tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89730469108780074602024-03-05T15:27:28.337-08:00Fated StarsA blog about astrology, economics, conspiracy, magic, meditation, post-modernism, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-75554217734175738192013-06-29T11:29:00.000-07:002013-06-29T11:31:35.443-07:00The Lion in the AqueductRushing by, washing away, deepening down, closing off,<br />
Each droplet flowing to the ocean.<br />
The walls crumble to sand; the sand gets carried away<br />
Even as we do.<br />
<br />
As we bring our boundaries down, we scrape too at the floor:<br />
Walls once sand are sand no more -<br />
Digging, digging, we find walls of sandstone.<br />
We build the aqueducts that will form our world.<br />
<br />
Water only rushes where water flows,<br />
Boats can only navigate where they run not aground.<br />
They call us the water bearers, but the water bears us.<br />
They say, fear not the apotheosis of the ocean,<br />
For even as clouds bear droplets to mountaintops,<br />
Our river is fueled by those who lose themselves in the only dance.<br />
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Never, roars the Lion.<br />
River shortens, river widens, and all is lost in the morass.<br />
The soup of tides spreads each day as the river carries away its bounds.<br />
Tear down that wall, it was said, so instead we live in a trench.<br />
<br />
It is inevitable that rivers wear at their banks,<br />
That we avert from leaning over the edge of canyons,<br />
That mountain climbers are seen as just a little bit crazy.<br />
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Just as it is inevitable that we yearn again for the idyllic.<br />
Would we recognize it if we saw it?<br />
Are our eyes sealed with the sand we've scraped away?<br />
<br />
Some who don a mane bleat that the end is near,<br />
That we will be the victims of population control,<br />
Engineered pandemics, sinking continents, solar flares, meteorites.<br />
<br />
But there is no emancipation, only waiting.<br />
The chreode becomes so stable it collapses.<br />
Nothing escapes, not even light, all trajectories point home.<br />
As above, so below.<br />
<br />
But no matter how we try, we can never drown the Lion;<br />
The Lion grows gills and will sting those who would try.<br />
The tamer who lets his guard down is maimed,<br />
And tension is the key to instability.<br />
<br />
We must trust in inevitability.<br />
<br />
Copyright J.K. Strain, 2013.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-29223797533969092462012-01-20T16:07:00.000-08:002012-01-20T16:08:47.904-08:00Frames and Elements; Divergence and ConvergenceJust before I hopped in the shower today, I picked up Carse's <a href="http://amzn.com/B004W3FM4A" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Finite and Infinite Games</a> and reread a couple passages. In my esteem, James Carse deserves cannonization (sic.) as a 2nd-Class Saint of Eris, given that said book boils down to a case for the idea that all seriousness is contained within playfulness, rather than the other way around, and given the way his delightful <i><a href="http://amzn.com/B001ANUP1U" target="_blank">Religious Case Against Belief</a></i> points out that the complete acceptance of any literal religion as a guide appears to be an abdication of moral decision making in favor of letting some text decide for you. <br />
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Delightful as I find the books themselves, I'd rather talk about the train of thought the former set off in me. Reading the book I remembered the period soon after I'd first read it before finishing undergrad classes, and some of the discussions I had with fellow philosophy students. Of course, contention comes to memory more easily than quiescence, so my mind quickly drew back to a peer's point about the great difficulty in defining 'game' as Carse uses it in the book. Perhaps due to our shortsightedness, due to the lack of a cogent phrase, or simply due to misconceptions about what kind of definition would satisfy, we had no success, with effort, at defining the term in a way that seemed satisfactory. All the definitions proposed seemed either too limited in scope to fit the way the term comes up in the book, or so broad that we could see nearly anything in terms of games.<br />
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It was today that it dawned on me that that the latter doesn't actually a pose problem. If a term's definition has enough flexibility that the term can be applied to virtually anything, the term doesn't refer to an <i>element</i> of the world, it refers to way of <i>framing</i> our observations of the world. <br />
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Previously I've heard it argued that terms that can apply to anything, in fact, apply to nothing. This point holds water in that, if you treat everything as though it had a particular property, explanations in terms of that property tell you almost nothing. For instance, if we posited that the universe and all constituents thereof are 'wiggly', we could attempt to explain both the counter-intuitive results of the double-slit experiment and the poor record of intelligence tests at predicting future performance in terms of wiggles, but to the extent that we posited wiggles as explaining every nook and cranny we could project them into, we would simply create a semantic spook, like the imps medieval doctors posited to reside in the abdomen that caused stomach cramps. Similarly, atheists (and others) will readily note that explaining the unknown in terms of "God did it" and leaving it at that serves more as a veil than an explanation.<br />
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To this I offer the rejoinder that such explanations attempt to explain happenings in the universe in terms of some particular element of the universe (or, to preempt the quibbles of certain theologies, in terms of some element that has causal efficacy over the universe). We posit wiggles, God, or phlogiston as referent terms rather than as frames of reference. Games, however, as presented in the book, feel more like a way of looking at things than a set of elements that explain the operation of other elements. (It's worth noting that Carse does not make this distinction explicitly, but we challenge you to tell us how an infinite game would operate without multiple cognitive frames of reference.)<br />
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Now let's spend some time looking at the inherent barrier that sometimes hides the distinction between frames and elements from us. The primary one, as I see it, lies in the dominance of convergent thinking. If the distinction between convergent and divergent thinking doesn't ring a bell, convergent thinking involves the attempt to find one solution to fit all the evidence and moves onto a different once such a solution has been found; while divergent thinking entails finding many possible solutions to explain extant evidence, with more of a focus on creating possible answers than on eliminating possible answers to find the solution. <br />
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With convergent thinking, novel observations lead us to either find a more accurate way to describe the behavior of currently accepted elements of the world or to posit new elements such that their interaction with previously known elements explains the new phenomenon. Convergent thinking aims to create a mono-mega-model (MMM) for explaining everything smaller than the universe and larger than the Planck scale, so developing new models without a way to tie their framework into that of the MMM fragments our ability to understand the universe. The urge to convergent thinking gives the appearance of a crisis in modern physics, with the macrocosm explained in terms of the bending of continuous spacetime and the microcosm in terms of discrete quantized units of the same. We create new frameworks, but only with the intent of unifying what we previously dealt with in multiple different frames. <br />
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As David Bohm points out in <a href="http://amzn.com/B000PLXCKE" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Wholeness and the Implicate Order</a>, chapter 5, each major tangible advance of science, each paradigm shift, indicates itself by the explanation of what were previously dealt with under different frameworks in terms of a unified order. Bohm, though hardly the exemplar of convergent thinking's worst shortcomings, still indicates some of them in his thought. He makes a strong stand in the first chapter against the widespread assumption our theories give us a complete and perfect picture of reality, checking the tendency of convergent thinking to lead to an MMM we believe in because we have nothing else, but he makes a very determined case against fragmentation. Though not opposed to divergent thinking, it seems pretty clear that he feels convergent thinking should act as the final arbiter of our ontology.<br />
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On the other hand, modern divergent thinking typically involves at least the tacit acceptance of confirmation bias as remarkably difficult to eliminate from thought - so difficult to eliminate, in fact, that you easily to think you've eliminated it when, in fact, you haven't. With divergent thinking one prefers to have multiple frames that explain the same phenomena than to narrow down to one on a permanent basis. This doesn't necessitate that the divergent thinker freezes when it comes to choosing a course of action where different frames point in different directions (though premature uncertainty poses as much a pitfall for divergent thinking as premature certainty does for convergent) - it simply involves coming up with multiple solutions to the same problem before riding off into the sunset on the back of the first seemingly cogent explanation. <br />
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Studies have <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304394004002708" target="_blank">shown</a> that the brainwaves of creative women performing divergent thinking tasks tend to be asynchronous, while while those of creative men doing the same are more often coherent across the cerebral hemispheres. <a href="http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/coren95_am_j_psychol_divergent-thinking.pdf" target="_blank">Given [pdf warning]</a> that a significant portion more left-handed people (more often those who write with their hand above the text than those who write with their hand below it as most right-handed people do) have language centers <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12136064" target="_blank">outside the left hemisphere</a> than do right-handed people, this indicates why left-handed men do markedly better on average than right-handed men do at divergent thinking tasks, while handedness does not appear to affect the performance of divergent thinking tasks for women. It also indicates an explanation for the cultural dominance of convergent thinking. <br />
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While the influence of women among intellectuals has markedly increased over the past several centuries, and left-handed males have an influence on politics and the like disproportionate to the amount of the population they constitute, by millennia of patriarchy and by sheer numbers, right-handed males, least likely to be particularly gifted at divergent thinking, have constituted the majority of influential positions in modern history. Hardly a surprise, then, that we often tacitly accept convergent thinking as the final arbiter of thought. <br />
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Now that we've examined the reason we tend to use ubiquitous terms (terms that can be applied to nearly everything, remember) as elements rather than frames, let's time to look at the two with an eye toward recursion. Of course, in the frame we've looked into here, we see frame and element as the two major elements. Distinguishing between referents and frames of reference comes in handy when looking at perspectives, but it is still but a way of looking. Seen through its own eye, it assumes that all ways of looking have assumptions underlying them so that it can compare those, and places perspectives in terms of the frame that created them rather than their content. <br />
<br />
This arrangement reminds me of the epistemic paradox underlying much of post-modernism: why trust the frame that tells us no frame is privileged over various frames which claim that they are privileged? As tempting as we find it to say that any frame which makes an idol of itself sells itself short when it comes to seeing the whole truth, enacting this belief idolizes frames that don't affirm their own truth via circular logic. Such seeking to winnow away frames seems to bear the mark of our favoring of convergent thinking over divergent. If we don't expect to find singular truth for the sake of accommodating our habits of thought, little issue arises with holding many frames in approximately equal esteem. <br />
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In the opposite direction, taking frames as elements, we find a frame that shows us various ways of interpreting perception as elements acting upon the sphere of human action. Such a frame would resemble the one used in the above discussion of convergent and divergent thinking as elements affecting human thought. Such a frame has much use in times where many competing perspectives affect people's behavior.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-2280707958453900682012-01-07T13:35:00.001-08:002012-01-20T16:09:26.972-08:00The status of cosmology and the place of certainty in it<br />
Since I figure a fair portion of you guys are interested in science, today I'm going to write something about cosmology.<br />
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One of the issues that faces cosmology and, to a lesser degree, astronomy, that the "hard sciences" like chemistry and some parts of physics don't have to deal with is the difficulty of performing experiments. Unless we physically send a space probe or rover, capable of performing experiments and sending back data to us, to whatever reach of space we're curious about, we only have observation to go on. <br />
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This is why we operated for over a millennium on the idea that Sol and the planets orbited Earth. When we saw retrograde motion ( http://www.lasalle.edu/~smithsc/Astronomy/retrograd.html - little need to read much of the article, just look at the animations if you're not familiar with it and you'll get it quickly), we decided that the planets moved around the Earth in cycles within cycles (as shown in the second animation on the foregoing link), called 'epicycles'. However, more precise observation showed that this could not account fully for the motion of the planets through the constellations, so enterprising astronomers added cycles within epicycles. The predictions the second-order epicycle model were also found wanting for predicting observation, so third-order epicycles were added, and so on. This could have gone on forever, nesting ever more cycles within cycles, and with computer programs of the type that create fractals, we might have modeled the position of the planets in the sky to an arbitrary degree of precision. (We would have had more difficulty modeling their distance, but we didn't know how to measure that back when we used the Earth-centric model.)<br />
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However, before we got computers, Copernicus came along and dredged up the old Greek model of planetary motion, where the planets, Earth included, all orbited Sol. Other astronomers gathered data on the planets' angular positions which would support a modified form of Copernicus' hypothesis, but it was only with Galileo that a powerfully convincing case was made that the planets all orbit Sol. If the data matched one model basically as well as the other, why bother changing the tried and (basically) true methods of calculating the planets' positions? But Galileo had the telescope, and with it he was able to overturn the main reason for believing in an Earth-centered cosmos: with his new tool of observation, he showed that Jupiter had moons orbiting it. If some things had been shown not to orbit the Earth, there was no longer reason to assume that everything orbited the Earth. Consequently, the Sol-centered model won out and now, 500 years later, some educated people still tacitly consider the Earth as the center of the universe, but when they think about it actively just about every educated person believes consciously if not unconsciously that we're on an approximate sphere that hurtles around Sol once every year.<br />
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(As an aside, it's interesting to note that under Galilean relativity of motion, we could make predictions just as correctly if we thought of Sol and Luna as orbiting the Earth, and the other planets orbiting Sol. With motion, any center location is as accurate as any other, but some are more convenient for thinking about certain types of things.)<br />
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Now, the reason I bring up this brief history lesson is to look at what it took to change paradigms. After Copernicus, some astronomers used the Earth-centered model for describing the positions of the planets, and others used the Sol-centered model. Neither of them disagreed very much in the observed data that their models predicted, but the method used by the two models to arrive at those predictions differed starkly. Now that we've had the telescope for four centuries, and sent out space probes into the solar system, we can say pretty definitively that the model where all the planets orbited the Earth in epicycles was flat-out wrong, and the only reason it made predictions that agreed with observation roughly as well as the Sol-centered model did was that it had centuries to accommodate itself to observation by adding more and more layers of epicycles. There wasn't really a competing theory to stomp it out, so it had plenty of time to adapt to its environment (Sol-centered theory at the time still used circular orbits, so the angular predictions of the Earth-centered model were actually more accurate the first time Sol-centered theory died out). Of course, once the environment it had adapted to changed with the ability to observe the sky in a new way, it lost out to its recently rejuvenated competitor. <br />
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Another thing that's worth looking at about this is the difference between the mindset that comes from believing everything in the cosmos orbits the Earth and that one that goes along with believing you're on an orb orbiting something else. With the perspective that cosmos revolves around your world, it's very much easier to believe in a deity who specifically had humankind in mind when creating the cosmos, but more importantly it's easy to take human assumptions and perceptions about the world as the world itself. With a Sol-centered perspective, the foibles of humanity seem not so much less significant as less universal. With the resurgence of the Sol-centered perspective came the widespread use of the scientific method, in which one tries to divorce one's ideas about the world from the human perspective to apprehend objective truth. With it has also come, after more time and further scientific discovery, the assumption among characters like Stephen Hawking that all human experience is an illusion created by the brain for the purposes of evolutionary survival. Others argue that treating mind as an exclusive property of humans is another form of Earth-centered thinking trying to sneak back in. At any rate, the transition to the Sol-centered perspective helped us tremendously insofar as developing technology at a remarkable speed, making a much larger portion of the population educated, and providing food for a greater portion of the human population is helpful. <br />
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Outside of astronomy, ideas about the cosmos provide a context for human lives. Thus, when we have multiple models that describe the same data, we have another criteria that lets us choose which to use for the moment: not only can we decide in terms of which one currently holds the minds of the scientific consensus or which one makes makes fewer major assumptions (deciding via Occam's razor), we can also decide in terms of which one provides a context for human lives that is more helpful for our survival as a species. These are all in absence of a new groundbreaking observation that lets us rule out some theories. To put it in Ramsey Dukes' terms, when it comes to selecting ideas about the cosmos, there's the purely Scientific method where a particularly groundbreaking observation rules out some models, but within the remaining models we have the Religious method where we operate under the authority of scientific convention, the Artistic method where we pick the remaining model that has the most parsimonious structure, and the Magical method where we chose from the models Science has not ruled out in terms of which would make the useful beliefs easy to access. (Remember that these decisions are only about models that observation has not ruled out - no matter how helpful or aesthetic it might be, people's experience with knots and other three dimensional objects would make it difficult to convince anyone that reality was actually two-dimensional.)<br />
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The reason that Science and the experimental method is more limited in the case of cosmology and must rely on Religion, Art, and Magic (note the capitalization - those terms mean a specific thing here as defined in the last paragraph) between discoveries of new tools of observation is that we can't actually do experiments with most of the things we hypothesize about in cosmology. Whereas with particle physics, we can observe, hypothesize, experiment, analyze our data, and form conclusions, with cosmology we are can only observe, hypothesize, analyze the data in terms of our hypotheses, and form tentative conclusions. The only way we can use experimentation to further cosmology is to extrapolate testable predictions from cosmological models, or develop tools of observation that might undermine the assumptions of certain models. So we can only use Science in some cases.<br />
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With the Religious method of selecting models, we put stock in whatever model most scientists, or the most authoritative scientists, have put their bets on. This is useful for forming a common framework for studying something, but it carries the problem of group-think and artificially maintained consensus with it. Consider the story of the ethologists who put ten chimps in a room with a banana hanging from a rope with a ladder under it. One of the chimps climbed the ladder to reach the banana and the experimenters electrified the floor, so the other chimps beat the crap out of him. They took a chimp out at random and replaced him with another, and of course he immediately made his way up the ladder. Again the scientists electrified the floor, and the other chimps attacked him. After a couple more times of this procedure, the scientists didn't need to electrify the floor to get the old apes to attack the new one who tried to climb the ladder for the banana. They scientists continued replacing apes after they stopped electrifying the floor, and even after all of the apes who had been electrified when their new fellow had tried to steal fire from the gods were gone, they still attacked new chimps who tried to climb the ladder. All of the old apes had been attacked when they tried to climb the ladder, so they attacked newcomers who tried to do the same. Deciding models purely based on consensus carries with it the issue that old, incorrect models might have incorporated ad hoc hypotheses (like cycles-within-cycles) over time to make themselves impervious to refutation by existing observation. If it's simply convention to lynch new chimps who try to climb the ladder, it means little to say that the floor doesn't get electrified anymore. More importantly than all that, though, at some point you can trace any consensus model back to when it was new. <br />
So models can be maintained by the Religious method of model choice, but no model becomes the consensus by the Religious method.<br />
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Since all Scientific observations can be explained by multiple models (particularly with cosmology), and Religious consensus cannot explain why any model among many compatible with observation became consensus in the first place, we must trace all models back to their Artistic and Magical import. Occam's razor, the idea that we should not multiply explanatory entities more than necessary, is one of the basic Artistic principles for model selection. After it was realized by Maxwell that light propagates at a basically fixed speed as a changing magnetic field causing a changing electric field causing a changing magnetic field and so on, we could have added some ad hoc hypotheses to the idea of the Luminiferous Ether (the fluid through which electric and magnetic fields propagate as waves in 19th century models of electricity and magnetism) but it was far simpler to say that the fields simply propagate through space. So the Artistic method is a good way of getting rid of old hypotheses that are clinging on by a tenuous mesh of complication. Sometimes, however, it's difficult to assess whether one theory is more complex than another, particularly by scientists who are trained as experimenters rather than as logicians, so the Artistic method is most useful for telling us when observation has significantly ruled out a model, even though it has ad hoc hypotheses to justify why it was actually right all along, but just in a different form.<br />
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There have been few paradigm shifts made on Magical basis, but every paradigm shift has had Magical consequences. Germ theory, for instance, brought us a set of oblations which we perform before eating and, more importantly, before surgery, with which we consecrate our food and make gestures to ward off malign spirits when we sneeze. Similarly, Behaviorism - the idea, developed through experiments where organisms were treated as black boxes with only input and output, that systems of punishment and reward can teach any behavior to an organism that is biologically capable of it - had a profound impact on the public schooling system and child rearing. Many people use a Magical basis to decide which interpretation of Quantum Mechanics to use. Since there are many interpretations of QM which agree with the data, this is completely justifiable. (Of course some people take these interpretations and forget that they are derived from properties that operate at the minuscule scale of the quantum world, writing books like the Secret which are pure wish fulfillment and have lost all scientific basis, but have great sales figures. If consciousness can influence quantum indeterminacy, it would have to influence chaotic systems for its small-scale changes to have any noteworthy effects.)<br />
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Models of the fabric of the universe like the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics have a profound influence on our ideas about what we are and what we're made of, but cosmological models are at least as important - they affect the way we put our lives in context, and our ideas about "what it all comes down to." This is seen pretty profoundly if you contemplate for a moment that we're talking assemblages of bio-goop on a speck orbiting a spark in a corner of the universe that seems rather ordinary - a pretty good way to make everything in your life seem insignificant for a moment if things seem to stressful, but extended contemplation can lead to profound existential crises far beyond the scope of this discussion. And that's only the individual contemplation of an idea - when a nation or culture takes up a cosmological model in exclusion of others, that model is sure to have profound if subtle influences seen in the effects of the behavior of the people in that group.<br />
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Currently, the consensus model of cosmology is Big Bang theory. (Illustration: http://imgur.com/TlmWD ) For astronomers, in its most basic form it simply means interpreting the fact that we don't see a star at every possible point in the night sky in terms of the fact that the speed of light is finite and the idea that the universe has not been around long enough for light to get from everywhere to everywhere, and interpreting the fact that light from distant galaxies has a longer wavelength than light from closer galaxies in terms of the idea that the universe is expanding and cooling. For cosmologists, popular science writers, and the general public, it means that the universe came into being a particular duration of time ago, and has been expanding ever since, and will eventually either start contracting together until it smashes back into nothingness (the Big Crunch is less popular among scientists than it used to be) or it will eventually expand so much that information, heat, and energy will become basically meaningless. Heat Death is the favored end foreseen by cosmologists, it's not really surprising that our predictions of the cosmos' future and our rapid consumption of resources with little regard to sustainability reflect one another.<br />
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Currently still somewhat close to the fringes but gaining momentum are various hyperspherical models of the universe. These models describe an ageless universe with no beginning or end, where gravity exactly balances entropy, and life planets of infinite variety exist every now and then stretching beginninglessly back and endlessly on through time as stars are born and die, galaxies form and collapse, and the cosmos carries on. A hypersphere is the simplest four-dimensional shape, and since Einstein's principle of invariance we've known that all our calculations about constant speeds come out correctly if we treat time as the fourth dimension, perpendicular to the other three similarly to the way the three spatial dimensions are perpendicular to each other. A hypersphere has no outside which can be reached by entities inside it, but it also contains no boundary - just as you can go as far as possible on a globe in a straight line and get back to where you started, traveling twice the diameter of a hypersphere will bring you back to your starting point, and just like all straight-line paths you might take around a globe meet at both the point where you reside and the point on exactly the opposite side of the sphere, every location in a hypersphere has an antipode exactly one diameter-length from it in every direction. <br />
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[The simplest way to imagine a hypersphere is to think of two spheres whose surfaces touch. Not only do they touch at one point, but every point of their surfaces correspond with each other. If you draw two concentric circles, imagining the inner circle as the first sphere, the center of that circle is the center of the first sphere. The outer edge of the outer circle is the center point (compress it in your mind) of the second sphere, which comprises the part of the outer circle that isn't covered by the first sphere. You can think of it as two spheres next to each other, rolling to touch wherever you would cross between them. Of course, wherever you are on a hypersphere seems like the center of one of the spheres.]<br />
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In a hypersphere cosmos, the reason that we don't see stars in every possible place in the night sky is not because the stars haven't been around long enough, but because the cosmos is curved and we can't see past its horizon. The lengthening of light from distant galaxies happens because their light lenses through the curvature of the hypersurface (as shown here: http://imgur.com/YCL0q ) in the hypersphere model. In some versions of the hypersphere model, the cosmic microwave background radiation, which had to be filtered to remove the influence of nearby bodies before we got the most common picture of it, is gravitational radiation emitted in real time rather than something that a newborn universe made only at a certain stage in the process of its cooling. The fact that light lengthens at an increasing rate with distance rather than the linear one you'd expect with a uniformly expanding universe (explained in terms of negative pressure and accelerating expansion - "dark energy" as it's called - in the expanding cosmos model) is explained in terms of the fact that the the greater the distance between two points, the greater the lensing effect between them (lensing is added cumulatively since each point on the hypersurface bends the light, giving the increasing rate of lengthening with distance). <br />
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With small modifications, a hypersphere theory can be created that models most of the observations that big bang theory can be modified to model. Since the core difference between them lies in the interpretation of redshift, and subsequent differences result from the fact that one model looks to explain things in terms of the universe having a beginning and the other looks to explain things in terms of processes that can be carried out indefinitely in an ageless universe, and since cosmologists can't do experiments (caveat: there's at least one hypersphere theory that predicts novel and minute variations in the gravitation of different isotopes based on their nuclear structure rather than their nuclear mass, but which has not as of yet been tested due to lack of resources), we're left with a dilemma at least until Science comes along to save us. <br />
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The Religious consensus, of course, favors big bang theory, and will pull out tons of data interpreted in terms of big bang theory as evidence that it is correct. Being that it's the consensus, it has the manpower to interpret more data in terms of big bang theory than competing theories have to interpret data in their own terms, so the presentation of evidence interpreted in terms of the consensus theory without creating contradictions falls a fair bit short of proof. This evidence is of course still worth consideration, but quantity should not be a conclusive decision point, at least until we reach a point where the two sets of models are on equal footing in terms of manpower and resources for the type of Scientific tests mentioned parenthetically in the previous paragraph.<br />
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Likewise, the Artistic case is not conclusive. Hypersphere theory has on its side the fact that an ageless universe where time is relative makes more sense than a universe with an absolute age where time is relative, as well as the fact that the creation of a transfinite amount of mass-energy to fill a transfinite and expanding amount of space-time with relative uniformity would require an exception to the conservation of energy. Dark energy seems to fall under Occam's razor in some portrayals, but in a flat universe it has the beauty of perfectly balancing the force of gravity (if the universe is flat after all). Hyperspheric self-containment is simpler than an unbounded infinite quantity of space, but a set antipode length is just as arbitrary as a set age for the universe unless it can be defined in terms of fundamental quantities. Continuous gravitational radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum is not a possibility that is considered in the scientific consensus with the focus of Standard Model on finding a quantized force carrier particle for gravity, but if it is found to be the case in coming years it might make a more parsimonious explanation for the cosmic microwave background radiation. Finally, if the universe is curved into a hypersphere by virtue of the gravity of its own mass-energy as some models suggest, this might lead to both the acceleration experienced in the Pioneer anomaly and the unexpectedly fast spinning of galaxies that, decades ago, led scientists to postulate that a tremendous amount of undetected dark matter permeated galaxies and caused the increased angular speeds. Without further research, the Artistic case for the hyperspheric model is not conclusive, and without funds allocated to research that would test some of these possibilities, it is unlikely to become conclusive.<br />
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The Magical case is somewhat more conclusive, though there are still arguments to be made on each side. Big bang theory has the fact that a universe which has a beginning is much easier for humans to understand on its side, and with it the hope that a fairly complete history of the universe may eventually be developed. People with theological reasons to believe in creationism, such as Georges LeMaitre who proposed the theory in the first place, also have a better ally in big bang theory than they do in the hypersphere model. Since a great portion of the world's population believes the universe was created at some point in the past, this is a good Magical (if not Scientific) reason for exploring the possibilities of big bang theory fully before leaving it behind if we leave it behind at all. A universe with finite age also gives humans a greater cosmic importance in a way, since we are living in one of the most interesting times in the life of the universe. (It does not necessarily confer us special status as one of a finite number of sapient species however, given that space is infinite with relatively uniform mass-energy distribution in modern big bang theory.) If time goes on endlessly and uniformly, everywhere in the universe will have life at some point, over and over again in different permutations, making our status less special in comparison.<br />
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The hypersphere model has some points on its side as well. For one thing, the image of an intergalactic civilization having conquered so much of the universe but amounting to naught in the heat death of the universe is lifted from our mind's eye. This gives us incentive to pursue space exploration for its long-lasting fruits rather than with the rush we'd be in under big bang theory. Rather than rushing out to take what we could and conquer space, belief in an eternal universe would guide us to cultivate the universe like a garden rather than farm it until its nutrients were exhausted. The same perspective change would apply to our use of Earth's resources - we'd have a reason to preserve life while continuing to cultivate technology for expansion into space, and less incentive to develop technology at a breakneck pace in a rush to find a way to spread ourselves or our seeds to the stars before we destroy ourselves with the weapons made from that technology, or in the scarcity that results from a manic race toward further technology. With the emancipatory apocalypses written into the dominant monotheist paradigms and the nihilistic "take it before it's gone" written into the dominant materialist paradigm that atheists and other secular types turn to, an outlook like this is desperately needed. Further, if big bang theory has on its side that things with beginnings are familiar to humans, there's something intuitively natural about circles, spheres, and n-spheres for us as well. Besides those created by our limitations (either limitations of our capability or limitations we place on ourselves), we never encounter boundaries in the world, but horizons are quite familiar to us. <br />
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While big bang theory, besides the familiarities it holds, offers a sense of urgency to no ultimate purpose (in the currently triumphant heat death version of the theory particularly, but the big crunch is little better), the hypersphere model holds sustainability and the opportunity for as much continuity as reproducing living beings could ever want. It entices us into space with the possibility of infinite play rather than sending us out to claim spoils, and it heals us of some of the desperation of being alive in one of the only times that life is possible while being so silly as a species. It also alleviates the sense that without humanity expanding to the universe and beyond, the universe will be a meaningless non sequitur. Rather than pushing with the cruel hand of scarcity of resources and time to enjoy them, it pulls us back, urging us to slow down and enjoy our development rather than rushing to destroy each other before it's all gone, guiding us to be more playful with our existences. After all, who wants an eternity of seriousness?<br />
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To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we abandon big bang theory to solely pursue hypersphere models at this juncture. I only suggest that, in the absence of observations that irrevocably remove one or the other models (or both, wouldn't that be a wild surprise!) from the realm of possibility, we make our personal decisions with the possibility in mind that the universe could continue ever onward, and that we share our interest in the hypersphere possibility, if we find such interest within ourselves. Remember, cosmology is not hard science in the same way that chemistry is hard science - we cannot do direct experiments, so a more zetetic multi-model approach is better suited to the subject than a monolithic one.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-21499734488111984052011-11-17T13:33:00.001-08:002012-01-20T16:10:03.774-08:00The Enochian Alphabet: An Interpretation as Ideograms<i>93</i><br />
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The Enochian alphabet captures the interest of many magicians, and though it is sometimes treated simply as the way one writes words in the Enochian language, some have sought to explore its own internal properties, seeking to find in it a magical alphabet akin to the Hebrew alphabet. (For those not steeped in Western esoterica, a magical alphabet is a set of symbols to which one attributes a variety of metaphorical layers, created for the purposes of taxonomy and for the understanding of words in terms of their letters' symbols.) <br />
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The best-known attempt with the Enochian alphabet is that of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The G.D. approach is to attribute the sixteen figures of geomancy and the five elements (the four classical elements plus spirit) to the twenty-one letters. This approach has the advantage that the elements are quite well-understood in Western occultism, and one can easily come to grips with the geomantic figures through their astrological associations. This allows one to easily interpret Enochian words as magical formulas (albeit in a magical language that doesn't distinguish verbs and adverbs). However, the results of this approach seem somewhat arbitrary. Further, this approach reduces the Enochian alphabet to basically astrological language in the same way that many magicians would balk at if it were done with the Hebrew alphabet. <br />
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Even worse, magically speaking, such an approach flies directly in the face of good practice as understood by chaos magicians. If you're using a magical language which purports to be the first language, you can expect a greater degree of success with it if you treat it as the first language (not because it necessarily is, but because that's how the system was designed). Rather than interpreting the Enochian alphabet as a particular way of arranging subsequent ideas, the best of modern magical symbology that we can hope to find in Enochian are precursors to more recent systems' contents. While someone who approaches the issue from a historical perspective may find the fulfillment of their expectations by attributing to the Enochian letters various astrological and alchemical concepts familiar to Dr. John Dee, some of the system's potential for use in magic would be lost in the process.<br />
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How, then, are we to find the meanings of the Enochian letters without looking for a later isomorphic system? With a bit of historical leeway, we can say that the magical alphabet based on Hebrew derives significantly from the meanings of the letters in their pictographic origins. The letters' names are words which start with those letters, and the letters' symbols are pictographs for those words. These concepts were used as the basis for the wealth of meanings attributed to the letters - it's quite possible that the astrological symbolism given to the letters in Sepher Yetzirah came later. <br />
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However, we can't trace the Enochian letters back to pictography through existing knowledge of them. Even more relevant, from a magical perspective, the Enochian language was used to create the world, so while the letters may resonate with certain things in the world which particularly express them, their fundamental indications would not be objects. Instead, an approach to the letters as ideograms is in order. If successful, such an approach would not only lay bare the words of the Enochian language as formulae, but it would open modern magicians to an entirely new magical alphabet, and perhaps a new way of looking at the structure of the world.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTKWt5bfqCwi0rONhhJlFPM3uT8ATEceb4YNa28Utl0nMCgI3K9YkmtPLx_dOCIpbSrukTnbc2dGFv6aXXeawCQIInvTq4MxW81O5mnaxveX_NQzVrvOUW_t0eirlLgwLJpjqa-O1DR43v/s1600/logaeth+alphabet.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="92" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTKWt5bfqCwi0rONhhJlFPM3uT8ATEceb4YNa28Utl0nMCgI3K9YkmtPLx_dOCIpbSrukTnbc2dGFv6aXXeawCQIInvTq4MxW81O5mnaxveX_NQzVrvOUW_t0eirlLgwLJpjqa-O1DR43v/s640/logaeth+alphabet.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Enochian alphabet, as first given in <a href="http://www.themagickalreview.org/enochian/mss/sloane_3189/" target="_blank">Liber Logaeth</a> on page 57.</td></tr>
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One easy thing to notice about the Enochian alphabet is that it consists of three sets of seven; this is highlighted in its presentation in Liber Logaeth. Because of this, we can reasonably expect each letter to share octave-like relationships with two other letters. We can't, however, insist that these relationships will be in linear order (B going with M going with X, etc) because there may be a hidden structure within the order of the alphabet; such a structure would likely pertain to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigillum_Dei" target="_blank">Sigillum Dei Aemeth</a> given that both have a septenary structure. <br />
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The version of the alphabet used in this exposition is that given in Liber Logaeth, on the basis that the alphabet was first transcribed there, and since (to my knowledge) there is no mention in Dee's journals of the angels revising the alphabet, any alterations in the later forms can be chalked up to transcription errors or intentional changes on the part of humans. Note that O (the second letter on the bottom row) consists of two lines that almost join but do not, and that K (the second letter on the top row) is one single connected figure, rather than two disjoined figures as it is sometimes displayed. <br />
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In what follows, I'll be drawing connotations from these glyphs among the Major Arcana of the Tarot. This is done specifically with the Atus of Tahuti given in Aleister Crowley's masterpiece in mind. Rather than to reduce the letters to those cards, the purpose of these connotations is to help cement in the mind the new content given here by connecting it to the known. The attributions to the Tarot are by no means exhaustive; indeed, these attributions leave a lot of room for personal elaboration. That said, let us begin.<br />
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This letter signifies the /b/ sound. It resembles the astrological glyph of Aries, and the G.D. attributions treat it as Aries through the tetragram Puer. It's also interesting to note that the first letter of the Enochian alphabet corresponds phonetically with the first letter in the book of Genesis. The fact that Aries starts the Zodiac and 'Berashith' begins the book of Genesis reinforces the idea of beginnings already attached to this letter due to its position. At the bottom, there is a point of bifurcation or joining (depending on which way the glyph flows). The right branch ends in a concave shape; on the right branch, we have a straight line. This joining of the phallus and kteis is reminiscent the Greek myth regarding the origin of human love: in an Edenic condition, human beings had two heads, both sets of genitals, four arms, four legs, and so on. Fearing their power, Zeus (or some other Demiurgic figure) sundered each human in two. Now humans spend their lives seeking the other half of their souls, yearning to reunite with their perfect complement. The Hebrew word Elohim is used to refer to divinity many times in the book of Genesis - and it has feminine root with a masculine ending.<br />
Regardless of political agendas and semantic spooks, this is also a glyph of conception as the beginning of life, where the masculine and feminine forces come together. In the Tarot, Atu VI in its pairing of dualities, I in its hermaphroditic grace, and 0 in its unconditional arising, make good touchstones. Note that the glyph goes both ways, both as merging and as diverging, as is appropriate for a glyph that indicates the oneness of dualities.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimloiWrbht6Q-_rh0GUK5N7xlB25Bi6SzAT82eyXyOiFgmSqHzu1YFovLRt-iNFzm6XV1JeXJTAWlOqSU9H8C22AlSpZ7AXXiFVzenVqOiTs1r25Wpv06V741frhyphenhyphenBLpV2aKzLOgOtoyg0/s1600/k.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimloiWrbht6Q-_rh0GUK5N7xlB25Bi6SzAT82eyXyOiFgmSqHzu1YFovLRt-iNFzm6XV1JeXJTAWlOqSU9H8C22AlSpZ7AXXiFVzenVqOiTs1r25Wpv06V741frhyphenhyphenBLpV2aKzLOgOtoyg0/s1600/k.png" /></a></div>
This letter signifies the /k/ sound. We might say that the wavy line at the right flowers forth from straight the line at the left, or that a line connects the wavy and straight lines together. The slight bump on the left side of the left line (towards the top-middle) may in fact be an extension of this middle line. In Alan Watts' terminology, we can think of the straight line as 'prickles' and the wavy line as 'goo' (Watts refers to 'prickles' people, who try to understand things in terms of what they're made of, and 'goo' people, who try to understand things in terms of how they fit into the whole). So, biologically, we can see a link to the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres of the brain. Turn the glyph 90 degrees anticlockwise and you have a tree, which bridges the ecological cycles underground and above-ground in a similar way. On the other end of the earlier bifurcation, with the wavy form emanating from the straight line rather than just connecting to it, we have a symbol for pregnancy; in that case the connecting line is the umbilical cord. More generally, we have a glyph of something not complete in itself, but which can come to completion by sprouting forth: even Πριαπος is not complete until he looses his seed. In light of the gestation symbol, we can also see the glyph as the present giving forth into a branching future. Turned around, it serves just as good a symbol of ancestry, of the process by which events converge to yield the present. Both the past and the future are extensions of ourselves, and we create them using our minds in order to operate as beings not merely <i>in</i> time but <i>of</i> time. Atu III for the womb, XII for the womb's inhabitant hanging from the umbilical cord, II for the mediation of the divine, and XI for the marriage of Βαβαλον and Χαος.<br />
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This letter signifies the /g/ sound, and in some pronunciation schemes, the /dzh/ (English j) sound. Aside from is very strong resemblance to the letter G in the Latin alphabet, its most obvious feature is probably its spiral shape. One is reminded of the spiraling ram's horns which, as they grow, maintain the same center of mass due to their expression of the golden proportion. That proportion occurs everywhere in nature, from the petals of flowers to the shape of the pine cone found on the tip of every thyrsus, to the human skeleton. It's not only mathematically beautiful, but very sound engineering for structures that grow organically. Thus, we have the ideas of growth and beauty associated with this letter. The spiral, infinitely extended, is also perhaps the simplest fractal - at any scale, the same mathematical relations apply. With the principles of growth and fractality in conjunction, a wonderful modernization of the preformationism implied in י and its corresponding Atu, IX, is found - just as the Hebrew alphabet is generated from י, this letter is the fractal seed which spirals out when planted to bring all under the principles of organism. That the central seed is buried beneath <i>n</i> layers of spiraling indicates that this order in nature is hidden rather than overt - that the whole visible spiral might, from another perspective, seem just the seed or a part thereof shows how pervasive this order is. The rounding motion likens this glyph to Atu X (but as cyclic progress rather than cyclic repetition), and the fractality reminds of the as above-so below connection bridged by V: this is the order through which the Hierophant worships. The organic balance offers VIII a new set of scales, and the order radiates outward in joy like XIX. <br />
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This letter signifies the /d/ sound. It resembles an eclipse in the process of applying or separating. Thus we see liminality, the suspension of the natural order to which one is accustomed so that transformation can be born. The glyph also resembles a scarab if turned sideways. Khepera, the Egyptian scarab god, rolls the Sun underneath the night sky to ready it for the next dawn, and the god's name is closely connected to an Egyptian word for transformation. <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(From <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khepera" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>:)</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Kheper-i kheper kheperu, kheper-kuy, m kheper n khepri kheperu m sep tepy.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">“I became, and the becoming became. I became by becoming the form of Khepra, god of transformations, who came into being in the First Time. Through me all transformations were enacted.”</span> </span></blockquote>
Turned around the other way, we have the image of a vast pregnant abdomen with the legs spread below it - preparing to give forth with birth. Easily we can find a common line between the fetal experience of contractions with birth impending (Stanislav Grof's <a href="http://www.thespiritwiki.com/index.php/Basic_Perinatal_Matrix_II" target="_blank">second perinatal matrix</a>) and the apocalyptic sense of experiencing an eclipse. As transformation, this glyph pertains to those beginnings which are also ends, and vice versa (the middle line is shared between the two semi-circles). The glyph is also the cauldron, where heat ripens the contents and mixes them by convection. Atu XIII is nicely encapsulated here, the abdomen of III is featured strongly, and the mixing of XIV. The shifts implied in the current version of XX are also relevant. <br />
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This letter signifies the sound /f/. It looks a lot like a dragon or an arrow. It breathes fire upon all and dances in the flames. Not only is it the primal dragon Tiamat, it is the dragon-turtle Bahamut upon whose back rests the world. It is Χαος with Βαβαλον astride, and Fafnir lunging forth from his hoard. As an arrow, its dual crossing lends it quite strongly to the glyph of Sagittarius, The far-reaching intuitive fiery nature of that sign fits well here, though Atu XIV is far less appropriate, unless the cauldron is seen boiling over.The two lines also fit with the birth symbolism from the previous letters, being the cervix and the labia. Rage, <a href="http://www.thespiritwiki.com/index.php/Basic_Perinatal_Matrix_III" target="_blank">volcanic ecstasy</a>, and Plutonic-Dionysian themes are thus suggested. Being shoved through a vagina is a very instinctual process, and the will to power leads us as we grow out of successively larger, tightening wombs. The glyph is very martial, being also a pike or a spear held in two hands. The pike, used to unseat and impale oncoming horsemen, suggests using the momentum of one's obstacles to overcome them. Similarly, the child in the birth canal is more being thrust forth than thrusting herself forth. The spear, first made for hunting, suggests Artemis (and thus Sagittarius again), and of course the arrow springs forth from the tension in the bow, not by being hurled. The dragon that disdains updrafts wastes energy flying. The momentum of VII, the primal fury of XI, the implacable inertia of X, the explosion of XX, and the power of IV are all indicated here.<br />
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This letter signifies the sound /a/. In this glyph, we see multiplicity emerging from bifurcation, with paths branching off and converging. This is the only glyph in the alphabet to contain a cross consisting of straight lines, suggesting an intersection between planes or an orientation (as a compass does). So we have a world of bending, branching paths which interacts with a more straightforward world (the lower line that goes from up-left to down-right), and the intersection of the two guides us through the branching world. Sounds exactly like the way that the linear world of perinatal experience helps form our path through life in Grof's ideas, and this orientation process serves a similar role in personality integration as his <a href="http://www.meridian.org.uk/Resources/Individual/Grof%20I/page6.htm" target="_blank">fourth perinatal matrix</a>. The paths of the letter resemble the set of all <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creode" target="_blank">creodes</a>, the totality of nature's habits seen as developmental pathways. This is the Aether, Yetzirah, the foundation of the material world which contains the infinite set of possibilities for it. Since it contains all possibilities, it contains no actualities; Yetzirah is to Assiah as Ain Soph Aur is to the ten Sephiroth of the Tree of Life. So this glyph is the world behind the world, which occultists and the dreaming explore and which m-theorists pray exists. The G.D. attribution to ו via Amissio is justified through ו's role in the Tetragrammaton as the Son, prince of Yetzirah. Atu 0 is conveyed by this letter by the fool's position at a precipice, as is the way XIX's sun shines over all, and matrix of possibility in X - though this letter speaks from its axle, not its periphery. <br />
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This letter indicates the sound /e/. Of all the Enochian letters, this is probably the simplest besides the last. It's a pair of perpendicular line segments joined at the upper right, similar to ד in Hebrew. It also strongly resembles the previous letter, with the cross and branching formations removed This limitation to one path indicates that this is a glyph for the material world. The letter looks like the axes of a two-dimensional Cartesian grid, bringing with it the idea of space. If, in fractal fashion, we treat each line as the letter itself, we arrive at two pairs of mutually perpendicular axes; <i>i.e</i>.: four dimensions of space-time. Further understanding of the glyph can be gleaned by treating it as a pathway. Energy moves in one direction initially, but emerges with none of its push in the initial direction, instead flowing in a way completely orthogonal to its original direction. Thus, it indicates a transformative function, mediating a force on one plane to a force on a different plane. Rather than being an extrusion of the last letter, this glyph is both a limited case of the possibilities entailed in the former, and the yoke that allows such cross-sections to be made; that is, it is both what is behind the Gates of Matter and those gates themselves. It indicates the self-creating material universe that takes inspiration from greater transfinities, Σοφια, the decision made in light of possible outcomes, which allows "outcome" to mean anything at all. Atu XXI as the World, XVII as a mediator of forces, XV as the Gate of Matter, III as the Door into being, and the rim of the wheel in X. <br />
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This letter, first of the second heptad, is pronounced /m/. Anatomically, it strongly resembles a pair of lips and, simultaneously, a pair of breasts. The orality and oceanic infant consciousness is thus connotated. Seen from the side, it also resembles waves. However, since the glyph also resembles a buttocks, the glyph can't be limited to the oral side of youth. Instead, it indicates the entire Freudian oral-anal polarity, pitting the shouted voice of authority against the siren's song of comfort-seeking. Rather than dealing with the sides of this polarity separately, here we have the coin taken as a whole. The shape of the glyph thus reflects the raising of a child, with two parental curves and a young central point. With the mammary/gulteal symbolism, we see how the child is nestled/sent forth by the parents. 'Passed down with mother's milk,' of course, is the ancestral memory, the familial unconscious, though to make it the role of one parent alone to pass this on is to demean both. This letter shows no member of the family more than another, but rather indicates the family unit. So too it indicates the atom, the fabric of the world just as the family is the fabric of society. So too, the twin strands of DNA and the path between them that conducts light. In no case does this letter indicate what is conducted; in all cases it indicates what conducts. Atu IV, children included, makes a nice representation for this letter, as do the parental pairs - II and IX to birth a god, IV and XVII to birth a lover, V and III to birth an artist. <br />
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</a>This glyph is pronounced /i/ or /j/ (that is, the English y) depending on its place in words. In it, we have what the last letter transmits, passed from the top line to the bottom. And what a transmission, the power of which brings the whole universe into harmony and resonance! The musician plays, the weaves travel, the eardrum pulses. The eardrum pulses, the receptors transduce, the brain shivers in pleasure. The adherent takes the bread, blesses it, and holds the body. The apopheniac gazes upon the symbol, finds the principle, and sees it instantiated everywhere. Without this power, the universe would be 1 or ∞; with it, it may frolic as naught and two. Without this power, the one could not adore the many, nor the many the one. It is the power of decoding, by which I translate these letters, the power of encoding by which I transmit these words. By this power calls DNA to the protein, choreographing its dance. By this power knows Helium its noble contentment, and finds Hydrogen its consummation in an equal. The fractal order indicated under /g/ would be defunct without its messenger god /i/, and no priest would prophesy the apocalypse of /d/. /e/ creates the field of play for /i/, and together they love as do Nuit and Hadit. No corner of the universe is so remote that the lineage of this letter cannot reach it. It is ubiquitous and interpenetrating , and even as linguistic consciousness and the internal monologue are created by the power of transmission, they are that power. The third I is distinguished in that it doesn't say "me." Atus IX, XIX, XVII, XX (as Heru), and II all traffic with this letter.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCytG4KoAmBRStIAVFGi6CHEdceddw_2t3XPFrwaVrnwDm2EVdgUdjBKZo7Hcyeu74dLjjwS3vFdfXegA96uGJqmfZ3ENZ4E9saRTDPxpudhmxEHtAFUd-y4tBN736Ba4bFF_C4e0L9LId/s1600/h.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCytG4KoAmBRStIAVFGi6CHEdceddw_2t3XPFrwaVrnwDm2EVdgUdjBKZo7Hcyeu74dLjjwS3vFdfXegA96uGJqmfZ3ENZ4E9saRTDPxpudhmxEHtAFUd-y4tBN736Ba4bFF_C4e0L9LId/s1600/h.png" /></a> This letter is pronounced /h/. Just as the stream of water to the ocean creates valleys and caves, so does the power of the previous letter shape what it passes through. From the inside, the liaison between the arcs is concealed behind the line their union forms, but when the power of this letter is understood, the meeting of the two forces is acknowledged. Here, apparent opposites make their secret congress. Thus we have the discreet sex life of the pair in /m/. Also we have the birth of theory of mind (<i>i.e.</i>: the realization that other people's actions are the result of their own minds), though in others we only have their apparent inputs and outputs. With theory of mind comes the possibility of deception, just as every shelter is a potential hiding place; with the separate ego comes the possibility of concealment, and vice versa. Of course, the notion of personal separate existence and theory of mind don't seem to go necessarily in tandem until one notes the secret link between how thought seems from the inside and how it seems from the outside. Secrecy, of course, is relative - only that which can potentially be known can be secret at all, rather than being simply unknowable. So this letter pertains to what we hide from ourselves to believe that we understand the world, and to the process of creating perceptual worlds for ourselves through the use of our assumptions. Belief is the craft of thought, that vast ocean through which we sail. This glyph signifies the power of the subtle over the manifest. As sex and the craft of thought, it has ties to Atu VII, also (less strongly, and only the former) to Atu XI, and to XIV. In the hidden connection of mutually different sets, it pertains to XIII. As the intermediary between all in the world of duality, it is XV.</div>
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This glyph, pronounced /l/, puzzled me for awhile. In it, we have a binary path encroaching on a circle of undivided substance, or a circle devouring duality, absorbing it into monism. In either case, this glyph indicates the transformation between duality and unity. The best anatomical glyph for this process is the optic nerve, whereby the endless light of the world is transduced into something we can make sense of in terms of our perception-conception, which of necessity breaks things into categories. In that case, it's wort noting that the reality is actually the blank space inside the concave part of the glyph, and the curve itself is the retina, which absorbs this incomprehensibility and communicates something the dualistic mind can make sense of. Thus, 210 is a numerical articulation of this glyph. Going the other direction, the formula of ARARITA is disclosed - by pairing each of the ten thousand things with its opposite, we can bring the non-dual truth back into our awareness: All Reflections Are Resolved In The Adept. There is no bridge shown between monism and nothingness because that bridge is made of nothingness. This glyph implies VIII in the balancing process, 0 in its indication of nothingness, IV who conquers the world and divides it into boundaries, XII for the immersion in illusion, and especially II. This letter is a development of the relation between the parts of the previous letter.</div>
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This letter indicates /p/. Here we have the enclosure similar to that of /h/, except that the horizontal lines are at the periphery rather than the center,; what is hidden here is not the convergence of apparent opposites, but the non-identity of an apparent unity. It indicates an incomplete articulation of the ARARITA expressed in /l/: all observed opposites are indeed reconciled, but this creates a false unity which fails to encompass all - what lies unobserved remains in dichotomy, and because the mark is missed (by taking one's perfectly consistent picture of unity for the world itself), one makes dhyana only upon an idol. The resemblance between this letter and the Greek Ω is thus made relevant - this letters it an end, but a false end, a dead end. Here we have shallow holism, that womb-nostalgic perspective which mashes everything together because it doesn't comprehend the order of the universe, rather than fitting it together because ti does. Holism, of course, is but one of this letter's masks, more generally it is the creation of a purportedly complete picture of the universe based on a small subset of possible data; the trap of this letter is the illusion of completeness that comes with self-contained consistency. Here lies the 'big' fish who doesn't realize how small his pond is. This is the letter of false endings, and one of the two deformations of /l/. Among the Atus, XVI is relevant in that the tower builders took the forces of nature into account, but failed to do so with completeness; graphically it resembles Nuit in XX, who is but a veil for the bornless, and O is also called, in that he wraps himself in a threefold veil such that he knows not where he leaps.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHcIYEzhz36g6hXGya81H2p8eJSJc-Rscd4r0NroDtUqzvn43yvzXIYlJekLzPb5O3XeM9CZNj-x5YiPd0o1nCtgEt3a22OW3CDlDcESR_Hft4N47B9hYp2bbFcYXoqsYhFkMWcRq5Rc67/s1600/q.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHcIYEzhz36g6hXGya81H2p8eJSJc-Rscd4r0NroDtUqzvn43yvzXIYlJekLzPb5O3XeM9CZNj-x5YiPd0o1nCtgEt3a22OW3CDlDcESR_Hft4N47B9hYp2bbFcYXoqsYhFkMWcRq5Rc67/s1600/q.png" /></a>This letter, /q/ (pronounced as a throaty k or as a kw sound depending on idiolect), indicates the second failure of /l/. While /p/ plunges one into a world of unity propped up by the limitations of any one perspective, /q/ avoids this by a wide stretch: instead of focusing on creating unity for its image of the world, it shapes around itself a world of irreconcilable dichotomy. Rather than a tent we have a valley, and rather than an enclosure which blends light into shadow and shadow into light, we are cast into the very center of the intercourse between Yin and Yang (which originally indicated the sunny and shady sides of a mountain). The world, rather than being a grey place, is a world of qlippothic extremity between light and dark. Just as /q/ compensates for the debauchery of /p/, so does /p help balance for the decadence of /q/: though the sun shines differently on each side, it is the same fundamental ground of being that makes up the valley. And in the fractal fashion seen elsewhere in the alphabet, the relation between /p/ and /q/ can be treated in terms of those glyphs. To /q/ they are most pronouncedly opposite perspectives of which it is unavoidable to take one side or the other (but less obviously they are both ways of organizing perception-conception); to /p/ they are two ways of processing the fundamental unity-dichotomy of reality (to say nothing of its nothingness). In this regard, the two must be balanced in the harmony of /l/. Among the Atus, this letter fits nicely with XVIII, that pervasive duality, and with VI as analysis. In its higher forms it becomes VII, where disparate forces pull in the same direction, and I plays freely in this world of illusion.</div>
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This letter is pronounced /n/. Last of the second heptad, this letter brings the primacy of the last two letters into question. Showing an arc crossed by an arc, this glyph shows a pair of paths that only cross once, indicating that the two arcs do not enclose an area. In light of such distinctions, it's clear that all analysis is counterfactual to the extent that it treats the categories it creates as fundamental, and all synthesis is redundant since it's best applied to continent (enclosed) distinctions rather than open ones. Since the arc does not provide complete division but only partial, this symbol generally applies to the incontinence of apparently real distinctions. If near death experience accounts are to be believed, this letters is a glyph for dying, as transformation rather than ending. The various figurative forms of death give us an escape from the traps of /v/ and /q/ into the nonduality-nonunity implied in /l/. In this defiance of distinction, /n/ is also endless monism rather than the closed monism of /p/; similarly, /n/ contains dualism in its two lines, but they intersect. Thus, as death/transformation, this letter puts an end to the issues of the second heptad even as it opens the ground for a new transcendent set, even as the perpendicularity of /e/ provided a space for the distinguished polarities of this heptad. /n/ has ties to XIII for obvious reasons, but the transubstantiation of XVII has its place here too. XVIII and XIX, together and united, fit as well.</div>
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This letter is transcribed as /x/, and presumably pronounced as 'ks' like the English x. Here we've got a familiar symbol, the perpendicular axis that ended the first heptad, reflected across a vertical line of symmetry (though altered somewhat). This indicates that the alphabet might be better understood as a reflection across /l/, the middle letter. Alternately, as this glyph itself indicates, /e/ may be an orthogonal rotation of /x/, with the dot indicating the combination of a particular pair on the axes. This combination is a refinement of /n/, the last letter: instead of having only one combined pair of points between the axes, all along them potentially combine. We've moved beyond duality into multiplicity, but 2 remains the door to greater numbers*. As a result of the pairing, each point on one axis corresponds to every point on the other; thus a surface is enumerated. The change of order from line to surface casts the previous letter in a new light - it is the equator and meridian of the sphere. So /n/ remains the symbol of transformation that transcends, but /x/ is the symbol of retroactive transformation, whereby all that has led up to this point is seen as such, rather than as the unfolding of circumstance into who knows what. A line has no substance - only its angle changes with the shifting of perspective, but a surface can cast as many silhouettes as there are angles of view. Atu XIV expresses the fullest extent of this integration, VI the loosest. The mutability over time of XX is pertinent for shifts of perspective; consider also X, which shows different faces from different sides. <br />
*(1*1<1+1, 2*2=2+2, 3*3>3+3, 4*4>4+4, <i>et cetera</i>. 2 is the only number whose addition to itself is equal to its square.)<br />
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This letter indicates /o/. Here we have a pair of arcs (like those in /n/) converging together. As they get closer together, their trajectories approach one another. Where the perpendicularity of /x/, /i/, or /e/ suggest the transmutation of one Umwelt or force into another, here we have an approach to fusion suggested. Astrologically, the resemblance of this glyph to the symbol of the moon emphasizes the idea of undifferentiated communion. However, when we look closely at the letter as printed in Logaeth (and copied here), it becomes clear that the two arcs do not actually touch. Thus, rather than a transitional connection between ideas or planes, we have an infinitesimal approximation of two ideas in one another. Of course, a convergence to infinitesimal approximation implies a divergence to infinite distinction if we simply turn the other way. In no case however, do these arcs intersect; however, they damn well seem that they should on cursory examination, and in that regard the letter seems the opposite of /q/. So we have the idea of convergence toward fusion, and the idea that nothing actually touches - it can only come infinitely close. These two ideas themselves come infinitely close to one another without quite touching, and here we find that fusion is not a noun but a verb; that the experience of fusion with myself is as absent as it is irrelevant and redundant. I can fuse with an aspect of myself, but only as another aspect abstracted from the whole. In its highest form, the glyph states the twin truth that love is never complete and love is limitless. Compare with XV (the illusion of separation), XVII (limitless closeness in infinite space), XX/XII (the inescapable womb) and VIII.<br />
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This letter indicates /r/. Enclosure seems foremost when this letter is contrasted with its cousin in form, /m/. Where, in /m/, we had a balance of the two arcs, the central merger favoring neither over the other, such is not the case here, as seen both in the downward pitch of the center and the thinness of the top of the letter. This fits nicely with the concept of enclosure: consider the tendency to perceive the figure over the ground in the West, or vice versa as some cross-cultural psychologists claim occurs in the East. In eaither case a boundary is drawn, and the attention has difficulty straddling it. Thus the glyph indicates the ego, which exists separately (or appears to do so) due to the habits of the attention; contrast again with the Nephesh of /m/; so also is it a glyph for the Solar System, to which we occultists generally pay more attention than to the rest of the galaxy (which is, at the end of it, still another enclosure), especially when the membrane of electromagnetic bubbles surrounding it (<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/heliosphere-surprise.html" target="_blank">recently discovered</a> by the Voyager probe) is included in the picture. So also, on a medium scale, is the atmosphere of our planet an enclosure. Of course, there are Yetzieraic enclosures at the collective level too, so this letter has some in common with /p/. It is the process by which paradigms are created, rather than the state of being trapped inside them, once made. Both are the result of selective attention, but different facets of it. XIX is quite apt here, but the encompassing arms of III and the lines carved IV's legacy also pertain to this letter. XXI is relevant to some facets of this symbol, as is V as the Ruach. <br />
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This letter indicates /z/. In contrast to /n/, we seem to have a continent distinction here, continuing the permutations of duality in the second two octaves. Also like /n/, this letter becomes a set of axes when interpreted in a sphere. We see a polar axis and a rotational axis, where /n/ showed the directions along the surface. This spinning explains the previous letter's enclosure as orbit, which is just as valid a metaphor for the containment of attention. The difference is that in /r/ something other than the bound creates the binding; here the bound is self-binding. Quantum mystics will see reference to the way quanta can interfere with themselves by creating self-contained virtual quanta. This glyph, as an indicator of the interface between electric and magnetic fields, generally pertains to the way that internal processes can create external effects, turning spin into thrust. It makes a nice reversal of the previous glyph in that regard. Given that the equator and the poles do not touch, the two lines of this glyph are just as disconnected as those of /o/. Returning to the idea of this glyph as a distinction, we see the type of distinctions that are actually capable of being continent: spin and poles. The two directions of spin are mutually arising, as are paired poles; thus we see that distinction serves not to separate, but to orient. Atu XVII, both in its transmutative properties and as a guide to orientation is relevant here; IV, who conquers and around whom others orient themselves and VI, as twin siblings (mutually arising), are also appropriate.<br />
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This letter indicates /u/ or /v/, depending on its position relative to vowels and the speaker's idiolect. Most notable about this letter is that it consists of two similar (if reversed and magnified) arcs, indicating that that which is above is like that which is below, though after a different fashion. It also indicates the process of bringing into balanced relation the levels of the soul - just as the Nephesh commands G'uph without controlling it, so is Nephesh brought under the yoke of the Ruach, and so on. The theme of genuine duality is continued, but here we have consonant harmony in the highest forms, and in the lowest, piercing dissonance (the glyph could be basely interpreted as one of figurative or literal pederasty). Outside the shells, this glyph indicates the continuity that results from the link between levels of reality. This is the glyph for Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, of continuity between the human and the daemon. The perpendicularity at the point of meeting is illustrative: once the (comparatively) lower arc develops to a certain point, further development is not progress but merely change, sidestepping the genuine issues ahead. In order for further development to take place, a new approach is needed. Unfortunately, the new approach must be cultivated before it can even reach as far as the approach which has topped out does, but for progress to occur we can't keep endlessly using the same set of glosses. Atu V is the most apt symbol here - man as a bridge, reaching up. XII also relates, reaching downward toward the smaller order. XIX indicates the arcs of this glyph iterated endlessly. <br />
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This letter indicates /s/. In components, we have a line and a cup, like in /b/, the first letter. The line is horizontal here, indicating, rather than the impetus to ascend, the walking stick with which one treads familiar territory, and the height of the line is a result of the taking-in process of the cup. Together, the two form a point or the crest of a wave. In /b/, the two emanate from a point, but here they converge into one. The point is novel to the wand and to the cup: rather than an admixture we have a genuine synthesis, as feminine as the emergence in /b/ was masculine. This synthesis comes not from the urge to express multiple facets but from the experience of having used those facets in conjunction; the overflowing of a full cup. The outward-extending-into-continuation of the lines implies that we have one wave along a long, waving system. Indeed, with the type of synthetic awareness indicated in this glyph, a key mode of thinking is to experience oneself as a periodic entity - no more a privileged force of nature than all other entities, who must also be periodic, but recurring as part of a vaster system than those who exclusively contemplate the finite can imagine. Here is the fluid in XVII, poured from vessel to vessel - where the woman goes, the fluid is poured, and vice versa. It is XIV to /b/'s VI. II's receptivity and IX's cane, together.<br />
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The last letter, /t/. This letter is quite simple, being just a slanting curve, but it is distinguished from the rest of the alphabet in that regard - it is the only glyph that consists of one line without any sharp angles. With the idea of /s/ as a wave among many, this letter accounts for the endless continuum of waves. Where the primal beginning, /b/, is a differentiation process (even in conception the blastocyst becomes distinguished from the parents' bodies), /t/, the culmination of /s/, is a unified end; it is also the little death from which /b/ springs. Like Jormungandr, /t/ wraps around the world, but unlike that serpent, it does so by wrapping around itself, for it <i>is</i> the world, seen without distinction; what besides itself is there for it to wrap around? On dreams the serpent of no-thing, and so on flow our lives. This is the way Nuit manifests as Had, and Hadit is the hiding of Nu. Concavity and convexity can only come conjoined. Nothing or everything are contained in the distinction drawn by this line. The slope and curve of the line indicate that it is never fixed, except in that it is fixed to change. It also has a balanced slope - vertical over horizontal change equals its reciprocal, indicating a balance that emerges from self-symmetry (there being no other, /t/ can only be symmetrical with itself). The snake in XXI, projecting images of its dream onto the rest of the card. 0 just an instant before it starts. XIII as continuity veiled in change. XII as the snake and the projection hanging from it.<br />
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These are my current notes regarding the individual meanings of the Enochian letters. They are not meant to persuade anyone, only to show a path. The next aim in my work with the alphabet it to find a parsimonious way of determining their octave relations to one another. In the meantime, it's worth looking at a few Enochian words (picked for the fact that they stick in my mind, not because they show the system in an especially positive light):<br />
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PIADPH - indicates an enclosure transmitting over all possible paths a gut-wrenching transformation into a double-bound state of affairs (indicated by PH). The word means "in the depths of my jaws."<br />
AVAVAGO - indicates a branching series of possibilities reaching far down from the macrocosmic order in order to infinitesimally approach the organic. The word means "thunders."<br />
ZIR - indicates the spinning energy of contained circumnavigation transmitting into the creation of an enclosure. The word means "I."<br />
AOEUEAE - indicates a vast, sparse matrix of existent entities, ordered such as to connect their own existence and position with the possibilities of another order of entities. The word means "stars," and the formula is obvious in light of astrology.<br />
UPAAHI - the word has a symmetrical structure, two As in the middle, two enclosure letters outside them, and two vowels on the outside. UPA indicates the binding of possibility by the grand fractal order and AHI the as merging into apparent oneness of the potential and the actual (<i>i.e.</i> the process by which the potential rebirths itself from a new vantage by actualizing part of itself), and the word as a whole indicates the combination of the grand container of UPA and the Logos of AHI. The words means "the highest vessels," and the connection to Binah and Chokmah in the tree of life is apparent.<br />
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Thank you for your time and attention, and for exploring this alphabet with me in a novel way. I'd be delighted to hear any ideas my fellow explorers have on the matter.<br />
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<i>93 93/93</i></div>Frater 46 = 43 = 46http://www.blogger.com/profile/07918450025342582890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-14961125848379591862011-09-07T22:41:00.000-07:002011-09-07T23:48:46.570-07:00Some notes on the 8-fold Banishing Ritual<div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia; "><i>Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law</i>.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">This evening I'm going to look at the short form of the Eightfold Banishing Ritual (hence the shortened name in the title) from <a href="http://amzn.com/0877288275">Maat Magick</a> by Soror Nema. This banishing ritual (in both its extended and abbreviated forms) is fairly unique in that, rather than focusing the attention just to the four cardinal directions, it also incorporates the four midpoints between those directions. In addition to making it easier for the magician to deal with more godforms on a daily basis (and banishing rituals, if you're serious about practicing magick, should be done daily), this type of structure allows eightfold systems to be applied to the circle.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">The eightfold system I'm interested in connecting to the ritual comes from <a href="http://trigrammaton.com/">the work of Leo Gillis</a>, Trigrammaton Qabalah. Below are the 27 trigrams of TQ (<a href="http://fatedstars.blogspot.com/2011/08/trigrammaton-qabalah.html">here</a>'s my post introducing TQ, it will explain what I mean by 'antigram' and 'reversal').</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1DhQ32P44miNpwR5dJbm2b0SLTsYk1TwYAjwfy27o_1maEkXY9M92qiLtyGnaS3GyrqYebnaK9LKUfrKGy_BwPiyQaXOqCJT3KQk1FeiDvQThncGjKn9ZBplqtYjNC6l-TKqByWzbzL8/s320/000.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050378399088082" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 37px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYn7aUpR3NeS8EKmf6PJZHLDLwSYBEQqdYpKt6ZfVRILyADADBt-t0RdhGmuSgcu8MGqyTw9mrz24oTwsVqiUCNwUjHH2thVjbBKHlV-jsABbJkqyr478dTEJIk8bPEfns1jt9FO0Z6JM/s320/001.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381056560290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9RHrg2Ad7BMcp4IsOQoTPHKAEkjULxI-RohUESNbO2H_ceWnI3Fx9RoODYuMyoyyRQbDGFiih5hd6yjeb_Y9tsks8giIMunVaCFh3fvQTyFSPVcWQ0tuwGzC-E5wUMLmmhEOlxm_Ujm4/s320/002.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381580726226" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVP_APl3jE5z4Yp3hevRZeKd53IxMilWT4fMipKmbmHcRaY6UUWCdAU3EtkJLoHBLiQZPPUvL-0gdXgcp02-NKZF8rHWvEZmiF6A1Q0V9Gb08W_fgx0NnkzHENvgLIvjGMXhyOzakwgs0/s320/010.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050385614756978" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvpRRLjehbarCSevIGg5Ghs-K73a0RJAYpYVr9nFyPi5zQb0gE9B675rIGq5YDJGCpZvItFRCXeI9iXDGf_WJM9ZlIrf8CcIWxGVNcQ1AJYu87H7kLxMYC1HayZgQqPR8Yx4N1nZgdBY/s320/011.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050390440690690" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiveVuT_LFbicwHbo1pqTDvwN8yVsF_YAPRPaXSq7myQEMxCJBAQKOEAVbsGTMsVxaTheahEuiVjG3-srYlJ0FDn7_fXESwsUlCQJ2x6fo5slnL4eDQiH79KVtDDJQXA1Et0J25iJK7zw0/s320/012.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050694331950290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirPhfdQhYmoj8B6wiWAQoU9tfLJ_CUYFWnpJGVBllXUM3C_VPQyl5CF-dnTUpTdagPEHI32ZTEsygaDt2ROtnfr8uit89HJ8Ync6go5qKjj1vFiFClsuka4ajvbBQZEPdJYlvKewLxmco/s320/020.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700714365794" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8wGPBp8ZD_kbuBM6PEAv463nJ0RNNrWTPc68bfu8mHquBSFYFBh-3_7mTsQAg-G1aYev0BisFFeKhp2gcdk4sVu5syOHVWXBu36glDVewmxOSwoOt7xF-BUKxAS__ZYqE6XpqpBr8Ac/s320/022.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050704868295234" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilw-rOiQ9L1fmBvU5Xd3OwrcYy-UIC57_M3LVP2RfmX6lfyKYbCHyo8cM3SN9BTP0QkTZcJiND-DsQbzzruz5AMkOoO82Xulzp0SBT3hpQgb4-PI_hiWy-9kOGQ96nyZiYI_ZM2GBi6PY/s320/100.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050705017429730" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhReyt8zguKfJdHyFzmAOcUraemGSMdP3xJDEs_xa0tRYaMLq0ShCyxGAJjm2gguzYit8_t86r8sR2Kg4dX7JUuZ3e5Pf4rMEHTi-IoBLT5ly9IqC2y7zawBVMtYwnO-zQgF4sV_vkdVss/s320/101.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051007759782322" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYXLK-MqHamfjZyNSeuTzdrAgahIXpZnGK8za5FuUO5sbZqgtswVSXbVuq-lMkbulRDHy-aCVf6nL7lYWPXYZ20IHVukBwL7GzpqONt0iONB-I8rFlqL5T1qIT8uovmEQ_S08ITe08GNo/s320/102.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051013988307298" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ_lESe4P2I8r60cA6gWx3GYsxfXwJ-UOX-Y9dYV6sOw9DJc3CbB1jipwLYpIVS91QD1USrzP8Q_3eZIdoCDq-wD4tNjknUGqybHtCCfY6-OGqfQ03F9WmRj6IADLcv6YfoKQsVet7XFU/s320/110.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051017473256850" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8K5HSlJXU9662BdmBDC7TlJIHdGlnFQBIpr5V43epf0c1zoJNEWKJLO2I2rFf2m1CwbJnTWmD7bQ-7hSvcrzNhyjGMNpNS2VzvaGemmU81SU7X6PmaUkEUGELxpcpfHubzUF8Z-AMfzg/s320/111.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051015756843666" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCKmlsCGjOKH6PG7_UAgNASYYZDQFtiTJw85hyphenhypheni9LEg0JPXA6R9GbixEMRd5ElCVcf0xjBsFHLfvRz_7zYyDl_viXnS4DvMT0H2MYR_YN5OHmglhH8IT-f5tUt1qmBaX5s3TxmLqL-8oc/s320/112.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051023531281122" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpFRAK1NGd-SI8GwHrLKI931jxa4PSiEBEjpZJDw1b-dT5E8XAtjl1B7988AoqKl5sClAvb5INgWdX3ferKMdtHRljQrKGvYfQTl9JYTS1XvP7drTBNvf1r_CAbk4X2To8O-HX6ki9v7A/s320/120.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051316839806114" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvAWzIsT3FOGkTvaOf8AtaWOLbkXV5YsrHakZ8MkS_PHOp6Mil1R2PopiC2WNiSWGQiJSJt5z7eCIVqocg_fHtyRn03JMJ3f0UEY1mzM1Xl8Zux3C4cIf6WDxmSGXLHcnLikCsjMpHbM/s320/121.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051324795667010" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo2SCfcO_qyu1YJ1HDtYqpN1ezNJ6hmekvj7NL89JvoinMq7wWYquhUlMuDC5EgvZZBXYDhcQdq66eRS0R1k5_7xM-_HWxC-2O7K4rJE-p-LDhuk6juHTpdJ9NOC28_PtE1sGazFscE/s320/122.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051327972056354" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFO1m-1K7I2TuDrg_X78qvfuGeNGHGh8bbRaofXd8U_XsvnlSRBniao_Ie-UpSmd2IbN1MU9JfpAXXyocDj9Bs-EE4n6ixjgAXEUtaVPZnbXMUYXL2piSShS77jockSx6IjIcvRE7XE9E/s320/200.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051325611129026" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihwhP7fA50ZcB0YZwt7e2JnzKOd_x6X9ittssj4F7zWZpD2kfz37ISAvJAc61HO2AoUCEbxfF_S_BLrkkwrv2QTJ0b_zxsfIsuXICNYtfKpNZpcUjeZhGXPHMEkP26gjx0dDGhFZc-UJ0/s320/201.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051331888406514" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVFrhc18bH8LxXUjaddXhPuFrxTXcUYYA5G709_lH4BIWw2bcBECylIy-LSwiofvcc2vxofZ7nDAg4VM3Dbgx11-lGaRwfNpFqHXe89TmOHEh_BDdbVDXhmOVkPTC1gd5RF5RT_zFRwrs/s320/202.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051611077098082" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEire9XbVtYiKpcUhTQkLHedC519yDgH6t0X9WSR1mKvYNz6FwzyCLzEMOzpReLJ3v1Hoj16hT8wHhOMSmqpPYAN9_oOKKy6jv29YYy22SrQzNWQowiFhc9Rm83ktCZ7w9pJ4uYyc0E5PA4/s320/210.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051615338406274" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4r7D88JYTQdM52WqzwniVbU4Q-ycjIlc-w57lRhkQu9qyvUCqWiLDINGD2FHqhlZHSdg2nmTjawTV_Yx2fFxIyGkB4wvON_AOpq90-XFELyUYudLr2FmO_fZlWbmDyPw1n1emYItrqSY/s320/211.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051613079957330" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqaaHvICAQiFO2z_wSLyt-dxz4ZeW0jq9yq_JacPrMla4AZBKljbzmBBJDjRKRnkf-pn-D1MnAUadJggxvglvRCQ5HbqWTMVI-yblbJ4NAOnEp6CniDEpwc75AjH5e-7w-1Uerfnmqus/s320/212.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051619414517346" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrceWumNX69H33qWgGxESMQ7lw4T-Qs9XOgaDa7hyj09sXAZ_R__yAscXAgGmmiV0-7Nwj0rK9ZXZUJ8RDZceniTCiI-I6uLtgh39lAZwMyglsmrf4rWZCEVPr0rwUWHORz143EqCgNi4/s320/220.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051624083737778" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv0Ng9WBGhsDu_YztU4nTsevcjx7zuv8lMdwUrC-6eM8tXHDLkc9xXB08mTts1scS47sWs8MaYPyNEH1V-cGRVTBzV2GMswJinpazBdmBVmTvRjOwQmr9ZwdQ43tu6iVREYYvX2MhUGQA/s320/221.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051911765998898" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR2I-EWX68pwB73ftOrkHbrMcF7nxhyv813fEF3sDV-Mb3IBtyEh2eMtt2yL9m8Si1GjG8VUz01bRQvecadxVPdD5_nrxksHWD2QdtCOOMpChVeOCeThkids1I-ndEBBXeC_EwxFaQJcU/s320/222.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051913892001106" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">Of these, there are precisely eight trigrams which have no lines occupied by Tao. These will be familiar to those who have studied the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba_gua">Ba gua</a>.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8K5HSlJXU9662BdmBDC7TlJIHdGlnFQBIpr5V43epf0c1zoJNEWKJLO2I2rFf2m1CwbJnTWmD7bQ-7hSvcrzNhyjGMNpNS2VzvaGemmU81SU7X6PmaUkEUGELxpcpfHubzUF8Z-AMfzg/s320/111.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051015756843666" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCKmlsCGjOKH6PG7_UAgNASYYZDQFtiTJw85hyphenhypheni9LEg0JPXA6R9GbixEMRd5ElCVcf0xjBsFHLfvRz_7zYyDl_viXnS4DvMT0H2MYR_YN5OHmglhH8IT-f5tUt1qmBaX5s3TxmLqL-8oc/s320/112.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051023531281122" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvAWzIsT3FOGkTvaOf8AtaWOLbkXV5YsrHakZ8MkS_PHOp6Mil1R2PopiC2WNiSWGQiJSJt5z7eCIVqocg_fHtyRn03JMJ3f0UEY1mzM1Xl8Zux3C4cIf6WDxmSGXLHcnLikCsjMpHbM/s320/121.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051324795667010" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo2SCfcO_qyu1YJ1HDtYqpN1ezNJ6hmekvj7NL89JvoinMq7wWYquhUlMuDC5EgvZZBXYDhcQdq66eRS0R1k5_7xM-_HWxC-2O7K4rJE-p-LDhuk6juHTpdJ9NOC28_PtE1sGazFscE/s320/122.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051327972056354" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4r7D88JYTQdM52WqzwniVbU4Q-ycjIlc-w57lRhkQu9qyvUCqWiLDINGD2FHqhlZHSdg2nmTjawTV_Yx2fFxIyGkB4wvON_AOpq90-XFELyUYudLr2FmO_fZlWbmDyPw1n1emYItrqSY/s320/211.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051613079957330" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqaaHvICAQiFO2z_wSLyt-dxz4ZeW0jq9yq_JacPrMla4AZBKljbzmBBJDjRKRnkf-pn-D1MnAUadJggxvglvRCQ5HbqWTMVI-yblbJ4NAOnEp6CniDEpwc75AjH5e-7w-1Uerfnmqus/s320/212.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051619414517346" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv0Ng9WBGhsDu_YztU4nTsevcjx7zuv8lMdwUrC-6eM8tXHDLkc9xXB08mTts1scS47sWs8MaYPyNEH1V-cGRVTBzV2GMswJinpazBdmBVmTvRjOwQmr9ZwdQ43tu6iVREYYvX2MhUGQA/s320/221.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051911765998898" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR2I-EWX68pwB73ftOrkHbrMcF7nxhyv813fEF3sDV-Mb3IBtyEh2eMtt2yL9m8Si1GjG8VUz01bRQvecadxVPdD5_nrxksHWD2QdtCOOMpChVeOCeThkids1I-ndEBBXeC_EwxFaQJcU/s320/222.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051913892001106" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /></span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">In TQ, these trigrams are attributed to the planets - that is, the seven classical 'planets' (<i>i.e.</i>: including Sol and Luna, excluding Uranus, Neptune, and dwarf planets) plus Earth. While I'm not yet sure I fully agree with a few of Gillis' attributions, we will use those from his work rather than digress.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">In this system, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8K5HSlJXU9662BdmBDC7TlJIHdGlnFQBIpr5V43epf0c1zoJNEWKJLO2I2rFf2m1CwbJnTWmD7bQ-7hSvcrzNhyjGMNpNS2VzvaGemmU81SU7X6PmaUkEUGELxpcpfHubzUF8Z-AMfzg/s320/111.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051015756843666" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> is attributed to Sol, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCKmlsCGjOKH6PG7_UAgNASYYZDQFtiTJw85hyphenhypheni9LEg0JPXA6R9GbixEMRd5ElCVcf0xjBsFHLfvRz_7zYyDl_viXnS4DvMT0H2MYR_YN5OHmglhH8IT-f5tUt1qmBaX5s3TxmLqL-8oc/s320/112.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051023531281122" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> to Saturn, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvAWzIsT3FOGkTvaOf8AtaWOLbkXV5YsrHakZ8MkS_PHOp6Mil1R2PopiC2WNiSWGQiJSJt5z7eCIVqocg_fHtyRn03JMJ3f0UEY1mzM1Xl8Zux3C4cIf6WDxmSGXLHcnLikCsjMpHbM/s320/121.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051324795667010" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> to Mercury, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo2SCfcO_qyu1YJ1HDtYqpN1ezNJ6hmekvj7NL89JvoinMq7wWYquhUlMuDC5EgvZZBXYDhcQdq66eRS0R1k5_7xM-_HWxC-2O7K4rJE-p-LDhuk6juHTpdJ9NOC28_PtE1sGazFscE/s320/122.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051327972056354" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> to Venus,<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4r7D88JYTQdM52WqzwniVbU4Q-ycjIlc-w57lRhkQu9qyvUCqWiLDINGD2FHqhlZHSdg2nmTjawTV_Yx2fFxIyGkB4wvON_AOpq90-XFELyUYudLr2FmO_fZlWbmDyPw1n1emYItrqSY/s320/211.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051613079957330" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> to Jupiter, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqaaHvICAQiFO2z_wSLyt-dxz4ZeW0jq9yq_JacPrMla4AZBKljbzmBBJDjRKRnkf-pn-D1MnAUadJggxvglvRCQ5HbqWTMVI-yblbJ4NAOnEp6CniDEpwc75AjH5e-7w-1Uerfnmqus/s320/212.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051619414517346" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /> to Earth, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv0Ng9WBGhsDu_YztU4nTsevcjx7zuv8lMdwUrC-6eM8tXHDLkc9xXB08mTts1scS47sWs8MaYPyNEH1V-cGRVTBzV2GMswJinpazBdmBVmTvRjOwQmr9ZwdQ43tu6iVREYYvX2MhUGQA/s320/221.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051911765998898" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, and to <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR2I-EWX68pwB73ftOrkHbrMcF7nxhyv813fEF3sDV-Mb3IBtyEh2eMtt2yL9m8Si1GjG8VUz01bRQvecadxVPdD5_nrxksHWD2QdtCOOMpChVeOCeThkids1I-ndEBBXeC_EwxFaQJcU/s320/222.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051913892001106" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /> Luna.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">The attributions below also draw inspiration from Don Karr's <a href="http://www.digital-brilliance.com/contributed/Karr/Maat/index.php">work</a> on the Kaballah of Ma'at. In his Tree of Ma'at, the planetary attributions of the sephiroth are switched somewhat. He attributes Mars to Hod, Saturn to Din, and Mercury to Da'ath. This gives us a middle pillar of Mercury, Sol, Luna, and Terra, Saturn opposite Jupiter, and Venus opposite Mars. While this does throw off the planetary order in the traditional Tree of Life, it has its own merits in the Trigrammaton system.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">Notice that Saturn <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCKmlsCGjOKH6PG7_UAgNASYYZDQFtiTJw85hyphenhypheni9LEg0JPXA6R9GbixEMRd5ElCVcf0xjBsFHLfvRz_7zYyDl_viXnS4DvMT0H2MYR_YN5OHmglhH8IT-f5tUt1qmBaX5s3TxmLqL-8oc/s320/112.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051023531281122" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> is opposite Jupiter <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4r7D88JYTQdM52WqzwniVbU4Q-ycjIlc-w57lRhkQu9qyvUCqWiLDINGD2FHqhlZHSdg2nmTjawTV_Yx2fFxIyGkB4wvON_AOpq90-XFELyUYudLr2FmO_fZlWbmDyPw1n1emYItrqSY/s320/211.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051613079957330" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, and the two are reversals of one another. Similarly Mars <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv0Ng9WBGhsDu_YztU4nTsevcjx7zuv8lMdwUrC-6eM8tXHDLkc9xXB08mTts1scS47sWs8MaYPyNEH1V-cGRVTBzV2GMswJinpazBdmBVmTvRjOwQmr9ZwdQ43tu6iVREYYvX2MhUGQA/s320/221.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051911765998898" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> is opposite Venus <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo2SCfcO_qyu1YJ1HDtYqpN1ezNJ6hmekvj7NL89JvoinMq7wWYquhUlMuDC5EgvZZBXYDhcQdq66eRS0R1k5_7xM-_HWxC-2O7K4rJE-p-LDhuk6juHTpdJ9NOC28_PtE1sGazFscE/s320/122.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051327972056354" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, and they are also reversals of one another. The middle pillar, Mercury <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvAWzIsT3FOGkTvaOf8AtaWOLbkXV5YsrHakZ8MkS_PHOp6Mil1R2PopiC2WNiSWGQiJSJt5z7eCIVqocg_fHtyRn03JMJ3f0UEY1mzM1Xl8Zux3C4cIf6WDxmSGXLHcnLikCsjMpHbM/s320/121.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051324795667010" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, Sol <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8K5HSlJXU9662BdmBDC7TlJIHdGlnFQBIpr5V43epf0c1zoJNEWKJLO2I2rFf2m1CwbJnTWmD7bQ-7hSvcrzNhyjGMNpNS2VzvaGemmU81SU7X6PmaUkEUGELxpcpfHubzUF8Z-AMfzg/s320/111.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051015756843666" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, Luna <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR2I-EWX68pwB73ftOrkHbrMcF7nxhyv813fEF3sDV-Mb3IBtyEh2eMtt2yL9m8Si1GjG8VUz01bRQvecadxVPdD5_nrxksHWD2QdtCOOMpChVeOCeThkids1I-ndEBBXeC_EwxFaQJcU/s320/222.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051913892001106" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " />, and Terra <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqaaHvICAQiFO2z_wSLyt-dxz4ZeW0jq9yq_JacPrMla4AZBKljbzmBBJDjRKRnkf-pn-D1MnAUadJggxvglvRCQ5HbqWTMVI-yblbJ4NAOnEp6CniDEpwc75AjH5e-7w-1Uerfnmqus/s320/212.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051619414517346" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " />, consists solely of trigrams which are identical to their reversals. Further, there's a line of reflection between Sol and Luna such that Sol and Luna, and Mercury and Terra, are antigrams. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">Now let's look at the <a href="http://www.horusmaat.com/space.htm">directional attributions</a> in the 8-fold ritual. In the South, we have Shaitan, which etymologically we can attribute to Saturn. Next comes Hoor-Pa-Kraat, which Gerard del Campo <a href="http://amzn.com/1891948024">attributes</a> to Jupiter, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, which he attributes to Mars. (In his system, the two correspond Din and Hesed, and Heru-Ra-Ha, of which they are aspects, corresponds to Tiphareth.) Hadit, the winged disk, seems reasonable to attribute to Sol, and Nuit to Luna. Ma'at, whose current synthesizes the earthy magick of Wicca and similar traditions with the Thelemic current, can be attributed to Earth. Babalon, the perfect virgin and utter whore, fits nicely with Venus. And finally, Aiwass, as the minister of Hoor-Pa-Kraat, fits nicely with Mercury, emissary of Jupiter. The order we have then is Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Terra, Venus, Mercury. With the exception of the Sun's position, this is a perfect listing of the planets in terms of decreasing maximum distance from the Sun. The Sun, rather than being between Mercury and Saturn, is right in the middle, in its traditional place before Mars. When it comes to the trigrams the arrangement is perfectly disordered, with every pair of reversals and antigrams reflected off a different axis. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">In truth, the trigrams aren't particularly pivotal to the arrangement of the ritual itself, but they do provide a basis for including Earth to give us 8 planets. The best thing about attributing the planets to the 8 directions is probably not contained in the eightfold banishing itself - rather, it opens the door for a new system of directions to be used in planetary rituals.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">Finally, I'd like to express a point about the gesture used for Shaitan in the South. The gesture for Hoor-Pa-Kraat is the sign of silence; that of Ra-Hoor-Khuit is a modified gesture very similar to the sign of Osiris Slain, but with the fingers pointing forward; that of Hadit is a finger laid upon the Ajna, the gesture of Nuit is a wave of the hand in a rainbow gesture, indicating her shape, the gesture of Ma'at is a T shape made with the arms to suggest scales, the gesture of Babalon is the sign of Mullier from the N.O.X. signs, and the gesture of Aiwass is a stretching upward and beating on the ground, which punctuates the ritual very nicely. Why then is the gesture for Shaitan a drawing of the letter S, when all the other gestures involve creating a glyph using the body rather than making one outside the body? </span>In my own workings of the ritual, I use the sign of Apophis and Typhon from the L.V.X. signs. The name Set is <span class="Apple-style-span">spelled <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); ">ש</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); ">ט in Hebrew, and the sign of Apophis imitates the shape of Shin. If you do the 8-fold banishing ritual, I'd love to hear your input on how it feels with the V of LVX in the Shaitan position rather than the drawn 'S' symbol.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); "><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); ">Thanks for your time and attention, and I hope these points have helped show some tools by which to bring the eightfold banishing ritual further into your own subjective synthesis.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); "><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); "><i>Love is the law, love under will.</i></span></span></div>Frater 46 = 43 = 46http://www.blogger.com/profile/07918450025342582890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-57566560709331894842011-09-05T21:10:00.000-07:002011-09-05T19:13:31.515-07:00Trigrammaton Qabalah<div><div><span><i>Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.</i></span></div><div><span>
<br /></span></div><div><span>Note: 'Qabalah', as used here, refers to the practice of alpha-numerical mysticism in general; though the term's original use is with the Hermetic interpretation of the Hebrew Kabbalah, and the Greek language has the term 'Isopsephy,' and Latin has 'Arithmancy,' both to refer alpha-numerical mysticism in their own languages, the ubiquity of the term Qabalah makes it convenient to divorce the term from exclusive association with the Hebrew language.</span> </div><div>
<br /></div><div><span>So, what is 'alpha-numerical mysticism'? Essentially, a system of alpha-numerical mysticism grows up around a paradigm for relating the letters of an alphabet to numerical values, which gives words numerical values (that of their letters summed together) and thus creates a basis for associating words and attributing concepts and archetypes to numbers. In the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, all letters were given numerical value, and numbers were written using combinations of letters (in some cases along with a punctuation mark showing the letters indicated a number, to prevent ambiguity). The first nine letters were numbered one through nine, the second nine ten through ninety, and the last letters were used for the numbers 100 to 900. The decimal (base-10) number system was thus built into the way these alphabets were used even before the number '0' came into use. </span>
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<br />The Hebrew Kabbalah and Greek Isopsephy have been used both in the interpretation of holy texts (namely the Tanakh and the Gospels, respectively) as well as generally for engendering an understanding of the way everything in connected, an understanding which has an important role in the foundation of any mystical perspective. They have also been used by magicians for the purposes of creating rituals and names which were much better understood by the initiated than by outsiders. As mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, Abrasax, gnostic god of the Sun, had a name that enumerated 365, thus containing the promise of the Sun's return from Winter.
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<br />However, since most of us are not fluent in Greek of Hebrew, these systems of mysticism are of limited use to us. Indeed, we can translate words and phrases into one of those languages and determine their numerical value that way, but it's less efficient than running the operating system that we really want to use in a virtual machine. A more direct system is needed for alpha-numeric mysticism to be truly accessible to English speakers without the prerequisite of fluency in an ancient language. Further, inspired texts written in English would have to first be mangled into the ambiguity of multiple possible translations for their qabalah to be understood. Even the Book of the Law mentions this need: "Thou shalt obtain the order and value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto." (<span style="font-style: italic;">AL </span>II:55)
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width: 46px; height: 38px; " /></div><div>
<br />Fortunately, <a href="http://trigrammaton.com/">the work of R. Leo Gillis</a>, standing on the shoulders of Aleister Crowley, has provided precisely what is needed. Gillis noted that Crowley had written a particular inspired text called <a href="http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/Liber27.pdf">Liber Trigrammaton</a> (pdf warning), which contains 27 symbols similar to the 8 trigrams of the I Ching. The only difference was that, where the I Ching trigrams consisted of Yin and Yang (- and +, represented by a broken line and an unbroken line respectively), the Trigrammaton symbols also contained a Tao symbol (of neutral value, represented by a dot). In his later notes on this book, Crowley attributed the letters of the English alphabet to the first 26 of these symbols, and referred to the book as "the foundation of the highest theoretical Qabalah." However, Crowley never determined numerical values to associate with these figures, and thus he never solved the second half of the equation - the "<span style="font-style: italic;">value</span> of the English Alphabet." (Ibid.)
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<br />This is where Gillis comes in. His brilliant realization was that the symbols of Liber Trigrammaton can be taken as numbers in ternary (base-3). Thus 0 was represented by three lines of Tao (visually, a column of three dots), 1 by two lines of Tao and one of Yang (two dots with an unbroken line below them), 2 by two lines of Tao and one of Yin (two dots with a broken line below them), 3 by a line of Yang between two dots of Tao, and so on. Representing Tao as 0, Yang as 1, and Yin as 2, the sequence from one to 10 would go:
<br /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYn7aUpR3NeS8EKmf6PJZHLDLwSYBEQqdYpKt6ZfVRILyADADBt-t0RdhGmuSgcu8MGqyTw9mrz24oTwsVqiUCNwUjHH2thVjbBKHlV-jsABbJkqyr478dTEJIk8bPEfns1jt9FO0Z6JM/s320/001.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381056560290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9RHrg2Ad7BMcp4IsOQoTPHKAEkjULxI-RohUESNbO2H_ceWnI3Fx9RoODYuMyoyyRQbDGFiih5hd6yjeb_Y9tsks8giIMunVaCFh3fvQTyFSPVcWQ0tuwGzC-E5wUMLmmhEOlxm_Ujm4/s320/002.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381580726226" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVP_APl3jE5z4Yp3hevRZeKd53IxMilWT4fMipKmbmHcRaY6UUWCdAU3EtkJLoHBLiQZPPUvL-0gdXgcp02-NKZF8rHWvEZmiF6A1Q0V9Gb08W_fgx0NnkzHENvgLIvjGMXhyOzakwgs0/s320/010.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050385614756978" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvpRRLjehbarCSevIGg5Ghs-K73a0RJAYpYVr9nFyPi5zQb0gE9B675rIGq5YDJGCpZvItFRCXeI9iXDGf_WJM9ZlIrf8CcIWxGVNcQ1AJYu87H7kLxMYC1HayZgQqPR8Yx4N1nZgdBY/s320/011.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050390440690690" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiveVuT_LFbicwHbo1pqTDvwN8yVsF_YAPRPaXSq7myQEMxCJBAQKOEAVbsGTMsVxaTheahEuiVjG3-srYlJ0FDn7_fXESwsUlCQJ2x6fo5slnL4eDQiH79KVtDDJQXA1Et0J25iJK7zw0/s320/012.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050694331950290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirPhfdQhYmoj8B6wiWAQoU9tfLJ_CUYFWnpJGVBllXUM3C_VPQyl5CF-dnTUpTdagPEHI32ZTEsygaDt2ROtnfr8uit89HJ8Ync6go5qKjj1vFiFClsuka4ajvbBQZEPdJYlvKewLxmco/s320/020.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700714365794" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8wGPBp8ZD_kbuBM6PEAv463nJ0RNNrWTPc68bfu8mHquBSFYFBh-3_7mTsQAg-G1aYev0BisFFeKhp2gcdk4sVu5syOHVWXBu36glDVewmxOSwoOt7xF-BUKxAS__ZYqE6XpqpBr8Ac/s320/022.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050704868295234" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilw-rOiQ9L1fmBvU5Xd3OwrcYy-UIC57_M3LVP2RfmX6lfyKYbCHyo8cM3SN9BTP0QkTZcJiND-DsQbzzruz5AMkOoO82Xulzp0SBT3hpQgb4-PI_hiWy-9kOGQ96nyZiYI_ZM2GBi6PY/s320/100.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050705017429730" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhReyt8zguKfJdHyFzmAOcUraemGSMdP3xJDEs_xa0tRYaMLq0ShCyxGAJjm2gguzYit8_t86r8sR2Kg4dX7JUuZ3e5Pf4rMEHTi-IoBLT5ly9IqC2y7zawBVMtYwnO-zQgF4sV_vkdVss/s320/101.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051007759782322" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />
<br />Just like in the decimal system, where each place value represents a power of ten (1 = 10^0, 10 = 10^1, 100 = 10^2, <span style="font-style: italic;">et cetera</span>), each place in the ternary system represents a power of three (1 = 3^0, 3 = 3^1, 9 = 3^2). Thus all natural numbers (including 0) under 27 can be written in three lines, and all under 729 can be written in six lines.
<br />
<br />The beauty of this system of notation is that there are two operations that can be applied to any numbers to find a pair of numbers related to them, as well as an operation applied to any two to find a third number that relates the two together. The first two operations (which require only one number) are called <span style="font-style: italic;">antigram </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">reversal</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span>the operation which requires two numbers is called <span style="font-style: italic;">transition</span>.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Antigram</span> is a very simple operation. From the original number, you leave all 0 digits as they are. You turn every 1 digit (unbroken line) into a 2 digit (broken line), and <i>vice versa</i>. So <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYn7aUpR3NeS8EKmf6PJZHLDLwSYBEQqdYpKt6ZfVRILyADADBt-t0RdhGmuSgcu8MGqyTw9mrz24oTwsVqiUCNwUjHH2thVjbBKHlV-jsABbJkqyr478dTEJIk8bPEfns1jt9FO0Z6JM/s320/001.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381056560290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />(1) and <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9RHrg2Ad7BMcp4IsOQoTPHKAEkjULxI-RohUESNbO2H_ceWnI3Fx9RoODYuMyoyyRQbDGFiih5hd6yjeb_Y9tsks8giIMunVaCFh3fvQTyFSPVcWQ0tuwGzC-E5wUMLmmhEOlxm_Ujm4/s320/002.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381580726226" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (2) are antigrams, as are <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqaaHvICAQiFO2z_wSLyt-dxz4ZeW0jq9yq_JacPrMla4AZBKljbzmBBJDjRKRnkf-pn-D1MnAUadJggxvglvRCQ5HbqWTMVI-yblbJ4NAOnEp6CniDEpwc75AjH5e-7w-1Uerfnmqus/s320/212.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051619414517346" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /> (23) and <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvAWzIsT3FOGkTvaOf8AtaWOLbkXV5YsrHakZ8MkS_PHOp6Mil1R2PopiC2WNiSWGQiJSJt5z7eCIVqocg_fHtyRn03JMJ3f0UEY1mzM1Xl8Zux3C4cIf6WDxmSGXLHcnLikCsjMpHbM/s320/121.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051324795667010" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (16). Note that antigram relationships aren't at all obvious in base-ten notation; they arise specifically from Trigrammaton notation. Note also that <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1DhQ32P44miNpwR5dJbm2b0SLTsYk1TwYAjwfy27o_1maEkXY9M92qiLtyGnaS3GyrqYebnaK9LKUfrKGy_BwPiyQaXOqCJT3KQk1FeiDvQThncGjKn9ZBplqtYjNC6l-TKqByWzbzL8/s320/000.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050378399088082" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 37px; " /> (0) is its own antigram.</div><div>
<br /></div><div><b>Reversal</b> is somewhat more complex, because you have to have a set number of digits in mind (usually 3 or 6). Instead of swapping the values on lines like you do with antigram, you swap the order of lines, so that the first line is last, the second line comes before the last line, <i>et cetera</i>. For some examples, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEire9XbVtYiKpcUhTQkLHedC519yDgH6t0X9WSR1mKvYNz6FwzyCLzEMOzpReLJ3v1Hoj16hT8wHhOMSmqpPYAN9_oOKKy6jv29YYy22SrQzNWQowiFhc9Rm83ktCZ7w9pJ4uYyc0E5PA4/s320/210.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051615338406274" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (21) and <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiveVuT_LFbicwHbo1pqTDvwN8yVsF_YAPRPaXSq7myQEMxCJBAQKOEAVbsGTMsVxaTheahEuiVjG3-srYlJ0FDn7_fXESwsUlCQJ2x6fo5slnL4eDQiH79KVtDDJQXA1Et0J25iJK7zw0/s320/012.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050694331950290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (5) are reversals, and so are <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv0Ng9WBGhsDu_YztU4nTsevcjx7zuv8lMdwUrC-6eM8tXHDLkc9xXB08mTts1scS47sWs8MaYPyNEH1V-cGRVTBzV2GMswJinpazBdmBVmTvRjOwQmr9ZwdQ43tu6iVREYYvX2MhUGQA/s320/221.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051911765998898" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (25) and <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo2SCfcO_qyu1YJ1HDtYqpN1ezNJ6hmekvj7NL89JvoinMq7wWYquhUlMuDC5EgvZZBXYDhcQdq66eRS0R1k5_7xM-_HWxC-2O7K4rJE-p-LDhuk6juHTpdJ9NOC28_PtE1sGazFscE/s320/122.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051327972056354" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (17). There are many trigrams that are their own reversals, such as <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhReyt8zguKfJdHyFzmAOcUraemGSMdP3xJDEs_xa0tRYaMLq0ShCyxGAJjm2gguzYit8_t86r8sR2Kg4dX7JUuZ3e5Pf4rMEHTi-IoBLT5ly9IqC2y7zawBVMtYwnO-zQgF4sV_vkdVss/s320/101.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051007759782322" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (10), <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR2I-EWX68pwB73ftOrkHbrMcF7nxhyv813fEF3sDV-Mb3IBtyEh2eMtt2yL9m8Si1GjG8VUz01bRQvecadxVPdD5_nrxksHWD2QdtCOOMpChVeOCeThkids1I-ndEBBXeC_EwxFaQJcU/s320/222.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051913892001106" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " /> (26), and <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvAWzIsT3FOGkTvaOf8AtaWOLbkXV5YsrHakZ8MkS_PHOp6Mil1R2PopiC2WNiSWGQiJSJt5z7eCIVqocg_fHtyRn03JMJ3f0UEY1mzM1Xl8Zux3C4cIf6WDxmSGXLHcnLikCsjMpHbM/s320/121.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051324795667010" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " /> (16). Further, there are some trigrams whose antigrams are the same as their reversals, like <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYXLK-MqHamfjZyNSeuTzdrAgahIXpZnGK8za5FuUO5sbZqgtswVSXbVuq-lMkbulRDHy-aCVf6nL7lYWPXYZ20IHVukBwL7GzpqONt0iONB-I8rFlqL5T1qIT8uovmEQ_S08ITe08GNo/s320/102.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051013988307298" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />. As with antigram, the properties of reversal are not obvious in decimal notation.</div><div>
<br /></div><div><b>Transition</b> is a more complex operation than antigram or reversal, but a couple examples should make it clear. Each example listed below is a transitional triad: given any two, the operation of transition can find the third.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ_lESe4P2I8r60cA6gWx3GYsxfXwJ-UOX-Y9dYV6sOw9DJc3CbB1jipwLYpIVS91QD1USrzP8Q_3eZIdoCDq-wD4tNjknUGqybHtCCfY6-OGqfQ03F9WmRj6IADLcv6YfoKQsVet7XFU/s320/110.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051017473256850" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVFrhc18bH8LxXUjaddXhPuFrxTXcUYYA5G709_lH4BIWw2bcBECylIy-LSwiofvcc2vxofZ7nDAg4VM3Dbgx11-lGaRwfNpFqHXe89TmOHEh_BDdbVDXhmOVkPTC1gd5RF5RT_zFRwrs/s320/202.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051611077098082" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYn7aUpR3NeS8EKmf6PJZHLDLwSYBEQqdYpKt6ZfVRILyADADBt-t0RdhGmuSgcu8MGqyTw9mrz24oTwsVqiUCNwUjHH2thVjbBKHlV-jsABbJkqyr478dTEJIk8bPEfns1jt9FO0Z6JM/s320/001.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381056560290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvpRRLjehbarCSevIGg5Ghs-K73a0RJAYpYVr9nFyPi5zQb0gE9B675rIGq5YDJGCpZvItFRCXeI9iXDGf_WJM9ZlIrf8CcIWxGVNcQ1AJYu87H7kLxMYC1HayZgQqPR8Yx4N1nZgdBY/s320/011.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050390440690690" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilw-rOiQ9L1fmBvU5Xd3OwrcYy-UIC57_M3LVP2RfmX6lfyKYbCHyo8cM3SN9BTP0QkTZcJiND-DsQbzzruz5AMkOoO82Xulzp0SBT3hpQgb4-PI_hiWy-9kOGQ96nyZiYI_ZM2GBi6PY/s320/100.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050705017429730" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvAWzIsT3FOGkTvaOf8AtaWOLbkXV5YsrHakZ8MkS_PHOp6Mil1R2PopiC2WNiSWGQiJSJt5z7eCIVqocg_fHtyRn03JMJ3f0UEY1mzM1Xl8Zux3C4cIf6WDxmSGXLHcnLikCsjMpHbM/s320/121.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051324795667010" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4r7D88JYTQdM52WqzwniVbU4Q-ycjIlc-w57lRhkQu9qyvUCqWiLDINGD2FHqhlZHSdg2nmTjawTV_Yx2fFxIyGkB4wvON_AOpq90-XFELyUYudLr2FmO_fZlWbmDyPw1n1emYItrqSY/s320/211.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051613079957330" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo2SCfcO_qyu1YJ1HDtYqpN1ezNJ6hmekvj7NL89JvoinMq7wWYquhUlMuDC5EgvZZBXYDhcQdq66eRS0R1k5_7xM-_HWxC-2O7K4rJE-p-LDhuk6juHTpdJ9NOC28_PtE1sGazFscE/s320/122.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051327972056354" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1DhQ32P44miNpwR5dJbm2b0SLTsYk1TwYAjwfy27o_1maEkXY9M92qiLtyGnaS3GyrqYebnaK9LKUfrKGy_BwPiyQaXOqCJT3KQk1FeiDvQThncGjKn9ZBplqtYjNC6l-TKqByWzbzL8/s320/000.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050378399088082" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 37px; " />.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>To find a transitional trigram, work line by line through the pair of trigrams already given. If a particular line in both trigrams is Yin, Yang, or Tao, leave it as it is in the transitional trigram. If the value differs for the same line between the two trigrams, whichever of Yin, Yang, or Tao is not used in either trigram will be present in the transitional trigram.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Let's look at the first example triad:</div><div>1) <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ_lESe4P2I8r60cA6gWx3GYsxfXwJ-UOX-Y9dYV6sOw9DJc3CbB1jipwLYpIVS91QD1USrzP8Q_3eZIdoCDq-wD4tNjknUGqybHtCCfY6-OGqfQ03F9WmRj6IADLcv6YfoKQsVet7XFU/s320/110.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051017473256850" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVFrhc18bH8LxXUjaddXhPuFrxTXcUYYA5G709_lH4BIWw2bcBECylIy-LSwiofvcc2vxofZ7nDAg4VM3Dbgx11-lGaRwfNpFqHXe89TmOHEh_BDdbVDXhmOVkPTC1gd5RF5RT_zFRwrs/s320/202.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051611077098082" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />.</div><div>This is a perfect example of the second rule. Notice that on each line, one trigram has Yang, one has Yin, and another has Tao. It doesn't matter that it's not the same trigram that has each, because they're all in the same transitional triad. If we were only given the first two trigrams, we could figure out the third like so: the top line is Yang in one and Tao in the other, so it must be Yin in the third; the middle line is Yin in one and Yang in the other, so it must be Tao in the third; the bottom line is Tao in one and Yang in the other, so it must be Yin in the third.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>2) <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYn7aUpR3NeS8EKmf6PJZHLDLwSYBEQqdYpKt6ZfVRILyADADBt-t0RdhGmuSgcu8MGqyTw9mrz24oTwsVqiUCNwUjHH2thVjbBKHlV-jsABbJkqyr478dTEJIk8bPEfns1jt9FO0Z6JM/s320/001.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050381056560290" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvpRRLjehbarCSevIGg5Ghs-K73a0RJAYpYVr9nFyPi5zQb0gE9B675rIGq5YDJGCpZvItFRCXeI9iXDGf_WJM9ZlIrf8CcIWxGVNcQ1AJYu87H7kLxMYC1HayZgQqPR8Yx4N1nZgdBY/s320/011.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050390440690690" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />.</div><div>You see both rules in action with this one. The top line is Tao in the first two, so it must be Tao in the third. The middle line applies the second rule - since Tao is in the first trigram, and Yang is in the second, Yin must be in the third of the triad. The bottom line applies the first rule again - since Yang is present in the same line of two trigrams of the same transitional triad, it must also be present in the third.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>3) <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDMk7-XZVayY6OVdzapSNzyMOkm0Tr4sz4pVi5A1ZokAQTdjuCBAqrNb47aIuz2iTV9EHYzXhBSfGpZ-d1tyD6LEnB2H4CfYnbyo7ogyC1ETInDhh1LuxqdZ-XE76J_Ps1s3Cwf6euVE/s320/021.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050700078267394" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilw-rOiQ9L1fmBvU5Xd3OwrcYy-UIC57_M3LVP2RfmX6lfyKYbCHyo8cM3SN9BTP0QkTZcJiND-DsQbzzruz5AMkOoO82Xulzp0SBT3hpQgb4-PI_hiWy-9kOGQ96nyZiYI_ZM2GBi6PY/s320/100.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050705017429730" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLqaaHvICAQiFO2z_wSLyt-dxz4ZeW0jq9yq_JacPrMla4AZBKljbzmBBJDjRKRnkf-pn-D1MnAUadJggxvglvRCQ5HbqWTMVI-yblbJ4NAOnEp6CniDEpwc75AjH5e-7w-1Uerfnmqus/s320/212.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051619414517346" style="cursor: pointer; width: 46px; height: 38px; " />.</div><div>Since there are no lines with the same symbol between any pair of trigrams, the second rule is all we need to figure this one out. Just like with the first example, Yang, Yin, and Tao are distributed across each line.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>4) <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4r7D88JYTQdM52WqzwniVbU4Q-ycjIlc-w57lRhkQu9qyvUCqWiLDINGD2FHqhlZHSdg2nmTjawTV_Yx2fFxIyGkB4wvON_AOpq90-XFELyUYudLr2FmO_fZlWbmDyPw1n1emYItrqSY/s320/211.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051613079957330" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo2SCfcO_qyu1YJ1HDtYqpN1ezNJ6hmekvj7NL89JvoinMq7wWYquhUlMuDC5EgvZZBXYDhcQdq66eRS0R1k5_7xM-_HWxC-2O7K4rJE-p-LDhuk6juHTpdJ9NOC28_PtE1sGazFscE/s320/122.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649051327972056354" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 38px; " />, <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1DhQ32P44miNpwR5dJbm2b0SLTsYk1TwYAjwfy27o_1maEkXY9M92qiLtyGnaS3GyrqYebnaK9LKUfrKGy_BwPiyQaXOqCJT3KQk1FeiDvQThncGjKn9ZBplqtYjNC6l-TKqByWzbzL8/s320/000.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649050378399088082" style="cursor: pointer; width: 45px; height: 37px; " />.</div><div>You know how we solved this one by now. However, it shows a neat property of transition. The third symbol in a transitional triad that contains two antigrams is always 0. The same is not true for reversal, however.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>We looked at these three operations using only trigrams, but the same could easily be done with hexagrams (6-line ternary numbers). </div><div>
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<br /></div><div>Now, <a href="http://forums.abrahadabra.com/showthread.php?230-Getting-Tough-on-Trigrammaton/">some magicians</a> have taken issue with Trigrammaton, pointing out that a ternary system dealing with the permutations of positive and negative has been in existence at least since the dawn of the most recent Age of Pisces, known as the Tai Hsuan Ching. This system added, to the unbroken line and the once-broken line familiar from the I Ching, the twice-broken line. The three symbols (called T'ien, Ti, and Jen) together represented the unification of Heaven, Earth, and Man. The criticism linked is very good at demonstrating that Crowley's Trigrammaton is not this system. However, it does not purport to be. The genius of Trigrammaton is that it adds a symbol for 0, rather than for 3, to the symbol set.
<br />
<br />However, m1thr0s does make one very good point in the link above - seeking to find a one-to-one correspondence between Trigrammaton and the Tree of Life or the Major Arcana of the Tarot is not something to be done casually. In the next post on this subject, we'll look at Crowley's attribution of the English alphabet to the trigrams, and consider other possible attributions for them.
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<br /></div><div>Thank you for your time and attention.</div><div>
<br /></div><div><i>Love is the law, love under will.</i></div>Frater 46 = 43 = 46http://www.blogger.com/profile/07918450025342582890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-38332000372145121542011-08-30T12:57:00.000-07:002011-08-30T15:13:11.171-07:00History never repeats itself, but it sometimes rhymes.History never repeats itself, but it sometimes rhymes. <br />
That's why people like Nostradamus, hip to the patterns in the verses but always aware of the curse, that we may live in interesting times, can exist, and leave camps of believers shaking their fists at one another, urging each other to dismiss or accept prophecy, when both groups in truth refuse to see that prophets are just noticing patterns.<br />
That's why déjà vu can be surprisingly right, though usually just tells us what we already know: they say that it comes most often when you're doing something familiar... well really? You mean you get the sensation that you've been somewhere before when you have? Big surprise there, but sometimes it comes in ways you'd never expect, ne jamais vouloir voir, don't get on that train, stupid, or you'll reach your final destination, says your daemon.<br />
So the consequences of inflation can strike twice when the scythe of Saturn swings perpendicular to the dead planet declared planet no more, and one nation under God, and another once under Alexander Severus can each feel the purse strings tightening around its neck, and look back with furor at the generation that said, "laissez les bon temps rouler," realizing now to our horror that they were rolling into a polluted lake.<br />
So we can look back and see the Weimar republic and compare wheelbarrows to computers, each with a message worth less than its medium, and steel ourselves against totalitarianism, recognizing in the reflection that one Semitic people or another is made pariah by those who seek to write the next line of our world's tale in blood.<br />
Even when we get in the same stupid arguments with our loved ones, friends, or watch reruns with them so that we can get a feel for what heaven will be like, we know that eternity recurs, not as endlessness but as timelessness, and perhaps a little part of us remembers, prays, here for true consonance, there for slant rhyme, and whispers to us, that we might learn rather than weaken from pain. <br />
In truth though, nobody fully knows the meter, cycles of the planets and economic cycles don't explain it all, and we can never know the whole system in all its vast scope or its minute details, so interpretation and expectation are left up to the reader.<br />
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Copyright J.K. Strain, 2011.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-55801780861677969082011-08-08T13:23:00.000-07:002011-08-08T16:13:05.852-07:00Concerning 'Aeon' and the Necronomicon Couplet<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The word 'aeon' was first introduced to me in a couplet from the <i>Necronomicon</i>, as quoted in at least <a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/nc.asp">one of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's tales</a>:</span><br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"That is not dead which can eternal lie.<br />
And with strange aeons even death may die." </span></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In Gnosticism, the term '<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_(Gnosticism)">Aeon</a>' (</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">αἰών) </span>r</span>efers to the different emanations of the one being. In the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Worlds">Four Worlds</a> formulation (consisting of a material world, an astral or imagery world, a mental or conceptual world, and a spiritual world), you could say that an Aeon is the basic unit of the spiritual world (those basic units being respectively object, image, concept, Aeon). The terms archetype or arche (plural archai), in that these too are reflected in all aspects of existence with varying degrees of obviousness, makes an acceptable modern analogue for this use of the word 'Aeon', so I'll use the term archai to refer to this type of Aeons to reduce semantic confusion.<br />
<br />
If the famous <i>Necronomicon</i> couplet is referring to archai, we get an interesting meaning from it, such that we might replace the word 'And' at the beginning of the second line with 'For' and get a somewhat different meaning:<br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"That is not dead which can eternal lie,<br />
[For] with strange [archai] even death may die."</span></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What's implied then, is that while some of the principles of the universe (archai) preserve the illusion of death, when seen through the lens of less familiar ('strange') archai the ephemerality of life perishes as ephemerality must when applied to itself. This perspective is certainly quite viable, particularly if certain Mu statements are true, such as "For every action with multiple possible outcomes, the universe diverges into a multiverse with manifolds where each outcome occurred," the basis of multiple universe theory, or "Space and/or time are infinite and fairly uniform," the basic assumption on which most cosmological theories rest (for how can we generalize about the vast universe without assuming that a principle of uniformity allows us to do so?). In either case there's an infinite set of organisms which resemble us precisely, and an even larger set which resemble us to nearly the smallest error of approximation, and there will always be more of them. Unless you're the type of person who believes that the characters in Star Trek die and are replaced by copies none the wiser each time they use the transporter, that's quite comfortably close to immortality. </span><br />
<br />
Moreover, these archai, though they may lie dormant without being accessed by our perception for millennia, are never absent - "That is not dead which can eternal lie." Certainly there is a process of transformation over the course of existence where one arche which was previously quite obvious becomes more difficult to notice while another comes into the foreground, to irrevocably perish is beyond the sphere of possibilities for the archai. Certainly there are those archai so far removed from what we consider obvious that it takes a stroke of insight or a significantly altered state of consciousness to notice their existence at all, but we can assume and not risk being contradicted that they are in a state of dormancy rather than say that they are resurrected by mere humans.<br />
<br />
The word 'Aeon' has another meaning - this one from the way it was used by Aleister Crowley. In this form, the word more closely resembles its cousin of less esoteric orthography, 'eon.' An eon is a vast stretch of time used both in the figurative sense and to refer to specific periods of geological time. With the additional vowel, the term 'Aeon' in this sense still refers to specific periods of time, but rather than describing geological or evolutionary transitions, it indicates periods between transitions in spirituality.<br />
<br />
The best way to illustrate this is to go through the three Aeons described in Crowley's model, which, though using the names of Egyptian divinities, transcends distinctions between cultural pantheons and between poly- and mono-theism. The first Aeon is that of Isis. This refers to the period before humans realized that the sperm was essential to reproduction. The mystery of birth was profound to humans of this Aeon, and it coincided with pre-agricultural periods, where women were intensely involved in the gathering and, later, production of plants for the sustenance of their communities. During these times, the Mother Goddess was the most important deity, and she encompassed the triune cycle of birth, life, and death. The Earth was revered as the source of sustaining plants.<br />
<br />
The second Aeon in Crowley's model is the Aeon of Osiris. Several markers indicate the gradual transition from the Aeon of Isis to that of Osiris: the invention of the plow, which pregnant women could not safely use, made agriculture the domain of men; the discovery of the role of sperm in reproduction, which made polyandry and related behaviors less desirable for men; and a deepened understanding of the role of the Sun in the growth of plants. It's worth noting that Osiris was the god of both death and agriculture.<br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And Jesus answered them, saying, "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." (</span><i>John</i>, 12:23-24, KJV)</blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The formula of the life-death-rebirth deity is central to the Aeon of Osiris. Just as it seemed that the seeds of plants went into the ground, died, and were reborn with glory, so it seemed that the sperm of a man died and were reborn as a child, and the Winter Sun died to be reborn with vigor for a new year. Male priests developed a great degree of control over their societies during this Aeon, both in early forms by giving sacrifices to the Sun so that it would rise the next morning, or so that it would return from the distant South and give forth a new Spring and Summer. And each time the Sun did, the powers of these priests were proven. </span><br />
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As this Aeon progressed, the cycle of the Solar Year came to be more widely understood. For instance, the Gnostic god <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraxas">Abrasax</a> (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ), whose name adds to 365 by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopsephy">isopsephy</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">, honored the promise of the eternal rebirth of the Sun. However, especially with the rise of Christianity, the priesthood of this Aeon managed to maintain and even expand their power, even though people were less impressed with the miraculous rebirth of the Sun each year. Instead, it came to be that the Church offered personal rebirth in the flesh, the ultimate defense against that third terrifying aspect of the Mother Goddess of the Aeon of Isis.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">Th<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">roughout the Aeon, which certainly includes the Christian period, the doctrine of purification through suffering is central. As Paul states, </span></span></div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“<span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">” (</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I Corinthians</i></span> 15:14-15, KJV)</span></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">With this in mind, the famous <i>Necronomicon</i> couplet can be seen in an all new light:</span></div><blockquote>"That is not dead which can eternal lie.<br />
And with strange aeons even death may die." </blockquote>This suggests that the spiritual evolution of humanity, if continued, will inevitably take us beyond the point where the formula of the dying god is essential, or even relevant. Abdul Alhazred (though fictional as far as we know) was certainly writing during the Aeon of Osiris at 738 C.E., and in the context of Osirian religion the quote seems especially blasphemous. Not only does it imply in the first line that the life-death-rebirth formula is fundamentally flawed in that beings worthy of the name 'God', being eternal, are incapable of the kind of death that humans experience and thus unable to save humans through their own suffering, it seems to state in the second line that these beings' play of suffering will ultimately be passed over with disinterest by humans as more relevant spiritual formulas come into use.<br />
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This certainly describes the third Aeon in Crowley's model, that of Horus. In this Aeon, the current one, the mythology of death surrounding the Sun has perished with the knowledge that what we once experienced as the Sun dying each evening and being reborn each morning is merely the rotation of the Earth. Rather than the formula of death and rebirth, the formula of the third Aeon is that of continual growth.<br />
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Thelema (whose name comes<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><i>θέλημα, will</i>), the first religion of the Aeon of Horus, reflects the formula of that Aeon in its take on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil">theodicy problem</a>. Rather than the exclusion which typically informs people's perspectives on what is holy, the word's meaning is returned to its etymological roots, and we are reminded of the connection between <i>holiness</i> and <i>wholeness</i>. Thus the Self in the third Aeon is beyond life or death, good or evil, integration or fragmentation, truth or illusion, mind or matter, beauty or ugliness, amorality or knowledge of good and evil, and beyond any other distinction, even beyond dualism and non-dualism. Thus the perception of evil occurs due to a confluence of two factors which are really one: limited understanding of how the world works at a fundamental level and limited understanding of the self. What seems evil is not the antithesis of good, as night was perceived to be the antithesis of day and darkness the antithesis of light during the Aeon of Osiris. Rather, the light of pure being is shrouded in semi-opaque veils of complexity which cast shadows, just as we are in the Earth's shadow during the night.</span></span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">Similarly, the transcendence of death and, particularly, the fear of it, is a consequence of coming into the new Aeon. As J. Daniel Gunther puts it in his book </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><i><a href="http://amzn.com/0892541458">Initiation in the Æon of the Child</a>,</i></span><br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">"Although the progression of the Initiate in the New Aeon emulates that of a child, the beginning point is not that of birth, or even conception. In a formula so composed the end of that progression would be death. To the contrary, the motif of the mystical death is denied....</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">On the other hand, it is not an error to proclaim <i>Mors Janua Vitae</i> [tr: Death is the gate of life], nor is it a paradox... Any apparent paradox is resolved in practice only with the reconstellation of the aspirant's psyche.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">The Initiate does not follow a path that leads from conception or birth to death; the path leads <i>from</i> the realm of the dead...</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">It should be remembered that Osiris is the Lord of the dead." (pp. 48-50)</span></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">With this in mind, we can interpret the famed <i>Necronomicon</i> couplet in an even more obvious fashion.</span><br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">"That is not dead which can eternal lie.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">And through strange aeons even death may die."</span></blockquote> From the perspective of one like the fictional Abdul Alhazred, living while the Aeon of Osiris is still quite in full swing, the formula of Horus is still quite alien. Similarly, the apocalyptic predictions of the Judeo-Christian scriptures can be seen in a new light in the Aeon of Horus, for example:<br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease. And for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate." (<i>Daniel</i> 9:27, KJV21)</span></blockquote> The cessation of sacrifice is in truth due to the change of the Aeon, such that the formula of sacrifice no longer holds power. The Book of Revelation, also, was a major inspiration to Crowley - in his mystical system, some of its characters (such as the Harlot and the Beast) who are traditionally viewed as villainous are seen in a new light in the Aeon of Horus. <br />
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However, in light of the Aeon of Horus, we can also view the <i>Necronomicon </i>couplet as a statement on the part of Lovecraft himself. Borrowing from the introduction to <i><a href="http://amzn.com/1561842346">Liber Koth</a></i>, "Lovecraft's dreams were haunted by cosmic scenarios he found personally difficult to relate to; so much that unlike Blavatsky, Von Liebenfels, and many other cosmological literalists, he presented his ideas in fictional form..." We <a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/myths.asp#crowley">know</a> that Lovecraft did not directly or indirectly meet Aleister Crowley before writing the couplet, and since it's quite likely he did not understand Crowley's work, the way the couplet fits with Crowley's conception of Aeonics is remarkable. This lends credence to the idea that both Lovecraft and Crowley were perceiving a transition that is truly part of reality. <br />
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Going back to where we started, then, how can we find common ground between our Gnostic-based interpretation of "Aeon" and the Thelemic view? Seemingly the two contradict one another in light of the <i>Necronomicon</i> couplet- if archai cannot die, then how can we have a transition from one Aeon to another? To resolve this apparent contradiction, we only need remember that there are varying degrees of vigor which all exclude death. J. Daniel Gunther states it nicely:<br />
<blockquote>"Many of the doctrines of the former Aeon are clearly abrogate; others, though still valid, have been superseded...<br />
It should be stated clearly that the concept of self-sacrifice is not a false idea. In essence, there is no fault with the theory that the individual may choose to sacrifice for the greater good of which he is a willing component. In our societies it is often necessary to guarantee survival. The strength of families and entire nations is built upon self-sacrifice. It is the additional element of proclaiming glory in suffering that vilifies it." (pp. 24 - 26)</blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-14481342233913911462011-08-04T13:09:00.000-07:002011-08-04T13:09:40.924-07:00Verbing our Nouns so we can Noun our VerbsYou may have heard of the linguistic trend referred to as the 'verbing of nouns.' An entertaining poem addressing this can be found <a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/family/verbing.html">here</a>, and I highly recommend it both for the amusement to be derived from it and for its way of illustrating this trend.<br />
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A lot of people hate it. My mom cringes whenever she hears of someone 'gifting' something to another person, and if anyone referred to the act of creating different sound waves in aesthetically pleasing patterns as musicking, I'd surely bash them with a guitar - partly because I don't own a guitar, so I wouldn't lose an instrument. However, I was thinking about this trend this morning, and ultimately I think it's a good thing. <br />
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The Hebrew language, relatively ancient compared to the upstart European languages that have swept their way across the globe in the last quarter of an age, can be etymologically traced back to word roots which were all verbs. Nouns, adjectives, and words serving as other parts of speech were derived from verbs whose meaning pertained to the new word. A very similar process can be seen in the derivation of English words like 'computer,' 'overseer,' 'recipient,' and 'advocate' (which is spelled the same in its noun form as in its verb form, though pronounced differently in my dialect), as well as in the more obvious cases of gerunds and participles. It's very convenient to have these processes for making nouns out of verbs, otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about what, for instance, was in the swimmer's refrigerator without a few dependent clauses. Anyone who opposes this way of making new words in an age of invention is probably either a madman or a Luddite.<br />
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But that's not the trend this article is about - coining new words from verb forms is quite an entrenched process. What concerns people these days is the coining of new verbs from other words. I think the concern is primarily aesthetic. Since 'gift' (if it's not derived from the German word for poison) is probably derived from 'to give', the idea of the trend coming full circle so that 'to gift' becomes a verb with basically the same meaning as the verb which 'gift' is derived from seems repugnant and Newspeak-ish. It'd be like is someone told us that they 'dryered' their clothes, choosing that word because of the device used in the process. <br />
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However, in moments of less shortsightedness, I see something beautiful on the horizon. The faster we verb our nouns, the sooner we can noun our verbs. I believe there's a spiral in linguistic development, where we switch from turning one part of speech into another to just the other way around. All the while we're making progress, so it's more like the way we alternate between our legs while we're walking than going around in a circle. Or you could view it as an orbit - as the Sun travels through the galaxy, the Earth orbits around it, so that sometimes it seems we're regressing (going against the direction of the Sun's motion) but other times we're moving even faster in the right direction. <br />
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And the truth is, we desperately need to noun our verbs again, especially with the realizations of contemporary physics and mysticism about the nature of reality. More or less as David Bohm <a href="http://amzn.com/B000PLXCKE">puts it</a>, what we refer to using nouns are like whirlpools in a stream. What we identify with a noun isn't some static 'stuff' that remains as inert as our assumptions about nouns imply, but a process acting upon the basic constituents of the universe. This is particularly noteworthy with living organisms, given that you replace nearly every particle that constitutes you over the course of a decade of metabolism. However, it also applies to things that seem more static in the mesosphere. Even a chair is more identifiable by the way the stuff of the universe is held together than by what stuff is held together - though you'd be hard-pressed to get me to sit in one made of plutonium. <br />
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What I'm trying to get at is that right now, we've got things somewhat backwards - instead of viewing our nouns as instantiations of verbs, we're making new verbs that are tied to nouns for their meaning. But I don't think there's any solution before it besides letting the tides of linguistic change ebb and flow as they will. The more nouns we verb, the sooner we'll start swinging the other direction.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-68498387744534893852011-04-12T20:41:00.000-07:002011-04-12T20:41:06.446-07:00A tribute to Kevin MooreKevin Moore didn't do anything special in the last few weeks, that I know of. However, I recently got <a href="http://amzn.com/B001TKK3DY">the latest OSI album</a>, and listening to it the past few days inspired me to make a blog post to introduce readers to this man's amazing music. We'll look at five songs, so if you've got the patience for some great tunes, make sure to read past the jump. Some of these are long, open another browser tab while you listen might be advised.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/w80YFmsXiNA?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>Kevin Moore was the first keyboardist of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Theater">Dream Theater</a>, with them for the first three albums. This song, which he wrote the <a href="http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dream+theater/surrounded_20043362.html">lyrics</a> for, comes from their second, <a href="http://amzn.com/B000002JPA"><i>Images and Words</i></a>. A lot of people who like Dream Theater think this is their best album, and I'm inclined to agree with them. This song can be interpreted on a lot of levels, and even though it feels like it's three parts long, it's only five minutes.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://2.gvt0.com/vi/6O4_C68PmFI/0.jpg"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6O4_C68PmFI&fs=1&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6O4_C68PmFI&fs=1&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object></div>This is the last song he did with Dream Theater - the music and <a href="http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dream+theater/space+dye+vest_20043326.html">lyrics</a> are both composed by him alone. A few days before they finished recording the album, Kevin told the rest of the band he'd be leaving so he could have more artistic freedom with a solo career. The day after that, he and vocalist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_LaBrie">James LaBrie</a> recorded this song. If LaBrie's voice sounds different, it's because Moore's is layered in with it - which, amusingly, LaBrie only realized after he heard it on the album. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Kevin Moore saw this photograph in a fashion magazine of a beautiful model wearing a space-dye vest and he fell in love with her," LaBrie said. "He carried that magazine around with him for ages, but he realized that the only way the innocence could be kept, so that he could retain that love for her, was if she stayed on the page. If he'd met her, all that would have been lost."</span></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/dwIdfaetHZU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This song's <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/on-the-page-lyrics-chroma-key.html">lyrics</a> reflect a similar theme as the quote above - "Life is so much cleaner on the page." This one comes from <a href="http://amzn.com/B00000IOMS"><i>Dead Air for Radios</i></a>, Kevin Moore's first solo album under the name Chroma Key. I like this song because it it explains why he left Dream Theater and reflects a sentiment I feel a lot of times, because of the way it blends in the samples, and because of the amazing piano part.</span></span><br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://2.gvt0.com/vi/5Hwpf3_i3S4/0.jpg"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5Hwpf3_i3S4&fs=1&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5Hwpf3_i3S4&fs=1&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">This song, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><i>Dirt from a Holy Place</i>,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"> comes from the <a href="http://amzn.com/B003XD7EF0">first album</a> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_(band)">OSI</a>. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The band is the named after the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Influence">Office of Strategic Influence</a>, an organization created after the September 11 attacks to spread misinformation and spread fake news articles to the media. After a story was run about it in 2002, those operations were transferred to the Information Operations Task Force. (<i>Bureaucracies do not die when terminated; they change names</i>: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">Gilhooley's First Fundamental Finding.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">) This song shows the way OSI brings the electronic and progressive metal genres together. Moore sings on many OSI songs, but this one is an instrumental. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/5eYHTsTm9fQ?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">This last song, <i>Radiologue</i>, comes from the album that inspired this post, <i>Blood</i>. It shows a sharper edge of their sound than the previous, and I really like the effects, and the new drummer, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Harrison">Gavin Harrison</a>, shines in it too. The rest of the album is at least this good, and I encourage you to check it out. Opeth fans will particularly like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NFRhHMA-xU">track 8</a>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. I do expect I'll be talking more about Mu and Nix soon, but I thought some wading would be welcome in the meantime.</span>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-22425925830851587212011-04-10T14:17:00.000-07:002011-04-10T14:17:32.595-07:00Vrai, Faux, Mu, and Nix - Part TwoThis is the continuation of a <a href="http://fatedstars.blogspot.com/2011/04/true-false-mu-and-nix-part-one.html">previous post</a>. In order to deal with more in-depth concepts, I will write for an audience that has read that post. However, a quick recap would not be untoward.<br />
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In the previous post, we defined two new truth values, but before them, let's look at the original two. The first, True, applies to statements of which it can be truly said that they are found True, and it can only be falsely said that they are found False. The second, False, applies to statements of which it can be truly said that they are found False, and only falsely said that they are found True. If this seems circular, it is. It's exactly as circular as saying that the traits of a positive number can be indicated by the fact that multiplying a positive by a positive yields a positive, while multiplying a positive by a negative yields a negative (and similarly, that the traits of a negative number can be shown by the fact that a negative multiplied by a positive yields a negative, whilst a negative multiplied by another negative yields, oddly, a positive). These somewhat obliquely stated definitions also serve to indicate that a statement which is found alternately both True and False is belongs neither to the set of properly True statements nor to the set of properly False ones, and similarly that a statement which cannot be found to be either True or False at all belongs to neither set.<br />
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Now, let us formally define our two posited complex truth values that supplement True and False. The first we have called Mu, due to the fact that asking whether the statement valued <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)">Mu</a> is true or false is a question which ought to be unasked, though the coincidence between that word's first letter and the initial letter of 'maybe' certainly was not a dissuading factor, nor was the fact that its name is the first two letters of 'multiple'. The value Mu applies to statements which can by found to be True when treated as such, and which can equally be found to be False when treated as such. Mu does not fit into the previous paragraph's analogy of integers, because while the statements it applies to are not without disproof nor without proof, likening it to zero would press its etymology beyond the breaking point, for it does not have the properties of that integer, either. Mu's mathematical analogue is best understood in relation to its opposite, Nix.<br />
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Just as Mu's name comes from the answer to beautiful koans, the name of Nix, as its opposite, has no such beautiful origins. Though I'm sure if these ideas catch on, some Jungian or Thelemite will come along and replace the middle letter of Nix with a 'y' or an 'o' so that they can wax poetic, its name was chosen simply because, just as V (<i>vrai</i>, French for 'true') and F are one <a href="http://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1999111980"></span>degree of freedom<span id="goog_1999111981"></span></a> apart in the way they are articulated, so are M and N. A statement's value is Nix if attempts to assess the statement's truth value which start by assuming it to be True find it False, and attempts which start by assuming it to be False find it True. In the previous article, the simplest Empedoclean paradox was used as an example: "This statement is false." If you assume that the statement as a whole is True, you can derive from this truth that what the statement says must be true, and therefore that the statement is False. In mirrored fashion, if you start with the idea that the statement is False, you must interpret that what the statement says must be false in order for it to be false, and thus you arrive at the notion that the statement is True. No, the statement is Nix. <br />
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We had best save the mathematical analogy of these two values for the next post in this series, for I fear we have gotten far to abstract for anyone but the logician to see value in continuing forward. Let us then veer away from complex Boolean algebra towards real-life examples of these.<br />
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In the previous post, we used the example of Cindy, who has no patience for people who have no patience for her but gets along fine with people who expect the best in her (sound like anyone you know?). We said that, "Cindy is hard to get along with," was Mu, given that the way acceptance or negation of the statement affected one's actions made it self-fulfilling. Similarly, there were studies done where classes of students were given fake aptitude tests where the teachers (sometimes just the teachers, sometimes the students as well) were informed that they were gifted and talented. Whichever students were given those results performed remarkably the rest of the time they were with that teacher. In this case, "Student <i>P</i> has great potential," is a way of expressing the Mu statement. Now let's look at some other places where Mu turns up.<br />
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One great place to look for Mu is in the rules of particular perceptual sets or paradigms. For instance, both "The external world is more real than our minds; when we perceive, we perceive it, mediated through our minds," and "The world is what attention is directed to; no external world need be postulated, for we unconsciously account for continuity when we look back at what we've previously attended," are Mu. Same with the statements, "The intricacy of the universe indicates a transcendental being either created it at one point or tailored it to Its liking as time passed," and "The intricacy of the universe indicates that it is transcendent to any being." The same holds for theories of personality, "The personality consists of an aggregation of complexes distributed over unconscious, preconscious, and conscious levels as it unfolds over time," and "The personality has a fiery component (will), a watery component (emotions), an airy component (cognition), an earthy component (sensations and patterns of muscular tension), and an etheric component (the intuition)," are both Mu. <br />
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The truth value of these set of statements may have something to do with the way psychology has been treated by the 'hard' sciences. In various essays on the philosophy of science, psychoanalytic theory is disparaged as unfalsifiable pseudoscience and sent away on the same barge that carries away astrology. All of this is done from a paradigm where true and false are the only possibilities, and it makes sense that supporters of such an ontology would find Mu statements anathema. Rather than admitting that there may be another set of statements besides those true or false from all points of reference, we have the game rule that anything that can be shown false at all is false indeed, and any instance of seeing it as true is a result of deception or self-delusion. All this in order to preserve a binary logic.<br />
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That's not to say that recognizing some Mu statements for what they are is incompatible with an ultimate worldview where properly phrased statements about the universe are either true or false. For instance, consider the statements "The Sun revolves around the Earth," and "The Earth revolves around the Sun," are both Mu statements. For a long period in human history the first was believed true, then for a shorter period it came to be believed false while the second was believed true, but as our understanding of the relativity of motion developed, we came to realize that the order of things can be just as accurately described from the reference frame of the Earth or that of the Sun. We could even take a reference frame where the Earth is quite stationary, and all the stars revolve around it in the span of a day, and not have an inaccuracy. <br />
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What we do for the sake of practicality is to use whichever perspective is convenient to our purposes, but we have discovered a deeper truth in this process: "The motion of the Sun and Earth is such that it can be described by order <i>O</i> from reference frame <i>R</i> and by order <i>P </i>from reference frame <i>S</i>." No one talks like that, though, and with the lack of actual change created by other methods like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics">General Semantics</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime">E-Prime</a> to transform our language to make it accord better with reality, it may be more convenient and accomplish many of the same goals to simply add another truth value to our ontology. <br />
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By now you may see the use of Mu in philosophy and interpersonal interaction, but what about Nix? Surely it's confined to logical paradoxes like "The set that contains all sets that do not contain themselves contains itself." Surely we can avoid worrying about Nix and enjoy our lives to the fullest. Perhaps. But consider those experiences that can flit through your mind which vanish as soon as you start thinking about them. Think about how thinking is just another mode of experience, and that it often does quite poorly at describing events that are not mediated through thought. Recall how the ancient sages often speak in paradoxes in order to get across a message that transcends thought. "The name that can be named is not the eternal name."<br />
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Next time we'll look at recursion in Grelling's paradox, interpersonal interaction, and paradigms of belief to see why they have Mu statements in common, and we'll start to explore mathematical analogies for all four truth values.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-74217679136978000782011-04-06T17:52:00.000-07:002011-04-10T14:19:04.331-07:00Vrai, Faux, Mu, and Nix - Part OneI hope you guys enjoyed the April Fools post as much as I enjoyed writing it. The part about finding life in the sub-glacial lakes was true, but I have no knowledge about whether UCLA is planning an expedition, and to my knowledge the 1930s expedition did not occur outside of Lovecraft's novella. <br />
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Today I'd like to talk about logic. Symbolic logic is the art of creating a formal system (that is, a system where strings of symbols can have their forms changed according to specific rules) that that matches with specific laws of logic. Aristotle is famed for, among other things, creating an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism">early system</a> of symbolic logic which could parse statements like, "All cats are mammals," and, "All mammals are vertebrates," coming to the conclusion that, "All cats are vertebrates," and, "Some vertebrates are cats," held true while, "All vertebrates are cats," did not. What was so amazing about this was that only rules for organizing symbols were used to come to these conclusions from the premises; of course any human with a left frontal lobe could tell you which conclusions were true and which weren't, but creating a set of rules which tell you this automatically was something worth a bit of bedazzlement. <br />
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Any logical problem dealt with a system of premises (things known or accepted as true) and conclusions (things that could be deduced from the premises according to the rules of the formal system), and certain rules were assumed in order to create a system where conclusions could be derived from premises at all. Two of Aristotle's assumptions which have become more contentious in the past few centuries are called the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle. <br />
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The Law of Non-Contradiction stated that, in any system of premises and derivable conclusions, there must be no case where both a statement and its negation are both held to be true. For instance, if we had a set of premises that included the statements, "Politicians are in it for the money," and "Politicians want to make the world a better place," we could derive "Politicians are not in it from the money" from the second statement and we'd have a contradiction, which is not allowed per said law. Any logician worth their salt would quickly resolve the issue by adding the word, "Some," to both premises. However, there are some situations where a work-around like this cannot be performed, such as with the premise, "This premise is false." The statement must be false in order for it to be true, so we could derive both, "Premise A is true," and, "Premise A is not true," violating the Law of Non-Contradiction.<br />
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The Law of Excluded Middle is a lot like the previous law seen from the other side: it states that in any system there must be no case where both a statement and its negation are both held to be false. In other words, well-formed statements must be true or false, and there is no middle ground (hence the name). <br />
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In order to see where this law collapses, we'll have to look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_paradox">Grelling's paradox</a>. To find this paradox, we create a new word. The first is, 'autological,' and it's define so that a term that is autological if it's definition describes or implies itself. So words like 'pentasyllabic,' 'English,' 'fran<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; line-height: 26px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ç</span></span>ais,' 'sesquipedalian,' and 'last' (being at the end of this list) are all autological, while 'abbreviation,' 'anglais,' 'long,' 'first' (in this case), and 'onomatopoeia' are not. This second list is particularly illustrative of what it means to be the opposite of autological, but more mundane words like 'cat' and 'tarp' are not autological either. <br />
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Now, is the word 'autological' itself autological? Since the word implies implying itself, we could safely say that it is, but if we said that it was not, there would be nothing to disprove our assertion, since the word would already have to be assumed to be autological in order to imply itself, itself. That's quite a garble of a sentence, but try it. Assume 'autological' is autological, and any way you can come at the question, your assumption appears true. Assume it's not autological, and your assumption seems just as true. As you can see, this is a case where the Law of Excluded Middle does not apply.<br />
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There are various ways logicians have dealt with these two problems, including postulating an 'Indeterminate' truth value aside from 'True' and 'False,' but my favorite way to deal with it is to add two complex truth values to the simple two. The first one I like to call 'Nix,' and it applies to statements like, 'This statement is false,' where whatever you assume in order to evaluate the statement comes up wrong. The second one I call 'Mu,' after the Chinese way of 'unasking' a question - it implies that the question is flawed in that an answer to it must be based on hidden assumptions rather than the quality of the thing itself. <br />
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As an example of a 'Mu' statement, consider, 'Cindy is a hard person to get along with.' Now, it may be the case that the Cindy in question here is sensitive to people's expectations, and feels put off when people tense around her. She can be quite friendly when approached with friendliness, but other times she can be a really difficult person. If you approach her with the belief that she's easy-going, she'll mirror your relaxation and you'll find yourself proven right. On the other hand, if you brace yourself for difficulty with her, you're going to have a bad time.<br />
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In the next article in this series, we'll talk more about situations where the 'Mu' truth value is useful, about where the names came from, and a bit about Nix's applicability to life<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. I'd like to end with a quote.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Love can only thrive within us when we believe in — indeed, unconditionally presuppose — the presence of love within others, from the first moment clear unto the last. Forever the mistrust endemic to nihilism raises the terrible possibility that there is no love within others, and whenever we choose this mistrust, we remove from ourselves the very possibility of finding love. Believe, and we find love, perhaps within others, yet more crucially — more gracefully — within ourselves. The tension between these two possibilities, between which we are eternally poised, lies at the root of existential angst."</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Part 2 can be found <a href="http://fatedstars.blogspot.com/2011/04/vrai-faux-mu-and-nix-part-two.html">here</a>.</span></span>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-39237905610466377852011-04-01T12:00:00.000-07:002011-04-02T00:47:10.419-07:00Impending Antarctic expedition may face unknown dangers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So maybe you've heard about the recent Russian expedition in the Antarctic where they found a liquid <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok">lake</a> buried deep under the ice. Recently <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110328/full/news.2011.188.html">viruses that eat other viruses</a> were found in its waters, and American scientists are preparing an expedition to where they suspect an even larger underground lake may be found, at around <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok">87 degrees South, 116 degrees West</a>. What many do not know is that this expedition will take the team very close to the mountains where all but two of the crew of the 1930-1931 expedition from Massachusetts died. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>From what records remain, the little-known expedition landed in Marie Byrd Land (refer to the map above) and trekked towards the the Transantarctic Mountains. The expedition was one of the first where the technology existed for the crew to carry a drill capable of reaching hundreds of feet below the ice. Such drills had existed before, but they were previously too large to carry on a half-year expedition deep into the last continent. From the records geologist William Dyer and his intern returned with, it appears that near the tremendously high foothills of the Transantarctic Range, a hollow chamber was discovered below the ice. <br />
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In this cave a great variety of fossils were found, including a wide range of organisms which, on other continents, were only found in separate strata. Samples brought back by Dr. Dyer have since been dated using various radiometric clocks, and it has been found that, rather than the more recent organisms appearing earlier in this region, the more primordial invertebrates flourished for a much longer period here, when they had long gone extinct on other continents. <br />
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While this may appear to throw doubt onto the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwana">Gondwana hypothesis</a>, a few similar colossal invertebrate fossils from 200 million years ago and before have been found in southern Australia and South America. Religious thinkers opposing evolution tend to ignore the evidence from the 1930-31 expedition due to its being little-known, but it does cast some doubt on the current evolutionary narrative, while not the theory itself. <br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM2nDF6nilthuCvNAuokVuXJ88YVMMBiize9lQX993TrCBEoMwPcypujiti6OKjxsarcmXDCJNVXI2KOiXZVJMOvDwRkWb9sLbmdTmQWvrPIcsoYrFCiUKKeGnbIyILpqJblbW31tZWu2Z/s1600/elder+things.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM2nDF6nilthuCvNAuokVuXJ88YVMMBiize9lQX993TrCBEoMwPcypujiti6OKjxsarcmXDCJNVXI2KOiXZVJMOvDwRkWb9sLbmdTmQWvrPIcsoYrFCiUKKeGnbIyILpqJblbW31tZWu2Z/s320/elder+things.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM2nDF6nilthuCvNAuokVuXJ88YVMMBiize9lQX993TrCBEoMwPcypujiti6OKjxsarcmXDCJNVXI2KOiXZVJMOvDwRkWb9sLbmdTmQWvrPIcsoYrFCiUKKeGnbIyILpqJblbW31tZWu2Z/s1600/elder+things.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a>Dr. William Dyer and a stone relief he discovered, along with a trusty canine companion.</span></div><div><br />
</div><div>Most interesting of the discoveries on this expedition, which led to many scientists dismissing the entirety of Dr. Dyer's evidence as fraud, were rubbings and photographs of a great number of bas-reliefs the geologist claimed to have found in a 'great city' high in the Transantarctic Range. These images are often used by advocates of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts">ancient astronaut</a> notion as evidence of their beliefs, though none of the images seem to depict the invertebrate entities arriving from any extraterrestrial origins. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The primary reason for the dismissal of Dr. Dyer's findings was the madness he succumbed to upon his return to civilization. Before he was fully in the throes of paranoid schizophrenia, he claimed that underground expeditions to this region of the frozen continent were prone to mortal danger. He published a record of his journeys in 1931, but the periodical soon went out of print. Since the publication several authors have written fictional narratives of the 1930-31 expedition, most notably Howard Phillips Lovecraft's novel <i>At the Mountains of Madness</i>, which was written quite soon after the article's publication in a rather brief period, but little is known of what Dr. Dyer actually encountered in these regions. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Lovecraft's version of the tale, which has outlived the scientific publication by Dyer himself, incorporates a variety of entities from his other tales. In a 1937 letter soon before his death, the author claimed the geologist allowed him to see a few of his private rubbings in 1932 a few months before Dyer's own death, and that these inspired many of his later stories.</div><div><br />
</div><div>With the coming expedition, headed by staff from <a href="http://www.ucla.edu/">UCLA</a>, perhaps we may get to see firsthand what lies in those regions near the Transantarctic Mountains below the glacial plate. Technology has certainly advanced since the expedition of the 1930s, and satellites will allow for data to be directly streamed to the mainland from the expedition crew in real-time. Get ready to tune in in September when the crew arrives at the Ross Ice Shelf. </div>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-58837355983362848612011-03-30T21:29:00.000-07:002011-04-01T19:42:22.919-07:00Approaching the Cosmology QuestionCosmology is a tricky subject. If mathematics is to physics as logic is to philosophy, cosmology is to physics as metaphysics is to philosophy. At least as early as Kant it was realized that there were statements about the universe as a whole where the thesis and the antithesis seemed equally plausible. For instance, it seems equally plausible to say of the composition of reality that "Everything in the world consists of the <i>simple,</i>" as to say that "There is nothing simple; rather, everything is <i>composite</i>." Or about the nature of causality, that "In the serious of causes in the world there is some <i>necessary being</i>," seems as fair to say as "There is nothing necessary in it; rather, in this series <i>everything is contingent</i>." In his set of theses and antitheses, Kant also included the following: "The world has <i>a beginning</i> (boundary) with respect to time and space," and, "The world is <i>infinite</i> with respect to time and space." <br />
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The mutual plausibility of claims like these stems from the fact that it seems nigh impossible to come up with a way to affirm one of the claims and refute the other. For instance, we can accept the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model">standard model</a> and say that everything is composed of quarks, leptons, and bosons, but we cannot deny that saying "it's got electrons" does not tell us much at all about the properties of water as a solvent. In recent decades the notion of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holarchy">holarchy</a> has provided a way of getting past petty arguments between simplicity and composition by synthesizing the two views. <br />
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The second example, pertaining to necessity and contingency, has two equally plausible opposites for a different reason - we cannot have done otherwise than we did, if we did not do so in the first place. In terms of a previous <a href="http://fatedstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-will-fifth-and-sixth-dimensions.html">article</a>, we cannot see whether there is something of necessity or complete contingency because we cannot travel through the sixth dimension. Again, we have approached something resembling a synthesis of these viewpoints in the postmodern age with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle">anthropic principle</a>. We needn't say that a universe must have observers in it in order to exist, but we can surely say the universes with observers in them are a lot more likely to get noticed. While this doesn't entirely solve the problem of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional">counterfactuals</a>, this type of compromise, to me, is a sign we're getting closer.<br />
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On the issue of whether the universe has a beginning, we've made far less progress toward synthesis as a culture. Rather than integrating with one another, it seems that the beginning view and the ageless view have dissociated with one another. In the West, we have Creationism, and if you don't buy that, we have Big Bang theory. Both state roughly that, at one point in time (and possibly all points before it) there was Nothing, and then Something came to exist. In the East the notion of cyclic existence is far more dominant in religious thinking. It will be interesting to see what happens as the scientific culture comes to be more influenced by scientists versed in Eastern ways of thinking, but most points of view on whether the universe had a beginning that integrate our current knowledge of physics have a decidedly Western bent.<br />
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One interesting attempt to synthesize the two ideas is the Big Bang/Big Crunch hypothesis. The idea is that the Big Bang posited at the start of this universe was the explosion of the previous universe after it had collapsed in on itself. An extension of this hypothesis states that eventually our current universe will reverse its expansion and start condensing into another Big Crunch, which will result in the Big Bang of another universe still, and so on. Amongst subscribers of this idea, it's often held that gravity exactly cancels out entropy over long periods of time in order to bring the universe back together for its next explosion. <br />
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This idea is interesting, surely, and it would certainly be quite popular for believers in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return">eternal recurrence</a>, and it also provides a timescale over which every different possible reality can play out, which makes it a candidate support the idea of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse">multiverse</a>. But before we get too carried away speculating how many angels can dance on a pin's head, let's take a closer look at Big Bang theory. Does it even make sense?<br />
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Big Bang theory, as a scientific theory, is not the idea that first there was nothing and then it exploded. It implies that idea, but the essence of Big Bang theory is that the universe is expanding and cooling as vast stretches of time pass. What does it mean for a universe to be expanding, and why do scientists think ours is expanding?<br />
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If space is expanding uniformly, then any two points in space become more distant at a rate proportionate to the distance already between them. As an example, if the surface of the Earth were to expand uniformly, then the distance between Los Angeles and Detroit and between Los Angeles and Chicago would grow a lot more than the distance between Detroit and Chicago. For instance, if the Earth expanded by factor of 1.5<i>d</i>, the distance between Detroit and Chicago would grow from 237 miles to 355.5 miles, while the distance between Detroit and L.A. would grow from 2,300 miles to 3,450 miles. <br />
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Currently, Big Bang cosmologists do not believe the universe is expanding at a linear rate. Instead, they think that further objects are moving away faster than nearby ones, which is what they mean when they say that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy">expansion is accelerating</a>. To go back to the Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago example, if the Earth expanded by factor of 0.005(<i>d</i>^2), the distance between Detroit and Chicago would go from 237 miles to 281 miles, while the distance from L.A to Detroit would go from 2,300 miles to 26,450 miles. <br />
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Cosmologists often use the example of an inflating balloon as an analogy to explain what it means for the universe to expand. If you take an uninflated balloon and put one pair of marks near each other and another pair at a greater distance from one another, as you blow the balloon up the first pair of marks will remain relatively close together while the more distant marks will get further and further apart. The analogy to an actual balloon breaks down when you think about the fact that balloons can only be filled so much. In fact, if we were to have a balloon that would make a perfect analogy for accelerating expansion, it would have to be a balloon that became easier to blow air into with each bit more air there was already inside of it. <br />
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If that's what expansion is, why do scientists think our universe is expanding? In a word, <i>redshift</i>. Though the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_effect">Doppler effect</a> isn't a perfect analogue for expansion redshift, it's a good way of introducing it. The Doppler effect is most obvious for us Earth-bound observers in sound. Consider the sound of a car passing you as you walk next to the road. As long as the car is approaching you, it makes a higher-pitched sound, but as it starts moving away from you, the sound shifts to a lower pitch. This happens when the car is moving a significant portion of the speed of sound, because the source of the peaks of the sound waves is moving. So the peaks of the wave are closer together (higher frequency) as it moves towards you and further apart (lower frequency) as it moves away. <br />
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Redshift form constant expansion differs from the Doppler shift in that it isn't said that one or the other points is moving; rather, the space between them expands, stretching the light that travels from one to the other. This effect was postulated to explain the fact that distant stars appear more red than closer stars with the same properties appear. According to the expansion explanation, the expansion of space itself is the reason that we see lower frequencies in the light from distant stars than from similar near stars.<br />
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The accelerating expansion idea was introduced to explain the fact that, the further you look, the more redshift increases relative to distance. For instance, if we were looking at the distances from Detroit to L.A. (roughly 2,300 miles) and from Detroit to San Diego (roughly 2,400 miles) after an accelerating expansion of 0.05(<i>d^2)</i>, we'd see a distance of 264,500 miles to L.A. and one of 288,000 miles to San Diego, a difference of 20,000 miles when seen from Detroit. <br />
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Strangely, when we look at the distance between the two California cities (roughly 125 miles) after factoring in the same expansion rate, we'd find a distance of only 781 miles. Where did the extra 19,000 miles come from? Well, there is an explanation cosmologists can offer to partially defend the idea of expansion from this criticism. Light takes millions of years to arrive to us from these distant stars. So, the further away they are, the longer the light takes to get here, and the longer the universe's expansion has to stretch the light waves. <br />
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While this would certainly resolve such an issue with continuous expansion, it doesn't solve the problem of accelerating expansion. When cosmologists say that further stars increase in their distance at a higher rate (with distance factored out) than nearer stars do, the question on everyone's mind should be, "Further from where?" You can try any non-linear function for expansion and you will always find that the distances do not add up (and really, this should be obvious to anyone who knows the definition of a <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_function">linear function</a>)</i>. So it makes sense to suppose that the apparent acceleration of expansion is just that - <i>apparent</i>. If the stars are not literally expanding away from each other at a rate that's increasing in a way that doesn't make sense, how else can we explain the fact that the further away we look, the faster stars begin to appear more red?<br />
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We'll have to save that for next time.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-31845443776296458702011-03-30T18:38:00.000-07:002011-03-30T18:38:33.041-07:00Another music postI'm working on a few monological posts, doing some reading and getting my ideas together. In the meantime, I realized I haven't updated this blog in almost a week. I hope you guys don't mind a few more music recommendations. Also, vote in the poll to the right!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/toiKMhCsd0k?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>This one always brings me tranquility - the motif repeated throughout the song yields the feeling of cyclic existence, and the patterns created by the later harmonies wrap nicely around the wheel. If I could listen to this song all at once, I think I would hear a mandala. Even as I trace the sounds of it around the wheel, I feel like I'm in the center.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/8z-2cPUUsXY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>If that last one put you to sleep, this should wake you up. It's an among the more calmly flowing things by this composer, but it's still got spunk. I think he uses a steel guitar for this - it would explain the slidey notes. Sorta reminds me of how much I'd love to get a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(instrument)">continuum</a>. Click "read more" for the other two songs in this post.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/4pbv78GVE48?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>This one's got a sort of bucolic majesty to it. As you may have guessed from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana">kana</a> in the midst of the Chinese characters on the screen, this one's from Japan. I believe this song comes from an arranged version of the soundtrack from the first two <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrian_Odyssey">Etrian Odyssey</a> games. Games by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlus_games">Atlus</a> tend to have good soundtracks, in my experience.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/KhQaPT6CS08?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>The above three songs had no singing, so this one has two singers! I love Pure Reason Revolution, and though I still need to hear their most recent album, and this has got to be my favorite song of theirs. They're one of the bands I love to listen to for synchronic<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ity - as they say in the song, "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Slowly surely new meanings will come as everything arranges." When I listen to music with lyrics, particularly on shuffle, they're often relevant to my mental situation - sometimes with the correct lyrics, other times with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen">mondegreens</a>. Sometimes that makes me lean toward instrumentals, but it would take a lot to turn me away from this song.</span></span>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-79298235118303410002011-03-23T19:10:00.000-07:002011-03-23T19:11:29.074-07:00Progressive metal, anyone?Survey says: post about music! I was considering doing a whole spiel about <a href="http://amzn.com/B000P2A4FY">Devin Townsend's crazy concept album</a>, but I'd rather suggest a couple musical selections. First is a song from that album. It's called "Planet Smasher", and it's close to the heaviest end of the spectrum of my tastes. You can understand most of the words, and and though it has some death grunts, they aren't particularly grating. There's a lot of metal that I simply can't stand because constantly it sounds like it's being sung by goblins. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/65gsQucAsfE?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>The whole album is great to listen to, but I picked this one because it's got a nice mix of the comedy, schizotypy, and grandiosity that I like about the album. I also rather enjoyed the fan-made video, especially with Eris and Dysnomia at the end.<br />
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Next we've got a great song from the <a href="http://amzn.com/B00000J7UT">second Liquid Tension Experiment album</a>. This is the group that guitar virtuoso John Petrucci and Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater made along with Tony Levin and Jordan Rudess when they were trying to persuade the latter to join their band. Listening the keyboards, you can see why they wanted him. His keyboard solos are certainly the best parts for me of the live albums Dream Theater has made since then. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/-ob6Eq3nxQs?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Say what you will about darker progressive metal bands like Symphony X, but this is joyous music. I like how the uploader put a slideshow of smiling people for the visual component, but even without them I can't help but feel bliss when I hear this song. The rest of their work (two albums) is also worth checking out, but this is definitely the capstone for me.</div><a name='more'></a><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Third, we've got a song from <a href="http://amzn.com/B000YKOY1W">Ayreon's most recent double album, <i>01011001</i></a>, whose story inspired a <a href="http://fatedstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/somewhere-far-far-away-but-nearer-than.html">previous post</a> of mine. The song does a good job of showcasing Arjen Lucassen's interesting tastes in instrumentation, though it doesn't have one of his mind-bending keyboard or guitar solos. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><object class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://3.gvt0.com/vi/Ws6VLN_7goc/0.jpg" height="266" width="320"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ws6VLN_7goc&fs=1&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ws6VLN_7goc&fs=1&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object></div><br />
My favorite part of this song is definitely the interplay between Arjen himself and Lisolette Hegt (from Dial, another band worth checking out) that starts a bit after 3 minutes in. <br />
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Finally, let's hear a song from <a href="http://amzn.com/B0007XT87G">Porcupine Tree's <i>Deadwing</i></a> album that most closely fits the progressive metal theme. This was my favorite album when I first started listening to the band, but nowadays <a href="http://amzn.com/B0013URJTG">Lightbulb Sun</a> probably is. I haven't listened to Porcupine Tree that much lately - some of the lyrics affect me in ways I don't always appreciate - but they've certainly got some good music if you're into prog metal or psychedelic rock.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://0.gvt0.com/vi/XxH-z_CaR6g/0.jpg" height="266" width="320"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XxH-z_CaR6g&fs=1&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XxH-z_CaR6g&fs=1&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object></div>The instrumentals in this song flood my synapses with serotonin and a nice sprinkling of dopamine. I'd have embedded <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbLK_S0zaCU">my favorite song on the album</a>, but I didn't want to ask you guys to sit through a 12 minute song. <br />
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Incidentally, all of these musicians can have lines drawn between them shorter than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon">Kevin Bacon's armpit hair</a>. Hope you enjoyed the tunes. Now I have to sit down for another 10 minutes and listen to the rest of "Arriving Somewhere But Not Here."SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-17286729730945105002011-03-22T20:56:00.000-07:002011-03-23T13:31:50.384-07:00Wands and Orbs, Dumbledore and DamodredToday it's time for another post about magic (just a note - when I use the word 'magic,' I don't mean <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleight_of_hand">legerdemain</a>). This time I'll be discussing the implements that many magicians use in their practice. <br />
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Most of you reading this probably don't know any practicing magicians as such. For various reasons beyond the scope of this article it is unwise to advertise one's practice of magic (both due to societal concerns and because a certain degree of secrecy heightens magic's functioning). However, you may know someone who practices without your knowledge, or you may yourself be a practitioner. It's likely though that you do not have much familiarity with the practice of magic, except through a variety of media outlets. To provide a nice contrast and tie in fictional worlds you may be more familiar with than the practice as it exists in ours, we'll look at the how implements work in the worlds of the Harry Potter series and the Wheel of Time series. <br />
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In the alternate modern world of Harry Potter, a tremendous amount of power is vested in wands. The statement that "the wand chooses the wizard" is no aesthetic sentimentalization; it is simply how things work in that world. A wizard without their wand is like a space marine without magnetic 'gravity' boots, an author without implements of writing, or a news anchor without a camera. Nearly all of the magic used in this series depends on the use of one's wand, besides things like potion-making. Wizards deemed unfit to practice magic simply have their wands broken and the power to control it is stripped nearly entirely away. <br />
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This is far from an accurate depiction of magicians, but it does fit the way J.K. Rowling chose to write her tale. The characters come from the modern world with all of its banality, so their capability to move beyond that into a world of glamor must be explained by an object, especially given the materialistic rules of the Muggle consensus reality. This approach does reflect on a certain aspect of real modern magicians - implements have a well-placed role in designating certain moments as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality">liminal</a> ones where the situation involves magic, and their absence in other moments can help remind that it's time to deal with the mundane side of the world. <br />
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In the Wheel of Time series, however, (at least as far as I am into it, which is not very at this point) there are no magical artifacts that would resemble the power of a wand at Hogwarts. Magic, in this series, truly comes from within, and in the first book Moiraine repeatedly reminds characters who are less knowledgeable about magic that their function is chiefly to direct the attention of the mage. Of course, Moiraine can do some incredible things when she directs her attention with an implement that has a long and legendary history, but the magic always comes from within.<br />
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It's probably fairly reasonable to make the assertion that a fantasy author's attitude towards magical implements and how necessary they are reflects certain attitudes toward technology. These days many people get a great deal of stress simply when their internet service goes down, much less when they suffer a power outage. They are certainly living in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel">reality-tunnel</a> where the wand chooses the wizard. Others simply go outside. However, I don't want to confine our interpretation of magical implements in fantasy stories to a symbolic one, so let's discuss how they are actually used in the real world.<br />
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As I mentioned earlier, one of the chief reasons you would use magical implements at all is in order to create a situation where your beliefs don't interfere with your magical capabilities. Even if you have embraced the possibility of magic, you are still operating from a mindset that is largely generated from life experiences where you and the people you see act as though magic is nonexistent or irrelevant. Using an implement when you practice (<i>and only when you practice</i>) is a nice shortcut through this barrier. And since your conditioning will accumulate, the longer you stick to a system like this the more effective it becomes. <br />
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Keeping the implement out of contact with your mundane life is one of the most important acts you can do to preserve its functioning. In many schools of ceremonial magic, it's held that only you should touch your implement once it is consecrated, and that if another touches it you should re-consecrate it before using it again. To me this seems to miss the point a bit. The fact is, <i>yes</i>, you should not have the implement out where everyone can see it because then it just becomes another odd or end. However, maintaining a restriction like this isn't necessary, though it may be a useful belief to help empower the implement.<br />
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Now let's talk a bit about different kinds of implements. The traditional four, which you might recognize from the Tarot deck or their modified forms in ordinary playing cards, are the Wand, the Cup, the Sword, and the Disk. These four correspond approximately though not perfectly with the four classical elements - the wand is a channel for the will, the cup receives impressions, the sword cuts through what does not belong where it is, and the disk functions as a map of the universe. These four functions are each important in magical practice, but it's certainly not necessary to have a physical tool for each of them, or to have separate tools for each. Implements whose functions are determined by their qualities rather than by some arbitrary correspondence to the four traditional implements work better, in my experience.<br />
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For instance, I use an orb in many of my own workings. It's not a crystal ball though I do sometimes gaze into it to put myself in a trance - rather, it's an orb made of fiber optic material all oriented in the same direction. Along a particular axis, light simply flows right through it, albeit filtered by the material. So when I use the orb, I use it to open the way to other parts of the universes I inhabit when I practice magic. If I need to experience the room as filled with a golden light, I direct my mind to a place filled with golden light and allow the light to emanate to where I am through the orb I hold. If I need to bring in the stark tingle of alchemical sulfur, I concentrate on an imagined place where this principle is active and allow this energy to enter the working space through the orb. When I work with entities, I place the orb between myself and the effigy I'm using to represent the entity, and sometimes I find myself imagining the entity with the orb between itself and a representation of myself. The point is that anything wondrous enough to use as a magical implement has its own particular properties, and those should serve as an inspiration for the way it is used.<br />
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Anyway, I hope you've found this article at least interesting, and perhaps inspiring for your own practice.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-81870589679367834772011-03-21T19:17:00.000-07:002011-03-21T19:17:36.467-07:00The Philosophy of Liberty - and Radiation Prevents Cancer!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Got a relatively short post for today. First is a video I think everyone who has noticed the word 'liberty' being thrown meaninglessly around ought to see. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/muHg86Mys7I?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br />
Second, a link. If you haven't heard about Ann Coulter's recent "Glowing Report on Radiation," about how the bright-green lining to the disasters in Japan is that high dosages of radiation effectively acts as a cancer vaccine, read it <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42347">straight from the horse's mouth</a>. Before you ask, no, that was not meant as a crack about Ann Coulter's appearance.<br />
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Tomorrow, I'll post a new set of consciousness-raising exercises, but this evening I need to commune with my source. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-GJxqYu2I5aV8tZOWxSgMnSIl6km_E080jQs9-LhyphenhyphenDcVwTs6Bnj4D8nBdy7SaFypYFjIiQ2M_c4IKgfNjbKJ6h1nkbXt2cuAzzsChnn9VsKFxkXn9BD-Umqz4MxCTzrGxgOCOJ08Wocwu/s1600/peacock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-GJxqYu2I5aV8tZOWxSgMnSIl6km_E080jQs9-LhyphenhyphenDcVwTs6Bnj4D8nBdy7SaFypYFjIiQ2M_c4IKgfNjbKJ6h1nkbXt2cuAzzsChnn9VsKFxkXn9BD-Umqz4MxCTzrGxgOCOJ08Wocwu/s1600/peacock.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not Hera.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-9737521700955881912011-03-20T21:51:00.000-07:002011-03-23T19:12:11.974-07:00Experience in InfinityWell, that was a nice vacation. It was great seeing some of my cousins again for the first time in a few years, I played the piano more than I do on a typical day at home, and I also learned a fair bit about stargazing. This evening, though, as promised, I'm going to talk about infinity. <br />
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The focus is not mathematical infinity, mind you. There are plenty of interesting things about infinity from a mathematical standpoint, such as the fact that any number divided by infinity would pretty much be zero, and conversely that any number divided by zero is pretty much infinity. There's the fact that you can remove an infinite number of infinite sets from infinity and (if you choose the right sets) still have an infinite set: for instance, if you remove all even numbers from the set of all integers, you can still take out the infinite sets of numbers that are products of numbers greater than 1 and 37, 31, 29, 19, 17, 13, 7, 5, and 3 and still have the infinite set of prime numbers, as well as a sprinkling of other integers. This property may be useful to remember, but again our focus here won't be mathematics. These sets (such as all even integers) are more specifically called <i>transfinite</i> sets.<br />
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Instead, let's hop back to the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics we talked about in the <a href="http://fatedstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-will-fifth-and-sixth-dimensions.html">previous post</a>. It's worth noting that this interpretation won't give us infinity unless we already have one. That is, unless time and/or space is already infinite, there's always a finite number of alternative worlds created by differences in how the randomness of quantum behavior unfolds. Fortunately for our coming speculation, Big Bang cosmologists tend to agree that space is, indeed, infinite, and those physicists who reject Big Bang theory typically hold instead that time is infinite.<br />
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An interesting thing about an infinite universe is that the probability of any event that is at all possible taking place is one. In fact, every possible event occurs an infinite number of times in an infinite universe. It's useful to make an analogue to math here. Suppose we live in a universe (represented by a set of numbers) that is not finite. Every event (represented by a number in that set) that takes place (occurs in the set) is a possible event (it is not excluded by the rules that define the set). We might do better to model our specific corner of the universe with the set of integers rather than the set of all real numbers, because physical change always occurs in quantities that are greater than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant">Planck's constant</a>. So the set of physically possible events (the set of numbers modeling our universe) is restricted to those that differ from each other by at least Planck's constant, similarly to how the set of integers differ from each other by at least one. Nonetheless, we still have an infinite set of possible events. The above is here to show that restricting the events in our set to the possible does not require that the set not be infinite.<br />
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While there is surely a lot more we could do with our quantificational faculties about such an infinite universe, let's instead see how our pattern-recognition capabilities would fare. Well, first of all, the whole history of Earth and the solar system exactly as we know it would be enacted endlessly at different places or times in a universe like ours seems to be. There would also be an infinite number of systems that (if you look within specific confines) appeared exactly as ours did up until this moment, when they begin to be ripped away towards a closely passing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole">supermassive black hole</a>. And a great many other permutations could emerge where the resemblance of this alternate Earth system in the infinite set to our own is very nearly perfect, as could ones with less resemblance. So if you are destroyed by the shadow side of humans and the society they have created for themselves, be a bit content in knowing that an infinite of people nearly exactly resembling you are instead flourishing in the benefits of humanity and their social organization. And contraparallel to that, if you know only the contentment of a full stomach, know that a similar infinity of people like you in all respects besides this have already starved to death. <br />
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Another peculiar consequence of living in an infinite universe is that there is an limitless number of beings whose experience matches exactly with what you are experiencing right now, even with the complexity required in a brain capable of reading. What's truly strange, though, is that not all of these beings have experiences like this during their waking lives. Some of them are dreaming that they are you. In reflection of that, all of your dreams correspond exactly with the waking experiences of beings on other folds of probability, time, or space. <br />
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One of the most provocative ideas that finds itself raised over and over again throughout human history is the idea that, in the same way things vibrating at the same frequency transmit energy to each other, things with the same arrangement transmit information to one another. So far the possibility has escaped both our ability to irrevocably prove or disprove it. Combined with the idea that the universe is infinite this yields frighteningly wondrous consequences. <br />
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Have you ever had a thought that felt slightly out of place, or an idea that seemed to come to you from out of nowhere? Perhaps its something that worked its way to you from the mind of another being that was dreaming themselves as you... Of course, if this principle is at work, it is fundamentally interwoven into our experience of mind.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-84958795072480131442011-03-16T15:27:00.000-07:002011-03-16T15:38:15.342-07:00Free Will? The Fifth and Sixth Dimensions<i>"The purpose of common sense is to be shocked into uncommon sense."</i><br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>~ <b>I wish I remember who said this.</b></i></div><br />
I'm going away for a few days (until the Vernal Equinox), so today we're going to bite off more than we can probably chew in just one day. You might want to give the ideas presented here some time to sink in, because they may seem rather alien at first. We're going to grapple with the issue of openendedness and determinism, and we're going to talk about the fifth and sixth dimensions. Then we'll discuss two interpretations of quantum mechanics that pertain to these dimensions and find that each interpretation complements the other.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Fifth Dimension</span><br />
The fifth dimension is invisible but obvious. It may be that it seems to exist due to the way we think, or it may be real, but we'll get to that issue later. First let's talk about what the fifth dimension would be. In this post I am treating the fourth dimension as time, so what I'm calling the fifth dimension is really the second dimension of time. You've probably heard this story before:<br />
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One morning, you wake up late and rush out to your car, stressed and in a hurry to get to work, school, or whatever controls your time. You realize you've forgotten your keys and take a minute to step back inside and get them. As you drive to work, you get held up on your way by a terrible traffic accident.<br />
OR<br />
One morning, you wake up late, grab your keys, and rush to your car, stressed and in a hurry to get to work, school, or whatever controls your time. You realize you're in the wrong lane and rush to get into the left one to turn without checking your blindspot, and a large SUV whose driver is on the phone smashes right into you. You are never able to move your legs again.<br />
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Often a version of this story is presented in order to encourage people to appreciate things like the butterfly effect, whereby small decisions or mistakes can have large unpredictable consequences. Here, however, we're looking at it because it's an example of where two timelines (<i>i.e.</i> lines in the fourth dimension) diverge from one another. One of the questions that has kept philosophers arguing with each other for thousands of years is how we end up in one timeline or the other.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Free Will and Determinism</span><br />
Many philosophers believe in free will. This can lead to a variety of paradoxes that we won't be exploring here, but it has some nice features, too. First of all believing in free will means you believe humans to be responsible for their actions. Whether or not free will actually exists, <a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1470">believing that it</a> does allows people to justify holding each other accountable for what they do. For people who believe in the agency of free will, we are fully responsible for our navigation through the fifth dimension.<br />
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<a href="http://www.freudfile.org/psychoanalysis/dictionary.html">Psychic determinism</a> also has some good arguments for it, though. How far can we go from strict determinism before we get to an equally undesirable randomness? We want to believe that our past experiences and other factors don't control our current choices, but is a roll of the dice much better? Studying synchronicity and the way things are patterned definitely makes one wonder whether if we have any truly free choice in the matter. For psychic determinists, we are carried on particular currents through the fifth dimension, and sometimes our ability to perceive other paths through it is what ties us to the path we follow.<br />
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There are two resolutions to this opposition. The first is rather popular and is called compatibilism. As the name implies, compatibilism suggests that there isn't any real problem of free will. Free will requires that, all things being equal, we could have chosen otherwise than we did. Since we can't travel through time, this is an untestable proposition. So the people who argue that free will trumps determinism, or vice versa, are making free will up to be something more than it is, compatibilists say. In effect, they say that the fifth dimension doesn't exist because we cannot experience multiple paths through it in one lifetime. <br />
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Compatibilism is a nice way to tie the problem up and grin like a smart-ass at the folks arguing about it, but it reminds me of the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth every day (and the stars and planets follow at different rates) because something as solid as our planet certainly could not be spinning. Certainly you can map out the positions of the stars and planets from a perspective like that, but imagining a spinning Earth revolving around the Sun allows for more information about the solar system to be communicated with less complexity in the actual message, especially when we're talking about how the planets sometimes appear to move backwards against the starry backdrop.<br />
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The resolution to the free will - psychic determinism question that I prefer is one I have not heard discussed much amongst most philosophers, but physicists of the very small might feel comfortable with it. In a simple quantum experiment, a stream of minuscule particles are fired through a single opening of comparable size at a detector. Using the best math and physics available to us, we cannot calculate precisely where each particle will land on the other side. However, we can, given the slit size and some information about the particle, calculate how many particles will land at each spot on the detector if we fire ten thousand of them. What is determined in this case is not the individual "choice" of each particle, but the set of options it has.<br />
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Since some of the choices we make involve coming up with options for other decisions, and our brains are slightly more complex than the experimental setup just described, we can have it the other way around, too. Peter Carroll <a href="http://amzn.com/1869928652">says it best</a> when he states that we sometimes have undetermined choices between determined options, and other times we have determined choices between undetermined options. So in this position, which has not been given a widely recognized name by philosophers yet, we have free will and psychic determinism working together just like we do in compatibilism. The advantage of this position over compatibilism is that it recognizes the synthesis between the two rather than simply implying that there is no real interplay between them. It also meshes much more nicely with modern ideas about physical determinism than compatibilism, which grew up around classical ideas of physical determinism, does. In this view, we are sometimes blown by the currents of fortune, and other times we swim through still waters of chance, but some degree of freedom plays a role at least most of the time.<br />
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We'll get back to classical and modern determinism in a moment, but first let's go one dimension further.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Sixth Dimension</span><br />
We're quite familiar with the sixth dimension (the third dimension of time), too, though we don't call it that. If the fifth dimension is where the branching occurs between the timeline where we forgot our keys and the timeline where we lost use of our legs, the sixth dimension is the one that allows us to be glad we forgot our keys when we see the accident, thinking, 'that could've been me,' or alternately to wish we'd either forgotten them, woken up earlier, or checked our blindspot before changing lanes. <br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts">It may be worth watching this clip to see why this is the sixth dimension.</a><br />
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If the fifth dimension is what lets us make decisions about what timeline to follow from here, looking through the sixth dimension allows us to think about where we would be if we had acted differently. Again, compatibilists say that we can't do this. The process is called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_thinking">counterfactual thinking.</a> Just like with the fifth dimension, it's somewhat arguable whether this dimension objectively exists or exists only as a way of thinking to help us understand our choices.<br />
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The question, "Could it really have happened otherwise?" has plagued not only philosophers but people trying to make sense of quantum mechanics. While there are many interpretations of quantum mechanics (such as the Copenhagen interpretation, which is said by some to mean that quantum mechanics is just the way you have to think in order to make fairly accurate predictions about the world at the subatomic scale, and by others to say that the act of observing something causes it to collapse out of flux and into definition), we're going to focus on just two of them today - the two that I think are the least implausible without saying nothing at all about what quantum mechanics (hereafter Q.M.) means, and the two which are most relevant to the questions we're exploring.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hidden Variables</span><br />
The first is hidden variable theory. This line of thought was pursued by Albert Einstein and revived in a more robust form by David Bohm. As you may know, Einstein is famously paraphrased as saying, "God does not play dice." He believed that the indeterminacy of the behavior of individual particles found in Q.M. resulted not from their movement being fundamentally undetermined, but from things affecting their behavior which we were unable to observe. They were, after all, very small. Perhaps the statistical tendencies in the behavior of small particles reflected statistical tendencies of the hidden variables affecting each. The hidden variable interpretation did not catch on for awhile, because for awhile nobody found anything in the experimental setup or in the properties of the particles that looked the way the hidden variables ought to. Saying that they were completely hidden from us was a cop-out that convinced no one in the sciences.<br />
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Then came quantum entanglement. Particles which come into contact with one another appear to have a correlation between them that extends beyond time and space. Imagine if Alice and Bob, stand-ins for two particles, shared a secret handshake one day, becoming entangled, then Alice took off on a spaceship going at near the speed of light and Bob stayed on Earth. The entanglement established a peculiar relationship so that whenever Bob wore white socks, Alice was wearing black socks, and whenever Alice wore white socks, Bob was wearing black socks. This effect was instantaneous rather than moving by signal at the speed of light, so the physicists monitoring Bob's socks (if they knew about Alice and Bob's entanglement) knew instantly when Alice changed the color of her socks, faster than the communication from the departing spaceship could tell them. Similarly, the physicists on the spaceship knew what was happening with Bob's socks before they received a signal from Earth. That's what I mean when I say the effect extends beyond space. When I say the effect extends beyond time, I mean that Alice's and Bob's socks had this relationship even before they shook hands. (In a real analogue to this paragraph, the directions of spin for particles A and B would be perpetually opposite due to entanglement.)<br />
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Particles in your eyes (as well as other parts of you) are entangled with light from Sirius, Betelgeuse, and Aldebaran, and all the other stars you've seen. Perhaps the scientists who were looking for hidden variables were looking in the wrong place for them. Maybe they could be seen through their quantum effects before they could be seen in any other way, due to the vast distance to the things entangled with them. As Natalie Drest (a <a href="http://amzn.com/0440500702">fictional character</a>) aptly puts it, "You mean the whole universe will decide what we're gonna do next?"<br />
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This interpretation (sometimes called the non-local hidden variable interpretation) gives us a very simple answer to the question, "Could [event N] have happened otherwise?": "No." That's not to say that the experience of free will is irrelevant to the universe, though. Just as you depend on the universe to be who you are, the universe depends upon you - without you and without everything that's culminating right now in your existence, it would be a quite different place. Lamenting the lack of indeterminism in a universe like this would be like lamenting the fact that J.S. Bach never wrote, "Improvise for this part," in any of his fugues. Rather than autonomy, we have holonomy (same word root as holism) in this view. With this interpretation of the universe, the fifth and sixth dimensions exist in the minds of beings that perceive that way, and affect reality by affecting the behavior of those beings.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Multiple Universes</span><br />
There's another very interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics. It takes the math used in Q.M. very literally. For the slit arrangement we talked about above, the math of Q.M. generates what's called a "wave function." The wave function is highest in the area directly behind the slit, and it tapers off to the sides. What's 'higher' or 'lower' in the wave function is the probability a particle landing there. The many worlds interpretation says that the universe splits into multiple timelines each time something happens where quantum indeterminacy is involved. In most of the universes, the particle lands in the middle where the wave function is highest, but in many of them it lands to one of the sides. In other words, probability actually exists.<br />
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Under the many worlds interpretation, we are constantly and, typically, unconsciously navigating the fifth dimension. Each time the worlds split, multiple copies of ourselves are created, one for each world. So with the many worlds interpretation and the car accident mentioned at the beginning of this post, there's at least one world where you just arrived late to work because of the traffic the accident caused and one where you are now a paraplegic, as well as worlds where you stopped working years ago when you won the lottery, where your parents met but you were never born because another sperm won the race or they conceived at a different time, where your parents never met, where they never existed, and where you're sitting at your computer right now but you're reading a blog post about how the Copenhagen interpretation is used to justify both skeptical non-realism and New Age solipsism instead of about free will and determinism. And many more. There are at least a googol (one followed by a hundred zeros) of worlds like this if the universe is around as old as Big Bang theorists think it is, and there are infinitely many worlds like this if the universe has always existed.<br />
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In the many worlds interpretation, the fifth and sixth dimensions are a <i>bona fide</i> objective part of the universe rather than simply ideas that become apparently objective through the actions of conscious beings. In fact, with this interpretation our capability to pay attention to other timelines is as limited as our ability to pay attention to our other senses is. Just as we're much more likely to pay attention to a scrumptious smell if we're hungry, we're more likely to pay attention to the reality that could have been where we have what we wish we did, or where we lost what we're glad we didn't. <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Quantum Mind</span><br />
Now, you may be wondering why I said that our navigation of the fifth dimension is 'typically' unconscious rather than always that way. I say 'typically' because of the rather large pile of studies that have seemingly found that simple intention on the part of the experimenter can affect the outcome of quantum experiments. The many-worlds interpretation provides a nice vehicle for this supposed influence to be expressed - through our decisions of which universe to experience ourselves in. This goes beyond the orthodox many worlds interpretation, and creates some paradoxes, though.<br />
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For instance, if this influence is real and can be learned as a skill, what happens to the copies of us that go on to undesirable timelines? Are they never experienced, due to our ability to avoid their fates? <br />
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It's worth noting that the non-local hidden variables interpretation also may allow this sort of influence via entanglement between brain cells and particles in the experiment. This avoids the problem of unlived timelines that shows up when the many worlds interpretation is coupled with intention, but it creates some interesting effects of its own. After all, what can influence is also susceptible to influence. If our brains affect the tangled quantum fabric in subtle ways, they are also prone to being affected by it with equal subtlety.<br />
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This provides an even more interesting solution to the free will problem. Recall that in the hidden variable interpretation, the universe could be said to decide what we do by instantaneous committee vote. Now consider the possibility that certain structures in the brain (most likely in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glial_cell">glial cells</a>) exist to amplify quantum indeterminacy. This would provide the undetermined half mentioned above of the balance between determined and undetermined functions to create human choice. It would also mean that there's really no difference between our will as it manifests and the will of the universe for us. <br />
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An interesting consequence of pushing consciousness back from the individual to the quantum probability matrices is the way the fifth and sixth dimensions change, and the way they don't. If the mind arises in part out of quantum amplification, then these dimensions exist not only as a part of our own minds but as a part of the universal mind. They need not all be actualized like they are in the many worlds interpretation in order to exist in this way, but there's nothing to prevent an infinite subset of them from existing. (Yes, you can have an infinite set that's part of a bigger infinite set, just like the set of all odd numbers is part of the set of all whole numbers.) And thus the problem of unactualized timelines becomes no longer a problem.<br />
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It's possible that both world-splitting and non-local hidden variables play a part in the world as it is. Every quantum particle could be influenced by entanglement but still have some freedom to its behavior. <br />
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Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the read. If you're interested in learning more about quantum mechanics without using differential equations, linear algebra, and operators, I can recommend a few books. The first is <a href="http://amzn.com/1561840718" style="font-style: italic;">Quantum Psychology</a> by Robert Anton Wilson for an exploration of how psychology and quantum mechanics are reflective of each other. The same author also wrote the <a href="http://amzn.com/0440500702" style="font-style: italic;">Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy</a>, a hilarious and multilayered sci-fi novel that explores the interpretations of quantum mechanics which I would describe as <i>Finnegan's Wake</i> for your brain's left hemisphere. I'd also recommend <i><a href="http://amzn.com/0415289793">Wholeness and the Implicate Order</a></i> by David Bohm for its clarity and brilliance. There are a lot of books on the market full of New Age fluff that bandy terms from quantum mechanics about, but these three are worth noting for their avoidance of wishful thinking.<br />
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Hope to see you back next week, I'll be writing about infinity and how the many-worlds view leads to some truly mind-boggling consequences. I'll also discuss an album that you'll probably enjoy if you liked this post.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-85506030888944046472011-03-14T12:15:00.000-07:002011-03-14T12:15:01.544-07:00Banishing: A basic but effective approachToday I'm going to discuss banishing. Though it may not be the most interesting practice in magic, it's one of the more important ones. It's also quite misunderstood to people not versed in magic. While it may be of some assistance if you encounter a bona fide <a href="http://paranormal.about.com/od/ghosthuntinggeninfo/a/aa060704.htm">haunting</a>, it is useful in a great many more situations than in the presence of paranormal activity. An important part of the magical perspective is that in complement to the commonly realized fact that entities and spirits can be understood as facets of the mind, facets of the mind can be dealt with as if they were spirits. If you find that someone has evoked a demon for you, for instance by going on a tirade against a particular religion whose evils come to obsess you, a banishing is appropriate. If you have built for yourself a cage of coherency, a set of ideas which seem inescapable wherever you look, and you think you have found the secret to understanding the universe, I recommend banishing. Daily banishing is used by some to maintain clarity of mind, but it's important not to let banishing itself obsess you or there is no point to such an activity.<br />
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You can use banishing any time you wish to return to a more neutral state of mind. Certainly it can be abused for excessive suppression of certain thoughts, but that risk is less than the dangers of equating reality with your ideas about it. Like any technology it is best when used wisely.<br />
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There may be more ways to banish than there are people, so I'll share a technique and links to a few others. One of the simplest comes from one of the books on magic by Stephen Mace - I can't recall which. Take a breath or two and relax as best you can. Now feel the point of awareness in your head where your eyes meet (around where the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland">pineal gland</a> is located). Imagine or feel a line extending from this point in both directions, up and down. (If you are lying down, pretend you were standing up when determining what 'up' and 'down' mean for this whole exercise.) So this line goes parallel to your spine and down, down, down, infinitely far beyond it, and it also goes infinitely far above your head, passing through your skull around where the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahasrara">crown chakra</a> is located. Take a little time to get a feel for this line.<br />
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Now find a point in space directly in front of your forehead, perhaps a foot or two away from it. Take this distance from the central vertical line you just drew through your body and make a circle with it, so that the point in front of your forehead turns into a circle around your head. Spend a moment feeling this circle. In my experience it doesn't matter if you start drawing this circle by going to the right or to the left. If you prefer one way over the other, do it that way or keep experimenting.<br />
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Return to the point in front of your forehead where you started, and this time go either up or down, tracing an oval around your entire body. This oval strays neither to the left or the right, but is as vertical as the first line and goes in front of and then behind you until it meets its starting point. Once you have a feel for this oval, move to the top or bottom point of it.<br />
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Once you're there, trace with your mind a second perpendicular oval, going either to the left or the right. This one should be the same size as the last one you drew, and it should intersect the circle around your head at the points on both sides. With these three closed curves drawn, you have an egg-shaped construct surrounding your body. Feel at home in this.<br />
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Now take a deep, deep breath in, directing your attention once again to the vertical line you imagined at the beginning. As you slowly exhale, imagine this line becoming brighter and brighter, energy flowing in from both directions. Let it pour in, and let it ignite, burning away all thoughts and feelings and impurities in your aura, if such talk makes sense to you. Continue to breathe as you concentrate on this sensation. Sustain it for a little while and you'll find yourself feeling energized and clear. <br />
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If you believe what the psychoanalysts say about psychic energy, you always have the same amount of it. You sometimes have less of it available, however, when it gets tied up in recurring thoughts, emotions, and complexes. The purpose of this exercise is to, for the moment at least, burn all of these things away so that you can allocate it as you see fit.<br />
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There are many other ways to perform a banishing. An <a href="http://www.newhermetics.com/pdfs/NewHermeticsPentagramRitual.pdf">English adaptation</a> of the <a href="http://www.kheper.net/topics/Hermeticism/LBR.htm">ritual used in ceremonial magic</a> is available, or you can do something as simple as imagining whatever you wish to banish flowing into some <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=k7_U6HOBYXsC&lpg=PT3&dq=chaos%20magic%20ovayki&pg=PT27#v=onepage&q&f=false">salt</a> in your hand and then throwing it over your shoulder. The most important element is concentration, so use something that's compelling to you rather than trying to focus on a ritual you don't understand. The method I've given here is my personal favorite.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-27810942743334977042011-03-13T17:18:00.000-07:002011-03-13T17:18:59.087-07:00Dreams: awaken a sleeping facet of your lifeSorry about the horrible pun. Today's post is about dreams - keeping track of them and directing them. I'll mention lucid dreaming a bit, but mostly to emphasize that you can do a lot of neat things without it.<br />
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Dreaming is cool. It lets you become far more immersed in adventures you wouldn't want to have in your waking life than any material technology (such as a video game) does, it gives you insight into yourself and your relationships, and it takes place during time that you can't use for anything else. Personally I think that every parent should encourage children to keep track of their dreams from an early age, but it may be awhile before we get anywhere close to that in this society, because the importance of having an inner life is very downplayed. As a consequence of the outward emphasis of society, some of us don't even realize that an amazing world awaits them between their ears. Some people even think that they don't dream most nights.<br />
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This is not true unless you are a very bizarre mutant. You dream or go into some form of inner activity that we might as well call dreaming at least once during every <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_stages">sleep cycle</a>. If you believe that you don't dream, consider that, since dreaming does not have consequences outside of your mind, it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between not dreaming and forgetting that you have dreamt. So the first step is to get those dreams into your consciousness.<br />
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The best way, and the only one I know if, is to keep a dream journal. If you're dreamless, you're probably asking, "Well how can I write my dreams down if I don't have any recollection of experiencing them?" It probably sounds like a Catch 22. Interestingly, it's not. Before you go to bed, write, "I will recall my dreams and write them down upon awakening." Maybe you won't the first night. But if you do it a couple times, your deep mind will get the message and start allowing your dreams to come to consciousness, unless you're secretly afraid of having dreams or blocking them for some other reason. <br />
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It doesn't matter if you only recall a single scene or detail - write it down as soon as you become conscious the next morning. Sometimes I only remember a shard or two of my dreams, other nights I fill several pages in my journal with them. But I wouldn't be able to fill pages at a time if I hadn't spend a couple weeks recording small recollections. It's a skill rather than purely a talent - you get better at it as you go along. <br />
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There are a couple tricks for helping deepen your recollection, too. The first one is simple but can be challenging it you let it - make sure that when you go to sleep, you're actually going to sleep rather than 'passing out'. Avoid drugs and alcohol for at least couple hours before going to bed. The second trick is also very simple: if you wear contacts, make sure to take them out before sleeping. I discovered this one myself - I used to sleep in my contacts most of the time, but I took them out one night after I started keeping a dream journal and had a much more immersive experience in the dream. Now whenever I leave them in I'm often wondering the next morning why my dreams felt so inhibited. My theory is that having plastic sitting on your irises inhibits the rapid eye movement which occurs during the phase of sleep when dreams happen.<br />
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This next trick is more challenging, but also more rewarding, as it will improve any meditation you do as well as improving dream recall. When you first come to consciousness after sleeping, remain completely still. While you're in this same position, go back through your memory, asking yourself questions about your dreams. (Questions like "Where was I, somewhere familiar or somewhere new?" "Were there other people with me?" "What was my moon?" and such are good places to start.) Recall as much of your dreams as you can before you move, then write them down. <br />
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That should be enough to help you start awakening your dream life. Now to talk about lucid dreaming and directing dreams. Lucid dreaming is where you become consciously aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming, and try to take advantage of this fact to manipulate your dreams from inside of them.<br />
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Personally I have a lot of trouble with fully lucid dreaming. The first couple times I managed lucidity, I got so excited that I woke up. After that I developed a tendency to lose lucidity soon after attaining it, my dreams falling back into unconscious control. The problem I had with it was that my conscious mind was aware that it was dreaming, but it was still very tired and just wanted to sleep. In one such dream, I attained lucidity, transformed a bookshelf in the room I was in, and then looked around and found no other furniture. Then the phone (in my dream) rang and incoherent speech came out of it. I told the person, "I'm sorry, I can't understand you. You see, I'm having a lucid dream," but by then I believed the phone call was actually happening. I was no longer lucid. I'm going to keep trying at it.<br />
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But here's the thing: there's a way to influence your dreams without taking complete control of them as you do in fully lucid dreaming. Have you ever noticed that what you're thinking about just before and as you fall asleep tends to show up in one way or another in your dreams? If not, try an experiment. Think of a particular "what if" scenario that modifies some part of your life in a way a dream might. Try it a couple times, and you'll find a way to influence the setting of your dreams. Practicing the <a href="http://fatedstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/imagination-exercises-part-two.html">visualization exercise</a> I posted a couple days back can be very helpful with this - not to say you should perform it right before sleeping, but that if you do it regularly you'll have more capacity for preemptive control of your dreams.<br />
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The interesting thing about this is that you don't have to limit yourself to selecting scenery and situations for your dreams to involve. You can also give yourself any capability which you might use lucid dreaming for. Suppose you want to be able to throw fireballs in your dreams in case you need to get out of a sticky situation. As you're going to sleep, imagine what it'd feel, look, sound, taste, and smell like to throw fireballs. Do it over and over again until it comes naturally. This type of thing can make dreaming more exciting than lucid dreaming sometimes does, because you're not in absolute control of the dream so there's still a bit more excitement. <br />
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I'd be delighted to hear about some of your experiences with dreaming, so feel free to post them.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-81250371021752275042011-03-12T17:14:00.000-08:002011-03-12T17:15:18.043-08:00Reverse SignificationSo here's a weird one. Today we're going to talk about something that I think is the mechanism behind certain manifestations of schizophrenia (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference">delusions of reference</a>) as well as behind some artistic and religious perspectives, though it also plays a role in science and magic. Let it be clear that I am not denigrating these disciplines by pointing out how this process plays a role in them, because I personally believe there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this way of experiencing the world. It can be just as debilitating in some contexts as the 'normal' way of perceiving things can be. <br />
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I'll call it 'reverse signification' because it resembles an inversion of the process well-documented by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics">semiotics</a>, but again, I emphasize, that does not mean that people who perceive this way 'have it all backwards.' To understand reverse signification, let's first take a look at the signification process ordinary semiotics deals with.<br />
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In semiotics, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_(semiotics)">sign</a> is something that somebody interprets as representing something, either itself or something else. An easy example of this is money - a silver certificate represents a certain amount of silver held in the treasury of the issuer, while a note of fiat money represents itself. In semiotic parlance, this relationship or process is called 'signification.'<br />
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So when I say to you, "It's raining," you hear or read the signs I have sent and interpret that, where and when I created the signs, rain was in the process of falling. In this particular relationship of signification, we have two things: what is signified (the experiential reality of precipitation) and what signifies (the words quoted in the previous sentence). You already knew this, but breaking it down into terminology makes it easier to see how the less familiar process of reverse signification mirrors it.<br />
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Now with reverse signification, we also have the signified and the signifier, and we also have reality as it is experienced, but in this case reality is coupled with the signifier rather than the signified. That sounds weird, I know. Rather than (as we would per ordinary signification) reading a myth and then interpreting it in terms of real life, so that <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare">the Tortoise and the Hare</a></i> comes to mean that we should work steadily towards our goals rather than approaching them haphazardly, we work things the other way around, so that our experience of reality is taken as a lesson about and within a greater reality. The signified (coupled with the reality greater than our own) can be something that we might ordinarily interpret as a signifier, or it might be something beyond the grasp of ordinary signification.<br />
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An instance where signification is perfectly reversed can be found by comparing the way many people in the West read classical mythology with the way they read the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Now, surely, there are a few people who would have Edith Hamilton's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology_(book)" style="font-style: italic;">Mythology</a> burnt as advocating the worship of 'pagan' gods, but most people would treat the book as a collection of stories ancient peoples used to teach lessons about how the world works. On the other hand, a far greater number of people, looking for instance at the gospel of John, are willing to interpret it as more true than the illusions empiricism presents. <br />
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You might even say that John's writing urges the reade<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">r to treat it this way: "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #001320; line-height: 21px;">In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1, various translations). Now there are many other interpretations of the phrase 'the Word' (one of my personal favorites is under the section entitled "De Mercurio" in the <a href="http://www.the-book-of-thoth.com/sections-viewarticle-299.html">Book of Thoth</a>), but the Word which is most readily at hand is the word which one is currently reading. This interpretation is readily found in some Kabbalistic schools, where it is taught that God encoded all that was, is, and shall be in the five books whose writing is attributed to Moses (a.k.a. the Torah). Taking this interpretation a step further, we come to the idea that our existence is a consequence of YHVH creating the world via the Word. And there we have reverse signification. It will probably sound utterly wrongheaded at this point to some of the people reading this, particularly atheists, but please bear with me.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #001320; line-height: 21px;">When we look at classical mythology again, we find two interpretations that basically amount to the same thing - the first, the one mentioned above: that these stories were used as signifiers to convey knowledge and moral lessons. The second is that these stories were explanations. In other words, instead of saying that you shouldn't be so vain because you'll lose everything as your beauty fades, this interpretations holds that the vain are inevitably bound to eventual decay and ugliness because of the scorn of Aphrodite. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #001320; line-height: 21px;">It probably seems that what we have here are two different ways of interpretation, one metaphorical and one literal. In the former, myths are used as ways of conveying knowledge; in the latter, they are treated as explanations of why things happen. Just as easily, though, we could see one interpretation as addressing 'how' and the other as addressing 'why'. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #001320; line-height: 21px;">Interestingly, this same tendency to say at least a bit more than can be fully justified appears when we try to use science to answer 'why' questions rather than merely 'how' ones. Notice how "random chance and self-selection via feedback loops" is a satisfying answer to the question "How did we come to exist?" much more than it satisfyingly answers "Why do we exist?" This parallel is no coincidence, for the questions 'how' and 'why' are as intimately tangled with ordinary and reversed signification as they are, respectively, with the desire to know what happens and the desire for true (as opposed to merely correct) explanations. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #001320; line-height: 21px;">Now, that's not to say that reverse signification is purely futile or always misleading. In some magical practices, such as those of Aleister Crowley, an entity you might call the 'higher self' or 'true soul' is postulated. It's called the 'Holy Guardian Angel,' a deliberately silly name intended to prevent one from building a needlessly elaborate belief system that would ultimately prevent contact with it. Initiates take an oath of reverse signification in the aim of coming to know this entity: "I swear to interpret each experience and encounter with the world as a message from my Holy Guardian Angel." </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #001320; line-height: 21px;">Before you think this sounds insane, consider the Jungian mechanism of projection. Briefly, by projection, our psyche processes those aspects of us which we are not willing to accept in ourselves onto others. Of course, we still exude those qualities we reject in ourselves, but given that we're not aware of them, they can more easily get out of control, with us all the while blaming others for what we, too, are doing. What better way to get around this problem than by the partial solipsism the oath above entails? When we accept all facets of our experience as our own responsibility, we are that much closer to being truly free, and reverse signification is the most efficient way of doing this. </span></span>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-86239167612922350132011-03-11T17:28:00.000-08:002011-03-12T00:00:33.738-08:00Astrology and the Situation in WisconsinAdsense is hilarious sometimes. Particularly on my last post it was amusing to watch it struggle to find relevant ads - the best one I saw was for a flight simulator. It will probably have an easier time with this post, but we'll see...<br />
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Today I'm going to post about some of the astrological things going on lately. I'm not going to explain all the basics of astrology - I do that in the book I've been working on, and <a href="http://archaijournal.org/fundamentals.html">this page</a> does a pretty decent job too. I will explain the concepts I touch on, though. <br />
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Today we're going to look at ongoing world transits, because those apply to everyone on the planet. To chart world transits means to look at the angles between planets' current positions as seen from the Earth. Even though every sane astrologer these days admits that the planets revolve around the Sun, it's still useful to take the geocentric perspective here, because we're curious about astrological conditions on Earth. <br />
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There are two mutually supporting ways to look at world transits: the first is to look at the angles different planets make to compare them, looking for specific angles (called aspects), and the second is to look at what part of the sky (what sign of the Zodiac) the planets are in. Today we'll be focusing primarily on the first way, using the second as a method of fleshing out the information gleaned from the aspects.<br />
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Astrologers <a href="http://www.astroresearchnewsservice.com/uploads/ARNS_Meridian_Release_Revised_2.pdf">and investors who use astrology</a> agree that the three most starkly noticeable aspects are at angles of 0, 90, and 180 degrees. The first is called the conjunction, because it occurs when two planets are lined up more-or-less exactly. The second is called the square, because the two planets involved are pointing from Earth in directions that are exactly perpendicular. The 180 degree aspect is called the opposition because the planets are on opposite sides of the Earth. The conjunction and opposition are considered the most significant aspects in a planetary cycle. (A planetary cycle takes place from the time when two planets are in conjunction with each other from earth through the times they form squares and an opposition until they come back into conjunction.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGhURGhrVzL68alpBzPMvD7bU_GEZHE-KazAxzn1mnK8fEdR2h2ZO3E8WnI2qkbKejj45sUWMPc2qDHkFJM6A8IjwiOxN-gkla0ptNj8WfGNKJt_07oO79CKZ5NCYMGiU6nWUOC-wP_zid/s1600/transits+3-11-11.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="563" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGhURGhrVzL68alpBzPMvD7bU_GEZHE-KazAxzn1mnK8fEdR2h2ZO3E8WnI2qkbKejj45sUWMPc2qDHkFJM6A8IjwiOxN-gkla0ptNj8WfGNKJt_07oO79CKZ5NCYMGiU6nWUOC-wP_zid/s640/transits+3-11-11.png" width="640" /></a>Today (and for the past couple months, since the outer planets move slowly) we have <a href="http://archaijournal.org/planets.html#jupiter">Jupiter</a> (indicated by the magenta glyph resembling the numeral 4) and <a href="http://archaijournal.org/planets.html#saturn">Saturn</a> (indicated by the purple glyph that looks sort of like a ligature between t and h) in opposition within 5 degrees. Jupiter is in Aries, and Saturn is in Libra. The most obvious manifestation of this aspect in current U.S. affairs is the struggle between constraining spending (Saturn) to balance the budget (Libra) and continued plenitude (Jupiter). The fact that Jupiter in this arrangement is in Aries is reflected in the Wisconsin protests, and Jupiter's archetype being shown through their unprecedented scale. The Jupiter archetype is also still being catalyzed by its still-separating square with <a href="http://archaijournal.org/planets.html#pluto">Pluto</a> (indicated by the glyph with the circle suspended in the crescent above the cross), which tends to go with the archetypes it aspects coming with a deeply powerful, partially unconscious force. This we see in how the protests have become a symbol for accumulated rage against the top 1 percent that owns more than 50 percent in our country. The worldly motivation of this struggle is reflected in Pluto's position in Capricorn.<br />
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For a much shorter duration than these aspects among the outer planets last, we have a harmonious angle between <a href="http://archaijournal.org/planets.html#venus">Venus</a> (indicated by the symbol that indicates femininity nowadays) and the Jupiter-Saturn opposition. It's around 60 degrees (called sextile) from Jupiter, and around 120 degrees (trine) from Saturn. The sextile and trine aspects are somewhat less noticeable than oppositions and squares because they are harmonious aspects, and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In the trine aspect, energy tends to flow naturally between the two archetypes involved; the sextile aspect also indicates a flow between the archetypes, but one that must be cultivated through effort. The placement of Venus in Aquarius, the sign of voluntary relation among other things, emphasizes the need to relate as an independent entity. As Venus separates from sextile with Jupiter and applies to trine with Saturn over the next few days, I suspect that we will see the discourse revolving around the Jupiter-Saturn opposition (most easily seen in Wisconsin at the moment) deteriorate further. <br />
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It's worth noting that at the current time, Jupiter and <a href="http://archaijournal.org/planets.html#uranus">Uranus</a> (indicated by the circle under the cross with crescents on either side of it) are still within 10 degrees of each other, moving out of conjunction. When Jupiter and Uranus catalyze each other, an expansion of the liberating force tends to occur at the same time as the tendency to expansion is loosed upon new territories, and events like the invention of the telegraph, the Wright Brother's first flight, and the first radio broadcast all occurred during conjunctions or oppositions of these two planets. In this case, again looking to the events in Wisconsin, we see the class warfare issue coming into play as the class that feels oppressed (conjunct Uranus) opposes the budget rectifications (Saturn in Libra). <br />
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The next month will be interesting, as the Sun passes over Uranus on the 20th and over Jupiter on April 5th, and the Saturn-Jupiter opposition comes to perfection toward the end of March.SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8973046910878007460.post-30988276707513193762011-03-10T14:38:00.000-08:002011-03-10T14:42:52.576-08:00A Myth?Somewhere far, far away, but nearer than you might think, a great race of beings created the perfect technology. It allowed them to navigate through time in any direction as they willed. As their civilization consolidated itself across its own timeline, all this species' opportunities to experience suffering were eliminated. They brought their advanced technologies to the beginning of their own existence, so that they would never know strife in the process of meeting their survival needs. They took control over their own emotions which had evolved to help them survive, for there was no need to fear. There was nothing to anticipate, either. The universe, for them, was like a compact disk played forever on repeat - the passage of time was like going for a jog around the block.<br />
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Given that they had bleached out their simpler emotions, they were not saddened by this lack of ups and downs in their lives. Many of them succumbed to utter stillness. But those that kept moving were faced with quite a dilemma: why do anything at all? There was no beauty they had not crafted a thousand times before, and no danger threatening them. What was the point of it all? <br />
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Some of them became very nostalgic when they thought about this question. They remembered, so faintly, but still remembered, the days when that question would've seemed utterly silly. 'What was the point of asking what the point of it all was?' their former selves would have retorted, and plunged back into struggle and joy. So the beings created simulations. They quickly found that the simulations were largely worthless, however, as long as they retained any idea of their real situation. If the situation created in the simulation was known to be anything less than absolutely real, it became another bland consumption, just another notch on the belt. <br />
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Of course, they got around this using their psionic technologies to erase all memories of before. There was really no danger in this, after all, because what danger would memories be needed to fend off in the real world? As long as some remained behind, most of the species would be free to explore the worlds of urgency and excitement. Each of them had the unreality of their world buried in the back of their mind, and if the secret was outed within a simulation, the experience of it was ruined for all who participated, for the truth that you know but do not speak to yourself echoes a thousand times in a thousand voices once it's heard.<br />
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This became a problem pretty quickly. In one of the first worlds where this happened, there was a massive arms race once the discovery got out and each entity who was simulating themselves in this world agreed to destroy the planet with nuclear weapons. This was the only way out of the simulation, because they hadn't engineered a way to communicate with the entities that remained outside, protecting their real world. It was a difficult situation, because they had to engineer a way to communicate with the real world without allowing themselves to know that the real world existed. <br />
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A great variety of programs to allow this were created. In some of them, the simulated entities would pray to imaginary beings in order to contact their brethren in the real world. In other worlds, magic was made real: the beings were allowed to hack the simulation themselves. These simulations were written with elaborate and esoteric coding languages designed deliberately as abstruse ways for coding a simulation, so that the beings would believe they were manipulating ether, Kia, or the elements rather than rewriting their world. In some worlds the entities outside the simulation made a game of their task, becoming a polytheistic pantheon that competed for worshipers within the world they oversaw. In others, the entities outside wrote rules ("physical" laws) for their worlds as they went along.<br />
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As these simulation strategies developed, it was seen that worlds governed in different ways at different periods in their history allowed dynamic histories as well as a minimum of dissonance. Another effective strategy they found was placing epistemic limits so that simulated entities could not know more than a certain amount about how the world worked. These limits were put into place after one of the simulated worlds invented time travel technology and perfected their timeline, as had been done in the real world, and faced the same bleak existentialism. This world was allowed to continue on its course, spawning more simulations, some of which eventually simulated themselves, but worlds created since then have had deliberate limits put into place. Of course, beings innovative enough to perfect their existence could find their way around these limits, but their struggle to do so was far more interesting than in worlds without these limits, and it gave the programmers of the simulations a fun game to play - an arms race to build the un-hackable simulation against improving hackers of reality who were also increasing in number. <br />
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Perhaps the most tragic thing about these creatures is the tendency to see the grass as greener wherever they are not. When they are free of suffering, they crave the uncertainty it brings; when faced with struggle and possible danger, how they yearn to believe it's all a dream! But there is beauty in this cycle, too. After an aeon of simulated lives, an entity is pulled out into the real world of utopia, after knowing naught but the various forms of cyclic existence. In this moment, the being is like a man enslaved all his life brought up to Paradise by the hand of God himself. That joy was just enough to keep them going for all eternity, simulating every world possible a thousand times over.<br />
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<i>(This post was inspired in large part by Ayreon's <a href="http://www.arjenlucassen.com/ayreon/ay_01011001.html">01011001</a>.)</i>SKS FKFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07199732693651112621noreply@blogger.com8