I've done it.
I think I've come up with a model of Reality that works (for me).
Hoo, boy. This one's going to be difficult to talk about. Buckle up. And remember, our roadways are connected to our families. (I like that anti-drinking and driving slogan better than Click It or Ticket.)
I've been trying to conceptualize Higher Dimensions since literally the week I gave up on University being a place I was either wanted or wanted to be. When I decided not to go back to any of my classes, I checked out at least one book on theoretical dimensions and I think the rest of Bob Frissell's work. I don't remember what the books were, I remember the Wright State University library being very upset with me. Lol
The point is, I heard a description of what fourth dimensional space is probably kind of like recently that made it kind of make sense for me: if the third dimension can be represented as a square whose sides have squares attached to them at right angles to enclose a space, then the fourth dimension can be described something like a cube with cubes for faces. Or, if you unfold the cube into six squares laid out in a cross pattern, each of those squares is a cube.
I found it to be a pretty striking image
Anyway— I don't know whether I've made this explicit, but over the last several years, especially, I have tried to marry the Materialist worldview I learned and adopted with the esoteric worldview I once was awed and inspired by into something approximating a functional understanding of what Reality actually is.
There are a few things about Reality that we know for sure to be true. One of them is that something does seem to be real, or exist in this Material Existence we find ourselves experiencing. Another is that everything we sense – but especially see for the purposes of metaphor is mostly empty nothing. Seeing as an action and as a metaphor is important.
It's important to philosophy because understanding metaphors is important to philosophy. But it was important enough in reality that Saint Augustine devoting time to remarking on what it means to see in his Confessions.
Everything we see with our naked eyes is mostly empty space. From the table I'm writing this on, to the air that surrounds us everywhere, to the ground beneath our feet and the sky above our heads.
We know this is true because for the last millennium we have created increasingly complex tools to allow us to see further into the sky above us, and closer at the objects near to hand. And what we've found is that they go on for an infinity in either direction – at any scale, the universe is infinite and mostly empty void.
And yet, that isn't our experience. That isn't what we see, taste, feel.... Feel is another interesting word, as far as how many and how complex can be its meanings in this context.
There are two things I really want to talk about here. Another pair of hairs I want to split. We have the technology. There is a fundamental flaw that thinkers on these subjects I undertake to understand habitually make, and you can identify them by this flaw: Materialism. Materialism is defined as 1) a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values, and 2) in philosophy, the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.
Materialism is a sickness. I've talked about Intellectual Contagions. Materialism might be the worst of them.
So, Materialism is a flawed worldview, and...? Materialists want to draw a line dividing the Material and the non-Material Realms. They call the one Science and the other Spirituality. But what they're really doing is the same thing the early church fathers and later, but still very Early Medieval, theologists were doing when they said that God was everything conceivable: They're replacing what can be known and experienced with Religion, and denying everything which can't be easily known and experienced and comprehended as Spirituality.
You see this argument among Thelemites all the time. All the time.
But I come after you Thelemites like Atheists come after Christians. I should ease off. I'm not going to. But I should.
It's a 2000 year-old semantics game. And our entire Civilization is caught up in it. You can't swing a dead cat in any public forum without hitting an asshole who erroneously believes he's a scientific thinker.
Why are we swinging dead cats? Why not something you might actually swing in public? A Skip-It.
You can't play Skip-It in a public forum without hitting an asshole who believes erroneously he's a scientific thinker. Even people in positions of apparently authority. It's a real problem.
I know I linked an article to it already, but let me do so again, just so there can be no quibbling about how I define Religion and Spirituality. This one's even from Pew Research, not just referring to it..
People who identify as Scientific thinkers – as Sciencists as it were – do not like it when you call them cultists. But it's what you are. You invoke the names of Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei in exactly the same way that Catholics invoke the Saints. It's hilarious, actually. Atheists try to make jokes about this very thing I'm talking about – like what does an atheist cry out in bed? They're never funny. Atheists aren't clever enough to be funny. They're too busy thinking they're clever to actually be.
See what I did there?
Cogito ergo sum, right?
Because you're human.
I've been called a robot lots of times. Insane. Stupid. I know I'm not stupid, so it's got to be something else. Is it really that I see more clearly than all of you? I want to deny it's possible. I've been wearing glasses since I was in fourth grade.
But I also stopped being indoctrinated into your Worldview in fourth grade.
Like, when Timothy Leary says to “Tune in, turn on, and drop out,” boy, I dropped out.
So I've had decades more time and distance to view your forest from the outside – and then to wander among you and examine the individual trees.
And I find you wanting.
No, that's a joke. Isn't that from a movie? I feel like it's something Emperor Palpatine would say. We're all wanting. That's the point in having a judgmental god for 2000 years and more: to remind us to do better. And that's the point of Jesus and his suffering: to give us a guide toward what to strive for in life.
That religion doesn't speak to this modern world. We are the Romans who killed Jesus. We are not the world, the people, he came to save, to liberate, to redeem – we are the world he came to destroy. The people he came to save or those we oppress: those factory workers who are slaves for our knick-knacks and the tacky bullshit with which we fill our homes. I listened to too much George Carlin when I was a kid. Should've listened to George Clinton. And in our hearts we know this. It's obvious.
We're decadent. We know we're decadent.
You can't open YouTube without being bombarded by 15-second clips of teenage girls getting naked. We have created a slave-state, and now everyone is a prostitute. That's what they would call us, you and me and everyone on any social media platform. Prostitutes. Whores. Proverbs has a lot of very good lines about spiritual prostitution. Doing a quick search, I found this gem from Proverbs 5: For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey, and her seductive words are smoother than olive oil, but in the end she is bitter wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps lead straight to the grave.” But before the girls among you think the bible is just sexist, and women are always blamed for everything, check this out from Deutoronomy 23: “When you are bringing an offering to fulfill a vow, you must not bring to the house of the Lord your God any offering from the earnings of a prostitute, whether a man or a woman, for both are detestable to the Lord your God.”
So what am I talking about, then?
God doesn't like women who have sex for money. Big whoop.
Wrong. Prostitute is the wrong word for us to translate to. Peitho and Rob briefly discuss cult prostitutes in Pavia. (just ctrl+f prostitute if you don't want the whole scene)
The men who wrote these books had a very specific idea in mind when they called the people who worshiped gods besides the One God prostitutes. Not necessarily to denigrate the sex professional – but to liken taking blessings from various gods to being an unfaithful spouse. They talk about daughters and women to liken these various gods to the false relationships men (and women) have with people they are only sexually attracted to – or who are only sexually attracted to them.
And, frankly, it's what I see in modern Paganism. Flirtation, no devotion. The different gods and their various symbols are like flowers, and the Pagan is a hummingbird. (I originally wrote hummingbee. Close. So close.) Except that's a bad analogy because Pagans aren't really cultivating anything. Being a modern pagan is more like being in the gay community in the 80s, frankly. Just intellectual AIDs running rampant, horribly and tragically killing human souls left and right and nobody cares enough to do anything to help them.
But I'm biased against Organized Religion as such and Gatekeepers of all kinds.
And Pagans are just the kids who weren't cool in school who've found a thing they can gatekeep for themselves, irrespective of how well they tend their secret gardens.
That's a book, right? The Secret Garden? The phrase makes me think of the Stone Temple Pilots song. Which, as it turns out, is “Wicked Garden.”
*hums* “Burn your wicked garden to the ground.” Yeah, that song might be about weed, not whatever I thought it was about when I was a kid.
See, I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do. Maybe not so much for me. Who knows.
What the hell was I talking about? I started listening to STP, and it's hard for me to focus when music is playing. Old habits – play the song, tune in, turn off. (I run through the world thinkin bout tomorrow)
Wow. I veered so far off my original topic.... But, hey, that's why I wanted to make these longer.
We're all prostitutes. That's the last thing I was saying that wasn't trying to give context to our places in history. That's the exact wrong way to describe that. I'm always trying to give context to our place in history. But I'm moving on. I actually do want to talk about what I sat down to write about today. And that's why I thought I might need to double the length of these things, yesterday.
We're all of us for sale.
That's kind of why I wanted to do this blog in the first place. That's why I have given everything I've ever made away for free. Except to people who wanted to give me money. It's why I have most loved working as a server when I have truly loved my work: I'm technically working for free. You can pay or not.
They have never said anything about it, but I went more than a year without cashing a paycheck from one restaurant job because I wanted to make sure we stayed afloat during the winter. Now, I would've only been making like $10 a week if I didn't end up owing him money in take-home dinners. But it was nice. Working for free.
It remains nice.
You might have noticed there are no ads on this blog. There better not be any ads on my fucking blog. I've told you before, but I'm telling you again now: I won't be putting AdSense on this blog. There's no sense doing it right now – the most views I've gotten on a post so far is 20, and I'm not convinced that all of those clicks aren't bots – but I'm not going to in the future, either – not at 200, not at 200-million. Just not doing it.
If there is one thing I will not be – or which I will be only insomuch as I am forced to by merely by existing within this modern civilization – it's a corporate prostitute.
There is much about me which I am willing to compromise. Too much for my liking. But my ethics and my values aren't for sale. My morals? What are morals?
Seriously. Someone define morals for me in a way which makes sense.
I'll tell you what – I'll trade you. I'll tell you what I think Reality really is, and you can tell me how much of an asshole I am.
I was talking about the Tesseract to begin this piece: the 4-dimensional cube.
But this doesn't really describe what existence in a 4-dimensional reality looks or feels like. That's just taking a planar section of any 4-dimensional space.
Reality, the Universe, seems to be a sphere.
From our earliest conceptions of the Firmament to our most modern models of the Known-Universe, Reality seems to be spherical.
So I'm wondering: is a 4-dimensional sphere a sphere around a sphere?
And I'm going to publish this now. Because I was just doing a thought experiment – and now I'm looking at what actual authors have published, and it looks exactly like what I was imagining....
Do you remember how yesterday I was complaining about how nothing revelatory or relevant to my personal Quest was showing up win the static of my life lately?
Yeah.
I'll be back.
Promise.
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