Two articles collided today in my perfervid mind, inspiring
this commentary.
Once was on a new type of computer chip called the V chip,
which is from a company working on creating a Quantum Computer, one of the
current holy grails. In a QC instead of the energy state of a bit being either
a 0 or a 1(as in our normal binary world of polarization), the bits are
entangled and dropped to a low energy state. As a result certain kinds of
calculations can be performed thousands of times more rapidly.
Let me quote from the article:
“Back in 2007, a company called D-Wave made waves by claiming it had built a
16-bit quantum computer at a time when most academic labs could only manage a
handful of bits. What they demonstrated, however, wasn’t a quantum computer in
the sense that most people use the term. The company has since started calling
its device a ‘quantum optimizer.’ Although it’s not a general-purpose quantum
computer, the hardware does seem to be capable of tackling some computationally
hard challenges.
The actual performance of the hardware and the software that controls it
(called, somewhat ironically, the Black Box) hasn’t really been described in
detail. That situation seems to be changing this week, as a pair of academic
researchers will be presenting a set of problems tackled both by D-Wave’s
hardware and by software running on more traditional computers. The results
generally show D-Wave’s equipment performing well, but it doesn’t always beat
the more mundane computers.
In a quantum computer, a set of qubits are both entangled and placed in a
superposition state where they have a mixture of the two possible values (zero
and one). The system is manipulated to perform a calculation, and then the
actual values held by the qubits are read in order to provide the solution.
Although it’s quantum in nature, D-Wave’s computer doesn’t work that way.
Instead, it uses a process called
quantum
annealing, which involves a set of interacting bits that are dropped to
their lowest energy state. The energy of the system is then altered so that its
final state represents a solution to a calculation. If this process is done
gradually enough, the system will remain in its ground state throughout the
process. When the process is complete, reading out the state of these
bits—which are in a new ground state—will provide an optimal solution to the
problem”
…..
The Travelling Salesman Problem
“The TSP involves a salesman who has a number of cities where he must sell
his goods. Being an efficient sort, he wants to plan his sales trip so that he
only goes to each city once, and also wants to drive as few miles as possible.
Planning the sales trip is the TSP. It is an NP-complete (nondeterministic
polynomial time) problem, meaning that there is no simple way of generating an
optimum solution. On classical computers, rather simple sets of cities can
require billions or trillions of hours of computation to find the true minimum
solution. However, the TSP is a natural to be solved by quantum annealing.
How did the D-Wave computer do on the tests? On the largest problem sizes
tested, the V5 chip found optimal solutions in less than half a second, while
the best classical software solver required 30 minutes to find those same
solutions. This makes the D-Wave computer over 3,600 times faster than the classical
computer in these tests.
This puts the effective speed of the
D-Wave quantum computer on this class of problems at roughly the same as the
tenth ranked supercomputer in the world as per the November 2012 Top500 list –
the IBM/DARPS Trial Subset, with 63,360 64-bit cores that produce a maximum
floating point performance of 1.5 petaFlops. The comparison shouldn’t be taken
too seriously, but suggests that the 439 qubits of the D-Wave computer can
solve such problems as quickly as do huge massively parallel supercomputers.
An ordinary computer has to try and calculate all the possible routes,
dealing with all the discrete paths that exist on this world level of
relationships (Logos). The QC deals with a pre-determinate state before paths
are fixed, thus running thru possible outcomes from a “higher” level.
In the analogies I am making here, this entering into a “low energy” state
corresponds to entering that zone in contemplation where we hover between the
indeterminate and determinate, and thus can “get the answers” in some way much
more quickly than slow mental calculations running through all the
combinations.
For decades I have been a student of classical alchemy, which is not the
Jungian model (but includes it), nor the entheogenic model (but includes it),
but that expression which says that after you have plumbed your own psychic
nature (Jungian), perhaps thru archaic underground initiatory streams
(entheogenic), and you have contacted the Mysterium Tremendum, and observed by
feel-know how the Unmanifest becomes the Manifest through polarity, you THEN
enter the laboratory, and attempt to either reverse-engineer this process, Or,
find that there are dribbles of the Tremendum that have entered our world yet
retain their androgynous pre-polar nature. Once captured this Root Seed can be
developed into something unique, the Philosopher’s Stone, that which is in the
world but not of the world.
One of the phases that I most was drawn to is the stage of Putrefaction,
wherein two subject matters, opposite in nature, and confined, and accelerated
into cross-cancelling each other out, until they fall back as it were, into a
pre-polar state called Prima Materia. This very much seems to correlate to that
Ocean of Dirac, the world of Quantum indeterminacy where a particle has not yet
emerged, where possibility is all, locality is not yet, and this magic
cross-over zone is the zero point wherein the potential of free energy is
boundless.
The texts say that to accomplish the Great Work one must become the Work in
themselves, and this certainly aligns with Vitvan who reiterates that the I AM
is our true self, but we remain separate from the feel-know of this.
Unless we go through the First Crossing
clarifying our vehicle of perception until we can reflect this truth in our
self, finding the Self behind the self. Here we can substitute the word
Putrefaction for First Crossing and see that process is one and the same.
Except we must understand Putrefaction as the farmer making compost does, not a
dissolution into stinking uselessness, but a breakdown into constituent
elements which are teeming with Life energy supporting all seeds planted in its
dark soil.
If this construct I call my personality is a mix of off-the-shelf parts
(from an astrological charted blueprint) creating a vehicle or quantum computer
for the I AM to make use of, then thru meditation and contemplation “I” should
be able to observe in myself that cross-over zone where the Undeterminate
Plenum expressed Itself into locality as “me.”
This act of self-observation is in fact a sort of self dissolution, by
pervading the component parts with the fluidity of consciousness, knowingness
juice, Gnosis by touching, direct perception without the mental step of
labeling. It is a self-induced Putrefaction.
It’s a conundrum, a hovering on the edge of self-suicide. When I spent 10
days in complete darkness (Darkroom Incubation tech) the neurotransmitters,
endogenous amritas, mutate from the juices of waking problem-solving
consciousness (beta), into dream state (alpha), into transcendent mind (theta
to delta), by the 4
th day pinoline had accumulated to the point
where I transcended (decended?) into the primary field body, prior to the manifestation
(and subdivision or fragmentation) of the so-called chakras. This is almost
like a blastula type “body” which has not yet undergone the specializations
into the embryo and then foetus, until sexual polarity enters on the 7x7 49
th
day.
On the 49
th day the soul or spirit enters the body, and it can be
a scary or grisly experience for the soul (as I saw on another Soma induced
vision), for the embryo is a weird shrimp like monster form, and one feels they
are being trapped into a Frankenstein form. This soul memory might lie at the
fascination many have for horror themes of bodies turned hideously wrong.
But I digress...
On the 4
th day in the Darkroom I felt a presence, which announced
itself as the Hydranos, and gave the explanation that this Ur-body I was
sensing was the Autonomous Field, the original egg form within whose membrane I
was incarnated. It called this also the Auric Egg, or the Child Body, for
underlying the world of chakras and centers remains the sleeping Christ child,
latent. More could be said but we’ll leave it there.
This intelligence answered my questions as fast as I could ask. When I said
WHO are you, It said “your future self” and it threw up a holographic displace
of the galaxy, explaining that all life in the galaxy flows out of its Mysterium
center, like a white blazing sap down the spiral arms of the magnificent Tree
of Life. We call this entity our Logos, the One in whom we live and have our
being. All of my future self already existed but it was flowing at “me”
creating a sense of time, just as in the metaphor of a phonograph needle
traveling thru the vinyl groove, experiencing event following event as a “progression
thru time” even though the Reality was that the entire composition already
existed in the Now in the wholeness of the recorded disc.
It showed me that my desire and fascination to penetrate to the Root of my
being (thru this so-called Putrefaction) would end in destroying me as I drew
closer to the unimaginable power, majesty, and Awe-full center of the Logos.
Like a moth to the flame, the end result of looking for the Root would be an
end to my being. This is the stuff junkie dreams are made of.
If the Cosmos is a dream exercise of the Self reflected down hallways of
looping fractal Self-reference, then what happens to the Oroboros serpent if it
keeps consuming Its own tail? Hah! Maybe it shits Itself into a composted state
of putrefaction called Pralaya.
And now onto the 2
nd article that synchronized with this quantum
computing metaphor. Here we come at this same zone of the Prima Materia of
consciousness, of indeterminate androgynous bits neither/either 0’s or 1’s, but
something we can touch in ourselves, contact with the Unrational.
Remember, the word Logos means set of rational relationships. That is, once
the Plenum has barfed forth fields and their luminous particle waves, a cascade
of relationships begins, giving us a Field of interconnectedness that we sense
as “meaning”, as in the “mean” being centeredness. Contact with the Mysterium
Tremendum is, according to my current perception, that cross-over zone where we
hover over our own coming-into-being.
And to make my Reform based point relating to the Work of undoing the
corruption and stuckness that has overtaken Home Farm, let’s be clear: the
essence of Vitvan’s Work was to first describe the process to the newbie, and
then, the real work was to go thru the Putrefaction until one contacted the
Mystery of the I AM. The farm, the buildings, the books, are all exoteric
shells to house this numinous truth, of which Ralph was an expression and he
knew it, he vitvan’ed it.
These children, these demented idiots who play act at “preserving” that
which they have not tasted, is a sacrilege, for they defile something holy that
was brought to this world through great effort. A portal into the numinous was
opened but it can be lost.
When the lady asked Ben Franklin what kind of government the Constitutional
Convention has wrought, he said “Madam, a Republic, if you can keep it.” To
which we add, what did “Saint Ralph” leave us? A portal to the numinous, IF we
can keep it open.
Home Farms death unto compost is natural order too; the carpetbaggers and
parasites have just about devoured the host, spending the banked up energy left
entrusted to them, but one day the Father will grade them and ask how they
spent their talents, did they multiply them, or squander them playing
mine-mine-mine?
______________________________________________
In
The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the
Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational,
Rudolph Otto
identifies and explores the non-rational mystery behind religion and the
religious experience (“non-rational” should not be confused with “irrational”);
he called this mystery, which is the basic element in all religions, the
numinous. He uses the related word “numen” to refer to deity or God.
Forced, necessarily, to use familiar words, like “dread” and “majesty,” Otto
insists that he is using them in a special sense; to emphasize this fact, he
sometimes uses Latin or Greek words for key concepts. This fact is crucial to
understanding Otto. Our feeling of the numinous and responses to the numinous
are not ordinary ones intensified; they are unique (I use this word in its
original meaning of “one of a kind, the only one”) or
sui generis
(meaning “in a class by itself”). For example, fear does not become dread in
response to the numinous; rather, we cease to feel ordinary fear and move into
an entirely different feeling, a dread that is aroused by intimations of the
numinous or the actual experience of the numinous.
The word “absolute” is used in its metaphysical sense of “existing without relation
to any other being; self-existent; self-sufficing” (OED); its adjectival form,
“absolutely,” is used with the same meaning. Finally, by “creature,” Otto means
a “being which has been created.”
The Numinous
The numinous grips or stirs the mind powerfully and produces the following
responses:
Numinous dread. Otto calls the feeling of
numinous dread, aka awe or awe-fullness, the mysterium tremendum. C.S. Lewis’s
illustration makes clear the nature of numinous dread and its difference from
ordinary fear:
Suppose you were told that there
was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would
probably feel fear. But if you were told “There is a ghost in the next room,”
and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a
different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is
primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is
a ghost. It is “uncanny” rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it
excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of
the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a might spirit in
the room” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere
fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder
and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is
the Numinous.
The
mysterium tremendum implies three qualities of the numinous:
a. its absolute unapproachability,
b. its power,
c. its urgency or energy, a force which is most easily
perceived in the “wrath of God.” It has been suggested that Gothic fiction
originated primarily as a quest for the
mysterium tremendum.
Stupor. Because the mysterium tremendum is wholly
Other, i.e., is unlike anything that we have encountered or ever will
encounter, it arouses in us a mental state of stupor, a “blank wonder, an
astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute.”
The shudder. In this state, the soul, “held
speechless, trembles inwardly to the farthest fibre of its being[;] … it
implies that the mysterious is beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the
feelings.”
Creature-consciousness and the simultaneous experiencing of the self as
nothing. Creature-consciousness is the awareness of ourselves as having being
or of existing. The nothingness is not a sense of guilt for a transgression,
but the sense of being profane, which is the opposite state to the holy or
holiness, which is an absolute quality belonging just to God. Only the person
who is “in the spirit” can experience profaneness, which Otto describes as a
“piercing acuteness… accompanied by the most uncompromising judgment of
self-depreciation, a judgment passed, not upon his character because of
individual ‘profane’ actions but upon his very existence as creature before
that which is supreme above all creatures.” I think of profane nothingness as
feeling, “I am nothing in the presence of that which is all.” In this state, we
are moved to praise the might of the numen, because its might demands praise
and even more because it is absolutely deserving of praise. This sense of
nothingness, which Otto calls “disvalue,” becomes a sin or sacrilege if the
numinous is perceived in or confined to a moral framework; it has no necessary connection
to moral judgments.
Sense of unworthiness and need for “covering.” Accompanying
the disvaluation of self is the feeling of being unworthy to be in the presence
of “the holy one” (we fear that our presence might even defile him). Being
profane, we need a “covering,” in Otto’s term, or a consecration or grace,
“that renders the approacher ‘numinous,’ frees him from his ‘profane’ being,”
so that he is no longer unfit to relate to the numen.
The numinous has another aspect which co-exists with the
mysterium
tremendum, the
power to fascination. The numinous
fascinates or draws us to it with a force that is nearly irresistible. Otto
calls the alluring quality of the numinous the
mysterium fascinosum.
At its most intense, this fascination becomes “exuberant” and transforms into
the mystical “moment” or direct, complete contact with the numen, a state which
few people experience. The numinous dread and the fascinating “combine in a
strange harmony of contrasts,” which Otto calls the
mysterium tremendum and
fascinosum.
Human beings as a species have the
a priori capacity of mind to
perceive or experience the numinous. This is not to say that the ability to
perceive the holy, let alone the perception itself is innate; it merely means
that every individual has the potential to perceive or experience the numinous.
The numinous state of mind or the feeling of the numinous must be evoked in us
or brought into consciousness; it cannot be taught. But not everyone has the
same degree of receptivity to the holy. The revelations of those who are
specially receptive, like the prophets, stimulate the numinous capacity of the
less receptive. Otto, who believes in the superiority of Christianity, awards
the highest stage of revelation to the Son or Christ, who embodies holiness.
The human soul has parallels with the divine or numinous; it too is “mystery
and marvel,” undefinable, and “wholly alien” to our understanding. Insight into
the soul comes, when it does, as an eruption, a flash or burst of illumination.
The numinous-ness of the human soul is what enables the mystic to apprehend the
numinous.
The Connection of the Numinous and the Gothic
Connection 1:
“daemonic dread.”
“Daemonic dread” is the first stage in religious development. Primitive people
misunderstood their experience of the mysterium tremendum or the dread inspired
by the numinous, to which they were drawn by the fascinating power of the
numinous. Otto explains, “The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an
object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that
allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly
cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay
even to make it somehow his own.” Still, “daemonic dread” is a genuine
religious experience and from it arose the gods and demons of later religions.
Otto regards the “dread of ghosts” as a “perversion, a sort of abortive
offshoot” of “daemonic dread.” Even after purer, more highly developed
religions have evolved, the primitive “daemonic dread” may assert itself. Otto
points for proof of this to the attraction of horror and “shudder” in ghost
stories. The ghost attracts us because it is wholly Other, and as such “falls
outside the limits of the ‘uncanny’ and fills the mind with blank wonder and
astonishment,” which are responses to the numinous. Ghosts have another
connection with the numinous; in the primitive experience, the feeling of the
presence of ghosts produces the stupor which the wholly Other arouses.
Connection 2: other interpretations of the numinous.
Other Gothic elements originate in the misapprehension of the numinous. The
feeling of the numen as mysterious stimulates “the naive imagination, inciting
it to expect miracles, to invent them, to ‘experience them,’ recount them.”
Terrifying, baffling, and even astonishing natural events have inspired
“daemonic dread,” a response which transformed them into portents, prodigies,
and portents. Demons and specters, in Otto’s view, are not part of the true
development of religious consciousness but “spurious fabrications of the fancy
accompanying the numinous feeling.” Nevertheless, these fabrications do serve a
positive function, one which may operate in Gothic fiction; though feelings of
horror and shudder at spectral hauntings are caricatures of authentic numinous
emotions, they enable us to break through rationality to contact “feelings
buried deep in religious consciousness.”
Connection 3: the sublime. A counterpart to the
numinous, the sublime provides another connection to Gothic fiction. Though
Otto distinguishes the numinous and the sublime as separate categories, they
have a close connection. Like the numinous, the sublime cannot be explicated,
is mysterious, and is both daunting and intensely attracting. Because of these
similarities, the sublime may stimulate the capacity to perceive the numinous,
and there is a tendency for the sublime to pass over into the numinous and for
the numinous to pass over into the sublime.
Otto explicitly connects the two categories; the sublime is the most effective,
if indirect way of depicting the sublime in the arts. The eighteenth century
Gothic novelists were aware of theories of the sublime; Edmund Burke’s A
Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful presented the most
widely accepted theory. They incorporated the sublime into their novelists.
Radcliffe was famous for her landscapes, which were imbued with the sublime.
Otto identifies portrayals of darkness and silence as a means of presenting the
numinous; he stresses that the darkness must contrast with a flickering or
dying light, the semidarkness creating a “mystical” effect. “The semi-darkness
that glimmers in vaulted halls or beneath the branches of a lofty forest glade,
strangely quickened and stirred by the mysterious play of half-lights has
always spoken eloquently to the soul.” And the Gothic novel abounds in these
particular effects and similar ones over and over. For Otto, these effects
expression the numinous in contrast to Burke, for whom they express the
sublime.
----------------------------------------------------
We can understand that if a child takes the Soma medicines of Self-inquiry, and encounters only confusion, then they should not have been initiated. And worse, they may assume that there is no value in use of such Tremendum revealing sacraments, for they derived no wisdom from it. Worse still, they come into control of an expression of this portal opening stream, and defile it with their unknowingness.
It's easy for the shallow to say "just go and make another portal" but they don't know what they defile. The Work brought to earth is the result of a Herculean labor. These squatters in a cathedral shrug and say, "Go build your own cathedral." Squatters, turning a cathedral into a hovel.
