#it's somewhere between seeing the object and just holding the abstract concept of the object in my mind

[jonathankatwhatever]

I am consumed with negative thoughts. It’s 3 Jan 2023, and I’m sitting for the first time on the couch in the living room of the furnished apartment we are now renting. What happens next? I’m in the realm of the over-dramatic, and I’m quite dizzy. Let’s try the stretching idea to recover. I’m forcing focus with my left. I’m seeing a cognitive delay because processing the words through just my left eye is a bit off from the mechanism which runs the other way through my fingers to the screen. In other words, not quite in synch. And trying to put them in synch is sort of sickening, like my eyeball is being pried open as I twist my vision around so I can suddenly see that my right index finger is flying off the keys because there’s a lack of sensation between that and the middle and out to the tip of the ring. I’m now stretching that out. Hurts.

So that was Analytic: the thread had an End, which was that I needed to stretch my right hand now that I don’t have to use it as much. I’m back to using only left eye, and am still having glitches where the image jumps or the wrong letter appears and I don’t just consider that a typo, though it is. So the form of condemnation which Attaches there is different than to the typo occurring when the right is in charge. My left eye depth perception is not very good.

I need to take a nap.

4 Jan 2024. I started reviewing matrices because I wanted to focus in on their nature when related to gs. Not even sure what that sentence means, but it seems to be what I’m doing. Along with graphs, because I’m seeing how the concepts of 1Segment and 1-0Segment enable the various graph forms. Like if you think of SBE as a single cycle, and so on, and then map those to D-structure, then you get a single cycle which is Triangular, meaning it constructs D3.

Oh, here is where the old counting notions come in: a count to D3 is also a count to D4 because the count has to start somewhere and end somewhere to register as a D3. That indeed is crucial to existence. Imagine having a count that doesn’t overlap Start and End. That’s a primitive. That’s where primitives come from.

So, the count of 0 to 1 has to exist. And it’s found in the concet of Ends and Segments, of the Sticks and Stones. Gosh, this is where I thought: Jo Rowling got it so close, because her vision of Dementers is those I know as the Sticks because they are the sticks which hold together the constructions. I mean the construction in abstracted space, the gsSpace which in D3-4 or Einsteinian terms encloses the tangible Objects of physical existence. So when the isolate a region by twisting the connection, they actually do that.

Yesterday, as I was driving and working out the vertigo, I realized that the eye switching, the mind shifting, the person shifting went back to the conception of self I ripped apart in college. But of course what spun that off was the words unification of the selves, which is what I asked to see from you back when I made an incornate identification.

Segments and Ends. Multi-dimensional Ends connected across multi-dimensional pathways. The process by which we bind ourselves runs across the 1-0Segments.

There are ideas I feel uncomfortable saying because they’re encoded in me to such a degree. As in, I though pe’ot and the family jewels.

I’m more comfortable talking about the cat. I realized he’s happy in retirement. He’s had 14 or so years of hunting, which would qualify him for some hall of fame. That’s a long career as a hunting cat. and he leaves the game without a mark on him. He had a lot of skill at the catching part of hunting, but it took him years to learn how to kill. I can’t count how many mice I rescued from the kitchen. Or the ones that got under the fridge. I would look at him and tell him that’s what happens when you play with your food: it escapes. As the chipmunks and rabbits moved in, that’s where he hit his stride. Those aren’t the most difficult prey to catch, but they’re hard to get near. Billy was good at the stalk.

And now? He hasn’t even walked down the steps to the front door. And he barely looks outside. His systems are all normal. His fur is softer than it has ever been. He doesn’t complain. He seeks interaction. He’s curled up on the ottoman which I padded with blankets so it has that soft firmness cats love.

I need some food.

[yardsards]

anyone else with aphantasia sometimes gain the ability to visualize things but ONLY in the moment like RIGHT before you fall asleep when your thoughts get all blurry and abstract and your senses start fading?

or is that just related to how sometimes if i'm sleep deprived enough i will start having very vivid lucid dreams before my body actually fully falls asleep

[jeybirdsuniverse]

Norse Constellations 

by Timothy J. Stephany

Today it is difficult to appreciate the understanding earlier humans had of the world around them. Tremendous power existed in the sky, the thunderstorm was a spectacle unrivaled and only periodic, less like the regular and predictable movements of the Moon and Sun. People would not have been aware of the true scale of the Earth, but it was clearly a circular disk with a domical sky overhead that appears to surround it. From this perspective everything was close, and the universe small, the Moon and Sun were same-size disks just beyond the clouds, the stars just up there in the heavens. People would have rarely met people beyond their immediate vicinity, perhaps only a couple times a year. A far-bound traveler could bring tales of far off places no farmer could visit. Nature was dominant and powerful, yet appeared to hold a spiritual, personified and regulated power that could also be appealed to by humans.

Constellations of Northern Europe

Among the ancient people of Europe the night sky was a mysterious realm sometimes viewed as a magnificent World Tree that stretched across the sky, where the stars were fruit upon its spreading branches, and the Milky Way was its massive roots that extended down to the Earth. This comprised their universe and their understanding of its powers.

There is an eagle sits in the branches of the ash, and it has knowledge of many things, and between its eyes sits a hawk called Vedrfolnir. A squirrel called Ratatosk runs up and down through the ash and carries malicious messages between the eagle and Nidhogg. Four stags run in the branches of the ash and feed on the foliage. Their names are: Dain, Dvalin, Dunyr, Durathror.

(Faulkes 1987:18-19)

Although the constellations here were known in the past, all but Thiassi’s Eyes and Nidhogg play no role within Norse mythology. Also it cannot be certain sometimes exactly which stars were the ones seen from those times (and this will continue unless a graphic depiction is located). The constellations are largely based upon evidence from knowledge of Germanic mythology, but they are modern recreations based upon the suggestions of these sources. (See the paper “Ancient Skies of Northern Europe” on the Mythology page for more details.) The ones shown here are the only ones that are known to be genuine Nordic constellations.[1]

(While it could be justified in saying that these are Norse constellations, it is not actually known if the Norse or Vikings knew they were constellations and not abstract concepts. It is clear that by the time of the Eddas that the descriptions of the deer, squirrel, eagle and serpent were no longer linked to constellations. Therefore, although they arise from Norse mythology, it is perhaps more proper to call them constellations from Northern Europe, to distinguish them from the Greek and Roman constellations known from Southern Europe. In addition, there apparently was never one consistent set of “Norse” constellations, just as there are several representations of the Sun or Moon. For this reason also it is possible that the constellations were identified outside of Scandinavia and then imported in at a later time, but without knowing which gods they were associated with it is difficult to hypothesize which peoples they might be associated with.)

Friggerock (Frigg’s distaff) – this consists of three stars making up a distaff, which is equated with the belt of Orion. (Assuming the Orion constellation was also viewed as a figure in the sky, in this case the goddess Frigg [2], the belt of Orion is still a belt but the sword has a vertical orientation as does the spindle as it would have been known in a society where women were the spinners.) “Though Icelandic writings do not contain this name, it has remained in use among the Swedish country-folk (Ihre, sub v. Friggerock). The constellation is however called Mariärock, Dan. Marirock (Magnusen, gloss. 361. 376), the christians having passed the same old idea on to Mary the heavenly mother.” (Grimm 2004: 270) “The same three stars are to this day called by the common folk in Up. Germany the three mowers, because they stand in a row like mowers in a meadow” (Grimm 2004: 726).

Thiassi’s Eyes – this consists of two Gemini stars Castor and Pollux, that are side by side of equal brightness resembling two eyes, reaching their peak in the sky at midnight in January, which is why they were associated with Skadi (goddess of winter and presumed goddess of Skandza).

Dain (dormant) – one of the deer constellations in the branches of the World Tree, an elf name and here is associated with the smallest of the deer. Consists of two stars along its back leg, two stars along its front leg, two for its trunk, one star on its neck, the bright star Vega is its eye, and the four Lyra stars form its antler.

Dvalin (sleeper) – one of the deer constellations, a dwarf name and here is associated with the second smallest of the deer. Consists of some of the same stars as Cepheus, with one star for each of its front foot and the North Star makes its rear foot, two stars for its trunk, one bright star is its eye, one star on its snout, seven stars make up its antlers.

Duneyr (drooping-ears) – one of the deer constellations, the name associated with the second largest of the deer. Consists largely of the stars of the Great Bear, with two stars for its front leg, five stars for its rear leg, seven stars make up its body, two for its neck, one for its eye, and three for its antlers.

Durathror (sluggish beast) – one of the deer constellations, the name associated with the largest of the deer. Consists of the Perseus constellation as its head and antlers and Auriga as its body, with one star for each of its three visible legs, six stars for its body, one star for its eye, one star for its snout, five stars make up its longer antler, three its shorter antler.

Ratatosk (gnaw-tooth) – the squirrel constellation. Consists of the main stars in Cassiopeia, with one star for its head, one for each foot, one for its body, and two for its tail. goddess of Skandza).

Eagle – the eagle constellation consists of largely the same stars as Cygnus the swan, with one star for its body, tail and head, its left wing being four stars and its right wing being five stars.

Vedrfolnir (wind-parched) – constellation for the hawk upon the eagle’s head. Consists of one star for its body and one for its head, two stars for its left wing, and three stars for its right wing.

Nidhogg (poison biter) – constellation of a serpent at the foot of Yggdrasill’s root. Consists of many of the same stars as Scorpius, four stars make up its head and 19 stars make up its body and tail.

Wagon – this constellation among the Germanic people is well-known, in England as charles wain, Denmark as karlsvogn, Sweden as karlwagn, and herrenwagen, meaning the “lord’s wagon” and ultimately related by Grimm back to Wotan’s wagon (Odin’s wagon) (Grimm 2004: 151) while in the Netherlands it is known as the hellewagen (Grimm 2004: 802). The same stars that comprise the Big Dipper, with four stars making up the wagon and three stars making up the tongue. “We know that in the very earliest ages the seven stars forming the Bear in the northern sky were thought of as a four-wheeled waggon, its pole being formed by the three stars that hang downwards” (Grimm 2004: 151).[3]

Hellewagen – constellation of the wagon of the dead, that travels upon hellweg or Frauen Hilde Street (the Milky Way) to the underworld. There is good reason however to think that the constellation known as Pegasus was the original Hellewagen (perhaps also Odin’s Wagon), consisting of four stars making up the wagon, with three stars making up its tongue.[4]

Norse Stars

Aurvandil’s Toe – Sometimes wrongly thought to be a Norse constellation is actually the Morning Star, the planet Venus. Venus and Mercury never appear full from the Earth, they are either approaching or receding when they are on the same side of the Sun as Earth. Mercury, however is not clearly visible and cannot be seen other than as a point with the naked eye. Venus is sometimes the brightest object in evening after sunset or in the morning after sunrise (when the Moon is not out). Often paired with the crescent Moon, both were very early associated with bear claws, Aurvandil specifically equivalent to Grendel in this regard.

Vidofnir – cock that is perched upon the highest branch of the World Tree. Likely equivalent at some point to Vedrfolnir (the hawk perched upon the Eagle upon the World Tree). The Otherworld was to have been to the north and down, which would place it at the North Pole, the tree would have had its height at the axis where the tree rotates, which would mean that Vidofnir is Polaris, the North Star.

You can take the opportunity, on a clear night away from city lights, to locate these constellations yourself, which sometimes requires going out different nights or different times to see them all clearly. It will perhaps help recall a time when the night sky held a significant place in the lives of humans.

Notes

[1] “Friggerock” and “Wagon” are identified by Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology while the rest arise from my own studies. Although it is commonly held that Thiassi’s Eyes are the Gemini stars and for a few that Nidhogg is the constellation Scorpius, these were arrived at independently. Attempts have been made of other constellation identifications, and it is possible that both the deer Eikthymir and the goat Heidrun are represented somewhere in the stars, but no reliable identification has yet been made (for more see Eddic Constellations on the Links page). Most attempts to identify Norse constellations have been highly speculative and based upon unreliable comparisons or mere guesswork. Valhall has not been clearly identified in cosmological terms, but if it or the tree Laerad were representative of the night sky Eikthymir or Heidrun might be found near the apex of the sky.

[2] There are internet sites that claim the Orion constellation was known among the Germanic people as “Freya’s Gown” and the belt was known as “Freya’s Girdle”, but again I am unaware of the source of this information.

[3] Grimm also identifies the plural term for the greater and lesser wagon, the latter, Ursa Minor, is called by Berthold the wegelin (Grimm 2004: 724). Neither Ursa Major nor Ursa Minor dip beneath the horizon as seen from northern latitudes.

[4] The Hellewagen constellation does not appear to regard the existence of the World Tree, which suggests that there was never any unified set of constellations in Northern Europe, so this speaks to the accumulation from different cosmological traditions (see the paper “Yggdrasill and Ymir’s Skull: The Cosmologies of Nordic Myth” on the Mythology page).

Sources

Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. 1883, 1888. Trans. Ed. James Steven Stallybrass. 4 vols. New York: Dover, 2004.

Sturluson, Snorri. Edda. Trans. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London: Everyman, 1987.

[biostudyblog]

Developmental Psychology

Research Methods

Studies involving human development are either cross-sectional (studies observing patients at different changes to see how different variables change over time) or longitudinal (studies observing one person over. a long period of time to precisely measure the effect of development on a specific group)

Prenatal Influences on Development

Two examples of prenatal influences are genetics (whose effect should be obvious; the chromosomes you’re born with influence the development of certain traits.) The amount of influence chromosomes have on development over environment can be observed in twin studies where the subjects have an identical genome. Another example is teratogens. Teratogens are chemicals or agents which can be inhaled, ingested, or contracted in some way by the mother. One of the most common is alcohol which can cause fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) caused by severe alcoholism during pregnancy. A less severe condition caused by moderate drinking is known as fetal alcohol effect. A natural example is the virus Zika which made the news a few years ago for its devastating effects on newborns whose mothers had contracted the illness.

Motor/Sensory Development

Reflexes

While in the past it was understood that babies were “blank slates” research has shown babies have a specific set of reflexes, or automatic responses to certain stimuli.

The Newborn’s Senses

Along with reflexes, humans are born with their sensory apparatus. Research has found that babies can hear before they are born, and have the same basic preferences in smell and taste that we do. The most different is sight. When we are born, hearing is the dominant sense due to baby’s poor vision (legally blind). Normally, by 12 months, sight becomes the dominant sense.

Motor Development

Assuming all goes according to plan, humans develop the same basic motor skills in the same sequence (commonly at different ages, however.) Our motor control develops when neurons in the brain connect with each other and become myelinated. Typically by 5 1/2 months, babies can roll over, stand at 8-9 months, and walk after 15 months.

Parenting

Attachment Theory

As important as nature is in development, nurture plays just as big a role in deciding how we develop. Biologist Konrad Lorenz found some infant animals imprint on individuals or even objects they see during a critical period after birth. While not so simple in humans or other complicated animals, attachment, or the relationship between child and caregiver has a profound impact on growth. 

Harry Harlow- Harlow raised baby monkeys with two artificial mothers. One had a bottle for the baby to eat, and the other was wrapped in a soft blanket. The babies preferred the soft mother when scared despite not being where the food was. Without a real mother, the babies Harlow studied became stressed and frightened, giving insight into what the deprivation of attachment can do.

Mary Ainsworth- Ainsworth researched what happened when newborns were placed into a strange situation- the parents would leave them for a short while and return. There were 3 types of reactions. 

Infants with secure attachments explored the environment with their parents, became distressed when they left, and went to them when they returned.

Infants with avoidant attachments resisted being held by the parents, preferring to explore. They didn’t seek comfort upon the parents return.

Infants with anxious/ambivalent attachments (resistant attachments) were ambivalent to the parents. They were extremely distressed when the parent left but resisted comfort when they came back. 

Parenting Styles

There’s a lot of debate about the “right” way to raise your child. Psychologists have been looking into the scientific answer, and there doesn’t seem to be a conclusive right way, however psychological research can point parents in the right direction. Psychologist Diana Baumrind researched parenting styles and defined 3 main categories of styles. 

Authoritarian parents: set strict standards for their children and provide harsh punishments. Obedience is more important than rationalisation- “Why am I in trouble?” “Because I said so.” 

Permissive parents: set unclear guidelines- rules either don’t exist or often change. Punishments may not be followed through on, and rule-breaking goes ignored.

Authoritative parents: have set, consistent standards for their children that they explain thoroughly to their child. If a child breaks a rule, it often includes a discussion about why the rule was important and why they are being punished.

Authoritative parenting has shown to produce the most desirable home environment. Children in these kinds of homes are often more socially capable and perform much better academically

Stage Theories

Nature vs Nurture is certainly important, but there’s another important debate going on in psychology; continuity versus discontinuity. Do we develop continually or do we have periods of rapid development and periods with little change? Biologically, we develop discontinuously, but what about thought? Lev Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development is one answer to this question. The zone of proximal development is the range of tasks a child is able to complete on their own. Adults can provide scaffolds to help them reach the upper end of their range encouraging further development. Stage theories are discontinuous theories by their nature. Two; Erikson’s and Freud’s are studied not because of their scientific merit but for historical reasons.

Sigmund Freud

Freud proposed we go through 5 psychosexual theories (sexual being where we derive our pleasure as we grow up.) If we fail to resolve conflict in any stage, we may become fixated- (preoccupied with behaviours associated with that stage.)

Erik Erikson

Erikson was a neo-Freudian- he believed in the basics of Freud’s theory but adapted it. He felt our personality was most influenced by our experiences with other, so created the psychosocial stage theory.

Trust versus mistrust: Babies learn whether they can trust the world to provide for their needs

Autonomy versus shame and doubt: Toddlers begin to exert their will over their own body. Here, toddlers learn how to control themselves and their environment.

Initiative versus guilt: When children begin to question everything- if initiative is encouraged, children will be comfortable about being curious later on. 

Industry versus inferiority: The beginning of formal education. This is where students learn to produce work that will be evaluated- children may develop what is known as an inferiority complex where they don’t feel competent that can carry on for the rest of their life. 

Identity versus role confusion: At adolescence, the goal is to find what social identity we are most comfortable with. Failure to resolve this conflict may cause an identity crisis.

Intimacy versus isolation: Young adults need to try to figure out how to balance their life- how much time should go to themselves, to family, to friends and to a partner?

Generativity versus stagnation: This is where the famous midlife crisis tends to happen. Adults here question whether they are making the best life they want. 

Integrity versus despair: At the end of their life, elders either look back on their life with fondness or regret.

Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget

Piaget worked for Alfred Binet, creator of the first intelligence test, and was curious about the behaviours of the children he was interviewing. He noticed that certain age groups made similar mistakes. Piaget used this information to explain how children view the world through schemata, (cognitive rules). We tend to incorporate new experience into existing schemata through assimilation. When information contradicts that schemata, it’s modified. A little girl who’s only ever seen girls wear skirts will have to adjust her schemata if she goes to a pride march and sees boys wearing skirts. Piaget described cognitive development in 4 stages. 

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2). Babies begin to explore the world through their senses. One of the challenges is developing object permanence- the understanding that an object exists when you can’t see it.

Pre-operational Stage (2 to 7). After developing object permanence, the child will begin to use language and can refer to the world using symbols. Children are egocentric during this stage and can’t understand other people’s perspectives. 

Concrete operational (8 to 12). During this stage, children learn to think logically about complex relationships between different objects- children at this stage demonstrate knowledge of the concepts of conservation. The understanding that properties of objects don’t change when the shape does. These concepts are shown in the diagramme below. 

Formal operational (12 to adulthood). Formal operational reasoning is abstract reasoning. It’s the ability to manipulate and study objects and ideas without physically seeing or holding them. An example of this type of reasoning is hypothesis testing- a child in this stage would be able to answer a question like “what would you do if you were born somewhere where language didn’t exist” despite not having a model to relate back to.

Criticism of Piaget: Information-Processing Model

Piaget’s model was imperfect- many children move through these stages at drastically different stages. His tests relied heavily on language which may have biased him towards the older children with a stronger grip on language. The information-processing model is a more continuous form of Piaget’s theory. It notes that our abilities to memorise, interpret, and perceive gradually develop as we grow up, instead of occurring at specific stages.

Moral Development

Lawrence Kohlberg

You can’t discuss moral development without discussing Kohlberg. His theory looked at how we reason about ethical situations and how that reasoning changes. His theory was built off of asking children a moral question (for example the Heinz dilemma- should Heinz steal medicine he can’t afford to save his wife’s life?) 

Pre-conventional: People at this stage will make the best decision to avoid punishment. A pre-conventional answer to the Heinz dilemma is that he shouldn’t steal the medicine because he could go to jail.

Conventional: Moving past personal gain and loss, this stage focuses on how the choice a person makes will affect how others see them. A conventional answer to the Heinz dilemma is that Heinz should steal the drugs in order to be seen as a hero. 

Post-conventional: People at this stage evaluate the rights and values involved with their decision. Self defined ethical principles can guide the decision someone makes (which can differ based on upbringing, culture, etc). A post-conventional answer to the Heinz dilemma is that he should steal the drug because his wife’s right to life outweighs the clerks right to property. 

Criticisms of Kohlberg

Carol Gilligan was a notable critic of Kohlberg’s work, because in his research, he only looked at boys. When he did research girls, he tended to put their responses into lower categories, implying an intense amount of bias informing his work. Gilligan’s research showed that boys have a more absolute view on what is moral while girls are more attentive to situational factors.

Gender and Development

Biopsychological Theory

Biopsychologists concentrate on how nature influences gender. Children learn obvious differences between the sexes, however there are several more subtle ones. People assigned female at birth, for example have larger corpus callosums, theoretically affecting how the hemispheres coordinate and communicate.

Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud believed that gender identities begin to develop when children realise, unconsciously that they can’t compete with their same sex parent for the affections of the opposite sex parent (this theory is nearly impossible to study, which is why it has mostly been written off.)

Social Cognitive Theory

Social and cognitive psychologists prefer to observe how society and thoughts about gender can affect role development. Boys are more often encouraged to play rough, leading to more aggressive play. Gender-schema theory states that we internalise messages about gender to form cognitive rules about how different genders should behave. If all a child sees on the TV are girls wearing makeup and being interested in fashion, they’ll internalise the idea that women should be interested in makeup and fashion. 

[mychildrenneedwine]

I’ve been wanting to read more film-philosophy this summer, especially articles. I want to feel out how this approach gets applied on a smaller and more concrete scale, close conversations with particular films or particular images. I find my ideas get lost in their generality and have a hard time coming back down to specific encounters with film. Reading the latest volume of Film-Philosophy, I seemed to hear an echo of this concern.

There are three featured articles, and the first two are heavy hitters: Jeff Fort’s essay attempts to re-read Bazin’s entire ontology (I’ve only read the abstract on this one, but it sounds very promising), and Jiri Anger develops an elegant account of ‘accidental aesthetics’ within the context of new digital technologies interacting with the materiality of filmstock. Both are grappling with film’s ontology, and both are trying to develop new ideas in relation to old traditions. Then, there’s the third article, by Silvia Angeli and Francesco Sticchi. At first glance, it seems far humbler in scope, simply applying concepts form the good old Deleuze/Guattari toolbox to a couple of European arthouse films. But there’s a germ of an idea nestled in this seemingly simple textual analysis, which might too easily be dismissed as a mere application of philosophical concepts to some films, and this idea interests me.

The idea has to do with how we experience a film, and, while it gets expressed succinctly at a few points within the article, it never seems to move to the foreground and become the point of what we’re reading. Textual analysis always occupies this centrality, and the notion of experience merely hovers around this analysis. Maybe the idea isn’t foregrounded because it’s been developed elsewhere, or maybe its significance is meant to be obvious. Whatever the reason, I want to foreground the idea for myself, if only to get a better grasp on it, to work through what it might mean for the film-philosophy relation.

The article looks at two films with explicitly Christian themes, Moretti’s We Have a Pope and Rohrwacher’s exquisite debut Corpo Celeste. It applies the concept of a ‘line of flight’ to these two films in order to argue that each film ruptures with itself, opening up a line of flight that allows it to produce change and move in new directions. Because of each film’s theological themes, these lines of flight are seen as challenges to established traditions of understanding reality. So far so good. We have films that play with thematic preoccupations, and they seem to be leveling critiques or advancing a worldview. Good for them. But the idea of experience that the article wraps around this account seems to push these films past merely representing a pattern of thought. These films also provide viewers with the experience of these ideas, they “allow the audience to experience a major problematization of the institutions surrounding the two main characters” (4). This emphasis on experience seems to link the lines of flight that exist within each film’s formal construction with the viewer, putting that viewer through the very process of these lines of flight.

This idea might sound trivial, but it strikes me as a fundamental part of the film-philosophy relation. We experience films; they are objects of sensation that carry us through an (often-times) allotted unit of experience. This motivates some of my interest in the connections between viewership and ritual, but here I’m more interested in how this frames film as a specific kind of object, one that does things and takes us places.

At this point, my mind jumps to Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which I read recently and will doubtlessly misremember here. But what brings me back to this text is her interest in objects that can take us places, specifically ones that can pull us into new directions. She talks about how queer objects can manage such a pull. What makes these objects queer isn’t so much the objects themselves. Rather, it’s about our reaction to an encounter with these objects, which itself has to do with how we’re oriented toward them, and how this can give them a queer quality. Basically, a queer object is one that manages to pull us off the ‘straight line’ at the moment of encounter. In a simple sense, this is a process of estrangement, of suddenly noticing how everything we take for granted is in fact ordered in a specific way, rather than simply being given naturally. When something, an object, is out of place, we tend to rearrange it into place, to pull it in-line. But the out-of-place object also has the ability to reverse this process, pulling us off-line by making us suddenly aware of the strangeness within the order we intuitively maintain. Now, none of this sounds very queer, not yet. But, for Ahmed, these seemingly natural arrangements of objects in space are often constructed around heteronormative assumptions, which subtly reinforce the naturalness of such heteronormativity through arranging our bodies in particular ways around such objects.

As the title of her book evokes, Ahmed gets the notion of a ‘straight line’ from phenomenology, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. This line actually starts out as an issue of perception, with Merleau-Ponty’s observations about how we tend to straighten our perception along a vertical axis in order to bring order to that perception. From there, Ahmed develops an entire analysis of how this process of alignment continues throughout other facets of experience. The family unit, with its basis in an assumed heterosexual line of procreation and continuance, structures much of this cultural alignment process. So, we’re in-line when we’re experiencing reality from the starting point of – and moving along the trajectory of – heteronormative reproduction. Anything that takes us off this trajectory, even for a moment, pulls us off-line.

Film can be such a queer object, without a doubt. I still remember noticing Steve McQueen’s ass, in pristine white pants, from The Sand Pebbles. That was a sudden encounter, somewhere in the nebulous mire of middle school, that could be said to have pulled me off-line, if only briefly. The pull of desire is just that, a pull. It opens up new trajectories, sometimes followed and sometimes not. However, this would be an account of film as a kind of brute queer object, something that evokes a sudden response to singular moment of encounter. But the way that films take us through an experience with their structure, as touched upon by Angeli and Sticchi, is more complex than this. It takes into account the formal properties of the film and, more importantly, how they interact to create a more prolonged experience. When I think of films that could be thought of as queer objects in this way, my mind turns to Claire Denis and Beau Travail.

The main conflict is between Galoup, a French Legionnaire of some mid-range stature, and one of his soldiers, Sentain. The nature of the conflict remains ambiguous throughout the entire film, but it’s interesting that Galoup feels this conflict immediately after his first encounter with Sentain. Sentain sticks out to him, and Galoup then talks about a ‘vague and menacing’ feeling that takes hold, which will drive his obsessive resistance to Sentain for the rest of film. But what’s really at the root of this feeling, so suddenly evoked? Given the way Denis films the sensual rhythms of male bodies, a homoerotic tension is clearly foregrounded, but there appears to be something more to it than that.

Ahmed’s notion of being pulled off-line comes with the complementary idea of being maintained on-line. She talks of ‘straightening devices’ that function somewhat in opposition to queer objects. Such devices work to keep us on the straight line by both maintaining our on-line position and erasing off-line alternatives. In Beau Travail, Galoup seems to take on the function of an ever-active straightening device. His role is to train the troops and keep them ready for combat. As such, he is constantly ordering and structuring their bodies according to his regiment. He leads them through single file runs across the deserts, and he makes sure the pleated lines of their uniforms are ironed to perfection. In one particularly intense scene, he leads his men in a push-up routine that repeatedly maintains their bodily alignment to a simple up/down momentum. So, Galoup literally keeps his men in line. While this process seems to serve a merely military function, the film works to infuse this military context with a constant sexual tension. This tension reimagines the military apparatus as a sexual one, and Galoup’s functional straightening begins to be seen in a different light.

Sentain’s arrival seems to pull Galoup off-line, creating the vague and menacing feeling. But instead of becoming a story about a man who can’t handle his homosexual desire, the film’s form makes it more of an investigation into the failure of the straightening process. Ahmed stresses that the process of maintaining straightness comes at a cost, the cost of systematic denial (some big and some small). Here, it’s helpful to remember that the film is told retrospectively, from Galoup’s memory. What’s interesting to me is how the film differs so much from the rigid linearity of Galoup as straightening device. Denis films male bodies from every angle imaginable, constantly adopting new orientations of vision that work to create potentially threatening positions. The film is always looking through new angles to see what might pull things off the straight line, while Galoup is fighting to maintain this very same line. It’s as if we’re seeing Galoup’s work in the state of orientational flux that Sentain’s pull of desire causes, a state that he distinctly remembers. This is the tension of the film, and it constantly works to pull us off-line, while producing a narrative about the failure of the straightening process.

So, along our initial lines, Beau Travail gives us an experience of being pulled off-line. This isn’t the kind of accidental experience that The Sand Pebbles gave me, but rather an experience designed into the form of the film. The question then becomes: what does this experience amount to? Is Beau Travail just a handy example of ideas articulated by Sarah Ahmed? It seems to me that focusing on experience takes the film in a different direction than this reduction. There’s a difference between reading and understanding the logic of Ahmed’s idea of being pulled off-line, on the one hand, and actually being pulled off-line, on the other hand. Beau Travail gives us the experience of Ahmed’s idea, rather than trying to articulate it. How significant is this observation? I’m not sure yet, but it does highlight one of film’s interesting philosophical capabilities. What I like is that it takes us away from ideas of ‘cinematic thought,’ pulling us instead toward an understanding of the thoughtfulness of cinematic experience.

[spikeymarshmallows]

Kliego, “Come on, sweetheart. We can’t stay here any longer.”

Thank you for the prompt, anon!

Sorry it took me a while to post this. I wanted to post the “main fic”, as it were before I did. [read this on ao3 if that is your preferred medium!]

Prompt post here. [*screams at how the formatting on this KEEPS FUCKING UP*]

Reality wasn't quite… real. Or was it? He didn't know. He felt like he was a few inches to the left of his body, in it, but not quite in it at the same time.

He didn't know how much of that was grief, and how much of that was the ketamine.

He slumped to the floor and lay there for a moment. It might have been longer, but who was to say?

Eventually, he managed to push himself up, surprising himself when he even got to his feet. Being upright lasted approximately three seconds before he stumbled, knocking a multitude of objects off the bookshelf that his hand shot out to brace himself with. He vaguely recognised that his knees would be sore when he could next feel things, but for now, the sensation was dulled.

Good.

That was the point.

He crawled up onto his bed, head spinning wildly. He ceiling above him looked circular. He giggled and tried to breathe through his nose to stave off the light-headedness.

It worked as long as he kept his eyes closed.

He was vaguely aware of his father coming in, but he didn't know how much time had passed. When his father scolded him, the words came through fuzzy, and delayed, and Klaus couldn't quite make sense of them. He nearly vomited when he was dragged out of bed, and he stumbled into things as he was pulled through the halls.

There was something about proper motivation to make his powers work now. Klaus knew it should infuriate him, but he mostly felt numb.

At least the mausoleum was cold against his feverish skin.

*

He wasn't sure how long he was in the crypt. Time had always been a bit of an abstract concept to Klaus, and this was no exception. He just knew it was dark when he'd been thrown in, and it was dark when he was pulled out.

Oh, and he was so very, very in the depths of withdrawal.

When it became apparent he couldn't stand, Father disappeared, and Klaus didn't even have it in him to plead not to leave him there.

The next time Father reappeared, it was with Luther. Klaus was almost as tall as Luther, but Luther had his oh-so-special powers. Luther scooped him up, weirdly gentle with him in a way he'd never been before.

There was jostling, and too much movement, but he was eventually settled down on his bed. After their father stormed out, Luther brushed the matted hair off Klaus' forehead. He grabbed a blanket from the end of the bed and tucked it over Klaus.

In the darkness, Klaus could kind of make out a look that was eerily like concern. Klaus didn't know what to do with that, so he didn't acknowledge it.

"Take care," Luther said softly, glancing back towards the open door. "I've already lost one brother this week. I don't want to lose another." He nodded sharply to himself and then scurried from the room, as if showing any hint of kindness would be an excuse for punishment.

Actually, knowing their father, that was exactly what would happen.

*

Klaus couldn't sleep. He was so fucking nauseated but he couldn't get out of bed. Every time he tried to move, the world tilted.

He heard the door to his bedroom open and the next thing he registered was Diego kneeling beside his bed. His face was close to Klaus', but he had trouble making it out in the darkness.

"Jesus, Klaus," Diego whispered.

Klaus tried to say something, but his voice came out a rasp.

"Come on, sweetheart," Diego said gruffly, hand a vice grip around Klaus' upper arm as he helped Klaus to sit up, "we can't stay here any longer."

"Where are we going?" Klaus asked, torn between finding the touch agonising and comforting. He shuddered and slumped down to the floor.

"Doesn't matter. Just. Not here. We're not staying here."

Klaus whimpered and nodded. His head felt like it was going to explode, weird pressure pushing from the inside out.

He wobbled again and groped around for something to be sick in. Diego must have been able to read his mind because the next second, there was a wastepaper basket in front of him while he emptied the contents of his insides into it. He was dehydrated and hadn't eaten in… Well, he didn't know how long. It was agonising to vomit up nothing but bile; maybe that was just the withdrawal.

Diego was stroking the back of his head and neck, hand blistering hot.

"I…" Diego stood. He disappeared but Klaus wasn't quite sure whether it was only for a moment or a lifetime. When he returned, he knelt in front of Klaus. Klaus blinked up at him, moaning when the world tilted.

He felt Diego's hands on his, wrapping around them and holding them around a cool mug. Diego let go of one hand but it shot back over Klaus' when it became apparent he couldn't really hold it. He helped Klaus take little sips of water, just a few mouthfuls before he set it down again. Klaus couldn't really make out Diego's face in the darkness, but he felt Diego's hands brush the hair off his forehead. Klaus lay his head back against the edge of the bed.

"Just stay there…" Diego told him, as if Klaus was in any position to move right now. Diego was moving around the room quickly so Klaus had to shut his eyes against the nausea that accompanied following him. He was suddenly so very, very cold, and began to shiver, even though he was sweating like a sinner in church.

There was faint clattering as Diego grabbed things and Klaus belatedly realised Diego was packing a bag on the bed above him.

"What… are you doing?" Klaus asked blinking slowly up at him.

"Packing," Diego said shortly.

"Oh. Where are we going?"

"We're getting out of here."

"Oh. Okay then." Klaus closed his eyes and rested his head back on the bed again. Diego knelt beside him again and helped him take a few more sips of water. Klaus drank it gratefully. He wanted more but figured that Diego didn't want him to vomit it back up.

"Just. Just stay here, okay?"

"Oh, I was planning on running a marathon, but now that you've told me that," Klaus said as drily as he could.

"Glad to hear you're feeling better," Diego said and even though Klaus couldn't see it, he knew Diego was rolling his eyes.

He disappeared from Klaus' room, but Klaus couldn't hear him. Of all of them, Diego was best at moving silently. Klaus, when he could be bothered, was a close second.

He found enough strength to lift the water to his mouth again, and was glad it didn't revisit him.

Diego returned at some point. He hoisted Klaus onto his feet. Klaus lurched and made to be sick into the bin again. He vomited up the water he'd managed, and shuddered again.

"Sorry," Diego said softly. "Do you… Do you think you can walk?"

"I dunno," Klaus said wetly. "Can't we… do it another night? Dad's still gonna be a prick in the morning."

"Can't wait until morning."

"Why not?"

"Because I stole a couple'a grand from Dad's office, plus some shit to pawn, and a few of his credit cards."

"Well, Diego, I'm impressed," Klaus managed.

"Didn't realise you'd be quite in this state when you returned though."

"Rookie error, Number Two."

Klaus pushed himself up with both hands on the bed to balance him. He stood on both feet, swayed, and leant into Diego. Diego wrapped an arm around his waist to help steady him.

"Just… Try not to be sick, and keep quiet, okay?" Diego said. Klaus nodded. Diego shifted abruptly, which almost set Klaus off again, but he realised he was just shouldering the bag on Klaus' bed. Klaus realised he had one of his own already. He would have felt guilty were he not feeling like death warmed up. Well, warmed up was a strong word for it given he felt like his veins were filled with chips of ice.

Diego navigated them through the hallways. They had to stop and let Klaus breathe a few times, let him stave off the nausea. Klaus braced himself against the walls, clutched the bannister down the stairs like a lifeline.

By some miracle they didn't encounter anyone on the way out. It made sense; Diego was planning this, and it was 3am. Diego wouldn't have tried to sneak them out if there was considerable risk of them getting caught.

The outside world was cool, but almost warm against Klaus' icy skin. Diego kept them walking until he managed to hail a cab. Klaus tucked his face into Diego's neck in the back of the cab, letting his eyes close. His head was throbbing, and he couldn't stop shivering. Diego kept stroking his hair, and if Klaus didn't know any better, he'd say Diego pressed a few kisses to his forehead and the top of his head.

Diego let him sit outside in the gutter when they reached a shitty motel somewhere far away. Klaus vaguely recognised it, but he put his head between his knees to keep the flickering neon lights from tormenting his exploding head.

And then there were steady hands peeling his damp clothes from his body. There was a shower. Diego helped him sit under the blistering water, and when he no longer felt like he'd slipped through a frozen lake, he was brought to a musty old bed and tucked under blankets.

"There's water here, and a bin here if you need it," Diego said, brushing Klaus' wet hair off his face. Klaus could scarcely keep his eyes open. He nodded.

"I'm going out for a bit, but I'll be back soon."

Klaus had a thousand questions, but he was too tired to ask them. Instead, he nodded again, felt warm fingers on his forehead again, and then heard the quiet sound of a door shutting.

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he could see Ben, sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed.

Klaus squeezed his eyes shut against the stinging and even though it made him sick, even though he fought it, he convulsed with a sob. He curled around a thin pillow, and buried his head in it.

And he didn't cry.

[tlbodine]

Self-Talk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue

It has recently come to my attention that there are a lot of people out there who don’t think in words but rather in images, numbers, abstract sensations, etc. Obviously I knew this was the case for some folks, but I always kind of assumed that inner speech was the “common” or “default” for neurotypicals and I’m sort of shocked to discover that apparently it’s not? Like different things I’ve been reading today suggest that it’s more of a 50/50 split or even 40/60 in favor of images. 

This blows my mind. 

I am super deeply curious what in the world the inside of other people’s brains are like! So please! PLEASE! Come here and tell me all about what goes on inside your head and what the shape of your thoughts are and how you engage with life on a day-by-day! 

For me, personally...well! Rambling under the cut! Brains are neat!

First off, there is always a song playing in there somewhere. I think most people get earworms, but I’m not sure if they’re constant? For me they are. I can sometimes change the song, a little bit like a jukebox, but it’s always there. Right now it’s “Home for the Holidays” for some reason I cannot begin to fathom. I can shut up the song in my head by playing actual music out loud, which is one reason why I prefer to work with music. 

I have inner speech running ALL the time. I also sub-vocalize when I read (ie, read each word aloud in my brain). The voice I read in is the same as the voice I think in. That voice doesn’t exactly sound like my real voice when I speak aloud. But that voice is “me.” That’s the “me” part of my brain. The “me” part of my brain is always talking. It’s usually delivering a lecture of some sort -- a lot of my thoughts sound exactly like Tumblr posts or articles. If it’s not lecturing, it’s instructing in some way, like it’s verbally giving orders or directing my meat-vessel to do various things. I think through to-do lists and plans a lot. I give a lot of internal commentary to the things I experience. 

The “me” voice always speaks as though it has an audience even though it’s just in my head. (When I was a child, I often imagined myself as the host of an educational TV show, delivering my thoughts to the audience. As an adult, well, the internet exists, so I don’t have to pretend, I can just word-spew at you folks. You’re welcome?) 

I can visualize things, and am actually pretty good at it. Like, I can look at an object and sort of turn it around in my brain to see what it would look like from different angles (like, I could match a puzzle piece with an empty space by looking at it, even if it was upside down). But the images are rarely more than flashes unless I put a LOT of effort into concentrating and imagining them. Like if you tell me to imagine an elephant, I’ll see it in my brain in a series of glimpses that all kind of piece together to illustrate the concept of “elephant.” I can’t hold the whole image in my brain at the same time without concentrating VERY hard. 

Oddly, obtrusive thoughts are always images. 

They show up out of nowhere, unbidden and very vivid. If the “me” voice is quiet, the images are more likely to rise up. This is probably why I keep that internal chatter and song running 24/7 -- a sort of defense against the image-part of my brain that does things I can’t control. I have mental compulsions where I have to consciously think certain things in order to drown out the other thing.

Sometimes OCD brain also serves up doubts. The doubt is not an image or a thought in words, it’s just a sort of feeling or sensation that questions whatever “me” brain is saying. Kind of like how when you’re talking to someone and you can see from their expression that they’re skeptical even though they don’t say anything? When the doubts happen, “me” brain starts trying harder to justify itself, thinking around in circles. That’s when I get worked up and basically gas-light myself. When this happens I call it “getting too deep in my own head.” 

Sometimes the doubts come in the form of OTHER people’s voices, and “me” brain argues with them. Sometimes that gets very upsetting because it feels exactly like actually arguing with them, and it’s very easy to forget that the version of people that lives in my brain is not, in fact, the real person. (More often than not, the person I argue with in my brain is my mother. But sometimes it’s my husband, my boss, random people on social media, etc.) 

Curiously, ideas come as images, from the same place as the obtrusive thoughts. They just show up.  While this is happening, I am usually vaguely aware of a background process where some part of my brain is cross-referencing and connecting things. It spots patterns and generates metaphors. I don’t think them up with “me” brain, they just sort of bubble up and I translate them into words. This is an almost-physical sensation. I can sort of guide the process into happening, but I don’t really control it. 

In practice, this means that ideas (like for stories) show up as very brief flashes of image + a sort of ephemeral web of feeling and interconnected ideas. There is the feeling that this is a brief glimpse at something that exists whole and finished and fully realized....somewhere else, in some place I can’t access. The whole process of writing is exploring the idea, visualizing it, and then translating it into words. It is EXHAUSTING until I can manage to slip into flow and cut out all the conscious thought processes between brain and keyboard. 

This is also why I can’t outline. Outlines are created by that talking, thinking, “me” brain. Those stories aren’t good. The good ones are the ones that bubble up from wherever the pictures come from. 

....huh. I just learned a bunch of stuff about myself in the process of thinking that though. That’s kinda neat. 

How bout you though? How does YOUR brain work?

[betweengenesisfrogs]

Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic

Yes, you read that right.

Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.

Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.

But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.

Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.

And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.

WHAT SPRITE COMICS WERE

Many of my readers are probably too young to remember the era of sprite comics. So: what were sprite comics?

Sprite comics were a genre of webcomics made entirely by taking pixel art from video games – especially character art, called “sprites,” but also backgrounds and other images—and placing them into panels to tell a story. They were near-ubiquitous on the internet in the early 2000s, emerging right as webcomics in general were seeking to establish themselves as an art form.

They were not, shall we say, known for their quality. The low bar to access meant that art skill was not an obstacle to starting one. The folks behind the huge swell of them tended to be young people, kids and early teenagers recreating the plots of their favorite video games with new OCs—not the most advanced writers or artists. They were the early 2000s’ quintessential example of ephemeral, childish art. Unfortunately, they look even worse today—blown-up pixels don’t hold up well when displayed on higher-resolution monitors.

Today, they’re mostly forgotten, remembered only as a weird, strange moment in the youth of the internet. Someone who evoked them today, such as a blogger who compared them to one of the most successful webcomics of all time, would be inviting good-natured teasing at the very least.

It would be unfair to dismiss them entirely, though. In this low-stakes environment, comics where the author could bring more skill—engaging writing, legitimately funny jokes, or especially, a real ability to work with pixel art—really stood out. (Unsurprisingly, these authors tended to skew a bit older.)

The obvious one to mention is Bob and George. Bob and George wasn’t the first sprite comic, but it was the most influential. Conceived initially as Mega Man-themed filler for a hand-drawn comic about superheroes, it quickly became a merging of the two concepts, with the original characters made into Mega Man-style sprites, full of running gags, humorous retellings of the Mega Man games, elaborate storylines about time travel, and robots eating ice cream. It was generally agreed, even among sprite comic haters, that Bob and George was a pretty good comic. Worth mentioning also are 8-Bit Theater, which turned the plot of the first Final Fantasy into a spectacular and hilarious farce, and of course Kid Radd, my second favorite sprite comic. (More on that later.)

But even if you weren’t looking for greatness—there was something just damn fun about them. The passion of sprite comic authors was clear, even if their ideas didn’t always cohere. To this day, I think the sprite comic scene has the same appeal pulp art does—it’s crude and rough, full of garbage to sift through, but every so often, something deeply sincere and bizarre shines through, and the culture of its authors is a fascinating object of study in itself.

Okay, full disclosure: I was one of the people who made a sprite comic. I’ve written about my experiences with that in more depth elsewhere, but yeah, I was on the inside of this scene, rather than a disinterested observer, and from the inside, maybe it’s a lot easier to see the appeal.

Still, let me make this claim: even with all their flaws, sprite comics were doing some incredibly interesting things, and Homestuck is heir to their legacy.

TAKE ME DOWN TO RECOLOR CITY

One of the problems people always had with sprite comics was the sprites themselves. They’re the most repetitive thing in the world. You just keep copying and pasting the same images over and over again, maybe with a few tweaks. That’s not really being an artist, is it? It’s so lazy. Re-drawing things from different angles keeps things dynamic, develops your skill, and makes your work better in general. Right?

I’m mostly in agreement. Certainly I think it’s fair to rag on the Control-Alt-Delete guy, along with other early bad webcomics, for copy-pasting their characters while dropping in new expressions and mass-producing tepid strips. And to be fair, digging through bad sprite comics often felt like an exercise in seeing the same slightly-edited recolors of Mega Man characters over and over again. You got really tired of that same body with its blobby feet and hands.

(It should be noted, though, that there were folks in the sprite comic scene who could pixel art the quills off a porcupine. I salute you, brave pixel art masters of 2006. I hope you all got into your chosen art school.)

All this said, I think the repetitive and simplistic nature of sprite comics was often their biggest strength.

THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION

In his classic work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation about cartooning that has stayed with me to this day.

McCloud notes that simple, abstract drawings, like faces that are only few lines and dots on a page, resonate with us more strongly than more detailed drawings. This is because our minds fill in what’s missing on the page. We ascribe human depth to simple gestures and expressions based on our own emotions and experiences – and this makes us feel closer to these characters as readers. Secretly, simple cartoons can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling. If you want your readers to fall in love with your characters, draw them simply, and let them fill them in.

Video game sprites work very well in this regard. They have that same simplicity that cartoons do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a huge part of the success of SNES-era RPGs was simple, almost childlike character sprites drawing people in. I think sprites did the same for sprite comics.

Here’s the weird thing: Bob and George worked. Despite four different characters being variations on the same friggin’ Mega Man sprite in different colors, they immediately began to seem like different people with distinct personalities. For me, George’s befuddled, helpless dismay immediately comes to mind whenever I picture his face, while with Mega Man himself it’s usually a wide-eyed, childlike glee. I would never confuse them. This, despite the fact that the only actual difference between their faces is that George is blonde. It’s pretty clear what happened. The personalities the author established for them through dialogue and storytelling shone through, and my brain did the rest.

Sprites, in short, were a canvas upon which the mind could project any story the author wanted to tell. Even the most minute differences in pixel art came to stand, in the best sprite comics, for wide divergences in personality and ideals, once the reader spent enough time with them to adapt to their style of representation.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Character designs that focus on variations on a theme, with subtle differences that nonetheless render them instantly recognizable?

Oh, right.

Look at what greets us on the very first page of Homestuck. An absurdly simple cartoon boy, abstracted to a ridiculous degree—he doesn’t even have arms!—followed a whole bunch of characters that follow suit. Though many other representations of the characters emerge, these little figures never quite go away, do they? Why is that?

Simple: they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re modular—you can give John arms or not, depending on whether it’s useful. You can put him in a whole variety of poses and save them to a template. You can change out his facial expressions with copy and paste. You can give him a new haircut and call him Jake. It’s all very quick and easy.

Sprite comics proliferated because they were very easy to mass-produce. Andrew Hussie’s original conception of Homestuck was very similar: something he could put out very quickly and easily, where even the most elaborate ideas could rely on existing assets to be sped smoothly along. We all know the result: an incredible production machine, churning out unfathomable amounts of content from 2009-2012. I’d say it was a good call.

But it goes way deeper than that. The modular nature of sprites always suggested a kind of modularity to the sprite comic premise. George and Mega Man were different people, true, but also two variations on a theme. Was there something underlying them that they had in common? Perhaps their similarity says something like: We exist in a world which has a certain set of rules? One of my favorite conceits from Bob and George was that when characters visited the past, they were represented by NES-era Mega Man sprites, while in the present, they were SNES sprites, and in the future, the author used elaborate splicing to render them as 32-bit Mega Man 8 sprites or similar.

Suppose there was a skilled cartoonist thinking about his next big project, who wanted to tell a story centered around this kind of modularity, a narrative that was built out of iterative, swappable pieces by its very design. He might very well create a sprite comic named Homestuck.

Homestuck is a story about a game that creates a hyperflexible mythology for its players, where the villains, challenges, and setting change depending upon what players bring to the experience, yet which all share underlying goals and assumptions. What more perfect opportunity to create a modular story as well? Different groups of kids and trolls have motifs that get swapped around to produce new characters, whether that’s through ectobiology, the Scratch, or the eerie parallels between the kids and trolls’ sessions. And yet each character can be analyzed as an individual.

This is an incredible way to build a huge emotional investment from your readers. Not only does this kind of characterization invite analysis, the abstractions draw readers in to generate their own headcanons and interpretations. A deep commitment to pluralism is at the heart of Hussie’s character design. Then, too, it encourages readers to build their own new designs from these models. Kidswaps, bloodswaps, fantrolls—these have long been the heart of Homestuck’s fandom. And what are bloodswaps if not sprite recolors for a new generation? With the added bonus that now a change in color carries narrative weight, evoking new moods and identities for these characters in ways that early sprite comics could only dream of.

In Hussie’s hands, even the dreaded copy-and-paste takes on heroic depth of meaning. Even when Hussie moves away from sprites to his own loose art style, he continues to remix what we’ve previously see. Indeed, Hussie talks about how he would go out of his way to edit his own art into new images even when it would take more time than drawing something new. Why? Because he wanted to evoke that very feeling of having seen this before—the visual callback to go along with the many conceptual and verbal callbacks that echo throughout Homestuck. This is at the heart of what Doc Scratch (speaking for Hussie) called “circumstantial simultaneity:” we are invited to compare two moments or two characters, to see what they have in common, or how they contrast. Everything in Paradox Space is deeply linked with everything else. And Hussie establishes this in our minds using nothing less than the tool sprite comics were so deeply reviled for: the “lazy” repetition of an image.

(It’s fitting that some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous images in Homestuck—dream bubble scenery and the like—are the result of Hussie taking things he’s made before and combining them into fantastic dreamscapes.)

But it all started with the hyperflexible, adaptable character images Hussie created at the very beginning of Homestuck.

And if you need more proof that Homestuck is a sprite comic, I think we need look no further than what Hussie, and the rest of the Homestuck community call these images.

We call them sprites.

THE FIRST GENRE-BENDERS

Was Andrew Hussie influenced by sprite comics in the development of Homestuck? It’s hard to say, but as a webcomic artist in the first decade of the 2000s, he was surely aware of them. It’s likely that he quickly realized that his quick, adaptable images served the same purposes as a sprite in a video game or a sprite comic, and chose to call them that.

One purpose I haven’t mentioned up until now: sprites lend themselves very well to animations. In fact, in their original context of video games, that’s exactly what they’re for: frames of art that can be used to show a character running, jumping, posing, moving across a screen. It’s not surprising, then, that sprite comic makers quickly saw the utility in that.

Homestuck was, in fact, not the first webcomic to make Flash animations part of its story. There were experiments with various gifs and such in other comics, but I think sprite comics were among the most successful at becoming the multi-media creations that would come to be known as hypercomics..

Take a look at this animation from Bob and George. It represents a climactic final confrontation against a long-standing villain, using special effects to make everything dramatic, but ultimately, like many a Homestuck animation, leads to kind of a pyscheout. The drama and the humor of the moment are clear, though. This relies in large part on the music—which is taken directly from the game Chrono Trigger. This makes total sense. Interestingly, it also contains voice acting, which is something Homestuck never tried—probably because it would run contrary to its ideals of pluralism. What I find fascinating is that in sprite comics, animations like these served a very similar purpose to Homestuck’s big flashes: elevating a big moment into something larger-than-life. Another good example is this sequence from Crash and Bass. Seriously, it seems like every sprite comic maker wanted to try their hand at Flash animation.

(By the way, it’s a lot harder than it looks!! I envy Hussie his vectorized sprites. Pixel art is a PAIN to work with in the already buggy program that is Flash.)

The result: because of the sprites themselves, sprite comics were among the first works to play around with the border between comics and other media in the way that would come to be thought of as quintessentially Homestuck.

What it also meant was that another genre emerged in parallel with sprite comics: the sprite animation. Frequently these would retell the story of a particular game, offer a spectacular animated battle sequence, parody the source material, or all three. Great examples include this animation for Mega Man Zero, and this frankly preposterous crossover battle sequence. Chris Niosi’s TOME also found its earliest roots as an animation series of this kind. You also found plenty of sprite-based flash games, in which players could manipulate game characters in a way that was totally outside the context of the original works.

The website the vast majority of these games and animations were hosted on?

Newgrounds, best known to Homestuck fans as the website Hussie crashed in 2011 while trying to upload Cascade.

What’s less talked about is that Hussie was friends, or at least on conversational terms with, the owner of the site, hence the idea to host his huge animation there in the first place, and other flashes, like the first Alterniabound, were initially hosted there as well.

It’s hard to believe that Hussie wasn’t at least a little familiar with the Newgrounds scene. I suspect that he largely conceived of Homestuck as part of the world of “Flash animation—” which in 2009 meant the wide variety of things that were hosted on Newgrounds, including sprite animations.

The freedom and fluidity sprite comics had to change into games and animations and back into comics again was one of their most fascinating traits. Homestuck’s commitment to media-bending needs, at this point, no introduction. But what’s less known is that sprite comics were exploring that territory first—that Homestuck, in short, is the kind of thing they wanted to grow up to be.

PUT ME IN THE GAME

I would be a fool not to mention another big thing Homestuck and sprite comics have in common: a character who is literally the author in cartoon form, running around doing goofy things and messing with the story. This was an incredibly common cliché in sprite comics, no doubt because of Bob and George, who did it early on and never looked back. You might have noticed that the animation I linked above concerns a showdown between Bob and George’s author, David Anez—depicted, delightfully, as another Mega Man recolor—and a mysterious alternate author named Helmut—who is like Mega Man plus Sepiroth I think? It’s all very strange. I could ramble for hours about the relationship between Hussie and the alt-author villains of Homestuck and what it all means, but I’m not sure I can nail anything down with certainty for these two. Maybe Bob and George was never quite that metaphysical.

But yes, bringing the author into the story in some form was already a cliché by the time Homestuck started up. Indeed, I think that’s why Hussie’s character refers to it as “a bad idea” to break the fourth wall—he’s recognizing that people will have seen this before, and are already tired of this sort of shit. And then he goes and does it anyway and makes it somehow brilliant, because he’s Andrew Hussie.

Homestuck breathes life into the cliché by taking it in a metaphysical/metafictional direction. I don’t think that was really the motivation for most sprite comic authors, though. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper.

I think the cliché kept happening because sprite comic authors were writing about a subject that very closely concerned themselves: video games. I’m only kind of joking. The thing about video games is that even though they’re made for everyone, playing through one yourself feels like an intensely personal experience. You develop an emotional relationship to a world, to its characters, that feels distinctly your own. Now, suddenly, thanks to the magic of sprites, you have an opportunity to tell stories about that world for others to read. Of course you’re going to want to put yourself in the story in some form.

When it wasn’t author characters in sprite comics, it was OCs. You know Dr. Wily? Well here’s my own original villain, Dr. Vindictus. You know Mega Man? Here’s my new character, Super Cool Man. He hangs out with Mega Man and they beat the bad guys together. Stuff like that. Most sprite comics retold the story of a game, or multiple games in a big crossover format, with original elements added in. There was quite a lot of “Link and Sonic and Mega Man are all friends with my OC and they hang out at his house.”

What’s interesting, though, is that because these sprite comics were very aware that they were about video games, this was where they sometimes got very meta. It started with humorous observation—hey, isn’t it funny that Link goes around breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots? But sometimes, it grew into more serious commentary. Is Mega Man trapped in a never-ending cycle, doomed to fight the same fight against the same mad scientist until the end of time? Is it worth it, being a video game hero?

Enter Homestuck. What I’ve been dancing around this whole time is:

Homestuck is a sprite comic…because Homestuck is a video game.

Or more specifically, Homestuck’s a comic about a video game called SBURB, where the lines between the game and the comic about the game blur as characters wrestle with the narratives around them, both those encoded into the game and those encoded into our expectations.

Homestuck presents the fantasy of many a sprite comic maker: I get to go on heroic quests, I get to change the world and become a god. I get to be part of the video game. And then it asks the same question certain sprite comics were beginning to ask:

Is it worth it, to be that hero?

I want to tell you about my second favorite sprite comic, a comic called Kid Radd.

Kid Radd distinguished itself from other sprite comics of the time by being a completely original production. Its sprites looked like they could be from a variety of NES and SNES-era video games, but they were all done from scratch, and the games they purported to represent were all fictional. Kid Radd used animations with original music, and sometimes interactive, clickable games, to tell its story. It also used all sorts of neat programming tricks to make it load faster on the internet of the early 2000s, which was great—unfortunately, these same techniques made it break as web technology evolved, something Homestuck fans in 2019 can definitely relate to. The good news is, fans have maintained a dedicated and reformatted archive where the comics can still be seen and downloaded.

Kid Radd’s premise is that video game characters themselves are conscious and alive—more specifically, their sprites. Sprites developed consciousness as human beings projected personality and identity onto them, remaining aware of their status as video game constructs while also seeking to be something more. The story follows the titular Kid Radd, at first in the context of his own game, commenting on the choices the player controlling him. He must endure every death, every strange decision along the way to save his girlfriend Sheena. Then the story expands into a larger context as Radd, Sheena, and many other video game characters are released onto the internet as data. They try to find their own identities and build a society for themselves, but struggle with the tendency toward violence that games have programmed into them. The story culminates in an honestly moving moment where Radd confronts the all-powerful creators of their reality—human beings.

It’s a very good comic.

The first sprite comic authors wanted to fuse real life with video games. Later sprite comic authors decided to ask: what would that really mean? Would it be painful? Would you suffer? Would you find a way to make your life meaningful all the same? Despite the limitations of sprite comics, these ideas had incredible potential, and in works like Kid Radd, they flourished.

Homestuck is heir to that legacy.

It takes the questions Kid Radd was asking, and asks them in new ways. It tries to understand, on an even deeper level, how the rules of video games shape our own minds and give us ways to understand ourselves.

At its heart, Homestuck is a sprite comic, and it might just be the greatest of them all.

EPILOGUE

I’ve seen a lot of good discussion recently on how Homestuck preserves a certain era of the internet like a time capsule: its culture, its technology, its assumptions, its memes.

I think sprite comics, too, are part of the culture that created Homestuck. Do I think Hussie spent the early 2000s recoloring Mega Man sprites? No, probably not. But what I do know is that sprite comics were part of his world. The first webcomic cartoonists came of age alongside an odd companion, the weird, overly sincere, dorky little sibling that was sprite comics. Like them or hate them, you couldn’t escape them. They were there.

And maybe a certain cartoonist saw a kind of potential in them, in the same way he summoned Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff from the depths of bad gamer culture.

Or maybe he just knew, as some sprite comic authors did, that the time was right for their kind of story.

On a personal level—Homestuck came along right when I needed it.

Around 2009, the bubble that was sprite comics finally burst. People were getting tired of them, or growing out of them, and blown-up sprites no longer looked so good on modern monitors.

I was more than a little heartbroken. I’d enjoyed Bob and George, read my fill of Mega Man generica, and fallen utterly in love with Kid Radd. I’d been working on my own sprite comic for a long time out of a sense that there was huge potential in them that we were only scratching the surface of. I’d dreamed of maybe someday doing something as amazing as the best of them did. But I was watching that world disappear. I had to admit to myself that my work wasn’t going to continue to find an audience. That I could live with. But it was painful to think that the potential I sensed, the feats of storytelling I wanted to see in the world, would never be realized.

And then, in the fall of 2010, a friend linked me to a comic that broke all the rules, that mixed animation, games, music, images and chatlogs. A comic that crafted its own sprites, just as Kid Radd did, and remixed its images into an ever-expanding web of associations and meanings. A comic that took on the idea of living inside a video game with relish and turned it into a gorgeous meditation on escaping the ideas and systems that control us.

That this comic would exist, let alone that it would succeed. That it would become one of the most popular creations of all time, that it would surpass other webcomics and break out into anime conventions and the real world, that it would become such a cultural juggernaut, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine an internet without Homestuck—

I can’t even put into words how happy that makes me. It’s the reason I’m still writing essays about Homestuck nearly eight years after I found it.

And it’s why Homestuck will always be my favorite sprite comic.

-Ari

[Notes: The image of the kids came from the ever-useful MSPA Wiki—please support and aid in their efforts to provide a good source of info about Homestuck! They need more support these days than ever.

For more on Homestuck’s place as a continuation of the zeitgeist of early 2000s experimental webcomics, this article by Sam Keeper at Storming the Ivory Tower is excellent and insightful.

Thanks for reading, y’all.]

[slurpingsoba]

For the requests, Shigadabi when they first realized they liked eachother?

Um this may be less lighthearted than what you wanted, but I was experimenting with my writing style. 

Word Count: 1.7k

--

So this was the point in which the sun settled down into the horizon for the night, its light and warmth disappearing from behind a curtain of darkness that replaced the cerulean sky. The curtain, black and dotted with little stars and a crescent moon, made the world seem a lot less animated. Looking down at the people on the streets below him, Dabi watched as the people slowed and retreated into their homes, the energy within them fading with the sun’s departure. 

‘Lucky them,’ Dabi thought, ‘at least they have homes to return to.’

Dabi’s apartment was a temporary living space; he didn’t like the apartment’s location nor its general atmosphere. Big city lights flooded through his window whenever he tried to sleep, and the ceiling creaked when the tenant above him decided to get drunk and rowdy and bustle around his room. Dabi’s next-door neighbor wasn’t any better with her late-night parties that continued until the sun peeked out from behind its curtain in the morning. But Dabi had no money - he could barely afford this month’s rent anyway - so he couldn’t move into a more desirable place.

He had no deep connection to his apartment, and he hated it as much as he hated dissolute heroes like his father, but he stayed because he needed to. It was the same logic Dabi applied to his involvement in the League. He truly didn’t enjoy interacting with the other members, especially Toga, with her twisted love for the Hero Killer, but he needed the League’s influence to pursue his own goal of carrying on Stain’s will. 

However, Dabi found himself fascinated by the one League member that he initially hated: Shigaraki Tomura.

Dabi’s interest in Shigaraki was akin to a child’s curiosity, innocently discovering things about the world through observation and investigation. For some reason, Dabi’s subconscious saw something in Shigaraki that was beyond his immaturity and madness; something that was perceptive, muted, and solemn, a forgotten boy buried inside a man of great misfortune. It reminded Dabi of himself, and perhaps that’s why he was drawn to him. 

The ghost of Touya Todoroki was trapped within Dabi’s frame.

Dabi knew pain and loss, and he was sure that Shigaraki knew it too. He could see it in his expression when he glanced down at his father’s hand, regarding it as both a prized possession and a cursed object, repulsion threatening to make him sick like the first time he saw the remnants of his family. He could see it in eyes when he fought, brimming with anger and hunger for violence; to hurt others before they hurt him. Dabi could hear it in his voice, a morose, aching drawl that seemed hesitant to share what was unknown, wanting to bond with people but never knowing how to convey his feelings with words. Pain and loss weren’t foreign to Shigaraki; they made up the very essence of his being.

‘Just what kind of person are you, Shigaraki?’ Dabi mused, the cool twilight glow seeping through his window.

He suddenly felt cold, and lonely. Even though fire rushed through his veins due to the nature of his quirk, Dabi couldn’t rid himself of the numbness that resided deep in his core. He didn’t like it. It reminded him of his childhood.

For once, he wished the alcoholic living above him would make a racket like he usually did to distract him.

To keep his mind from recalling the sins that Endeavor committed against him, Dabi thought of Shigaraki and his dull colored hair and scarred lips. His face was a coarse one, marked with blemishes that explained his past better than he ever could. Dabi couldn’t imagine what would’ve created the wrinkles that stretched from the skin around his eyes to his forehead, or the small tear underneath his eye. Dabi sighed and thought back to his scarred lips bitten raw, and wondered what Shigaraki’s lips would feel like on his. 

Dabi’s eyes widened with the realization that he was attracted to Shigaraki, the idea revealing itself unconsciously in his absentminded daydreaming. When did hate turn into lust? Why did he not feel disgusted by the prospect of being in a romantic relationship with Shigaraki? Why could Dabi imagine himself running his fingers through Shigaraki’s matted hair, holding his pale face in his warm hand, inching closer to him excruciatingly slow...

For some reason, Dabi believed that a kiss from Shigaraki wouldn’t feel rough, but soft. 

Prompted by his fantasy, Dabi picked up his phone and dialed Shigaraki’s number. Only Shigaraki could understand what Dabi was going through right now. Pain and loss, hate and love.

He would understand.

---

Putting down his phone, Shigaraki pursed his lips, stood up, and grabbed the black jacket that laid haphazardly on a nearby swivel chair. Dabi had asked him to stop by his apartment, but he never stated why he wanted him there.

But Shgaraki knew why.

He noticed the way that Dabi watched him whenever they occupied the same room. The distance between them felt infinite, yet intimate, like space and time did not apply and all tangible concepts became abstract. Everyone else in the room would vanish, and the two of them would exist in their own little world.

Dabi always looked at him with those intense blue eyes of his that saw what resided beneath Shigaraki’s exterior, into the deeper, secret side of him. He would move closer to Shigaraki, and dropping the air of aloofness he carried with him, touch his arm gently, making goosebumps rise on Shigaraki’s skin. His shy display of physical affection would linger for what felt like lifetimes, dissipating only when Dabi removed his hand to place it somewhere else on Shigaraki’s body. But he would stop himself, realizing that his need for contact was something more than platonic.

Dabi liked him, but he was afraid to show it.

And this notion was endearing to Shigaraki, mainly because it was ironic that a man as insightful as Dabi was out of touch with his own emotions; a stranger to his heart’s desires. 

As Shigaraki stepped out of his own room and into the empty streets, he wished that Dabi wasn’t so disciplined. If he didn’t fear showing affection, he would know that Shigaraki craved his touch as much as Dabi craved his, and he even dreamed about it.

To Shigaraki, Dabi was an enigma, another game or puzzle for him to beat. Shigaraki wanted to investigate every aspect of him, learn about his oddities, and then win his devotion. 

He wanted to care for Dabi in ways that he had never been cared for himself. He wanted to cherish him and protect him from harm - especially from cruel men like Endeavor.

‘Was he the one who left you disfigured?’

Shigaraki pictured Dabi’s scars, the color of raisins, arranged in random patches and encircled by crude staples. He cringed remembering the scent that emitted from Dabi after he used his fire, smoke rising from the gaps between his staples, the smell of burnt skin filling his nostrils. Shigaraki knew - too well - that quirks could cause unbearable amounts of pain, both physically and emotionally, and memories from Shigaraki’s past involuntarily entered his mind.

Nausea overcame Shigaraki, making him feel faint and dizzy. He would’ve fallen over if he didn’t grab onto the lamppost that was beside him for support, gripping it with eight deft fingers.

‘Did your father hurt you like mine did?’

He looked up toward Dabi’s apartment complex, which was nearby, and then toward the stars. Some people wished upon them to solve their problems or even considered them symbols of fate. Shigaraki never had confidence in superstitious nonsense like that, but as he stared at the little bright dots in the sky, and the waxing crescent moon, he wanted to believe that some force bigger than himself was driving him toward Dabi. 

‘I understand why you called.’ Shigaraki reflected, ‘you need me, and I need you.’

Shigaraki gained the strength to stand and he continued on his way to Dabi’s place. 

Soon reaching the elevator of Dabi’s complex, Shigaraki stepped in and pressed the appropriate floor number. 

He pondered the outcomes of a relationship with Dabi. Could they possibly be able to heal each other, and make each other happy? Or would they just remind each other of their own personal trauma? 

As he leaned against the back wall of the elevator, Shigaraki imagined the League, his League, in uproar after finding out about their relationship. Spinner and Mr. Compress would congratulate them graciously, but Twice would take it one step further and hug them both. Twice’s type of happiness was contagious and inescapable, and Shigaraki found himself smiling, hoping that his fictional scenario would become reality one day.

Exiting the elevator, Shigaraki felt lightheaded. Although he prepared at length to deliver his confession, the thought of rejection plagued him. Shigaraki was too afraid to ruin his connection with Dabi, but their current friendship wasn’t enough for him. He needed his attention, his adoration...

His love.

Shigaraki approached his door and knocked, trying not to dwell on his negative emotions. When Dabi appeared before him, Shigaraki couldn’t breathe.

The unspoken truth between them was unveiled.

Dabi gazed at him with intense blue eyes saturated with lust, and Shigaraki felt himself relax. He remembered that Dabi could see straight through him. 

There was nothing to hide.

Shigaraki let his heart do the talking.

“I like you.” He said simply, not waiting for Dabi to speak first. 

Dabi grinned, and the apprehension that clouded his face waned. He didn’t feel so numb anymore. In fact, it was the first time in a while that he felt completely unburdened.

“Somehow…” Dabi began, “you’ve managed to say the phrase that I couldn’t say over the phone so easily.” He opened his door a bit wider, welcoming Shigaraki into his apartment. “But now I have the courage to.”

“I like you, Shigaraki. I like you too.”

[loststargrazer-blog]

Can You Smell Infinity?

Astrophysicists have been trying to find out how big the universe is and their inconclusive measurements suggest it could even be infinite. What does philosophy make of that? In order to do certain mathematics, like Sir Isaac Newton's calculus, you can use certain concepts like infinity (the amount without limit) and the infinitesimal which is what you get when you divide something down infinitely. These concepts, or I shall call it a 'conception' (as a technical term) of infinite, has not been mainstream for that long, only really from Newton onwards. Aristotle said whatever could be described using non-finite concepts could also be described using finite concepts; so Aristotle was what is called a 'finitist', and a very influential one until Newton. In blog 11, "What Makes Us for Real?", we discussed whether certain things exist, and we decided that mathematics was a part of the hyper real: What then of the infinite?

The infinite cannot literally exist in the hyper real as you would need infinite storage to store the items, and we live in a finite and digital mind space here on earth. So there must be a massive sphere confusion (see blog 1) somewhere in mathematics as many mathematicians believe in the everyday infinite. We shall discuss why non-finitists believe in the absoluteness of the infinite, and then we will discuss what the infinite is as a conception of the number line and follow on to a more sensible conclusion compatible with the hyper real experience.

It is true that the infinite conception works in mathematics to solve equations. The simplest form of this I can think of is the sum of a geometric progression. This takes a series, and if the series is declining geometrically, will come to a finite value after infinite terms; for example:

   1/1 + 1/2 + 1/4 +1/8 + 1/16 ... 1/∞ = 2

Here the first term is the coefficient a=1, and progression is multiplied by the common ratio r=1/2, and the series is summed to infinite terms. Where r<1, this can be proved using algebra to give the formula:

    a/(1 - r)

    or 1/(1/2) = 2 in our case.

So to conclude this paragraph, there is something that works about infinity that needs to be explained; perhaps how does it work finitely?

In previous blogs (particularly blog 8 on reductionist science), I have mentioned that even in STEM subjects there can be heavy sphere confusion. Here the idea of infinite, like eternal, or all powerful has been absorbed into and from monotheism, and it is probably a nonsense. Even medieval Christian philosophers had a conception of god's eternal property to be outside of time entirely and not infinite. So the familiarity of infinite or eternal cannot hide the possibility that it is an example of a religious theoretical entity, like those in the last blog 18. This infinite likely cannot exist, so not only is it superfluous, but it contradicts the way we can count space & time so can be rejected.

This notion of eternal outside of time is also probably nonsense, but does make two suggestions: The first trivial one is to reject eternal as everything happens in finite time, for time is just a function of change. The second more important one for us is that 'infinite' the conception is not infinite, being a conception. So the infinite is not infinite as many had confused religion with metaphysics, metaphysics with a mental conception, and a conception with a placeholder in an equation. So what then is a hyper real conception that acts as both a placeholder and a concept?

Before we begin on conceptions, we should look a little more broadly at the issues conceptions need to cover. Can impossible things work in mathematics? Yes they do seem to be able to. We have the infinite series, the infinitesimal calculus, and there are others. A simple example of something impossible is the imaginary number i, which is defined as the square root of minus 1, or (√-1). No number multiplied by itself equals -1; yet using i you can solve real world problems of engineering and even some simple algebra:

   Suppose you have two lots of partition walls for two square boxes that will reduce the clutter in your bedroom, one by -4m2 of clutter and the other by -9m2 of clutter; and you wanted to make the boxes equal sized rectangles using the existing pieces; how much clutter would they store?

    √(-4m2) x  √(-9m2) = 2im x 3im = 6i2m2 = -6m2  as  i2 = -1

    so 2 boxes x -6m2 = -12m2 of clutter. This is not better than -4m2 -9m2 = -13m2 of clutter before, but at least you know that the cost of making them equal and rectangular is +1m2 of extra clutter in your bedroom.

So conceptions such as i, need not be infinite, and can sometimes be used in mathematics, also they are not really existing.

If a conception is not the real thing, then we can treat it as a name for a thing; so implicitly a name is a new type of set as first described in blog 6 on causation. This conception though is more than a normal name; by normal I mean a key for filtering and grouping objects so we can categorise and understand them. A conception is more like a meta name, a description of multiple circumstances or sets: In the case of natural numbers, the name's schema describes increasing +1 from 0 repeatedly without a limit. In the case of i, as a replacement for (√-1), and reversibly as replacing i2 with -1. In the case of a number line, it is the natural numbers increasing and subtracting from zero, each number of which can be divided by any other number to a point on the line. Finally, we can conceptually add an infinite term, and divide by it to create an infinitesimal and so create some place holding names for something that doesn't exist, but can be used to cancel out other series. So what else can be a conception?

I suggest anything that automatically creates a system of names - by which I mean the new sets - is a conception. So you could invent a conception to name every brick in your house by an index linked to a database of baby names; a fairly useless conception, but one you could spontaneously create for Bob, Billie, & Barbara Brick. So conceptions are clearly arbitrary. Conceptions have no ultimate or transcendent existence. We have created them as hyper real artifacts by abstraction from our language.

So conceptions are names attached to more complex descriptions, usually of name schemes, that help us manipulate schematic concepts. I disagree that the manipulations of conceptions are obvious as Wittgenstein says in 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus', but I do agree that they have implicit or explicit rules. These rules create a model, and flexing the model within the hyper real can tell you new things about the real and your concepts. For me here it is less interesting whether Wittgenstein was a finitist, but more of more interest in whether he, and therefore we, should be sceptical of the infinite, as I think we should. Having come to this conclusion, what can philosophy say to mathematicians about their working with infinity and some mathematicians' odd views that mathematical objects have transcendent existence?

I don't think philosophers have a lot to say to mathematicians on this topic because mathematicians, like Hilbert with his paradox of the Grand Hotel and the finitists, have already done extensive work themselves. So philosophers can only point out that some mathematicians are taking religious prejudices to work and should rethink their metaphysical assumptions and listen to the finitists. However the use of a finite model called infinity instead of an actual infinity may not always be that important if the placeholder allows the proof to be shown and an answer to be given. The conception of infinity has as much to say about metaphysics and language analysis as maths; so these I will discuss next.

In metaphysics there are two sides to the same argument, the first is the necessary non-existence of infinite properties as I mentioned previously. The other is that if we consider oneness, an axiom I used in blog 12 on axioms, we can suggest that there could be no unity to something if it was infinitely diffuse. There wouldn't be a facility to see the universe as a multidimensional monad, or pulsing with cause and effect as mentioned in blog 6 on causation. As Hilbert pointed out, there would be potentially infinite distances between points on an infinite line. This conclusion suggests distance would stop everything from interacting absolutely. So you couldn't smell infinity because it would be too far away.

In terms of language analysis, a conception is a function of the hyper real (as described in blog 11). We can see that there is more than simple names and propositions (as Wittgenstein described), for a conception is:

1) Named and referenced,

2) Has a schematic,

3) The schematic creates other names or allows substitution with other names,

4) Does not exist as an object (so may be impossible),

5) Is expressed in the hyper real,

6) Is an extension of language,

7) Can be compatible with an implicit logic or model.

Given the language and metaphysical analysis of infinity, we can see some parallels with our finding in the last blog, blog 18. Something has been theorised to exist which probably doesn't, and it became part of our grand theory or religious views. But, how excitingly, we can see that the normal expression of a grand theory is through a conception. So now we have a micro mechanism in language to anchor what we analysed was happening at a macro level in our theorising. We previously talked of making generalisations, now we can see that the language for generalisations are conceptions. From the last blog we know that generalisations/conceptions don't exist as objects, but are just patterns in the hyper real language, moving beyond a sign about signs, or language about names. So a generalisation is just one form of a conception. Specifically, a generalisation allows the substitution of a value loaded general term to take the place of multiple names.

How do we ground conceptions further? We can go further and say that the 'conception' is a conception itself. It is (1) named; (2) it has a schematic; (3) it is substitutable to its subsets including generalisations; (4) it is not an object but exists in language; (5) it is hyper real as we are thinking and writing about it; (6) it does extend language to a new area from Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus...'; and finally (7) it is compatible with the epistemological model of generalisation, induction, and identity mentioned in blog 5 on making generalisations as well as the last blog 18.

This is all very exciting philosophy tying together loose ends, but we can also comment a little more explicitly on rationalism, the belief you can learn new things by reasoning. Flexing a conception, a hyper real model, based on the rules of the schematic, will give logical and mathematical answers to hypotheses. This does not give a clear answer as to why rationalism works or when it will work, but it does explain why we get an answer. If we add in the principle of non-contradiction (see blog 6) and apply the schematic only to applicable real world objects, we can model those objects and learn new things about them rationally. I wouldn't (unlike Wittgenstein) call this information obvious or implicit as it might be complex, emergent, or even chaotic, and certainly not always an obvious tautology.

In the final conclusion, the smell of infinity opens up a lot of further analysis on knowledge, language, and the hyper real. So it is very useful even though we can show infinity doesn't exist in any objective terms. We can also account for infinity without relying on any dodgy metaphysics (like the flawed circularity of Plato's eternal forms), even if infinity has applications that are still partly mysterious within mathematics. I would encourage STEM students amongst others to focus more on the schematic descriptions used in their conceptions as experimenting might yield new mathematical or theoretical architecture, both through substitution and the conscious creating of schematics for new groups of names. As I will discuss in my next blog, this is not really the job of professional philosophers any longer.

[thedefinitionofbts]

A Thousand Centuries

Pairings: Kim Seokjin x Reader

Genre: Fluff, Soulmate Au

Words: 5k

Description: A Seokjin soulmate au requested by  @marsmellowl85

A/N: My first Jin fic!!!! Mars, thank you for always supporting my writing so enthusiastically. I hope you like this one!

 Have you ever wondered if you were unknowingly looking for someone?

You were told as a kid that your perfect partner is out there somewhere. That one day they’ll come and take you away like a Disney prince or the male lead of every romantic movie, and that they would always love you for who you are, unconditionally. But as you grew older, you realized that the world is not that perfect dream-like fantasy and fairytales are just therapeutic stories, no more, no less. And that the existence of a soulmate, that thing that you’ve heard about since you were young and the idea that people continue to take delight in fantasizing over, is nothing but a simplistic adolescent dream.

You didn’t think it would be something you’d ever believe in, and certainly not after you grew out of daydreaming about fictional stories and imaginary scenarios. After all, it was just an idealistic concept, something that isn’t meant to be seriously considered because it went against all logic.

But then you met him.

A man as beautiful as the flowers that bloom in the middle of spring, their colors scattered throughout endless fields and vibrant meadows, telling centuries worth of emotions and memories that are as visceral as the ones located in that inexplicable place within yourself.  

   “Do you want to be partners?”

You lift your head to the source of the voice, eyes slowly tracing along the silhouette of the person standing next to you. He awaits patiently for your response, eyelids blinking gently as your lips part slowly at the sight of him.

“S-sure” You stutter, realizing you had been staring at him in silence for longer than you should have.

His face breaks into a gentle smile, one that makes your heart suddenly tug in a way that it has never done before. “Great! My name is Kim Seokjin.”

“Y/N” You reply lightly, still looking at him in mild disbelief.

He pulls up a chair and sits down next to you, the elegant scent of his cologne filling the air between you, instantly throwing you back to a dream you had experienced not too long ago, one in which you were wandering in a flower garden, holding the hand of a man whose face you could not see.  

“I was thinking we could design a park” His voice cuts through your momentary lapse.

Your thought bubble bursts, and you’re back to realizing you’ve yet again been staring at him for longer than you should.

“A-a park?” You utter nervously, mentally scolding yourself for being so out of focus one the first day of Architecture class. This was very unlike you’re usual on-top-of-things self, and the professor had even mentioned just moments ago that this project would count for 50% of your final grade. In your defense, you also hadn’t planned on having the most popular guy in your year to ask you to be project partners. 

“Yeah, like Central Park in New York City” He explains. The voices of the other students who were paired up in the classroom are drowned out completely as you observed the way he pulls a notebook and pen out of his backpack to make design plans and sketches. “I know it’s mostly landscape architecture, but I think we can get really creative with designing castles, bridges, fountains and other structural elements.”

“That sounds like a great idea!” You manage to say without stuttering and making a fool out of yourself for once. “Central Park was what actually inspired me to major in architecture.” You confess, using it as more of a conversation filler than anything.

“Really?” Seokjin’s eyes light up and his mouth opens in astonishment. “Me too! My parents took me there for vacation when I was young, and it was amazing!”

His full body reaction surprises you, making you forget how to respond because you were wondering how in world his demeanor had changed from being calm and collected to something so…animated. You actually have to suppress an oncoming laugh, opting to just let out a small giggle instead.

“So we should probably get started as soon as possible,” You suggest, feeling much more comfortable now that he’s made you laugh so effortlessly.

He takes a second to ponder over your proposition. “Are you free this weekend?”

“Yeah”

“Great!”

 …

 Kim Seokjin was everything you had expected him to be. His soft and delicate features were physical traits that would be the object of envy for anyone who had the fortune of laying eyes on such a breathtakingly beautiful man, but his playful and uplifting personality revealed a duality that could only be described as fitting for someone so unique. 

He was a man who carried a type of aura that gave off the undeniable impression that you’ve known him for a long, long time, like the scent of home or the warmth of companionship. And it made you feel like you finally understood what it meant to meet a person that you had an air of familiarity with, despite the fact that your encounter with him had happened only recently.    

“We should start from the edges and work our way towards the center.” Seokjin says as the two of you sit the in studio with your sketches splayed out on the long table. The glass walls of the building were crystal clear, allowing the sunlight from outside to penetrate into the room as masterpieces were born out of boundless imagination.

“What do you think the theme of this section should be?” You inquire, peering over at the piece he was working on.

“Young earth at the beginning of time” He whispers, gazing at his roughly drawn garden of shrubbery and small plants.

“Born in the desolate ocean,” You read the little note scribbled in the corner of his drawing, tilting your head as you examine the artistic meaning behind the theme.

“Oh yeah, that’s what I’ve sort of named this section of the park.”

You have a sudden flashback to a dimly lit cave, the atmosphere cold and damp. The rain outside is falling in sheets, with droplets twirling in the wild wind and dripping onto the frozen rocks. A human-like creature sits next to you hesitating to lean closer. You do not remember who it is, but you recall the feeling of him using his arms to embrace you, growing a human heart and learning how to love for the first time.

“I like it” You finally comment as your mind is brought back to the present.

“Oh good, I was kind of worried the idea would be too wacky for your taste.” He chuckles. “

“You would be worried about that?”

“Well, not that I would’ve doubted myself, because you know, my ideas are always brilliant.” He grins, exuding a kind of humorous confidence that you were just starting to get to know, but at the same time, you had sort of expected the exact response.

“I’m just surprised you chose me to be your partner of all people” You murmur, dropping your gaze shyly as you felt his eyes land on you, scrutinizing the way you were nervously biting your bottom lip.

“Well, you were the closest person in the room” He voices, not noticing the way his words made your heart drop like a stone being thrown in the water because he was too distracted by the his own design thoughts to pay attention to the way you shifted uncomfortably in your seat.

“Oh…”

It was then that you felt the cathartic joy of finding that distant object of your yearning for the first time, only to be hit by the realization that no matter how close it was, it will always be just out of reach.

 …

  Do you know that you carry a perpetual feeling of loneliness despite being unaware of it?

Perhaps it stems from the ingrained yearning for something preordained that cannot be grasped, a set of emotions and memories so visceral that the even the time that carries them cannot help but to preserve such a gift through numerous centuries.

“Chaos”

You whip your head around to face Seokjin who had his eyebrows furrowed as he stares at his design for the next section of the park.

“A time in human history when things were sort of wild, and there were wars between empires that rose and fell.” He explains. “Making people even more dependent upon one another.”

You notice a distant sorrow manifest in your chest, or maybe it was always there and you were unaware of it until now, but Seokjin’s words ignite a constricting sensation to grip at your chest, one that makes the air in the room feel thin and insufficient. You vaguely see the figure of a man dying in your arms. The blood gradually seeping through his tattered soldier uniform makes you want to scream, but the faint smile on his face just before his eyes close tells you that was not the last time you would see him. And that thought somehow made everything ok.

You blink away the strange tears that are trying to form in your eyes. “I see that you’re trying to make this park sort of a walk through history.” You analyze with as steady of a voice as you can, attempting to piece together his relatively abstract ideas and making sense of it all.  

“This is the section where we can put a castle on a hill and stone bridges arching over streams.” He turns to you enthusiastically.  

You smile in return.

“Is something wrong?” He asks, noticing the tear quietly slipping down your face.

You quickly shake your head and reach up to wipe it away. “No, no, I was just thinking about a sad war movie I saw a couple of years ago.” You lie, sniffling one last time and averting your eyes for a quick second.

There’s a pause as he continues to gaze at you curiously, expression hard to read other than the gentle blinking of his eyelids.

“You must be hungry,” He suddenly states.

“What?” You breathe out in disbelief. “What makes you think that?”

“It’s late afternoon and neither of us have eaten all day.”

You glance over at the clock hanging in the studio, and to your utter surprise, t was almost 5pm.

“Should we call it a day then?” You query, turning your attention back to him who was already packing up the supplies.

“Definitely.” He confirms as he zips up his bag. You turn to do the same, but he isn’t finished talking. “Hey, do you want to come over for dinner?” You hear him ask as he continues to check that he’s packed everything.

Your heart skips a beat. “Umm, sure. Are you ordering take-out?”

He shakes his head. “I’m the resident chief in my group of friends.”

“Oh really” You raise your eyebrows in disbelief. “Am I suppose to just take your word for that?”

“Hey, just ask any of my buddies.” He defends. “They’ve all relied on me to feed them for years.”

It’s not that you would’ve rejected his offer anyways. Hell, he could be the worst cook in the world and you would still gladly eat anything he placed on the plate in front of you because it meant being with him for that much longer, which these days (or more like ever since you met him) you strangely harbored the urge to do.

You think it’s a just natural attraction, no different from any of your other crushes in the past, but of course you’re trying not to overanalyze the sudden onset of these mysterious flashback you keep on getting or the inexplicable feeling that washes over you whenever the stillness allows your thoughts to do as they please.

Seokjin drives the two of you to his apartment that he shares with two of his younger friends who are both, quote, immature little brats, end quote. Apparently they bicker all the time, but it’s mostly just the youngest that won’t seem to “let him live”.

“’Bout time you found yourself a girl” Jungkook comments the moment you and Seokjin step through the door. “At this age I was starting to worry you were going to die alone.”

“Ya!” Seokjin shouts at the boy lying on the couch with his eyes glued to the TV screen and hands wrapped around a game controller. “Show some respect or I’m not feeding you tonight.” He turns to you. “Please don’t take him seriously.” 

You nod, feeling your face heat up just a tad bit because you honestly weren’t expecting such a blunt comment, even if it was in the form of a joke.

“Hi, you must be Y/N” Another person pops up from nowhere, he had light blonde hair and his eyes formed a pair of half moons as he smiled at you. “I’m Jimin.”

“Nice to meet you” You greet him.

“And the little brat over there is Jungkook” Seokjin adds, nodding towards the guy on the couch.

“Hey! I heard that” Jungkook snaps back, despite his attention still drawn towards the game flashing across the screen.

“Good” Seokjin shouts back.

“Don’t mind them two. This is completely normal.” Jimin reassures you, noticing how awkward you were feeling in such a situation.  

“Oh wow…” You murmur, taking a deep breath. So Seokjin wasn’t kidding about the bickering, go figure.    

Seokjin also wasn’t exaggerating when he said he was a good cook. His culinary skills turn out to be excellent, and his tastes are refined. He prepares a full course meal for the four of you, complete with side dishes that barely fit on their moderate sized dining table. All you can see in Jimin and Jungkook’s eager eyes as they stare at the food splayed out in front of them are how thankful they are to have Seokjin as an older brother figure, and it is then you are able to understand how good-natured their relationship is, despite the bickering.  

“Noona, so are you and Seokjin hyung…” Jimin sneakily glances over to the kitchen where Seokjin was still finishing up the last dish, making sure he can’t hear what you guys are discussing.

“No, no” You violently shake your head, feeling your cheeks blossom into roses. “We’re just project partners.” You explain.

“Really…?” Jungkook butts in, clearly unconvinced according to the tone of his voice. “Hyung asked a girl to be his partner? Without any other intentions?” He crosses his arms and snorts. “I find that hard to believe.”

“I was the closest person in the room” You quickly interject, not knowing why you were getting so defensive. Perhaps it was a failed attempt at preventing your cheek color to deepen even more than it already was.

Jimin’s eyes disappear into crescents. “Kookie’s right, he usually stays away from girls because he doesn’t want to deal with unreciprocated feelings. Cause, you know, it’s hard not to fall for someone as handsome as hyung.”

“Please” Jungkook rolls his eyes. “Let’s not boost his ego more than it already is.”

“What was that about my ego?” Seokjin’s voice makes all three of you jump in your seats as he walks up to the table with a pot of boiling stew.

“N-nothing” Jimin quickly says. “We were just talking about how admirable your confidence is.”

Seokjin’s eyes narrow as he looks from Jimin to Jungkook and back to Jimin. He doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it slide because everyone was starving and ready to dig into the food before it gets cold.

“I’ll drive you home” Seokjin says as the two younger males are tasked with washing the dishes in the kitchen.

“It’s ok, I can just take the bus”

“That’s inconvenient and it’s late.” Seokjin insists, already grabbing his car keys. 

The drive to your apartment is a silent one, sans Seokjin’s occasional comments on the project and the 3-D software that you’ll soon be using to make your rough sketches come to life.

You’re not really paying attention to all of the details because technology was never really your thing, and you’re mind is dozing off after a long day. Despite your half conscious state, you’re still entranced by the way he’s expertly controlling the steering wheel, the way he drives so smoothly and how safe it all makes you feel.

Before you know it, you’ve reached the destination.

“Umm, thanks for dinner” You say as you unbuckle your seatbelt.

“No problem. I should be thanking you for putting up with those two.” Seokjin says, sighing and looking around as he debated how to phrase his next sentence. “So uh, maybe next time we could go out for dinner or something. Just you and I.”

For a moment you think you didn’t hear what he said correctly, but when you look up at him in surprise you notice a faint flush in his cheeks under the streetlight.

“Y-yeah, t-that would nice” You manage to respond, despite your heart pounding a mile a minute. 

“Great! So, I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah”

And then you’re watching him drive off, wondering why all of this felt so familiar and so right like it’s happened before in some far off land or the distant past.

 …

 “So this castle you’re designing…” You trail off, eyes tracing over the 2-D blueprint of the structure Seokjin was designing at that very moment, his hand hovering in midair as he waits for you to finish your analysis. “What inspired such a layout?”

It wasn’t that you were purely curious about where he got the idea because you know it’s probably not that significant and if it were any other castle, you wouldn’t have even battered an eyelash, but this, this particular castle was all too familiar, in fact you think you’re becoming delusional for equating it with the one you saw in your dream the night before.

There’s a long pause as he tries to form a response. “I don’t know,” He ultimately says. “It kind of just came to me.”

You can practically sense that’s there’s more to it than he is choosing to explain, but he’s holding back for some odd reason.

“The secret passageway” You begin to point out, walking over to examine the tunnel that leads into the bedroom in more detail. “someone has used it to meet with their lover.” It’s a confident statement rather than a passing comment or even a question, and you have no idea what invisible force has compelled you to declare something so absurd with such certainty.

“The prince and his secret lover, a female warrior who was not allowed to be with him but eventually became his queen.” Seokjin turns to glance at you, his dark eyes unreadable, making you question if it was a coincidence he knew exactly what happened in your dream.

Time stills.

And you can see the lovers on a bridge, watching the sunset together as they’ve finally vowed to change the ways of the old where status decided who you could and could not love, to build a better kingdom and rule over its people with justice and equality. The man standing next to you is your king. He was the man your birth proclaimed you could never be with, and yet you are by his side.

You have been acquainted with this man numerous times, despite not being able to recall who he is or why he is altered and unchanged at the same time. He is reminiscent of the figure in all of your ephemeral hallucinations, the creature in the cave, the dying soldier….

 Are they the same person? They can’t be… can they?

 …

 Kim Seokjin is sweet. He’s everything that is warm and inviting about a cozy home, the nostalgic tranquility of the calm sea at the brink of sunset, and he reminds you of dainty cherry blossoms in the spring, the way pink flower petals drift in the wind.

But Kim Seokjin is also humorous and lively, and he’s able to fill a room with his contagious laughter that initially seems like a mismatch to his elegant physical features, but makes him even more attractive and compelling.

You also find out he’s great at singing.

“Wow, I didn’t expect you to be good at so many things” You comment as you walk alongside him by the river after he had taken you out to dinner. The moon was bright on a clear evening, and the city lights were reflecting off of the dark water like dazzling gemstones.

“With a face like this?” He quickly does a modeling pose, and even under the guise of the night you can still see the self-satisfied look on his face.

You giggle. “What does looking good have to do with cooking and singing?”

He blinks blankly a couple of times, realizing his statement did in fact, not make any sense. “Aish, I said it at the wrong time.” He shakes his head in disappointment, making you laugh even harder.

“I’m not denying your good looks,” You say in between your muffled giggles.

“I’d be surprised if you were. I’m certified worldwide handsome.” He grins, and you playfully roll your eyes even though he probably can’t see anyways.

You smile and shake your head, not knowing why his arrogantly confident attitude comes off endearing and amusing when you know for a fact that if it were any other person you’d be annoyed by such a narcissistic proclamation.  

Maybe you were just blindly infatuated, or maybe…

“You’re really beautiful, you know” His unexpected remark makes your heat skip a beat.

You turn to look at him not knowing what to say.

“You remind me of a lot of things I can’t make out.” He continues, and you notice he’s not looking at you but is instead staring at the starry sky.

“Seokjin…” You murmur, drawing his attention back toward you. You see his lips curve up slightly when his gaze lands on you.

“It’s getting late, we should probably head back.” His statement makes your heart drop ever so slightly, and for once you’re glad there are no streetlights to illuminate the melancholic tint in your eyes.

Kim Seokjin is physically close yet so far away, and although all of your senses tell you he’s right there, well within reach, the imperceptible distance between the two of you remains unchanged.  

And it makes you wonder if you’ll ever find what you are looking for.

 …

 The following section of the park was intended to transition into the modern world, so the next few weeks of brainstorming was dedicated to experimenting with different contemporary elements.

“A cityscape” You suddenly voice as the idea pops into your head. “What says modern-day more than a high-tech city? We can use metal wires to depict the skyline of a metropolis using abstract shapes analogous to those found in contemporary art.”

“That sounds like a great idea” Seokjin concurs. “We could add decorative lights so that the area is illuminated at night.”

You nod enthusiastically, and proceed to jump straight into sketching. You were imagining a mall area lined with trees that guided park goers towards the center, using the metal fencing as the foundation for the lights Seokjin had suggested.

“The cement sidewalks in this area of the park are like empty city streets.” He comments as he hovers over your drawing, examining the newly conjured shapes on your sketch board.

“Empty city streets...” You echo slowly, seeing the exact scene he was describing in the back of your mind.

A man is holding a bouquet of baby blue flowers, wearing a perfectly iron suit as he gets out of his car. You don’t see his face but you know that he’s smiling wider than the Pacific Ocean, and your heart is swelling as you begin to make your way towards him. Then there are lights and the sharp squeak of tires against the pavement, and everything goes black. 

“Y/N?” Seokjin’s voice brings you back to the sketch.

“Huh?” You realized you had spaced out again.  

“I was just wondering if you had any ideas on what to put in the center of the park.” He says. “It’s probably going to be the most important section. The one that ties everything together.”

“The center?”

He was right. The center is what the two of you have been building up to, and whatever piece you decide to put there will ultimately define the meaning of the park, the meaning of the story your architectural elements were trying to convey.

Normally it would be pretty difficult to come up with such an essential portion, but you had a pretty good idea of exactly what should be placed in the center.

 …

 By the end of the semester, you and Seokjin had completed the entire park. It was breathtakingly magnificent, and even the professor was extremely impressed by everything the two of you had put so much time and effort into crafting, even referring to it as one of the greatest he’s seen in all his years teaching an upper division architecture course.

“A walk through a thousands centuries.” Seokjin sighs as he gazes proudly at the finished design displayed on the screen.

“It turned out really good,” You agree, smiling softly.

“I’d never thought I’d say this, but my favorite part is the sculpture you designed for the center piece.”

His compliment puts a satisfied and sentimental smile on your face. You’re eyes turn towards the precise piece that he was still examining, its three dimensional shape even more mesmerizing now that it was projected on the big screen.

The piece that you had designed was the culmination of your flashbacks and dreams from the past semester, a tangible portrayal of everything that you had felt but could not put into words or explanations. It was a statue of a round time portal, one that faces an area of planetary alignments dancing across the cosmos on one side and two faceless people standing in each other’s embrace on the other.

“What was the inspiration behind it?” Seokjin’s voice cuts through your brief lapse, and you realized it was the first time he’s asked you the same question you had been asking about his designs. Turning your attention towards him, you notice that he’s looking at you in a way he seems to have never done before, like he’s truly seeing you for the first time. He is exclusively focused on you in that moment, and truthfully you kind of wish he wasn’t waiting so intently for your response because it makes you too nervous to admit the real motivation behind your work.

You had actually considered the idea kind of silly, and you didn’t really know what compelled you to design such a structure, but the idea had taken shape throughout your semester spent with Seokjin and although part of you wants to brush off that strange feeling of overwhelming emotions you’re hit with when you are with him, it was a calling that spoke to your heart rather than your mind to create such a representation of what the park in its entirety meant to you.

“It’s just something that sort of hit me out of the blue,” You voice nonchalantly, clearing your throat because the room was awfully silent and you could literally hear the pounding of your heart. 

“What are you going to call it?” He asks softly, voice almost inaudible.

Your breathing pauses, and it was like all of your indiscernible, frenzied thoughts had been set aside to make room for one thing only.

“Reincarnated to be together.” You whisper, not in complete control of where your words were coming from, where such an impression had manifested into tentative form. Your mind might forget, but your heart will always remember.

“One day we suddenly remembered the past.” You hear the melodic tone of Seokjin’s voice dance over to your eardrum, sending a shock wave coursing through your veins.

Seokjin is rooted in place as he finally realizes the one thing that had eluded him all along. He had been searching all this time, for the girl whose soul was hidden behind all of his designs, but only now has he realized it was you. The stories that traversed over centuries of human kind, the fate written in the stars at the beginning of the universe was the unbroken link between of the two of you.

“You’re him,” You breathe out as your eyes flicker up to meet his, the identity of the faceless person in your flashbacks finally coming to light.

“Sorry” He finally whispers. “I should have known.” His parted lips linger as his gaze trace down to your lips and back up to your eyes.

You look into them, eyes that are conveying everything he doesn’t need to put into words because you already know.

“We found each other,” He murmurs, and that’s the last thing you hear before feeling his tender lips meeting yours, closing the gap that you had thought would never be conquered.

The feeling that you know all too well, the same motion you’ve felt many times over, like artistic brushstrokes on a clean canvas waiting for millennia of stories to unfold, crafting the masterpiece that it was always meant to create, a destiny that will always be fulfilled.

Kim Seokjin kisses you like he’s been waiting for lifetimes to do so. He caresses your cheek like he’s been searching for you since the beginning of time and he holds you in his gaze like you’re the only thing he can see because he was born to love you and reborn to find you in every century he has been alive.

  “Until civilization is destroyed once again,  On the first day after a thousand centuries In the Garden of Eden we’ll stand side by side And laughingly watch the sun be extinguished.”

...

[talesofealdancynedom]

Tien Bucflowen, in fairy robes; You didn’t think this book would be free of a magic zen master and mind screw chapter?

Tale 19: Meriam Craweleoth: Mage Queen of The Grand West  (chapter 9.2 - In The Moment 9/10) part 4. Stories of Old

Maps

none

           The Stag Gate, is at the top of golden rock butte, surrounded by rice patties, and tropic air. It is just like Meriam’s Raven Gate, but jade instead white veined black marble. It sits in front of a bronze gong, upon a tile pedestal, moated with water and koi, undeath a square gazebo of arched red tile, and smooth green pillars. Meriam had only a moment to admire it, until her husband, linked at her elbow, fell.

“Fredrick! By all colours, you have gone dark!” Meriam cried. He seemed calm in shadow veil, and she was too focused on her mission to notice magic consume him. Fredrick was alos too busy admiring the veil to notice himself, and nearly felt feint. His nose bled, and his forehead was warm; but he was in better shape then Felin, or even her men, had been. Perhaps, focusing on and embracing the fey, was the way for a commoner to survive. Then, it began to rain, and they lay on the steps of the gate. Meriam holding Fredrick in her arms, as she sang a healing charm. The sound of rain can aid in the healing spells of heartmann. As a Seer, Meriam knew how to do anything, but seldom did. Particularly song. Speaking of heartman, if Meriam ever met Corona again, she should thank her for the spells and recipes. If this is a gate, it is a magic forest; which means magic ingredients that may save her husbands life after the rain. At the end of the day, Meriam was not a powerful enough charmer to fully heal someone with spells alone.

“Do I have new colours?” Fredrick interrupted, “Like you, Odette, Eatheltwein and your men?” he asked.

“Yes.” Meriam smiled. “Your hair is like wild roses, and your eyes even more glassy and teal; You look as handsome as ever. May I continue to sing? The spell will be strong in the rain, and the wet should cool your fever.” Meriam said. She held his hand, and started the charm again.

           By afternoon, the rain had stopped, and Meriam took her husband over her back, and began to walk a trail. There was labyrinth trail to walk, around the gate. But not a trapping one; It was an intentional, man made, meditative one. It led through the entire top of the butte, through all it’s fey and gardens. Calci Trees that grant wishes, a gold serpent dragon that liked clocks, naga that slept about with baskets of treasure, Kirin that pranced upon ledges, and giant gold flower. If you ask nice, the tree children may give you a lucky petal, to speed up recovery. The darling did not fail to give a golden petal to another friendly mage. The fey were very sweet; in stark contrast with the previous magic forest she had gone to. Meriam thanked the tree child, and gave the petal a chewing.

“Another mage is here dear!” Fredrick gleamed.

“Yes, Gates need mages to stay open. Though, I admit it slipped my mind.” Meriam mumbled. She kissed the chewed magic medicine into his mouth. Forget spoons full sugar, not even that could sweeten the worst kiss of their lives.

“Bloody fuck Meriam. Why!? and why?” He swallowed and coughed.

“Fredrick, the secret ingredient is always love. And I don’t mean the proverb; that is actually how your supposed to do it…” Meriam apologized. The tree children were laughing.

“But I do suddenly, feel a bit better…. Thankyou kindly.” Fredrick said to the golden flower bush.

“shucks your highness; you can deflower me any time. Anything for true love.” It chimed. Fredrick went pale; a plant spoke to him. Him and Meriam recoiled at the discomfort of the statement.

           Now that Freddie was back on his feet, they followed the circular maze path around the gate together. Walking past all the fey, little Tibetan cottages, sand gardens; completely mesmerized. Could it be enchantmented? They began to postulate. The passing curiosity, of what was the cause of their calm, waving over them. Entranced, they passed a fallow deer by the path. It didn’t run. As they walked past, they saw an elder Vietician man, wearing white and spring green Stag Kingdom Fairy robes. He was sharpening a blade of jade. He had been there the whole time, minding his own business.

“Excuse me sir, but I must say that is a beautiful weapon.” Fredrick said.

“Apologies; master???” Meriam inquired.

“Tian Bucflowen. And it is not a tool of destruction. It is a sword of restoration. I make things that aren’t. The jade and bronze I mold, makes object that do what they don’t. they embody existence needing non-existence, and that what we know is, is also not.” Tian said softly.

“Ah. My name is Meriam Craweleoth, and my husband King Fredrick Cynedom.” Meriam said. Tian did not respond.

“Why are the paths in a curiously soothing maze?” Fredrick asked.

“Because they are made to be a large labyrinth walk. A tool of meditation and mindfulness. Did you find the serenity of the present upon it’s tread?” Tien mused. Meriam and Fredrick nodded calmly. Then Tien went silent again.

“I will walk with you now.” He then said, placing the sword on the ground. “This is a fallow deer, and my familiar. Cha. She will walk aside us now, as well.” Tien continued, as they began to walk about the paths once again.

           As a half hour passed, in silence, Fredrick and Meriam began to enjoy each moment more. They forgot why they were here, or anything that had happened, or will. No thought of betrothals, missing children, war, and dead friends. Only locked elbows, and the smooth flow of each step. The sound of running water, chirp of raven children, and smell of green.

“Do you hear from beyond this butte?” Meriam asked Tien.

“Yes. What do you want to hear?” He responded.

“Is this land of Vietica, free of Sinonian soldiers? Are they merchants now?”

“That is a transformation that has occurred. Though I do not know why it was. Why there were men here, or why they should, or should not have been here; I do not judge any person, for where they are, come from, or go.”

“You confuse me a bit; But I assert Anglia seeks peace. Such a , transformation, would mean the emperor of Sinonia had a changed his opinions of war and gratitude. With the Eastern lands now calm, I assume this means we have peace?”

“Do we have? Do you possess peace? Is it peace still, when there is no longer conflict to witness, or something to make it?” Tien said. Meriam and Fredrick, were then drew back to reality, by confusion.  

“Wait. What? I’m sorry, I fear you have lost us both.” Fredrick said.

“Peace is something everyone has, because they did not have it. It is a matter of mind and existence. But what of you, here now; What do you now have?”

“Each other?” Fredrick postulated.

“It would appear so, in this moment.” Tein chimed

“The ability to control time?” Meriam said.

“Oh, do you?” Tien said softly. “Do you control time Meriam? Or is it controlling you; Thus, simply exists and flows regardless of meaning, or a human will? Akin to magic itself.” He went on. Meriam felt Tien’s questions in her chest. Though she knew it was not sired from malice, but truth. The whole time Meriam knew magic, and manipulated time, she knew it always flowed back into place. In magic, past and present became illusive, to the point of disposing any notion of polarized concepts. Like magic, Tien appeared to be absent of any judgment, time, resentment or pain. Meriam now wanted his secrets.

“You don’t use words of good or bad, or certainty. You do not care if your work is worth recognition as a warlock. You even live alone to old age, unbothered. I have many things from the past, that make me thirst for goals; I cannot imagine life without such direction and pain. What makes a man, sitting alone upon a mountain, with unicorns, so blissful in spite of everything?” Meriam asked, stopping on the path.

“Ah, you have left the moment. Torn between past and present; When you care for neither. My secret, is none. I am here alone, because that is where life has led me. As I flow with time, I go many places; and come from many places. Where I end, and where I start, is irrelevant to any given point in-between. If I need meaning, I make it from a moment, not a goal. Do I need recognition to exist, when I clearly do? I am at peace here, because I am at peace here. I accept here, thus I accept uncertainty, and I accept the past and all futures. Are you here Meriam, and Fredrick? Or are you somewhere else? But if you see things as meaningful here, stay here.” Tien smiled.

           Meriam, was never here. She was a young woman in Francia just ready to wed, being torn from her family as a political pawn, at the beginning of a war, watching her friend die; and wishing she could change it, but knowing she never would, and feared if she even should. Meriam was lost. Because she could not accept where she was, as she was unaware of her here is. Meriam, after a moment, bowed to Tian, who smiled and lifted her cheek.

“Now I will eat.”

“I guess, now we will join you.” Meriam giggled. Her laughter made Fredrick burst out as well. It was like a honeymoon they never got.

“Remember everything flows.” Tien said, sitting over a bronze stove in the middle of a house. It was small, but well made. Inside and out, it was painted green and dark red, with gold leaf imprinting, and fine eastern silks. They would have complemented Tien on his courtesy, mastery, accommodations and cooking; but they felt that though he might have appreciated it, he would only do so for a moment, before he returned to his blissful lack of dichotomy. Filled with good chicken, and on nice sleeping mats, Meriam and Fredrick found themselves here, in a pleasant present, together, and close. King, Queen, or anything else, melted into abstract. They were themselves here. In the setting of the sun, and tender love. The kind that never lasts long enough. As they settled for rest, Meriam began to cry again; for she has started to arrive in a single moment in time, unchained from her mind.

“Fredrick. I hated being betrothed, and being a political tool. And then falling in love anyway. I am sad because of how mercilessly Felin was murdered. I am angry that Francia, which I love, is fighting, when they just needed help. I am unsettled from the sight of war, and confusion of magic. I am scared by the uncertainty, of what wizarding may become in the hands of commoners. I resent myself for not telling this to my mage friends. I miss our daughter, and I miss all the time I could have spent with you. I hate that I have all the time in the world, and it is not enough. I stay so strong in these trials, to do what I must; but Fredrick, I am sad.” Meriam cried. Her voice quiet, but still as clear as she always spoke. Fredrick pulled his wife closer, to hold her in a moment of need, while they both admitted, it feels cold now, but it is also now warm.

           As Meriam and Fredrick got up in the mourning, they dressed, ate, then went to walk around the labyrinth path once more, before they left. Tien was in a different spot, finishing the sword; and Meriam and Fredrick began to notice the houses. There were little red roofed houses within the bamboo, and tree children; The houses with decorated eaves, had happy children and merchants who played nice with the fey. One of them even gave the couple peaches and tea. They did not know Anglian, but everyone’s faces and gestures communicated joy well enough. Meriam showed the children, and villagers, some time magic. Then her and her husband continued to walk. The people here sparkled with adoration of the mystical. The Fey were like family; Not too dissimilar from Grand Snow.

“I do love magic forests” Fredrick said. “Everyone is in love with magic; and it makes them kind.”

“When we went Dania, their mage took us to their magic forest; Grand Snow. It was like this, but colder and higher up.” Meriam smiled. “I love that peaceful acceptance commoners have towards magic, when they live alongside it. The fey become a part of the community, and every day is an adventure. The commoners have no need to wield magic power; they are satisfied by only it’s presence. It makes me wonder why wizards exist in the first place.” She spoke. Meriam had seen so many people around the world, sparkle or cower before infinite possibilities. She wanted the Raven Gate to make commoners sparkle; But knew now, there is always many types of people. From those who are dazzled by magic, to those who are overwhelmed by it. There is never just one of anything; theory, illness, gender, colour, nation, type of person, winner and loser. Life is too complicated for that. It is better to just turn right in the middle of a desert, when your guides decide to go that way.

As it would appear, there was something to be said for the people who are not magically inclined, but find it wonderous and enchanting nevertheless. Helrem Monafyra did not need to make wands, and special spells, to share his love of magic; As the commoners who would accept his gifts already had this spark. Wizardry was pointless, yet enticing to people who have not persisted alongside magic before; Those who are not satisfied with mages being the ones wielding spells, making potions, or having friends in fey. Without the guidance of a mages, these people may not know how to respect their newfound abilities. The wizards may only see power, having not learned from the wars that just settled. Magic is not good or bad, but is. Like a perfectly generic object, air, or subtle emotion. The ethereal energy that permeates the human plain, does not fight in wars, as it does not take sides. That is what humans do. Because common humans are not here, like mages and fey, they grab onto contrast. Thus, they are somewhere else, in body and mind. Desensitized to the day veils overstimulation, that distracts them from their present. The day veil is so full of sensations, it is hard not to label and compare them. Just like the day veil, there is nowhere like the shadow veil; where you do not need to meditate to move past a racing mind, and notice things of glory that should only be in imagination. If one is not used to it, it is uncomfortable. Yet, if you’re not careful, you will get lost in its submerssion, and neglect all else. It is something both veils have in common.

Meriam and Fredrick went back through the gate, and across the shadow veil, to get home. Fredrick was looking at all the fey, and holding his wife close. He was genuinely serene this time.

“I think that Vietician man is wise. Earlier you said you were worried about the wizards murdering all the mages, and yet you let Eathletwein join, to protect him no doubt. If I learned something here, it’s that you should ignore the wizards. I think mages need to accept common men of magic houses, can now wield magic; and there is no knowing the outcome. Wizardry has already happened, and to disagree would make us fools. I think we should ignore it, and give the people what they want. The ability to choose a life that is either magical or mundane. It’s not the concept of wizards that is terrifying, it’s the concept of people that are unpredictable and uncontrollable. Sure, some wizards may be reckless, but maybe some will be as kind as mages. Put it aside for now. Because we must enjoy now, as we have peace across the ten kingdoms; and we will accept that there will be wizards, and ‘talented wizards’.” Fredrick laughed. When they returned through the Raven Gate, their men were waiting to take the Queen and King back to the palace. Some were taken aback by the king’s slightly different appearance, but overall happy their leaders had returned.

           Ethleltwein had permitted the three remaining ladies to stay as long as they liked. He asked them about what they would do if they were to never be married, and why he should and shouldn’t chose them. There was what was good for him, good for the lady, good Anglia, and good for the world. There was no good choice. The only ‘good’ choice, would be to choose the lady he liked best in company, and nothing else. ‘In magery, love was the best choice’, Meriam had told Eatheltwein. He was dumb enough to believe her. Meriam only told him that, just to make sure he would be free to chose his own love interest. There was a nugget of truth however; Unlike commoners, mages experience bouts of romance very suddenly. Often permanently, after half the encounters it would usually take to build a relationship.

Even so, Eatheltwein had trouble selecting his heteronormative life partner, form only three options. No Anglian ladies accepted an audience with their prince, the Danian girl ran home to be a hunter with her brothers, and the Celtician girl left after agreeing she could not give the Eatheltwein affection he deserved. This left the Francian princess, flustered as her chariot was loaded with her things. She looked dreadful and distressed as the King and Queen arrived safely at their door step.

“Mourning my dear. You look unkempt.” Meriam said. “Princess Charlette was it?”

“I want to say good bye.” The princess said sadly. She looked most distraught. Her rouge was smudged like she had been crying, and her hair was frizzled in yesterday’s braids.

“He’s likely in his quarters at this hour; If you want to talk to him so badly, just go to him and say good bye?” Fredrick said. Charlette, paused in place, then bowed, and promptly excused herself. She ran back into the palace, followed by Meriam and her husband.

“Quite odd. Never seen a lady flustered like that, simply because they wanted to politely say goodbye.” Fredrick, whispered to his wife. “She seems very sweet.”

“Yes. To say good bye. Very sweet….” Meriam said, peering around the corner, to look down the hall to Eathel’s quarters. The princess ran into his arms crying that she’ll miss him, after only a week of dancing, tea, and conversation. Meriam tried to refrain from laughing.

“Poor thing” Fredrick said. Then Eatheltwein embraced her and proposed to her. Fredrick an Meriam starred in bewilderment. “Well. Didn’t see that one coming.” Fredrick gasped.

“I want the wedding in Francia. So, both Francia and Anglia can show good will. I have been far from home for so long.” Meriam mused. She spoke without restraint leading to Eatheltwein and Charlette hearing her.

“Aunty! You’re back! Wouldn’t you know it; The girl I liked most, came back to me! I am so happy. Better yet, this is good for our country; Though I hope the other lands don’t take it personally, but politically.” Eatheltwein chimed.

“Eatheltwein, I encourage you to not care what others think.” Meriam smiled.

“It is convenient though.” The king whispered. He receives a good elbow from his queen again, and they left back to their room with Charlette bowing to them. As they left, she turned her full attention to Eathel.

“I was going to say the same thing! It is convent the kindest man I met, who also shares my love of green, requites my desire for affection. I will not be forced into any other dumb political mirage. Not that we have any men left to marry… Oh, I owe your Queen so much. I cannot wait to hold your hand every day.”  Charlette swooned.

“I don’t think you owe her anything; vicarious living is actually enough for my aunt. Do you want to help me pick a shirt for today? I’m afraid I’m half dressed. I don’t know if I want to wear indigo, woad, Lincoln or Kendal?” Eatheltwein laughed.

“Not Saxon? Anglia is famous for that shade of green in their fabrics, and eyes…. I’m joking, if we’re married, I would tell you that you have no need of a shirt today.”

“Well then, I will wear green to our wedding in Francia; Hopefully treat each other so kind, that it inspires our homelands do the same!” Eathel chimed, clasping her hands. When Meriam look back still eavesdropping. The princess had leapt into his arms. Woad is she.

They all slept well that night. After so many years, everyone would meet Francia at its borders, for a peace summit and wedding, instead of in arms. Meriam and her friends, could reach out their hands to help Francia, and now they would take it. The tears of relief on many of their faces. But that is for another day, as for now, Meriam was here, excited to see Francia again. Should could nearly smell the dry earth, potpourri, and prairie air.

NEXT--->

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[idontinsultpeopleidescribethem]

The Metaphysics of a Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister communicates that everybody is God's holy child. We are all equal. Even Jesus is our equal. A course in miracles message is that the physical world we seem to be in was not created by God, but is a delusion of our own making.

The metaphysics of a course in miracles isn’t something that somebody made up, it isn’t an interpretation, it isn’tthemed to anyone's opinion, and there is no room for questioning it. It is not one of many possible definitions of the truth. It is the truth. Either you understand it as it is and accept it as logically true, or you are in denial and confusion.

Metaphysics is facts. The thought system of the Holy Spirit is completely logically consistent, as is the thought system of the ego. There is absolutely no room for interpretation. What is "true" can easily be determined by looking at the logical structure of what has happened and where things fit. If you master metaphysics, you will be able to extrapolate the logical thought system to explain absolutely anything in its correct perspective.

What happens after the separation from God is completely 100% logical. Everything that happens after separation must happen, and it must happen in a very specific way. The results of separation are not diverse or one option amongst numerous. There is only one way to separate, there is only one scenario that comes about when separation seems to have happened, and there is only one outcome.

If you can learn the essential, totally rationally consistent metaphysical structure of the separation, it provides you with a framework in which the whole thing just fits into place. A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister is teaching this metaphysical structure, but it is not always very obvious. Its obscure nature tends to lead people to not even realize there is a solid "core" to the Course or that you can use this structure to perfectly explain everything the ego does, the meaning of death, and what must be true based on it.

For example, separation from God is not possible, because you cannot be somewhere that God is absent. God is everywhere. This immediately tells us that, logically, to believe that this is possible is insanity. It also must tell us that to believe in such a separation is to believe in a dream, a fiction, something which is false or not true and not real. This is already the beginning of some very solid metaphysics, and many people grasp this basic starting point.

As you study the metaphysics of a course in miracles, which is rather deeper than just "the words" of the Course, you will attain a kind of pattern or set of simple laws that you understand to make perfect sense. These can be rather abstract so it can entail some learning  a course in miracles to generalize the learning and understand that it's all grounded on a simple set of logic. But when you then get the simple logic, you can now use that simple logic to observe deniably any part of life, any activity or drive or way that something happens, and describe it in terms of what the metaphysics says about it, which will be the truth. Irrefutable truth. Provided your grasp of metaphysics is clear and consistent and you're not making subtle logical errors, metaphysics gives you the vision to be able to see the truth of what's happening or where things fit together.

For instance, lately, there have been debates about whether you can be in harmony with death. There were many opinions given. None of the opinions were relevant. The one fact is in what the metaphysics declares. In the metaphysical fact, the body is a device of separation, it is a deception, and it is within the mind of Christ. It blocks and hides what is behind it and its only function and purpose is to maintain the illusion of the mind being separate. Metaphysics also tells us that since God is life, and being opposed to God is the separation, the separation must be death. It also must be a fiction of death - a dream of death. It has to be. It also tells us that therefore when the body is alive, the body is still inside a dream of death. This also tells us that the death which occurs at the end of life is just a symbol for death, because what happens before it is also death. This is why Jesus says "death is not an end, it is a continuation."

Since metaphysics teaches that death is the opposite of life, and life and peace are one, and therefore death is not peace, we very simply can conclude that it is not possible for there to be death and harmony at the same time. This is irrefutable, perfect logic. This is the truth that metaphysics tells us. It has no strings to do with someone's opinion, someone's inability of understanding, someone's story of what they believe is true based on their so-called experiences, or anything else. It cannot be true that death and peace are the same things or that they truly can be hundred percent experienced at the same time. Yet many people have tried to justify that they are at peace with death or have come to accept it. They must be in denial. Metaphysics makes this clear.

The Most Commonly Asked Questions About A Course in Miracles

1) What is the nature of God?

To start with, it is imperative to distinguish that the true alive God articulated in A Course in Miracles is a non-dualistic Being, in Whom undeniably no contraries reside. The Holy One is the Creator of all life, a Being of clean Love and the Foundation and First Cause of non-physical truth and totality, the flawless One Who is all-encompassing, outside of Whom is factually nothing, for He is Everything. Our Source's nature can’t be defined or really understood at all, as Jesus’s explanations in the workbook:

   Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say "God is," and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something, not itself. It has united with its Source. And like its Source Itself, it merely

2) What is the nature of reality?

Reality as well-defined by A Course in Miracles is not a physical empire, dimension, or knowledge, since truth is created by God and as God is unformed, unchanging, everlasting, endless love, and boundless and unified perfection -- a non-dualistic oneness. The reality in the Course is one and the same with Heaven and perceptibly cannot be connected in any method to the universe of form that the world calls reality. Being unchanging, true reality is everlasting and fixed, and therefore any assumption of separation -- which is change -- is not possible and therefore no occasion was. As a non-dualistic state, the reality is beyond insight, since perception presumes a subject-object dichotomy that is integrally dualistic and so can’t be real. In A Course in Miracles, the reality is also synonymous with knowledge, the state of being that is Heaven.

3) What is the nature of life?

In A Course in Miracles, life, as created by God, has nothing to do with what we call or know of as life in the body. Life is the soul: non-material, non-dualistic, and everlasting. Possibly the richest states in the Course on the essence of life -- what it is and what it is not

4) Is the God in A Course in Miracles the same as the God in the Bible?

Jesus clearly states in the Course that God did not create this world, and thus on this basis unaccompanied, He is definitely different from the Judaeo-Christian deity. The biblical God is a dualistic creator of a physical universe that he creates by the articulated word, as noted in Genesis' first account of creation: "And God said, let there be ...... Thus, this world and all creatures came into existence as separated entities, existing outside of him. In effect, therefore, the biblical God creates by projecting a thought or concept outside himself, where it becomes a physical "reality," as witnessed, again, in the creation story in the Book of Genesis.

But the differences between the two are even more philosophical. The biblical God is very much a person who sees sin as real, and must therefore respond to it, first by punishment, and then by the plan of the atonement wherein salvation and forgiveness are won through the suffering and sacrifice of his holy Servant (the Suffering Servant in Isaiah -- Old Testament) and his only begotten Son Jesus (New Testament). The God of a Course in Miracles, on the other hand, is not a person and therefore has none of the anthropomorphic qualities of homo sapiens. This God does not even know about the separation (the Course's equivalent of the biblical notion of original sin), and thus does not and cannot respond to it.

Therefore, the God of the Course is not the God of formal religion, and certainly not the God of the Bible. In truth, our Source is beyond all concepts and anthropomorphisms and has nothing in common with the biblical God who has all the attributes of special love (a God who has a chosen people) and special hate (a God of punishment) that are associated with the ego thought system.

A Course in Miracles: The Message:

A Course in Miracles the message teaches us that there is a Voice for God in our minds that is always talking to us, telling us that we are: unlimited, one with all life, eternal, and literally invulnerable. That Voice is the Holy Spirit. There is another voice in our minds that we made up that lies to us and tells us we are: limited, separate, mortal, and vulnerable. That voice is the ego. A primary focus of a course in miracle’s message is to teach us how to tell these two voices apart. Once we do that we must choose to listen to the Holy Spirit and trust the Holy Spirit's counsel. We will always hear the voice of the ego while here in the dream but we should not accept its guidance or counsel about anything. In a course in miracle the message is not about the death of the ego, but how to properly relate to it.

[avecesfui]

The Metaphysics of a Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister communicates that everybody is God's holy child. We are all equal. Even Jesus is our equal. A course in miracles message is that the physical world we seem to be in was not created by God, but is a delusion of our own making.

The metaphysics of a course in miracles isn’t something that somebody made up, it isn’t an interpretation, it isn’tthemed to anyone's opinion, and there is no room for questioning it. It is not one of many possible definitions of the truth. It is the truth. Either you understand it as it is and accept it as logically true, or you are in denial and confusion.

Metaphysics is facts. The thought system of the Holy Spirit is completely logically consistent, as is the thought system of the ego. There is absolutely no room for interpretation. What is "true" can easily be determined by looking at the logical structure of what has happened and where things fit. If you master metaphysics, you will be able to extrapolate the logical thought system to explain absolutely anything in its correct perspective.

What happens after the separation from God is completely 100% logical. Everything that happens after separation must happen, and it must happen in a very specific way. The results of separation are not diverse or one option amongst numerous. There is only one way to separate, there is only one scenario that comes about when separation seems to have happened, and there is only one outcome.

If you can learn the essential, totally rationally consistent metaphysical structure of the separation, it provides you with a framework in which the whole thing just fits into place. A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister is teaching this metaphysical structure, but it is not always very obvious. Its obscure nature tends to lead people to not even realize there is a solid "core" to the Course or that you can use this structure to perfectly explain everything the ego does, the meaning of death, and what must be true based on it.

For example, separation from God is not possible acim , because you cannot be somewhere that God is absent. God is everywhere. This immediately tells us that, logically, to believe that this is possible is insanity. It also must tell us that to believe in such a separation is to believe in a dream, a fiction, something which is false or not true and not real. This is already the beginning of some very solid metaphysics, and many people grasp this basic starting point.

As you study the metaphysics of a course in miracles, which is rather deeper than just "the words" of the Course, you will attain a kind of pattern or set of simple laws that you understand to make perfect sense. These can be rather abstract so it can entail some learning to generalize the learning and understand that it's all grounded on a simple set of logic. But when you then get the simple logic, you can now use that simple logic to observe deniably any part of life, any activity or drive or way that something happens, and describe it in terms of what the metaphysics says about it, which will be the truth. Irrefutable truth. Provided your grasp of metaphysics is clear and consistent and you're not making subtle logical errors, metaphysics gives you the vision to be able to see the truth of what's happening or where things fit together.

For instance, lately, there have been debates about whether you can be in harmony with death. There were many opinions given. None of the opinions were relevant. The one fact is in what the metaphysics declares. In the metaphysical fact, the body is a device of separation, it is a deception, and it is within the mind of Christ. It blocks and hides what is behind it and its only function and purpose is to maintain the illusion of the mind being separate. Metaphysics also tells us that since God is life, and being opposed to God is the separation, the separation must be death. It also must be a fiction of death - a dream of death. It has to be. It also tells us that therefore when the body is alive, the body is still inside a dream of death. This also tells us that the death which occurs at the end of life is just a symbol for death, because what happens before it is also death. This is why Jesus says "death is not an end, it is a continuation."

Since metaphysics teaches that death is the opposite of life, and life and peace are one, and therefore death is not peace, we very simply can conclude that it is not possible for there to be death and harmony at the same time. This is irrefutable, perfect logic. This is the truth that metaphysics tells us. It has no strings to do with someone's opinion, someone's inability of understanding, someone's story of what they believe is true based on their so-called experiences, or anything else. It cannot be true that death and peace are the same things or that they truly can be hundred percent experienced at the same time. Yet many people have tried to justify that they are at peace with death or have come to accept it. They must be in denial. Metaphysics makes this clear.

The Most Commonly Asked Questions About A Course in Miracles

1) What is the nature of God?

To start with, it is imperative to distinguish that the true alive God articulated in A Course in Miracles is a non-dualistic Being, in Whom undeniably no contraries reside. The Holy One is the Creator of all life, a Being of clean Love and the Foundation and First Cause of non-physical truth and totality, the flawless One Who is all-encompassing, outside of Whom is factually nothing, for He is Everything. Our Source's nature can’t be defined or really understood at all, as Jesus’s explanations in the workbook:

   Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say "God is," and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something, not itself. It has united with its Source. And like its Source Itself, it merely

2) What is the nature of reality?

Reality as well-defined by A Course in Miracles is not a physical empire, dimension, or knowledge, since truth is created by God and as God is unformed, unchanging, everlasting, endless love, and boundless and unified perfection -- a non-dualistic oneness. The reality in the Course is one and the same with Heaven and perceptibly cannot be connected in any method to the universe of form that the world calls reality. Being unchanging, true reality is everlasting and fixed, and therefore any assumption of separation -- which is change -- is not possible and therefore no occasion was. As a non-dualistic state, the reality is beyond insight, since perception presumes a subject-object dichotomy that is integrally dualistic and so can’t be real. In A Course in Miracles, the reality is also synonymous with knowledge, the state of being that is Heaven.

3) What is the nature of life?

In A Course in Miracles, life, as created by God, has nothing to do with what we call or know of as life in the body. Life is the soul: non-material, non-dualistic, and everlasting. Possibly the richest states in the Course on the essence of life -- what it is and what it is not

4) Is the God in A Course in Miracles the same as the God in the Bible?

Jesus clearly states in the Course that God did not create this world, and thus on this basis unaccompanied, He is definitely different from the Judaeo-Christian deity. The biblical God is a dualistic creator of a physical universe that he creates by the articulated word, as noted in Genesis' first account of creation: "And God said, let there be ...... Thus, this world and all creatures came into existence as separated entities, existing outside of him. In effect, therefore, the biblical God creates by projecting a thought or concept outside himself, where it becomes a physical "reality," as witnessed, again, in the creation story in the Book of Genesis.

But the differences between the two are even more philosophical. The biblical God is very much a person who sees sin as real, and must therefore respond to it, first by punishment, and then by the plan of the atonement wherein salvation and forgiveness are won through the suffering and sacrifice of his holy Servant (the Suffering Servant in Isaiah -- Old Testament) and his only begotten Son Jesus (New Testament). The God of a Course in Miracles, on the other hand, is not a person and therefore has none of the anthropomorphic qualities of homo sapiens. This God does not even know about the separation (the Course's equivalent of the biblical notion of original sin), and thus does not and cannot respond to it.

Therefore, the God of the Course is not the God of formal religion, and certainly not the God of the Bible. In truth, our Source is beyond all concepts and anthropomorphisms and has nothing in common with the biblical God who has all the attributes of special love (a God who has a chosen people) and special hate (a God of punishment) that are associated with the ego thought system.

A Course in Miracles: The Message:

A Course in Miracles the message teaches us that there is a Voice for God in our minds that is always talking to us, telling us that we are: unlimited, one with all life, eternal, and literally invulnerable. That Voice is the Holy Spirit. There is another voice in our minds that we made up that lies to us and tells us we are: limited, separate, mortal, and vulnerable. That voice is the ego. A primary focus of a course in miracle’s message is to teach us how to tell these two voices apart. Once we do that we must choose to listen to the Holy Spirit and trust the Holy Spirit's counsel. We will always hear the voice of the ego while here in the dream but we should not accept its guidance or counsel about anything. In a course in miracle the message is not about the death of the ego, but how to properly relate to it.

[redblooms]

The Metaphysics of a Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister communicates that everybody is God's holy child. We are all equal. Even Jesus is our equal. A course in miracles message is that the physical world we seem to be in was not created by God, but is a delusion of our own making.

The metaphysics of a course in miracles isn’t something that somebody made up, it isn’t an interpretation, it isn’tthemed to anyone's opinion, and there is no room for questioning it. It is not one of many possible definitions of the truth. It is the truth. Either you understand it as it is and accept it as logically true, or you are in denial and confusion.

Metaphysics is facts. The thought system of the Holy Spirit is completely logically consistent, as is the thought system of the ego. There is absolutely no room for interpretation. What is "true" can easily be determined by looking at the logical structure of what has happened and where things fit. If you master metaphysics, you will be able to extrapolate the logical thought system to explain absolutely anything in its correct perspective.

What happens after the separation from God is completely 100% logical. Everything that happens after separation must happen, and it must happen in a very specific way. The results of separation are not diverse or one option amongst numerous. There is only one way to separate, there is only one scenario that comes about when separation seems to have happened, and there is only one outcome.

If you can learn the essential, totally rationally consistent metaphysical structure of the separation, it provides you with a framework in which the whole thing just fits into place. A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister is teaching this metaphysical structure, but it is not always very obvious. Its obscure nature tends to lead people to not even realize there is a solid "core" to the Course or that you can use this structure to perfectly explain everything the ego does, the meaning of death, and what must be true based on it.

For example, separation from God is not possible, because you cannot be somewhere that God is absent. God is everywhere. This immediately tells us that, logically, to believe that this is possible is insanity. It also must tell us that to believe in such a separation is to believe in a dream, a fiction, something which is false or not true and not real. This is already the beginning of some very solid metaphysics, and many people grasp this basic starting point.

As you study the metaphysics of a course in miracles, which is rather deeper than just "the words" of the Course, you will attain a kind of pattern or set of simple laws that you understand to make perfect sense. These can be rather abstract so it can entail some learning to generalize the learning and understand that it's all grounded on a simple set of logic. But when you then get the simple logic, you can now use that simple logic to observe deniably any part of life, any activity or drive or way that something happens, and describe it in terms of what the metaphysics says about it, which will be the truth. Irrefutable truth. Provided your grasp of metaphysics is clear and consistent and you're not making subtle logical errors, metaphysics gives you the vision to be able to see the truth of what's happening or where things fit together.

For instance, lately, there have been debates about whether you can be in harmony with death. There were many opinions given. None of the opinions were relevant. The one fact is in what the metaphysics declares. In the metaphysical fact, the body is a device of separation, it is a deception, and it is within the mind of Christ. It blocks and hides what is behind it and its only function and purpose is to maintain the illusion of the mind being separate. Metaphysics also tells us that since God is life, and being opposed to God is the separation, the separation must be death. It also must be a fiction of death - a dream of death. It has to be. It also tells us that therefore when the body is alive, the body is still inside a dream of death. This also tells us that the death which occurs at the end of life is just a symbol for death, because what happens before it is also death. This is why Jesus says "death is not an end, it is a continuation."

Since metaphysics teaches that death is the opposite of life, and life and peace are one, and therefore death is not peace, we very simply can conclude that it is not possible for there to be death and harmony at the same time. This is irrefutable, perfect logic. This is the truth that metaphysics tells us. It has no strings to do with someone's opinion, someone's inability of understanding, someone's story of what they believe is true based on their so-called experiences, or anything else. It cannot be true that death and peace are the same things or that they truly can be hundred percent experienced at the same time. Yet many people have tried to justify that they are at peace with death or have come to accept it. They must be in denial. Metaphysics makes this clear.

The Most Commonly Asked Questions About A Course in Miracles

1) What is the nature of God?

To start with, it is imperative to distinguish that the true alive God articulated in A Course in Miracles is a non-dualistic Being, in Whom undeniably no contraries reside. The Holy One is the Creator of all life, a Being of clean Love and the Foundation and First Cause of non-physical truth and totality, the flawless One Who is all-encompassing, outside of Whom is factually nothing, for He is Everything. Our Source's nature can’t be defined or really understood at all, as Jesus’s explanations in the workbook:

   Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say "God is," and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something, not itself. It has united with its Source. And like its Source Itself, it merely

2) What is the nature of reality?

Reality as well-defined by A Course in Miracles is not a physical empire, dimension, or knowledge, since truth is created by God and as God is unformed, unchanging, everlasting, endless love, and boundless and unified perfection -- a non-dualistic oneness. The reality in the Course is one and the same with Heaven and perceptibly cannot be connected in any method to the universe of form that the world calls reality. Being unchanging, true reality is everlasting and fixed, and therefore any assumption of separation -- which is change -- is not possible and therefore no occasion was. As a non-dualistic state, the reality is beyond insight, since perception presumes a subject-object dichotomy that is integrally dualistic and so can’t be real. In A Course in Miracles, the reality is also synonymous with knowledge, the state of being that is Heaven.

3) What is the nature of life?

In A Course in Miracles, life, as created by God, has nothing to do with what we call or know of as life in the body. Life is the soul: non-material, non-dualistic, and everlasting. Possibly the richest states in the Course on the essence of life -- what it is and what it is not

4) Is the God in A Course in Miracles the same as the God in the Bible?

Jesus clearly states in the Course that God did not create this world, and thus on this basis unaccompanied, He is definitely different from the Judaeo-Christian deity. The biblical God is a dualistic creator of a physical universe that he creates by the articulated word, as noted in Genesis' first account of creation: "And God said, let there be ...... Thus, this world and all creatures came into existence as separated entities, existing outside of him. In effect, therefore, the biblical God creates by projecting a thought or concept outside himself, where it becomes a physical "reality," as witnessed, again, in the creation story in the Book of Genesis.

But the differences between the two are even more philosophical. The biblical God is very much a person who sees sin as real, and must therefore respond to it, first by punishment, and then by the plan of the atonement wherein salvation and forgiveness are won through the suffering and sacrifice of his holy Servant (the Suffering Servant in Isaiah -- Old Testament) and his only begotten Son Jesus (New Testament). The God of a Course in Miracles, on the other hand, is not a person and therefore has none of the anthropomorphic qualities of homo sapiens. This God does not even know about the separation (the Course's equivalent of the biblical notion of original sin), and thus does not and cannot respond to it.

Therefore, the God of the Course is not the God of formal religion, and certainly not the God of the Bible. In truth, our Source is beyond all concepts and anthropomorphisms and has nothing in common with the biblical God who has all the attributes of special love (a God who has a chosen people) and special hate (a God of punishment) that are associated with the ego thought system.

A Course in Miracles: The Message:

A Course in Miracles the message teaches us that there is a Voice for God in our minds that is always talking to us, telling us that we are: unlimited, one with all life, eternal, and literally invulnerable. That Voice is the Holy Spirit. There is another voice in our minds that we made up that lies to us and tells us we are: limited, separate, mortal, and vulnerable. That voice is the ego. A primary focus of a course in miracle’s message is to teach us how to tell these two voices apart. Once we do that we must choose to listen to the Holy Spirit and trust the Holy Spirit's counsel. We will always hear the voice of the ego while here in the dream but we should not accept its guidance or counsel about anything. In a course in miracle the message is not about the death of the ego, but how to properly relate to it.

[saudadedemi]

The Metaphysics of a Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister communicates that everybody is God's holy child. We are all equal. Even Jesus is our equal. A course in miracles message is that the physical world we seem to be in was not created by God, but is a delusion of our own making.

The metaphysics of a course in miracles isn’t something that somebody made up, it isn’t an interpretation, it isn’tthemed to anyone's opinion, and there is no room for questioning it. It is not one of many possible definitions of the truth. It is the truth. Either you understand it as it is and accept it as logically true, or you are in denial and confusion. 

Metaphysics is facts. The thought system of the Holy Spirit is completely logically consistent, as is the thought system of the ego. There is absolutely no room for interpretation. What is "true" can easily be determined by looking at the logical structure of what has happened and where things fit. If you master metaphysics, you will be able to extrapolate the logical thought system to explain absolutely anything in its correct perspective.

What happens after the separation from God is completely 100% logical. Everything that happens after separation must happen, and it must happen in a very specific way. The results of separation are not diverse or one option amongst numerous. There is only one way to separate, there is only one scenario that comes about acim when separation seems to have happened, and there is only one outcome.

If you can learn the essential, totally rationally consistent metaphysical structure of the separation, it provides you with a framework in which the whole thing just fits into place. A Course in Miracles by David Hoffmeister is teaching this metaphysical structure, but it is not always very obvious. Its obscure nature tends to lead people to not even realize there is a solid "core" to the Course or that you can use this structure to perfectly explain everything the ego does, the meaning of death, and what must be true based on it.

For example, separation from God is not possible, because you cannot be somewhere that God is absent. God is everywhere. This immediately tells us that, logically, to believe that this is possible is insanity. It also must tell us that to believe in such a separation is to believe in a dream, a fiction, something which is false or not true and not real. This is already the beginning of some very solid metaphysics, and many people grasp this basic starting point.

As you study the metaphysics of a course in miracles, which is rather deeper than just "the words" of the Course, you will attain a kind of pattern or set of simple laws that you understand to make perfect sense. These can be rather abstract so it can entail some learning to generalize the learning and understand that it's all grounded on a simple set of logic. But when you then get the simple logic, you can now use that simple logic to observe deniably any part of life, any activity or drive or way that something happens, and describe it in terms of what the metaphysics says about it, which will be the truth. Irrefutable truth. Provided your grasp of metaphysics is clear and consistent and you're not making subtle logical errors, metaphysics gives you the vision to be able to see the truth of what's happening or where things fit together.

For instance, lately, there have been debates about whether you can be in harmony with death. There were many opinions given. None of the opinions were relevant. The one fact is in what the metaphysics declares. In the metaphysical fact, the body is a device of separation, it is a deception, and it is within the mind of Christ. It blocks and hides what is behind it and its only function and purpose is to maintain the illusion of the mind being separate. Metaphysics also tells us that since God is life, and being opposed to God is the separation, the separation must be death. It also must be a fiction of death - a dream of death. It has to be. It also tells us that therefore when the body is alive, the body is still inside a dream of death. This also tells us that the death which occurs at the end of life is just a symbol for death, because what happens before it is also death. This is why Jesus says "death is not an end, it is a continuation."

Since metaphysics teaches that death is the opposite of life, and life and peace are one, and therefore death is not peace, we very simply can conclude that it is not possible for there to be death and harmony at the same time. This is irrefutable, perfect logic. This is the truth that metaphysics tells us. It has no strings to do with someone's opinion, someone's inability of understanding, someone's story of what they believe is true based on their so-called experiences, or anything else. It cannot be true that death and peace are the same things or that they truly can be hundred percent experienced at the same time. Yet many people have tried to justify that they are at peace with death or have come to accept it. They must be in denial. Metaphysics makes this clear.

The Most Commonly Asked Questions About A Course in Miracles

1) What is the nature of God?

To start with, it is imperative to distinguish that the true alive God articulated in A Course in Miracles is a non-dualistic Being, in Whom undeniably no contraries reside. The Holy One is the Creator of all life, a Being of clean Love and the Foundation and First Cause of non-physical truth and totality, the flawless One Who is all-encompassing, outside of Whom is factually nothing, for He is Everything. Our Source's nature can’t be defined or really understood at all, as Jesus’s explanations in the workbook:

   Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say "God is," and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something, not itself. It has united with its Source. And like its Source Itself, it merely

2) What is the nature of reality?

Reality as well-defined by A Course in Miracles is not a physical empire, dimension, or knowledge, since truth is created by God and as God is unformed, unchanging, everlasting, endless love, and boundless and unified perfection -- a non-dualistic oneness. The reality in the Course is one and the same with Heaven and perceptibly cannot be connected in any method to the universe of form that the world calls reality. Being unchanging, true reality is everlasting and fixed, and therefore any assumption of separation -- which is change -- is not possible and therefore no occasion was. As a non-dualistic state, the reality is beyond insight, since perception presumes a subject-object dichotomy that is integrally dualistic and so can’t be real. In A Course in Miracles, the reality is also synonymous with knowledge, the state of being that is Heaven.

3) What is the nature of life?

In A Course in Miracles, life, as created by God, has nothing to do with what we call or know of as life in the body. Life is the soul: non-material, non-dualistic, and everlasting. Possibly the richest states in the Course on the essence of life -- what it is and what it is not

4) Is the God in A Course in Miracles the same as the God in the Bible?

Jesus clearly states in the Course that God did not create this world, and thus on this basis unaccompanied, He is definitely different from the Judaeo-Christian deity. The biblical God is a dualistic creator of a physical universe that he creates by the articulated word, as noted in Genesis' first account of creation: "And God said, let there be ...... Thus, this world and all creatures came into existence as separated entities, existing outside of him. In effect, therefore, the biblical God creates by projecting a thought or concept outside himself, where it becomes a physical "reality," as witnessed, again, in the creation story in the Book of Genesis.

But the differences between the two are even more philosophical. The biblical God is very much a person who sees sin as real, and must therefore respond to it, first by punishment, and then by the plan of the atonement wherein salvation and forgiveness are won through the suffering and sacrifice of his holy Servant (the Suffering Servant in Isaiah -- Old Testament) and his only begotten Son Jesus (New Testament). The God of a Course in Miracles, on the other hand, is not a person and therefore has none of the anthropomorphic qualities of homo sapiens. This God does not even know about the separation (the Course's equivalent of the biblical notion of original sin), and thus does not and cannot respond to it.

Therefore, the God of the Course is not the God of formal religion, and certainly not the God of the Bible. In truth, our Source is beyond all concepts and anthropomorphisms and has nothing in common with the biblical God who has all the attributes of special love (a God who has a chosen people) and special hate (a God of punishment) that are associated with the ego thought system.

A Course in Miracles: The Message:

A Course in Miracles the message teaches us that there is a Voice for God in our minds that is always talking to us, telling us that we are: unlimited, one with all life, eternal, and literally invulnerable. That Voice is the Holy Spirit. There is another voice in our minds that we made up that lies to us and tells us we are: limited, separate, mortal, and vulnerable. That voice is the ego. A primary focus of a course in miracle’s message is to teach us how to tell these two voices apart. Once we do that we must choose to listen to the Holy Spirit and trust the Holy Spirit's counsel. We will always hear the voice of the ego while here in the dream but we should not accept its guidance or counsel about anything. In a course in miracle the message is not about the death of the ego, but how to properly relate to it.