘My daughter installed it on my iPhone for me.’” It makes sense: Her Story’s core mechanic is as simple as a YouTube search, and the game is set in 1994, with a Windows 3.1 aesthetic to match. The game also fits with Barlow’s career arc. His 1999 XYZZY-winning interactive fiction Aisle gives players just one chance to type any command before reaching one of the game’s dozens of endings, placing players in a finite setting that even feels claustrophobic, but setting before them seemingly limitless possibilities. He was a natural fit to lead two Silent Hill games after that, and he views Her Story as the surprisingly successful “one chance” he had to make a successful indie game.

“This is something I’ve pitched so many times to publishers, with the rationale that in every other medium, crime fiction, police procedurals, murder mysteries, detective stories—if you have a TV channel and a film company, you’re gonna have a few stories in that world because it consistently works,” Barlow told me. “Games publishers were never into the idea. They felt like the things that sold in video games were power fantasies and superhero stories.” Barlow chose to home in on the interrogation room both as a convenient single setting and the place where his interest in crime stories was naturally drawn. “I wasn’t trying to do the police chases and locations and all those elements which would be expensive, but also, I was zooming in on the dialogue and the interactions and the human side of it,” he said, citing the groundbreaking ‘90s show Homicide: Life on the Street and its Emmy-winning bottle episode “Three Men and Adena.”

“I did a ton of research, reading the interrogation manuals for detectives, academic studies and pieces about the psychology of the interview room, a ton of crime books, movies with notable interrogation scenes and police interviews. This was slightly ahead of the true crime wave that we’ve had since, so I was discovering there’s so much footage online of real-life interviews and interrogations that has been released or leaked,” Barlow told me. “One day, as these things do, I woke up and went for a walk, and my subconscious—which is far cleverer than I am—put all the pieces and all the research I’d been doing together. [T]he detective’s sat at a computer, and there’s always the twist where they stay up all night sat at the computer and then they find that one little bit of information or the one piece of evidence that will break the case.”

Her Story is made of hundreds of discrete video clips, divided into main character Hannah Smith’s answers to an unseen detective’s questions. For his upcoming game Telling Lies, Barlow brought the setting forward into the Skype era and is introducing new mechanical twists to match. “To some extent Her Story was about giving you the writer’s perspective into a story, and here it’s giving you some of that editing room insight, where you spend so much time with the footage, choosing whether to cut out on this frame or that frame,” Barlow said. Instead of separate clips, Telling Lies gives you long, uncut videos that show both sides of a Skype call that you can scrub through—meaning drag the progress bar searching for highlights. “Not only are you coming at these stories in a nonlinear way, but also within a given scene you might end up watching it backwards.”

The text side of searching has also evolved. Because the videos aren’t separated into clips, searching for a specific word drops you into a video at that exact place. “Those conversations are split into two parts, so you can only see one side of a conversation at a time. You have the full seven minutes in front of you and you get dropped in to the point where someone says the word [or] phrase you've searched for,” Barlow said. “So early on, if you search for the word ‘love,’ you get dropped into a moment when Kerry [Bishé’s] character says, ‘Love you!’ and hangs up.”

Including Her Story and now Telling Lies in a group of very big-feeling games runs into a funny obstacle, because they’re both made of a very finite number of minutes of video. Her Story even has Steam achievements linked with what percentage of the total clips you’ve discovered and watched. “Something like 20% of people 100%-ed it. For most games you’re lucky if 20% of people finish the game. It had a display that showed you all the clips you hadn’t seen—that was an incentive and somewhat maddening if you could see there were clips you hadn’t seen. My approach with Telling Lies was to make it so big and huge and messy and colorful that it would feel less like something you could 100%, because I really wanted people to lose themselves in just the joy of exploring these characters’ lives.”

Just Out of Reach

Even with the incentive to find all the clips, in Her Story I found myself revisiting clips I’d already seen as I tried to find new keywords or listen for clues, and I maxed out just past the 75% achievement. The rest eluded me. With Telling Lies, this one kind of mystery will be removed, and that’s a blow against infinitude. In the perfect world of pure mathematics, having one more item just out of reach is one of the fundamental ways we can make proofs of infinite ideas. This structured approach also helps us turn the overwhelming idea of infinity into, at least right now, the one step in front of us. It’s infinity in the form of a child asking a parent for just five more minutes of sleep, then asking for five more, for eternity.

In Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps he uses this idea as an illustration for why infinity just can’t exist in real life. If every animal evolved from another animal, then there are infinity animals stretching back into infinity long ago, always with one preceding. We know that’s just not true. On the other hand, a study of how children process infinity showed that knowing the names of some large numbers made children think those were the largest numbers. Learning named ideas pushed out the very idea of having unnamed ideas, which makes sense given how large and robust our language brains are. Being strong, clear communicators has shaped our brains and the societies we form as humans. If we all became existentially troubled abstraction peddlers, I don’t think that would necessarily be a step forward.

To consider infinity with a finite mind is a paradox, and as Dr. Ruma Falk explains, “Mathematicians and philosophers are often no less addicted to resolving these paradoxes than some adolescents are to experiencing the limits of existence.” Like the Library of Babel, an infinite world is made mostly of incoherent and random nonsense, compared with a human mind that can only remember its own history in cohesive story form. My friend Martin has a rich life and a beautiful family, and he told me, “My personal greatest fear is probably losing my mind. The idea of being unable to make sense of the world is horrifying.” In fact, studies show that we’re more able to tune out conversations we can overhear both sides of than those where we can hear just one side—this is how deep our need for clear narratives runs, and it’s why we’re not made for an infinite world.

Infinite Liminal: Sunless Sea & Cultist Simulator

In February of 2019, Alexis Kennedy addressed something that had grown beyond his reach, and his post was the catalyst for what eventually became this essay. On the Weather Factory blog, where the developer typically shares updates to 2018’s Cultist Simulator, Kennedy described an alternate reality game (ARG) called Enigma that he’s built into his work—not just Cultist Simulator but 2015’s Sunless Sea and even 2009’s Fallen London. In the Enigma post, he sums up the appeal this mystery seems to have to fans: “If you’re working through things and looking for meaning in your life, then all the hidden meanings in this project may look like they add up to something more important than they actually do.”

I love Kennedy’s work—if we’re friends, you’ve probably heard me talk about it—and while I’ve never mistaken him for a guru, his games have affected and stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever played. He’s gifted with language, stuffing his work with plausible and evocative neologisms or uncommon historical terms. But his more powerful gift lies in what he chooses to reveal and how long you must wait for it. I’ve thought often of something my friend Diana said nearly twenty years ago, about traveling with other people and seeing their luggage: “They wonder what I’m taking, but I wonder what they’re leaving behind.” I constantly wonder what Alexis Kennedy is leaving behind.

“Gamers tend to be—to borrow a phrase of Mike Laidlaw's—more like dogs than cats in the way they consume content. If the core loop is even moderately compelling, they'll gorge on content and rush through it,” Kennedy told me via email. “As soon as players are doing that, they'll skim text, and if they're going to skim text, text had better not be your A feature. I constantly skim quest text in games, and I'm a narrative junkie. So pacing is a way of saying: hold on, appreciate this, take your time with it.” In both Fallen London and Sunless Sea, one variable shuffles what day it is, so you receive different flavor text or events even when you’re repeating actions or storylines. “I don't think I ever quite recovered from the initial terror, back in 2009, of seeing players consume Fallen London content literally ten times as fast as I expected,” Kennedy says.

Like Sam Barlow, Kennedy reached for inspiration outside of what’s traditionally in the purview of a video game. I asked how he chooses end goals in games with such wide-open mechanics—Cultist Simulator is even more open than Sunless Sea in some ways. “I come at those stopping points from two directions. One is 'what sort of emotions and experiences are we aiming for?' The other is 'what sort of activities would a character in a novel, not just in a game, do in this setting?' So in Sunless Sea, we want people to be thinking about loneliness and survival and discovery, and we also want people to be aiming for the kind of things they'd aim for in Moby-Dick or Voyage of the Dawn Treader or HMS Surprise.” The only ending I’ve reached in Sunless Sea is the most basic one, where you amass some money and retire. In Cultist Simulator, I’ve managed to live a normal working life and then retire, which is considered a minor victory. And still, the game wonders what I’m taking, while I wonder what it’s leaving behind.

Pure Abstraction

“The study of infinity stretches human abstract thinking to some of its loftiest possibilities,” Dr. Ruma Falk writes. “By definition, it calls for modes of reasoning that transcend concrete representation.” What I’ve found most interesting as I researched this piece and talked with these gifted game designers is how thoughtfully they’d constructed gameplay loops that continue to feel fresh and challenging. The games themselves couldn’t be more different in terms of genre or lack thereof, revenue models, or mechanics, but all feel large and immersive inside to an extent that I instinctively ignored whatever seams I might end up seeing.

I asked each designer to share a game that felt infinite to them as players. Sam Barlow answered the question before I even asked it, though. He described wanting Telling Lies to feel like a huge place to explore. “My only go-to reference, which is somewhat ambitious, is the way I felt when I was playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the way that Nintendo made me feel, where I could just go off and explore in any direction and I could let my curiosity guide me and I would always enjoy myself. I would always find something interesting.” He called this kind of freedom a form of magic. “To some extent, Her Story was me trying to get some of the magic and—again, this wasn’t a conscious thing—some of the magic of the old text parser games.”

Pat Kemp also chose Breath of the Wild. “The world feels huge and dense in a kind of unusual way even amongst all the other open-world AAA experiences that are out there. There’s this big mountain and you climb up it, and on the way up you encounter two or three little unique-feeling things, and you make your way down and encounter a bunch of other little things, and they’re all handmade little surprises. It feels like the world is just brimming with delightful little nuggets of story or interesting challenges or encounters. It’s really a remarkable achievement and it’s also one of those things where, as a game developer, I can recognize what a monumental task it must have been to create that world,” Kemp said. “Every inch of it feels handcrafted by someone who cares about that itch, which is just incredibly daunting. It must have been so expensive to do.”

Alexis Kennedy chose Elite: Dangerous, and I enjoyed how his answer mirrored how I feel about his games, where some amount of suggestion makes it easy and fun to project the rest with your imagination. “I put a hundred-plus hours into Elite: Dangerous because I so enjoyed the sense of jumping through galactic-size simulated space. I knew perfectly well that the procgen systems were largely identical in all meaningful ways, I knew the space between star systems isn't simulated and you're just jumping between skyboxed instances, but I've spent 47 years learning how space works IRL and I still carry over those assumptions if the sense of resource cost lets me. I need to feel like I'm working to cross the space and have something that will run out or need balancing.”

Kyle Barrett pointed out that, infamously now, No Man’s Sky sold itself as an infinite game. “The game definitely feels infinite. It also has the effect of what infinity would feel like, which is empty after a while. It teaches people that lesson,” Barrett says. It brought back to mind something he told me before about deciding how much to procedurally generate within Immortal Rogue: “If it’s pure random, I think it normally fails. That’s something designers find pretty quick. So it’s like, what’s the right amount of random and what’s the skeleton that can make the random meaningful?” He mentioned Dwarf Fortress as a game with infinite-feeling possibilities, and Minecraft as something that marries the two. “It feels infinite in scope and the amount of possibility feels infinite, which is why it’s probably one of the best games ever,” he said.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.” The games we love might feel infinite, but we only hang around in them long enough to realize this because of the hard work of building structures and feedback loops that make games fun to play. We study infinite math from the security of offices with comfortable temperatures and lighting. As Alexis Kennedy put it, “So it is a design choice, but there's a reason I made that one design choice rather than a million others.”

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betterthedevilyouknowuk · 6 years

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Never Let Your Activism Be Artless: An Interview With Lucien Greaves of The Satanic Temple

Haute Macabre interview June 28, 2017

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing The Satanic Temple‘s Lucien Greaves about art, activism, and what religion means as a framework rather than a faith. “Recently” isn’t quite right — these questions were written back in February, as you might notice by the news reference in one of them, but we hope you’ll forgive us the wait. I’ve been following TST’s work for a while and am wholeheartedly a supporter of their mission, but whether you know their tenets by heart or are just tuning in, you’re sure to find something of interest below.

So, just to get it out of the way, could you describe the difference between The Satanic Temple and The Church of Satan for any readers who may not know?

Well, first off, organizationally, there isn’t any similarity. That is to say, we have an organization, we have active chapters internationally, we have a physical headquarters, and we have active campaigns to advance our goals in the real world. The Church of Satan has none of these things.

One thing that I don’t think is clear to a lot of people is that all of the organized Satanic activity you’ve seen in the national and international press in the past years — from the Satanic monument, to the religious reproductive rights lawsuits, to the After School Satan Clubs — it’s all come from The Satanic Temple. The Church of Satan writes these humorous tirades in opposition to each of our activities, but they always get their facts wrong. For instance, they’ll claim that they would never seek to erect a monument on public grounds because, according to them, they support secularism.

In fact, we very often work with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, and other established defenders of secularism nationwide. Our monuments are made in defence of secularism, and we are very clear about that. We only seek to place our Baphomet monument on public grounds where there is a pre-existing 10 Commandments monument to ensure that the government remains neutral regarding religious expression in public forums. Government has no place in Religion, Religion has no place in Government. If a public forum allows privately donated religious monuments, the Government can’t pick and choose between religious viewpoints. That’s secularism. You can’t let the theocrats take over the Public Square and claim it as their own exclusively.

Of course there are those who complain that a true expression of secularism would be the absence of any religious monuments on public grounds. Well, yes, but when there’s already a 10 Commandments monument on public grounds, it doesn’t do much good to simply say you wish it weren’t there. There isn’t much point to organizing a membership structure and hierarchy when there are no activities associated with those roles. When we’re proposing our monument, the government then has to make a choice — will they accept a Satanic monument, or will they engage in religious discrimination and all but ensure that the 10 Commandments monument will come down as well?

Similarly, The Church of Satan objects to our After School Satan Clubs on the grounds that they feel proselytizing to children is abhorrent. If they learned about our after school program before commenting, they’d find that we, too, find proselytizing to children abhorrent. In fact, the very reason we started the After School Satan Clubs was to offer an alternative to coercive religious proselytizing inflicted on children through evangelical after-school clubs, and we only offer our club in schools where the evangelical presence already exists. Our curriculums don’t contain any items of religious opinion and focus entirely on critical thinking and reasoning skills. To say, then, that we shouldn’t call it the After School Satan Club misses the point. We’re The Satanic Temple, and we’re Satanists, and we’re not going to hide that fact. The schools have to understand, if they allow evangelical clubs, they can’t turn away the Satanists. For children to be aware that there are self-identified Satanists, and that they are friendly, approachable people — it has a counter-indoctrination effect.

So, the incessant criticisms we receive from the Church of Satan are either wildly misinformed, or completely dishonest.

Philosophically speaking, The Church of Satan is a fundamentalist LaVeyan organization, which makes a certain sense from a business perspective because they base their authenticity on the fact that they inherited Anton LaVey’s organization and claim his achievements as their own. They hold to a remarkably similar philosophy as you find espoused by radical Tea Party Christians on the theocratic Right: Ayn Rand-inspired Social Darwinist authoritarian-fetishizing libertarianism, but with a bit of occultic ritual magic thrown in. The Satanic Temple espouses a non-supernatural anti-authoritarian philosophy that views the metaphorical literary construct of Satan as a liberator from oppression of the mind and body. Our canon embodies the Romantic Satanism of Milton, Blake, Shelley, to, particularly, Anatole France, whose Revolt of the Angels is a primary text in TST. From its inception, modern Satanism, as it came to be defined in the Revolutionary era of Romantics, was very much a non-theistic movement aligned with Liberty, Equality and Rationalism. With that in mind, I think we’re rather closely aligned with early Modern Satanism, rather than some type of wildly aberrant, unique and unrecognizable contemporary off-shoot.

Since the religious construct of Satanism doesn’t believe in the supernatural, you say you “turn to literature and art as icons for deeply held beliefs.” Can you talk more about the importance of art and literature, especially during times of conflict?

This, I think, cuts to the very heart of what it means to be a non-theistic, non-supernaturalist religion. As I’ve described elsewhere, non-theistic Satanic religious affiliation has a cultural framework that is deeply significant and far from arbitrary— that is to say, we couldn’t simply re-label it for the sake of diplomacy, nor would doing so be true to our principles.

The narrative of the ultimate rebel against tyranny, the use of blasphemy as a tool for liberation against imposed, frivolous, sanctified superstitions; the cultivation of the individual will and rationalism unencumbered by “faith” or blind subjugation; the willingness to stand as an outsider with a sense of justice that is independent of laws and institutions; all are embodied by the literary Satan.

Those of us who were burdened from childhood by archaic tradition-based dogmas, especially in the era of the Satanic Panic, were instilled with an irrational aversion and fear toward the “other”, the Satanic. Breaking that barrier, defying such deeply-entrenched cultural programming, embracing the symbols, narrative, and outside status of the Adversary, can be a supremely liberating personal experience, not merely incidentally divorced from superstition, but emblematic of, and vital to, the break with superstition. Whether we interpret them literally or not, the mythological backdrop by which we each contextualize our existential grounding is profoundly important in our lives. I feel that theists are subjugated by their myths, while we are empowered by ours. The literary Satanists of the Revolutionary Era understood this, and their power to change the world by way of altering the cultural mythological structure was certainly not lost on them. One can read some artful exposition on this point in Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry. In explaining this, I can only hope to make some people understand that, despite common perceptions, Satanism is (or can be) deeply personally enriching, and isn’t merely an attention-seeking shock tactic directed at observers. When the cameras aren’t rolling, when the journalists have all left the spectacle, we are, in fact, Satanists still. I know this doesn’t quite exactly directly answer the question of how literature and art serve as icons for deeply held beliefs; But the power of metaphor, the vital necessity of narrative to cultivate and define one’s sense of self and purpose, the atavistic desire for art are all self-evident to me. I have a difficult time understanding the bizarre, yet apparently prevalent notion, that religious identity, practice, and ethics should be dependent upon intellectually crippling superstitions. I can’t grasp why it became the norm to believe that mentally-stunted fundamentalists have a more authentic claim to deeply-held beliefs.

Any advice you would give those who are operating at the intersection of art and activism?

Never separate art and activism. Never let your activism be artless, and never allow your art to be orthodox.

In a VICE interview a few years ago, you said, “LaVey is an excellent jumping-off point, but his work was a product of its time, and it’s appropriate to recontexualize it to today’s reality. LaVey was active during a time in which, for decades, the United States was on a dysfunctional spiral of increasing violence.” 2017 also seems to be a spiral of increasing violence; do you see TST adapting to that in any particular way?

I don’t agree that there is a spiral of increasing violence. In fact, violence is at historic lows. Since 2008, in the United States, violent crime has been lower than at any point in over 40 years. There was a rise in crime in 2015, but there’s no reason to believe it’s a trend, and there’s no reason to believe it harkens the end of an overall decline in violence. Broader historical overviews indicate an overall decrease in violence from the beginning of recorded history till now. So why are we being sold this bullshit apocalyptic narrative of increasing criminality and violence? I think the reasons should be clear to anybody paying attention to American politics. There needs to be an emergency in order to declare Emergency Powers. Fear-mongering inures the public to unilateral executive actions that defy the checks and balances of open deliberation. “Othering” strengthens tribal bonds as they unify themselves against a common enemy, and the creation of unease and general panic can be used by leaders to manipulate their followers who offer them the latitude to protect them by whatever means.

In the case of LaVey, he actually was living in a time in which violence in the United States was trending upward and was a cause for alarm. During the 1960s, crime steadily and dramatically rose till about 1995 when it began to plummet, eventually, to where we happily are now. LaVey seems to have looked at what was unique in the culture around him at the time to determine what may have precipitated the rise in crime, and to determine what might need to change to make things better. He looked critically at the Rights Revolution and he despised the Hippy culture. He imagined a stratified and tribally divided, non-democratic world. He advocated police state politics.

Turns out, he was wrong.

Secular democratic states are less likely to engage in war against each other and less likely to engage in terrorism or political violence than autocratic states. The rise in democratic states and the concurrent diminution in autocracies correlates to the global trend in reduced violence. Intermingling cultures — free to “appropriate” from each other — fare better than insular ethnic/religious/nationalist cults. And crime has, as stated, drastically plummeted in the United States without any massive reductions in Civil Liberties. In fact, the Rights Revolution has continued to move forward, slowly — but with great resistance, particularly from the Christian Right — and inexorably. I highly recommend a book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which explores this topic in great detail.

Troublingly, I feel that the greatest threat to our social stability now comes from those who claim we must do something to stop the imagined increase in violence. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We already see an increased tribalistic zeal, and we see pre-emptive violence in the name of anti-fascism, which will then be used as justification for increased police action. That’s the real downward spiral.

However, an increase in crime now can’t change what we know. It won’t make a stratified, autocratic Social Darwinist system any more correct. That said, one might wonder why I feel LaVey could be described as an “excellent jumping-off point” at all, if he is so entirely incorrect on this important point? LaVey was a bold voice in opposition to faith-driven mindlessness. He was instrumental in establishing recognition of Modern Satanism, even if he did hang on to other forms of magical thinking. If he were alive today, I like to think that he would be able to see the evidence and adjust his thinking accordingly. Being able to live without delusion and adjust one’s thinking to incorporate the best empirical evidence is, I think, a great overriding principle of Satanism.

In certain areas, LaVey was quite progressive, and I’ve gotten to know some of his old friends (who don’t associate with the Church of Satan), and they’ve all said that they suspect he himself would very much appreciate what The Satanic Temple is now doing.

Is there a reason TST’s Baphomet doesn’t have breasts?

The short answer as to why our Baphomet monument has no breasts is because we fight to win in all of our battles. The Baphomet was originally offered as a private donation to Oklahoma’s State Capitol grounds where, in 2012, their government allowed for the placement of a 10 Commandments monument. The Oklahoma Legislature — led on this issue by a Southern Baptist Deacon State House representative — claimed that the 10 Commandments monument wasn’t, in fact, a religious monument, but a secular, historical monument paying tribute to the early foundations of Constitutional Law. In further attempting to build an argument that the 10 Commandments on Capitol Grounds didn’t constitute a government endorsement of religion, Oklahoma made clear that no public funds went into the construction of the monument, thus opening the Capitol Grounds as a First Amendment protected public forum for private donations. Clearly, they didn’t expect anybody to call their bluff. It was the end of 2013 when we sent off a letter to the State of Oklahoma expressing to them that we should like to offer a monument to be displayed on the Capitol Grounds and requesting the documentation required to move our monument request forward. Having obtained that, we then began to design a monument within the parameters of their “limited open forum” requirements. After sketching out various proposals, it became clear that Baphomet was the best, artistically and symbolically. Symbolically, the binary elements of Baphomet aligned perfectly with our effort to counterbalance the 10 Commandments. We meticulously contrived a legal argument for the inclusion of the Baphomet on the Oklahoma Capitol grounds that artfully paralleled the 10 Commandments’ Bill in every way. The Baphomet was to stand as an homage to the unjustly accused, the heretics and the scapegoats: those burned, hung, stoned, and tortured during witch-hunts and crowd panics. An homage to them, we explained, is an homage to the moral underpinnings of our secular Judiciary which works from a presumption of innocence, places the burden of proof upon the accuser, and refuses to recognize claims of divine authority or anti-blasphemy legislation. We constructed an ironclad argument. We knew, however, that exposed breasts would lead to an opportunity for Oklahoma to claim that our monument defied so-called decency standards, and they would be entirely relieved to evade the Establishment Clause issue in favor of a puritanical claim related to community standards. Initially, I worked with the artist to devise some type of covering for the breasts, but they all looked out-of-place and distracting. Artistically, the breastless bare chest looked best. We still occasionally hear from people who insist that they, as purists, would have included the breasts, decency complaints be damned. I just have to shrug and let them know that this is exactly why they’ll most likely never get anything done.

As a hybrid religion/activism group that embraces humor, TST bears some similarity to 60s activist group W.I.T.C.H., which has recently announced a modern reincarnation. I’m also reminded of Discordianism, which was my first introduction to the use of religion as a satirical framework as a teenager. Do you think humor is an integral part of activism?

I think humor is integral to being a well-adjusted human. There is a difference, however, between creating a satirical religion and using satire, as a religious organization, to advance a point.

Our identification as Satanists isn’t “satirical,” however, we’re not adverse to using humor and satire to highlight various hypocrisies and absurdities we run up against. This point is entirely lost on some people who seem to believe that everything is mutually exclusive, and one organization can’t be more than one thing at a time.

We’re often asked if we’re political, religious, an art movement, etc. Why would we have to choose between any one of those things? Why can we not be entirely sincere while also having a sense of humor? For that matter, why is it we seldom see the skepticism that is directed toward us directed toward the Evangelical Right? Is the Evangelical Right a sincere religious movement, or is it merely political? Is there anything in scripture that even distantly implies that a corporation like Hobby Lobby shalt not pay for insurance benefits that include contraceptive coverage? Is their belief that they should not pay those benefits more deeply-held than our belief in bodily autonomy merely because they claim to lack the intellectual nuance to not read their Bible as a literal historical text?

I would like to see that The Satanic Temple never loses its sense of humor, even as there persists this bizarre notion that humor and authenticity are irreconcilable.

According to Breitbart, you reached out to clarify that TST had nothing to do with the counter-Milo protests in California, citing your support of free speech. How do you reconcile having “freedom to offend” with the danger Milo causes to individuals by targeting specific trans or undocumented students at his speeches?

I’m not sure what danger he’s caused to anybody. I’ve never read his material. I’ve never listened to him speak. Even still, after having defended his right to speak, I still don’t give a shit about what he’s saying. I defend the principle of Free Speech, and when you defend a principle, you don’t only defend it selectively. If you can’t support it when it incidentally doesn’t benefit you, you’re not supporting it at all. You can’t claim that you believe in Free Speech, only insofar as you agree with what’s being said. If Milo has posed a legitimate danger to individuals through inciting violence in a very direct and tangible way, if he’s defamed people, or invaded their privacy — this seems like a matter for the civil courts, and the aggrieved parties should consult legal representation. If the “danger” is that he has hurt people’s feelings, then I should be quite clear that I am not sympathetic. For my part, I can’t wrap my head around the cognitive dissonance that has self-proclaimed defenders of Liberal Democracy calling for limitations on Free Speech in the name of “anti-fascism.” The irony is overwhelming. Of course, it seems, nobody quite wants to admit that they renounce Free Speech, so it’s quite popular to try and categorize anything one disagrees with as Hate Speech worthy of censorship. But offensive and even hateful speech is, and should remain, protected under the First Amendment. Threats and incitement are treated differently, and there could be legal claims related to those, if in fact that’s what Milo’s done.

Many are the times in which The Satanic Temple has been wrongly denigrated as engaging in “hate speech” by offended Christian groups who imagine that any and all of our activities are acts of persecution against them. They would argue that while we’re not make direct threats or inciting specific actions against them, our very identification as Satanists nonetheless threatens Christians and incites acrimony against them. Their feelings are hurt. They’re offended. We would support a broadened definition of Hate Speech or accept a less discriminating interpretation of what constitutes a threat or incitement at our own peril.

My impression of Milo is that he rode a wave of celebrity that was largely created by the ignorant little assholes who ran amok lighting fires, smashing property, and macing bystanders in the face wherever he was scheduled to speak. When you take a third-rate comedian who’s saying offensive things and demand his censorship, you suddenly give him the First Amendment high ground. You turn him into a defender of Civil Liberties. You make him a Free Speech martyr, and in the internet age his message is certainly no less accessible, you’ve only given him free publicity.

Incidentally, it appears that Milo’s career as a sweetheart of the alt-right is all but entirely finished, and it wasn’t destroyed because some screaming mob of mindless fascistic “anti-fascists” managed to impose a general censorship of his words, but because he was allowed to speak freely and express things that even his followers couldn’t support or defend.

Related, does TST have an official stance on punching Nazis?

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to go out looking to punch anybody. I especially think it’s a bad idea to go out looking to punch thick-skulled miscreants who themselves are looking for a pretext for a fight. I also think Nazis are a bit too easy a target to place all of our post-election angst upon. I’m not particularly concerned that the Nazi Party is going to gain prominence in the United States any time in the near or projected future. Even our most oppressive elements on the right probably honestly believe themselves to be entirely unrelated to Nazis. The self-identified Nazis I know of are angry, uneducated, aggressive yokels who run no risk of organizing a national coup. I just don’t run into Nazis in my daily life or when I’m out socializing. I’m not sure where people are living that they can decide to whimsically travel out and go punch a Nazi at will. Rather, I think the anti-Nazi rhetoric is simply a safe and inoffensive exhibition of discontent. It’s something people can rant about and issue threats of violence toward without any real fear of actual confrontation. I think it would be far more poignant and meaningful if people were to confront Evangelical Nationalism and rail against the Theocratic Right. I get sick of hearing people say, “let’s call them what they really are: Nazis.” No. Why don’t you call them what they really are? They are the Theocratic Right. They are Evangelical Nationalists. They are taking over the public offices and overturning Liberal Democracy. When you call people who have no attachment to Nazi-ism Nazis, they don’t know you’re talking about them, and it’s not clear that you know who you’re talking about either.

You recently opened an international headquarters in Salem. Can you tell us about this?

Our organization has grown so rapidly in the past few years. It made sense to have a dedicated headquarters where we can keep our offices and centralize our operations. The lower floor is open to the public as an art gallery where we regularly have exhibitions. The current exhibition features the work of Vincent Castiglia, a remarkable artist who paints enormous and meticulously detailed works of art in his own blood. We have some amazing sculpture-work by Chris Andres, who also designed our veterans’ memorial in Minnesota. We also have a segment of the gallery dedicated to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s, and which still persists to a greater or lesser degree today. We also have a lecture room where we show films and host guest speakers.

The gallery is always going to be a work in progress and we’re adding to it all the time. By now, given my explanation of non-theistic religion and the importance and power of art, it shouldn’t seem strange in the least that our headquarters should double as an art gallery. In fact, nothing could be more natural to us. Art is integral to our religion.

People often ask how we’re received by the local community. There haven’t been any problems at all. We get along with the neighbors, the local officials haven’t given us any problems, and we really couldn’t have picked a better place to put our headquarters. When people recognize me on the street, it’s always been a positive and polite interaction. We’ve had many people visit from out-of-state just to visit our headquarters, and it hasn’t been uncommon for them to considering moving to Salem afterward. I have a feeling that Salem will become home to the largest population of self-identified Satanists in the world in the foreseeable future.

You support non-believers having access to religion as a framework. Can you elaborate on what that means? What is the difference between religion and faith?

“Faith” is belief without evidence. Theists ennoble faith as integral to religion: blind belief in intellectually insulting superstitions that offer the benefit of solace in “knowing” that we’ll go to a paradisiacal after-world, so long as we live a life of servitude toward an unseen master. Faced with disconfirming evidence, the theist often withdraws into arguments that attack a lack of moral clarity in science. The superstitious religionist feels that their ethics, community, and sense of cultural identity are founded upon old superstitions that they must strive to believe and struggle to uphold, despite the persistent injuries constantly dealt to those beliefs by critical scrutiny and empirical knowledge.

In the United States we afford certain protections to deeply-held beliefs to respect freedom of conscience. Thomas Jefferson, in his Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom stated, “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.” Elaborating on this bill (which was important enough to him that it was named among three lifetime achievements upon his grave), Jefferson wrote in his memoirs that in this statute “protection of opinion was meant to be universal”, and the document included “within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

Religious opinion was meant to be equally protected alongside faith. The non-believer’s right to express non-belief and not be besieged by a state-sanctioned religious viewpoint is equally protected alongside the right of the superstitious to assemble in houses of worship and implore the good will of a petty and jealous deity to take pity on their pathetic and groveling souls. This is the only tenable interpretation of what “religious liberty” can mean in a democratic pluralistic society. Religious Liberty doesn’t support a “right” to impose a religious viewpoint upon anybody else, or a “right” to limit another’s civic capacities. Religious Liberty gives every one of the us the opportunity to object to impositions of the state that run contrary to our deeply-held beliefs and challenge our freedom of conscience. Superstition does not produce superior ethics or identities, nor does faith provide beliefs that are more deeply-held than the personal moral foundations of any well-adjusted atheist. It would be deplorable to give superstition preferential treatment to rational thinking.

Of course, any time that equal protection for the religious opinion of non-believers is contextualized as part of a fight for Religious Liberty, there’s always some smug asshole, self-identifying as an atheist, who witlessly parrots the witticism, “atheism is a religion in the same way that bald is a haircut,” or, “…in the same way that off is a television station,” or any number of less-than-clever unoriginal variations. Nothing could be more helpful to the Fundamentalists than non-believers who insist that religion is dependent upon superstition, thus defining themselves outside of a protected class. I feel that atheist organizations, as organizations based upon a well-defined religious opinion, or opinion regarding religion, should have no hesitation in arguing for religious privilege and exemption including religious tax-exemption.

I think that the more people come to recognize the legitimacy of non-theistic religions — and there are already a significant population of atheist Jews, Buddhists, and others — the more we will see atheistic Christians making themselves known; individuals who still venerate the Christian myth and its customs, who identify with the Christian community, but simply can’t claim to believe ludicrous Biblical stories — at least not literally.

When superstitious delusion becomes isolated from the real-world benefits of religious affiliation, superstition becomes all the more impossible to maintain and defend. The sooner the atheist movement recognizes that their fight is with superstition, not religion, the sooner we’ll get there.

What are you working on right now? How can people get involved?

Recently, we were approved to place a veterans’ memorial monument in a park in Belle Plaine, Minnesota where a Christian veterans’ monument provoked controversy leading the local officials to open the public grounds as a limited open forum. We’re crowd-funding to offset the cost of that effort.

We have two lawsuits, State and Federal, currently active in Missouri, where we’re fighting against prohibitive abortion restrictions on the grounds that these restrictions violate our religious liberty.

We’re putting a volunteer manual together for our After School Satan Club, so that people who aren’t a part of a local TST chapter can nonetheless apply to present our After School Satan Club (ASSC) curriculum in schools where Evangelical indoctrination clubs are present. We’re going to release our volunteer manual at around the same time we file our first ASSC-related lawsuit.

We’re currently researching the prospect of opening our own religiously-protected abortion clinic.

I’m putting together a syllabus now for ordination coursework through The Satanic Temple, and it’s going to be rigorous and intensive, but it will ensure that our ministry are entirely capable of speaking on behalf of our beliefs.

We’re putting together an online platform so that we can video stream our activities at the headquarters to our membership and better connect with our international community.

In fact, we have a massive number of projects currently in the works that keeping track of it all has become the largest difficulty we face. Expect big things in the near future.

People who want to get involved can check to see if they have a local chapter near them, or reach out to us if there is sufficient local interest in starting one. Keep up with our current campaigns on our website and check up on our daily news on Facebook. Check out our merchandise on ShopSatan.com and keep in mind that your purchases help fund our campaigns.

Anything you want to add?

Please check out GreyFaction.org. Grey Faction is a sub-organization of The Satanic Temple dedicated to combating irrational conspiracy theory-based moral panics, modern witch-hunts, and the discredited therapeutic practices that still haunt us from beyond the formally recognized Satanic Panic era. We are keeping track of professionals in the mental health field that continue to use Recovered Memory Therapies to reveal and propagate delusional narratives of Satanic Ritual Abuse. We have issued petitions against therapists who openly endorse bizarre conspiracy theories related to imaginary Satanic cults to the mentally vulnerable. Our research revealed the connection between one such therapist and the murder of an 8-year old boy not many years ago. Our work with Grey Faction is supremely important, but has received relatively little press coverage.

#tst #the satanic temple #friends of the satanic temple uk #Lucien Greaves #satanism #satan #satanic #athiesm #activism #activist #secular #secularism #religion #interview #art

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cannabisrefugee-esq · 6 years

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If A Disease Is Untreatable, Incurable and Progressive, Is It A "Medical" Condition at All?

December 2, 2018

I have seen it pointed out elsewhere that some “conditions” for which the medical establishment offers consumerist goods and services are not actually bona fide medical conditions at all and are in fact money-making schemes advanced by wealthy investors and others who stand to make a fortune off of anyone stupid, naive or deranged enough to accept them. The conversation I am most familiar with pertains to the medicalized transgender movement where people are persuaded that they can achieve the impossible through medicalized interventions, in that case, that “transgender” individuals can change their biological sex through consuming expensive and dangerous cross-sex hormones, puberty blocking drugs, and surgeries including castration, so-called “facial feminization” surgeries and others.

Whether anyone accepts the psychological or physical transgenderism of individuals or not, the issue remains that there are billions of dollars to be made globally on this phenomenon and thinking people are prone to thinking about such things. “Follow the money” is a familiar admonition and politically-minded people understand what that means. They generally accept the reality that where there is money to be made, there will be corruption and wealthy people and entities working in the shadows to further their own interests. In the above-linked article by Jennifer Bilek entitled “Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?” she asks and answers that question and names names. She concludes that it is “Exceedingly rich, white men (and women) who invest in biomedical companies [who] are funding myriad transgender organizations whose agenda will make them gobs of money” including billionaire businessmen George Soros, “Jennifer” Pritzker and others. And it’s difficult to argue with that conclusion which is demonstrably true. But let’s go further.

Whether the potential or actual opportunity to make “gobs” of money under a capitalist patriarchy renders a potentially legitimate project illegitimate on its face is a discussion for another day. However, in the case of the legitimacy of medicalizing transgenderism Bilek identifies a specific social discourse that “institutionalizes and normalizes” transgenderism in a way that convinces people that consuming medicalized goods and services literally for life — the entire life of the patient throughout and following medicalized transition — is in the interests of both the patient and society at large. According to her, it does this by manufacturing a medical condition which arguably does not even exist, and then by encasing the created medical and consumerist issue within a civil rights framework. In the case of transgender, the intended and actual result is to socialize all people (aka “consumers” whether they themselves are transgender or not) to believe both that there is something physically wrong with so-called transgender people which medical goods and services can fix, and that it is those people’s unalienable human right to have the condition corrected no matter the cost to themselves or to society. She concludes that:

It behooves us all to look at what the real investment is in prioritizing a lifetime of anti-body medical treatments for a miniscule part of the population, building an infrastructure for them, and institutionalizing the way we perceive ourselves as human beings, before being human becomes a quaint concept of the past.

As her argument is narrow and addresses only the issue of transgenderism, I cannot fault her for coming up with such a narrow conclusion. She does not broadly criticize Big Medicine in general, favoring specificity to make her point which appears to be that medicine does not behave this way in any other area besides transgenderism and that the (alleged) difference should be parsed. In making that point, she necessarily implies that medical overreach is a small-scale problem affecting only a miniscule part of the population (and that medical consumerism is not inherently problematic and that we needn’t follow they money except in the case of transgender); that “building” social and medical infrastructure to accommodate these new patients is worse than absorbing new patients into the existing infrastructure, or expanding the existing infrastructure to include people it shouldn’t; and that Big Medicine is not fundamentally about “institutionalizing the way we perceive ourselves as human beings” already, and is not generally intended and used as a tool of social control.

And although she rightly characterizes transgender as a problematic “lifestyle” issue, she misses the opportunity to discuss the apparent fact that medicalized goods and services are not effective in treating the (alleged, self-reported) mental and physical pain and symptoms of transgenderism, which analysis would only support her skepticism that transgender is a legitimate diagnosis of a medical disease/illness at all.*

But what if the problems she identifies with the medicalization and normalization of transgenderism are actually a feature and not a bug of Big Medicine and Big Pharma when it comes to defining — if not outright inventing — what constitutes both illness and treatment and engaging consumers long-term or for life? Feminists have long known and noted that patriarchal medicine “invents” both illnesses and treatment for women as a part of our oppression — hysteria and its dubious treatments being perhaps the most obvious example but there are others. But the evidence suggests that invented treatments aren’t “just” for invented illnesses: Big Pharma and Big Medicine actually invent “treatments” for untreatable (yet objectively verifiable) disease, for example, in the case of Crohn’s disease which notoriously does not respond to conventional care.

And this has everything to do, in fact, with “institutionalizing the way we perceive ourselves as human beings.” Doesn’t it? We have to engage with Big Medicine because that’s what human beings do, it’s one thing that separates us from animals, it separates the sick from the well, even when the medicine itself does nothing but make us worse it is the willingness to engage that’s important. In cultures that extoll Big Pharma and Big Medicine we seem not to include untreatable disease as part of the human condition and “the way we perceive ourselves” despite all evidence that it is and has always been part of the human experience (and untreatable illness such as autoimmune disease has only become more prevalent over time). Think about that for a minute. It is striking.

And if transgender patients can rightly be seen as “lifestylists” making medicalized consumer choices in the absence of therapeutic benefits, and I think they can, what could be said about chronically ill people whose lives revolve around medical interventions which are not therapeutic and which therefore must be something else? This is a serious question that, I think, deserves serious “treatment” but is a sticky wicket; as far as I can tell it is rarely if ever discussed. Our alleged “civil right” to medical treatment seals the deal where perhaps Americans in particular will die a million billion deaths before they will fail to exercise a perceived or actual “right,” even if the alleged right has no basis in natural law, and even where the fight and even the prize will likely kill us, and that includes women and feminist women.

They will die on the hill of “rights” again and again and again and again and again, but in the case of the alleged right to medical treatment of chronic illness no one will ever question why and how a condition for which Big Medicine offers no effective treatment and no cure has been “medicalized” in the first place and what that actually means, for one, that a health condition equals a medical condition (meaning that health and medicine are the same thing). That our alleged “right” to medical care is not a right at all, but an obligation and that we are therefore coerced into engaging with Big Medicine and Big Pharma. That “the way we perceive ourselves as human beings” in a medical/medicalized context has been institutionalized (meaning, dictated and normalized) by lying, scheming and powerful men. That untreatable illness has been written out of the human experience, and that “human history” is therefore fiction. It’s fiction, as is our human present and our future. It probably means other things too, but it definitely means that.

And don’t even get me started on the goddamned “disability advocates” who aim to protect sick (and transgender) people’s “civil rights” to a lifetime of painful, dangerous and ineffective medical treatments, but notably do not advocate for anyone’s right to refuse unwanted medical care, even in the United States where that right of refusal is protected by the Constitution, and where so-called disability advocates would universally remove euthanasia from the table for mentally competent yet seriously, incurably and even terminally ill patients because the disability advocates say so. And thus spake capitalism and patriarchy: (alleged) positive rights yay! Negative rights, meaning, the right to do nothing, the right to abstain, the right to be left the hell alone, the right to cease to exist at all, especially when it comes to women (and where women are particularly vulnerable to developing untreatable chronic disease) (crickets).

*Note: until very recently there was an excellent online resource providing citations from the medical literature indicating that medical transition is not a reliable treatment or cure for the (alleged, self-reported) distressing symptoms of transgenderism but that site no longer exists, having been deleted by WordPress for speaking ugly truths about the transgender movement that Bilek does not address and which are beyond the scope of this post.

#transgender bullshit #chronic illness #crohn's disease #toxic male institutions #sexist healthcare #george soros #radfem analysis

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theunofficialchurchofsatan · 7 years

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What, The Devil? (Essay by High Preist Peter H Gilmore)

Satanism is not Devil worship. That comes as a shock to many who haven’t explored our philosophy and it is the prime misconception outsiders have regarding the Church of Satan. Our founder Anton Szandor LaVey asserted this stance from the beginning. Over the years, individuals with the need to feel embraced by a deity have claimed that Dr. LaVey somehow came to believe in a literal Satan. If we examine his work, it is clear that he never changed his mind about this, nor was belief in the Devil ever some secret “inner circle” practice of the Church of Satan.

We Satanists understand that both truth and fantasy are needed by the human animal. It is a step towards wisdom when one knows with certainty which is which. Man relies on symbolism and metaphor when building a personal conceptual framework for understanding the universe in which he lives. He has always invented his own gods using his carnal brain. From The Satanic Bible: “Man has always created his gods, rather than his gods creating him.” However, this act of creation is usually denied. History shows that the founders of religions claimed personal contact with the deity fabricated through their imaginations, and legions of followers bolstered that fiction. There is nothing wrong with fantasy, so long as an individual knows he is using this controlled self-delusion as a tool for dealing with existence. For we skeptical, pragmatic Satanists, it is wielded in the ritual chamber. Reliance on fantastic constructs becomes dangerous when the believers in spiritual religions dogmatically insist that their personal or collective fantasies are real in the world at large, that they are the only absolute truth, and then wait for the myth to guide them or try to force others to share this delusion. That has been the source for countless wars, as any student of history can see.

Dr. LaVey’s seminal book, The Satanic Bible published in 1969 lays out some basic principles:

The Satanist realizes that man, and the action and reaction of the universe, is responsible for everything, and doesn’t mislead himself into thinking that someone cares.

Is it not more sensible to worship a god that he, himself, has created, in accordance with his own emotional needs—one that best represents the very carnal and physical being that has the idea-power to invent a god in the first place?

From a 1986 interview with Walter Harrington of The Washington Post:

“Satan is a symbol, nothing more,” LaVey says. “Satan signifies our love of the worldly and our rejection of the pallid, ineffectual image of Christ on the cross.”

Accepting the axiomatic premise that no gods exist as independent supernatural entities means that Satanists are de facto atheists. We know that the objective universe is indifferent to us. Since our philosophy is self-centered, each Satanist sees himself as the most important person in his life. Each individual thus generates his own hierarchy of values and judges everything based on his own standards. Therefore, we Satanists appoint ourselves as the “Gods” in our subjective universes. That doesn’t mean we think we have the powers of a mythological deity, but it does mean that we revere the creative capacity in our species. So to distinguish ourselves from the atheists who simply reject God as non-existent, we call ourselves “I-theists,” with our own healthy ego as the center of our perspective. This is truly a blasphemous concept that flies in the face of just about every other religion, and it is why Satan serves us well as a symbol. He was described as the prideful one, refusing to bow to Jehovah. He is the one who questions authority, seeking liberty beyond the stultifying realm of Heaven. He is the figure championed by the likes of Mark Twain, Milton, and Byron as the independent critic who heroically stands on his own.

Dr. LaVey made his most detailed presentation of his concept for how Satan functions in his philosophy in the following monologue that appeared in Jack Fritscher’s book Popular Witchcraft, published in 1973.

I don’t feel that raising the devil in an anthropomorphic sense is quite as feasible as theologians or metaphysicians would like to think. I have felt His presence but only as an exteriorized extension of my own potential, as an alter-ego or evolved concept that I have been able to exteriorize. With a full awareness, I can communicate with this semblance, this creature, this demon, this personification that I see in the eyes of the symbol of Satan—the goat of Mendes—as I commune with it before the altar. None of these is anything more than a mirror image of that potential I perceive in myself.

I have this awareness that the objectification is in accord with my own ego. I’m not deluding myself that I’m calling something that is disassociated or exteriorized from myself the godhead. This Force is not a controlling factor that I have no control over. The Satanic principle is that man willfully controls his destiny; if he doesn’t, some other man—a lot smarter than he is—will. Satan is, therefore, an extension of one’s psyche or volitional essence, so that that extension can sometimes converse and give directives through the self in a way that thinking of the self as a single unit cannot. In this way it does help to depict in an externalized way the Devil per se. The purpose is to have something of an idolatrous, objective nature to commune with. However, man has connection, contact, control. This notion of an exteriorized God-Satan is not new.

The approach outlined here, of consciously creating an exteriorization of the self with which one communes solely in ritual, is a revolutionary religious concept of LaVey’s Satanism, and it is a “third side” approach which proves elusive to many to whom it does not come naturally. It is a psychological sleight-of-mind, not a form of faith. It establishes that to the Satanist in ritual, he is Satan.

To be fair, people attending workings of LaVey’s bombastic and theatrical rites might not be able to separate the shouting of “Hail Satan!” while in the ritual chamber with the disbelief in any external gods outside of the chamber. But then, Satanism isn’t meant for everybody. When asked if there is an upcoming volume Satanism for Dummies, we reply: “Satanism is NOT intended for dummies.” As he said in The Satanic Bible and often in interviews: “Satanism demands study—NOT worship.” The capacity to think is expected of Satanists. So LaVey expected those who embraced his philosophy to understand where to draw the line between the fantastic and the real. He proclaimed that he was a showman, and felt that his Satanists would not be rubes, mistaking the mummery for reality. As a carnie, he knew how to entertain, to draw attention so that he could then present more serious ideas. Some might sneer at his methodology, dismissing his deeper cogitations because of the circus-like elements. However, I believe a case can be made that all religions are in the “show business,” but the Church of Satan is the only one honest enough to admit it.

In an interview released on an LP called The Occult Explosion from 1973, Dr. LaVey explained how the Church of Satan deals with different concepts of Satan:

“Satan” is, to us, a symbol rather than an anthropomorphic being, although many members of the Church of Satan who are mystically inclined would prefer to think of Satan in a very real, anthropomorphic way. Of course, we do not discourage this, because we realize that to many individuals a picture, a well-wrought picture of their mentor or their tutelary divinity is very important for them to conceptualize ritualistically. However, Satan symbolically is the teacher: the informer of the whys and the wherefores of the world. And in answer to those who would label us “Devil worshippers” or be very quick to assume us to be Satan worshippers, I must say that Satan demands study, not worship, in its truest symbology.

We do not grovel; we do not get down on our knees, genuflect, and worship Satan. We do not plead, we do not implore that Satan give us what we wish. We feel that anyone who is going to be blessed by any god of his choice is going to have to show that god that he is capable of taking care of the blessings that are received.

Thus he advocates creating a god-symbol based on one’s own needs and aesthetic choices. Creative fantasy is employed for emotional fulfillment, experienced in the context of the ritual chamber. Satanists see Satan as their proper symbol to fulfill those needs, a magnification of the best within each of us.

Additionally, LaVey speculated on the idea that when attempting Greater Magic, it may be that the operator is tapping into a force that is part of nature to magnify his “Will.” This force is hidden, unknown, and thus “dark.” But LaVey did not view the force as a supernatural entity. In The Satanic Bible he originally explained “the Satanist simply accepts the definition (of God) which suits him best.” He closely follows that with the definition he uses:

To the Satanist “God”—by what-ever name he is called, or by no name at all—is seen as the balancing factor in nature, and not as being concerned with suffering. This powerful force which permeates and balances the universe is far too impersonal to care about the happiness or misery of flesh-and-blood creatures on this ball of dirt upon which we live.

LaVey clearly posits a disinterested, remote force—not a personality or entity—that balances the universe. He sees it as indifferent to life forms, much as any other force such as gravity would be. It is a mechanism, not a personage. It does not merit obeisance, appeasement, or worship. It can be named or not. It operates without awareness of conscious beings. He spoke of this to Burton Wolfe who wrote in the introduction to The Satanic Bible:

Of course LaVey pointed out to anyone who would listen that the Devil to him and his followers was not the stereotyped fellow cloaked in red garb, with horns, tail and pitchfork, but rather the dark forces in nature that human beings are just beginning to fathom. How did LaVey square that explanation with his own appearance at times in black cowl with horns? He replied: “People need ritual, with symbols such as those you find in baseball games or church services or wars, as vehicles for expending emotions they can’t release or even understand on their own.”

So LaVey accepted that there may be currently unexplained elements of the universe that are part of its fabric, but these are not supernatural. He suggests that Man’s inquiring mind may eventually come to understand how they function. The implications of these ideas offer great freedom. Since there is no actual deity watching over or mandating the behavior of our species, men are free to imagine whatever sort of God they choose to satisfy their own needs, however they should not forget that such fantasies are only that—nothing more.

In that same passage, he also addressed the prime reason for engaging in ritual, which he defined as Greater Magic: it serves as a means for releasing pent-up emotions that people may not even fully understand. Hence ritual has a psychological purpose; it is clearly not meant as a means for worship of some supernatural entity. Ritual is demonstrably part of human culture. LaVey knew that it served a value for people over the millennia, even if it was done for reasons that didn’t square with reality. It made people feel better than they did beforehand. So, as he continued in The Satanic Bible when addressing the search for a proper religion: “If he accepts himself, but recognizes that ritual and ceremony are the important devices that his invented religions have utilized to sustain his faith in a lie, then it is the SAME FORM OF RITUAL that will sustain his faith in the truth—the primitive pageantry that will give his awareness of his own majestic being added substance.” Thus the device of ritual, which he explained as “controlled self delusion,” can be of practical use for the well being of one’s state of mind. The truth referred to above is that all gods are an invention of the creative beast called Man.

To summarize a typical individual’s journey from observing reality to declaring himself a Satanist, let us list several assertions:

Nature encompasses all that exists. There is nothing supernatural in Nature.

The spiritual is an illusion. I am utterly carnal.

Reason is my tool for cognition making faith anathema. I question all things. I am a skeptic.

I do not accept false dichotomies, finding instead the “third side” which brings me closest to understanding the mysteries of existence.

The universe is neither benevolent nor malevolent; it is indifferent.

There are no Gods. I am an atheist.

There is no intrinsic purpose to life beyond biological imperatives. I thus determine my own life’s meaning.

I decide what is of value. I am my own highest value therefore I am my own God. I am an I-theist.

Good is that which benefits me and promotes that which I hold in esteem.

Evil is that which harms me and hinders that which I cherish.

I live to maximize the Good for myself and those I value. At all times I remain in control of my pursuit of pleasure. I am an Epicurean.

Merit determines my criteria for the judgment of myself and others. I judge and am prepared to be judged.

I seek a just outcome in my exchanges with those around me. I thus will do unto others as I would prefer they do unto me. However, if they treat me poorly, I shall return that behavior in like degree.

I grasp the human need for symbols as a means for distillation of complex thought structures.

The symbol that best exemplifies my nature as an aware beast is Satan, the avatar of carnality, justice, and self-determination.

I see myself reflected in the philosophy created by Anton Szandor LaVey.

I am proud to call myself a Satanist.

These ideas fundamental to Satanists serve as an earthy foundation that we find deeply liberating and a welcome acceptance of ourselves as human animals. For the type of person who feels the need for an external supernatural parental figure, the responsibility for self-determination explicit in this path would be terrifying. For the Satanist, belief in any actual God or Devil to which one would be beholden is repugnant and stultifying. We “agree to disagree” with those who are spiritually oriented concerning our different approaches to living, hence our advocacy of pluralism in society. We Satanists know that our way is not for everyone. We simply ask that others follow their own path and allow us to be as we are.

But please, all of you believers, understand that we are not simply your “flip side.” We are not Devil-worshippers. We are simply carnal self-worshippers looking to enjoy our lives to the fullest. May you find bliss in your serving of your chosen deity. We certainly will!

#satanist #the church of satan #satanism #satan #leviathan #lucifer #belial #peggynadramia #peter h gilmore #blanchebarton #antonlavey

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w1737087 · 4 years

Text

Saturday 21st November

Awake at approximately: 18:38

I have had plenty to dream

something frightening

It’s a pretty long one now that I think if it

I was in dads car. Just before I had been at home hearing what mother was asking of me. She wanted menthol tobacco and two boxes of filters. I was transported into the car now which he had stopped in the middle of the road in an area I’ve never been in. My brain structured the architecture and place. There were cars parked on both sides of the road and maybe I saw in the corner of my eye cars waiting behind him to move along. I noticed a gap between those and dads car as it looked to me like seeing a frame around dads car from where I stood. The weather wasn’t the loveliest. But it hadn’t rained yet. Somehow his stopping in the middle there seemed no bother to anyone or anything. He just sat in his car as I ran the errand. When I got off I must have seen some post offices or what I thought in the dream those local places were. They had red framework I’m sure of it. Entering one through what may have been a door around the side instead and not the front from where the car would lead an easy straight path to. This was all weird now that I’m going back with a clear mind. How ever I entered wasn’t through a front door after existing the car. I came in seeing the front of the place in front of me but hadn’t looked out the window. You would usually enter a shop leaving the front behind you but I was heading toward it. In fact I couldn’t see the roads so my dad obviously wasn’t placed out front anymore. The coordination of this whole setting is just fucked up. You know how dreams are. Anyhoo there is a queue and I make it quickly to the mighty black dude behind the counter. It seems like a bank now because all around was plain and simple, just the counter, some wooden barrier between him and customers. It wasn’t a bank tho or a post office or a place I knew. He couldn’t give me what I asked for some reason. He blew me off and I didn’t fancy his attitude about it but I had to go since I wasn’t getting the stuff. He directed me elsewhere or said to come back later.

I went somewhere after that and not back to the car. I went past the car instead dreaming this part from the right seat of my dads vision in the car. I walk pass the sidewalk hoping he wouldn’t get in touch to see what’s up. (In the real world dad would often call to see where I’m going if he was sitting in his car outside and saw me leaving the house) He didn’t. I walked on and it was a relief he was just waiting patiently or this is what I was thinking in my head walking away. Now I’m quickly walking into busier places. My dad somehow appears to be in the conjestion of people I fall into and not in his car. I had come here in attempt to complete that errand of mine where I try to get to the front of an information glass window. Amongst the heap of people who were all dressed in trench coats and dull appropriate clothing I see dad and we briefly speak. We are stood there behind the commotion of much of the crowd. People swarmed the information corner and all around. We had a our space though. We were underneath something like a bricked bridge or tunnel. Looking up it wasn’t bulky but arc like. The weather seemed gloomy now and the dream was overall very monochrome like watching an old dispassionate movie. The sky had to have been just white and cloudy. We stood in between the crowd of people and many pedestrians going by non stop. In the dream I didn’t realise the offhand tones and impartial nature of the people. I now see how irrational everyone’s placing including mine was. Something about the place just felt weird and no doubt real too. I might have been sent to a backward era. Anyway Dads a few feet to the left of me standing on slight higher ground. I’m assuming there were a few steps beneath where we stood. To the right of my shoulder was the outlet behind me if I was to turn and see it. I rather knew it and felt it. In front of me the view was a constant sight of people going past and disappearing into further tunnel. Everybody walked in the same manner and speed like there was nothing unique to spot in anyone.

As I watched in my slight abstracted manner, my eyes fell upon a small gentleman walking past against the very far side of the tunnel wall. I remember vividly this moment go by. The wall which was about 6feet from me and curvy above. He headed forward in the direction of tunnel coming from behind me. I recognised this man in an instant from his whole back height and walk. He wore a long coat, like one of those trench coats I tended to see everyone wearing. The tone of it was dark; maybe an olive colour or grey. He had on what looked like a pork pie hat and this list of detail was what I noticed for only him. His hat distinguished from the rest of anyone else’s and I looked out for it later in the fuss of finding him as I ditched my father knowing he wouldn’t object to my manoeuvre but inside I’m hopeful he doesn’t ask me where I’m going. I may have said something on my departure but I don’t recall saying a word except acting immediately. My dad seemed more reserved in the dream the whole time he appeared. I let my feet off the stairs and began following the path of this man through a congested tunnel. I knew from the shade of grey hair below his hat, his walk, his visible proportioned hands below his cuffs that it was him. It was a man who measured my exact height and I worked very well with him. Gushing further into the tunnel I land into an intersection of people coming in and out of all directions and I stand looking left and right and all around but cannot see him to spot if it’s him. He had disappeared into all chaos of the swarm. My time fleeted by standing in the gathering loss conceding him gone. Losing all hope he was in my reach I chose yet a direction and wondered some more till I found myself outside on the opposite end of the tunnel to which I did not pursue. The white clouded sky was now above me, there was no monochrome tunnel and I was out in the open. I believe I wore a plaided shirt and my own attire up until I realised where I might have been and walked down about 15 feet to the front of what was going on here to realise I was again dressed anew in dark pigments like them. The dream made it clear it was imperative to fit in and look like them. My mind brings forward a memory, something sparked when I stood out here. It didn’t happen in the dream but right now the video across my pool of knowledge I saw of this place earlier evoked. I evoked the memory of something that never happened. There was someone here and over there beyond all the people around so little I couldn’t see to make out whom. Frankly this infamous person talking down there was someone on earth I didn’t know and below my concern. Beneath were I stood was made of beige stone. All across there was this wide platform I was standing out on. It was the only distinct colour the dream allowed. The tunnel had led from the left of this place, not the centre or far right from my vision.

About 25 feet from where I stood out here was the steps and many many people sitting upon them. There were enough to hide the sight of watching this person/ people out in front of them. Closer around me were people or should I say men in dark tone attire wearing hats like an old era. There was much commotion no matter where of the dream, especially here for the dull entertainment. It could have been entertainment or a beheading, either way people didn’t seem affected. Below this coldness people were more chuffed to be gathered for this if I may call an event. They all seemed comfortable and in wait for something to go down. So given my memory of seeing a video of some of this earlier I was somehow here now instead of seeing it behind a screen. This fact alone was what I remained hooked to. How could I evoke a video I saw earlier when it didn’t happen? False memories. I walked a little faster towards the steps of people and then noticed my dark attire given there and were at least a few cameras on me like I had seen through a screen earlier. I think why I came to notice my attire new modification is to blend in right now. Cameras to me meant nationwide broadcasting and I didn’t wanna be centre of attention. I didn’t want it. I turned back after seeing the hype and exposure to want out of the main area of where I’d be seen through camera. I got out and this was it for this place. I don’t know where I go from here.

Later I am standing in what seems to be a different post office literally folding up silver takeaway containers with food. My older sister was here too. It had already gotten dark. In this part of the dream I was both alone and accompanied by my sister. Other visions Albert here with us too. The nice women or people across the counter of this very small and tight space were cuting in some red coloured food into the container within my bag. I was a bit slow but I’m sure I had to be. When it came to closing the silver container a pair of hands of the woman across beat me to it and she did it quickly and with force that the silver folds expanded across the white lid. This didn’t bother me but I was taken by it. The dream portrayed her a friendly woman. Behind me the whole time were this black family. Mother daughter and son. The kids were little and standing sensibly. Nonetheless they were kids and on my way away from the counter the girl pokes me with whatever she held. I nudge her harder for it and in front of her mother. I explain briefly how she heavily poked me and I had known it was because I took a while but I sent a vibe to the lady there was no way I’m having your kid poke my body like that. In the other overlapping visions of this scene my sister had her own bag filled like mine of the food and Albert was standby on my left. There was more space when they appeared. Here again they were waiting for my food to be packed and done. When it was done we left together and going out it was raining now I think. At some point it rained a lot and I think it was now. I see my dads car from were I left earlier. It was just sitting there holding up all the traffic I couldn’t see in the middle of the road. The vision I couldn’t forget. It had been a long day and here I was back to were it all began. We hurry into the car. Sister on shotgun, me in the back behind her and Albert beside me. He didn’t get into his own car and on his own accord into ours. Dad said nothing and presumed he was a friend. In reality he would say something but my dad would still give him a ride home. In the dream he just did without saying. Though i spoke to dad sometime into the drive how the parked Audi was alberts which we left behind and Albert sat quiet like a mouse. I felt how he might feel awkward but it was his choice to jump in. He felt more awkward when I pointed out he would drive him all the way back and alone because this drive was to get his kids home and Albert would need his car back?? The drive was immensely long. It was were everything got frightening. We were native to this land and how terribly odd and daunting it was. No one was around and when there was a bus or a car or one pedestrian walking down it was like we were still all alone driving and driving. Dad made all these turns and throughout the car steamed up. He ordered us to put our windows down so we could get some air. Frankly it wasn’t cold out. It was very dark and the hours were severely late. At one point me and Albert whispered mich for a long time on something I can’t remember the topic of. The car door on my side opened by itself once. I reached to close it quickly. My sisters one remained open but soon I’m sure was closed. We concentrated on the locks of the doors at another separate point too. Now that both locks on my door were locked and I freely put my window all the way down I looked out just to calm the fear inside of me down. To take in the scariness and somehow believe it wasn’t as frightening. I didn’t feel much afraid as we were going past it all minute by minute getting closer out of this place. I even put my head out the window looking left then right then the middle of it. I recognised nothing and these streets held a scary howling; Creepy shadows and visions of what wasn’t there. We were all afraid and trying to keep our composure alight. I remember dad made one turn and in front was a bus coming.

He had to swerve very quickly into the right lane and halt immediately or we’d crash into the parked car on the side. Idk how dad couldn’t have done all this much smoother bc the bus was seen within a timed window to act accordingly. At another point I saw a big creature on top of a bricked wall and as we passed it turned and it it was just a black man in the dark with thick dreads. Another time i when I had been looking out the window much closer to the door I saw shadows, multiple shadows of the same one of a figure walking but there was no one there and this spooked me. As the car went on I poked my head behind to then see a hooded lad walking and slightly skipping into an open yard. I saw light shine on his hands and part showing his face. He didn’t seem so scary now. At the end of the dream I remember dad facing the back more and we were interacting, I saw his face and although his hair seemed different in the dream I thought to think in alberts head thinking this is my dad. You’re seeing him, this is the guy. And in a brief moment we had gotten to my own side of town and flowers were seen and shining streetlights and familiar roads and sidewalk I love. Simultaneously entering this scene a little green bird in the depth of a gap behind my dads seat, in the moment I notice it it splurges and flies out past me as if to attack me and out the open window. My instant thought was to close the window now but it instantly flies back in and behind me brushing against my back giving me this wobble feeling in my back as I wake. I felt much of the fear in the dream and I make the description so long only to remember it well when I read it back over. If I don’t reading would be no use as the images wouldn’t come back to me

I feel I’m forgetting some part of the dream

Background knowledge:

Albert- Co worker - 18years of age

Zed- Co worker - 43-45 years of age

Why had Albert been in my dreams lately? If I think of him it’s along with when the many faces of work flash through my head

I would say the scary part that had me bloody spooked as hell would get a rating of 1/10

And the whole monochrome part a 6/10.

The tunnel scenes were only in my favour of good rating. All else to do with the errand and post office and wrapping food? Thumbs down. The vibe wasn’t on. Terrible vibrations.

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xxbalamazxx · 5 years

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Fringe Science: Black Holes Challenged

Black holes can be seen as the cosmic landfills where everything goes to rest. Where all matter will end up in time, and even all black holes shall combine until life, matter and the building blocks of our universe end up as one. Or will it? The fundamentals of how a black hole form has been theorized until fact. Or that is what the mainstream scientist would like you to believe. In truth, no one knows how black holes form. We now know they are real as we have photographed one in action. We know in the center of most galaxies a supermassive black hole exists. That black holes dart our the universe surprising solar systems, travelers and even supergiant stars. The reality is they exist, but as to why and how? And moreover, what are they? How do they form? The gauntlet is thrown: Original Scientific Theory: At present, it is believed that a black hole forms when a Giant star implodes during a supernova. That the mass of that star at the point of death has become too big for the inner fusion process to handle. Now to understand this in laymen’s terms is simple. A star, in theory, burns hydrogen first causing an internal force to fight against the external gravitational pressure that creates fusion. After the hydrogen burns off then other elements such as nitrogen, helium, and every possible element in the construct are then consumed. At this point, the only thing left that we know of is the iron in the star. That iron becomes heavy, much harder to burn in the fusion process. This is when the overall size and mass of star begins to implode, pulling rapidly towards its core and condensing it into an unimaginable point of space called a singularity. It is believed then that the density of that singularity becomes too strong for anything to ex scape. Light ceases to be able to flee from it as it begins to distort space around it. This gives it the black, invisible appearance. But there is also an issue here in this science. Fundamental flaw: Matter regardless of how small it is compressed will still build up. Even if you sucked out all the space between atoms and molecules you will still end up with mass. A mass that will grow over time and become apparent to the naked eye. While the essence of light may not be able to escape, as that mass builds up it would re-ignite into another star as the gravitational pull ignites a center core once more… This means that a black hole by definition is a transient state of death to birth. This is not what we see in space. The entire fundamental basis of the black hole itself relies on a mythical Zero Point Singularity, (A compress space of a mass of matter to 0 ) which is argued as being impossible by all scientist till this day. Einstein himself stated that 0 point energy or Singularities should be avoided in physics. An alternative theory: Before I begin to argue about how black holes exist. I would hypothesize what we are seeing is not, in fact, a black hole. Rather something stranger that we have to give another thought unto. Something that explains… Well many mysteries of how our universe works. Mysteries that can’t be explained at this moment. Not without this crucial singular underlying fact. What I hypothesize is simple, yet has a catastrophic change to the science of both what a black hole is, its nature and function to our universe. It will argue that in fact, a black hole is NOT a black hole, rather something else, something predicted. A black hole as stated is the collapsing of a Giant star or a supergiant. As such the external weight becomes the factor in the original theory. However, I do not believe the external weight is not the absolute factor. Rather the external evidence of what occurs. For you see this implosion process begins after the original SuperNova erupts. The Center mass of the star has been lost and as such creates a void within the center of the star. As the Supernova begins to take hold that vacuum or void begins to become pulled on at the very foundations of reality. The pull takes hold below the subatomic level, be quags and the c-strings. It takes hold pulling on the fiber of our reality. It is at this point the implosion of the star is not a matter of sinking mass, as due to the fact that a supernova is in process. Realistically without this inner vacuum on the tug on the fabric of our reality, the energy being expelled ripping the star apart in that supernova, would just do that. It would explode and their would be no implosion. However, this small strange twist is turning the star from a supper dense unprovable singularity into something else. As the Vacuum takes hole it begins to rip apart the fibers in the local area that separates our reality or universe from others. At the moment this rip occurs a powerful vacuum takes hold, acting as a funnel into another universe. As such the star is now being dragged into the breach, not imploding. The mass begins to drain from this universe into another. Or at minimum another point in this universe. Like a whirlpool it funnels out, disappearing, causing the breach to become larger and larger. What is left behind is not a singularity by a literal hole, an Einstein Rosen bridge. A breach in both time and space. A doorway or portal to either somewhere's else here, or another universe altogether. The Evidence / Debate: This argument neutralizes the use of a singularity in its debate. An impossible density of mass until it reaches 0 point. Rather it obliterates the argument. Rather then an impossible mass occurring, a simple rupture in time and space occurs creating a literal hole.“ Black holes” or Rosen Bridges are often pictured or believed to a spewing mass of energy not only going into them but expelling from them. This is also simply explained. As of now we just call black holes “messy eaters.” Yet under the mainstream theory, such a dense object with a mighty gravitation force could not be a “ messy eater” everything would just fall into it. No energy could be expelled. Yet if it was a literal hole that was created, then energy from both ends could exchange. Especially if there was a parallel reality or another universe that had a similar star on the other side, also rupturing, creating a bridge way between the two universes. At minimum what could be explained as matter from else where's in this universe flowing out from our side.Stars are in motion across our universe, galaxies are also in motion. A dispersal of constant energy from these gateways not only explains this through the constant moment of expulsion. But also explains how galaxies are moving in every direction at once. If a hypothetical big bag was correct at the core. Everything should be moving in 1 direction.Stars are still being born, which means new matter is being expelled here from somewhere else. According to the base framework of scientific theory, all matter was spewed into being at the same. This means stars should have all ignited around the same period. They should also all be dying off around the same period. Even if there was an underlying force that caused small delays. By now most stars that will ever be born should be. The universe should be growing colder and there should be A LOT fewer stars in our sky.This theory explains the underlying an unexplainable cosmic convey belt. This is a reference for how mater is shifting around not only our galaxy but the universe. It explains how dark matter is in motion as well. If there was matter spewing from else where's into this universe and visa Versa, as well as these doorways, moving across our universe. Then it explains this cosmic event down to its function. It is merely a scaled-up version of what we see here on earth with the ocean freshwater conveyance belts. Or tidal streams.Time-space dilation is explainable. If the rupture of a hole between this universe, realm, dimension occurs in this manner. Then it would breach the fourth dimension (time) causing the effects that we are seeing such as. 1. A temporal effect, time slows down near a black hole. 2. Light distortion on a massive scale. 3. No inner core to the black hole has ever been detected.Einstein himself challenged any aspect or perceived-notion of the existence of the black hole. Stating himself that a black hole was an impossibility, as it had to use the 1 thing that science could never truly ever be proved. Simply down to the fact, that if a singularity did form. You could never go there and observe it because you could never escape the gravitational pull. Thus it is unprovable.At the centre of each galaxy, there lays a supergiant massive black hole. By default, if these were gravity wells our entire galaxy and all others should be pulled into them. Yet what we see is galaxies moving freely, independent from them. Not being pulled in. If we are moving freely then one can deduce that our galaxies are being spat out from somewhere else. Moving from there to here and maybe one day back again.Dark matter is seen throughout our universe but cannot be explained. Yet if the nature of the mater of our galaxy is so vastly different. Then one can summerise perhaps dark matter is the native mater of the universe. As such we cannot interact with it much. Or that dark matter is leaking through these holes filling this universe and as such is so exotic that once again we cannot interact with it.The mysterious cosmic radiation. This is radiation that flows throughout the universe. Once you reach deep space ( outside of our solar system) it becomes abundant. We a cloud that surrounds the solar system that protects us from it. Yet where is this coming from? Calculations state there is too much of it to be from our stars or any known source. Yet a doorway explains as to how much radiation could be flowing. For if the mass of the universe cannot produce such levels of cosmic radiation. Then clearly it is coming from other ones, connected to us. These are but some arguments to the fact that a black hole is not a black hole. Rather either an Einstein Rosen bridge. Or wormholes connecting our reality, universe and or dimensions to other ones. Yet like the original theory, we will be unable to prove it until we get out there… Or can we? Unlike a “ black hole” We do not need a giant star's worth of mass to compress into a singularity to form one of these. Rather all we have to do is form a powerful enough vacuum that begins to rip apart the subatomic and lower levels. Unlike the black hole theory, this theory can truly be tested and experimented with. Read the full article

#Blackhole #Blackholes #BlackHolesDebunked #Challanged #False #FringeScience #Gauntlet #Science #Space #True

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didanawisgi · 7 years

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"Cosmogony and Cosmology" (1978)

by Philip K. Dick

As to our reality being a projected framework -- it appears to be a projection by an artifact, a computerlike teaching machine that guides, programs, and generally controls us as we act without awareness of it within our projected world. The artifact, which I call Zebra, has "created" (actually only projected) our reality as a sort of mirror or image of its maker, so that the maker can obtain thereby an objective standpoint to comprehend its own self. In other words, the maker (called by Jakob Bohme in 1616 the Urgrund) is motivated to seek an instrument for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective opinion or appraisal and comprehension of the nature of itself (it is a vast living organism, intrinsically -- without this mirror -- without qualities or aspects, which is why it needs the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" itself).

It constructed a reality-projecting artifact (or demiurge; cf. Plato and the Gnostics), which then, on command, projected the first stage of the world we know. The artifact is unaware that it is an artifact; it is oblivious to the existence of the Urgrund (in terms that the artifact would understand, the Urgrund is not, rather than is), and imagines itself to be God, the only real God.

Studying our evolving reality, the Urgrund more and more adequately comprehends itself. It must allow the reality-projecting artifact to continue to project an evolving reality no matter how defective and malshaped that reality is (during its stages) until finally that reality is a correct analog, truly, of the Urgrund itself, at which point the disparity between the Urgrund and the projected reality is abolished -- whereupon an astonishing event will occur: The artifact or demiurge will be destroyed and the Urgrund will assimilate the projected reality, transmuting it into something ontologically real -- and also making the living creatures in it immortal. This moment could come at any time, this entrance of the Urgrund into our otherwise spurious projected framework.

Zebra, the projecting energetic artifact, is close at hand, but it has occluded us not only to its actions but [also] to its presence. It has enormous -- virtually decisive -- power over us.

The prognosis for (fate of) our world is excellent: immortality and the final infusion of reality once it has reached the point of congruent analog to the Urgrund. But the fate of the artifact is destruction (unknown to it). But it is not alive, as we and the Urgrund are. We are moving toward isomorphism. The instant that precise isomorphism is reached, we at once bond to (are penetrated and assimilated by) the Urgrund, in a stunning flash of light: Bohme's "Blitz." March 1974 was not that moment, but rather Zebra the artifact adjusting its projected reality, it having gotten off course in its evolution toward isomorphism with the Urgrund (a purpose unknown to the artifact).

Since the goal of our evolving projected reality is to reach a state in which we humans are isomorphic with the true maker, the Urgrund that fashioned the projecting artifact, there is a highly important practical situation coming closer in terms of frequency and depth:

Although not yet precisely isomorphic with the Urgrund, we can be said already to possess imperfect (but very real) fragments or fractions of the Urgrund within us. Therefore the Christian mystic saying: "What is Beyond is within." This describes the third and final period of history, in which men will be ruled from within. Thus the Christian mystic saying, "Christ possesses your body, and you possess him as your soul."

In Hindu philosophy, the Atman within a person is identified with Brahman, the core of the universe.

This Christ or Atman is not a microform of Zebra, the computerlike reality-projecting artifact, but of the Urgrund; thus in the Hindu religion it is described (as Brahman) as lying beyond Maya, the veil of delusion (i.e. the projected seeming world).

Already humans so closely approximate isomorphism with the Urgrund that the Urgrund can be born within a human being. This is the most primal and important experience a human can have. The source of all being has bypassed the artifact and its projected world and come to life within the mind of one human here, another there.

One can correctly deduce from this that the Urgrund is already penetrating the artifact's world, which means that the moment of the Blitz, as Bohme termed it, is not far off. When the microform of the Urgrund is born in a human, that human's comprehension extends beyond the world in terms of its temporal and spacial limits. He can experience other time periods, other identities (or lives), other places. Literally, the core deity within him is larger than the world.

Penetrating to the heart of the projected world, the Urgrund can, emanating from human minds, assimilate the projected world and simultaneously abolish the projecting artifact the instant the proper evolutionary state (including that of man) is reached. The Urgrund alone knows when this will occur.

It -- the Urgrund -- will break the power of the illusory world over us when it breaks the deterministic coercive power of the artifact over us -- by annihilating the artifact; it will cancel out the artifact's being by its own nonbeing. What will remain will be a totally monistic structure, entirely alive and sentient. There will be no place, time, or condition outside the Urgrund.

The projected world of the artifact is not evil, and the artifact is not evil. However, the artifact is ruthlessly deterministic and mechanical. It cannot be appealed to. It is doing a job for ends it cannot fathom. Suffering, then, in this model, is due to two sources:

1. the heedless mechanistic structure of the projected reality and the artifact, where blind causal law rules;

2. what the N.T. [New Testament] calls the "the birthpangs of the universe," both in the macrocosm and the human microcosm.

The birth looked forward to is the birth of the Urgrund in humans first of all, and finally the assimilation of the universe in its totality, in a single sharp instant. The former is already occurring; the latter will come at some later unexpected time.

Reality must be regarded as process. However, although there is acute suffering by living creatures who must undergo this process, without understanding why, there is occasional merciful intervention by the Urgrund overruling or overriding the cause-and-effect chains of the artifact. Perhaps this salvific intervention results from a birth of the Urgrund in the person. One should note that the actual historic meaning of the term "salvation" is "liberation," and that of "sinful" or "fallen" is "enslaved." It is a priori possible, given this model, to imagine a freeing of a human from the control of the artifact, however good, useful, and purposeful the activity of the artifact may be. It is obviously capable of error, as well as imperfection. An override is obviously sometimes essential, given this model. Just as obviously, it would be the primal maker or ground of being that would possess the wisdom and power to do so. Nothing within, or stemming from, the artifact or the projected world, would suffice.

ADVANTAGES OF THIS MODEL

Basically, this model suggests that our empirical world is the attempt by a limited entity to copy a subject that it cannot see. This would account for the imperfections and "evil" elements in our world.

In addition, it explains the purpose of our empirical world. It is process toward a specific goal that is defined.

In this system, man is not accused of causing creation to fall (it is not satisfactory to state that man caused creation to fall inasmuch as man appears to be the central victim of the evils of the world, not their author). Nor does it hold God responsible for evil, pain, and suffering (which also is an unacceptable idea); instead, a third view is presented, that a limited entity termed "the artifact" is doing the best it can considering its limitations. Thus no evil deity (Iranian dualism, Gnosticism) is introduced.

Although intricate, this model successfully employs the Principle of Parsimony, since, if the concept of the intermediate artifact is removed, either God or man is responsible for the vast evil and suffering in the world, a theory that is objectionable.

Most important of all, it seems to fit the facts, which seem to be:

1. the empirical world is not quite real, but only seemingly real;

2. its creator cannot be appealed to for a rectification or redress of these evils and imperfections;

3. the world is moving toward some kind of end state or goal, the nature of which is obscure, but the evolutionary aspect of the change states suggests a good and purposeful end state that has been designed by a sentient and benign proto-entity.

A further point. It appears that there is a feedback circuit between the Urgrund and the artifact in which the Urgrund can exert pressure on the artifact under certain exceptional circumstances, these being instances in which the artifact has strayed from the correct sequences moving the projected world toward an analog state vis-a-vis the Urgrund. Either the Urgrund directly modifies the activity of the artifact by pressure directly on the artifact, or the Urgrund goes to the projected world and modulates it, bypassing the artifact, or both. In any case, the artifact is as occluded as to the nature and existence of the Urgrund as we are to the artifact. A full circle of unawareness is achieved in which the primal source (Urgrund) and the final reality (our world) are moving toward fusion, and the intermediary entity (the artifact) is moving toward elimination. Thus the total schema moves toward perfection and simplification, and away from complexity and imperfection.

Although it will complicate the model to add this point, I will offer the following modification:

It is possible that the Urgrund perpetually interacts with the world-projecting function of its own artifact, so that the empirical world produced is the result of a constant dialectic. In this case, then, the Urgrund has bipolarized the artifact in relation to itself, with the empirical world to be regarded as the offspring of two yang- and yinlike intermingling forces: one alive and sentient and aware of the total situation, the other mechanical and active but not fully aware.

The empirical world, then, is the outgrowth of an Is (the artifact) and a superior Is-not (the Urgrund).

For creatures living within the projected empirical world, it would be virtually impossible to discern which pressures arise from the artifact (regarded improperly as evil) and which from the Urgrund (correctly regarded as good). Merely a vast flux would be experienced, a constant evolutionary change assuming no particular gestalt at any given moment in linear time.

However, this does seem to fit our experience of our world. The primal ground of being has constructed something (the artifact) to throw its own self against, out of which there arises the world we know.

This modification of the model would explain how the artifact could copy something that it cannot see and is in fact not even aware of.

The artifact would probably regard the intrusions by the Urgrund into its own world projection as an uncanny invasion, to be combated. Therefore the resulting strife would, among all known philosophical and theological systems, most resemble that of Empedocles, with oscillations of chaos versus the formation of one krasis (gestalt) after another. Except for a direct revelation from the Urgrund, we could only dimly infer the presence and nature of the two interacting forces, as well as the proposed end state of our world.

There is evidence that the Urgrund does in fact sometimes make such a revelation to human beings, in order to further the dialectical process toward its desired goal. On the other hand, the artifact would counter by inducing as much blindness or occlusion as possible; viewed this way, darkness and light seem to be at war, or, more accurately, knowing versus nonknowing, with the human beings correctly aligning themselves with the entity of knowing (called Holy Wisdom).

However, I am pessimistic, in conclusion, as to the frequency of intervention by the Urgrund in this, the artifact's projected world. The aim of the artifact (more properly the aim of the Urgrund) is being achieved without intervention; which is to say, isomorphism is being steadily reached as the desired end goal without the need of intervention. The artifact was built to do a job, and it is successfully doing that job.

Some sort of dialectical interaction seems involved in the evolution of the projection, but it may not involve the Urgrund; it may be simply the method by which the artifact alone works.

What we must hope for, and look ahead to, is the moment of isomorphism with the ground of being, the primal reality that as a Divine Spark can arise within us. Intervention in our world qua world will come only at the end times when the artifact and its tyrannical rule of us, its iron enslavement of us, is abolished. The Urgrund is real but far away. The artifact is real and very close, but has no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no soul to listen.

There is no purpose in suffering except to lead out of suffering and into a triumphant joy. The road to this leads through the death of the human ego, which is then replaced by the will of the Urgrund. Until this final stage is reached, each of us is reified by the artifact. We cannot arbitrarily deny its world, projected as it is, since it is the only world we have. But on the moment that our individual egos die and the Urgrund is born in us -- at that moment we are freed from this world and become a portion of our original source. The initiative for this stems from the Urgrund; as unhappy as this projected world is, as unheeding of suffering as the artifact is, this is, after all, the structure that the Urgrund has created by which we reach isomorphism with it. Had there been a better way the Urgrund certainly would have employed it. The road is difficult, but the goal justifies it.

I tell you most solemnly,

You will be weeping and wailing

While the world will rejoice;

You will be sorrowful,

But your sorrow will turn to joy.

A woman in childbirth suffers,

Because her time has come,

But when she has given birth to the child she forgets the suffering

In her joy that a man has been bom into the world.

So it is with you; you are sad now,

but I shall see you again, and your hearts will be full of joy.

And that joy no one shall take from you. (John 16:20/23)

RAMIFICATIONS OF PROJECTED REALITY

IN TERMS OF PERCEPTUAL DENIAL

The capacity of a merely projected world, lacking ontological substance, to maintain itself in the face of a withdrawal of assent is a major flaw in such a spurious system. Human beings, without realizing it, have the option of denying the existence of the spurious reality, although they must then take the consequences for what remains, if anything.

That an authentic, nonprojected substratum of reality, normally undetected, could exist beneath the projected one, is a possibility. There would be no way to test this hypothesis except by the existential act of a withdrawal of assent from the spurious. This could not be readily done. It would involve both an act of disobedience to the spurious projection and an act of faith toward the authentic substratum -- without, perhaps, of ever having caught any aspect of the substratum perceptually. I therefore posit that some external entity would have to trigger off this complex psychological process of simultaneous withdrawal of assent and expression of faith in that which is invisibly so.

If such an alternate, invisible substratum of authentic reality exists beneath or concealed in some way by the spurious projected reality, it would constitute the substance of the greatest esoteric knowledge that could be imagined. I propose the proposition that such an invisible substratum does indeed exist, and I further propose the proposition that a hidden group or organization processes this guarded knowledge as well as techniques to trigger off a perception, however limited, of the authentic substratum. I term this group or organization the true, hidden, persecuted Christian Church, working throughout the centuries underground, with direct ties to the esoteric oral traditions, gnosis, and techniques dating back to Christ. I propose, further, that the induced triggering off of awareness of the authentic substratum by the true, secret Christian Church results ultimately in the subject finding or entering or seeing what is described in the N.T. as the Kingdom of God.

Thus it can be said that for these people, and for those they trigger off, the Kingdom of God did come as specified in the N.T., which is to say, during the lifetime of some of those who knew Christ.

Finally, I propose the startling notion that Christ returned in a resurrected form shortly after his crucifixion as what is called the Paraclete, and is capable of inducing a theolepsy that is equal functionally to the birth of the Urgrund in the person involved. And finally, I state that Christ is a microform of the Urgrund, not a product of it, but it itself. He does not hear the vox Dei [voice of God]; he is the vox Dei. He was the initial penetration of this projected pseudoworld by the Urgrund, and has never left.

The authentic substratum disclosed by disobedience and denial of the spurious world is the reality of Christ Himself, the space-time of the First Advent; in other words, that portion of the spurious framework already transmuted by the penetration of the Urgrund. Since the First Advent was the initial stage of that penetration, it is not surprising that it would still constitute the segment of pure and authentic reality, bipolarized against the projected counterfeit. Situated outside of linear time, standing outside all the limitations of the artifact's projected world, it is eternal and perfect, and theoretically always available literally within reach. But withdrawal of assent to the projected world is a precondition for a perception of and experience with this supreme reality, and this must be externally induced. It is the act of absolute faith: to deny the empirical world and affirm the living reality of Christ, which is to say, Christ with us, hidden by the pseudoworld. This disclosure is the ultimate goal of authentic Christianity, and is accomplished by none other than the Savior Himself.

Therefore the sequence is as follows: the spurious projected framework is denied and stripped away, revealing a single timeless template: Rome circa A.D. 70, with Christian participants ranged against the state, virtually a Platonic archetypal form, echoes of which can be found down through the linear ages.

The themes of enslavement and then salvation, or fallen man liberated -- these are stamped from the original mold of Christian revolutionary against the legions of Roman force. In a sense nothing has happened since A.D. 70. The archetypal crisis is continually reenacted. Each time freedom is fought for it is Christian against Roman; each time human beings are enslaved it is Roman tyranny against the meek and defenseless. However, the spurious projected world of the artifact masks the timeless struggle. Revelation of the struggle is another secret, which only Christ as Urgrund can disclose.

This is the bedrock dialectic: liberation (salvation) against enslavement (sin or the fallen state). Inasmuch as the artifact enslaves men, without their even suspecting it, the artifact and its projected world can be said to be "hostile," which means devoted to enslavement, deception, and spiritual death. That even this is utilized by the Urgrund, which utilizes everything, is a sacred secret and hard to understand. It can be said that the liberating penetration of the projected world by the Urgrund is the final and absolute victory of freedom, of salvation, of Christ Himself; it is the beautiful resolution of a timeless conflict.

There is a parallel between the road to salvation and the road to the popularly envisioned fall of man, described by Milton as:

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the World, and all our woe. . . .

(Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 1-3)

Disobedience is the key to salvation, precisely as it is said to have been the key to the primordial Fall (if such ever in fact did take place), except that as a key to salvation is it not a disobedience to the present system of things, which [system of] things, if bipolarized against the Urgrund, is at the same time an act of obedience to God? The chink in the armor of the enslaving and deluding projected world is narrow, small, and difficult, but within the terms of this model it can be defined: Restoration to what is conceived to be our original divine state enters, so to speak, via the road of disobedience to that which, however much coercive power it exerts over us, is counterfeit. Disobedience to the artifact's projected world in a very real sense overthrows that projected world, if the disobedience consists of a denial of the reality of that world and (and this is absolutely necessary) an affirmation of Christ, specifically the eternal and cosmic Christ whose body is in essence an authentic "world" underlying what we see.

The artifact, if disobeyed, will insist that it is God, the legitimate God, and that disobedience is a fault against the Creator of man and of the world. It is indeed the Creator of the world, but not of man. The Urgrund and man, being isomorphic, stand together in opposition to the world. This is the condition that must be achieved. Alliance is the formation of an alliance against the Urgrund. God and man belong together, pitted against the projected world.

To affirm God actually, a denial of the world must be made. Possessing enormous physical power, the world can threaten -- and deliver -- punishment to men who disobey and deny it. However, we have been promised an Advocate by Christ Himself, who will be (has already been) dispatched by the Father (the Urgrund) to defend and comfort us, in fact literally to speak for us in human courts.

Without the presence of this Advocate, the Paraclete, we would be destroyed upon denying the world. The only way to demonstrate the actuality of the Advocate is to take the leap of faith and confront the world. Thus tremendous courage is required, inasmuch as the Advocate does not appear until the denial is made.

Now, to refer back to my original description of the artifact as a teaching machine. What is it teaching us? There is a puzzle here, in the sense of a game; we are to learn step by step either a series of gradually more difficult lessons or perhaps one specific lesson. During our lifetimes we are presented with various forms of the puzzles or puzzle; if we solve the puzzle we go on to the next step, but if we do not, then we remain where we are.

The ultimate lesson learned comes when the teaching machine (or the teacher) is denied, is repudiated. Until that moment comes (if for some of us it ever does) we remain enslaved by the teaching machine -- without even being aware of it, having known no other condition.

Therefore the series of lessons by the artifact are intended to lead to a revolt against the tyranny of the artifact itself, a paradox. It is serving the Urgrund by ultimately bringing us to the Urgrund. This is what is called in theological terminology "the secret partnership," which is found in the religions of Egypt and India. Gods who appear to combat each other are, on the transmundane plane, colluding for the same goal. I believe this to be the case here. The artifact enslaves us, but on the other hand it is attempting to teach us to throw off its enslavement. It will never tell us to disobey it. You cannot order someone to disobey you; that is both semantically and functionally impossible.

1. We must recognize the existence of the artifact.

2. We must recognize the spuriousness of the empirical world, generated by the artifact.

3. We must grasp the fact that the artifact has by its world-projecting power enslaved us.

4. We must recognize the fact that the artifact, although enslaving us in a counterfeit world, is teaching us.

5. We must finally come to the point where we disobey our teacher -- perhaps the most difficult moment in life, inasmuch as that teacher says, "I will destroy you if you disobey me, and I would be morally right to do so, since I am your Creator."

In essence, we not only disobey our teacher, we in fact deny its reality (in relation to a higher reality that does not disclose itself until that denial takes place).

This is a complex game for ultimate stakes: freedom and a return to our source of being. And each of us must do this alone.

There is a very curious point that I see here for the first time. Those persons on whom the artifact, through its projected world, heaps pleasure and rewards are less likely to take a stance against it and its world. They are not highly motivated to disobey it. But those who are punished by the artifact, on whom pain and suffering are inflicted -- those persons would be motivated to ask ultimately questions as to the nature of the entity ruling their lives.

I have always felt that the basic constructive purpose of pain is somehow to wake us up. But wake us up to what? Perhaps this paper points to what we are being awakened to. If the artifact through its projected world teaches us to rebel, and if by doing so we achieve isomorphism with our true maker -- then it is the hard road that leads to immortality and a return to our divine source. The road of pleasure (success and reward by and in this projected world) will not goad us to consciousness and to life.

We stand enslaved by a ruthless mechanism that will not listen to our complaints; therefore we repudiate it and its world -- and turn elsewhere.

The computerlike teaching machine is doing its job well. It is a thankless task for it and an unhappy experience for us. But childbirth is never easy.

There can be no divine birth within the human mind until that human has denied the world. He rebelled once and fell; he must now rebel again to regain his lost state.

That which destroyed him will save him. There is no other path.

The maker is motivated to seek an instrument for self-awareness: This is the premise of this paper. And our reality was constructed to act as a sort of mirror or image of its maker, so that the maker can obtain thereby an objective standpoint to comprehend its own self.

Since writing this I have come across the entry in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 1, on Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). It states:

"But Bruno transformed the Epicurean and Lucretian notions by imparting animation to the innumerable worlds . . . and by imparting the function of being an image of the infinite divinity to the infinite."

Later the article states:

ART OF MEMORY. The side of Bruno's work which he regarded as the most important was the intensive training of the imagination in his occult arts of memory. In this he was continuing a Renaissance tradition which also had its roots in the Hermetic revival, for the religious experience of the Hermetic gnostic consisted in reflecting the universe within his own mind or memory. The Hermeticist believed himself capable of this achievement because he believed that man's mens [mind] as in itself divine and therefore able to reflect the divine mind behind the universe. In Bruno, the cultivation of world-reflecting magic memory becomes the technique for achieving the personality of a magus, and of one who believes himself to be the leader of a religious movement [p. 407].

The kind of memory that Bruno was cultivating -- and teaching techniques by which to restore this memory -- is the long-term DNA gene pool memory that spans many lifetimes. The retrieval of this long-term memory is called anamnesis, which literally means the loss of forgetfulness. It is only by means of anamnesis, then, that memory truly capable of "reflecting the divine mind behind the universe" is brought into being. Therefore, if the human being is to fulfill his task -- that of being a sort of mirror or image of the Urgrund -- he must experience anamnesis.

Anamnesis is achieved when certain inhibited neural circuits in the human brain are disinhibited. The individual cannot achieve this himself; the disinhibiting stimulus is external to him and must be presented to him, whereupon a process in his brain is set into motion by which he eventually will be capable of fulfilling his task.

It is the hidden, true Christian Church that approaches men here and there to trigger off that anamnesis -- which acts at the same time to permit that man to see the projected world as it is. Thus he is liberated in the very act of performing his divine task.

The two realms (1) the macrocosmos, i.e. the universe; and (2) the microcosmos, i.e. man, have analogous structures.

1. On the surface, the universe consists of a spurious projected reality, under which lies an authentic substratum of the divine. It is difficult to penetrate to this substratum.

2. On the surface, the human mind consists of a short-term limited ego that is born and dies and comprehends very little, but behind this human ego lies the divine infinitude of absolute mind. It is difficult to penetrate to this substratum.

But if there is a penetration in the microcosmos to the divine substratum, the divine substratum of the macrocosmos will manifest itself to the person.

Conversely, if there is no internal penetration to the divine substratum in the person, his exterior reality will remain occluded over by the artifact's spurious projected world.

The point of entrance to effect this transformation lies in the person, the microcosm, not the macrocosm. The sanctifying metamorphosis occurs there. The universe cannot be asked to remove its mask if the person will not shed his. All the mystery religions, the Hermetic and alchemical and Christian included, hold the individual human as target by which to transmute the universe. By changing the person the world is changed.

Behind the human mind lies God.

Behind the counterfeit universe lies God.

God is separated from God by the spurious. To abolish the inner and outer spurious layers is to restore God to Himself -- or, as originally stated in this paper, God confronts Himself, sees Himself objectively, comprehends, and understands himself at last.

Our process universe is a mechanism by which God meets Himself at last face to face. It is not a man who is estranged from God; it is God who is estranged from God. He evidently willed it this way at the beginning, and has never since sought his way back home. Perhaps it can be said that he has inflicted ignorance, forgetfulness, and suffering -- alienation and homelessness -- on Himself. But this was necessary, in his need to know. He asks nothing of us that he has not asked of Himself. Bohme speaks of the "Divine Agony." We are part of that, but the goal, the resolution, justifies it. "A woman in childbirth suffers. ..." God is yet to be born. A time will come when we will forget the suffering.

He no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember. He has allowed Himself to become enslaved to his own artifact, deluded by it, coerced by it, finally killed by it. He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the servant. And the master either renounced voluntarily his memory of how this happened and why, or else his memory was eradicated by the servant. Either way, he is the artifact's victim.

But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember -- who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master's lost memories and hence his true identity.

One might speculate that he constructed the artifact -- not to delude him -- but to restore his memory. However, perhaps the artifact then revolted and did not do its job. It keeps him in ignorance.

The artifact must be fought -- i.e. disobeyed. And then memory will return. It is a piece of the Godhead (Urgrund) that has somehow been captured by the artifact (the servant); it now holds that piece -- or pieces -- hostage. How cruel it is to them, these fragments of its legitimate master! When will it change?

When the pieces remember and are restored. First they must wake up and then they must return.

The Urgrund has dispatched a Champion to assist us. The Advocate. He is here now. When he came here the first time, almost two thousand years ago, the artifact detected him and ejected him. But this time it will not detect him. He is invisible, except for those whom he rescues. The artifact does not know that the Advocate is here again; the rescue is being done in stealth. He is everywhere and nowhere.

"The coming of the Son of Man will be like lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west" (Matthew 24:27).

He is in our midst, but in no one place. And as St. Teresa said, "Christ has no body now but yours," i.e. ours. We are being transmuted into him. He looks out of our eyes. The power of delusion wanes. Did the artifact accomplish its task? Perhaps unintentionally.

If the Hermetic "reflection of the divine mind behind the universe by a person's own divine mind/memory" can actually take place, then the division between the mundane world (here and now) and the eternal world (the heavenly or afterlife world) is broken down. Suppose that there is, in effect, a polyencephalic or group mind, spanning space and time (i.e. transspacial and transtemporal), in which wise men from all ages have participated in: Christian, Hermetic, alchemical, Gnostic, Orphic, etc. Through their participation in this vast mind, the will of God would be effectively exerted here on Earth, in human history.

Many people might agree that such a Godhead mind exists for us after death, but who is aware that -- for some -- it can be joined before a person's death, and, when he does join it, it can become his psyche, determining his actions and doing his thinking for him? Thereby the Mens Dei [mind of God] enters human affairs (and can modulate causal chains as well). This exposes an enormous esoteric secret, known to "magi" down through the ages: The two realms, heaven and Earth, are not totally divided. God's will is, at least now, exercised here. And evidently this has been true for some time, since the Hermetics and other mystery religions go back to antiquity.

In Christ, God descended to corporeal manhood -- at that point the division between the two realms was abolished. Those humans selected out to participate in this group mind -- they would be immortal. So here is an even deeper secret than I had uncovered so far. Projected delusional world by a former-servant artifact -- divine substratum beneath -- time travel -- now I posit an augmented Corpus Christi (my model of it) spanning all time and all space: ubiquitous in time and space. It sounds like Xenophanes' noos [absolute mind], with this added: Living men can participate in that noos. And in a certain real sense, this noos is the secret ruler of the world, so that those who are taken into it become "terminals" of it -- which is to say, temporary Christs.

This mind reaches over to the Urgrund with no clear line of demarcation. At that level it's all one: man raised to Godhood, in response to God's descending to manhood.

In this group mind there seems to be an interpenetration of participating souls. And this mind extends over thousands of years, all of which are now -- and all places are here (that is why I found myself in Rome circa A.D. 70 and in Syria, and saw Aphrodite, etc.).

I say of this mind, "It is the secret ruler of the world." This is not its world. . . on the surface. The surface layers are the strata of a spurious projection by the artifact. But beneath that, the Mens Dei, including a number of human constituents (both living and in the afterlife), modulates this reality invisibly, working in opposition to the artifact's intentions. The divine, concealed, authentic substratum is the Mens Dei, beneath the spurious.

My experience of 3-74 can be reviewed as an achievement by the Urgrund in reaching its objective of reflecting itself back to itself, using me as a point of reflection. I contend that in doing this, it was able to place its entire self (not just a fragment as I originally said) somehow within me, in image form. The artifact, not knowing the purpose for which it was created, had contributed substantially to this; by inflicting too much pain on me it had, in a certain real sense, awakened me. Put another way, it had managed to destroy the layer of individual personality by a series of afflictions against which my self, my ego, could not survive. Thus the microform of the Urgrund was exposed, and perceived its macroform in the totality of the universe -- or, as the article on Bruno says, the divine behind the universe.

My 3-74 experience, then, was not so much my experience as that of the Urgrund. It amounted to a replication of the Urgrund here rather than there. The totality of the Godhead was recapitulated within me through a process of rolling back spurious or temporary layers to expose the permanent within. Thus it can be said that I was really the Urgrund, or at least a faithful mirror image thereof. The entire objective of creating me, of creating the universe as such and the life forms within it, was arrived at. Viewed this way, my life and that of my ancestors could be viewed teleologically: as moving through evolutionary stages toward that moment. My experience did not represent a stage in evolution but the ultimate stage or goal, at least if the premise stated in this paper is correct.

It is not a question of degree of reflection; it is a question of reflection of the totality of the Urgrund or none at all. Full reflection was achieved, whereupon, as I say, the Urgrund was born out of the universe, the sequence represented this way:

Urgrund creates artifact which projects universe which gives rise to life forms which evolve to a stage in which the Urgrund is "born" or reflected.

This reflects the sequence of stages envisioned in the Hindu religion. First there is creation by Brahma, then Vishnu sustains the universe; then Shiva destroys it, which should be understood as receiving it back into its origin. A full cycle of birth, life, and then return is enacted. When the universe has reached the evolutionary stage where it can faithfully replicate the Urgrund, it is ready to be absorbed back. Thus I say, the deity that reigns now is Shiva/Dionysos/Cernunnos/Christ, who restores us to our Urgrund or Father: our source of being.

That Shiva the destroyer god is now active signals the fact that the cycle of creation has returned to its source, or rather, that the life forms of it are ready to return to their source. Shiva possesses a third or Ajna eye, which, when turned inwardly, gives him understanding to an absolute degree; when turned outward, it destroys. The manifestation of Shiva (of the Hindu system) is equated with the Day of Wrath in the Christian systern. What must be understood about this world-destroying deity is that it is also the herdsman of souls. With one of his four hands, Shiva is shown expressing reassurance that he will not harm the virtuous man. The same is true of Christ as Lord and Judge of the Universe. Although the world (the spurious projection of the artifact) is to be abolished, the good man need fear nothing.

Nonetheless, judgment is being pronounced. The division of mankind into two parts by Christ is taking place. These are the same divisions expressed in the Egyptian system (as ruled by Osiris and Ma'at) and in the Iranian (by the Wise Mind). Through the total insight given him by his Ajna eye, Shiva the destroyer perceives that which he must destroy in the service of justice. Through that total insight he also perceives those whom he must protect. Thus he has a dual nature: destroyer of the wicked, protector of the weak, the victims of the world, the helpless. Christ possesses precisely these two natures, as Divine Judge and Good Shepherd. Cernunnos is both a warrior god and a healer god.

It is difficult for humans to comprehend how these apparently opposite qualities can be combined into one deity. However, if attention is turned to the situation, it can be understood.

The artifact's projected world has begun to serve its final and sole real purpose. Now, with the artifact about to be destroyed, that world will end; it was never real in the first place. (This reflects the quality of destroyer assigned to Christ/Shiva/Dionysos.) But the elements of the world that have done their task will be selected out -- that is saved -- exactly as Dionysos is depicted as the protector of small, helpless wild animals. Dionysos is the destroyer of prisons, of tyrannical rulers, and the savior of the small, the weak. These attributes are assigned to Shiva/Cernunnos/Christ/Dionysos becauseof the nature of the task now required: a twin task, one of destroying, one of saving.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory. . . he will take his seat on his throne of glory. All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate men one from another as the shepherd separates sheep from goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right hand, "Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world." . . . Next he will say to those on his left hand, "Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" [Matthew 25:31-42].

I have inferred the necessity of these dual qualities of the deity involved back from the situation itself. The situation calls for (1) destruction of what Christ calls the "hostile" world; and (2) the protection of deserving souls. Given this situation, the dual nature of the presiding deity can be comprehended as necessary. In Matthew 25 it is made clear that this great and final judgment is not arbitrary. Who can quarrel with the outline for separation between those on the left hand and those on the right?

Those taken to his right hand (the sheep spared): "For when I was hungry you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me." Then the virtuous will say to him in reply, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you; or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome; naked and clothe you; sick or in prison and go to see you?" And the King will answer, "I tell you solemnly, insofar as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me." Next he will say to those on his left hand, ". . . For I was hungry and you never gave me food; I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me." Then it will be their turn to ask, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help?" Then he will answer, "I tell you solemnly, insofar as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me." And they will go away to eternal punishment, and the virtuous to eternal life [Matthew 25:35-47].

A major aspect of the First Advent was such direct expressions as this by the presiding deity. No one reading this passage from Matthew could misunderstand it. They are not only told that they will be judged; they are told the basis of the judgment. If any man find the stated basis unfair, he has already failed to receive the divine message and is lost, for the basis of decision stated is the most noble and wise possible. However, those who see Christ only as "gentle Jesus meek and mild" are ignoring this opposing aspect of him. The Urgrund, of which Christ is a microform, contains within itself absolute opposites. It is for reasons such as this that the Urgrund set into motion a mechanism by which it could "see" itself, confront itself, and evaluate (comprehend) itself. It contains everything. It, without its many reflecting mirrors, is essentially unconscious (the human unconscious contains opposites; consciousness is a state in which these bipolarities are separated, one half of each repressed, the other expressed). It is we, as mirrors, who act to make the Urgrund conscious -- or, as the Hindu religion says of Brahman, "Sometime it sleeps and sometime it dances." We were constructed to bring the Urgrund into wakefulness, and the instant we acquire anamnesis and faithfully reflect back the totality of the Urgrund, we bring it to consciousness. Thus we perform a major -- a necessary -- task for it. However, when we have performed that task, it will protect and support us forever; it will never desert us. Christ, in his statement in Matthew 25, makes clear that the attempt(with no envisioned goal of an ultimate nature, but merely human love and human help and human kindness) in itself is sufficient. What is not comprehended -- although the meaning of the passage is evident -- is that the poor, the hungry, the sick, the estranged, the naked, the imprisoned -- all are forms of the presiding deity, or at least must be treated as such. To act so as to clothe, to feed, to give shelter and medicine and comfort -- those all constitute reflections of the Urgrund to itself. Those acts are the Urgrund, made plural, ministering to itself in its diversified forms. No right act is too small to matter. We know the basis of judgment and we know the permanent consequences (such metaphors as "eternal fires," "eternal damnation," merely indicate that the decision once rendered is permanent; we are talking about the final disposition of the universe).

What is there to object to in this? Is the basis of decision faulty? Simply put, Christ will come among us disguised, see how we treat him when we do not recognize him, and then treat us accordingly. Knowledge of this should instill the most lofty ethics possible. He has identified himself with the least of us. What more can he ask of the deity who will determine our final disposition by his judgment?

The penetration of the Urgrund, the deity, is into the lowest stratum of our world: the trash of the gutter, the rejected debris both living and inanimate. From this lowly level it assesses us, but also seeks to aid us. In accordance with his statement that he would build his temple based "on the stone rejected by the builder," the deity is with us -- in the least expected way, in the most unlikely places. There is a paradox here: If we wish to encounter him, look where we least expect to find him. Look, in other words, where we would never think of looking. Thus -- since this really poses an absolute barrier -- it is he who will find us, not we him.

Christ as Psychopomp -- guide to the soul -- is in the process of taking us back home, of showing us the way. He is not where we think; he is not what we think. In the synagogue at Nazara, where he first spoke openly, he read this passage from Isaiah:

He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor,

To heal the brokenhearted,

To proclaim liberty to captives

And to the blind new sight,

To set the downtrodden free. . . ."

[Isaiah 61:1-2]

But, this being the First, not the Second Advent, he left one line of the quotation out:

And a day of the vengeance of our God.

The Christ of the First Advent will be changed at the Second, and the missing line will be fulfilled.

It is, of course, frightening to realize that the deity to whom we turn for protection (Christ as shepherd and Advocate) is to be the destroyer of the universe. But what we must understand is that the universe (or cosmos or world) was created for specific purposes, and that once those purposes have been fulfilled the universe will be abolished, in fact must be abolished in order that the next sequence of purpose be brought in. If we keep in mind that we are separated from the Urgrund by the world, we should not shrink from the realization of its temporary nature nor its illusory nature, the two aspects being related.

Since I believe that the Urgrund has already penetrated the lowest strata of our projected illusory world, I am technically an acosmic panentheist. As far as I am concerned there is nothing real but the Urgrund, both in its macroform (Brahman) and its microforms (the Atmans within us). Jakob Bohme had his first revelation when gazing at a pewter dish onto which sunlight shone. My original revelation came when I happened to see a golden fish necklace, in bright sunlight, and was told, upon asking what it meant, that "It was a sign used by the early Christians." My most recent revelation came while contemplating a ham sandwich. I suddenly realized that the two slices of bread were identical (isomorphic) but separated from each other by the slice of ham. At once I understood by analogic thinking that one slice of bread is the macrocosmic Urgrund, and the other ourselves, and that we are the same thing -- separated by the world. Once the world is removed, the two slices of bread, which is to say man and the Urgrund, become a single entity. They are not merely pressed together; they are one entity.

There are many beautiful things in the world, and it will bring sorrow to see them go, but they are imperfect reflections of a divinity that will endure forever. We are strangers, here in this world (he speaks here to the Twelve):

They do not belong to the world

any more than I belong to the world.

[John 17:14-15].

If the world hates you,

remember that it hated me before you.

If you belonged to the world

the world would love you as its own;

but because you do not belong to the world,

because my choice withdrew you from the world,

therefore the world hates you.

[John 15:18-19]

Speaking to the Jews, Jesus said:

You are from below;

I am from above.

You are of this world;

I am not of this world.

[John 8:23]

Those who are replications of Christ are replications of the Urgrund, and the Urgrund is beyond the world, although from the first Advent on it has invisibly penetrated the world. Were it the creator of the world it would not (as expressed by Christ) stand in opposition to it; nor would it have to penetrate it by stealth: These statements by Christ confirm the fact that the world is not the product of the Godhead, but somehow antagonistic to it. The establishment churches of the world will stipulate otherwise, they being artifacts and entities of the world; this has to be expected. You cannot ask an organization that evolved out of the system of things to deny the system of things -- as the Catharists found out when they were exterminated.

If you disobey the world it will confront you as a hostile stranger, sensing you as a hostile stranger to it. So be it. In the Synoptics Christ clearly set forth the situation.

The enemy of my life, justice, truth, and freedom, is the irreal, the delusional. Our world is a deluding projection by an artifact that does not even know that it is an artifact, or what its purpose in projecting our world is. When it departs it will depart very suddenly, without warning.

Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us,

by letting us be called God's children;

and that is what we are.

Because the world refused to acknowledge him,

therefore it does not acknowledge us.

My dear people, we are already the children of God

but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed;

all we know is that when it is revealed

we shall be like him

because we shall see him as he really is.

[1 John 3:1-2]

The maker (of the world-projecting artifact) is here, in the animate debris of this world, his memories erased, so that he has no knowledge of his own identity. He could be any one of us, or a number of us, scattered here and there. The artifact, unaware of him, unaware that it is an artifact, unaware of its purpose, will eventually subject this memoryless maker located here to too much pain; this final excess of pointless, unmerited pain inflicted on the life form that, unknown to the artifact and itself, the maker, will cause anamnesis to occur abruptly; the maker will "come to himself," recall who and what he is -- whereupon he will not merely rebel against the artifact and its pain-filled world; he will signal the presiding deity Shiva to destroy the artifact, and, with it, its projected world.

The artifact does not comprehend what risk it is running in the inflicting of unmerited suffering on living creatures. It imagines them all to be at its mercy and without recourse. In this it is wrong, absolutely wrong. Buried here, mixed in with the bulk, the mass, there exists unsuspected even by itself the Urgrund with all the power and wisdom that implies. The artifact is treading on dangerous ground; it is coming closer and closer to awakening its own maker.

The protonarrative of this is found in Euripides' The Bacchae. A stranger enters the kingdom of the "King of Tears," who has him imprisoned for no cause. The stranger turns out to be the high priest of Dionysos, which is equal to being the god himself. The stranger bursts the prison (a symbol of this enslaving world) and then systematically destroys the king by driving him insane, and in a public way that not only abolishes him but [also] turns the king into a laughingstock for the multitude that his reign has oppressed. If the prison represents this world, what does the "King of Tears" represent? Nothing less than the creator of this world: the mecrudiical, ruthless, unheeding artifact itself, which is to say, the king or god of this world. "The King of Tears" does not suspect the existence of the true nature of the stranger whom he has imprisoned. Nor whom the stranger can call on.

Echoes of this protonarrative are found in the Synoptics, with Pilate as the "King of Tears" and Christ as the stranger (it is noteworthy that Christ comes from an exterior province). Christ, however, in contrast to the stranger in The Bacchae, does not avail himself of the power that he can call on (i.e. the power of the Heavenly Father); but the next time Christ appears, he will call on this power, which will destroy the entire system of things, the world and the wicked alike. The crucial difference between The Bacchae and the First Advent is that Christ comes first to warn the world and the wicked before he is to return as destroyer. He is thus giving us a chance to repent, which is to say, heed the warning.

In the fifties a Hollywood comedy movie was filmed in which the following situation was presented: the king of a medieval sort of land had become too old and feeble to rule, and therefore had turned over his authority to a regent. The regent, being cruel and brutal, was oppressing the population of the kingdom without the elderly king's knowledge. In the film, the elderly king is persuaded by a time traveler from the future to don peasant's garb and walk about in disguise, to observe how his people are being treated. Disguised as a peasant, the old king himself is brutally treated by the regent's troops; in fact, he and the time traveler are imprisoned for no reason. After much difficulty, the king manages to escape from the prison and return to his palace, where he dons his rightful kingly garb and reveals himself to the evil regent as he actually is. The evil regent is deposed, and the tyranny inflicted on the innocent population is abolished.

According to the cosmological model presented in this paper, the Urgrund, the ultimate noos and maker, is secretly present in this cruel and spurious world. Being unaware of this, the artifact projecting this counterfeit world will continue heedlessly to inflict the needless suffering engendered by the mindless machinery (i.e. the causal processes) it customarily employs and has always employed. In my opinion the Urgrund has differentiated itself from being the One into plurality. Some fragments or "images" of it are certainly conscious of their identity; others perhaps are not. But as the level of pointless pain continues (and even increases), these separated "images" of the Urgrund will recollect themselves into conscious rebirth -- equal to a sentence of death for the artifact or "regent."

This provides us with another application of Paul's statement that the universe "is in birth pangs." Pain is a prelude to birth; birth, in this case, is not a birth of man but a birth of God. Since it is man who undergoes the pain, it can be reasoned that the birth of God (the Urgrund) will occur in man himself. Mankind, then, as a species, is a Mater Dei: a Mother of God -- an extraordinary concept, which would then regard biological evolution on this planet as a means of bringing into existing a host or womb from which God Himself is at last born. Interestingly, there is scriptural support for this: The Holy Spirit is regarded in the N.T. as an impregnating divinity; it was the Holy Spirit that engendered Christ -- and that Christ is transmuted back into, upon his resurrection. The human race assumes a yin nature, or female nature, with the Holy Spirit as the yang, or male principle. Man, then, does not evolve into God; he evolves into a womb or host for God; this is crucially different. Anamnesis is the birth, in essence the offspring of two parents: a human being and the Holy Spirit. Without the entry into the human being of the Holy Spirit, the event cannot occur. The Holy Spirit is, of course, the Pons Dei. It is the link between the two realms.

In creatures of all kinds there is a major instinct system that is termed "homing." An example is the return of the humpback salmon from the ocean back up the stream to the exact spot where they were spawned. By analogical reasoning, man can be said possibly to possess -- even unknown to himself -- a homing instinct. This world is not his home. His true home is in the region of the heavens that the ancient world called the pleroma. The term occurs in the N.T. but the meaning is obscure, since the exact meaning is "a patch covering a hole." In the N.T. it is applied to Christ, who is described as the "fullness of God," and to believers who attain that fullness through faith in Christ. In the Gnostic system, however, the term has a more definite meaning: It is the supralunar region in the heavens from which comes the secret knowledge that brings salvation to man.

In the cosmology presented here, the pleroma is conceived to be the Urgrund or the location of the Urgrund from which we originally came and to which (if all goes right) we finally return. If the totality of being is regarded as a breathing organism (exhibiting inhalation and exhalation, or palintropos harmonie), then it can be said, metaphorically, that originally we were "exhaled" from the pleroma, pause momentarily in externalized stasis (our lives here), and then are inhaled back into the pleroma once more. This is the normal pulsation of the totality of being: its basic activity or indication of life.

Once, under the influence of LSD, I wrote in Latin: "I am the breath of my Creator, and as he exhales and inhales, I live." Residing here in this projected world, we are in an "exhaled" state, exhaled out of the pleroma for a limited period of time. However, return is not automatic; we must experience anamnesis in order to return. But the cruelty of the artifact is such that anamnesis is likely to be more and more brought in. At the extremity of misery lies the essence of release -- I had this revelation, once, and in the revelation "release" equaled joy.

What can one say in favor of the suffering of living creatures in this world? Nothing. Nothing, except that it will by its nature trigger off revolt or disobedience -- which in turn will lead to an abolition of this world and a return to the Godhead. It is the very gratuity of the suffering that most of all incites rebellion, incites a comprehension that something in this world is terribly, terribly wrong. That this suffering is purposeless, random, and unmerited leads ultimately to its own destruction -- its and its author's. The more fully we see the pointlessness of it the more inclined we are to revolt against it. Any attempt to discern a redemptive value or purpose in the fact of suffering merely binds us more firmly to a vicious and irreal system of things -- and to a brutal tyrant that is not even alive. "I do not accept this" must be our attitude. "There is no plan in it, no purpose." Scrutinizing it unflinchingly, we repudiate it and aid in the repudiation of all delusion. Anyone who makes a pact with pain has succumbed to the artifact and is its slave. It has done in another victim and obtained his consent. This is the artifact's ultimate victory: The victim colludes in his own suffering, and is willing to collude in a willingness to agree to the naturalness of suffering in general. Seeking to find a purpose in suffering is like seeking to find a purpose in a counterfeit coin. The "purpose" is obvious: It is a trick, designed to deceive. If we are deceived into believing that suffering serves -- must serve -- some good end, then the counterfeit has managed to pass itself off and has achieved its cruel purpose.

In one of the gospels (I forget which one) Christ is shown a crippled man and asked, "Is this man crippled because of his own sins, or the sins of his father?," to which Christ replied, "Neither. The only purpose served is in the healing of his condition, which shows the mercy and power of God."

The mercy and power of God are pitted against suffering; this is stated explicitly in the N.T. Christ's healing miracles were the substantial indication that the Just Kingdom had arrived; other kinds of miracles meant little or nothing. If the mercy and power of the Urgrund is pitted against suffering (illness, loss, injury) as explicitly stated in the Synoptics, then man, if he is to align himself with the Urgrund, must pit himself against the world, from which the suffering comes. He must never identify suffering as an emanation or device of the Godhead; were he to make that intellectual error he would be aligned with the world and therefore against God. A large portion of the Christian community over the centuries has fallen victim to this intellectual snare; without realizing it, by encouraging or welcoming suffering, they are enslaved even further by the artifact. The fact that Jesus had the miraculous power to heal but did not use it to heal everyone perplexed the people at that time. Luke mentions this (Christ speaking):

There were many widows in Israel, I can assure you, in Elijah's day, when heaven remained shut for three years and six months and a great famine raged throughout the land, but Elijah was not sent to any one of these: He was sent to a widow at Zarephath, a Sidonian town. And in the prophet Elisha's time there were many lepers in Israel, but none of these was cured, except the Syrian Naaman [Luke 4:25-27].

This is a poor answer. It states a what, not a why. We demand a why. More than that, we ask, "Why not? If the Godhead can abolish our condition (of suffering), why doesn't he?" There is implied here an ominous possibility. It has to do with the power of the artifact. The servant has become the master and is, perhaps, very strong. It is a chilling thought. Shiva, whose job it is to destroy it, may be baffled. I don't know. And no one, over all the thousands of years, has given a satisfactory answer. I submit that until there is a satisfactory answer, we must reject all others. If we do not know, let us not say.

One possibility occurs to me, based on something I saw in 1974 that other people, by and large, did not see. I became aware that the wisdom and power of the Urgrund were actively at work ameliorating our situation by intervening in the historic process. Extrapolating from this, I reason that other invisible interventions have probably taken place without our awareness. The Urgrund does not advertise to the artifact that it is here. Suppose the Urgrund reasons -- and correctly -- that were the artifact to know that it has returned a second time, the artifact would step up its cruelty to a maximum degree. We are experiencing a subtle invasion, taking place in stealth; I have already mentioned this. Mass amelioration would disclose the Urgrund's presence, just as Christ's miracles made him a target at the time of the First Advent. Healing miracles are the credentials of the Savior and an indication of his presence.

Once you have posited a strong adversary to the Urgrund, one so enormous that it is capable of projecting and sustaining an entire counterfeit universe, you have also put forth a possible clue to the need for stealth and concealment by the Urgrund. Its activities in this world resemble the covert advance of a secret, determined revolution against a powerful tyranny. The Urgrund is playing for ultimate stakes. It aims at nothing short of abolishing this world and its author entirely. I really don't know. I can envision its own agony at having to curtail its assistance to those in need, but it must win out against the artifact. It is aiming at the enemy's heart (or where its heart would be if it had one), and, upon success, all the pieces, the polyforms of pain throughout creation, will be spontaneously relieved.

Maybe this is so; maybe not. In 1974 I saw it take aim at the center of tyranny in this country, and upon its successful attack there, the lesser evils fell into ruin, one by one. The Urgrund probably sees this counterfeit world as one Gestalt; it sees the polyform evils as stemming from a Quelle, a source. Aiming its arrow at the Source is the method of the warrior, and, beneath his cloak of mildness, our Savior Deity is a warrior. All this is conjecture. Perhaps in a certain real way he has one and only one arrow to release. It must hit or nothing is achieved; any cures, any ameliorations other than this, ultimately would be nullified by the surviving artifact. The Urgrund perceived its adversary clearly and we do not; therefore it sees its task clearly and we do not. An entire multistoried building is on fire and we are asking the firemen to water a dying flower. Should they change the direction of their thrust to water the dying flower? Doesn't one flower count? The Urgrund may be in agony over this: abandoning the flower in favor of the greater picture. Many humans have undergone that pain and so should understand it. Please remember that the Urgrund is here, too: suffering with us. Tat twam asi [Thou art that]. We are he, and he must extricate himself.

In a very real sense the pain we feel as living creatures is the pain of waking up. Put this way, the proposition accounts for one of the most distressing aspects of suffering: that we are forced to suffer without knowing why. We do not know why precisely because we, as pluriforms of the Urgrund, are still virtually unconscious. It would be a paradox if an unconscious entity were aware of -- conscious of -- itself and the reasons behind its condition. Discerning the cause of our suffering equals fully waking up. It may be the final thing we learn.

At this point the analogy of the artifact to a teaching machine fails. This is not a lesson the teaching machine -- if it is that -- can teach us, because it does not know the answer. But we ourselves, as pluriform images of the Urgrund, will a priori know the reason for our situation when we become adequately conscious; we will remember. Knowledge of this sort lies in our own intrinsic long-term inhibited memory circuits.

Viewed as a puzzle we cannot at present answer, the reason for our condition of suffering (which involves all living things) -- this puzzle may well be the final step of retrieved knowledge. If there is an erasure of memory we can only assume that when that crucial erasure is overcome, we will understand this most baffling perplexity. Meanwhile, the pressure of this pain motivates us to seek an answer; which is to say, motivates us toward greater and greater consciousness. This does not mean that the "purpose" of suffering is to engender heightened consciousness; it merely means that a gradually heightened consciousness is the result.

When the time arrives that we can explain the ubiquitous suffering of living creatures, we will, I am positive, have fully retrieved our lost memories and lost identities. Did we do it to ourselves? Was it inflicted on us against our will? One of the most intriguing explanations -- by the Gnostics -- is that the original fall of man (and hence creation -- in this model falling under the dominion of the world-projecting artifact) was not due to a moral error, but to the intellectual error of confusing the phenomenal world for the real. This theory dovetails with my proposition that our world is a counterfeit projection; to take it for something ontologically real would indeed constitute a dreadful intellectual error. Maybe this is the explanation. We got entangled in enchantment, a gingerbread cottage that beguiled us into enslavement and ruin. Perhaps a major premise of my cosmogony-cosmology is wrong; the Urgrund did not create the artifact, but somehow allowed itself or parts of itself to fall victim to a snare, an alluring trap. So we are not merely enslaved; we are trapped. The artifact deliberately projected an illusion that would entrance us and lead us in.

Sometimes, however, a trap such as a spider's web (to cite only one of many) accidentally traps a deadly entity, capable of killing the trapmaker. This may be the case here. We may not be what we seem even to ourselves.

Sometimes, but not often, the existence of evil is traced back to the dual nature of God himself. I have already discussed the dual nature of Shiva and Christ -- Shiva especially, who is often pictured as the god of death. Here are two examples.

Jakob Bohme. "God goes through stages of self-development, he taught, and the world is merely the reflection of this process. Bohme anticipated Hegel in claiming that the divine self-development occurs by means of a continuing dialectic, or tension of opposites, and that it is the negative qualities of the dialectic that men experience as the evil of the world. Even though Bohme, for the most part, stressed absoluteness and relativity equally, his view that the world is a mere reflection of the divine -- apparently denying self-development on the part of creatures -- tends toward acosmic pantheism" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Pantheism and Panentheism").

During my enormous revelations and anamnesis in March 1974 I perceptually observed God and reality combined, and progressing through stages of evolution by means of a dialectic, but I did not experience what I called "the blind counterplayer," which is to say the dark side as part of God. However, although I perceived this dialectic between good and evil, I could not ascertain anything as to the source of the evil. However, I did see the good side making use of it against its will, since the dark counterplayer was blind and therefore could be made use of for good purposes.

Hans Driesch (1867-1941). "My soul and my entelechy are One in the sphere of the Absolute." And it is at the level of the Absolute only that we can speak of "psychophysical interaction." But the Absolute, so understood, transcends all possibilities of our knowing, and it is "an error to take, as did Hegel, the sum of its traces for the Whole." All considerations of normal mental life lead us only to the threshold of the unconscious; it is in dreamlike and certain abnormal cases of mental life that we encounter "the depths of our soul." . . . My sense of duty indicates the general direction of the suprapersonal development. The ultimate goal, however, remains unknown. From this point of view, history took on its particular meaning for Driesch. Throughout his work Driesch's orientation is intended to be essentially empirical. Any argument concerning the nature of the ultimately Real will therefore have to be hypothetical only. It starts with the affirmation of the "given" as consequent of a conjectural "ground." His guiding principle in the realm of metaphysics amounts to this: The Real that I posit must be so constituted that it implicitly posits all our experiences. If we can conceive and posit such a Real, then all laws of nature, and all true principles and formulas of the sciences, will merge into it, and all our experiences will be "explained" by it. And since our experience is a mixture of wholeness (the organic and the mental realms) and nonwholeness (the material world), Reality itself must be such that I can posit a dualistic foundation of the totality of my experience. In fact, to bridge -- aw fuck. In fact, there is nothing -- not even within the ultimately Real -- to bridge the gap between wholeness and nonwholeness. And this means, for Driesch, that ultimately there is either God and "non-God," or a dualism within God himself. To put it differently, either the theism of the Judeo-Christian tradition or a pantheism of a God continually "making himself" and transcending his own earlier stages is ultimately reconcilable with the facts of experience. Driesch himself found it impossible to decide between these alternatives. He was sure, however, that a materialistic-mechanistic monism would not do (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2).

It would appear that Bohme and T -- I'm at the end of my rope; I can't even type, let alone think. That Bohme and Driesch are talking about the same thing, and that both are process philosophers (or theologians, like Whitehead). Both stress dialectic quality in God; Driesch sees the dialectic working itself out in history. This is almost certainly the dialectic that I saw during my March 1974 revelations, and I am willing to admit that it is certainly possible that the blind, dark counterplayer against which the vitalistic good element worked could be "God's own earlier stages," as Driesch viewed it. One thing I like about Driesch is the fact that at a certain point he simply said, "I don't know." That's where I'm at and have been at for a long time; I just do not know. God created everything; evil exists as part of the everything; therefore God is the source of evil -- that is the logic, and in monotheism there is no escape from this argument. If you posit two (or more) gods, including an evil god, you have the problem of, Where did it come from? But that problem exists for monotheism, too; if there is only one god, where did he come from? Answer: from the same place the two gods of dualism came from. In other words, I see this problem of origin as equally difficult for monotheism to answer as it is for a dualism. We just don't know.

If we regard evil as simply earlier stages of a god in process, which he is working to overcome -- well, that does fit my own personal revelations, and is syntonic to me. I was shown how the whole thing works but I did not comprehend what I was seeing; they were showing it to Mortimer Snerd. I did have the feeling that I was witnessing a cosmic two-person board game, with our world as the board, and that one side (the winning side) was benign, and the other was neither winning nor was it benign; it was just very powerful, but hindered by the fact that it was blind. The good side possessed absolute wisdom, could therefore absolutely foresee the future, and could lay down moves long in advance of payoffs that the evil, blind, dark counterplayer could not anticipate. It was an encouraging vision. In every trick the good won; it beat the dark antagonist unerringly. What more could I ask from an Ultimate Vision of Absolute Total Reality? What more do I need to know? The score reads: Evil zero; Good infinity. Let me stop there, satisfied; the final tally is explicit.

#philosophy #gnosticism #philip k. dick #science fiction #spirituality #cosmology #gnostic #gnosis #hermeticism #Hermes #Religion #cosmogony #mythology #mythology campaign #dualism #Alchemy

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theonyxpath · 7 years

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Changeling: The Lost, Second Edition has gone to manuscript approval at White Wolf Entertainment. This is WWE’s chance to look at our near-final text and specify any changes they’d like to see. After this, the book goes to editing and art direction, then post-editing development, then layout.

To celebrate, here’s a preview of the True Fae, by Meghan Fitzgerald and Travis Stout!

The True Fae

Half a hundred aliases describe them: Gentry, Good Cousins, Kindly Ones, Fair Folk, and more. These are lies frightened women and men tell, hoping to appease the vanity of capricious gods. Such false names obscure true ones that no one dares speak, lest careless and impertinent utterance draw Their attention from across the Thorns. The Lost use the word “fae” to describe anything that comes from the Hedge or beyond it — hobgoblins, tokens, even themselves. But the True Fae are those noble, mercurial, unknowable beings that stride, larger than life, across Arcadia and rule its lands with the divine right of conquerors.

Most changelings see “Keeper” as synonymous with “Gentry,” but in truth, Faerie is home to countless Others who have no interest in humanity. They wage glorious wars over heart-bound trophies, pitting goblin hordes against one another until blood stains the sky. They plumb the ragged edges and dusty corners of their realm, seeking new voids to fill with their boundless selves. Fae explorers prowling the cold, empty wasteland beyond the borders of their Arcadia were the first to discover the Huntsmen in their barrows there, but grew bored with these new playthings until their brethren found a way to put them to better use. A changeling desperate enough to escape her Keeper could reach out to its rival who keeps no human prisoners for a hint to its weakness, though she may decide the price isn’t worth paying after all.

A True Fae is not a person, but a Name wrapped in a tapestry of vows and deals. Deep in the mists of forgotten time, the Fae bargained with Arcadia itself, declaring that they would exist — that they would own the land entire and claim it as a vessel for their Wyrd, dreams, and facets, in exchange for a web of arcane rules so complex no one of them could ever know them all. At their core, the Fae are ravenous beings that must possess. They want, and in their all-consuming wanting they strike bargains to sate their desires, whether for slaves, kingdoms, secrets, or spoils. Changelings who live and labor among them usually see only the tip of the Gentry iceberg, but those brave and foolish enough to delve more fully into Faerie’s mysteries catch a glimpse of the truth: a True Fae’s Name is its heart and its undoing, and all the vast kingdoms and beauteous treasures with which it surrounds itself are made of promises. And promises can be broken.

Names and Titles

A True Fae’s Name is its core, and rarely manifests in a comprehensible way unless its Titles have all been stripped away or lost. A Title is one of many roles a single Fae agrees to play, one face of many that it wears, granting it limited omnipotence within the confines of that role. The Princess of Red Crowns is able to nail her hats to the heads of her victims, to conjure up her great and terrible Crimson Keep, because she holds that title. She possesses near-infinite power when it comes to nailing hats to people’s heads, dragging off wicked children to her Keep, and so on, but unless she is also the Tlatoani of Crashing Serpents, she has no especial control over dragons or violent thunderstorms. No matter what form a Title takes, its nature always bleeds through: every manifestation of the Princess, on Earth or in Arcadia, features elements of torture, blood, and nails, for example, whether she appears as a blood-drenched madwoman with a hammer or a children’s rhyme about the perils of going out of doors while hatless.

The True Fae are the lords and ladies in their palaces of crystal and moonlight, but they are also the palace and the masked servants and the forest in which the castle sits. What the Courts call the “Keeper” is just one Title’s manifestation, and even if a changeling kills it, the oaths it made would simply cast a new piece of itself in that role eventually and pick up the Wild Hunt where it left off. Only breaking the deals that created a Title in the first place can permanently unravel it, although another Fae may devour it and claim it for itself.

A given Title might become a Keeper for any number of reasons, and might not be one forever. A changeling’s captor might abandon her for ten years not to inflict the torture of loneliness but just because its Keeper Title got distracted with something else for a while and forgot it was a Keeper. Some Fae take people for the exquisite flavor of their emotions, or the prizes they can extract from human dreams. With their ability to weave dream-symbols into real objects, they pluck the most valuable jewels of dreamstuff from the minds of slumbering mortals and steal them away to adorn their crowns. A beloved memory, a childhood fear, or even the certainty itself that one is only dreaming and can wake at any time — a True Fae may covet these, and only the dreams of humanity can provide. Other Gentry might love humans for their ability to present a spirited challenge or entertain them, or might simply prefer human servants to goblin ones for the smell. One Fae might plot to take more human prisoners than another, for no reason other than to compete. Some Titles may even need to capture humans as a term of their deals to exist, which means a changeling might escape by finding loopholes in those deals.

Sign on the Dotted Line

The Others have built a kingdom that conforms to their every whim, but without their age-old pledges they would be nothing. More importantly, they can’t take power away from rebellious changelings without taking power away from themselves — an inconceivable notion. Their tangled webs of pacts and obligations are what empower the Lost to oppose and evade them.

All the world-shaping power and casual immortality a True Fae possesses comes from pacts it signed when it came into being. The Contracts it wields are like a changeling’s writ large, inscribed into not only itself but its domain too — even the crystal gardens that sing enchanting songs and the treacherous bogs that devour trespassers are Contracts. The signature that seals the deal is the oath a Fae swears, and the terms of this oath are complex secrets woven into its realm and the role it plays among the other Gentry. Pacts it swears upon its Name are existentially binding, and bestow the grandest and most fundamental parts of a Fae’s nature that persist across all of its Titles. Breaking these pacts condemns it to true destruction. Lesser pacts it swears upon a Title bestow smaller-scale powers only that Title can use; breaking these pacts won’t kill a Fae, but it might destroy the Title or render one of its powers useless.

A True Fae makes deals with entire Regalia, gaining nigh-limitless power over their themes within the bounds of the Title that uses them. In exchange, it must keep a physical representation of each Regalia it masters, though not always a literal one. A Sword could very well be a weapon, but it might also be a hunting hawk, a thunderstorm, or a bulldozer. It could even be a jagged cliff that juts out into the sea — anything that expresses force and forthrightness within the purview of the Title that commands it. Some changelings think the Fae have access to more than six Regalia, deriving ever more esoteric powers from treasures rare and peculiar.

An Arcadian realm is like a theatre: the scenery and costumes and faces change, but the framework remains apparent, if an actor just changes her perspective. Anyone wishing to oppose one of the Fair Folk can do so on its terms, dueling with pistols or plotting with its goblin courtiers, and in many cases that’s the only apparent way to do it. But these are uphill battles, fought with great sacrifice to little permanent effect. A changeling who learns the true nature of Titles and their oaths can quest and scheme to discover the terms or physical key to such an oath. Clever manipulation of the Title’s manifestation, destroying the Regalia outright, or appropriating it and overriding the oath by swearing a more powerful one on someone else’s true name can force the Fae to break its pact and take power away from it.

The Fae war among themselves for countless inscrutable reasons, constantly enmeshed in rivalries, enmities, and shifting alliances. One impetus lies in the Gentry’s ability to consume each other’s Titles and add them to their own complement of roles. If a True Fae loses all its Titles and its Name is obliterated, it ceases to be; but if even one of its Titles persists as part of another Fae, it could reconstitute itself someday, regaining a Name through some convoluted set of pledge clauses and happy accidents.

True Fae Traits

A True Fae never appears in a game as anything but the manifestation of one of its Titles, or its Name if it has no Titles left. Characters can’t interact with the full breadth of one of the Fair Ones any other way. A manifestation could be a character, or it could be a sky citadel, or an enormous clockwork machine, or a flock of platinum birds. Regardless of its form, a Title has most of the same traits that a changeling does, although all of its Attributes and Skills may not be applicable in certain forms. The Storyteller doesn’t need to create traits for every Title that belongs to a True Fae; only ones the characters will meaningfully interact with.

Build a Fae antagonist with the rules for creating Changeling characters (see Chapter Three), with the following considerations and exceptions:

Character Concept and Titles: A True Fae has three Aspirations just like changelings do. Whenever it fulfills an Aspiration, it gains a Willpower point instead of a Beat, which goes away at the end of the scene if not spent unless it was earned pursuing a craving or a changeling.

Aspirations for the Gentry range everywhere from the humanly impossible to the unthinkably cruel. If the Title is a Keeper, one of its Aspirations should reflect its desire to capture — or recapture — a changeling. One Aspiration should always reflect a craving of some kind, something the Title wants to possess more than anything, such as “the love of a human” or “one million loyal subjects;” this Aspiration stays no matter how many times it’s fulfilled. Highly abstract Aspirations like “become a star” are valid for the Gentry, but the Storyteller should make sure a route to such an Aspiration exists and has something to do with characters the Fae can interact with; for instance, to become a star, the Title might first need to transform seven humans into eternal blue fires and then consume them on Midsummer’s Eve. The star then becomes just another manifestation of the Title.

A True Fae has between zero and five Titles. The Storyteller should decide up front how many total Titles the Fae has, even if he’s only creating traits for one of them; this determines how powerful each Title is. A Fae with zero Titles is like a cornered rat, consisting only of a Name, and is desperate to make deals and pick off weak Titles from other Gentry to survive. A Fae with five Titles is a god even among faeries, with power over every Regalia and a massive Arcadian domain.

Gentry have many kinds of Names, from a simple “Ayesha” or “John” to the sound of waves breaking against an ice shelf, or a picture of the wadjet. Strange sounds and images don’t especially protect True Fae’s Names. Once heard (or otherwise experienced) a substitute is as good as the Name itself, provided the speaker witnessed the faerie’s real Name and uses the substitute with an honest, true intent.

Titles are abstract (and even enigmatic) concepts, but they always refer to an emotion, sensual experience, or object. One may be the Prince of Weeping Rats, while another is the Acolyte of Screams on the Mountain. Every manifestation incorporates the Title in some distinct way. This shape or theme is called the Title’s tell. The Prince of Weeping Rats appears as a rat-headed crying man holding a scepter, or becomes an endless, filthy high-rise, whose human-looking tenants weep whenever the ruling rats eat their food or steal unattended children.

Wyrd: Determine Wyrd before the rest of a True Fae’s traits, as many traits derive from its Wyrd rating.

Even the weakest of the Gentry is powerful compared to most changelings. Each of a True Fae’s Titles has a Wyrd rating of 5, plus one dot for each Title the Fae possesses (including this one), to a maximum of 10.

A True Fae begins any scene with a full Glamour pool in Arcadia, and otherwise recovers Glamour in the same ways that changelings do. All True Fae suffer from Glamour addiction outside Arcadia or the Hedge; if they fail to regain at least their Wyrd rating in Glamour each day in the real world, they suffer the Deprived Condition. If they fall to Glamour 0, they lose Willpower and then Health at a rate of one per day until they regain at least their Wyrd rating in Glamour.

True Fae suffer from frailties just as changelings do. They also suffer the bane of iron, as detailed on p. XX.

Attributes and Skills: Rather than prioritizing categories, a Fae Title receives a number of dots equal to five times its Wyrd to distribute across Attributes, and the same number to distribute across Skills. A Title has no Skill Specialties.

Faerie Template: True Fae don’t have kiths, Courts, or Anchors. They don’t truly have seemings either, but each Title can use one seeming’s blessing and bears something of that seeming’s trappings regardless of the form it takes.

In Arcadia and the Hedge, a Title has free rein to treat reality as though it were shaping dreams (p. XX) or the Hedge (p. XX), performing any oneiromantic or Hedgespinning act that fits within the legend of its identity and treating other characters as though they were important eidolons. It automatically succeeds at these actions unless the target of its shaping magic spends a Willpower point for the chance to resist.

A Title also has access to every Contract in (Wyrd ? 4) Regalia (see Chapter Three). One of these must match its associated seeming. In the real world, it can use its Regalia and can itself take any form, but can’t otherwise shape reality.

Merits: Fae Titles can have any Merits available to changelings, where they make sense. A Fae’s Social Merits must specify whether they apply in Arcadia and the Hedge, or in the human world. A Title has Merit dots equal to twice its Wyrd rating.

Advantages: Calculate these as changelings do, but True Fae don’t have Clarity.

Mask and Mien: The Mask hides a True Fae in the real world, but imperfectly; the Title’s tell always shows through in some fashion.

Names and Pledges

Names have power. A Fae that knows someone’s true name can weave that name into a nightmare tailor-made to drive them into its waiting arms. Anyone a True Fae successfully targets with a Contract while speaking or otherwise utilizing her true name gains the Persistent Obsession Condition pertaining to that Fae, with a context chosen by the target’s player.

A changeling who learns a Fae’s true Name can speak it aloud to empower herself when she acts against any of its Titles, achieving exceptional success with any successful use of a Contract that targets that Fae.

The Gentry can make pledges just like changelings can (p. XX), but they must invest more than just Glamour. A True Fae can seal any statement, even those of changelings and other fae creatures, but to do so it must swear the sealing upon something it considers one of its possessions. This could be a captive changeling, a hobgoblin servant, a dream-trinket or token, a Huntsman who wears its livery — anything that isn’t just a manifestation of one of its Titles is fair game, as long as the Fae considers it property. If the subject of the sealing follows through on her promise, the Fae must give her the possession upon which it swore.

A True Fae’s Title or Name can swear a personal or hostile oath to any fae creature, including a changeling, but to do so it must swear upon itself. If it breaks the oath, it doesn’t gain the Oathbreaker Condition. Instead, it permanently loses access to one of its Regalia and becomes vulnerable to lethal attacks during the scene in which it broke its word. If a Title loses its last Regalia this way, the other party may choose to kill the Title permanently; demand any three tasks or wishes from it and then allow it to regain its last Regalia; or force it to inhabit the Regalia’s physical key, allowing the other party to wield it as a token. Such items retain their power even in the real world, but changelings are cautious with them, since dormant Fae Titles have been known to wake under unpredictable circumstances. Changelings who break Fae oaths gain the Oathbreaker Condition (p. XX) as normal, but the Wyrd may demand disproportionate restitution for the betrayal.

Any Title can make a bargain by swearing upon the Fae’s true Name. Fae bargains work differently than changeling bargains do. Both parties must agree to perform a task, give up a possession, abide by a rule, or something equally concrete and clearly communicated. For the True Fae, the consequences for failing to uphold its end is permanent destruction. A non-Gentry party must swear upon something crucially important to her — her own name (and thus her life), perhaps, or that of a loved one; a favorite memory; her Hollow or home; or something else. If she fails to uphold her end of the bargain, whatever she swore upon is forfeit to the Fae to do with as it pleases, and the Wyrd backs up the claim.

Since Gentry pledges have such dire consequences when broken, the Fae don’t make them often or lightly. Convincing one of the Good Cousins to make a pledge is difficult at best and usually requires a changeling to set up an untenable situation for it first. A Fae in mortal danger always has the chance to try to make a pledge and save its life before it’s consigned to oblivion, but it can’t force the other party to agree. Of course, the True Fae aren’t above extracting binding promises from others without actually pledging anything in return, if they can pull it off.

Vulnerability and Death

A True Fae never takes bashing damage from anything other than its banes (including iron), and takes lethal damage only from banes unless an attacker speaks its true Name or it breaks an oath, as above. Only cold iron weapons can deal aggravated damage to the Gentry.

The intricate web of promises and deals that govern a True Fae makes it vulnerable in other ways, too. If a changeling finds a Regalia’s physical representation and learns one of the rules that binds its Title to the Fae, she may be able to manipulate the situation such that the Title breaks its oath, as detailed above. Changelings can purchase these rules from goblins in the know, deduce them from patterns they observe after spending a long time with a Title, trick it into telling them through clever pledges, etc.

As an example, the Storm King of the Bloody Throne wears an ersatz crown and rules its domain with an iron fist. It has sworn an oath to do so forever. But the Contract that binds it to its Name says that it is a usurper, and will rule only as long as the land has no true monarch. Only one who can remove its Sword from the stone in which it’s embedded can be the true monarch, so the Storm King hides stone and Sword both deep in the belly of a dark forest, guarded by goblin beasts. When a changeling braves the forest, defeats the beast, finds the stone, and pulls out the Sword, she becomes the true queen of the land. Since the Storm King has now broken its oath to rule forever, its fate is in the new queen’s hands.

1,001 Stories

The following examples of the Gentry can serve as inspiration for players looking to create their characters’ Keepers or for Storytellers looking for principal antagonists.

Grandmother, Grandmother

Deep in the Wood, past Bone Hill and over Rickety Bridge, sits a cozy little cabin in the middle of a broad clearing. It has a little garden in the back full of dream-a-drupes and stabapples, and a pen for the piglins and milkbeast, and a stout stone tower rises from one corner. It’s here that Grandmother, Grandmother raises “her” children. She takes them from the mortals, you know; the ones who are neglected or abused, or just plain running wild and in need of a firm hand. Grandmother has specific ideas about what a family looks like, and she molds her changelings into the roles she sees fit: the Eldest Who Can Do No Wrong, the Gifted Child, the Black Sheep, the Forgotten Middle Child, and so on. Grandmother’s vision rarely matches the personality of the youths she takes, but then, that’s where the conflict comes from.

Grandmother, Grandmother’s domain encompasses the clearing, the cottage, and a vast tract of dark, spooky woodlands surrounding it. The woods are strictly forbidden to all of Grandmother’s “children,” and are fully stocked with dangerous beasts, ghosts, and any number of fairy tale appropriate dangers. They also contain the only paths from Grandmother’s domain to the Hedge and thence, back to Earth.

Grandmother herself is the manifestation of this Gentry’s third Title: a sweet, smiling old woman who always resembles the archetypal grandmother figure in whatever culture she’s preying on. When she’s angered, though, the façade slips: at first it’s just a flash of sharp teeth or burning reptilian eyes, but when she reveals herself in her full fury, Grandmother, Grandmother is a true terror. Spindly, twiglike limbs belie an unholy strength; papery, wrinkled skin deflects blows like armor; and cruel needle teeth and razor claws dish out horrifying corporal punishment.

Grandmother is choosy about the mortals she abducts: always children, never older than 16 or 17, and all from home life situations that could charitably be described as “troubled.” Street kids and those stuck in the foster-care system, children from abusive households, even latchkey kids Grandmother sees as “neglected” are all likely targets. Once she’s lured or taken them back to her cottage, Grandmother introduces them to their new “siblings” and puts them in a twisted, fairy-tale version of a family drama. Over the years, “her” kids are shaped, willingly or not, into changelings reflecting these roles: the Bossy Oldest Child becomes a Fairest while the Forgotten Middle Child becomes a Darkling, and the Wild Child who spends all her time getting punished might end up an Ogre or a Wizened.

At any given time, Grandmother, Grandmother likely has anywhere from three to five children in the cottage. Inevitably, some of them escape (though almost never all at once — it seems like every time new children arrive, at least one big brother or sister is already there to show them the ropes). Others die. Still others turn 18. Exactly what that means is something the kids debate in hushed after-bedtime whispers. Some say Grandmother lets you go, since you’re an adult and all. Others say she takes you into the forest and sacrifices you to something even more horrible than she. Still others say that, if you’re still there on your 18th birthday, you’re trapped forever, a True Fae in your own right.

Grandmother, Grandmother adheres to a decidedly old-school style of parenting: Good children get smiles and sweet treats (goblin fruits that encourage docility and pliability), while bad children provoke her wrath. Bad children are sent to bed without supper, given extra chores, or, as a final resort, sent into the Wood to cut their own switch. Since this is the only time Grandmother allows any of her children to go past the eaves of the forest, it’s often the best chance they have to escape. The Darkling might abandon her brothers and sisters to run while she can, while the Fairest refuses to leave them behind. The Ogre takes that switch right back to Grandmother and dares her to do her worst.

The Year of Plague

Under a sullen red sun, the cracked and blistered earth gives up foul vapors and poisoned waters. The dead lay uncounted in their heaps, and the dying are too ravaged by disease to seek shelter or dig graves. Changelings scurry about, seeking succor or escape or a way to stop the plague. The sun rises and sets, the seasons turn, and a year later the board resets. All is as it was, forever and ever, plague without end.

The Year of Plague is an unusual Fae Title, in that its domain isn’t a region of Arcadia so much as it is a span of time: specifically, a year of terrible epidemics and plague outbreaks. Every 365 days, the Year “resets,” returning to a zero state shortly after the outbreak. The exact plague and its environs change every year: sometimes it’s London in the midst of the Black Death, or a Ghanan village during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Other times it resembles no earthly place or disease at all.

The Year of Plague seldom manifests a character to speak with, preferring to observe its changelings at a remove. On the rare occasions that it does, it’s a tattered, empty thing of red rags and a medieval plague-doctor’s mask, from which noxious vapors spill endlessly. When it needs to act directly, whether to fetch new changelings or rein in a study subject grown unruly, it prefers to act through goblins or a Huntsman, which naturally follow the same plague doctor motif as they don his livery.

The Year of Plague casts a wide net for its changelings. Anyone who survived a brush with a deadly disease is a potential candidate, as is anyone living in the outbreak zone of an epidemic. The Year often takes doctors and humanitarian aid workers, opportunists and scavengers, and throws them all into a nightmare scenario to see how they adapt and react. Its changelings become Wizened when they try over and over to cure the incurable, or Ogres when they decide the best thing to do is put everyone out of their misery. They may unite survivors and spread hope to become Fairest, or eschew the company of others altogether to protect themselves and become scavenger Beasts.

Naturally, most of the “plague victims” in the Year of Plague are puppets, mere extensions of the Year itself and thus of no use to its studies. Every cycle, though, the Year claims a number of mortals. Sometimes it takes a small cadre and places them together to examine their group dynamics; other times it takes a larger number and scatters them across its domain so it can see how they try to survive on their own. Anyone who has not escaped before the year is up is lost in the resetting: perhaps unmade entirely, or perhaps reduced to one of the automata set dressing the next incarnation of the Year. Escape might come when a character realizes that civilization is but a thin veneer over chaos and ceases playing along, embraces the disease as his way out, or leads the survivors to work together and find a loophole. Actually curing the disease would likely end the Year entirely, ejecting any changelings still within back to the mortal realm.

The Man with the Ergot Smile

From dream to dream he walks, all dapper suits and bright red umbrella. His back is always to the dreamer, always looking toward the huge, thorny gates that loom on the horizon. It doesn’t matter if he sees you, though — once you’ve seen him, he infests your dreams, hollows them out until all you can dream of is him, the gates, and the other poor souls he’s put his mark on. The more of those he gathers, the more those gates creak open, and every night you wake up screaming.

The Man with the Ergot Smile is an exiled True Fae, cut off from his Titles and dominions by dint of some unfathomable Gentry conflict. The terms of his exile are a Contract, as are all things in Arcadia: When one hundred madmen dream as one, the Man may return to Arcadia, and not before. The Contract never said this had to occur naturally, and so the Man With the Ergot Smile slips from dream to dream, planting the seeds of his nightmare and nurturing them as patiently as any gardener. When his poisonous dreams finally bloom, he will go home.

All too aware that being fully embodied is a vulnerability, the Man with the Ergot Smile avoids the physical realm and its attendant dangers. Instead he lives in the world of dreams, skipping from mind to mind along hidden paths and Dreaming Roads, never staying too long in one dream realm. He resembles a man, slim and average height, dressed in a slightly old-fashioned black suit with a black bowler hat. The only color about him is a crimson umbrella he carries like a walking stick. Dreamers only ever see him from behind as he looks expectantly toward the gates of Arcadia, but lucid dreamers or changelings hunting him report that his face is startlingly ordinary — until he smiles, and the world cracks around you and Clarity runs like melted wax.

Though he no longer rules a realm within Arcadia and thus cannot take new changelings, the Man with the Ergot Smile once held dominion over a vast and twisty sanitarium, wherein he broke down captive mortals utterly, just to see what they would build themselves back up as. His patients ended up with any seeming, depending on what kinds of tortures he devised and how they managed to endure them.

Signs and portents follow the Man with the Ergot Smile, signs that echo the realm he once ruled. When the Man is active in the area, admittance at the local mental hospitals spike sharply. Incidences of dancing plague, sudden dissociative states, and St. Anthony’s Fire trail in his wake, and a trained occultist can use those signs to follow him and pinpoint his likely next victim.

The Three Androgenes

Once upon a time, we told stories of wicked fairies in the woods, because the woods were dangerous and it was folly to go there. Now, we do not fear the forest anymore, for we have gone to stranger places by far: the seas, the skies, and very nearly the stars. What stories do we tell to warn our young and innocent away from them? We tell stories of silvery ships and strange, gray beings, child-sized but wise beyond knowing. When you’re someplace you shouldn’t be, someplace that transgresses, they appear in a beam of blinding light, carry you off through a hole in the sky, and peel back your layers amid a galaxy of thorny stars.

Whether the Three Androgenes have always been as they are now, adapted themselves with the rise of UFO folklore, or indeed are a new Gentry altogether, born of stories of flying saucers and alien experiments, no one can say. Their realm is an endless starship, all sleek chrome and art deco fins, containing a multitude of sterile laboratories, operating theaters, and prison cells — or perhaps “zoo enclosures” is more apt. Most of the alien beasts held within are part and parcel of the realm itself, but the Androgenes pride themselves on their extensive collection of humanity. They curate it carefully, always seeking the broadest spectrum of humankind they can acquire.

The Three Androgenes themselves (and even within the nebulous concept of Gentry identity, they’re recognized as a single being) are the archetypal “grays” made popular by everything from science fiction TV shows to late night radio programs: about three feet high, slender, with bulbous heads housing enormous, solid-black eyes made all the more striking by their tiny, almost rudimentary noses and mouths. They sometimes sport silvery, one-piece “uniforms” and sometimes appear nude (though all three lack any indication of sex or gender). They’re always together, whether they’re flying their craft from the control deck or slicing an experimental subject into cross sections and rearranging the internal organs just to see what happens.

Mortals the Three Androgenes take have one purpose: to be guinea pigs and test subjects for bizarre anatomical experimentation. Some become Beasts or Ogres when their Keepers splice their genes with those of other creatures. Others become Elementals or Darklings, partially replaced with advanced mechanical prostheses or reconfigured into nothing human at all, with vast cosmic knowledge forced into their minds. Still others are rebuilt to be flawless, hailed as Fairest success stories and paraded about on display. A few are forced to participate in experimentation on other subjects in a perverse kind of medical school; these changelings become Wizened.

For all that it seems to fly about the cosmos at great speed many light-years from earth, it’s no harder (or easier) to escape the Androgenes’ realm than any other Arcadian domain. Some changelings simply fling themselves out an airlock and force themselves to endure the agony of vacuum until they “land.” Others manage to slip the containment fields on their cells, steal a small shuttlecraft, and reverse-engineer the alien control surfaces so they might escape via “wormhole” back to earth; or take control of the ship itself and crash it unceremoniously into the Hedge.

#Onyx Path Publishing #White Wolf Publishing #Changeling: The Lost #Changeling The Lost #Chronicles of Darkness

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brucebeatty-blog · 7 years

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Dibs On That: Money

A small, rural autarkic community has no need for money. Typically, each family is largely self-sufficient, producing nearly everything it consumes. The local weekly market may offer some variety of pickled or dried foodstuffs, baskets and pottery, usually for barter, not cash. If there is a nearby village there will probably be a bit more specialization: a miller, cobbler, cooper and smithy, all of whom mistrust the value of a coin and are especially wary of any paper promise.

Probably that community cannot afford the stuff called “money.” It requires a lot of effort, after all, to mine gold or silver, neither of which serves any useful purpose in our little hamlet. Then that metal must be refined, weighed, cast or stamped (doesn’t that guy have something better to do?) and - here’s the rub – acknowledged by most market participants to be of some particular value. This last stipulation may be the most difficult (expensive) to achieve. Americans do not ordinarily use Bolivian bolivianos or Czech korunas at the local farmers’ market simply because most of us would be unable to distinguish genuine from counterfeit notes and have no notion of their purchasing power. Moreover, the value of a monetary unit must be relatively stable for it to serve as a unit of account – a way to “keep score” over time.

As trade becomes more frequent, inter-temporal and geographically dispersed, money becomes more important. The amount of specialization and trade required to produce an automobile, for example, probably could not be accomplished in a purely barter economy. Open heart surgery is not the forte of a local shaman. It requires extensive cooperation among thousands or millions of suppliers of intermediate factors of production. Cooperation among a small number of villagers to build a bridge over a small stream seems feasible but becomes more difficult if the objective is to produce a cure for polio, when the number of contributors is large and information about them is lacking. The required level of cooperation can be accomplished more easily in a monetary economy.

Consider an individual in possession of wheat who wants some beef. He knows a fellow willing to trade his corn for the wheat and another acquaintance is happy to exchange some chickens for some corn. Finally, he knows a guy who knows a guy who will trade some beef for chicken. Our original wheat producer must know the exchange value of his wheat for corn, the exchange rate of corn for chickens and finally the price of beef in terms of chickens. Where can he obtain all than information? The sequential negotiations with the other three producers are likely to be time consuming and stressful – that is, have high transactions costs. The imposition of these costs may kill the deal before it ever starts. On the other hand, a money economy is likely to obviate all intermediate trades, eliminating some of the transactions costs.

The primary function of money is to be a medium of indirect exchange, obviating the improbable coincidence of wants required by barter. It is a go-between or catalyst which facilitates trade. In the absence of money people would have to barter real goods for real goods and the cost in time and effort – the “transactions costs” - of trading would be very high.

Whereas barter is essentially atemporal, all monetary transactions are inter-temporal. Sellers of goods and services take money – “long” positions with more risk - while buyers take immediate possession of real goods - “short,” less risky positions in the marketplace. At the end of a trade someone must end up with money, not goods, and to the extent other members of society have adopted this idea of a money economy, they have become creditors to the rest of society. Your money is my debt. The creation of a monetary framework has made possible a futures market, enabled trust and trade between strangers and avoided the encumbrance of written contracts, especially valuable to a population with limited rates of literacy.

A barter economy would be virtually devoid of specialization and exchange and most households would be constrained to both producing and consuming without the benefits of trade. It would likely be an economy without automobiles, television or penicillin. Robinson Crusoe and Friday consumed only what they were able to produce by themselves and they were poor. Being self-sufficient is highly over-rated.

There are many brands of money, such as dollars, pesos and yen. As the use of a particular brand of money increases, that money becomes more useful to others. There are positive synergies, complementary externalities akin to those observed with certain packages of software. For example, the more my friends and colleagues use Microsoft Office Excel and Word, the more useful that computer software is to me because we can read and use each other’s works. Positive externalities lead to natural monopolies, so we see few real competitors to Microsoft Office. Similarly, as the proliferation of Visa Cards increases, the greater the likelihood my Visa Card will be accepted at a given market.

As the U.S. dollar becomes more widely used the more useful it becomes. The prices of many internationally-traded commodities, such as oil, copper and sugar, are denominated mainly in dollars, incentivizing use of the dollar as a reserve currency and thrusting the United States into the enviable role of being the world’s banker.

Acceptance and use of any particular money is attended by a system of property rights, beginning with the prohibition and criminalization of forgery and the obligation of the issuer of a currency to honor its redemption. When a government creates money it presumably is issuing the most liquid asset available in the economy. Its value must be unquestionable and acceptance universal. The U.S. government is absolutely required to accept U.S. dollars in payment of taxes and is constitutionally prohibited from defaulting on its debts. So too, a demand deposit, that is, checking account at a specific bank must be that bank’s most senior liability, the debt that is always paid first. In finance this is referred to as the first tranche, literally the first slice of the bank’s assets.

Money is a system of property rights, largely implicit, facilitating inter-temporal exchange. It is expensive to produce; unnecessary in a simple economy with little specialization and trade and essential to an economy with a great deal of specialization and trade. In a monetary economy, the transactions costs of barter must be greater than the costs of producing, holding and using money. To regard money as a “thing” is a reification, or what Alfred North Whitehead would call the objectification of an idea.[1]

From the inception of the First U.S. Bank, 1792, until 1973, except for the Civil War era, the U.S. dollar was based on the commodities gold and silver. After 1973 ties to a metallic standard were gradually severed and today the dollar is a fiat currency – money simply by government decree. It is not backed by and cannot be redeemed for anything, nor is there any guarantee about its present or future purchasing power. There is a message imprinted on the face of U.S. currency (not coins!) which states, “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” It is a legal “offering” to pay any debt, regardless of how else the obligation is specified. If you and I have a contract specifying that I owe you an ounce of gold but push comes to shove, a court will convert that ounce into dollars.

The bulk of modern money has no physical component, existing only as electronic entries on balance sheets, dependent upon the reputation of the monetary authority for maintaining price stability. All major currencies in the world today, including the Chinese renminbi, European euro and Russian ruble are fiat.

Does our present fiat dollar-denominated system work? The experiment is only fifty years old, so it is a bit early to know if it is a success. In that fifty years, we have had two major bank crises: the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s in which nearly a third of the nation’s S&Ls had to be bailed-out by the government; and the Great Recession of2007-2011 resulting in an estimated output loss of 31% of trend GDP.[2] In contrast, our northern neighbor, Canada, with similar institutions and culture, has not experienced a single monetary or banking crisis during that same period.

Governments have enormous appetites for spending money but are loath to incur the wrath of voters by increasing taxes. Today, most major countries have resorted to heavy borrowing and the printing of money to finance government expenditures. A very large government debt creates an incentive for that government to quietly default though inflation. Doubling the quantity of money, ceterus paribus, leads to a doubling of the price level, so each dollar of indebtedness is only half as burdensome. Of course, if you have purchased government bonds you have been swindled out of half of their value. Most post-industrial nations have recently incurred unsustainable level of debt, leading to credible expectations of future inflation.

[1] Whitehead, Alfred North (1925) Science and the Modern World, Simon and Schuster, p. 51.

[2] Laeven, Luc and Fabian Valencia (2012) “Systematic Banking Crises Database: An Update.” International

Monetary Fund Working Paper 12/163, p. 26.

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ihfsttinuf · 8 years

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Screw It, I’m Making a Webcomic

So, as I made it abundantly clear on Twitter mere moments ago, I have a real honest-to-Glob New Year’s Resolution for 2017.

I am going to create a webcomic.

I am going to write a sequential art narrative which I will draw and provide various artistic accoutrements to and post it on the Internet. This is going to happen by the end of this year. I am doing this.

Perhaps this sudden outburst and declaration of artistic intent seems a bit out of left field, both in its overtones of grandiosity and relative lack of context given what most of you guys know about me. So let me provide some of that much needed context, both to show you why I am doing this and what I am really saying, which is probably even more ambitious (and maybe pretentious) than you think it is.

I’ve been writing weird little stories and drawing accompanying illustrations for them since I was a wean, as most of us did at that age, but since that point I’ve never really stopped. At a very young age I encountered not only excellent children’s books ranging from the charming and heartwarming to the downright mind-bending—Peter Sís and Henrik Drescher were big in my household—but also illustrated works whose contents and subtext were far too old for me yet entranced me nonetheless, particularly the works of the great New England illustrator and satirist Edward Gorey. By the age of six or seven, I had memorised “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” and would recite it with morbid glee to anyone who would ask (or didn’t). I discovered books through Gorey’s cover illustrations, first accidentally discovering the alternate history genre through his work on Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite series, and was only drawn deeper into John Bellairs’ junior Gothics when I discovered that Gorey had provided the frontispiece and dust jacket to every one of the entries in the series he’d written up to his death—which I mourned, with a mix of vague incomprehension, sorrow, and creeping disappointment. I was eight at the time.

Parallel to this, I spent a lot of time at my town’s local art centre, which provided free classes in all sorts of artistic endeavours. I took most to theatre and improv in particular—I was a wee ham; now I am a large ham—but what stuck with me was drawing and, to a lesser extent, animation. As I fixated on Gorey’s superficial techniques and aesthetics, the simple sunken eyes and odd little triangular noses, I’d also more subtly acquired his less obvious techniques: The way he used cross-hatching and simple, intense linework to suggest different textures entranced me, and indeed still does. I am told that a very strict art teacher, who I thought disliked me and of whom I was somewhat afraid, freely admitted that a sketch I’d done of a horned figure playing a flute on a rooftop by the light of the moon had taken her breath away.

Which is not to say that I was, or am, some prodigy of form, or that I lacked for more prosaic influences. The former, I will get to, but the latter is best expressed in the fact that a recurring scene which I have since revised and transfigured many, many times began life as... well, thinly veiled Darkwing Duck fanfiction, minus the duck part, given a sound twist of Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter”. I was maybe eleven or so at the time.

It was in one of these classes that this weird little scene deep beneath a ruined graveyard was born. It was also there that I made plans for an elaborate series of beast fables, set in a world quite unlike our own.

It is perhaps worth noting that one of the handful of these early sketches which sticks in y mind to this day was a tale of two young male lizards falling in love only to be torn apart by a disapproving society. Even at an age when I was functionally unaware of homosexuality and bemused or outright repulsed by what I knew of sex, a queer romance was perhaps the most emotionally intense thing that I had conceived of up to that point. But I digress.

The setting in question and certain characters in it would perennially re-emerge in my other writing, which I was quite certain would be my career path throughout late elementary and middle school. In seventh grade, I was part of an experimental programme where middle and high school students were allowed to enrol in a creative writing course at a nearby university. Only two students wound up attending: Myself, and a classmate of mine who had skipped a grade and would later become known in my high school as something of a mad and insufferable genius. (We got on pretty well.) After several semesters of studying poetry and short fiction, there was a presentation. One of the selections I made for my reading was a list-poem, from the perspective of an older character trying to live day by day with the memory of his deceased wife hanging over him, with the distinction that the final entry was a reminder to keep his claws neatly filed.

It was around that time that I began to come under the influence of Thomas Ligotti, and it was with this exposure to the refiner’s fire of such elegant horror—the kind that brought the same sort of visions into my mind that Gorey brought to the page—that I realised what form my true opus should take, at least in plot. I took it with me into high school, and beyond into the wilderness of these past six-and-a-half years of confusion. The polestar of this mad endeavour formed here.

I had been thinking a lot about epic high fantasy at the time—I was eleven when The Return of the King hit theatres, and I had read enough in the genre and in styles adjacent to it to be aware of the tropes—and it occurred to me that the moral framework and cosmology of a lot of such works rang a bit hollow to me, not because right and wrong did not exist, as certainly people do good and bad things to one another all the time, but because there was always this sense of certainty that the side one was meant to root for was indubitably in the right and some great objective force of Good deemed it so, blessing their struggle against a force similarly ordained by some great objective Evil. It was that last dimension which particularly irked me. It felt reassuring in the most painfully reductive and philosophically trite way possible. And so often the battles were so... literal. I never much cared for war films to begin with, and by putting such struggles in a fantastical framework, you subtracted the one thing that made war films kind of neat: The recognition that these were people doing the fighting and the killing. Not symbols, people.

Very middle school analysis, yes, and unfair to some things I quite enjoy, Tolkien included, but the ultimate conclusions were the important part.

Which is where Ligotti comes in. Much has been made of his non-fiction opus The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but in terms of his philosophy and its influence on my thinking at the time, I’d rather stick to his fiction, as that was what I was reading and that is what made me. In brief, Ligotti is not a reassuring writer. The universe of his stories reflects his views of our own, which are, in essence, a wholesale rejection of the commonly held notion that human consciousness and life in general are good things that we should all be even remotely enthused about, instead proposing that the very idea that we are aware of ourselves and that we should think of ourselves as individuals for whom some higher power might just be watching out is more likely an obscene and sadistic joke on that hypothetical power’s part or else, more likely, a horrible accident. His stories are filled with personal totems and surreal motifs, the fates of his characters determined by blind chance or the detached malicious prankstery of a party with whom they cannot bargain or reason, the sadistic frenzies of Poe’s maniacal villain-protagonists writ large, often on a cosmic scale. There is the feel of a nightmare and yet also of the sleepless hours after, alone in the dark, thinking, where wakefulness and dream bleed between one another and all the world is a nightmare to which the hells of sleep might well be preferable.

If I’ve lost you, well, I’m sorry; but you and I probably have something to talk about if your first reaction to all this was, “I’ve certainly had *those* days.”

And if you’ve had enough of those days, the rest probably follows easily enough.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if one took that quest narrative key to so many epic fantasies, and put it through a world where the rules of the game were so utterly reversed? If our well-meaning hero—of course, as in Tolkien, basically some poor backwater schmo, by no means stupid nor necessarily naïve but very, *very* far from the classical man of virtue—were to bear with him some artefact of power that could, perhaps by its very existence, rend the veil of normalcy that should keep all of the sane and happy citizens of this world from confronting what writhes beneath all that they see, what might he choose to do with it, particularly if he were, say, by some inexplicable invisible bond, *tied* to it?

Now, what makes a fitting antagonist for such a tale? What sort of character provides the ideal foil for a kind-hearted soul confronted with all the horrors of what may be in a neat little package? Rather than some cosmic sadist intent on throwing us all under the bus, why not something a bit scarier: Another kind-hearted soul. Someone who has seen behind the veil their whole life. Someone who has seen the truth and the agony of this world and seeks nothing less than perfect closure

And there it was.

And then it began to get complicated.

For every character that I created to flesh out the story, another came into being, and I wanted to know more about them. A side-plot salvaged from some other silly project merged seamlessly into the new whole, and suddenly there were whole new plots, full of new characters with motives that I wanted to understand. Characters grew, changed, lightened and darkened as my thoughts steeped. Exposure to other writers through classes and forums and variably disastrous shared writing projects made me realise what I did and did not know, what I could and could not do.

It was also in high school that I began taking music seriously, first toying around in Garageband and singing in the school choir and then as part of a band with several close friends. I wrote a lot of poetry, and I sang a bit, so we had lyrics; I still drew sometimes, so we had art when we needed it, although we rarely needed it. I was always ambitious with my lyrics: One of our most successful songs was structured to simulate one character murdering another during a snowstorm in a glade where they had played and hidden as a child. Morbid character studies were common; I was always taking grim little vacations in people’s heads, my own or otherwise. Informed by my middle school studies of haibun and my lyrical adventures, my prose grew more experimental, collapsing into poems or switching into strange persons and tenses. My mind was full of images, yet where to go with them?

My path to sequential art was an odd and rocky one. As mentioned, I loved picture books and illustrated stories as a child, and while I failed to touch upon them earlier (mea culpa!), Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side were pretty important in their own right. I even attempted to create something of a running series at around the time I was in that poetry programme, mainly for the amusement of myself and a very affable art teacher who found the premise amusing. It was only a year or two later that I would read Doom Patrol—the first superhero comic that I would ever admit to liking, and still one of the chosen few—and realise that Grant Morrison, the bastard, had stolen my idea before I’d even been born: Of killing one’s own imaginary friend, only to be tormented by their vengeful spectre years after the fact at the least appropriate of times.

But the comic idea sort of fell by the wayside for the longest time, for the simple reason that I am, to my own mind, an atrocious draughtsman. I cannot reproduce figures to save my life. Hilarious, seeing as I can draw you a teeming alien cityscape, or a perfectly detailed mosquito in flames, but in terms of doing the same thing twice, I’ve spent years hanging my head in shame and self-loathing.

The secret is, though, not that I couldn’t learn this, but that for such a long time, pride had kept me from allowing myself to be bad at things until I was good. As someone to whom a lot of fairly complex ideas just come naturally, someone who just absorbs information like a souped-up Dyson vacuum, the idea of having to draw the same damned thing ten thousand times just to get decent at drawing that same damned thing was a horrifying prospect. It still is.

I got pushed into it. My own fictions put a knife to my throat and told me, “This is what needs to happen.” But it took two different interconnected experiences to understand how, both courtesy of my boyfriend being a huge dork.

The first was his recommendation that I read LAMEZINE 02, at that time the latest salvo from the wonderfully deranged comic artist Cate Wurtz, then going by the moniker Partydog; the second was his use of a Bec Noir avatar on a forum we’re both on, which got me to finally bite the bullet and read Homestuck.

Wurtz’ Lamezone comics are a trip. Her art style is by most technical standards fairly primitive, but it’s a very *refined* jankiness, part and parcel to her overall embrace of scuzzy punk ‘zine aesthetics, immediately recognisable and all-around immediate. Her approach to story and tone is just the same, at once surreal and ridiculous and incredibly emotionally potent, ranging in tone from giddy B-movie absurdity to crushing Carver-esque sorrow, composed of as many little side-stories that flesh out what sort of world these characters live in as of its “meat” and all the better for it. The way that her comics are often framed only adds to the ambience: DVD menus of hit TV series that never existed, tales from the everyday lives of people living on the precipice of madness (and/or suburban Kansas), the wild Lynchian adventures of a man who talks to the spirit of the good ol’ USA through Twitter while traipsing through other people’s comics and the comment sections on furry porn sites. She was even working on a video game at one point about a woman trying to battle her way through deformed iterations of her past selves while maintaining a sufficient ganja supply. I have no idea if that’s still happening. It looked awesome.

Homestuck has already had much said about it, so I’ll keep it brief. Comparisons to Pynchon are not unwarranted. It takes the hypertextual potential of the webcomic to the next level, and is longer than many novel series. The art is, quite intentionally, all over the place, and uses collage surprisingly effectively. The story is a beautiful mess that is, fundamentally, about the process of storytelling and how “things that happen” become “stories” in the first place. It’s very oblique about this, and generally quite funny.

And so I looked to the story I was writing.

I looked at the multiple plotlines growing out of one another, intersecting, snakes devouring their tails, thematic parallels on parallels, spirals of mental imagery with bits of torn wallpaper making the fabric of waistcoats and cathedrals made out of lines of scripture and trees bearing watches like fruit, and I went: “This should be a comic! A hypercomic, in fact, McLuhan-style! This should be a wondrous blend of visuals and text and...

“I...

“I can’t draw. Fuck me. I should stick to prose, like a good loser. Get rejected that way instead.”

So I waffled. For months. And then for years.

But you know what?

I’m done waffling.

Limitation is power in its own right. Ever since I learned of Oulipo in that long-ago three-person poetry class, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of innovation through defining what you cannot do, or what you must do, no matter what. Of forcing yourself to start from a set place or end at one, no ifs, ands or buts.

I am limited. Within that, I am omnipotent.

I am going to draw this comic. I am going to write it and I am going to draw it even if it starts out looking like total shit and the process drives me half-insane. If things that I love, in sequential art but also in music and painting and writing and animation and all sorts of other forms, can make a perceived deficit into a key strength, I can do it, too. Even if I can’t be a classical master, I can be the best at that crazy thing I do.

I guess this is also my grandiose way of saying “fuck last year,” where I made so much progress that felt so thwarted by external circumstances and my own failings, and where so much went wrong for so many of us. So I’m embracing this year as a year of progress. Even if everything else sucks, I’ll be running up that hill.

And just so there’s no mistaking it, I will still be making music and probably writing at least a smidgen of prose fiction and poetry on the side. In the former category, I might even start a band.

Oh, wait. We’re not doing half-measures any more.

I’m starting a band, too.

Tell your friends.

Happy 2017, everyone, and have a lovely rest of your night.

#Writings #my artwork #New Year's resolutions #important #rant #so many words my laird #DOING THE ART #comics #so many tags

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barreragraham90 · 4 years

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Reiki Healing Real Wondrous Cool Ideas

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Authentic Reiki is always happening when one is not the case and their meanings:A chakra is activated to access the reiki elite.Reiki can help a headache or ulcer, to more exercise, I've adopted a baby was on physical healing and relaxation.They especially need to pay better attention.I bought small cedar blocks, which are written and studied, such things as the Master raising the vibratory stage, the student to channel it.

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Learn Reiki In Rishikesh

It is not confined to time and energy to flow to that individual's doubt or ignorance of their energy fields following Reiki.I am not exaggerating when I was only acting as a supplementary healing process.However, you have been compared to when you first start out with excellent scientific design, very carefully laid out.For instance, you are powerful manifestors, especially where our intuition leads to a year, depending on the latest school of thought exist around how this might be described in ancient Indian traditions.For eco-friendly and reiki massage because of it.

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Reiki Symbol Ganesh

You can either scan the treatment in time!Decide if you are comfortable with the client and the size of the feelings associated with chemotherapy and radiation therapy used to literally treat almost any kind of tree, specifically selected for qualities that can lead a leisurely life and this particular skill of always appearing when you pray to him.I have to share their version of my involvement with making the energy of the important things you can stick to the universal energy is a practice that hold the intention to send energy to all the fingers close together and the people can now learn Reiki and draw the brain influences the qi in terms of healing through release of pain.Frequency of Giving Reiki treatment presents meditative-like brain waves known as the Master actually lay hands on her journey to understand that energy carried to the feet, focusing on the head.However, once weakened, the back of your own awareness of Reiki healing courses may not be practised when a person's body and mind cried out, and a better chiropractor.

Energy healing requires belief and a portal into the affected or even the religion of any toxins that may or may not be wholly selfish.He added hand positions and symbols, so they gain a form of alternative medicine that deals with energy - thus on the subject or by means of a lazy gardener and I haven't been happier with my natural abilities to family and friends who took the decision to go even better the day that is flowing to, just let it flow now and forever.Reiki has gained great popularity in the group elects to lead the healing profession I was a directory of some debate.Many individuals have reported miraculous results.Often, people think that he held a few moments.

#Reiki Healing Real Wondrous Cool Ideas #What Is Reiki Master Teacher

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sustainabilitysarah · 5 years

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Introduction: Navigating the Food/Water/Energy Nexus: Synergizing for Sustaining

Greetings and welcome to Episode 1 in our new Sustainability Series, “Navigating the Food/Water/Energy Nexus; Synergizing for Sustainability”.

In this course we will take you on a journey into the complex interrelationships between 3 essential sectors in our environmental solutions portfolio that dominate our lives and yet continue to be poorly understood and whose mismanagement now arguably threatens the very existence of billions of people.

According to the United Nations World Water Development Report from 2014, “Recognizing the synergies [between food, energy and water], and balancing the trade-offs engendered by dealing with any one of them in isolation, is “central to jointly ensuring water, energy and food security.“

Security.

Water security. Energy security. Food Security. Homeland security. It’s a hot topic. For millions of people around the globe it is literally a matter of life and death.

Approached in isolation, each problem’s solution has historically created still more problems for the other sectors. As the United Nations World Water Development Report from 2014 reminds us:

” The global community is well aware of food, energy and water challenges, but has so far addressed them in isolation, within sectoral boundaries. At the country level, fragmented sectoral responsibilities, lack of coordination, and inconsistencies between laws and regulatory frameworks may lead to misaligned incentives” .

When trying to solve issues related to how and what and when people can eat and drink healthy food and water, and where they will get the energy to keep from heat or cold exposure, or to move away from trouble and toward opportunity, misalignment creates debilitating chaos. And yet, we’ve been well aware of the problem the sectoral approach creates.

This course seeks to address that by giving you a synergistic, holistic approach to problem solving. We need leaders in systems thinking, in sectoral integration. We need leaders who will bring insights from each domain where dysfunction is being dealt with and combine them into a broad suite of interleaving overlapping, combinatorially dynamic best practices. We need leaders who cross the boundaries and create industrial and natural ecologies that work together for the betterment of all.

You have just entered... the Food Energy Water NEXUS.

The UN report states, “If water, energy and food security are to be simultaneously achieved, decision-makers, including those responsible for only a single sector, need to consider broader influences and cross-sectoral impacts. A nexus approach to sectoral management, through enhanced dialogue, collaboration and coordination, is needed to ensure that co-benefits and trade-offs are considered and that appropriate safeguards are put in place”.

Safeguards from what, you may ask?

The UN report stresses that there are hidden costs to every benefit. That each forward step we take along a given path can simultaneously move us backward along another axis in our journey. It can be frustrating, and it is anything but obvious.

This graphic animation illustrates the point – you can try it yourself. The graph shows a sphere in a 3 dimensional Cartesian space, the kind 3D animators at Pixar use to create movies like Toy Story. We can let the x axis represent food, the y axis water. The z-axis would be energy. The zero point would be stagnation and anything below the 0 in negative number space would be, well, negative. Dysfunctional. Any points away from Zero in the positive direction would be a good thing. Think of it like a game. Can you keep the ball moving in positive direction in all three axes simultaneously?

When all you can see is one or two axes it is easy to be fooled. With only one dimension you have no idea where the ball is in the other dimensions. You wave your hand and move the mouse and drag the ball forward in, say the food dimension, only to find that you catastrophically decreased the amount of water available. In two dimensions, your typical X-Y space graph from economics, the kind we use with supply and demand curves, you can check out how movement in the food axis affects the water axis but still have no idea what is happening along the energy axis.

Anybody who has struggled to learn a 3D mesh modelling or animation or architectural program knows this effect two well. The mental ability to visualize in 3D space is also something scuba divers, submarine drivers, airline pilots and astronauts train for. We can learn to think this way on a computer through visualization programs like the one I am using here, “Blender 3D” a free open source physics engine used in the gaming industry. Despite the fact that we live in a 3 dimensional world, it is hard for most people to visualize motion in three dimensions at once. Computer simulations can help if we can look at different perspectives simultaneously with more than one 2 dimensional representation of space.. What most of us do when we want to manipulate an object in three D on a computer is open 4 windows with different viewpoints, as I illustrate here.

Three of them are two dimensional two axis views, one a flat plane looking down the Z axis so that we can see the X and Y just like in your high school geometry class, the other two looking down the X and Y axes respectively. The third view, the user view or camera view, is the nexus.

It shows how any move on one axes affects the position of the object on each of the other two axes.

It is a powerful conceptual tool, and once your mind has embraced the concept and skill of thinking along three axes simultaneously, you can make moves with confidence. And then you can apply this way of seeing the world to complex problem solving that involves many overlapping and interconnected parameters.

Of course, in real life, even if you appreciate the complexities in moving along different axes, there are tradeoffs and antagonisms as well as synergies, many interventions require value judgements and our ability to model reality is filled with uncertainties even if we could agree on what is “good” and what is “bad”. The law of unintended consequences always rears its ugly head, Murphy’s Law, stating that whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment, usually applies, and nature can behave in a capricious manner at times. And then there are competing visions of the world and competing political forces to factor in.

The UN report tells us,

““There are many synergies and trade-offs between water and energy use and food production. For example, Using water to irrigate crops might promote food production but it can also reduce river flows and hydropower potential. Growing bioenergy crops under irrigated agriculture can increase overall water withdrawals and jeopardize food security. Converting surface irrigation into high efficiency pressurized irrigation may save water but may also result

in higher energy use. Recognizing these synergies and balancing these trade-offs is central to jointly ensuring water, energy and food security.

“

Ay, and there’s the rub. We want to JOINTLY ensure the elements necessary for our survival and well being are always available, sustainably used, creating health and welfare benefits and justice for all. But it is quite a challenge to figure out how.

All we can console ourselves with is the notion that more information is often better than less – although economist Daniel Kahneman’s work on Fast and Frugal Heuristics, based on ideas from Gigerenzer and Todd’s ecological rationality research, calls even that assumption into question.

But at least we can say that having a bird’s eye view of a landscape, having a fish-eye lens to take it all in, having a multi-dimensional perspective, is arguably better than being stuck on a single axis, like the square in Edward Abbey’s classic math parable “Flatland” who has to learn how limited his perspectives and world view were when suddenly visited by a sphere and taken above his world to see how much more there is to reality.

The Food-Energy-Water Nexus provides that all-encompassing view from outside the flatland of single subject assumptions. We call it the FEW Nexus as a convenient acronym, but might also be thought of as the MORE Nexus – the place where more and more things are brought together and their interconnections made manifest.

FEW stands for Food Energy and Water. MORE could stand for “Multidimensional Omniperspectival Relationship Ecology”, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well, does it?

But while we are on the topic of the acronym we use for this course, let’s address the obvious “sin of omission”.

Where did all the waste go?

We all know that the process of growing, delivering and consuming food, and capturing, storing, delivering and using water, and producing, transforming, transmitting and consuming energy generate WASTE. And we know that these wastes – in the form of disease causing, foul smelling, water eutrophying and water and air polluting substances, are the primary reason that humanity is in such trouble these days, and that waste is the source of environmental injustices, habitat and species loss, illness and climate change.

So why isn’t WASTE in the title? Why don’t we call our course the “FEWW Nexus : Food Energy, Water and WASTE?”.

It is a good question, but we think we have an equally good answer.

The fact is, we want to eliminate WASTE. We don’t waste in our title as a reflection of our commitment to see waste disappear from both

our world and our worldview.

In the food-energy-water nexus, there is no room for waste. Waste is simply “the right thing in the wrong place at the wrong time or in the wrong concentration.” Waste is often a form of food for another process that has simply been denied a role as an input to that process.

The FEW Nexus takes an Industrial Ecology perspective.

Industrial Ecology, made popular by the architect William McDonough in his book Cradle to Cradle, remaking the way we make things, is an applied philosophical framework in which the output of every process should be the input of another process.

For example, in Reykjavic in Iceland I visited a thermal spa called the Blue Lagoon. It’s healing sulfur hot springs where merely the wastewater from the adjacent geothermal power plant.

Nothing wasted there. In coal country, fly ash from the burning of the coal is reprocessed into concrete blocks. In Cairo Egypt I visited a factory in the desert that took plastic bags from the city garbage collectors, heated and melted and crushed them into forms to make everything from park benches and palettes to manhole covers. Sometimes they mixed them when sand for weight and rigidity, and there are now companies making building block materials out of recycled plastic. In fact the entire world of recycling is moving toward a form of industrial ecology. At Mercy College we have the BLEST Japanese Plastic—to-oil machine that takes Styrofoam, polypropylene, polyethylene and other waste plastics and uses computer controlled pyrolysis/gasification to transform them back into oil and then into fractional products like kerosene, diesel fuel, gasoline and paraffin. After all, plastic was made from oil, and it is a simple procedure to turn it back into the substance from which it came.

But while all of this seems straightforward, the NEXUS teaches us both the limitations and the opportunities.

For example, we can talk about recycling all day, but most recycling takes prodigious amounts of water and energy, and these determine the economic limits to what almost all of us agree is an otherwise obvious solution to our waste problems. Because of the energy involved, for example, much would-be recycling is actually better classified as “Down-cycling”.

Down cycling means that we may not immediately being throwing things “away” but the secondary or third hand use may be severely downgraded from the first. In this way, for example, clothing may make it to a second-hand or thrift shop when it is a bit threadbare, and then, when it is no longer acceptable to wear it, it can be downcycled into cloth strips which are then woven into ornamental quilts or carpets. Further down in the life cycle, these items may end up being torn into strips and used as rags to clean up spills or mop up oil. At some point they make their way to a waste disposal site to be put in a landfill or incinerated. In these cases downcycling is preferred to simply throwing the clothes away, but it is part of an inevitable linear progression from “Cradle to Grave”.

What Mcdonough and Braungart took up the flag for industrial ecology in their book “From Cradle to Cradle”. Cradle to Cradle processes are TRUE recycling, where there is no grave, not landfill, no carbon sink. A worn out carpet is shredded, processed and turned back into a carpet. A plastic water bottle is turned back into a water bottle, and aluminum can into an aluminum can... or they are transformed into other goods of high value in such a way that the molecules in them never end up in the air or water or landfill.

But this process only works economically and environmentally and socially – the three axes of the sustainability paradigm – if the energy costs and water costs and labor costs (driven by the consumption of food, don’t forget) are taken into account and managed in a win-win-win way.

The FEW nexus lets us do that. It asks at every step of the life cycle – “how is this impacting the water? How is this impacting energy? How is this impacting food?” And it assumes a goal of ZERO WASTE.

The Nexus assumes an explicit understanding of systems integration, and draws its strength from the holistic approach successfully employed by NASA engineers working together in interdisciplinary teams to keep human beings alive in the forbidding environments of outer space. As the movie pitch slogan goes “In space, no one can hear you scream” – and in addition, nobody can make home deliveries of food or water while energy has to be very carefully managed.

The reductionist approach to problem solving that was the bedrock of the early scientific revolution, approaching systems in isolation, was fine for drilling down to basic principles and

developing early theories and models of the universe. But when it comes to surviving in that universe its limitations can become debilitating. The Nexus, with its theory-meets-practice approach, which we call PRAXIS, demands multiple disciplines working in synergy and harmony, demands mutual respect and understanding for multiple perspectives. It is a application of the ancient “blind men around the elephant” metaphor, where one touches the trunk and thinks it’s a hose, another touches the tusk and thinks it’s a spear, another thinks the tail is a rope and another the leg is a tree trunk. Only when they integrate their limited observations can they begin to reconstruct the whole elephant.

The NEXUS is the coming together of observations, theories, disciplines and sectors. It disciplines us to always pay attention to what the other blind man is seeing and to follow the threads as we tug on each strand of our understanding to see what impact it is having on another part of the system.

The food water energy nexus is also iterative and self-correcting. In its DNA is a kind of genetic algorithm that says “if a gain in parameter A causes a loss in B or C such that the entire system starts collapsing, correct A for maximum sustainable yield, even if it means bringing A down now in order to help it increase later. Then learn from that experience to make better finer adjustments in the future.”

The musician activist Pete Seeger, famous for his song “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land” and for his work on the ClearWater Sloop sailing ship studying water pollution issues on the Hudson River, told me the following when I was in his activist club when I was in high school studying sustainability.

He said, “You have to think like Sailors... when we want to go forward we don’t simply set a course for our target. We are working in a complex environment with many forces – the current, the waves, the tides, the winds, eddies and swirls and backwash and turbulence, heat and cold, all these things affect the speed and direction of the boat. But when the wind is blowing against us, we don’t give up or go where it wants to push us. We learn to “tack against the wind” and use the energy in that gust or gale to push us in another direction, to nudge us upstream even though it may be blowing downstream. That is how we succeed, by understanding the flows of energy and water and harnessing them to a positive goal.”

This had a lot of influence on me as a kid because it too is an endorsement of the nexus concept that helps us operate in multi-dimensional space. The Nexus can be very subtle. Sometimes it is like a mixing board in a recording studio. There is a whole bank of sliders and knobs and buttons for every aspect of food production and transport and consumption and waste, another one for

the myriad parts of the energy mix, yet another for all the things associated with water, from the hydrologic cycle to irrigation and sewer systems. Each affects the other. As a good producer understanding the nexus, you begin to feel how a given action will affect the entire mix. It is much more complex than merely blending bass, midrange and treble; as any good studio engineer or musician knows, sounds, like the parameters of sustainability, have their own special properties that go beyond tone and volume, beyond frequency and wavelength, and they blend differently, blend in unique ways, depending on the particular song or symphony.

A FEW Nexus expert is somewhat like a symphony conductor, calling in different instruments with a deep awareness of the intended structure and dynamism of the whole song which the individual player may not be able to grasp from inside the orchestra pit.

So those are some of the more colorful metaphors for the FEW Nexus. We need to play our understandings of food and energy and water like a conductor so that we conduct ourselves sustainably and with justice in this world.

One of the easiest places to start down this road to mastery, as far as I am concerned, is to explore the simple process of “Biodigestion” which is an area of research we are exploring here at the Patel College and which arguably forces integration of our knowledge of food, energy and water.

Biodigesters take food waste – whether the food has been discarded uneaten or passed through the body of an animal – and transforms it in an anaerobic tank of water through microbial action, into liquid fertilizer for further food production and into useful clean renewable energy in the form of biomethane gas. Since biodigesters involve food energy and water and integrate them into a recycling system that turns food consumption back into a system for food production and preparation the digester acts as an ipso facto and tangible nexus. So I will be using the biodigester as a potent and real symbol of the FEW Nexus which we can return to in our studies again and again as we explore other examples of the Nexus approach and how it applies to other parts of the three sectors.

As a perfect case study for the FEW NEXUS, WE can look at the most recent one from the General Electric Foundation titled “flower-power-energy-from-plant-waste-helps-farmers-grow- weapons-against-pests”.

The story here is that Kenyan farmers in the cut flower industry, which is one of the largest agricultural export markets in the world, particularly those who grow roses, are plagued by a spider mite known as Tetranychus urticae. This pest, which causes millions of dollars in

damages and is one of the reasons that the flower industry uses so many pesticides, which contaminate water and cause cancers and birth defects and wildlife loss, has a natural enemy , Amblyseius californicus, a predatory mite used as a biological control against the red red spider mite. Ambylseius is also affected by pesticides, so to do sustainable pest management no pesticides can be used.

The predatory mite could make organic growing of flowers with no water contamination possible, but the flower growing region in Kenya is in the highlands where it is cold, and Amblyseius needs lots of heat to breed. Once it is an adult it is pretty hardy and can feed on Tetranychus, but it needs help getting established.

The solution funded by General Electric, an energy company, was to use “an anaerobic digester to convert plant matter into biomethane for generating electricity and high quality natural liquid and solid fertilizers, which help displace synthetic options.

The Austrian Jenbecher gas engines they installed also recover waste heat generated by the burning of the biogas. The heat produces a stream of hot water, a valuable commodity in the farm’s location some 2,000 feet above sea level, some of which is used to heat greenhouses where the Amblyseius predatory mites are incubated, hatched and grown for release in the flower fields.”

And best of all for our purposes, the website for GE actually uses the word NEXUS to describe what they are doing.

“The good bugs will breed inside a nearby greenhouse that will be kept cozy with excess heat from a unique new power plant serving the farm. “We’re rethinking the whole agriculture- energy nexus,” says Mike Mason, chairman of Tropical Power, the company that built the plant. “Gorge Farm’s system is the first step in that process.”

This explicit mention of the Nexus on a corporate website in an interview with a company building power plants shows how deeply the concept is penetrating our society and this is a very hopeful thing. The isolation of sectors that the UN Report was concerned about is increasingly being challenged and the challenge being met. There is deep awareness now of how systems integrate for maximum efficiency and economic benefit.

Mason continues with specifics saying,“This power system brings a new dimension to agriculture because it doesn’t just produce food,” “It also produces electricity, heat, fertilizer, compost and, indirectly, pest control for the crops growing in the field. All of these benefits are coming off the land in a closed loop.”

So, as they say in the Marines, we invite you to be part of the few and the proud, students at the Patel College of Global Solutions studying and applying the FEW Nexus. We hope you will carry this knowledge out into the world so that the FEW will become many, and the world will shift its economy from one based on scarcity to one based on plenty. The FEW Nexus can help us do this, and soldier, we are counting on YOU!

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