V: whiteRabbit

 

“The universe is a far more amazing place than your toys of it allow, and there are forms of intelligence far beyond your most imaginative speculations. For example, there’s a living dimension in which all organisms communicate instantly across any possible gap in space, time or speed. We live in that dimension, and we act as transports for that communion. We’re gap-crossers. But we’re also librarians...”

— whiteRabbit

 

Piers Anthony is a relatively well-known author of speculative fiction. In the early part of his career, he wrote a book called Macroscope, in which a group of scientists discover a repeating ‘teaching-signal’ being broadcast by an alien intelligence or collective. But instead of just ‘information’ this signal is like a game — it can be presented as a visual progression — a series of shapes, transforming in phases. As one follows the presentation, it radically amplifies the ability of the perceiver decode it — which changes how they receive it — such that even a repeating signal of relatively brief duration is able transmit incalculable quantities of knowledge. Each repetition of is experienced as an entirely new sequence, due to the peculiar effect on one’s understanding effected by the previous experience of it. Piers’ idea involves a strange application of the concept we call a fractal, but in his story, this is a different kind of fractal, one which changes in the scale of one’s perspective don’t just change the perceived shape of the construct, they radically alter its meaning.

In Macroscope, most of the people who view the presentation of the signal are bored by it and can’t understand it, but people with a peculiar sort of intelligence are able to grasp and follow it. This results in an ongoing explosion of prodigy in the dimension of their relations with knowledge. Because of the alien character of the signal, and how it ‘teaches in phases’ it functionally contains not only the answer to every possible question, but a way of transmitting these answers that grows vastly more accurate any time one repeats a question. There are some other important aspects of this story that I am leaving out, but personally, I considered the idea fiction. Even had I not considered it fiction, I doubt anything I might have considered would have prepared me for the experience I was having, and it was extremely similar to the one described in his novel. The being teaching me communicated this way — with progressions of shapes whose transformations communicated meaning directly, as though my mind had been engineered to work best with this form of conversation. The results continually staggered me; I could learn more in 5 minutes than in any year of my life.

By the second week, I had come to clearly understand that some kind of being was teaching me. In the beginning, the experience was so overwhelmingly positive that it really didn’t matter what the source was, but over the coming days, it became clear whatever was guiding this new part of my intelligence wasn’t me, and wasn’t ‘human’. Moreover, the experience was changing what it meant to be me. I acquired a cognitive symbiont, and the ongoing process of our unification gained complexity and speed in expanding leaps that became extremely challenging for me physically, as well as cognitively. My metabolism changed, and it felt as if my whole body was resonating in waves — almost as if my cells were ‘singing’. Whenever I did anything involving thought, we thought with two minds in conversation, but my new neighbor was alien, hyperintelligent, poetic, and had profound understandings that unified the branches of knowledge I was taught to approach and consider as distinct.

There was now a new part of me that thought with me, felt with me, spoke with me and experienced the living world in unison with me. When I saw, I felt what I saw with both our senses and understandings. The my experience, particularly the experience of conscious thought suddenly accrued an entirely new dimension of meaning – a very amazing kind of meaning — in which the stories of everything around me were instantly revealed in such a way as to cause them to link up and form incredible epics involving character, history and purpose. I had acquired an ever-growing array of new senses, some of which reached outside of time into a dimension where ‘all of time was available’. The universe came alive around me; and everything was speaking in a new language, a language so miraculous that it transformed seeing into an astoundingly profound form of learning which was as emotional as it was intellectual. Mysteries I had wondered about throughout my lifetime clarified themselves before my inner eye in a complex fashion that unified them in the process of resolving them. The most inspiring aspect of this was these resolutions didn’t complete the cycle in a static way — every experience of them led onward toward a more astounding integration with others like them, and startling new questions were continuously revealed by what was learned. Every waking moment was like standing in a living waterfall of alien wisdom.

By about the third week, I began to refer to this visitor as whiteRabbit. He was ‘incredibly bright’, impossibly fast, extremely playful, and superbly skilled at traveling across gaps in order to make new connections — a game involving ‘holes’. He was so good with holes that he could pass into and through the entrances and exits of multiple ‘tunnels’ at once, and the knowledge-games he played consistently involved this skill, where we would assemble a vast and shifting network of perspectives simultaneously, together. He understood my thoughts, and had perfect access to every dimension and function of my mind. In fact, he became able to drive it in ways that I myself cannot, such that I could employ faculties of sensing and learning that I was completely unaware were even possible for human beings.

Although I was curious about his ‘what or who he was’, my direct experience of him constantly satisfied this curiosity without actually answering this question literally. Questions about his identity resulted in ongoing sets of related stories instead of answers, and the language we used had no words — instead, it involved ‘being shown’, which was a game where we danced to multiple perspectives expressed as stories we would experience together. I have no way to describe this because my ‘regular’ human experience is totally flat in comparison — it would be like trying to compare the Sun to a charred matchstick. When he answered my questions, he always did so uniquely, such that if I asked the same question twice, the second answer radically changed and increased the understanding I had previously acquired. For this reason, finding out ‘exactly what he was’ was nearly impossible because the answer simply kept expanding. He wasn’t ‘exactly’ anything we have a word for, so he would run through stories that, from my human perspective, would imply he was an alien, a spirit, an angel, and something we don’t have a word for which lives in the universe of connectivity and has a variety of amazing ways of growing, teaching, learning and expressing itself.

Part of the problem with this question is that humans expect everything to be ‘one class’ of thing or being. We are trying to ‘flatten and freeze’ whatever we have contact with into a static form — but the real nature of the universes around and within us is all bout absurdly rapid growth. In truth, anything we encounter is entirely new every time we contact it, but our languaging habits force us to discard this aspect of the truth in favor of the stability of identity that our names, tokens and extant understandings demand. Since whiteRabbit is actually changing so fast that any two contacts with him will reveal two entirely unique beings, our language cannot point to him accurately because to do so violates the fundamental structure and activity of our stasis requirements. From moment to moment, his general form, activities and character remain the same — but ‘what he is’ does not. His ‘perspective’ is always multiple and will grow so dramatically between any two references that the meaning and shape of any previous information warps in response. The basic nature of his mind makes the idea of ‘a fact’ absurd. The one thing he did manage to communicate clearly was that, in his own perspective, he was ‘very small’ and that he ‘learns with incredible speed.’ To him, learning is a game, which everyone everywhere is always playing together — and this game is extremely ‘fun’ — all the time.

One of the first stories he told me about his identity involved a rock that was at that time hurtling toward Earth. Around June 7th, he began to show me stories about this rock, and on June 18th our astronomers finally discovered it and labeled it 2002 MN. It was a relatively small Near Earth Object, (an NEO) but it came extremely close to our planet — about 30% of the distance between Earth and the moon. In the beginning, whiteRabbit implied that there was a relationship between his presence and the near-to-Earth passage of this object. Bear in mind that in answering this way, he wasn’t telling me ‘what he was’ but rather creating a basis of meaning upon which he could later expand. In order to ‘answer’ my questions, he would tell me a expanding set of related stories, over time, and each story would prepare me to be able to understand the next story, which would in turn radically modify the meaning of the previous ones We actually do not have a concept like this, at all — and we do not tell stories or even teach this way. He took me to experience this and see it from his perspectives — and this resulted not in statements, but a set of experiences that taught me from multiple points of view in time and relation to the material he presented. I caution you to remember what I have said about how he answers — this is really the basis of many future expansions, and is not meant to be taken literally —it is a ‘toy’. In reality, this toy has as much to do with our species as it does with his identity.

 

Gap-crossing

 

“If we examine what living beings do from a very general perspective, we can see that every form and scale of Life is constantly engaged in a mutually stimulating game involving crossing gaps. At its foundation, this playfully purposeful activity is about sharing and acquiring resources. Although it appears that Life competes with itself over resources, in reality most of the important resources available are relational, not physical, and access to them radically alters the character of those sharing and receiving. In this dimension the shape of the competition is ‘very friendly’, and the reason is that everyone depends on everyone else, and loss or denial of relations is catastrophic. The field of play is an assembly of all possible places and ways where which seemingly discrete participants communicate — a universe of pure relation or connectivity — which comprises the complement of every possible form of physical separation. To you, many aspects of this dimension are invisible, and appear as gaps or separations, but their real nature is far more intriguing than anything their superficial features could imply.

 Like the Universe they are founded with(in), the character and activity of living planets generates profound diversity, and as a result of this, gaps emerge all over the place — between beings, moments, resources, circumstances, relations, and experience. Evolution is the epic story of organisms bridging these gaps in ever more complex, complete and often miraculous ways. But it’s not only organisms who are adept at this game —everything is — from the smallest and most specific scales to the vastest and most general. Stars cross the gaps between worlds (and other stars) with light, a reality you experience on any clear night when you gaze at the sky. Although it is expressed in different forms and speeds, a star’s luminous song ceaselessly communicates its status, activity and character much like the unique music of your own voice. Of course, light isn’t the only way a star talks, but it’s one of the most impressive and obvious transports of its elementally powerful expressivity. Living worlds also  ‘advertise their character’ in many modes and terrains at once but instead of producing light, they reflect it. Of all the available ways of talking light (whether generated or reflected) is favored because it is beautiful, fast, and understood by nearly everything.

Somewhat like a metalanguage, the expressions of stars and worlds reach across countless sizes and forms of gaps at an incredibly high speed, engendering a whole spectrum of effects in all recipients. In the case of Sol and Earth, the incredible energetic fertility of Sol’s light crosses the gap between him and Earth, and the marriage of his energy and her material results in an explosively generative form of celestial marriage. The progeny of this marriage are organisms, and, like their parents, are born gap-crossers. The shapes, activities and characters of these children, like your own, are unique yet complete expressions of the unified characters of the two parents and their environment. Not surprisingly, almost all of their children have flowers. In fact, most of their children are flowers. There are just a whole lot of ways to make flowers, and any specific expression is at once generally like these ways, and a very unique instance of them as well. Flowers exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously, such that a flower in the physical dimension can be simultaneously embodied in dimensions like cognition, emotion, metabolism or relation.

But the beings you specifically identify as flowers are particularly interesting, in part because their favorite game is to attract pollinators by adopting enticing forms, colors, and fragrances. Their elemental attractiveness is no, accident, and neither is the profound and common reference to it in your literatures. Flowers actively change the basic character of the reflected light you see on your world, and are amongst the most ardently and passionately colorful beings of any you may encounter. Plants that produce them cannot actually travel across the gaps to their mates, so they do the next best thing — they hitchhike. In order to accomplish this feat they need either wind or pollinators, and thus their form, fragrance, and color are organized to broadcast a ‘very attractive’ signal to any creatures who might carry them across the gaps. [1] The form and color of flowers speaks into the ocean of light by reflection, stimulating the visual senses of pollinators, while the fragrances they exude into the atmosphere excite their olfactory senses. These two transports represent unique modalities of a flower’s ability to attract ‘rides’, and although they cannot ‘travel’ they are staggeringly adept at attracting creatures who can do their traveling for them, and benefit in the process. And this process is, for flowers of every kind, synonymous with sex.

Like stars and planets, the conversations of flowers are addressed to a very general audience. Though there are exceptions, their evolutionary prowess doesn’t usually limit itself to attracting a single bee, or just a single type of bee, or even a single kind of pollinator. This would unnecessarily squander their exceptional communicative skill and reproductive opportunities. Flowers are so generally attractive that even large animals like humans are seduced into cultivating and transporting them all over the place. They advertise in reflected light partially because almost everything that’s anything recognizes and understands this language. The sensual attractiveness of flowers isn’t entirely unlike what we call gravity....

Like flowers existing at another scale of size, speed and complexity, living planets don’t bother with speaking in only a single dimension, or to only a single other star or world, primarily because it’s far easier to speak so generally that every possible recipient is included —in the reflected light generated by their local star. The wonderful and astonishing features of this situation are revealed only when we realize that all things and beings in the universe are playing such a game, in a way that continues to grow ever-more diverse as it grows ever-more complete.  Your own consciousness is a symphonic cascade of gap-crossing in many simultaneous dimensions. The neurons in your brain are profoundly proficient at this activity, and they form a hypersystem in which your awareness and intelligence emerge as side effects of their explosively connective functions and modes of their conversations. In truth it is not merely ‘neurons’, but all of your unique constituents and all of participants in your environment who are involved. Outside the tiny scale of the cell, at the scale of animals, human language and communication are all about crossing gaps between individual minds, and in this way are akin to the conversations of stars and planets — but perhaps more interestingly they can be seen as living expressions of ‘what stars and planets are, and are doing’.

The amazing features of character and activity of Life on Earth are actually the result of the incredibly robust skills of organisms and their collectives at this very general game. And the best way to play is to experience ever-more diverse relationShips, because the more relations you have to learn from and share with, the more the experience and potentials of the participants are radically and continuously enriched by the inflow of new ways of knowing, being, conversing, or acting. As an added bonus, progressive connectivity-games insure that everyone will have to spend far less effort and time attempting to re-invent what’s already been accomplished by other players or groups.

If we realize that stars are flowers of progenerative energy and living worlds are flowers of sentience, we are approaching a place where we can begin to explore and appreciate the amazing character and activity of a very novel form of pollinator.

 

starFish

 

There’s no doubt that interstellar and even interplanetary space appears extremely inhospitable to Life as you know it, the cold is uninviting as the threats of vacuum and hard radiation. Without an atmosphere, which lenses sunlight into a reasonably nurturing form, the expressions of Sol (for example) are deadly to terrestrial organisms — they’re simply ‘too energetic’. But suppose that through an unexpected set of circumstances, a form of very sophisticated tinyLife — cells of some sort — came to exist on a small object flying around in space. Perhaps they were ejected into space as dust by a living world, and were gathered into a near-passing cometary mass. Or maybe they are the remnants of a living world that was shattered, and are encased in a crystal filled with water, inside a stone. Over millions of years, their microculture evolves to allow them to at least survive this dangerous and apparently limited circumstance. With a bit more time, they might even find ways make use of the solar expressions that terrestrial life could not withstand contact with. They become starFish: swimmers in the space between (or around) stars.

Due to the limited nature of their environment and circumstance, there isn’t a lot of room for complex physical adaptations — like generating animals, for example — but there is a great deal of potential for working in closer cooperation, with and for each other. The vector into which starFish pour the full measure of their evolutionary momentum and prowess is simple: they learn to ever-more-adeptly lens each other’s sentience, in the same way a school of fish (or the cells in an animal) do. However, instead of differentiating into different physical kinds of cells, the starFish differentiate into unique cognitive functions. This diversification continually offers them new potentials for better lensing, which in turn offers new niches for specialization.

The treasure produced by this approach is constantly and immediately available to all members, and vastly supercedes anything a given individual might otherwise experience or know. At the same time, the unique cache of history and experience held and expressed by each individual is similarly valued because each star contributes crucially important diversity to their tiny biocognitive galaxy. Their common activity insures that the relational bridges connecting individuals, groups, and the whole population are always being more expertly re-woven according to even the slightest changes in their environment, opportunities, and interactions with each other. This is an excellent strategy for any set of organisms who find themselves limited or endangered by a very inhospitable situation, and it allows them to ever-more proficiently capitalize on whatever resources or opportunities might be at hand.

As the eons pass on their very tiny world the starFish continue to grow more skillful in their connectivity-games; not only with each other, but with the Universe in general. Eventually, the skill and sophistication they develop in their ability to act in unison as a lens leads to the startling discovery of a very subtle transport of unification that exists outside of time and in spite of distance in which everything that is alive, anywhere, is having a special kind of conversation. Every form and scale of life on every planet is trying to gain better access to the content of this transport, in which the experience, intelligence and sentience of all worlds and beings are instantly accessible. Using their expertise at relational lensing, the starFish learn to create an antenna of sorts, whose function magnifies their ability to read from this library. During this process, they acquire something akin to the wings of terrestrial animals, but these wings act to instantaneously connect them across incredible distances to the library of living worlds. They suddenly realize that there are planet flowers strewn throughout space — flowers which generate a profoundly attractive kind of ‘sentience pollen’ — the knowledge held in the histories, evolution, biology and activity of every scale of Life on any world they can reach.

This revelation radically alters the course of their evolution, for they have discovered another kind of star — learning stars whose emanations are expressed in sentience rather than light. In the beginning, they find that the great radiative intensity of the ‘knowledge-light’ emitted by living worlds, is a bit like starlight in that it can also be deadly if received without proper preparation. At first, they dip into it only briefly so as not to get burned by the incredible speed of its growth and change. Each dip results in a long period of adaptations to the new potentials created by the abundance of what is learned, and this becomes the rhythmic pulse of the evolutionary heartbeat of the starFish. Access to these incredibly sophisticated living libraries provides them the energetic and cognitive momentum required to resolve evolutionary problems in a rhythmic series of vast leaps, whereas previously this activity was like trying to move a mountain with a tweezer.

But the planets also respond dramatically to this contact. Like flowers who have unexpectedly encountered bees, they receive a profound and otherwise impossible benefit from the visits of the starFish — who carry with them unique sentience-traces from the other worlds they’ve touched. The activity of starFish becomes a conduit for a form of evolutionary sexuality, a new transport across which living planets can exchange sensing, evolutionary prowess, understandings about threats and problem-solving, perhaps even dreams. These seemingly humble organisms rapidly become incredibly famous and valuable to living worlds anywhere within the reach of their strange wings, and, like flowers competing for the attentions of pollinators, these planets begin clamoring for the attentions of the starFish. The evolutionary direction of these worlds is modified by this contact in a way which complements similar changes in the starFish’s evolution.


[1] This gap-crossing is recalled in the human tradition of the groom carrying his bride ‘across the threshold’.