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:
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.
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 4th 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 49th day.
On the 49th 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 4th 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 2nd 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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment