The Keys to My Karma

Many long years since I put pen to paper
My mind's full of mist or possibly vapour

And so my new poem is bound to be vapid
whether or not the wordflow is rapid.

But what can I tell you, what have I learned?
What have I clung to, what have I spurned?

Fell in love with my self for a decade or three
but came to my senses eventually.

And then I began to notice my flaws
transgressions, obsessions and festering sores.

I felt down, I felt out, and very unhappy
My life seemed so empty, and yes, rather crappy.

Until I remembered the rule that is golden
the one that ensures one is never beholden.

As long as you give as much as you get
you'll be free as a bird, don't ever forget.

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eBooks by Cosmic Rapture
(for kindle, tablet, smartphone or e-reader.)

NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS. This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously and grotesquely illustrated.

AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?). We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.

MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS. A disturbing repository of quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.

MASTRESS & OTHER TWISTED TAILS. An unholy corpus of oddities, strangelings, bizarritudes and peculiaritisms, including but not limited to barbaric episodes of herring-flinging and kipper-kissing. A cacklingly bizarre read that may induce fatal hysteria. Not Recommended!

FIENDS & FREAKS and serpents, dragons, devils, lobsters, anguished spirits, hungry ghosts, hell-beings, zombies, organ-grinders, anti-gods, gods and other horse-thieves you wouldn't want to meet in a dark cosmos. Immature Content! Adults Maybe.

HAGS TO HAGGIS. An obnoxious folio featuring a puke of whiskey-soaked war-nags, witches, maniacs, manticores and escapegoats. Not to mention (please don't!) debottlenecking and desilofication, illustrated. Take your brain for a walk on the wild side. Leave your guts behind.

We are all strange loops

In “I am a strange loop” (2007) Douglas Hofstadter proposes that the self -- personal consciousness -- is a pattern. Hofstadter notes that patterns exist at different levels of resolution, ie at different points on a spectrum of granularity, from coarse-grained to fine-grained.

Here’s an example: Jack and Jill are persons who know each other. Per Hofstadter’s idea, the knowledge of Jill in Jack’s mind is as much a valid part of Jill as Jill's physical body is part of Jill. But the knowledge of Jill in Jack’s mind is “low res.” compared with the knowledge of Jill in her own mind. Jill’s actual body and mind are at the highest res available.

Extending the idea: A photograph of Jill is part of Jill. And so too are letters written by Jill, letters written about Jill, clothes worn by Jill, memories of Jill in the minds of her friends: these are all parts of Jill. Every part and aspect of reality touched by Jill in any way, is part of Jill — the “Greater Jill”, the total, aggregated footprint of Jill upon Reality.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the various parts or aspects of Jill is the extent to which each is subject to change. Everything is subject to change, but some things change less than others. A digitized photograph of Jill uploaded to the internet is less subject to change than Jill’s physical body.

See fish below the submariner's temple

SEE-FISH BELOW THE SUBMARINER'S TEMPLE, roughly 60cm x 50cm. Oils. finalised in 2000, maybe?

The eyes of Poseidon are deeper than guile
swimming in tears that drown every smile
while always the temple looms on the hill
in the clouds from which the rainwaters spill.

Frozen in time eternity sleeps
in the place where a god eternally weeps
on the shimmering shores of an unmapped ocean
the sand is drenched by waves of emotion.

.

... Not published in AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY for kindle, tablet, smartphone or e-reader.

We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes. Read 'em and weep!

Enlightenment? Or a Cold Beer Instead?

MAYA, MIRROR OF ILLUSIONS by A.B. Davies

What is this thing called "enlightenment" and why would one want it?

I've got nothing against the concept: I just want to know what the specific benefits are. As it says in the poem in the previous post (below): One wonders why oneness is set as a goal.

Unfortunately, there's not much hard info on the benefits of enlightenment, nor on what it is exactly or how it manifests or how to achieve it. It's one of those slippery words/concepts, like "God", that can mean many things to many people. Conveniently though, we can identify a small number of broad themes to help make sense of all the detail.

Enlightenment is believed to involve:

• escaping the endless cycle of reincarnation -- the recurring samsara of birth, death, rebirth -- in which every soul is believed to be trapped
• quantum entanglement in the biological sense, ie being "at one" with all living things
• getting closer to God (I don't know what "closer" or what "God" means; but some people do, apparently)
• absence of personal identity, or the state in which one finds oneself after losing oneself
• living outside of time / "living in the now", a technique believed to lighten the (alleged) psychological burden of regrets about the past and anxieties about the future
• accessing lost or secret knowledge about how things really work, and our individual roles in the process
• seeing through the illusion, the maya, of a time-bound, material world in which everything is relative to every other thing, and nothing stands still long enough to be real.

cognitive dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance, by SRS, Oils on art paper, 42 cm x 29.5 cm, Can't think of an appropriate title -- any suggestions?

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Note to Self

Must find out why I'm here.
Must discover where "here" is.
Must clarify what I am.
Must understand what "what" is, and why.
Must identify when now is, and how.
Must do all of the above, then die.

Not published in AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY for kindle, tablet, smartphone or e-reader. We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.

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The Assembly of Peaceful and Wrathful Deities

The male buddha Vairocana in union with the female buddha Akasadhatvisvari.

This post is about the so-called "peaceful and wrathful deities" in The Tibetan Book of the Dead (deluxe edition, Penguin, 2005).

Here's a crude summary: when you're dead, initially you may encounter things that may seem to be deities but which are really just products of the mind/imagination.

According to the Book (p 387), the deities are symbols that emerge from:

the meditator's own awareness ... and sensory and mental processes.

The 42 symbols of peacefulness:

represent the quiescent natural purity of these fundamental components of our being.

Up close and personal

This image features the head of an extra-terrestrial lifeform superimposed on 'Vitruvian Man', a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)

The nature of interactions between persons is determined by the extent to which one person believes another is a person.

In the apartheid years in South Africa, for example, the Dutch Reformed Church rationalised the harsh treatment of black people (“non-whites”) on the basis that they have no souls, do not qualify for salvation, and therefore should not be treated as persons. This twisted logic was frequently included by Dutch Reformed Church ministers in their Sunday sermons to the volk.

Slavery is another example. As the property of the slave-owner, slaves were (and in some places still are) used, abused, bought, sold, burnt, broken and disposed of as if they were pieces of furniture. Clearly, a slave is not a person in the eyes of the slave-owner.

Dictionary.com lists a number of different meanings of “person” including “…a human being as distinguished from an animal or a thing.” “Person” can also mean “a self-conscious or rational being (in the philosophical sense)”, or “a group of human beings, a corporation, a partnership, an estate, or other legal entity (artificial person or juristic person) recognized by law as having rights and duties.”

So an animal can never be a person, according to at least one dictionary. Of course, the Indian government would disagree, having declared dolphins to be non-human persons.

There are many different definitions of “person” but they all belong under either (but not both) of the following two headings:

• Every person is a human.
• Every human is a person.

The Guts and Toes of the Meaning of Life

Engraving by an unknown artist first appearing in Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. The caption (not shown here) translates to 'A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet...'

We’ll get to the meaning (and purpose) of life later, but first we need to talk about guts, toes and strings.

Physicists tie guts and toes with string. Or to put it less simply, string theory is seen as a promising way to integrate grand unifying theories (GUTs) with theories of everything (TOEs).

GUTs are about unifying three of the four forces that physicists call fundamental. “Fundamental” means there are no others. "Fundamental" means that across the whole of the universe are no forces, powers or energies other than the fundamental four: electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, and gravity.

Every force is one of the four fundamentals or is based on one of the four. Centripetal and centrifugal forces, for example, are just gravity in the round. Nuclear energy is the strong force flexing its muscles. Radioactivity is the weak force at work.

Electricity and magnetism have been unified: they are different aspects of the same underlying force, electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism and the weak force have been unified into the electroweak. To put it less simply: electricity, magnetism and the weak force are thought to have once been the same thing, or at least, different aspects of the same thing.

And you're not wrong if you think this is all weird, strange or abnormal. In fact, renormalizing the electroweak was how three nerds (Glashow, Salam and Weinberg) earned their Nobel Prize.

The strong force keeps it all together. What is it? It is ordinary matter (as opposed to non-ordinary matter, called dark matter, which is believed to exist but about which we know very little). Specifically, the strong force binds protons and neutrons into nucleons, and confines quarks to their hadrons. (Jeez! It’s got to be true, you just can’t make this stuff up!)

It is thought that the strong and the electroweak were once unified but went their separate ways shortly after the big bang.

GUTs are about unifying three of the four fundamental forces. TOEs are about unifying all four. Unfortunately, the fourth fundamental force, gravity, has a mind of its own and continues to go its own way. Relatively speaking, of course!

TOEs aim to wrap all four fundamental forces into a nice, neat, tight, little parcel. And the best way to wrap a parcel is with string.

Worlds without end

Drawing in René Descartes' (1596-1650)
"Treatise of Man" explaining the function of the pineal gland.

According to Descartes, cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. But aye, aye, aye, I’m tired of talking about me (i.e. I). Let’s rather talk about thought, without worrying about who is doing the thinking.

Thoughts exist. They don't exist in the material world, but they do exist somewhere. Thoughts are real. Thoughts are.

And what about feelings? Feelings are not the same as thoughts. You can feel happy without thinking of happiness. You can feel happy without thinking about being happy, or about whether the happiness is warranted, or about where the feeling of happiness comes from. Feelings don’t exist in the material world. But they do exist. Feelings are real. Feelings are. It’s unclear whether feelings exist in the same world as thoughts, or in another, non-material world.

Emotions: are they the same as feelings? Are emotions thoughts? Where do emotions exist?

A sharp jab in the I

Demiurge, painting by SRS, oils on canvas, 50.5 x 40.5 cm. In the context of this post, "Where's Wally" would be a better title for this painting, "Wally" being the lost and/or non-existent Self.

According to Heraclitus you can’t step in the same river twice. Why not? Because no river is ever the same; the water is never the same – there’s always new water flowing downstream. (If the water isn’t flowing, it’s not a river). In fact, not only can’t you step in the same river twice, the same you can’t step twice into a river. Why not? Because there is no “you” that stays the same.

Physically, you’re always changing. Your body is never the same. Your blood is always flowing. Your heart is always pumping. Cells die and new cells are born all the time. And living cells are changing all the time: their biochemical processes only stop when the cell dies.

Nor is your mind ever still. New thoughts, ideas, imaginings are constantly emerging then fading away. And if you think you don’t always think, think again: you’re constantly receiving information about the “outside world” via your senses. Even when you’re asleep you’re monitoring internal processes such as breathing as well as external factors such as temperature. Your brain is a perpetual motion machine – neurons are firing all the time, in sleep and in wakefulness, even in coma.

The Binding Opportunity

The so-called "binding problem" of psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, metaphysicians and other horse-thieves relates to the proposition that some aspects of reality are processed in some parts of the brain, and other aspects in other parts of the brain. It's believed to be a Problem because the neuromancers cannot explain how datasets from different parts of the brain combine to form an integrated, holistic consciousness--whatever that is.

According to Revonsuo and Newman (1999) the binding problem is "…the problem of how the unity of conscious perception is brought about by the distributed activities of the central nervous system."

For instance, say that Jon sees a red balloon floating across a room. The quality of "redness" is said to be processed in one part of Jon's brain, the shape of the balloon in another, the size in another, and the movement in yet another. Where then, and how, are these qualities or qualia combined to form the unified experience ("red-balloon-floating") in Jon's consciousness?

Who are you and who is in charge?

Dialogues (monologues? multilogues?) of the self, with the self, can produce understanding, empathy, congeniality, even love. But these solipsistic conversations can also involve negative emotions---hostility, confusion, hatred, recrimination, resentment, contempt, and the like.

Many a person who believes ze is overweight, for example, experiences inner conflict. Part of the person wants to stick to a diet; another part wants to feast on fast-food. This kind of conflict frequently involves a person arguing with themself, castigating themself for being weak and unable to resist temptation. But how can this be, that a person can be in conflict with themself? To be at war implies plurality. Yet personhood is a singularity. Or so we believe. Or so we are taught and encouraged to believe. But is it true?

Meat jockeys ride again and again

Soul, Self, Consciousness, Mind and Personhood may not be the same thing, but they are the same kind of thing.

• They all refer in one way or another to the essence of a person.
• They are all of the same nature: they’re immaterial ie non-physical.
• They all do the same job: they’re meat-jockeys, riding embodied brains.
• And they’re all immortal*, at least in theory (unlike the body, which can’t keep it together after death).

To a duellist the mind doesn’t matter, it’s immaterial. Instinct and intuition are critical in a fight to the death where there’s little time to think. Also immaterial is the soul. There’s little love or joy or oneness when you’re piercing eyeballs with a rapier. The body, on the other hand, is very material to a duellist: you can’t duel without one. In fact, you can’t even duel with one: only two will duo. Duellists understand how one opposes another, which equals two.

where consciousness lives

A process is a frozen pattern. Consciousness is a process and cannot be found at any material address in this or any other universe or reality. Patterns, on the other hand, can be found at many material addresses, including wool, cotton, polyester and many others in the fabric of reality.

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