On the Dangerousness of the Zero/ Part 5

By Brian George

The theft of Occam's Razor

“Those who move neither near nor far, who are not real Brahmins nor pressers of Soma; using speech in a bad way, they weave on a weft of rags, without understanding…”—From “The Origin of Sacred Speech”, the Rig Veda

On December 9th, 2009—one day before President Obama was scheduled to give his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo—a rotating white spiral appeared in the pre-dawn sky over Norway. It was seen by thousands of people, and was visible for several hundred miles. The bright “pinwheel” at the center was surrounded by a series of harmoniously spaced rings. A blue cone could also be perceived to emanate from the center, or else to originate from a point on the horizon from which the spiral was projected. As the spiral pulsed and expanded, it looked at times like a Yin/Yang symbol and at other times like a nautilus shell. After 15 or so minutes, it collapsed into what many have described as a “black hole.”

Hi Stace (Tussel),

You wrote, "Of course, 'official' explanations are beginning to filter out into the media, including what I expect to eventually be the popular explanation: that the spiral was comprised of fuel debris from a failed Russian rocket launch—a launch which Russian officials have denied. What motive would exist to deny the rocket launch, especially when the evidence was hanging there in the air for 10 to 20 minutes, at least?"

You would think that it might be difficult to come to terms with such an event—you would think. Perhaps one should take a few moments to allow it to sink in—or out and down—and to filter through the archeological strata of the mind? But even before its afterimage faded, small armies of “debunkers” had set fire to their keyboards. Indeed, we are living in strange days. It is rare for each government press-release to be taken at face value; to be many times repeated, almost word for word, by those who should know better.

As if their very survival were at stake, and the Earth might decide to collapse into a hole—leaving only a smudge where a hieroglyph used to be. As if disinfomation were a breastplate against death.
                                                                           
Occam wrote, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem," which translates as, "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." What else is this "Russian missile" if not an unnecessary "entity" that has been conjured out of the small amount of evidence at hand? As if this weren't enough, there are two "official" Russian versions of the cover story—that the "failed missile launch" did not exist, and then, later, that it did. Such "entities" would indeed appear to have "multiplied" beyond necessity.

People are always putting words in poor Occam's mouth, as well as claiming to have inherited his razor! But which side in the debate about the Norway Spiral would Occam actually be on? It always amazes me that supposedly "hard-headed" observers can somehow fail to take into account their own ontological fears; if the evidence does not add up in one's favor, then one has only to throw out bits and pieces until it does.

The “simplest explanation” is that we do not know what we are looking at, and that it falls outside of our current framework of “reality." To say as much, however, would be to justify the ways of the “big mind” to the “little mind”; it would be for the Ego to capitulate to Terror. It is we who are the innocent balloons! To defend against the pin invasion any slight-of-hand is justified.

Fate “took from our eyes the day of our return”—and thus no such day can be permitted to exist.

False analogies are productive; because they both involve "spirals," the Norway Spiral is "like" a failed missile launch. This is like saying that there is no difference between a sheet of notebook paper and an interstate highway, because they are both more or less "2-dimensional." One's opponents are by definition "flakey." If all else fails, one can always appeal to the God of the Hermetically Sealed Observer—which, in its role as both a "participant" and a "judge," is uniquely suited to place its thumb upon the scales.

Perhaps the Norway Spiral is a kind of "sky-art," an atmospheric version of a "crop circle," in which plasma is a substitute for wheat? No; no way; not a chance; don't even think about it! As you listen to my voice, you are getting very sleepy...Such things cannot "exist" because we know that such things are not "real." Because—well—Occam said so!

I am not at all convinced, however, that Occam would jump to dismiss the Norway Spiral as an "out of control rocket." Too often, these days, it is the conventional scientific explanations that fly in the face of common sense, and that are actually the screwiest and most implausible. My own sense is that certain "skeptical reductionist" elements have hijacked the once flexible concept of "Science"—keeping only the shell of the methodology of "Empiricism"; to which lip-service must be paid, after the manner of all orthodox religions. A true "Enlightenment" position would be one that argues in favor of open-ended inquiry; it would put Curiosity always at the forefront of its virtues.

We should not regard an explanation as the "simplest" simply because it corresponds to our existing system of beliefs. Conversely, we should not regard an explanation as "far-fetched" simply because it calls attention to the limits of our knowledge, and thus forces us to question everything that we believe ourselves to "know."

In New Age circles, almost everyone feels free to heap abuse upon the 18th century; as if a group of long dead explorers were responsible for our own outdated habits of perception, and for our failure to respond with focused intuition to the challenges that confront us. But Newton—who spent 40 years in the study of Alchemy and Kabbalah—was not as far from Blake as we imagine, or as Blake imagined then; stealth concealed the extent of his revolutionary impulse. Even now, perhaps, he continues to experiment with “spooky action at a distance,” as his followers attempt to imitate the blank perfection of his marble bust.

Newton did what he was able, as must we. Fixed laws must be once more set in motion. “Here is the Tropic of Cancer,” we will say, “and here is the Tropic of Capricorn—but how does the 3rd dimension intersect with the 8th?” Daring ourselves to conceptualize and to test a new 10D version of “longitude,” we must set forth on the sea of the 64 cube tetrahedron.

On the Dangerousness of the Zero/ Parts 3 and 4

By Brian George

 

3

With three quarters the Man rose upwards; one quarter remains here

“What was the original model, and what was the copy, and what was the connection between them?”—From “The Creation of the Sacrifice,” The Rig Veda

Among other things, Roger Scott wrote:

“Someone's first-hand experience can be taken with a grain of salt as concerns their 'interpretation(s) (of hard inter-dimensional data).

“When I asked for 'references', it wasn't for some self-reference. I could do that. I can ask any reader to refer back to something I wrote before and so make circular nonsense appear to be 'referenced'…

“Do better. Present a crystal-clear delineation of bare-bone FACTS!

“Right. We'll get meat-of-fact from fictional characters or maybe someone who's got an 'e-meter'…

“Imposing world on dream or vice versa: gonna lead to some problems…
“And as enunciated above: internal, self-referenced or hermetic certainty is nothing to the world at large.”

4

Let Indra the killer of Vrtra drink Soma in Saryanavat

“He is the navel of all that moves and is firm, who with his mind stretches the thread of the poet.”—From “The Hidden Agni”, The Rig Veda

“They forced up the fountain with their power; they split open even the mountain on its solid base. Blowing their reed-pipe, the Maruts who give fine gifts performed joyous deeds in the ecstasy of drinking Soma.” –From “The Maruts,” The Rig Veda

In responding to Roger Scott, I did not attempt to counter his “rational” arguments with similar arguments of my own; instead I incorporated many of his points and phrases into a mythological narrative, before presenting a brief description of the method behind the madness.

I wrote:

Hi Roger,

Pretty harsh, and surprisingly incurious for someone who is rumored to be a serious student of the Vedas.

In pursuit of the 1-inch hyperobject, and, at will, moving up or down into the shadow known as “History”, those yogic poets followed where their energy systems led. Speech was the technology that gave birth to each archetype. Their random moods prompted changes in the weather; their fears could easily be mistaken for an army, against whose numbers an “enemy” would be delegated to advance. They did not need eyes to see; their vision was omnidirectional. They would not have put their trust in the “good intentions” of the gods. They would have asked questions and demanded answers from them.

To them, seeing was not believing; for even a good memory played tricks. A day was 4,320,000 years long, and no act of conjuration was ever to be taken at face value. The 1 law: to breathe in and out. Nature was not other than the fossilized image of one’s body—that an alien presence had made somehow discontinuous. First-hand knowledge was of a world that one had made with one’s own hands.

Snares had been set. In spite of the hermetic certainty of the magicians, and in spite of their explosive focus, the spell cast by the powers of devolution grew. Some strange trick of perspective had occurred.

The Satya Yuga and all of its wonderworks were now written off as a “hoax.” Few remembered that to speak was to create.

The Vedic seers became as nothing to the world at large.

—But I digress. Possessed by the 1-inch hyberobject, my intoxication is such that I am ignorant of the year. You must educate me. Much thanks for drawing the 3-ring target on my head; for by striking it you will wound yourself. And so, my ritual counterpart, let us start again:

My goal in posting “The Invasion of the Bindu”—which is based on a short piece posted in September of last year on the forum for Daniel Pinchbeck’s “Absorbing Orbs”, and which was revised over the weekend in response to issues raised on the “Crop Circles; An Invitation” forum—was not to present a scientific argument or to provide you with  any “proof” of the phenomena that I describe; it was rather to call attention to the “direct experience” component of empiricism, which has long since been supplanted by the component of “objective observation.”

Let me say this very simply—I don’t believe that any amount of fact gathering is ever going to illuminate the mystery of crop circles, or open us to participation in the type of dialogue that is being offered. Without assistance from the lamp of intuition, and without the raw fuel of other-dimensional experience, the vehicle of abstract theory is not going to go anywhere at all. This is like the classic story of putting 10,000 monkeys in front of a row of typewriters, and waiting to see how long it will take them to come up with a version of “Hamlet” by banging on the keys at random. It is just not going to happen; or would, if possible at all, take longer than the amount of time left in the universe.

My objective in this, as in much of my work, is to speak directly to the deeper levels of the mind, to disorient and to provoke, and to challenge the reader to reconfigure the very structure of his/her thought. This, I believe, is also the objective of the actual makers of the circles, who are neither human hoaxers nor benevolent and/or evil aliens from a “different” part of the Milky Way—but rather something almost unimaginable from the “inside” of our present state of amnesia.

Once, an alien technology had coiled Soma in a cloud-mass; the life-force did not flow. Some regard this as the origin of the digestive system, or of the convolutions of the neo-cortex. We are what we ate. We are trapped within the factory to which we had herded other species. We must act, and yet even the most omniscient of our actions lead to death. As if planning for a war, the problems that we face are practical: by what means can we liberate our vision from the cloud-mass, and thus reconnect with the energy of the Zero?

Questions and answers go hand in hand. One leads the other, and the questions that we ask determine the answers that we get. We keep on asking questions—ad infinitum—for love means never having to say that you are sorry.

It is for this reason that we do not “see” or “hear”—or at least not like we used to; when, as resonant space, we gave birth to the gods.

Then we questioned the reliability of our omnidirectional senses, but, once having sorted through each atom of the evidence, we were just as happy to throw caution to the wind. We listened with wide-open ears. We did not hesitate to act upon our vision. Now, our eyes and ears have shrunk. One thought no longer fills immensity; false messengers stuff our heads with information. The more space we fill the fewer gigabites of memory are available. We do not always recognize that an answer is an answer.

Like a lightning bolt aimed at the dark bellies of the cloud-mass, a glyph can blast apart our conceptual obstructions. It must come from the “outside.” Through 8 overlapping worlds, flashing “in” and “down” from the circumference to the center, it will there imprint the map of its descent.

Quite suddenly, the “world” has stopped.

The world that is in front of you has stopped. Worlds continue to explode out of the back side of the mirror.

Do not attempt to adjust the settings on your television set.

For we control the Vertical. We control the Horizontal. But perhaps we faceless manipulators are not who or what we seem.

We may or may not have played both sides off against the middle. In the end, our “both/and” logic will prevail. What I have just said is true in a “manner of speaking”; it is one way to frame a fairly complex issue. Other tricksters may say otherwise.

Let us look once more at the following critique of my approach, which through the centuries has appeared in a long series of variations. The inventor of the Snare, once known as Vrtra, wrote: “I can ask any reader to refer back to something I wrote before and so make circular nonsense appear to be 'referenced.’” My reasoning may well seem circular, it is true; since the circles pose a non-linear challenge to the Psyche—one “gets them” or one does not; with all relevant details to be filled in later by some more transpersonal version of the Self.

In “Allogenes”, a manuscript from the Nag Hammadi Library, the author describes a kind of protean figure that can be understood only through his contradictions. Anonymous writes:

“He is superior to the Universals in his privation and unknowability. For he is not perfect but he is another thing that is superior…He is not corporeal. He is not incorporeal. He is not a number. He is not a creature. Nor is he something that exists…And he is much higher in beauty than all those that are good, and he is thus unknowable to all of them in every respect. And through them all he is in them all, not only as the occult knowledge that is proper to him. And he is united with the ignorance that sees him.”

It is not a question of raising one’s I.Q., or of meeting the most famous thinkers of one’s period at a seminar, or of finding the key to some lost theorem of Pythagoras, or of betting on the biggest dog.

For Darwin is dead, thus proving the Theory of Evolution wrong; he was unfit to survive. You will argue that I am not “playing fair.” Yet “I”, as well as “We”, am here; we have never ceased to live. We have put our shoulders to the wheel of Time; by stealth our energy has assassinated both Darwin and his opponents. Space does not need to be “created” by a god; it is the vacuum from whose geometry the past and future are projected.

We are going nowhere fast; even as we are not going anywhere at all. It is not a question of figuring out this or that; we must instead let go of our every preconception. The New Human will then improvise a new set of laws for Supernature, which every cosmonaut will be free to follow or to disregard, as he/ she chooses. This new/ old world will be almost infinite in its simplicity, and tactile; touch will be used to translate the most convoluted of archaic texts.

If there is any “end” that is imminent—and I do not dabble in linear speculations of this type—then I believe that this has to do with the completion of one particular stage in our growth, and with the breaking apart of the shell that has—for this period of 5200 or 12,000 or 26,000 years—protected us; even as it has blocked us from full access to our origins.

2) There is an excellent translation of the Rig Veda by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty. In the introduction she has a comment on the peculiar style of the Vedas that I immediately saw also as a description of my work. She writes:

“The hymns are meant to puzzle, to surprise, to trouble the mind; they are often just as puzzling in Sanskrit as they are in English. When the reader finds himself at a point where the sense is unclear (as long as the language is clear) let him use his head, as the Indian commentators used theirs; the gods love riddles, as the ancient sages knew, and those who would converse with the gods must learn to live with and thrive upon paradox and enigma.

“The riddles in the Rig Veda are particularly maddening because many of them are Looking Glass riddles (Why is a raven like a writing desk?): they do not have, nor are they meant to have, answers. They are not merely rhetorical, but are designed to present one half of a Socratic dialogue through which the reader becomes aware of the inadequacy of his certain knowledge.

“This deliberate obfuscation of issues that are in any case intrinsically unfathomable seems to add insult to injury; one feels that the hymns themselves are mischievous translations into a ‘foreign’ language. Like the Englishman who announced that he preferred English to all other languages because it was the only language in which one said the words in the order that one thought of them, one feels that the Rig Veda poets are not saying the words in the order that they thought of them, let alone the order that we would think of them.”

On the Dangerousness of the Zero/ Part 2



By Brian George

Signs of the Unseen

“You did the deeds of heroes in that ocean that has no beginning, no support, no handhold, when you Asvins carried Bhujyu home after he had climbed on board your ship that has a hundred oars.”—From “The Deeds of the Asvins”, The Rig Veda

Taken mostly from Janet Ossebard, here is a partial list of crop circle puzzles and anomalies—also known as “facts”:

“When a crop circle appears in a young crop, its seeds germinate and grow up to five times as slow as usual. When a crop circle appears in a ripe crop however, its seeds germinate and grow up to five times as fast as usual.”—J.O.

Snow melts immediately where a crop circle was months before, producing a “ghost” of the original design.

In the soil of many crop circles, up to 800 times the normal amount of magnetite can be found. The amount is no higher than normal just outside of the formations.

Crop circle plants are often “bundled” by their leaves, or twisted into complex basket-weave type patterns. This would not occur if the plants had been pressed down by a board.

“In some cases, the seed-heads of crop circle plants do not contain any seeds.”—J.O.

Many plants show blackened edges, where the seed-heads have been scorched and shrunk by heat.

Many genuine crop circles contain elongated and blown nodes, which appear to be the result of a brief, intense burst of heat. These are never found in man-made circles.

Heat and spiral movement can sometimes bundle plant shafts into balls—like the nests of field-mice—but with the bottom of the shafts still green and connected at the roots.

Nodes are sometimes bent into a horizontal curve, caused by cell manipulation along one side of the shafts. This cannot be reproduced by human hands; any attempt will cause the shafts to bend back or to break.

“Crop circle seeds show an extremely high secretion of free radicals.”—J.O.

Mysterious white powders have appeared in the counter-clockwise circles. Electron Dispersion Spectroscopy has shown some batches of this powder to be a compound of soda-lime-silicate—quite similar to ordinary glass—but which has been subjected to temperatures in excess of 3000 degrees. Lab analysis has shown another batch to be a copolymer of styrene and butylacrylate. Again, it had been subjected to high temperatures. The shape of the copolymer was completely unknown to science.

Crop circles have appeared during nights of driving rain, with no footprints leading to or from them through the muddy fields.

Many crop circles appear almost instantly. For example, on July 7, 1996, a large number of eyewitnesses, among whom were professional pilots, reported that the “Julia Set” crop circle appeared in a matter of minutes in a field outside of Stonehenge. This was a complex fractal spiral, made up of hundreds of smaller circles. It was not there at 17:30, and then was there at 18:00.

On the Dangerousness of the Zero/ Part 1

By Brian George

1
The dawn banners of the Asvins

“Yes! I will place the earth here, or perhaps there. Have I not drunk Soma?...I am huge, huge! flying to the cloud. Have I not drunk Soma? I am going—a well-stocked house, carrying the oblations to the gods. Have I not drunk Soma?”—From “The Soma Drinker Praises Himself,” The Rig Veda

In her essay “Crop Circles; An Invitation,” Amely Greeven describes and theorizes about her experience in Wiltshire, England, in the summer of 2009, where more than 70 complex crop circles appeared between April and the end of August—an average rate of one circle every two days. Among these was a 600-foot “Portuguese-man-of-war” jellyfish. To me, the scale and flawless complexity of these circles argued for their “other-than-human" creation, at least insofar as the word “human" is currently understood.

Occam’s Razor would reveal the simplest explanation; in this case, much evidence points to the very explanation that we are also the most reluctant to confront.

When the essay was posted on Reality Sandwich, I was amazed by the number of mechanical comments on the forum, and decided to play the role of “agent provocateur.”

Many “skeptical reductionists” dismissed the phenomenon of the circles out of hand; they argued, as is the custom with such thinkers, that the most wildly implausible of explanations was—of necessity—the most “scientific”; so long as one’s own habits were not called into doubt. True science should be subject to small tweaks, as well as open to the demands of a continuous revolution. Step by step, the laws of Nature can be modified, by word or paradigm-generating act, as they have been with each passing year. One universe is rolled off; another is rolled on. Slight-of-hand rules, and by far the great majority of our views are not formed by “objective” means. The “conventional wisdom” is a law unto itself; it yearns for the classical solidity of a world that never did exist.

Most often, these flat-earth proponents would explain that the mystery of crop circles had been long ago cleared up. Reasons ran the gamut from A to D, and then back again to A:

A) They had a friend who knew a guy who had met one of the circle makers.

B) It had been reported by the 5 large media conglomerates that this or that group of circle-makers had “confessed.”

C) The best reasoning by the biggest brains had been proven to be circular; nothing unreal can exist, and thus the phenomenon of the circles could not be other than a Hoax.

D) All of scientific theory from the time of the Renaissance would be wrong if such a thing as inter-dimensional artwork could exist.

Or variations on the above. For example, “InOurbrain” wrote, “The first crop circles appeared in 1966 and the creators of the circles eventually admitted crafting the hoax after recent tales of UFOs. Now that digital space/flight imaging is more affordable and graphing software is widespread, it’s amazing that these human and computer crafted pieces of art are thought of as anything more.”

In this comment, there is no trace of anything that might resemble a piece of evidence. Instead, the author imagines humans at their desks, chuckling to themselves as they perfect their ever more incomprehensible Pythagorean brain-teasers, and “wondering who will come up with the mythology to define them first.” To have launched such a 43 year transcontinental project, these Neo-Pagan technocrats would have to have been busy bees indeed.

Roger Scott, a passionate science teacher with often highly idiosyncratic views—and a thinker for whom I have a great deal of respect—argued that we have so far not accumulated enough “facts”, and that it was only a question of becoming more systematic in our approach. Science was not at all ill-equipped to interpret such a “mystery’; instead Science had not yet deployed the full arsenal of its methods. I could grant his point, and yet still ask, “Why?” With a phenomenon of such complexity and duration, one has to wonder what mainstream Science has been waiting for.

Based perhaps on her experience as a teacher of Vedanta, Amely argued for what I would call a “methodology of wonder.” This is the orientation to which Keats referred as a state of “negative capability”; the capacity to wait—to actively do nothing—and by waiting to remain open to many contradictory views.

She writes, “Try too hard to decode, translate, and semiotically read the symbols and you risk losing the essence of what they're about. A child, frankly, can understand the symbolism of the crop circles, because they trigger an instant experience. For example, looking at a perfect geometrical image, which is what many of the formations are, will deliver an instant understanding of something profound. At some universal level of reality, even if it's far below your chaotic reality, you know that everything is balanced and in the right order. You don't have to understand ‘how’ geometry works. You don't have to know the significance of twelve arms of the mandala versus ten. Like hearing notes in a tuneful chord, you immediately experience the harmony as a felt experience inside yourself when you see it depicted visually.”

There were few significant differences between Amely’s views and my own, and yet I decided that a more confrontational attitude was in order. The resulting tone of voice was one that my wife described as “mean,” as well as “self-important.” Perhaps, but that is neither here nor there; for this was a voice that I recognized as one belonging to my “Double.” It taunts me also, and probes the Body/Mind for flaws. As harsh as it is generous, it provokes me to confront the full extent of the unknown—from which I have come. It mocks my ignorance of the preexistent records, of the bad faith of the gods, of the Archimedean Point from which the circles are projected; it challenges me to adapt to the technology of the vacuum.

In many of my forum comments, I had put on the mask of a 432,000 year-old Trickster; who, although his native language was “Paradox,” was also fluent in the grammar of these geometric glyphs—a sub-dialect, say some, of the Music of the Spheres.

The circles spoke clearly; it was we who had refused to listen or respond. We would far prefer to be tortured on the Procrustean bed of the Psyche. It was easier to ignore any and all such ultimatums from the beyond. Quite oddly, I did believe that we knew exactly what we were looking at; we simply chose to pretend that we did not.

The mystery of the crop circles is not a problem to be solved; it is a boundary between the existent and the non-existent orders; a test that we must pass.

At the table of the Transparent Ones a chair is waiting for us to sit in it. Again, the archaic smile will return. The Great Year tunes its instruments. Again, we have been invited to join hands with the 12. We may go here or go there, and subject ourselves to any method of dismemberment; yet in each case, we are here—at the intersection of Hyperspace. From time out of mind, laws have dictated that we should see the world from only one direction. We must dare to remove to two hands from the clock. To see the world at once from all of 360 degrees would be to overthrow the atomic guardians of Duality.

(Illustration: Brian George, Head with lightning sphere, 2004)