"Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think "scientifically" that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution."
— P.D. Ouspensky (A New Model of the Universe)
Even when we come to the general and primary reductionism of the paranormal spectrum and pronounce that all of it is between the Self and Non Self. To me, this is simply a Cartesian trap. Where are the gaps or boundary layers or clear delineations in a spectrum of light? The answer is clear, there are none. So between the Self and Non Self, what exists? The older I become I see that this is where the material becomes invisible and the invisible becomes material, akin to the intermediate danger zone that the Taoists warned us of, albeit indirectly.
Discernment and self awareness are a learned and unnatural sacrifice we make in order to rid ourselves of this awful anthropomorphism applied to reality. Everything is arranged to keep us locked in ourselves and after so many decades I wonder if that is not well justifiable at this point.
"I" as an artifact of human commerce appears to be a sedentary creature, but, in the realm of barter, in the realm of guile, and in the realm of the paranormal, each of us has multiple personalities.
The curious and humble purveyor of selfless truth. The defensive and angered righteousness of hurt feelings. The debt collector of what is owed. The rapacious seeker of Self through the desire of another, to possess. All of these we own. Who or what is "I"?
What gear is tripped like a player piano scroll being activated by a stimulus that we have created ourselves within us? I prefer salt to pepper, a hot dog to a hamburger. What do you value the most? What do you loathe? Are you capable of destroying both as an aim?
Are we Pinocchio up on that moonlit ledge wishing to become real and then the world thus becomes real? Do you think of this when pursuing the ghost memories of others? Do you turn in fright at what you may be versus what you prefer to chose?
Is language more important than not having a way to describe the incommensurable?
What are we sacrificing to when we go out on a dark night and search the sky for phantom ships?
The multiple personalities of the observer and their compounded interest are perhaps a debt that is collected when confronted the strange.
Many claim that quantum principles are only operand at a subatomic level, which I have been saying for well over two years that this is not necessarily so. A cyberneticist I know tells me everything is behavioral. A mathematician would say it's externalized demarcations. A theologian would say it is a contest between light and darkness. A physicist would say it is the storage, transformation and irradiation of energy. A philosopher would say it is value applied to form. Each is perhaps correct and each is patently wrong. The observer bias tainting reality or reality as an outcome is not confined to the subatomic realm.
So much redundant material is self referential. I read posts by many authors in the common locations where they are gathered and they have a certain thermodynamic of consensus where such and such is repeated, reinforced and given a momentum, that if the phenomenon vanished or did not occur in the first place, you could place a blank scroll from here to the moon to be filled up with future verbiage to affirm it's intermediary existence as a relic of anthropomorphism.
Everyone wants a chair when the music stops. A provisional, defensive stance masked as an affirmation.
Why? Our language is a trap that defines what is allowed. We are pushed here, pulled there because of it's phenomenological and proverbial gravitational field.
Science without theology or theology without science. Take your pick and both are hopelessly, well, provincial, quaint and are, in the end, fables when one is opposed to the other. We know this, you and I. We only see what we allow ourselves to see and thus are unintentional creators of jewelry that defines us by defining the exterior of this demarcation we have set in the midst of what is a spectrum. I know I am a rube in this and have said so. Many claim by inference to be cultivated sophisticates with a inside track on a universal conceptual model of reality which has one facet of a infinite fractal and holographic outer circumference as a imprint or stamp that pounds out our reactive edicts. When faced with them, I run as fast as I can and hold my head under a sink of cold water. I would prefer to believe anything to rid myself of sincerity, as we all would. But we know it becomes like Gurdjieff's joke of a "thousand year old frozen turkey." Tasteless, having zero nutrition, dry, difficult to swallow... and yet preserved so finely...Ah, this must be a truism then, look at how ell it has withstood the vulgarities of Time. Of course this preservation was due to artifice.
Our expedition up Mount Analog pauses here to ascertain the cost of return, and the cost of going further. We recheck our supplies. We inventory our health. We know that Time is counted. There is no particular urge to discuss the nature of this risk as in this environment we know beyond any intellectual knowledge that we are contingent. Our native guides warn us regarding our self comforting allusions to how prepared we are, as the line of corpses litter the caves and crevices in this graveyard, frozen where they fell or where they simply closed the eyes and awaited their place to become organic statuary is self evident. This distance is not covered in miles. It is covered by steps.
Beyond us, and below us is the bartering and bustle of the village, whose commerce is adapted to traditions of environment and pragmatism, and we from their line of sight have become invisible specks, as tiny, random cinders on the glare reflected by the sun on the summit. Words like "paranormal" sound like a proverbial slang for an artificial sweetener.To us. To them it is a trade of commerce, a rumor, a cause for armchair adventurism. A stimulant.
Here, where the air is thin, it is more basic, more evident and more compelling as a voluntary sacrifice to the mountain. Nothing is guaranteed in return. My good friend Carter has been listening while poking a stick in the ground. We both have failed relationships, discarded money and foolish trinkets traded for blood behind us, as well as death, which is as stark and as unforgiving as our aim.
We stand as we get up to leave the tent and the wind is incessant, loud and a white noise like bacon frying in a pan. He stops and turns to me as he pauses.
" Is this a goal or a long term and well planned suicide?"
I laugh with a nervous edge.
" We are becoming invisible, not invincible"
" So it's both in a sense"
" That's what we have come to discover"
He digest this and as always responds with a smirk.
He asks with more than a trace of irony, "Are you ready?"
I shout above this din. "No!"
He responds by opening the flap to the tent and all hell breaks lose,
as he responds, "Good, you're ready then...let's go"
Fade to white.
