Heading Out and Heading In

It is common in the sometimes bizarre world of therapy to find an individual feeling wonderful one day and depressed the next. There are numerous explanations and terms depending on which paper you read, but one of the common traits in these roller-coaster rides is the difference between extroversion and introversion, feeling exterior to the body and able to freely look outward, versus feeling sucked into the massy dark shadows of the soul and drawn itno a fruitless wrestling match with the apparent forces and arguments of interior darkness.

Heading out, looking further into the world and the worlds of others, and the further reaches of one’s own polyphonic universe, is adventurous and bold.

Heading in, wrestling with the unfathomable gravitic balls of unresolved meaning in the interior, is sobering, serious, saddening and often induces apathy and helplessness.

This is a strange state of affairs, really; it would seem that in a naturally healthy and free state, the being should be perfectly comfortable cruising the interior and the exterior, and in fact see little boundary between these two landscapes, seeing clearly that both are composites of his own creative energies blended with the apparent inputs from the physical universe and the datasets he/she assimilates from the whacky fun-ride world of Others.

But there is a trick, or perhaps several, which gives the lie to this clear exploration of these conjoining territories, and which gives rise tot he sense of being within the imprisoning pale of one’s own difficulties, or being free to explore outside them.

One form of this trick stems from space-time in the physical universe, and another from the tribes who emulate matter in their approach to being in the world.

The first such trick is the entropic condensation of space, which appears to be an inherent attribute of space-time in an energy-driven universe. Absent the intervention of intent, space-time tends toward condensation, solidification, gravitic in-drawing and the gradual dissipation of energy differentials, idling towards a flat plain of no-event in which no forms may be sustained. This tendency toward uniform distribution of energy levels is entropy. Systems once erected start toward it if left to the clutches of the material realm just as a new house starts growing dust, mold, and decay under the weather from the day it is built; barring the intercession of life’s intent to bring order, for example by scraping and painting, or vacuuming up the dirt, the thing falls slowly apart and returns to dust. Let one fireball of a creative designer or a determined char-person come along and the entropic inertia is countered firmly by intent.

The secret behind this rather stupid mechanism of material systems in the final analysis is the apparent sourceless, causeless, automatic nature of mass and space, which offers no direction of change except to be the effect of gravity, erosion, implosion and condensation. The core belief about such things is they are not caused, they are mechanisms, operating on their own inherent devices.

This is well and good for our little sandbox; but notice too that some folks who have been overly exposed to this drearty machine like to espouse these traits as necessary, and even in a perverse way virtuous. They will persuade you, a living source of all creative possibility, that you should, like mass, comply with conditions around you rather than seek to improve them. They will invent logical tricks which make it seem inescapable that you are eternally in the grip of apathetic machinery, careless of feeling, blind to seeing, callous to all knowing, and indifferent to preference. Buy these considerations, and you will find your own powers of creation being suborned by the Masters of Massiness. You will find your desires to be constantly reined in by gravity and inertia, your creativeness endlessly undermined by quicksands of groundless apathy and sucked dry by the black holes of Thinginess. The lies you buy will reinforce the patterns of the material world and give you a mind married to mortar, stone, black matter and the decay of stars into cold iron. And inherent in this sad transition will be the belief throughout that these things cannot be understood, are not permeable by thought, and have no insight to offer, being the solid and intransigent darks which they are.

Thus, the decadent and battered souls you meet will inspire you toward death and the rejection of your own nature. This will tend to make a ball of wax with strong gravitic properties, which calls you back to wrestle with its lies every time you start to look outward and see further beyond the apparent normalcy of the usual frames of existence.

Thus, the conspiracy of matter and mind will show you there is an inuperable pale beyond which travel is harsh and hard to do.

It is worth bearing in mind that these two sources, the mass of an entropic mechanical universe and the mocking messages from life beaten into compliance with the same mode of being, are lective, not mandatory. If you learn to discriminate themessages offered, and select with true preference those you will take on board as your own, you can unwind this winding sheet and find yourself free to look out or in at will.

All it requires is to understand that the truest Self you can be is also the freest, highrest, best and most aware Self you can be.

The material universe and those who elect themselves as its dark-faced hall-monitors will both tell you otherwise; but you, in the final analysis, must choose who and what you prefer to believe. From that choice, all the experience of the universe will follow.

# # #

Seemings

There is the whole truth and there is the way things seem.

Seemings are the sum of all appreciable mechanics relating to a view of existence and a moment in time.

But seemings are not the whole truth. They are enough to do engineering by, but they are not enough to provide enlightenment by.

# # #

Intimacy As Problem

The problem with intimacy is not physical. There is a river of evidence that physical connection of the most intimate kind can mean everything or nothing. In either case it is not the problem.

The problem with intimacy is that it violates the rules of communication in unpredictable ways, and distorts communication the way magic distorts physics, when it does, whether for better or for worse. It is extremely tricky to sort out the better and the worse and to cleave to the best.

The reason is that there is too much similarity between the co-existance of genuine, high-communication intimacy, and the “collapsed-worlds” imitation of it that stems from a surrender of one's position from desperation or fear. The latter tactic causes a neurotic closeness approaching identity, need-driven. Genuine intimacy of the higher order brings about orders of magnitude more communication, of an instantaneous sort, without ever compromising the clear and serene certainty of who is who, causing what. High intimacy is a delight; its low-bred evil twin is a plague seeking sympathy.

One effect of the genuine article is to multiply individual reach outwards into unlimiting spaces, fueled by a huge increase in energy, redoubled creativity, an empowerment of souls.

One effect of the ersatz version is to turn the self within itself wondering why it has been so badly split and broken, internally.

An answer is because the soul’s breath has been stolen under fraudulent terms of disguised and treacherous self-loathing imposed on the one by some other.

This does not occur without consent, but being tricked is a lot easier when you do not know the mechanisms of the game, and this collapse between an I and a Thou is one worth noticing.

# # #

Emerging Systems, Complexity and Attention

Complex emergent systems develop from the bottom up.

Our general obsessions as humans, intellectually, is to try to characterize the high level system, ignoring the details; thus we invent flying abstractions like “God” , his various siblings, and broad identities like “normal people”. We make entities of the high-level systems, often overlooking that they are in fact organizations. The granularity is all wrong, and we end up with a culture to some degree built on granfaloons.

In system design, when the low-end grains are done right, the higher more evolved and complex system tends to take carte of itself. The Almighty may be on high, but the devil is in the details, which is where He comes from. God will behave much better when the human grain becomes better-formed.

But this leads to a bit of a paradox: the human being, itself a composite of complexity, is defined by organizations of complex associations, looking deeper, of cells, DNA, the molecule, the proton, space itself and at the bottom, the ‘unit’ of attention.

The inconsistency and spinning imponderability of this notion might be enough to drive one to religion. The resolution to it is NOT a new synthetic composite at the high level, but to identify the real nature of the real grain.

An “attention unit” is a functional description of something which we know happens. You know you have placed attention on this sentence.

If a bee, wandering by, were to sting you on the lip, all of that attention would be diverted rapidly. If the bee, instead, flew by a few yards away, only some of your attention would be redirected; miles away, and none of it would be. This reveals some interesting questions about how interference works.

But we should also note that this has to do at least in part with the quality of INTENTION involved. The fullest intent brings about the least divertible or deflected attention.

If the core granularity of the culture is in the intimate details of attention being sent around by the participants of the culture, then it seems reasonable there is a lotto know about how attention really works, what happens when it is placed on something, if there are different kinds, frequencies, colors or grades of attention, and if so how to select among them or improve them.

Both marketing and the psychological sciences (as they are sometimes called) have started groping into and grappling with this jungle of unknowns, but neither have gotten far enough to tip the scales of out times.

# # #

Time and the Spirit’s Space

From a letter to a friend. December, 2000

"…We spoke a while ago of "it", the “z” ingredient, the seat of being and the creative energy behind thoughts and identities.

There is no question from experiential data that "It" is a real part of existence; but it is equally true that "it" gets very squashed and hemmed in by physical universe mechanisms and gradually from overwhelm begins to imitate them, getting more and more like a reaction and less and less like an author.

The entrapment of life force in the physical universe is the biggest and most important single puzzle to be solved in our time.

Of course, in order to solve it, there are a couple of heuristic obligations we have to take.

One is to steer clear of overlays provided by the not-quite-bright or the too-heavily-persuaded. These overlays, for want of a better term, include all the mystic rag-tag solutions to terror and darkness ever dreamed up by confused humanoids in the history of our species: including, but not limited to, gods, demons, after-death tortures (and after-birth tortures, too!), cosmological control mechanisms, saviors, goddesses, ghosts angels and premature ectoplasm foofaras, baroque and bizarre explanations which do not explain anything, and other distortions of simple clear thought.

Another heuristic obligation is to quell the semiotic fires of past meaning as a form of overlay.

A third is to be constantly on the alert for premises and assumptions which are hidden in data and which send the mind reeling into a warped nest of implications and old freight-hauls by simply using terminology that is too rife with assumption. A key example is the old lemon "Do you believe in God?". Wow -- talk about an unanswerable question riddled with hidden premises! Worse than "Have you stopped abusing your wife?".

A special set of such premises and assumptions is the world-view we have grown accustomed to by driving bodies. As an analogy, consider how it would be if we became so addicted to driving cars that we would not be able to recognize a cowpath, or a meandering foot-trail, because it wasn't appropriate for the vehicle we were addicted to. Anything not a driveable road would gradually become filtered out of our windscreen perspective.

Similarly, our sensory mechanisms would get very tuned into bumps, rattles and steering pressures -- the sort of sensory perception a car gives you -- but we would gradually lose the ability to detect other frequencies, such as the subtle changes of air moving through grass, the rhythms of seasons, or the smell of snow the night before it starts. Wouldn't be part of the sensory package allowed by our addiction.

One of the more interesting premises which we inherit from the body's perspective and tend to automatically depend on, as described above, is the sense of space and time. The physical universe depends for its illusion on the persistence and universality of spacetime. Without that great shadow-show, we would find cracks and holes riddled throughout it. It may be that we once did, back before we animated so much of it with central heating, alternating current lighting systems, broadcast media, poured concrete, and other neat devices of human comfort.

Anyway, this addiction to space and to time are two things which we learn about from the body, which is firmly embedded in the continuum and which sends us painful messages of pressure, hurting, nausea, or even death if we try to step too far through the envelope of the continuum while still dragging it (the body).

We should give reflection to the possibility that space is a by product of viewpoint, and the only reason we have a common physics of space is because we engage in an average of illusion of viewpoint, and surrender certain abilities in order to support that commonality, like good taxpayers supporting a town fire department. If we all give up 90% of our abilities to generate spaces at will, why then we can have a common Monopoly board and all agree on how the game looks. Isn't that NICE?

Instead of accepting this "Monolithic Space" view, let us assume for a moment, in spite of the body's insistence not to do so, that space is generated by a viewpoint seeking dimensions to view. Why wound a viewpoint do this? For the fun of the experience, I suppose.

Anyway, if that were the case, then what appears to the body as a single spread of unbroken space from Toronto around to Reykjavik and back, including all the myriad contortions of awesome Orion and the numinous nebula of endless galaxies around... may actually be a composite of trillions of points of view left on automatic. More important, if this is the case, the individual viewpoint should be able to reduce the addiction to body identification by selecting spaces and separating them from the uniform monolith, or at least practicing seeing the many components in space, noticing their beginnings and ends, rather than just buying the TV show of uniform space.

Time is a similar subject -- if it is simply the constructed knowledge that things will persist, and therefore that one moment's creation HAS to be considered as a direct extension from the moment before, which is more or less how the body sees it, then a similar "reduction of habit" might start up if one began insisting that each now was only linked to the next to the degree one wished it to be so. This could be scary in social discourse, like a visit to Smallville.

And try insisting, for fun, that time is not one directional but bi-, tri-, or n-directional according to the will of the time-maker. Another slip of the old habit would be to try, meditatively, to sense the millions to the nth kinds of time being created in every moment. That sounds paradoxical, like the person who wrote a letter saying "I meant to send you the check with this letter but I had already sealed the envelope when I remembered..." . But it is not; only the adamant habituation of basic unidirectional definitions of time make it feel impossible; and thinking about it can give a body a nauseous reaction, because nothing is more uncomfortable to a body than hitting space or time irregularities.

Here are some exercises for the fun of it.

Pat your body on the head and say several times "Good seeing-eye dog".

Spot three spots in the body, then three spots in the room, over and over until you are comfortable being near but not the same as either one of them. You can extend this to the city or area around the room/building if you feel comfortable spotting spots there.

Get the idea of creating some time. Then get the idea of throwing away the time you just created. Make some more and throw it away. Invent different kinds and get the idea of other people agreeing to have it be your way. Then throw it away and invent some more. Get the idea of your body agreeing to travel through time in any direction you say.

Get the idea of time running so fast that you live a whole lifetime between 9 and 9:15, with all the emotions and experiences and rich perceptions you have grown accustomed to thinking of as a lifetime: puberty at 9:03, wealth at 9:06, etc...hmmm.

Try some other styles -- time so slow it takes a year to even assemble a single perception. Time which splits, and split time streams which mysteriously reunite, or run counterpoint to each other, like a fugue writ large in the heavens, a cognitive symphonic work.

Fun stuff.-- Lemme know what you think.

A.

Pragma Among the Universes

A pragma is a sort of filter of data flows in a software system – a low level function that defines what sorts of input will come in to the system and in what form. It is used to define a particular variation in how a program written out in source code will be compiled. The compiler, which condenses the English-like line entries of a program into a much more compact language close to the machine’s native binary, will change how it treats incoming segments of the program based on rules set up as pragmae. You can have a whole dictionary of these rules, a pragma dictionary, to call into use for a compiler which is processing a source-code program.

In consciousness, there is a similar kind of transition in which the individual establishes certain mechanisms defining the rules for how raw experience os going to get treated as it comes into the “system”. These rules are also collectable, and some people have scads of them. These “pragmae” guard the wide open bandwidth of direct raw perception and produce a compiled version, with the calls and data structures modified according tot he rules in the pragmae.
A hierarchy could be postulated of gradiently more involved and densified creation on this order:

POSTULATES
BELIEFS
PRAGMA (Own universe) (Pr_U)
PRAGMA (Material Universe) (Pr_M)
PRAGMA (Social Universe)Pr_S

It is an interesting study how these structures in knowing work to keep us in phase, in tune, within limits and on the same small piece of bandwidth. Perception is an instant compliance to a Pr. One note of special interest is that a Pr_U must somehow be published as a distributed knowing for any entity (Ex) which can be experienced in the intersection [U]. Pr _M can MASK a subscription to PR_U but may not cancel it.

There is perhaps a great deal more to know about these layers of constructed knowing among the universes -- both those we share and those we tend alone.

# # #

The Greatest Debate

It is a Tuesday morning in September and I have just been on the phone with a friene discussing the model of the “implicate” (unfolded and yet-to-manifest) order of existence which is described well in The Holographic Universe. I am struck with a resonant insight and sit down to hurriedly tap out an electronic message.

“I believe we began, this morning, one of the really great metaphysical debates of our era, and didn't even notice. "Implicate universe", as a name for the Great Unfolded, is a wonderful term, and raises all kinds of great questions which have been beaten to death in the explicate universe but died the death of the imponderable in our history because they excluded the much larger part of the scene -- the implicate and its means, origins, nature and design.

At the core of this understanding is the major question we tripped over, like a brick on the bathroom floor at midnight. Are they folded different? Or are they just folded up in another part of "it"?

The latter notion is (to use shorthand) scholastic, while the former is Socratic, in my opinion. Including my implicate opinions which have many surprises in store. My perception is that the great tangled sheet of our spacetime is in fact the manifestation of the beings who comprise it, all enfolded in their loops and spirals of trillenia of compression, distortion and interleaving with their creations and decisions.

My “God” is this: the unfolding of all beings. Beyond that, he is numinous Causation, unformed, indiscriminate, all-permeating, unidentified, non-centric, non-terminal, and while not unknowable certainly not describable in any framework to be found in the explicate time-bound and space-bundled part of existence.

The problem with the language of most organized religions, and many of the branches of Christianity in particular, is the imposition by language of explicate frames of reference on the implicate.
We cannot avoid this entirely in any zone, religious or not. Our experiential baseline, from which so many of our expectations are defined, is drawn naturally in large measure from the appearances of the explicate universe. Embedded in the forces and spaces and time-boxes of material apparency, we measure the world in a way that makes sense to our bodies and its extensions. We target our expectations to take place in the same framework.

If anyone ever wondered why the “Wheel” – the endless recycling of beings through lifetimes – seemed to be such a persistent pattern, this mechanism is a key part of the answer – the loop of perceive, evaluate and intend which draws our attention and our ability to create futures repeatedly back to the baseline framwork of human effort and its explicate-universe vocabulary. That vocabulary is a loop of its own which dampens the possible by burying it under the familiar.

So this is not a religious or Christian issue; it is a fundamental philosophical and metaphysical one. Not to say ontololgical and epistemological. How we know is perhaps the key thread. The enduring illusion is that we know from explicate forms and pictures of explicate forms. All our efforts at de-stressing others and relieving them of charge or distress circles around that campfire. The truer picture is that we know from the enfolded to the explicate, and then fool ourselves with the apparencies generated by our knowing, into taking the manifestations more seriously than the sources. This is the Big Lie of all time.

The state of beings in the explicate universe is kind of beaten up by this endless self-whanging. Like a tribe of mad dancers hitting themselves in the head with frying pans in the moonlight: Whack! Gonng! Whack! Gonng! They dance a frenzied circle around the flames, beating themselves toward unconsciousness. Traditionally, the first to render himself knocked out cold is elevated in esteem and privelege among the bucks of the tribe. He gets to paint purple circles around his armpits for a year and his frying pan gets elevated to the top of a tall pole in the center of the village. “Whack! Gonng!”. The dance goes on past midnight – these are hard-skulled bucks, indeed.

“Why are you doing that?”, enquires the anthropologist.

“It is our way,” they answer. “This is how we Know.”

Freud once remarked that it seemed that “every conversation takes place between at least four people.”

“We shall have a great deal to say about this,” he added.

He didn’t know the half of it.

And now, I really have to get to work. Let’s see...where did I leave that frying pan?”

And a Very Merry Christmas to us all.

# # #

Vast Shores, Vaster Depths

The vasty deep of the places of consciousness is untapped by normal living.

Like sun-loving multicells we float within inches of the surface, mapping waves and ripples; and this is the greatness of our vision.

Beneath these sunny shallows are dimensions of beauty, insight, powerful intent, and endless design of which we wot little.

To ease our sense of self-esteem we often mark these up to a more powerful intelligence, and say the deeps are God. But they are no more God than seaweed.

The shores are vast enough, and the depths which approach them many times more so.

To know, to know, is the sole ambition of the soul becoming one.

# # #

Technology As An Infinite Solution

We have seen the burgeoning of a certain, fundamental conviction in our time; not one that was born here, but one that certainly grew up in the West in the last century. Grew up, waxed and even became slightly obese. The conviction is that at the core, mankind will remedy its ills and earn its destiny through the continuous expansion and refinement of technology.
This is a deeply persuasive conviction because it has a track record. Some large segments of our past trials and griefs have been remedied by the use of it: the eradication of small pox has spared millions of tears, as has the banishment of childbed fever and the discovery of penicillin.

For uncountable years our origins and our efforts have been involved with the things that technology helps: conquering the environment so it will not hurt us, getting enough food and water, defending our selves and families against catastrophe and against attack by other species, and finding better ways to coordinate these efforts. Thus, technology has grown up as the most needed of our intellectual children, the one area at which we were superior to carnivorous tigers and athletic apes.

These challenging material goals have been met, moved up, and met again repeatedly because we relish those of our kind who come up with technology, pay them well and give them praise. We educate our young to see as heroes the Edisons, Fords, Jobs, Eli Whitneys and Nikolai Teslas of our various eras. Even when we vilify our inventors, as when Isaac Semmelwies was run out of town for curing puerperal fever or when Harvey was mocked for asserting circulation of blood as a system, we use their discoveries and grant them recognition in the backhanded flattery of assimilating their inventions. If Einstein is the man of the 20th Century, so Newton was of the 18th, and perhaps Watts of the nineteenth.

But this is perhaps a constrained perspective with some blinders at the edges. Not all of our miseries of the last millennium (1000-1999) were induced by physical needs unmet, although many were. In modern Africa, the gentle fields of Zambia were painted red by the wanton murder of thousands of Tutsis by Hutu tribe members gone amok, and vice versa; and in proud Zagreb the gutters ran with the blood of ethnic Albanians eliminated by Milosovic's ancient venom. As our young children might well ask, "What's UP with that?".

This is not a new game. The British slaughtered Scots, Boers, Hindi and Irish in their efforts to consolidate their extended empire; tens of thousands of shallow graves have been filled by Stalin alone, and before him by the troops of the Czars; millions more were filled by civilized Germans being led pell-mell to their destiny by a psycho midget. The Crusades spilled the blood of thousands of fathers and brothers; the Union army died in droves and spent the equivalent of millions likewise killing droves of Confederate men, most of whom had loves and many of whom left fatherless children behind. Afghanistan, Kuwait, not to mention Tarawa and the bloody battles of Midway; the slaughter of millions by Japanese Imperial forces even before the Second World War. The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fried mothers and infants in the same fireball that vaporized their homes, their parents, their grandparents, their dreams and their hopes. "What's UP with that?", repeats the voice of our next generation.

The jails of our great democratic experiment, where we put the failures, are stacked high with the wasted lives of men and women who were driven to manslaughter and mayhem in the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. Is there a cognitive dissonance here?

Even short of physical assault, our psychiatric wards across the planet are also filled with those whose burdens were too great to stand, who lowered the drawbridge and allowed the floods of insanity to sweep the donjon keep of their inner centers; they could not cling to the shell of accepted civilized interchange, finding it without substance in the battle of demons, a paper weapon quickly crisped by the deep fires of their insanities. Out streets, in our centers of commerce across the planet, are lined with the poor and homeless who have not been able to find a way to build happy lives. While we can blame them for their misfortunes, doing so does little to find causes. What's up with THAT, dude?

Here is what's up: we do not know who we are. We do not know what our minds are capable of, nor do we know how they work. Those to whom this work has been entrusted are largely failures, are often more in need of therapy than their clients, and have not provided a model we can relate to. Without a clear view of our own natures, we are left facing the fact that, as a species, a large part of our numbers is completely mad, and the rest possess a large portion of madness which could readily overwhelm them under the right duress. Human sanity is not a known equation, and the elements which make it and destroy it are unknown elements. In its place we have build a machine driven often by clunky opinions and frail whimsy. That we have managed at all to build societies and commerce and products worthy of exchange is a tribute to our resilience and the overwhelming good that also lies within all our kind. But these are not issues for which physical technology can provide an answer directly, aside from perhaps instrumentation.

Thus the dream of solving existence with technology is a bounded one, a dream full of richness and value but one that is not ultimate in any sense, and one which covers only a part of the playing field. Beyond technology, we need--with a burning need --- to find a language with which we can see our own hearts, resolve our own insanity, and build a civilization of which we as humans can be proud instead of ashamed. This is another game, beyond the scope of electronic designers and nanotechnologists.

It can be argued that technology remedies the factors of want that lead men to desperate acts, and much can be said for that view. But the failures that lead humans to desperation are not just material failures. They are also failures in compassion, failures in imagination, failures in social design, failures in insight, failures in initiative. When we lose the battle of civilization to the barbarian hordes of madness, mayhem, chaos and the dogs of war we are losing through shortfalls of communication, of human affinity, of creative power, much more than we are to a lack of technology. That is the challenge for our kind to turn to next.

If politics, economics, schools, business practices and manufacturing plants were all informed by a vital and clear cognizance of our actual natures, by some proven vocabulary of the spiritual and mental and emotional dynamics that lurk within our makeup as individuals and as members of larger groups, we would be on a bridgehead indeed, with greater conquests ahead than any we could claim before.

Maybe we should start.

# # #

The Trap Of Mentality

An ancient wise man (20th Century) wrote wisely that "the map is not the territory". This was applied to the symbols of semantic systems in the fancy subject of semiotics, the study of portable meanings.

But it needs to be applied to a more fundamental layer of abstraction, the generation of "mentality" or systems of thinking.
Systems of thinking consist of complex arrays of pictures and Representations of states of existence (or unexistence) in some universe.

If you need an example, just watch yourself doing an algebra problem and notice where you keep those rules of division, or watch yourself make up a shopping list while you study the larder and think about your family's quirky appetites.
Systems of thinking (as distinguished from thought itself) are collections of recreatable images of how things are combined with new postulated impressions of how they might be. Some folks add in impressions of how certain others think, such as a little generator that dictates what Mom would say about this.
The reason this becomes a trap is that these systems becomes substitutes for perception. This is a handy mechanism, since it lets us put these trivial issues such as life on automatic and go off and smell the daisies in some septic tank of apathetic resignation somewhere.

To add a bit to how this works, consider that all these impressions of how things are or might be are figured in awareness as objects of impression, such as images to look at or emotional waves to feel, or thoughts to look at and think. Whatever their content, whatever they tell us about the universe, they are created forms. They are generated by our own authorship in the first instance, no matter how automatic they may seem to become over time. They are born in the hot forge of our own attention, doing what it does best -- making things to perceive, and then perceiving them. We use attention to animate or reanimate them in order to pose and resolve real or imagined problems. That's how we remember how to change a tire or ride a bicycle even though we haven't use the skill in fifteen years.

But we sometimes fail to notice that they are representations. We take the content of them at face value; for example, we get stuck in believing we feel a certain way because we are looking at a picture which has such feelings in it. Because some of these representations are closely related to our decisions to be a certain way or feel a certain way, it seems logical to assume they are who we are, the makeup of our identities. This is a lethal error because at that point, we associate so closely with them that they become neatly invisible, just as the eyeballs become invisible to their owner.

From this we can deduce two crucial rules to remember, and if we keep them in mind (how? By making a picture of them!) we can bail out of the mentality trap, which often leads in endless figure-eight loops back and forth like a little go-cart track in a grungy back lot of existence, lined with rubber-tire wards and supposed-to's to keep us well contained.

Crucial Rule Number One: Content is Not Structure. What a thought contains can be infinitely various, but it will still behave according to rules which govern the nature of thought structures. Be not so led by content that you fail to notice structure, the nature of the construct itself.

Crucial Rule Number Two: Ground is Not Figure, Nor Figure, Ground. The forms we dance to are erected on the ground of a deeper nature, the full scale of which has not been explored, which is the infinite awareness which is Thou. Upon this ground, we build the mazes of amazing mentality. Return to ground, becoming one again with your own power of perception in full, and the figures dance to nothingness. Otherwise, you can be bemused by the very constraining conviction that ground is the same as figure, and in consequence find yourself endlessly figuring. Figure, figure figure. Let yourself know when you tire of it, and see Rules One and Two.

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