missed opportunities
Watched three videos tonight that recalled some experiences or thoughts I have had. A video called "swallowable perfum", which happens to be the next article that Miranda is meant to write about in TBD storyline Trancebible; written in 2003, I called this "ingestible perfumes". A video covering the eighth mp3 experiment, and how this contrasts with the experiential nights I introduced to my friends back in 2002. And a video called "consensus" about Occupy Wall Street movement, which starts with messages being transmitted through a crowd through non-electronic amplification; which is exactly what I suggested to friends back in 2003 when the G8 met at St Andrews and we went on the anti-war march, to turn and send a message to the front of the march, something like the audio equivalent of a mexican wave.
I shall be experiencing this kind of thing over the coming decade. Seeing versions of thoughts and experiences we tried locally. I can mention these things, as I did to Chris, and it can be heavy, for it appears to pull to the past, the gravity of guilt, that we did not manifest what I called the "edinburgh wave", which might have accelerated the process of self-organisation, so that perhaps we might be more sophisticated by now, 2011, rather than the rather reactionary, groping in the darkness, that is the consensus discussions in New York at Occupy Wall Street.
Definitely missed opportunities. Chris did not know what to do. He does not work with guilt either, so he can only stand and wait for me to use this fact, which I did not. Only in the low orbit of sleep could I see that this recognition be presently used. Imagine, I can see such things like those mentioned above emerge over the next decade and know that we are on the right track. This is assuring for me, in some gentle sense. And should my material ever be found, this might serve as evidence, that I was on the right track. And as we approach 2020, or as we decend into social collapse, the consequential steps I have taken with XQ may be of sufficient depth that we might be able to pull out of whatever negative asymptote we may find ourselves in. Which means, as I continue this line of thought as I write now, that it might be useful for me to consider the social implications or reflections of XQ. I have been quite exclusive in considering psychological dynamics, what with negative numbers/experiences and the mental operation of multiplying by negative one, and what the subjective equivalence of this might mean; what may the social manifestations be? What might constitute social objects from the collective exploration of XQ?
Returning to the original thought trace as I lay in bed, the opportunities we missed means that we jump to solutions that appear good, but are not in line to create the necessary conditions for 2020. Instead of manifesting the "edinburgh wave" in 2003, we have such dynamics in 2011. Another way to think about it, perhaps more presently, is to notice how most people seem to still be content with organisational collaboration, still thinking "organisationally", rather than attempting to collaborate individually, based on real one to one relationships. Such actions and thought mean that there are spectrums of experience missing from us, personally, and thus socially. Experiential nights, or its more recent reinvention as the action cycle, was designed at the granular level of the individual: we learn in groups of ten, and perhaps, experientially, learn how to expand our trust games to hundreds and millions. The mp3 experiments show how we jump to larger scale social movements, rather than work at the small scale. This means we get large numbers of relatively passive paticipants at these mp3 experiments, or indeed Occupy Wall Street rallies. We have not developed the skills individually to interact in small groups, let alone such large groups.
Nevertheless, these incredible developments are steps in the right direction. It will remain to be seen, as a species, whether we are content to travel at the rate we are, which might see us patch oureselves together in a pseudo-self-organised way that can cope with the environmental disasters we have participated, or whether things get so bad that we are forced to follow emergency behaviours, a miracle of social alignment unseen in history so far.
the inevitability of one
Another trajectory of thought, influence of which might be discerned in the above writing, perhaps in the manifestation of collective unity. I remember talking with Yinka at the Elephant House in Edinburgh in 2002, the first person I spoke to about 2020. She already had pieces in her mind, because she was conducting the Human Ecologies course, and once she saw the possibility, she said it was inevitable. She actually said she that, that it was inevitable. I remember correcting her, saying that seeing a possibility does not mean it will happen. But perhaps she was right.
Recently, just this weekend, I encountered a woman who remembered a conversation she had had with me as far back as 2003 or 2004; an unusual experience, to be sure. Laura recalled a conversation where I ran through my thought experiment about the probabilities of the state of the world by 2030, whether we will have destroyed ourselves, whether we will have maintained some kind of unequal status quo, or whether we will have achieved sustainability, a healthy, peaceful world. She admitted to saying she had said zero. I am sure I remarked on my existence and the thought in my head, and thus the chance was non-zero. But, actually, it has turned out -- so far -- that she is right.
How can both be right? Well, it's to do with the effect of non-zero.
To see a possibility, is like seeing a star in the dark, perhaps the first of the evening. At some stage there is nothing, a blank expanse, perhaps a high state of INERTIA. But once there is enough light, the eye is drawn to it, and suddenly there is a direct awareness of a sun billions of miles away. Literally in the blink of an eye, a direct path through all probability space, what may constitute "insight" if this were directed within to psychological realms, and perhaps "revelation" if directed out to the space between us.
So, when the mind see this possibility, however small, it immediately escalates to one, conscious appreciation. Well... something like this. No-one saw the possibility of 2020, apart from Yinka. But I lost Yinka when she broke her neck. Her spirit was taken up entirely with brightening the dark place she had found herself, so bright she was that she was the only one that I nearly fell in love with.
Yinka demonstrated it. She saw the possibility, and when she saw it, like a distant star, she recognised the equivalent "sun" that it was. She was not blinded by the "way things are" currently. She saw the possibility and thus for a moment, saw it as inevitable. The trick, of course, is to realise its relative size, or distance. I saw the chance as tiny, but I also saw it as possible. To see it as possible means to experience the one-ness of it.
And this is true of mental states, as it is true of social states. Having revised my language through the experience of writing Wisdom, I can say that the buddhists centre on a state that is far deeper than is required for social peace. The depths necessary individually to maintain a socially balanced world is merely at the recognition that we are one species, of humanity on this planet. This is a level of awareness that is becoming quite widely recognised. Something over-emphasised in my opinion at peace rallies, a frequency of our social chakras if you like that is over-bright, "love as power", and that kind of thing. A necessary voice, a necessary awareness, but one band of the spectrum. We need others. The kind of frequencies I am mentioning here.
making love
The other night I had a fitful sleep. It was not troubling. It was not an intellectual energy, like the energy that eventually got me out of bed tonight to find myself writing this in the dark at chris' at Roslyn at 4:43 in the morning. (I've been writing for something like an hour and a half... this mindflow is a marathon... I can't expect anyone to follow it!)
I slept fitfully for a few hours. It was not sourced physically, neither in my skin discomfort, nor in any sexual desire. However, it was related. I really felt an urge to make love. Strange. It was like the sensuality of tango, that is also non-sexual for me. But it was a different approach. Meeting Laura had a strange effect on me, and it manifested in this fitfull period of sleeplessness.
As I say, it was not sexual. I was not excited, sexually. But the energy was full, it reached my body. With tango, there is very much grounded in the body, in the sensation of proximity, the feeling of movement, of a sense of mutual existence that permeates the skin, the customary boundary of distinct selves, or personality. There is spirit, a mutual presence is arrived at, which is an acute tango, but arrived at through the body, through its interpretation or mutual response to the music, concurrently. It happens simultaneously, so I don't like to use temporal sequences in my description. But it is like a zip whose fastener starts at the bottom and is pulled up, from the base chakra up. Again, not that it is rooted in the sexual, but the sensual.
So, lying there, alone, there was no physical presence to zip up the chakras to some higher state, like in tango. It started from a different place. And it manifested in my mind as a desire to make love. Again, non-sexually. Even though that was the object, the taste of it, the approach was not through the senses, was not even sexual. So it was not frustrating. I did not have any desire to relieve myself of any pent up energy. It was enough to keep me awake, and fantasise, perhaps, and I did not wander off and start thinking up something.
To bring mind, such a resolution of mind, to touch. To bring consciousness to each and every nerve-ending, to dissolve this focus of attention so entirely that is like the sea traced through every river of the world, through every stream, to each trickle of a source, to bring this queen of awareness to such utter, utter abandon. If mother nature is the personification of the living world, then my sense, my intention, was to bring this entity alive to my senses as a witness of this flower, this leaf, this raindrop, this tree, this hillside, looking over this valley, beneath this sky. To be entirely swallowed up in the moment, in this tiny pocket, to bring to awareness the very living wonder of it all. To admire, to witness. That even my conscious brightness, no more than this, certainly not the lazer strength of will, but as gentle as the light from a single candle-flame whose warm orange light may set a room's surfaces defined, as gently my consciousness witness the expansive corona of your existence.
I have waxed lyrical... It was not this that murmured my mind to wakefulness. Though there was something of the dim glow of a candle flame. A gentle thing. And yet, so full, that I wished to make love, madly, passionately. I was all the light in the room, etching every surface, edge and corner. Happy, in some way, that just as I was contained in that little room, sleeping beneath Chris' mezanine bed platform, so the room, the space, the pocket, that my little candlelight of my mind imaged was only a tiny corner of something so vast, so full, so rich.
Nope. Can't put words to it.
landing with a bump
The following day, I ended up talking with Laura for a good few hours. It was delightful. Laura is clearly interested in Chris, something I was aware of before. So, I was greedy, not to have her in any sexual way, but I wished to see what her response was some ideas. We talked perhaps too much about my book, TBD, and then I gave the most general description of XQ possible. And somehow, she made sense of this! She has both linguistic control, far greater than me, and also a strong background in mathematics, which she humbly disavowed. I wanted to finish the evening with a few simple thought experiments, to make the generalities real, but we never got round to it. Nor did we enter into any physical experiments to see if her resolution of mind translated to her body, something she was adventurous enough to consider.
It was a strange conversation, in that I was directing the energy between us, something which had echoed as the fitful sleep the night before, towards a healthy engagement, that of tango, that of XQ. I eventually managed to put to words something of this process, this energy that we had felt, this energy of attraction, and Laura's response was rather... abrupt... no, not abrupt, but I certainly found myself self-contained. Because we had moved through such spaces, well beyond anything physical, I was brought back to my body, my skin. This may not have been her intention. On the way back to Chris', in the car, she wondered whether I wished a response to my commentary, regarding our attraction and my direction to XQ and tango, and she said that she did not wish to pursue anything romantically. Perhaps I had thought there was a possibility of this. No, certainly, I did, in some sense, but none of my actions, or even thoughts, aimed this way. I had certainly had a feeling of making love, but as I have tried to describe, it was from a strange, non-sexual, and non-intellectual, source.
I guess I was brought back to reality with a bump. I had forgotten about my appearance. My skin condition, primarily. Perhaps my age. Perhaps my balding head. Who knows? But something closed, and I felt it as we drove back to Chris. I guess I had assumed that this attraction, this energy between us, would naturally have some sense in her. Her phrasing indicated that it had not. Perhaps it did? Perhaps, like me, it had, and, like me, she was directing it into an intellectual engagement, with eg XQ and potential writing projects, and physically with tango? Perhaps. But whatever the goings on in her head, I sat there in that car, bound physically once again, brought to reality as easily as a bump on the road. I had reached an escape velocity with her, but it had passed.
And we never got to consumate our general flight in any way. Not with written words, though that may come; not with some tango-esque physical calibration experiences, though I am sure that Iain will invite her to tango; and not with a simple maths thought experiment. We flew. We never landed.
a dangerous state
I described myself to Laura as being dangerous, or being in a dangerous state. I think this is true. I have been out of orbit of 2020 for a year, and I have been open to all kinds of possible developments, and this includes personal ones. The engagement with Harriet has effected me strongly. I feel I am slingshotting around her. I was aiming for her, but there is now something of higher gravity nearby which has altered my course, and I am slingshotting out of any recognisable orbit whatsoever.
I will be seeing Harriet soon, I hope, to see how she is, and how she is with me. I do not know how I will be afterwards. If I can not bring to bear my responsibility, then there is a strong sense of increasing irresponsibility. That accounts for the energies that awoke that fitful night's sleep. It was a positive energy, no doubt, but it was directing itself towards making love to a woman I hardly knew. This is dangerous. Luckily, I was responsible enough during my waking life to direct it towards tango and XQ and future writing projects.
And this is true not only for local concerns of heart, mind and desire. This also holds for my larger horizons, the globe and "work". I am in a very open state. Very vulnerable, possibly very powerful, whatever the grounding bump that I experienced subsequently. A dangerous time for all concerned. This might last weeks, months, maybe a year. Depends very much on what people do and say around me. What opportunities arise, what I attend to. Being aware I am in this place, with so much uncertainty in terms of location, is good. I am ready.
the degrees of openness of a door
A door exists in time. When it is closed, it is a wall. When it is open, it is a hole in the wall. Some animals can understand doors, in some sense, like cats and dogs. There is a temporal dimension to it. A door does not exist "now"; it is of the mind, a process, a range in time.
I have known about this for some time. What was different this time around, while I lay in bed a few hours ago now, was that I became aware of the number of degrees of an open door. How open it is. However, when we talk about closure, it appears on first appearances, to have a single state, as closed. But on closer inspection, we might see a door as just being closed, as beind closed with a latch, click, or being locked. And then you get degrees of how well locked.
Map this to thoughts about zero and one, about non-zero. About possibility, awareness, probability space.
What attracts my mind is the click. When a door is open, and then, click, it is closed. We might have different degrees of openness, and I think this is quite different about the resistance a door has to being openned in terms of lockedness. But that difference between open and closed seems to my mind to hang on that click. And that seems close to that notion we explored before about non-zero and the inevitability of one.
I am in a high degree of openness. I seem to be increasing this. Whereas, as it happens, because of the state of the world, there are a lot of people which are increasing the state of closedness -- of battoning down the hatches. I guess it depends on whether people feel they have something they want to keep for themselves. This time is definitely polarising us. Do we give more, or take more.
Such thoughts fray from the "click" moment, the cleaving edge between open and closed, individually in the cleaving moment of our mind, as Laura and my interaction demonstrate, and in the bifurcating effect at the collective level, as a species as our politico-economic structures undergo transformation.
gatekeeper
When we hit 2020, I shall most likely be in a monastery. I have said this before. If I feel perturbations in me when I see simple things like consensus processes at Occupy Wall Street, if I can see the rebound off the wall that is Chris, it is definitely something I shall need to attend to with my full attention when the actual year passes, should I still be alive.
Nevertheless, just as my awareness can turn the backward recollection of missed opportunities to be signs that we are going in the right direction, this may manifest along the 2020 route too. How so? I do not hold the possibility as open any more. This does not mean I am negative. It means that I am no longer emphasising idealistic, but realistic. I have passed through the action of a decade, where I applied myself to increasing the chance of a realistic opportunity for peace for the year 2020.
Most people who have seen their dreams shattered, become depressed or disenchanted. Witness so many adults who believed in true love, and somehow are wandering through relationships in their thirties and forties. Witness so many adults who dreamed of changing the world with wide eyes, now with blinkers of almost blinding positivity. Witness adults who dreamed of idealistic professionas, who have given up their dreams for years of over-work, who live off the open-eyed wonder of dreams that their children bring to the world.
To have lived the possibility of 2020, and to end with it, is no bad thing. I am in a good position to give relative comparisons to currrent actions, as demonstrated above. I am not like most futurists and pundits who rally to the Occupy Wall Street like enthusiastic teenagers, who take any social movement to plant their flag of anti-capitalism or peer-to-peer dream, who move on from social disruption to social disruption with such enthusiasm and who seem to be ignorant of the actual disarray, destruction, raw uncertainty that follows, such as from the movement "the arab spring". My observations are quite clean because they are tempered by failure. 2020 has failed, in my personal experience, in my mind.
My mind is closed, in this sense. The door has closed with a click. But it is not locked. It merely requires evidence for it to open. Not things like Occupy Wall Street, nor many much more powerful social events we will see over this next decade. I shall respond with measure, and the door will only open in 2020 if there is sufficient evidence. Thus, I am fulfilling something I intuited in the 2020worldpeace network of ideas within the "actuator ladder" nexus: I am a profounder. I have already lost. We have everything to win. I am not going to be blinded by positivity. But neither am I going to be weighed down by negativity.
As far as I can tell, there are plenty of opportunities ahead for us to get our act together. We may have missed 2020, but who knows what will happen? And perhaps we may see some marvellous changes for 2030, or 2040 or 2050, as most serious futurists working in government or NGO's envision. The door to 2020 may be closed. I am part of the click that constitutes that closer. Not my friends and family and their past behaviour. Sure, they were part of the wind that pushed back the door. But I, in my mind, made the closure. It has never been open, in a way of thinking about it. Laura, for example, saw the door as closed.
There never has been a door. Only Yinka saw it as open. But she did not see a door, she saw an opening, a hole in the wall.
I still have the door in my mind. It is closed. Sure. But it is a door. It can be opened. It is not for me to open it. As a profounder, I shall only open it if there is enough evidence. And by evidence, I mean the conditions set out in the 2020 nexus.
Quite remarkable, if you think about it. How many will be willing to see 2020? How many will fail and become profounders? Yet another win-win. For even if we pass the door in the year 2020, and it is closed, we can still offer service to the world and remark on how close we are, presently, both in our social forms and in our individual awareness right here and now. Useful to have such people hanging around, don't you think?
So, are you looking at a wall? Or do you see the edge of an opening? Will you actually look at the possibility? Will you read what I have thought about? Will you consider where you are, what your experience has been, and consider the rates of changes of social events, technology and so on. Or can you actually see the door?
0 responses:
Post a Comment