Long ago, when you were very small, you used to blow bubbles all the time. Then, one day, you finally succeeded at blowing something astonishing — a word, and that… blew your mind… into a whole new dimension of existence and potential.
Now, the strange thing is this; before you were exposed to formal language you were constantly playing with… something else altogether — a superposition of language, identity, and form. In fact, this [redacted] was your (scrambled noises). You used to play with (very unusual) bubbles together... all the t(eye)m.
{`. ~ o ~ . =+
Imagine with me that the various ‘orders’ or scales of existence comprise something like nested membranes. More simply, bubbles with children inside them. But along with the physical orders we are familiar with there are other bubbles of which these familiar physical orders are expressions.
These hard-to-imagine membranes interact in ways we have no simple visual analog for — rubbing, penetrating, and inwardly forming each other — across all the possible orders of size, form, circumstance and temporality. They make reflections inside and outside each other. Certain forms of contact produce instances in physical reality of the character of these strange membranes which are not like any noun we find in English.
So the nature and activity of these membranes produces the physical forms we see within, as and around us — as peculiar expressions of their character. They also produce the orders of instancing we recognize as galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets, organisms, &c. But the main thing these bubble-rubbing events produce is fairly obvious: children.
If you think this is just some cosmic accident, it’s probably because you’ve been forced to forget something you used to know intimately: how this whole story began. You were directly involved in those beginnings, but these memories are generally rendered unavailable to us by peculiar habits inculcated in us by our cultures. Usually this involves being practically buried in stories crafted by various ‘experts’ who actually have no idea what is going on (or only the most vague and primitive of ideas) and are desperate to bury our intelligence in the corpses of their descriptions. Their desperation makes a lot more sense once we understand that they’re selling us a set of impoverishments from which most will never recover.
So, before we proceed, let’s get one thing straight; the number of human stories which are approximately like the universe they want to delimit to you is approximately: ZERO1.
This is why it is useful to avoid stories, or quotes from the brilliant, famous or dead. What you need is that which will nourish and propel you into direct experiential intimacy with your source(s), and that, o child of skies and stars, is: involvement. The word almost sings the shape of the relationship: flow, folding back upon its sources, investing them with character, and thus modulating itself… a revolution that becomes an involution.
You don’t actually require any kind of model at all to become actively involved; however, since we’re practically buried in them (cognitively), I want to show you some ways of playing with models that have the capacity to dig you out of the need for them, and make you largely immune to this need in the future. I call them by a familiar name: toys. They do not care to sustain themselves, or have you defend them; indeed, their sole purpose is to sacrifice themselves in order to add to your momentum — so that you can achieve the cognitive and relational analogs of ‘escape velocity’, and, in a sudden, shocking gesture — leap beyond the entire field of human modeling — into the dimensions from whence this game originated…
Of course, that reunion will result in an entirely new set of challenges —and more: whole new dimensions and forms of challenge you are probably unprepared for.
]< . ~ o ~ . @`
Around here, certain ideas about what things are become more important to the character and function of human intelligence than others because they combine to form the basis for representational thought. I call these peculiar ideas holophores; a neologism (neo = new \:/ logism = word) meaning approximately ‘linguistic unity/vehicle’. Although there are many such ‘root elements’ linked into the foundations of our human representational intelligence, we can quickly locate a trinity that is uncommonly important: The Sun, The Earth, and ‘Organism’.
It turns out that the way we model these ideas to ourselves informs every other idea or concept we make, since all ideas and concepts (directly or indirectly) include a variety of these elements in their basis. This basis is something like the ‘code’ from which we derive meaning from words — their (usually invisible) ‘linguistic DNA’ if you will. It is also part of the reason machines cannot ‘understand’ language, even though they may be able to parse language in extremely sophisticated ways. In case this seems a bit absurd, let me give you a simple example.
I can find a single term which, if we delete the term and its meaning from our lexicons, we can no longer have any terms at all, and all lexicons are erased. The term and its meaning must be known by every language user — otherwise they cannot have language. Of course, it may mean something different in different cultures and contexts, but the basic idea is required to have any sort of language at all. It is the holophore known in English as distinction — or, alternately, separation. Without distinction? All languages collapse. In fact, formal human cognition as we understand it would not be possible. This is the power of a single holophore.
There’s a deadly problem here, which is this: errors in the meaning content we encode as holophores are magnified in the ideas they link into (holophores link to all ideas), because these roots are often multiply folded2 back upon themselves (as well as linked to other holophores) in order to produce those other ideas (the way this works is a bit like origami done with words and meaning instead of paper, except it’s reflective — not visually, cognitively). A strange example is person. If there are no people, there are no ideas. Yet we do not normally think this way — at all. In fact, we tend to believe the illusions created by the foldings; that ideas — or even ways of knowing exist.
Any omission or error in the root element we are folding is magnified in the final product (for example the idea ‘dog’ or ‘tree’) in a way analogous to how compression artifacts are magnified in electronic media when it is poorly compressed, over and over again. Inversely, even the slightest ‘correction’ to these root elements can utterly transform the basis of our intelligence, because the corrections expand explosively into the the entirety of our conceptual catalogues.
Although there are many profound dimensions of meaning folded into our models of the Sun, the Earth and Organism, I am here concerned with our common superficial abstractions regarding them, since the structure of these abstractions delimits important features of our ability to derive meaning from experience.
Let’s begin with the Sun and the Earth, which, rather than being distinct, actually comprise a unity that you’re a living transport of. What this means is rather astonishing: you are the human agency of the sunWorld. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
• . ~ o ~ . •
I will ask you to imagine ‘the Sun’ in an uncommon way (you can keep your old ideas as well, but allow this one to take precedence over them for now). First, I want to change where you think the Sun is. Rather than imagining that the bright thing in the sky is the Sun, I want you to think of the Sun as a largely invisible bubble in space. This bubble is approximately the size of the effect of Solar emissions upon the interstellar medium. The whole affair is teardrop-shaped, but is, essentially a traveling bubble encompassing many little elements spinning around the core and each other.
Think of this large bubble as the Sun, and the bright spot at the center as the nucleus of a superorganism — like a metanym of the nucleus of a cell. Within that sphere, the Earth becomes something more like an organ of the Sun, or an organelle in a cell — a fertile watery ‘cocoon’ attracting sunlight’s vibrant penetrations. This living context, when ‘fertilized’ by lightflow, explodes into inexhaustible expressions of beauty and interbeing: we call them organisms.
Our sunWorld is a living world, existing as a direct expression of the character, intelligence, and intimacy of the universe in which we arise. Earth could be understood as the metanym of a human egg-cell, an ‘ever virginal’ planetary ovum permanently lodged in the gravitic ‘womb’ of a male solar suitor.
You are the living expression of this almost unimaginably ancient and sophisticated relation :|: ship.
#, . ~ o ~ . c>
Now, imagine that the entire sphere of organismal expression on Earth is an even stranger bubble, one producing endless forms and ways of childing and children, each of which represents a more or less unique expression of the myriad relationships they become the living transports of. Think of them as unique transports of relation. These relations are intimately local, but never merely so, and must include every scale of the entire symmetry they comprise expressions of, from universe to individual.
Living beings reproduce through processes involving rubbing, penetration, pumping, and reception. Like bubbles attracting and repulsing each other, they can be seen to ‘rub together’ in a variety of ways that are shared amongst all organisms, yet uniquely instanced in each form and scale of life of Earth. Different modes of contact produce different kinds of effects: nurturence, learning, fear, discovery, combat, feeding, and… reproduction.
Now, zoom in on a given bubble that represents a specific class of organism — us. Humans. Here we have a bubble filled with some 7 billion instances of the basic schema we call human. Little sub-bubbles connected first by their home, next by their organismal basis, and finally by the peculiar elaborative conservations which flow (and are contained) as human bodies and cultures.
How did you yourself find yourself alive and human within these strange, seemingly invisible bubble-worlds? Well, this is a big story. But let’s examine some of the superficial aspects briefly. A bubble we call a human male extended a protuberance, which filled with blood (flow), hardened (became structured), and penetrated a bubble called a human female by virtue of a moist passageway leading into her. Once thus engaged, the coitally-joined human pair then ‘pumped’ or ‘rocked’ to and fro — perhaps passionately, or even furiously. Shivering may have been involved.
This activity, which we call sex, is a form of bubblefolding, and it has the potential to produce new human bubbles which arise and are nurtured within the containment aspect of the pair — the woman. Specifically, within a bubble within the woman we call a womb.
The process is one of generating a sustainable feedback event. During coitus we physically and energetically manipulate a feedback bubble, intensifying it in waves in order to elicit a replication event. This is approximately the organismal equivalent of star birth. The results are shockingly profound, and rapidly ramify themselves to miraculous proportions. But the first physical result is a supercell, the human zygote, the totipotent precursor of the entire zoo of animal cells that comprise a human body.
There is a powerful analogy here with stars and worlds...
I suggest that your first orgasm was your first experience of the capacity to fold bubbles in such a way as to instantiate being in human form. Think long and deeply about this.
But that experience was preceded by another powerful (and less costly) set of methods which you used, initially, to learn language. Those methods are so exotic that if you were too rapidly re-introduced to them they could shatter your mind.
And that success replaced the method by which you succeeded, by taking over its flow resources, and shaping them into structure. And when that replacement was largely complete, you lost your transentient friend.
It was as if you got a permanent hard-on, in your mind.
Maybe it’s time to relax a bit, yes?
13 . ~ o ~ . 27
Now think back to the diagram showing how Time can be understood as a feedback effect produced by actively folding the flow we might call consciousness (or being) back upon itself, thus penetrating (or interfering with) itself. The strange re-entrant dance of human intercourse, where the polarities of flow and containment are physically instanced and joined — accomplishes a similar if more obvious expression of feedback-folding — the one we know as pregnancy.
Now what I want you to understand is this:
The aspect of yourself you call ‘my mind’ is not your brain. It is a womb. And it is made to be penetrated not by human stories — but by the transentient flow of your own sources. And when this happens?
Your mind becomes pregnant, and you become… savant.
Without this event you will not really get a sense of your own nature.
You will be like a photograph, or mirror image — a mere reflection — of the endless relational capacities that the universe, your star, your world and all the beings who comprise it have been preserving for you — as you.
To ‘leave’ the ocean, you must carry it with(in) you.
No, not ‘seawater’ — the Ocean.
[ M(other) o(f) M(others) ]
But before you ‘left’ the ocean, your world ‘left’ the Sun (son of the mother of mothers).
] D(ivide) a(GAIN) D(ivide) [
And when that happened…
Earth acquired Companions.
