“In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms — fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.”
— Newsweek, ‘The Creativity Crisis’
o : O : o
The Universe, the paraEmeTheos, the Emitters; and the Ersatz paraEmeTheos •
II~ : O : ~XX
Imagine your human life and body as a transport through which being-as-flow enters, explores and transforms timeSpace.
Although we often model beings as receptors (and agents), I suggest that this is incomplete: we should realize that organisms can be meaningfully understood as complex living symmetries that encharacter flow and direct it (as sensing potential) into the universe as an ordinary result of their participation in it. I visualize this process as involving a series of emitters that comprise a unity in the form of an array.
What we receive as sensing is not as ‘objective’ as we imagine, since sensing actually begins with something we’ve never admitted: the unique emission of encharactered sentience into timeSpace through (for example) a human being. Since this is occurring in a living context, that is to say a swarming intersection of endless participant contributors and recipients, each being changed by all domains of their participation, what is actually going on bears little resemblence to mere reception and begins to look complexly synergistic.
Each organism is a unique way of encharactering and ‘emitting’ this sentient flow into the world, which is changed in receiving and reflecting it back to us, imbued with the character it picked up bouncing around in timeSpace. The ‘content’ thus acquired informs our own character and development — and the source of the flow itself — which, at least eventually, modifies the flow we are emitting as sensing-potential.
By day you direct the flow into the world and the world appears within you.
At night this transforms, and the nature of the transformation is astonishing.
Iv~ : O : ~vX
There was a first moment when we encountered the open expanse above us. For some of us it was during our birth. Most of us had many encounters with the sky, however, before we were told what it was.
What is the sky?
vI~ : O : ~Xv
I dreamed of a strange living ribbon that made a loop.
On the other side of the loop,
a stray strand was sticking out from the edge of the ribbon.
The tip of the strand had become aware,
and as it looked back upon itself, it saw, indeed, that it was everything.
At first, it pondered: Could it be that I am the Source of Sources?
Later, it turned its perspective around, and was wonderstruck:
Ah! I am a child!
