The Tyranny of Sapience

The tyranny of private property that dominates this world fears nothing more than not being able to exploit humankind anymore. It values its hegemony above all else. That's why this world is so fucked up. Its "reality" is literally a conceptual framework that binds humankind's actuality to its reward and punishment regime. That's why the truth has no actual place in this world and merit is meaningless. Everything here is designed to spin your wheels and humor you while you power the tyrant's treadmill. This "dog eat dog" world with its institutionalized exploitation is designed to make predators and prey of human beings.

Humankind's current actuality is one of captivity enforced by various forms of organized crime, including disinformation, warfare, and societal terrorism (such as political assassinations, mass murders, and "honor" killings).

Like the owners of a casino, the protagonists of this world have humankind playing a "game" in which the "house" always wins. The House of Private Property essentially owns human existence, including human potential and the future. One can accept rewards for playing along, or else...

In contrast, the world of an emancipated humankind will be administered by actual democracy instead of by proxy as it is in republics. Able to set the agenda, people will choose to spend their wealth on improving the planet's quality of life, instead of wasting it on boondoggles such as weapons of war, partisan political posturing, and vehicles of organized graft. Imagine being able to reclaim all of the time, energy and wealth that is wasted on those things. Imagine a world driven by cooperation instead of competition. Imagine a world that is intrinsically honest and kind, like a good teacher. Imagine a world that invests in merit. Imagine a world that reflects favorably on its caretakers. Humankind is on the threshold of actuality and the universe is the limit.

History can serve its purpose as the ultimate database of existential errors. Humankind's sapience is contingent upon learning its costly lessons.

Dreams

Also many years ago, I dreamed that I will meet and become the old man again on the snowy peaks of deep time, at the end of my trail. My dreams keep me going when nothing else is able to.

Dream memory is an interesting phenomenon. I can remember approximately when a dream occurred by the general circumstances of my life at the time, but not with precision. The conscious mind resists recording dreams because their logic and sense of time defy quantification; it only records the most impressive and quantifiable dreams. The subconscious mind has its own memory, though, as I experience every time an event in my actual life triggers the memory of a dream I had forgotten.

It's true that one can learn to summon the conscious mind from the subconscious simply by frequently thinking about the idea of being awake in one's dreams. When I want it to happen, I remind myself before going to sleep to notice the discrepancies in space and time that signal the dream state. I do that every day until it happens. If you're interested in trying it, it works better during naps when one is genuinely tired. It's difficult to do in deep sleep. Also, keep in mind that you might experience what is known as sleep paralysis: instead of being in a dream, one's mind is where the body is, yet unable to rouse it. That can be scary, but it can also be a starting point for experimentation in what is also known as an "out of body" experience. For starters, try to separate yourself from your body and notice how you're attached to it like a magnet.

When I was studying at the Slade School of Art in London during the late 80s, I became conversant with the subconscious mind over a period of about a year. Often high on hashish and tired from walking everywhere, it was easy. I started by exploring the environment of each dream, always involving doors to go through and steps to other levels. Naturally, it seems, I was more disposed to exploring foundations, so I found myself eventually in tunnels and caves. One dream in a tunnel, presumably at the center of my being, I found a cave inhabited by an enormous being with the head of lion and the body of a snake. Its head was big enough to swallow me in one gulp. As frightening as it was physically, the most frightening thing about it was its mind, which had mine trapped magnetically in its orbit. In mortal fear at first, I learned that he didn't mean to harm me and is actually my benefactor. I found out years later, on the Internet, that he's well-known to humankind.

Chnoubis, the Demiurge

In the last dream that I remember about the tunnels, I followed a passage that led outside, to a meadow at the base of a towering cliff. As I watched, the rocks split and crumbled and gave way to a deluge of water that swept me up and delivered me on a wave to the ocean.

After the tunnel dreams, I began to experience sleep paralysis and did my best to explore the state, but it's very difficult to get any distance from one's body without falling back into a dream. My intention was to make it outside from my first floor flat to get a "view" of the ever changing details that I could verify a moment later after waking myself. With much effort, I eventually made it past my door and down the tall hallway to the front door of the house, where the strangest thing happened. The light coming though the frosted glass on the front door sent me into what appeared to be a dream, but in a similar space. There was an unexpected doorway to my left, leading to a room where an older woman sat still on a chair. I approached her and asked her where I was but she didn't answer or even look at me. I felt frustrated, and knowing that I was dreaming, I decided to shake her gently to get her attention. As I shook her, a piercing scream woke me from the dream. I ran outside to the hallway where the scream had come from and saw that my landlord had fallen off of a small table he had been standing on to hang a picture. He had broken his leg and was in much pain. As his wife ran down the stairs to help him, there was a knock on the front door and she asked me to see who it was. I opened the door to find an older woman who told me that she had lived in the house as a child, and she wanted to come in and see it.

Then life changed, as it does, and I developed new habits that changed my focus on lucid dreaming. Now, based on what I have learned from 56 years of life, I understand the meanings of my most impressive dreams, and I marvel at the mind's ability to perceive and create meaning in seemingly magical ways.

Some Thoughts

When I was a youngster in art school, I had a dream once that I lived on what appeared to be another planet in a small, idyllic community where everyone knew each other and lived together in harmony. It was a green paradise on an ocean bay, warm and heavenly. I saw from above that the town resembled a circuit board, with the buildings arranged like processors, capacitors, diodes, resistors and transistors. As the dream ended, I saw that I decided to leave there, alone, by walking across a stratospheric land bridge suspended above deep time, and into a frozen, untouched wilderness.

When people talk about the possibility that the universe is a 4-dimensional sphere, they invoke the analog relationship between a hypothetical 2-dimensional world and our actual 3-dimensional world. The idea states that 2-dimensional beings living on the surface of a 3-dimensional sphere may be able to deduce the existence of the sphere by being able to set off in any 2-dimensional direction and eventually arrive where they began. Similarly, if the universe is a 4-dimensional sphere, we should be able to set off in any 3-dimensional direction and eventually arrive where we started. Also, since we, as 3-dimensional beings, can see inside of 2-dimensional shapes, it stands to reason that a 4-dimensional being would be able to see us inside and out.

The ideas are very interesting and I do believe that we live in a 4-dimensional universe, but no one talks about how time is affected by the transition from 3 to 4 dimensions. I believe that sequential time exists only inside 4-dimensional bubble universes like ours. A 4-dimensional being would not be limited by 3-dimensional space or sequential time. That means that a 4-dimensional being would not only be able to see us inside and out at once, but also from beginning to end. From a 4-dimensional perspective, every moment within our 3-dimensional existence would exist simultaneously. Any moment of any actual person's life could be visited at will in the highest level of detail. From a 4-dimensional simultaneous time perspective, everything created inside the universe exists forever.

Knowing this, bringing others into existence takes on a new meaning with the explicit responsibility to ensure the quality of their existence. In what state do you want your children to exist forever, in a dangerous state of ignorance supported by privileges taken from others by force? Do you want them to live and die for existentially unsupportable customs arranged by greed and maintained through disinformation?

When I say that human beings are not animals, what I mean more precisely is that we are not natural predators. If we were, we would not be equipped with donkey-like teeth. Our specialized minds are not for killing each other or other animals. The problem with agreeing with the proposition that human beings are animals is that human beings have a dismal understanding of what animals actually are. It does depend on the context, but to agree with that proposition in this world may be to give one's consent to treating human beings as fundamentally irrational, existentially inferior, factory farmable herds of burden. This existentially dysfunctional vulgarity of a world is fueled, after all, by the inferiority industrial complex.

I have called humankind a nascent information species because most of us are only now becoming aware of how information defines our lives. In actuality, though, all animals are information beings. The only difference between us, of course, is in the physical form capable of receiving and transmitting information. Keep this in mind for the next time you have the opportunity to communicate with another animal. Instead of words, we can use actions. When I find a single ant in my house, with the knowledge that it is able to communicate its experience to other ants, I gently give it a ride outside instead of killing it.

We are metainformation beings. That is to say that our special ability is the ability to process the information of information. Intelligence is most definitely a force of nature, but it's important to understand that its strength is not as a consuming force. Intelligence is the orderly and creative force of nature. It is the source of life and the evidence, I believe, of 4-dimensional metabeing. Capable of transcending 3-dimensional space and sequential time, the mind and its imagination offers a taste of it.

Christian Passover - Scapegoat Day

Religions are the epitome of disinformation, but they do inadvertently outline the contours of that which they obscure.