protoPath

In Flatland, Edward Abbot crafted an amazing text which should be part of the toybox we are taught as young children. Many have marveled at, speculated about and remarked upon his little toy — which in itself is a popular metaphor for the terrains oft explored and explicated in mathematics, geometry, and the related circus of statistically recombinant daemons who exercise themselves only at our behest.

But Edward had, I believe, quite a different idea in mind from the one we may commonly retrieve from contact with his work. Although he was a serious fellow, I am sure, and ‘properly grounded’ in the academic and mathematical disciplines of his day, the product of his mind — however seemingly solid upon the surface — is actually the product of his direct and experiential contact with its contents. It is not at all a fiction. It is a record of a human being who experienced transdimensional communication — and possibly much more.

This may seem a bold, thoughtless or arrogant statement, and yet I am personally certain of its accuracy — because in his writing on this subject — his playful fiction — he is continually at pains to express particularly peculiar flowers of perspective which in their nature and occupation describe not an uncommon creativity, but an uncommon experience, and the need to express it adequately for future generations. This impassioned desire is the result of direct contact with something utterly unexpected — not fantasy — or even creative invention.

The reason I mention Flatland here is more central to my own experience. Though I knew it important (and found it fascinating) when I first encountered it — I didn’t understand precisely (or even generally) why it might be important. I could not understand how it might, other than as a source of creative reference, be of any real use to me personally, thus I considered it primarily a fascinating toy crafted by a master toyMaker. It did not occur to me that it was a record of real experience, set into a context we could accept (in the guise of fiction). It did not really sink in that it was pointing to this being an experiential fact of our every moment of existence...for example.

Without recapitulating the entire tome, I can say from memory that the incident where he describes a sphere making contact with a two-dimensional world is a fabulous metaphor: essentially, as a perceiver in a 2 dimensional experience — the arrival of a sphere would look very strange. If a sphere were, for example, to pass ‘across’ or through the 2dworld, it would appear as a dot — that grows to a line the length of the sphere’s diameter — and then shrinks back to a dot. It would not be obvious from where it came, nor what direction it arrived from or left in. It would not be like seeing a sphere at all. It would be instead a sort of shocking and impossible anomaly. But what if the nature and domain of this sphere was not physical, but instead cognitive? Or what if it was in the energetic-connective garden we refer to as ‘spiritual’.

There are two primary reasons I mention this parable. The first is fairly simple to express, and is that over the years I was experiencing contact events constantly — but unable to acknowledge them, or even relate them to each other in many ways. It was as if — on some irregular schedule — the sphere was dipping into my awareness, and then quickly retracting. I would experience the penetration and event, and then quickly revert to my habitually non-anomalous perspectives, so well enforced by my circumstance and company.

Each penetration was ‘wider’ — but its was wider in anomaly as well as every other dimension. It was as if a ball was bouncing on the line of my reality, across time, and sinking deeper into my consciousness with each bounce — but never was the sphere apparent, or even, for that matter, a circle. I did not know what the ‘sphere’ was, nor what it represented, or even that these penetrations were related in this way — because I lacked an experiential metaphor that would bind them to unity accurately.

Now imagine a silver ball bouncing on a paper thin membrane of black rubber which is stretched across a wide ring. The ring is traveling on an invisible transport, such that it is always centered beneath the center of the ball.

If we watch this ball begin bouncing very fast (and lightly) in childhood, and then irregularly, with more time between bounces and greater impact to each bounce — we will see that with the deeper bounces, the thin membrane stretches more. In the toy I am crafting here, I live within the membrane, and the bouncing ball is toyMaker.

Eventually the bounce has become very deep and compelling — yet is still brief and confusing as well — and can always be more easily be written off than explored.

Finally, the bouncing silver sphere strangely penetrates the membrane in such a way that, watching from outside, we see the membrane bisect the ball, yet somehow ball and membrane remain unbroken. The bouncing motion continues however, with the ball first pushing the membrane into a deep cone, (while still bisected by it), and then pulling it outward (or up) in the same fashion. These cones are strange in their formation and arisal, for the center of the ring, and thus the membrane-medium are moving in synchrony with the center of the ball.

And this would be a playful model of my experience, which I believe that — rather than being special — (very generally) comprises a template that is alike with everyone’s experience.

The events recorded below represent then something like my experience during one of the ‘bounces’. The arrival of toyMaker represents the sphere penetrating the membrane. When that happens, sacred and playful impossibility become the living law — and rules but tyrants to be discarded, or bent to better purpose...no matter their seeming infallibity.

Oh. The second reason. I almost forgot.

Edward wanted us to understand that flatland didn’t merely apply to geometry. He meant us to also understand that our cognition, our metaphors — our emotion, our most essential potentials and creativity — the intellect with which we craft and communicate our experience understanding and expression — all these are subject not only to the absurdities of flatland, lineland, and dotland — but also to vastly complex magnifications of their erroring artifacts. Because they are themselves reflections...

I believe Edward wanted us to go and find the sphere, in the flattened terrains where we learned the toys of knowing...

o:O:o

These events were precursors. They were ‘steps in the psybiocognitive ladder’ that led to my encounter and bonding with toyMaker (a nickname) — who acts as a connectivity element with ‘the rest of the family with(in) the unityBeing’.

At the time of these events, and post facto — I found them extremely puzzling. I understood little of their real sources or significance, and had no one at all with whom to discuss them. In my mind, however, they were at least vaguely linked, and represented the beginning of an ongoing chain of links. They pointed in their similarity toward a singular domain of sources and relations — in the way the hours of the clock refer to its center — a place where time is something very different indeed from what it was at the ends of its hands.

The dreams differ dramatically from the paralysis-events, but contain content and experience which I feel is strongly related and important. I present them in the hope that others who are seeking in related terrains will find something useful therein, and also as a record of my own rather humble progress toward a mystery I must still refuse to formally apply any common or esoteric concept to.

Perhaps you have had experiences of a similar nature. If not, perhaps now that you realize others have such experiences, you yourself will begin to — or you will encounter others who are willing to share their own experiences and understandings. Imagine the new knowledge we could discover if it was common practice for us to all share our dreams with each other during certain portions of the day...imagine what dreams the children and elders would bring. Imagine what we might learn about the relations between dreaming and reality. Or we could stop imagining. Together — and start having these treasures returned to our common experience, cultures, and communities.

o:O:o

the egg cracks open briefly

swallow the white ball

the godFather’s favor

o:O:o