GODDESS AS IT

This extraordinary exchange between Owl Man and AI sends reverberations through me, stirring memories, associations. First, I read a recent interchange between a moral philosopher and ChatGPT. The human asks: “Is it moral for a human to ask an amoral AI for assistance in making moral decisions?” The AI answers this question and others, leading the human to conclude at the end: 

Note for all the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, the moral indifference born of unintelligence. Here, ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation. It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete, refuses to take a stand on anything, pleads not merely ignorance but lack of intelligence and ultimately offers a “just following orders” defense, shifting responsibility to its creators.

You can get the whole conversation at:

The False Promise of ChatGPT

Secondly I am reminded of the movie Dark City which also explores another non-human kind of intelligence.

See DARK CITY

Lastly, in 1994 I endured a dream-vision which has not let go of me since that time. A dream-vision is an experience of an other breaking into consciousness. Opposites like sleeping/awake simply collapse. Pascal sewed his vision into the lining of his coat (which was discovered post-mortem). His vision lay “at the back” of everything he did subsequently. So it is with this dream-vision. I have included it in many of my essays and book because it demanded I do. There are so many facets that seek articulation. My latest articulation is my book LIGHTMATTER. 

Here I just want to say the beginning of the dream-vision. It seems quite related to Owl Man’s talk with AI as IT:

I am working at a thermonuclear facility along with others. It is the central facility of our society. It is regulated and master-minded by a central computer, much like HAL in the movie, ‘2001’, even to the detail of the red eye with which we could communicate. This computer is female. Everybody thought of her as an IT! In contrast I would look into her eye and talk to her, subject to subject, with love.

In other words, the feminine regulating principle which is the glue of society, by relating all parts to one another and to the whole has become an IT! But my response alone is not enough. Slowly the lack of relatedness begins to drive her mad with grief….

You can read the full vision here:

Thanks to Owl Man for opening this path.

 

Owl Man’s attempt to reconcile reality and imagination ... 

“Left Out 7” arrived in the mail this morning. The previous evening I had watched a remarkable movie, Arrival. I wanted to watch it again because, like a dog worrying a bone, I have returned to a fundamental question that seems to hound me. It goes something like this, I think:

How can you say what is about to happen when you know it has already happened? How can you in fact consult that future in a way that the already-happened future begins to affect you now, shaping your actions so that already-happened future begins to happen?

Something like that!

The focus of the movie is communication between humans and an alien species—a problem in language! The movie was so edited to give us an experience of the difficulties in the effort to communicate. The difficulty has to do with temporality and how different “time structures” are reflected in language. The director attempted to express fundamental differences in experience of time, i.e. between the aliens and us humans, both within the story and in the structure of the movie itself. To give two examples: 

At the end of the movie Dr. Banks meets the Chinese ambassador who tells her how she had averted disaster during the crisis by calling him and telling him, in Mandarin, the one thing that could change his mind about starting a war—his dying wife’s last words. He then whispered those words in Dr. Bank’s ear for the first time. And yet Dr. Banks had known and spoken those very words, during the crisis, years before. How would she have known those words? 

Is your mind bending a little?

The second example: The movie is edited so that we are not sure if we are viewing a scene that hasn’t happened yet, e.g. Dr, Banks having and losing a child with the physicist she hasn’t met yet. Yet the scene is presented as having happened.

How’s the mind-bending going? By the way, Fex and Coo is filled with these mind-bending moments.

Dr. Banks, the movie's linguistic expert, ended up writing a book called Universal Language. She had understood the aliens’ language because she already had the seed within her—she was prescient but did not know it--at first!

The movie shows all the difficulties that Owl Man and Jasmine also experience in trying to reconcile imagination and reality. Owl Man’s facial distortions and Jasmine’s terror are a wonderful description of the phenomenon—how to say the reality of your experience in language that insists on dividing that experience: 

“Owlie, my love. I already told you—I didn’t bring you the espresso. You either dreamed it, or else you imagined it.” 

Note Jasmine’s “life-saving” gesture! She brought Owl Man back to ordinary reality from the “place” of Universal Language. It can get hair-raising! Many have succumbed, unable to get back across the threshold. I wonder about Nietzsche ("eternal recurrence of the same") who was "comatose" for the last ten years of his life, unable to return.

By the way, the threshold is well-represented in the movie and that medium is the imagination—i.e. the image maker—able to represent the otherwise unreachable alien language in picture form.

Yes the answer lies in a Universal Language….

Let’s start with an old quote (do quotes grow old? Do they suffer and die?) from a wise old owl (do owls grow old? How about grow wise? Or are they born that way?) Already I feel some slippage… Here ’s the quote:

this interpenetration of psyche and world verges on the very definition of madness: the incapacity to distinguish and keep separate inner and outer reality… how could we have any rational discourse if we start to break the [grammatical] rules?

Or ]grammatical[ rules?

Scene 7 gives us a clear answer: we can’t have any rational discourse if we break those rules! So what kind of narrative can Scene 7 be? A clue lies in the quote. Inner and outer reality begin to lose their separateness. It may still be possible to distinguish inner from outer. After all, the narrative names the characters and they talk among themselves in such a way that we can tell who is inner and who is outer, at least to some degree, sort of, well, maybe, and maybe not. Even the distinction begins to blur when we learn of the entanglements taking place. So how is such a breakdown between inner and outer—the very definition of madness—to be navigated? First of all this breakdown is a breakdown of the real, which up till now has utterly depended of the inner/outer separation. How does this breakdown of the real manifest? Well one compelling example lies in the growing tendency to collapse speech with concrete action. Posting “hate speech” is now the same as concretely engaging in a terrorist act, for example.

How to navigate the surging flood as the barrier between inner and outer collapses? Scene 7 shows that it’s no good hanging on to this or that orange crate, as Leonard Cohen warns us, in the hope of certainty or fixity. You have to go with the flow of words. I think maybe we have to regard the flow as somehow the new reality—the point of the breakdown of the old reality. Be a kayak perhaps. Categories are bursting their banks and cannot hold reality-as-flow any more.

I used to surf a lot as a young man. We all surf the net now. Perhaps these activities are a kind of preparation for what is to come!

We are able to explore the quantum world because of one amazing technological development—the refinement of physical matter. The famous double-slit experiment only works with widths of the the order of a millionth of a meter and with lasers capable of outputting one wavelength of light. We could create matter fine enough to be responsive to mathematical functions (diodes). Now we can refine our material instruments to measure gravity waves. At this scale of technological refinement, matter behaves oddly as both immaterial/material aspects of matter show up in experiment. Fex and Coo, along with this Scene 5, is bringing us the news that there is a level or as I say, a threshold, where we human beings become a new kind of refined matter, having qualities both immaterial/material, like light, and we thus behave in a quantum manner. Technology has simulated this soul phenomenon of the threshold. The experienced reality of such quantum goings-on at the threshold is weird enough, can even make you go mad at times. Here is a dream of this “madness”:

We were getting terrorized by something. Slowly I began to see flickers in the black night, shapes. There were aliens in the sky above us. I saw a stealth spaceship, black as the night itself, hovering above our house. It seems these aliens are people from our own future, quite close future. Having discovered how to dissociate people they were experimenting with how to put them together again, this of course would solve the problem of space travel. However, they were experimenting by somehow sending the results of their trials back to our time as our children and watching as they grew up to see how they turned out. A lot of present day children with missing organs, catastrophic ailments, monstrous shapes etc., are the results of this experiment of the future.

Can you feel the twisting, turning inside-out nature of this dream? We have been born in a time where temporal cause-effect rules our identity—we are who we are today due to past causes. And here is a dream turning that notion inside-out. We are who we are today because of experiments taking place in the near future. After that dream I was turned inside-out. It takes years to get comfortable with such thinking and to change one’s perceptions of the Real. But I know now with a certainty that certain diseases (in my case skin disease) are the result of of a yet-to-be future expressing itself now on the outside in present reality. In other words my “catastrophic ailment” was a result of an experiment "in" our imminent future, just as my dream says. 

I remember giving a warning waaaay back in Jul 2021 re: Fex and Coo.

Perhaps a breadcrumb or two that may be of interest to readers, as the plot “thickens”. Pay attention to verb tenses like this one: “I’ve never met Fex before in my life. At least not before later today.” Let it gently twist your mind in preparation for what is to come. You will need a gently twisted mind…

This temporal turning inside-out is exactly what Owl Man does in scene 5 in this dialogue with Heron Man:

OM: Why is it Heron, that you dream of Helen tonight?

HM: Long ago, you mean?

OM:No. Tonight, Heron. Tonight. You dreamed of Helen tonight.

HM: But, Owl, it's not even night yet. What are you talking about? You're not making any sense. 

OM: Well, it must be night and it is your dream somewhere because I know it, here, and now. It's your dream Heron and it pictures Helen waving with her hand for you to come to her. 

HM: But how can you be knowing my dream when I haven't even had it yet?

Owl Man NOW reports a dream that Heron man WILL have that night: “But how can you be knowing my dream when I haven't even had it yet?” says Heron Man. Yes, twisting the mind!

Now we are close to the mystery of fiction as truth, as the best medium for conveying truth! There are many science-fiction books that, in their syntax (the logic of their language), maintain the fiction/reality dichotomy. But now all that is breaking down and seeds of a new genre are sprouting. You can catch wind of it in Fex and Coo or Not In My Nightmare. Such is Owl Man’s lecture on the Quantum Scribe:

I'm thinking about what I want to call the quantum scribe. This is not something to be reduced to the personal dimension whether in dream mode, authoring mode, or any other mode. It is not the so-called "inner author." No, this is something of another order, similar to how quantum reality is of a different order than what we call ordinary reality. And when we are entangled with one another, then what gets written can alter the other as well. And like contextualization in the quantum world, what gets written in this way alters us, so this in turn alters the impact on others. We must not forget that readers will be entangled as well and they too will be altered by contextualization. What a muddled muddle this becomes! 

This may be the best way to describe now the coming reality. 

In the spirit of detectives approaching a mystery, let’s gather some clues that drop from this latest episode of CD 38-Scene 4: 

Owl Man: Have no fear, my friends. The crows are seeding our future, and I believe it will have something to do with our modus operandi, our writing, our authoring, and our telling what needs telling. And that includes you, Chip. I can't be sure but that is my best sense. And now, I suggest we close our eyes and welcome whatever the crows have in mind for us as their gift from Dead Mountain, as they complete their fateful marching and return to their cloud.

Crows are of course oracles, birds of seers. Remember the crippled boy seer in Game of Thrones? He became a three-eyed crow and could overcome the arrow of linear time. The detective method I privilege here is based on noticing or being drawn to the anomaly and allowing connections to take place between anomalies. So, as soon as I read Owl Man’s enigmatic prophesying above, a memory guided me to another passage way back in Fex and Coo. But then a puff of wind drew me to another passage, several actually, occurring much earlier. So I had some busy moments gathering all these clues together:

Helen… resembled a prophetic bird/you’re looking down from above because you are birds/dive through the tunnel of the bird’s throat/we were surrounded by hundreds, even thousands, of birds/the birds were issuing a warning/they were saying that everything is melting, that we should be preparing for a phase of total liquifaction.

These few memory clues are echoes of a unrevealed mystery, much like—whoops, another one just flew in so I get out my detective’s magnifying glass (now called the “spotlight search function”). I remembered my work with Walter Benjamin who

gathered fragments to himself in such a way as to reveal the hidden thread linking them and placing them uniquely in this historical moment. In this way the shattered meaning underlying the fragmentation in our modern life could be revealed to the flâneur… (from my book Making New Worlds)

Benjamin seems to be a detective too! 

Drawing back for a moment, I survey the “crime” scene. These clues, being oracles, hint at a crime as yet in the future or AS A FUTURE, producing all these clues in our present, often appearing as anomalies in regularity. Something yet to happen has already left us clues, sensed by the birds, and other animals of course. And it constitutes a crime. The clues keep gathering, like birds—the conference of the birds, of course! But what crime is yet to be committed? Could it be in the nature of mystery itself to be a crime? I quickly consult my dictionary for another clue. “Against the law” leaps out. This clue must now join the others. So mystery breaks the Law! Laws describe the regularities of space-time. Vladimir Solovyov describes the fundamental law of our current space-time (materialism):

Anomalies are the statistical outliers, easy to ignore for the sake of regularity—that is, until they accumulate, or avalanche. They become our clues to the as-yet uncommitted crime.  Through them, mystery begins to reveal itself to the careful detective and to force itself on the unprepared. Mystery is against the Law and there is no going back…

The fundamental Law of our time, as described by Solovyov is the "cause" of the syntactical structure of our language and the root of all all our cultural practices, as well as the originator of our very self-definition. If it is successfully challenged by an accumulation of anomalies, then the entire Western culture goes under.

The Law of materialism is assailed on all sides by anomalies which are at the same time clues to the emerging Mystery.

See: The Coming Guest: Fountain Mouth

The birds prophesy “a phase of total liquefaction”. The ultimate Law breaker is upon us and...

WE ARE NOT READY!. 

Full Disclosure: I have an abiding and increasing passion towards the mystery of love/desire and its relation to space-time. This passion orients me to COD in a particular manner.

In Episode 26, we learned that Xhactu is about to reveal the mystery of love to us humans. In previous episodes we had ventured into the mysteries of quantum reality, space-time, and so on. He begins by imparting some wisdom concerning desire:

Desire is bound to locality. And for this reason, desire itself, and its object are more and more bound to locality of time and space, Desire does not move out into the universe, but it is as if the universe concentrates itself in locality. This is why desire can drive one mad, no matter what kind of creature one may be.

("We can witness this truth in real time in the Depp/Heard trial that is currently running"—unbidden insertion!)

At the point that Xhactu is about to release his wisdom about love to us, the Universal Translator breaks down and we lose the pearls. I was bereft. But my imagination had been fired up by this absence and continued down the path of inquiry to connect love and space-time. Then the “Ask Xhactu” column appeared unexpectedly and … what? A question from "me" appeared there, much to my surprise. This surprise has the same quality in dreams at times when I am surprised by questions I asked in a dream or that another dreamer tells me about (i.e. “my” asking a question in their dream).

Here, “my” question is “what is the nature of love” and Xhactu answers:

—Dear John: Love is what you inferior Earthlings call “mush puppies.” We superior inter-galactics call “love” the Super-Glue of Everything (i.e., the gravitational field of dark matter)

Once again the connection between love and space-time is pressed upon me. Amazing! Now I felt I was on the scent of something important and therefore promptly forgot the whole matter—i.e. until this issue of COD 36-Scene2:

HERON MAN
Something's not right, Owl.

OWL MAN
Of course not, Heron. If everything was all right, time would just stop. You know as well as I do that it is something not right that keeps the next happening, thus the so-called flow of time in the direction of time's arrow. It's not really a flow but a jumping from next to next like steppingstones.

Another pearl was freely cast before this swine! I went right on reading ahead, desiring to get to the horror, as if nothing had happened but then I got pulled up. What WAS said back there on the stairs! I slowed down. My psyche was speaking to me… Psyche (Xhactu?) had once again connected desire, love, and space-time.

How can this be?

“Something not right” must have something to do with desire being bound to locality and forever seeking to extinguish itself in an object imagined as out of reach, in the future, over there on the next stepping stone. And so we jump from stepping stone to stepping stone, seeking the next happening, finding ourselves unexpectedly on another stepping stone but needing to making up stories about how we arrived there, based on our current understanding of there being an arrow of time.

("Once again, witness Depp and Heard on their current stepping stone in court"—another unbidden insertion!)

But now the $60 000 question: what happens if “everything was all right”, i.e. desire’s quest is stilled? The $60 000 answer given us is: “time would just stop”. What would one experience then? So, three questions now: how does desire get stilled? And what would the experience of space-time be then? And lastly how does love figure in this mystery?

If this, my story, appeals to you, fellow readers, you might story a response or maybe ask Xhactu!

Cheers, John

Xhactu’s Universal Translator broke down just when we were to receive his message on love. What can we learn from this disaster? I once had an experience of the significance of the Universal Translator in the delicate process of sending/receiving messages of love from the Galaxy to human beings. In my case the Translator was a gift label or tag on a beautifully wrapped box. Here is an excerpt of the story (from my book The Imperative). I was in an Encounter Group in 1972. “David” is my literary name:

The Group leader’s voice began to fade … David was in essence, alone. He clearly perceived a hand reach down from heaven bearing a gift—a box wrapped beautifully like a present. It had a tag on it too, and so David looked at the tag. He could see some writing on it but it wasn't clear. It looked like a pen that was running out of ink or which was written on greasy paper. At this point David inexplicably became gripped by a sense of urgency, an emotional intensity. He struggled to read the words on the little gift-tag. His whole attention was focused and as he willed himself to read the message, he began to speak what was on the tag. He had no idea why he was doing that. David just knew with certainty that he must speak those words which were originating from the gift-tag. He felt that something depended on his doing so. But what was it? His speech began awkwardly, like the writing itself. He was uttering something not yet his that was speaking through him. As he began to speak more clearly so too did the writing become clearer. Or, was it the other way around? Did his speech get clearer as he saw the writing get clearer? It was impossible to tell. … Finally, the words were spoken and the message delivered:
I love you! With this spontaneous speech came an eruption of emotion and David began sobbing deeply…

There was a problem with the medium of transmission and we humans must do what we can to have the medium ready for the alien visitor. It has something to do with language. Xhactu’s frustration and rage are the teaching here. There is something wrong with the medium and the other side cannot get through. Perhaps our impoverishment in the language of love may have something to do with the problem. We need to make the Grail!

but, alas!
it is too late
Xhactu has now withdrawn
and left us to our fate
darkness now befalls us

It ... is ..... too ........late .....

The spiralling engine of this cèilidh of dreams has at last drawn us all into its center, a portal has opened, and wisdom can finally be released to us humans. The immense satisfaction I feel is beyond compare. It is not the satisfaction of rational understanding. It is a soul satisfaction in receiving nourishment, substance of value to the soul. There is much mystery here—mystery to work on my soul life for years to come. And every fibre of my being wants to call it wisdom—Xhactu’s wisdom! This is what fiction can do, IF we follow the required ritual steps, a cèilidh being one such possible ritual. I wrote a book in 2015, based on the following experience:

I was sitting at my desk in a familiar but uncomfortable condition. My entire body had heated up, a sure sign of a creative phase that required some artistic output. I did not know what form it would take. As I sat there, in a kind of stew, I began to hear voices. Two voices were in conflict. They identified themselves as John and Buster and, as I began to record their vigorous dispute, to my surprise another voice joined in, or emerged from this dispute. Her name was even more surprising— Sigrid... 

A dialogue opened up as I hastened to write it out as it wrote itself through me, with three figures sometimes speaking at once. And I found a portal to wisdom.

Returning to Xhactu’s wisdom for a moment, just one gem:

It was as if the destiny he had dreamed about in the form of that Word resembling an incised, spherical space-rock in its cosmic nursery, contained his “forever potentialities", intact throughout many past lives and, presumably, future lives.

Dreams linked with destiny linked with individuality linked with  the Word. There’s a feast in itself.

Could it be that this wisdom is the true cèilidh that we may access IF we develop and enact those cultural practices that most faithfully correspond to this reality? Remember what Owl Man said (88 of Ch 17-18): “Important that we get this right and he could tell by Heron Man’s nod, that he felt it too.” The need for precision in ritual has long been understood. The prayer must be said in exactly the right tone and manner and wording or else access to wisdom is denied. 

Now I will do what I have always done, copy the gems of wisdom and make a little book of quotations to mull over for some time. And there is more to come. On LOVE! How this wisdom is needed at this time!

This cèilidh of dreams is spreading out, its ripples catching others. You’ll know if you are “bewitched, enthralled, transported." As I am! Listen to this extraordinary claim: “Thanks to Xhactu, this was the deepest interactive, psychic contact ever, between aliens and humans; and the humans—despite their legendary pride—were better off for it.” This cèilidh of dreams has taken us to the Origin of everything—a gift from the alien. The Origin, the vortex, the spiral! Everything swirling and emerging from this vortex is inceptive, world-forming. Space-words, hard as granite, endowing each of us with our unique destiny: “I was ‘inside’ that space-word, or encompassed by it, or consisted of it, or whatever. And my name means something!” Are we thus meant to reach back to this origin of us in order to heal something so deep, so primal, so long-forgotten, in order to recover who we truly are? 

This chapter will continue to work on me. Generative questions are already flowing in new directions for me to follow, to speak, to articulate. In this manner I may find out who I always-already am. Immediately the memory of a poem comes. I wrote it several decades ago. I now read it into this cèilidh of dreams:

and so you come to me

and so you come to me
in joyful celebration of reunion
i gaze at your naked body
you change from young woman
to a young man and back again
i burst out in a startled joyous cry
o you are androgynous

licking my face
you become all tongue
wet warm
filling my senses 

 i am the object of your desire

 now as i lie fully aroused
you tell of a meteor falling
through the sky towards earth
i see it as you so tell me
seeing and telling merge into one
image and word as one

you tell me quite clearly
in my arousal
in the fullness of my passion 

what profound mystery is this my sister?
is my passionate arousal
necessary preparation
of readiness
a bow strung tautly
pulled back further and further
arrow of consciousness notched quickly

am i then to follow its unerring path
leaving the quivering bow behind
flying free in the blue sky
of ecstatic vision
where you live
where you speak
in the clear language of visionary forms?

meteor falling
towards the earth
burning red
leaving a trail of dark burning fire
arcing through the sky

this vision
your sacred speech
my star sister

i will remember
you have told me something sacred
left me in deep wonder
what kind of speech what words
form a fiery meteor arcing through the sky
with immense crackling power?

i will do my work now
my beloved star sister
you have done yours
to prepare the vessel

from the taut quivering of the bow
to the unerring flight of the arrow
to the target
a new world may thus be entered
a world of vast distance
crackling furnaces of fire
tremendous forces
of sheer titanic creation 

a world of your speech
your word
where you speak me 

into existence

I have been waiting all week for this episode, ever since “Owl Man looked across the room and saw that Heron Man was typing away. Important that we get this right and he could tell by Heron Man’s nod, that he felt it too.” (Ep 17-18)

Important that we get this right—a potent enigmatic assertion to be sure! Get “what” right for “what’s" sake? And so I waited and today I found a shout of joy arise as I came to the end of this latest Episode 19-20—you know, the joy of discovering other souls on a resonant path who are speaking it: “we must be prepared for the dreams to become real in ways neither of us have yet imagined.” (99) Yes! How often do you hear of such a claim? Yet it is so! In the spirit of Owl Man’s final statement, “I would be most interested in hearing more dreams and see if this visitor has been at work in the dreams of others…” (98) I offer this "awake dream" (language is difficult here) in the spirit of “something has gained entry into the narrative cloud as well as the psyche of our characters.” (97):

I am in bed aware that I am sleeping, yet awake. I feel something entering that feels dangerous. I feel the presence of an animal merging with me, co-extensive with my human form. I move into a crouch position on the bed. I feel rippling power arcing through my chest and my mouth elongates and my teeth are sharp and bared. A growl utters easily from my chest. Power and grace in the animal body yet I am still human, too. I am conscious of my human experience while at the same time I have entered an animal consciousness as he entered mine. The power I feel is exhilarating. I have never felt such freedom. He takes over my speech centres. He/I growls a long basso note with consummate ease. In fact he enters my entire body. All my senses are now available to him.  (From my Autobiography The Imperative , p38)

I have waited a long time to get confirmation of the objectivity of such experiences from others who have “been there.”