Multitasking And Art

"It's impossible for me to read this post, and these picayune 
judgments of the supposed sins of mysterious others without alarm, 
when all you seem able to do in this lengthy post is to project your 
own stinted childhood beliefs of what your own jaded fate might be... 
if you acted out the thoughts and acts you accuse THEM of performing. 

I'd like to know why you are placing the innocent others you accuse 
of bearing your own judgment of yourself (thereby creating them 
in your own image via insensitive, crude, born-in-a-barn implications) 
between you and your blown-dry, patronizing blasphemy of the spirit, as if 
to use their purported, worst-case sins as your defense AGAINST your own 
experience of God... because your own sins by comparison... are lesser? 

This gruesome chiding of the spirit forces me to disavow you (well, at 
least for an hour or two) in case whatever it is you got is contagious 
over the internet." 
_

I wrote this response to one holy man in the Thomas group, but then, used it exactly so in response to the very next post it seemed so appropriate and tersely to the point. Too bad I'm not immoral or unethical enow to publish their posts so you, dear reader, could see how your own professions stood up to it.

I don't actually care much what I write, but sometime pride takes over when I think I've gotten it just right. That I've written exactly what my muses told me to in order to make them happy they selected me to punish the world through via "neti-neti" (denial-not this/not that). LOL

I've just finished reading this article which is really about the memsistor:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/shuttle_nanotube_memory/

The real story of the memsistor is here or one of the links found at this Hewlett Packard Lab web site:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor.html

Honestly, I'm amazed to consider that I feel like I understand this discovery a little deeper than your ordinary bear because of sheer, random coincidence. This really is the the most astounding discovery in my life, as far as my interests are concerned, since the transistor back literally when I was a boy. I studied vacuum tube electronics after I joined the Navy at eighteen.

It startles me a little to realize how learning to weld pressure vessels using the TIG process allowed me to understand how they created this stuff in a chamber backfilled with argon. Argon is used in the TIG welding process to keep oxygen away from the molten metal of the weld. It's apparently used the same way here.

I can visualize nanoscopic levels of matter since I received my remembering vision, since it revealed to me how I evolved from a teeny tiny bejinning. In the vision I serendipitously found suddenly intriguing (but not on my way to the forum), the basic element which resembles an oyster pearl in my imagination might find a nano sized object to appear like boulders or at least huge building blocks from which it was to populate the Earth.

This seems like an appropriate spot to insert my disclaimer that I don't know or particularly care what "the truth" is. I don't write to discover the truth as much as I write to see what flows out of my arthritic fingers before they rebel against being forced marched this way. I try to capture drifting thoughts with words. I can't do that and verify the truth or falsity of what pops up alluringly in my mind's eye. I mingle joyously with the lower classes.

Hypnogogic Vs Hypnagogic Visions

I don't think what I "see" as a dreamscape with familiar beta brainwave characteristics is there for me all the ti-me. It sags into a Jackson Pollack painting until inspired by hook or by crook into "jumping out at me" as a comprehensible, well-shaped form that I can react to as reliably cogent. I don't feel forced to make it real with volition and curiosity (i.e., belief) if I'm not in the mood or for any number of other reasons that don't have to make sense except in a sensory dimension.

I'm referring to the hypnogogic stuff that dreams are made of, and I'm calling it hypnagogic material for lack of more revealing or appropriate descriptors. There may have been a nayme for it on the tip of my tongue once, but the cat got it. That damned felix. "Whenever he gets into a fix, he reaches into his bag of tricks..."

The characteristics I keep associating this hypnagogic stuff with acts quick like mercury, but just as quickly, this stuff gels into what seems like a solid when an abstractly constructed force like self-generated insight deactivates it via undirected conscious awareness that's scattered about by the solar wind like neutrinos newly released into the wild. Like the MM experiment where mere consciousness of the goal of the experiment alters the results. Movement and rest. Mulberry bushes. All fall down.

Sometime when I think I see something out of the corner of my eye in my
peripheral vision, and when I turn to look at it directly, it becomes an immovable object instantly. Like in the time it takes to shift from peripheral focusing to foveal focusing in the center of my power of comprehension. That's probably quicker than stopping on a dime or a New York Minute. '-)

All of this and that, and despite my distinct impression that this docetic force truly doesn't know of or emotionally invest in the notion that I am is has created a persona for the soul purpose of intently, pedantically, and persnicketibly observing it's unhidden, yet unperceiveable mechanizations, in order to mimick it's bold and unchallengeable non-decisions.

I finally made a decision about what I'm gonna do about upgrading the RAM in my present computer up to deal with the bottlenecks that have gotten more pronounced lately. I upgraded from 512 Megs to 2 Gigs. Fortunately my youngest brother next door helped to make it happen. I unsocketed the cables that make things go on the Mac Mini, took it over to his house where we could consult with the online tutorial at the web site I bought the memory chips from using his computer,

Neither one of us had cracked open a Mac Mini before. By following the instructions on the web site we got the job done in about an hour. We had a problem with one bent pin that was fairly simple to fix after we recognized what had happened, and when I brought it back home and hooked it back up to the peripherals, it worked like a charm. I won't hesitate to crack it open again.

The SSD I was gonna install got delayed for a few months. I wanna see what the improvement might be with the additional RAM. It's plenty good. It's faster, snappier all around, and smoother segueing from one task to the next. I may put off buying an SSD a little while longer. What will it hurt? The prices have to go down eventually, and the size has to go up just because of the competition from the major players coming on the scene.

I have two goals I wanna realize as far as getting another computer is concerned, and these goals are not necessarily intended toward future-proofing. Apple is coming out with it's own 64-bit Operating System. For all practical purposes this move will allow for unlimited amounts of RAM to be accessed. My Mac Mini doesn't have a 64-bit CPU. I could upgrade to one, but there is another problem. The Intel motherboard graphics system is slow. That's why Apple changed over to Nvidia chipsets and motherboard graphics. Because the onboard graphics can's be swapped out I'd have to buy a newer Mac Mini to get the Nvidia graphic system. I'm not sure of the timing, but the new system called Snow Leopard is supposed to be in it's final phases.

My other goal for a new computer is directly associated with SSDs (solid state storage drives with no moving parts). They're fast and swiftly getting damned faster. Not as fast as DRAM, but they're already faster than the SATA2 bus system can handle. Recently, the SATA authorization group put out the final standards for SATA3 that increased the bus speed from 3 gigs per second to 6 gigs per second, thereby doubling the bus speed, and it's still not fast enough for the newest SSDs. What used to be one of the slowest bottlenecks on home computers is faster than it's detractors.

The better solution to this rapid and somewhat improbable situation is the newest version of USB that will arrive supposedly in a year or maybe less. There is a lotta excitement over this development. It will be 10 X faster than USB2 that presently maxes out at 480 megs per second. The USB3 transfer rate will be well over a gig per second. What this means to SSDs is that they can be mounted in a small external box like any other peripheral and will furnish data to the onboard memory controllers faster than a speeding bullet.

USB3 will have to be built into the chipset of the motherboard or it won't perform in an ideal manner. The pundits say that's gonna take some amount of time to happen. There are rumors about just how long, but nobody seems certain. SATA3 and USB3 are prototyped and on their way to the sweatshops. It'll happen when the investor groups get greedy enough to act out of the fear that their competition will get the upper hand if they hesitate, and thus lose the entrepreneurial high ground.

When it does happen, USB3 will be the quickest bus possible for optimally using SSDs, and it'll probably be the most ubiquitous solution for personal computers which in a relatively short time will be getting incredibly fast and maybe even cheaper than the current crop. Buying a SATA rigged SSD now would really improve the boot times for both my Mac Mini, and the applications used on it, but in the future, the near future as I understand it, the SSDs will be built with and use inexpensive USB3 connectors, and I'd be mad at myself if I got impatient and didn't wait it out until they do. Maybe the new RAM upgrade I installed today will stymy potential impulse buying a little longer.

The Golden Rule Is A Two-Way Street

Hi Felix,
I thought the golden rule was "Them what has the gold makes the rules."
_

The wisdom books appear to suggest it might be prudent to let them think so. 

As a rule, I like to think I can back up faster than The Golden Horde can come forward. I've always liked to dance. The most troublesome problems I've encountered in this regard has to do with those dense, obtuse moments when I have taken it for granted that the male gender is supposed to lead due to his natural superiority over the "gentle sex". It has been an extremely humiliating experience to find out it ain't necessarily so. 

I didn't really know what a religious fundamentalist church meant as opposed to the religious tenets I was forced to attend to as a child, much less what fundamentalist forbade. Not until I married my first wife in a church of this sort. I had only known this woman for five weeks, and didn't have a clue about the tenets of the church where she and her immediate forbearers had been life-long members. Among other sins I didn't know I was committing was the one where they didn't cotton to no dancing... no how.

This charmingly beautiful creature knew when I tricked her into marrying me that neither of us could hold no truck with no sort of fundamentalism and keep our marriage together. Her religious upbringing was what she rebelled against during puberty. Why would she not? That's what pubescent kids do in some form or fashion in a strong youthful attempt to establish their own identity apart from home and hearth.

A decade or so after she divorced me I began to speculate about whether her marrying a deliberately adventuresome nomad like me was an attempt on her part to get shed of those early fundamentalist drummers she marched to, but when a dogma like that (or any dogma, I suppose) is installed as one's psychological framework from first breath, it is stronger than a mere whim on my part to dismiss it as merely problematic. I think I figured that if I had to sacrifice my career as a homeless bum, it was gonna have to be with some woman it was okay to dance with.  

To me, the Golden Rule is about how I seem to go around tediously showing people how to treat me by demonstrating what I respond to most favorably in the be-jinning. In that way I'm being respectful to the first part, literally, by doing unto others what I would have them do unto me. Frankly, I've been disappointed with the feedback contained in their tepid responses. 

It appears to be a two-way street by my word. By showing other people how to do unto me, it appears to obligate me to be on the lookout for what they're attempting to show me about how to treat them. Honestly, I'd prefer to live in almost total ignorance. With the advent of old age I may not have a choice much longer. "Free at last! Free at last. Great God Almighty, I'll be free at last." Yeah. Right.

Once I grokked that, it seemed selfish to bother showing other people how to treat me when there was suddenly so much to do about them being theyself, and not knowing what being theyself is all about. It's like I'm a traffic cop with all the right moves of an artful dodger. Okay, maybe "selfish" is not the best descriptor for the dynamic I got in mind. I hate to admit it, but I'm a bit of a control freak (Oh, shut up! I heard that collective groan of "No shit, Sherlock!").

When people I open up to show me time and time again how they want me to treat them by how the way they treat me, that information presents a problem for me. The problem? I gotta interpret what I think their original intent is by referencing my own experiential database, in order to ascertain what-I-think-I-would-intend by imitating the self-same behavior in my person.

Candidly, at the end game, I usually wimp out and settle for so-me random idea of their intent, and for my reasons instead of their reasons. The content of this very unreliable channel of information is horrible for making friends and influencing people. They get all sullied out, and angry that I don't appear to be listening to how they counting the ways they want me to love them, and maybe, by God, I wasn't listening. It seems like for some people, no matter what, I don't have the ears to hear them. What a drag, man. I gotta do mo' bettah.

Spending Another Day At The VA Hospital

I started writing this by replying to an e-mail about A Course In Miracles in the Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion group after I got home from keeping appointments at the VA Hospital. I stopped by Rainey's house on my way home. By the time I got here it was almost darktime:

http://www.acim.org/

Here's a link to the article in Wikipedia. Sometimes Wikipedia offers a general, overall view of a topic that gives me the short version that's more useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Course_in_Miracles

I've never studied the ACIM. It doesn't make sense to me to replace one Christian dogma with another. That's for people who have not experienced gnosis, or don't remember having experienced it. A person needs something to say when it's their turn to talk, and the ACIM is as good, and probably better than most views of Christianity if you're disenchanted with the Christian culture you were raised in.

Experiencing gnosis is critical, but experiencing it was/is just the beginning. The "beginning" or bejinning for me was the unexpected occurrence of a vision I couldn't have prayed for. I couldn't have imagined what did happen could have happened. That's why I couldn't have preyed for it either. So, what am I saying?

I am saying that I consciously experienced a vision so profound it took me thirty years to figure out how that vision could have turned out to be what is historically been called gnosis. When that vision happened to me, I was afraid to tell anybody about it, but I somehow knew that if I didn't testify about what happened, then I would forget it happened. I did not want that to happen, and so I told a few people about it. I was right. Nobody believed me. They thought I was crazy and didn't hesitate to tell me as much, unfortunately, in a very public way sometime. 

It was fortunate in the long run. I had the vision when I was 30 years old just after my first Saturn Return. By that time I had already been called crazy so many times I agreed to volunteer to commit myself to the State Hospital a year or so before I saw the vision. Calling me crazy after that was useless as a tool for refuting my sanity. 

I worked at being able to explain what happened for a long, long time. I began to study the occult. First by following this guy I met in Boulder to learn the Tarot spreads, then astrology and palmistry. I needed something to say when it was my turn to talk that would help me understand this vision, but I didn't even know that it was the vision that I needed to understand. I thought it was more important to understand jumping off cliffs and leaving my body standing beside the road hitch-hiking while I explored outer space. 

Eventually I ran across Pagels' book about the gnostics. Reading her book was what started me thinking about how that vision of singularity was what she was writing about. That was previous to the existence of personal computers and later the internet and this discussion group. I  subbed to the group when I connected reading Pagels' book to the Gospel of Thomas. 

When I read about a discussion list about the Gospel of Thomas, it was the scholars group that I read about, but by the end of the paragraph that was a mention of the non-scholar's group. I clicked on the link that got me here and never felt the slightest interest in the scholar's group, and still don't. 

One thing led to another, and I begin to take Klaus' argument for doceticism serious. I began researching doceticism and realized doceticism has it's roots in the same experiences as Kundalini. You see, experiencing Kundalini was what caused me to check myself into the insane asylum, not gnosis. My vision that brought gnosis to me happened five years after I experienced Kundalini, and I"m fairly convinced they're connected and part and parcel of the same experience.  

Keeping Up While Staying Home

I've watched at least four TEDtalk videos today. The web site on the Talks have links to several categories of talks. I like choosing from the videos grouped under most popular. Interestingly enough, my favorite videos were among the site favorites.

Before I started listening to the TEDtalk series I listened to a lotta Google videos on consciousness. Now most of those are on youtube, but there are a lot of free lectures and even college courses free over the internet. I like the idea of it, but lectures and powerpoint talks get to be all the same after a while.

I think the reason I am enjoying these TEDtalks are because the presenters are there to talk about what they're fired up about, but they are also very entertaining. For all practical purposes they are sometimes as funny as professional standup comedians, and why would they not be?

Early in life, however, the Baptist preachers who used to come around the circuit to preach at our local church. There was a distinct difference between the traveling preachers and the ministers. The evangelists were there to get people all riled up with hell's fire and brimstone. They weren't gonna be around to take the flak next week when the energy they stirred up dissipated in their absence. The ministers were.

I watched a video this afternoon that feature Malcolm Gladwell who authored the book I've been writing about since last fall called Blink. His talk was about spaghetti sauce and the research guy who invented "chunky" spaghetti sauce. Malcolm is not only a good writer, but he's a good orator too. A fine storyteller. Instead of telling the Jesus stories and passing the plate, he wrote his own stories and passed the plate. Got rich doing it. Thinks it was the cat's meow. No blame.

The only classes I liked in college were the ones that had good orators for teachers. Maybe one of the reasons I never got a degree was that I refused to take courses that had boring teachers. Sometime it took half a semester for me to figure that out. Hardly ever did I go through a formal process of dropping their classes, I just stopped going. I got a lotta "F's" that way.

On the other hand, I took as many courses as I could in Geography without changing majors because I liked the geography school's department head's lectures. He was very charismatic, and I learned an awful lot of geography without trying.

I knew from watching my parents that neither of them taught the topics they claimed expertise in. They both taught life and what they thought you oughta know about it to get ahead. I don't think I had much choice about looking for that sort of teacher wherever I went to school. Between five years worth of GI Bill money and two different full four year scholarships I took what I wanted and threw the rest away.

I'm paying for my selfishness, but it's been a good run. Rather than having learned to earn to consume I've learned to do without. I'm a natural miser. It was easy once I realized that nobody had a clue about why they did what they did. They just ate what they could keep down.

Just Who Do You Think You Are?

Abandoning who-you-think-you-are gets easier the more often you do it. It's the same thing that's expected from the dead person when the Tibetan lama reads to it from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The problem in both cases is that the dead person or idea of yourself doesn't know it's dead. It's a big deal in the now defunct Tibetan culture because they claim the spirit of the dead person will be approached by a series of globe-like lights by which the spirit is supposed to let itself be absorbed into the light, but any resistance will stop it from happening. The biggest problem is that the spirit of the dead person can't accept that they're dead, and pay attention to what's being offered on a one-time-only basis.

I'm saying there is who-you-think-you-are, and neither were or will be. If the dead person's spirit refuses to accept that it's past life no longer ex-is-ts, but now, only is, and no more, chamber doors not withstanding...

That's why some pundits preach against the sin of needing to feel like an important person. Writers like Carlos Castenada claim that desire is the biggest impediment to spiritual understanding there is. Spending any time at all attempting to convince the other the world owes you a living is time you could have spent waiting for the colors to be-co-me with in order to matriculate to the next quest. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

It's the same way I interpret The Fool card in the Tarot deck. It's the zero card. It's neither high or low. But, if those in the high arcane to pass to the low arcane, and those in the low arcane wanna pass to the high arcane, both parties have to find a way to change who-they-think-they-are into who-they-thought-they-were.

They have to abandon completely their old way of doing or it gets in the way of where they're trying to go. They have to let the dead past bury it's own dead in order to attend to the light at the end of the tunnel, and in as fully conscious a mode as possible. It's only when the living spirit of the dead man realizes that what he was is now a mere carcass, that it can let go of what it was and let itself be absorbed unknowingly into what it can be. Maybe it's not just a species flaw. That the part that has to be overcome. The spirit not only has to let it's dead past bury it's own dead, but it's got to let itself be absorbed into a future of which it knows not.

It's pretty much the same story with the Grail quest. Percival, the country bumpkin tried to obey the laws of a gallantry instead of simply asking the Fisher King where it hurt when he was carried before him on a litter.

It's my ill-considered opinion that these myths and fairy tales depict the same story as that of the first Saturn Return in the system of astrology. The Saturn Return happens when the planet Saturn completes it's first orbit around the Sun 29 1/2 years after the native draws they first breath. It's reputedly when men let go of the personality they were raised to have and take on their own individuality.

The first part of life is a process of individuation culminating in the Saturn Return. It was written that the age of thirty is when the boyhood life of Jesus got in his way, and he offered it up for crucifixion as baggage to be abandoned. He had to become something else, and being his Father's son could be a real drag. So, he did the suicide-by-cop routine to put it all behind him, then retired with Mary Magdalene in the south of France the wine industry was well established, and he wasn't obligated to turn water into wine except on special occasions.

It's how the native reacts to the transformation wrought by their Saturn Return that determines how the rest of their life will go subjectively. That's because it's at this juncture that one realizes their fate is in their own hands, and that facticity can be a curse as well as a blessing.

I just got through watching this TEDtalk video by this woman percussionist on how to listen:

http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html

She is a great communicator and she knows her subject. I was astounded by her skills with her hands and how she plays the drum and the vibraphone. She uses them throughout her talk, but at the end of her talk she plays the vibraphone, and it truly astounded me. I wanted to grab somebody by the elbow and direct them to look at what this woman was doing. I wanted to scream at my children, "Look! Look at what's she's doing. That's what God is like!"

Maybe I Left Something Out

I wrote something for yesterday, but it was so boring (even to me) that I couldn't even edit it and give it any worth.

There was possibly another activity going on besides me standing before the Moody Blues poster reading the lyrics of some of their songs. I was standing in front of the Moody Blues poster because I was at a house I'd never been inside of before. I was at this house in order to smoke a joint with the people who lived there, and the woman who lived in the same house I did. This happened forty years ago, but not necessarily forty years ago today.

I had some sort of relationship with this woman and she with me that neither of us appeared to understand. We slept in the same room most of the time, and made love with other people at the same time in that room, but although we got nakid together and tried to have physical sex together, it never worked out. We didn't excite each other in that way.

Since we didn't have a physical relationship and we made love with other people without any apparent problems there was no real reason for us to be jealous of one another, but we kind of were jealous, but maybe that's not the best term to describe what happened between us. It didn't last forever. Later, she became rather contemptuous of me and soon enow she appeared to deliberately avoid my presence.

I can't really know what my bottom-line motives for insisting on going over to those college boy's shared house to get high or in order somehow to protect Marion. By that I mean to say that I knew that my going over there to their house for any reason meant that if anything happened to Marion, I'd know where she was that night. She was notorious for having sex with several or more men one after the other.

She took the "free love" aspect of being a hippie very seriously. I never entertained the thought she was doing it for money. Most of the college kids she was boffing didn't have any money to pay her. Contrarily, she was doing what prostitutes do, and it wasn't a secret. She seemed sort of like the women that Jack The Ripper types would murder for the good of the world. A high number of serial murderers appear to choose mostly prostitutes and so-called "loose women" for their victims.

That might have been in the back of my mind as the real reason I sort of forced the guys into inviting me to go with them when they came by to pick up Marion, by insisting that they get me high or I'd put the kibosh on their romantic plans.

Anyway, when we did get to the house where they lived, and we all went inside, and they hurriedly brought out their stash and started passing joints, I knew it was to get me out of their way as soon as possible. I toked enough off of the several joints that were being passed simultaneously to get what I was gonna get from whatever we were smoking, and to indicate that and to move toward the door to leave, I segued into the dining room behind the living room where everybody was sitting.

The dining room was not completely walled off from the living room. The two rooms were adjoined by a Spanish arch in such a way that the rooms were open one to the other. The poster was in a small alcove in the wall and lit by a black light so that the lyrics really stood out. I may have only pretended to read them while I listened for what was going on in the other room.

This is how my attention may have gotten split in the first place. I certainly didn't plan to have a life-changing vision in that instant. As far as I was concerned I was only in that room as a station I attended to use as an excuse to move directly from standing in front of the poster to the front door, and could say I was leaving on my actual way out, and be gone before they could even say "Good night."

That did eventually happen. When the vision was over I had forgotten why I was there, much less concerned about getting high or protecting Marion for any reason at all. I was desperate to find a writing implement and something to write down what happened on. They ignored me, naturally, the party had begun and not everybody was fully clothed. I don't think they even noticed I'd gone. No blame.