Crossroads Dispatches

you will be coming into a fortune

"You will be coming into a fortune." - fortune cookie 7/30/07 from restaurant on Mission near 25th St, San Francisco   

You will be coming into a for tune.

For tune: what we speak reverberates in resonance with the frequencies of aether spun using nearly invisible light-threads striated into a tapestry of matter.

What we speak matters. Matters. Matter. What matters to us is alive in our every waking thought, vibrating wavelets, imprinting in matter.
 
What are you singing? What's your refrain? Who's in your choir?

crystal did you know: abracadabra is derived from the Aramaic word meaning "I create as I speak."   10:43 PM August 21, 2007 from web

I started reading The Chronicles of Narnia recently myself since as a small boy, Awen (twitter.com/awen8), a semi-fictional yet quite real character, was fascinated by the otherworlds that these children travelled to. It was an influential book in his young life, and perhaps the clearest murmurings of the beginnings of his musical, magical life.

"All this time the Lion's song, and his stately prowl, to and fro, backward and forward, was going on. What was rather alarming was that at each turn he came a little nearer. Polly was finding the song more and more interesting because she thought she was beginning to see the connection between the music and the things that were happening. When a line of dark firs sprang up on a ridge about a hundred yards away she felt that they were connected with a series of deep, prolonged notes which the Lion had sung a second before. And when he burst into a rapid series of lighter notes she was not surprised to see primroses suddenly appearing in every direction. Thus, with an unspeakable thrill, she felt quite certain that all the things were coming (as she said) "out of the Lion's head." When you listened to his song you heard the things he was making up: when you looked round you, you saw them. This was so exciting that she had no time to be afraid." - The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis (1st book chronologically in The Chronicles of Narnia series)

There are passages in William Irwin Thompson's visionary handbook for the future, Darkness and Scattered Light, that I've read and re-read and re-read. (And I hardly can read any longer. Alas for this once adoring booklover, most books lack requisite juiciness and zest.) This is one of them:

"Perhaps the best way for me to describe the re-creation of the past in the future is to follow Plato's example again to tell "a likely story."

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there were two brothers. One was big and strong and highly respected as a great warrior; the other was looked upon with scorn, for he was soft, gentle, and effeminately given to lying among the flowers to play his flute as he gazed at the sky. A time came when the town of the brothers set about the work of constructing a great temple to honor their gods. Since the oldest brother was the largest and strongest man in the community, the elders asked him to move the huge stones needed to make a truly holy temple, after the fashion of the ancients. The older brother responded with muscle, but he could not move even the smallest of the large rocks the priests wanted. So then in good warrior fashion, he set about organizing the conquered slaves in work gangs; but no matter how hard he beat them with the whip, the slaves could not budge the stones. While the slaves and the older brother were struggling with great effort, the younger brother came strolling in from his morning with the flowers and the sky. He looked at the people and the stones, and then he looked into the stones and recognized them, for he could see their names. With a smile he took out his flute and began to play. The older brother shouted that that there was real work for real men to do, but his shouts were stopped by an exclamation from the slaves, for the great stones were beginning to sway back and forth in rhythm to the music of the younger brother's flute. Stopping for a moment, the younger brother told the priests that they should speak to the stones and tell them that they were being moved to make a great temple to honor the gods. And when the priests had done this, the young brother told the slaves to take the stones gently by the hand, for they were very, very old, and lead them along the path to the site of the temple. And then he began to play his flute again. The stones began to sway back and forth; and as they did, the slaves gently guided them and the great stones danced themselves down the road into the place the priests had chosen for them.

Contained in this variation on an old legend is a racial memory of a lost technology... All our legends of magic and wizards are simply memories of the days of this lost sacred science. From the point of view of this ancient knowledge, matter was alive and was singing; if you knew its key signature cabbalistically, you could vibrate in resonance with it, and dance the rocks into place." - William Irwin Thompson

p.s. If ever there was a tune toon town, it's New Orleans. "this whole city throbs 2 the sound of musica, even in july." - text from Nola friend in July 

Art Spiritual e-Art by Maia; when I meditate with any artwork from the spiritmythos.org site (all available as prints and screensavers), my poetry is otherwordly, or more accurately, I'm attuned to my highest dimensional self and words dance themselves into perfect placing like stones fitted for a temple. (These poems are secreted away in an anonymous, public website - email if you're interested in checking out.)

I'm well aware that Maia's work is thoroughly copyrighted, yet I just saw the bumper sticker (clearly a sign from the blue-white starlings), "When in doubt, share."

Damanhur temple. A very real underground place. Go, should you ever be within a thousand miles of the vicinity of Turin, Italy. I spent seventeen or so idyllic, life-altering days there one fantastical August.

could you or I believe how fantastically weathly they all became?

I run across more & more hyperspace artists everyday.

Sometimes the art may arise unbidden from an unconscious quest question that arises from the seventh dimension or the fifth octave of our multidimensional existence. The question a breathing being of its exhaling its own universes, visitors and dwellers.

A play of consciousness that pervades every masterpiece of inbreath & outbreath, every interstitial realm, every parallel universe within parallel universe, fractally holographically multiversally limitless infinity. Questions that unfurl of their own without prodding like:

"How can perception, an act of perceiving which is receptive, be the same as the active process of creation?" - "The Infinity Codes of 2007", Starchild Global

Don't necessarily look for hyperspace art at your uptown museum. That art tends towards the retrospective.

Hyperspace art may show up in the guise of the graffiti artist, the street performer, the acrobat clown, the fractal equations playing with the astrophysicist, the bedtime story you're telling your child that morphs in the telling, the unusual conversation about the cosmic Egg, unicorns, simultaneous timelines, aborginal songlines you're engaged in the initial 3.33 minutes with the seeming stranger at the bank checkout line.

You never know. But on the other hand you know when you feel it.

You know because you are this multithreaded existence. You have been there in your imagination. A sense of deja vu so refined it is as ethereal as a griffin feather's touch. So subtle that you aren't sure if you are officially awake or merely dreaming this art into existence on the spot. You known this from the 'tween terras of sleeping dreams. And in the haunting dragon wind that flashes sweeps reverberates up and down your spine.

"We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?" But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin’ on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out." - Jack Kerouac (soul kin, a pioneer to the counterculture of the sixties and muse to many hyperspace revelers)

Here graphic novelist meets visionary comic strip:

"Quoting again Patrick Farley's visionary future [Electric Sheep Comic's Chrysalis Colossus, or, An Illustrated Blue Unicorn Travelogue], "Could you or I believe how fantastically wealthy they all became?" we can now see what this might mean. When wealth is separate from accumulation but refers to a richness of relationships, each person's wealth makes everyone wealthier. Art, the creation of beauty, will no longer be limited by what we can afford, for money will be art's ally not its enemy." - Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity (from Chapter 7, The Age of Reunion)

Consider treating yourself to a vortical excursion of your 360 degree spherical life. Unhinge from linear time and travel into your present future through the fiction of the graphic storyteller (they call themselves comic strip) recommended above: the Chrysalis Colossus.

 "Ask yourself,"

said the Caterpillar,

"is there really such a thing as a 'trivial occurrence' at all?"

- Chrysalis Colossus, by Electric Sheep (my favorite line)

p.s. "If a librarian isn't sure where to shelve a book, that may be because the material is interstitial in some way, not fitting comfortably into a single, conventional literary category." More hyperspace art is coming. In the very near future, and it will absolutely shatter attempts at single, linear, conventional categories. Boundless as outer space, through the art you won't be tethered to comfortable, single, conventional categories either.

Instead of discrete fits and starts,  digital 0's and 1's, on and offs, Boolean true and false - duality's offspring glides in one fluid fluxing symphony of electric hues and magnetic glyphs. Occupying many categories simultaneously they'll totally flabbergast librarians and curators. (The word category ceases to have meaning.)

p.p.s. No coincidence some of these artists were labelled ADD as kids: hyperactive, impulsive, inattentive quite often equates to hyperdimensional, spontaneous, nonlinear. Hyperspace art is quite ADD. Ritalin and other restraints are akin to the librarian's quandry, How do we shelve this confounding interstitial book conventionally comfortably in a single category on the shelf? Answer: It's not the book; the Dewey Decimel System ain't gonna work anymore, Alice. Consider this: take a second look at these kids not as defective, but as perfectly conceived for the age and time they are born into.

Art: A frame from Chrysalis Colossus, by Electric Sheep Comics artist Patrick Farley; glasswing butterfly photo via Splendid Pictures Around the Net (more transparent butterflies photographs there)...symbolically, as our own sense of transparency deepens, lightens, after the larval stage, and space pervades within and without, we 'bleed' more apparently into hyperdimensions.

my life is science fiction, or what a quaint old notion: the digital age

"Our guests today are a group of American artists from the Manual Age," starts the Tom Wolfe's essay on the Digital Age. The world's premeire illustrators of the 20th century from the Pushpin Studio are the esteemed guests for the current exhibit.

(Oh, shant be too long before we introduce guests from the Digital Age.)

The scene: Wolfe says is "the Suntory Museum, Osaka, Japan, in an auditorium so postmodern it made your teeth vibrate. In the audience were hundreds of Japanese art students."

The time: Since book published in 2000, based on the pace of the publishing world march, guesstimates it as penned in 1998. So too judging by the breathless infatuation of the Internet, and of the digibabble (Wolfe's term). Yup, methinks it's got to be gulping-kool-aid 1998. In another essay Wolfe says of Silicon Valley: "some sort of light shines still" - 1998, for sure. (In Rudy Rucker's sci-fi novel, Realware, Silicon Valley is a Rust Belt and SF is the happening scene.)

"...I wish I had known Japanese and could have talked to all those students as they scrutinized the primeval spectacle before them. They were children of the dawn of - need one spell it out? - the Digital Age. Manual, "freehand" illustrations? How brave of those old men to have perserved, having so little to work with. Here and now in the Digital Age illustrators used - what else? - the digital computer. Creating images from scratch? What a quaint old term, "from scratch," and what a quaint old notion... In the Digital Age, illustrators "morphed" existing pictures into altered forms on the digital screen. The very concept of postmodernity was based on the universal use of the digital computer... whether one was morphing illustrations or synthesizing music or sending rocket probes into space or achieving, on the Internet, instanteous communication and information retrieval among people all over the globe. The world had shrunk, shrink-wrapped in an electronic membrane. No person on earth was more than six mouse clicks away from any other. The Digital Age was fast rendering national boundaries and city limits and other old geographical notions obsolete. Likewise, regional markets, labor pools, and industries. The world was now unified... online. There remained only one "region," and its name was the Digital Universe." - Tom Wolfe, "Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill", Hooking Up

In 1995, people peered at me (I was living in Salt Lake City) as if I were a Venusian when I said every business would one day have a website. I'd been using email since the late 80s, and thoroughly addicted to listservs and Internet by the early 90s, switching from the virtual reality industry to the Internet industry circa 1994.

The second Internet company I worked for IPO'ed on May 22, 1996.

Per Henry Adams predictions, the 17-year Electrical Phase (aka Digital Age) is about up. In many ways, cyberspace is a smooth leap to hyperspace (hyperspace being my preferred term for Adam's Ethereal Phase).

For instance, I hear rumors that Google will be beginning its own metaverse to compete with Second Life.

Second Life's tagline? Your World. Your Imagination.

Your World. Your imagination. Sit with that a long while.

The Ethereal Age has already begun for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Henry Adams envisioned that the Ethereal Phase would "bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities." Expect the unexpected (and I'm not talking about any alternate virtual reality world).

I suppose I write this post by way of introduction, by way of warning, that the leap into imagination will most decidedly be trippy (no psychedelics required). And that trippy will be the way of things for the next few years at least.

Welcome aboard the rollercoaster. You must be willing to be daring & looney to the point of frisson. (Synonyms: shiver, chill, quiver, shudder, thrill, tingle). Yes, a rollercoaster can be exhilarating.

"The children who swallow the star are the poets - like Yeats or Tolkien - who become wanderers between two worlds." - Colin Wilson

Things slowly started getting a heck of a lot weirder for me last year when a book started writing me on May 2. Weird to the point that this sentence makes 100% absolute sense: "My life is science fiction," Terence McKenna assures me.

For forty days straight I wrote about what was vividly occuring within my life, and within my mind. 'Reality', fantasies and flashbacks were all weaved into the unfolding story.

This experience crystallized for me in an unshakeable, visceral, kinetic way that what was going on inside my mind is as tangibly real as what is going on 'out there'.(Hmmm, one day they may start to inextricably blend together.)

I'd tiptoe down the stairs each morning at dawn and open the sliding glass doors to the garden (the sheer spoken word 'garden' transformed the backyard into something much more magically imbued with numinosity) as the earl grey tea with bergamot was seeping and the bread was toasting.

In the beginning, the fantasies that wove into my mind were quite innocent, near normal. They encountered the everyday nature that was on display that beatific May: perhaps I'd see animals and goddesses lounging in the morning clouds and faeries exploring the morning glories climbing the fence.

Nearly simultaneously I'd begun a new romantic relationship with a dear old friend, and sometimes the fantasies would slip into the erotic (in my mind, the beloved and Beloved are fluid). And the erotic spoke of innocence too.

Each day the writing of its own volition started to challenge the conventions of the black-and-white mundane and fantastical categories (not too mention innocent and erotic). Hanging the laundry outdoors one day, I recalled Jack Kornfield's title "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry and immediately the idea popped in, Oh yeah? Hmmph! Laundry can too be ecstastic!!)

Over time fantasies and waking dreams would visit me during the day, not sit patient for dawn and dusk writing time. Symbols in the real world unsheathed their cloaks. It was later I'd learn via the 21st delphic oracle that many of these dreams and symbols were quite ancient and legendary and mythic.

Although well-read because of my insatiable curiousity, the actual fact is my education doesn't have much breadth (alas, engineering school does that to you).  So I had no way of knowing apriori that the things I was independently imagining weren't new at all but dwelt in the universal archetypal Well.

Weirder stuff happened still. And I only mean weird in the sense that if you have a certain fixation of what reality is and how reality should operate and what perception is.

By the time I got to day 40, I was all too ready to set the pen down. Too wild an adventure, even for me. I don't feel that way any longer, yet I forceably turned my back on imagination for months and months afterward.

Though, if you have a shaman's soul, well, it's only a matter of time before it feels familiar.(You can only turn away for so long. She's a charmer, she is.

And gifts aren't meant to be kept. Gifts are meant to be given.)

Near day 40, the wedding at Cana kept arising in my consciousness. (I actually knew little about Biblical stories, well, that was so before I started the book. It's embued with rich Biblical symbology despite my horror and protestations.)

Purportedly, at the wedding feast, Jesus performed his first so-called miracle. (Miracles are simply weird things that happen. And then we get used to weird.)

If you don't know the story, when the hosts were out of wine, Mary turned to Jesus for help. Here's one version that is a perfect telling.

"And Jesus said, Pray what is wine? It is but water with the flavouring of grapes.

And what are grapes? They are but certain kinds of thought made manifest, and I can manifest that thought, and water will be wine.

He called the servants, and he said to them, Bring in six water pots of stone, a pot for each of these, my followers, and fill them up with water to the brims.

The servants brought the water pots, and filled them to their brims.

And Jesus with a mighty thought stirred up the ethers till they reached the manifest, and, lo, the water blushed, and turned to wine." - Chapter 70, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, by Levi H. Dowling (entire text available online), I stumble onto this book at a used bookstore the day before Easter this month

images various mandalas from U of Maryland Experimental Geometry Lab; Flower of Life from Lightsource (myriad of products geared around sacred geometry: "all of creation is moving light"); and the Mandala Hotel

Bonus: The Henry Adams snippet:

"He envisioned a 90,000 year Religious Phase (what we might today call the Age of Modern Humans, Jared Diamond's "Great Leap Forward" of complex linguistic and cultural innovation which began circa 100,000 years ago in Africa, and led to the behaviorally modern Cro-Magnon invasion of Europe 40,000 years ago), followed by a 300 year Mechanical Phase (e.g., Industrial Information and Computer Ages), followed by a 17 year Electrical Phase (e.g., the Symbiotic Age), followed by a 4 year Ethereal Phase (e.g., Autonomy Age), which would subsequently "bring Thought [from the human perspective] to the limit of its possibilities." Given the difficulty of timing the start of each phase, he suggested that the asymptote (the phase change singularity) might occur anywhere between 1921 and 2025." - from A Brief History of the Intellectual Discussion of Accelerating Change, AccelerationWatch.com

the future was postponed so long that now the breaking of the longjam is going to look like Apocalyse

"Eternity is in love with the creations of time....[all of them.]" - William Blake

Totally forgot about Web 2.0 Expo until I got a note from Tara, then another from Brian. Ooops! Had every intention of going when I heard about it last year. One of those must attend events, I muttered to myself. (Well I guess not, seeing as reality has me in New Orleans.)

I am less interested in cyberspace these days than I am hyperspace.*

"Apparently McLuhan was right. It's technology that shapes culture more than anything else. The politics, the art, all this is derivative of what technologies are in place." - Terence McKenna

And what are the technologies of hyperspace?, I wonder. (I'm certainly not the first to ponder.)

Mathematics is one. Imagination another. (Ay, there are more...) Though I think both the beauty of mathematics and the imaginal have been languishing far too long in a dark age:

"Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: 'What does his voice sound like?' 'What games does he like best?' 'Does he collect butterflies?' They ask: 'How old is he?' 'How many brothers does he have?' 'How much does he weigh?' 'How much money does his father make?' Only then do they think they know him.

If you tell grown-ups, 'I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof,' they won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, 'I saw a house worth a hundred thousand dollars.' Then they exclaim, 'What a pretty house!' That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups."  - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To get you in groove of hyperspace, I'll introduce Terence McKenna chatting about his novelty theory which I recommend brushing up on (the referenced inteview with McKenna is a good start). The future McKenna speaks of may go into hyperdrive in 2012, yet it's happening, happens, happened right Now:

"I'm kind of inclined to the hard positions, I mean, why not, you know? And what a hard position is is not that this is a social transformation, not that this is a political dispensation, but that in fact it's a crisis in physics itself. And that we didn't cause it and we're not responsible for it. We're just being pulled along by something on the scale of an earthquake. And that it affects physical law...

[T]hey [the Singularists] take all these engineering curves--curves of energy release, curves of speed, curves of population, curves of information densification--and reach exactly the same conclusion, that some time between 2010 and 2020, life becomes unrecognizable...

And the trick, I mean, the motivation for my career, why I do this rather than stay home in Hawaii where it's very pleasant, is I think a lot of people are anxious. This causes anxiety, all this. It needn't. It isn't a bad thing. It's scary because the future was postponed for so long that now the breaking of the logjam is going to look like Armageddon. But it isn't Armageddon. [I prefer Apocalyse myself; the etymology of apocalyse meaning Revelation; hmmm, Illumination.] What lies beyond all this I think, is the first authentic human civilization. These are the pre-pre- times. You know Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization and he said "It sounds like a veddy good idea." So, that's my idea of how the future will look back at this scene." - Terence McKenna in interview, "CYBERDELIC: Hootenanny talks with Terence McKenna" (my best guess is this is a 1998 or 1999 interview)

images from Khunrath’s “Amphitheatrum sapientiae” (1604) and is reproduced as figure 145 in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy,  p. 291 (via paper, "Spiritual Alchemy: Interpreting Representative Texts and Images" by Karen-Claire Voss); wow wow wow, check out how beautiful math is at this blog, Not Quite Perfect, this Spiral Wave is one of tons

p.s. * One def of hyperspace: Multidimensional space beyond the three dimensions that we can easily represent. Another twist: N-dimensional space (hyperspace): Extension of regular three-dimensional space to n-dimensions, reflecting more complex multivariable situations. Hyper- indicates higher dimensional space than 3-d, e.g. hyperplane.