So with novels like The Armistan Chronicles and Database Divine under my belt, I could one day be considered an author who passionately defends less-than-mainstream topics and interests.
And the novel I have planned after this current one will certainly fit this category.
The novel's entitled Skunk Ape Semester, and will examine the trials associated with the field of Cryptozoology, better known as the study of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and other large marvels of nature still hidden in the questionable buffer zone between legend and reality. The title refers to the noisome Bigfoot counterpart said to inhabit the remote swamplands of Florida, but though this creature forms the Ahab-Whale axis of the story, the book will examine several other mysterious animals as well as the cryptozoological field as a whole - its history, its successes, its failures, and the many obstacles it faces in the attempt to get full attention from mainstream science.
Anyway, just as I never would have been able to write The Armistan Chronicles without having been involved in an independent videogame project, so too am I not going to write something like SAS without the proper experience informing the finer points of the story's focus. Thus, I have contacted the non-profit organization CryptoSafari and will hopefully be able to accompany them on field outings, small expeditions, or at least meet with them for interviews and a bit of personal show and tell.
If that can't be done, well, I've read literature aplenty about Bigfoot's most frequented haunts, from Texas to Alaska. Maybe I can watch for him myself :-)
(By the way, the famous Patterson-Grimlin footage from 1967, largely considered a hoax, has in fact never been proven to be a hoax. Of all the people who have stepped forward to claim their 15 minutes and say they were the person who either made or occupied the "costume", not a single one has been able to replicate it, or even point to where the original costume is. Hoaxing can work two ways, and it's unfortunate that liars who claim something was a hoax aren't nearly as closely scrutinized for their claims as the ones who put out the story to begin with).
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
God 'n Stuff
One thing about Western culture that nags at me is the prominence of the two extremes of belief. Just as you've either got to be a Democrat or Republican, so it seems that you've either gotta be a fundamentalist who believes in fairy tales, or a hard-nosed atheist who believes everything we see in the material world is, well, everything.
Granted, there are plenty who occupy the spiritual middle ground (myself included), but they seldom have a voice comparable to the Richard Dawkins or Sean Hannitys of the never-ending debate. Deepak Chopra is the only name I can currently conjure up whose work is respected and moderately well-recognized.
I believe the problem with the whole debate - at least as it's presented in mainstream media and literature - is that it centers around a very archaic view of God: a separate supernatural entity who created us, then moved away to watch over and ultimately judge us. This is a very antiquated theistic notion, and one that is pointless for the religious to defend and for the atheists to attack.
Ironically enough, I believe George Carlin, during one of his famous (or infamous, depending on your take) rants on religion, hit the nail on the head: "I believe we're part of a greater wisdom than we'll ever understand, a big electron that doesn't punish, doesn't reward. It just is." Similarly, Chopra had this to say on God: "God is a field of consciousness that allows for maximum diversity ranging from the divine to the diabolical....[and is] the infinite organizing principle of Nature."
The subject of non-local communication between even the most infinitesimal components of the physical world has been observed and recorded by science, thanks to the age of quantum physics. Cells, photons, and all the other building blocks of us and the world we inhabit share a synchronized matrix of information and communication that sponsor the flourish of life. This is observable not just in labs but in your own backyard. Somehow, everything in our body is communicating - otherwise we'd all just collapse in a random unkempt heap.
Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion" (guess to which extreme he belongs), once said in a debate with Christian scientist Francis Collins something to the effect of, "Why would God sit around for another billion years before taking the next step of evolution?" Obviously, he was referring to the trial and error process of evolution as proof that Nature had no idea what it was doing.
Back up a second. The first problem with asking something like this is that it rashly assumes God is confined to living in the linear constraints of Time. In some ways I believe this to be true (for I believe the "force", if you will, is apparent in everyone and everything, from rabid dogs to Mother Teresa), but think back to the quantum mechanics notion that all things are inherently everything until they are observed, taken in by the subjective nature of a single consciousness. That means that duality doesn't exist except as pure potential, and "pure potential" is just a euphemism for "spiritual domain." Time and space do not exist outside of this dimension, so in essence, a billion years is meaningless: God created the Universe in the blink of an eye, over billions of years. It's both. It is not one or the other. Right and wrong, hot and cold, up, down, left and right all come from the same singularity, the same non-duality, and are thus One, as is everything else.
Another issue is assuming there was a plan for evolution. There was no plan except for the cosmos to experience itself evolving from the low to the high, inevitably returning to the singularity. The Universe isn't going to force itself on itself. Non-local intelligence generated life to be experienced through local consciousness, and non-local "design" responds to the actions taken by species of local consciousness. This means that if, let's say, octopuses had for whatever reason pursued a different evolutionary path that had taken them en route to intelligence, then we'd be sharing the planet with them, or, we'd still be swinging through trees while they drove SUVs and made closing statements to juries of other octopuses. The point is, God is one with Life, and Life is free to meander, wander, explore at will. If it wants to not develop for a billion years, then it won't. Time doesn't matter anyway, as I've stated. In the non-local realm, past, present and future exist simultaneously, as a single potential - just like the rest of all things pertaining to probability.
Our bodies all came from pure potential, as do our thoughts. Quickly, think of a giant green rabbit. Now where did that image come from? Sure, your neurons strung it together for you upon my command, but where did they get the information? Brain functions are physical, but the very impetus of these functions is not. The brain draws from the pure potential of the nothingness and the everythingness from which we came, and to which we will ultimately return.
Now, why is all this going on? What's the point? Quite simply, it'd be boring to be a timeless singularity, wouldn't you say? "This" got bored, so it created a "That" so it could have something to relate to. But it didn't stop there...it created many "this's" and "thats" so that it may develop and define itself over and over. God has to keep itself occupied somehow.
Regarding consciousness: I read a brilliant analogy recently comparing our bodies to a TV. When you turn the TV off, do the programs stop? No. All the information continues to transmit, just not through your particular instrument because it was shut off, or because it broke. Likewise, consciousness is the field of knowing that becomes localized in a body when we're born, and is released back to said field after our instruments are shut off.
Granted, there are plenty who occupy the spiritual middle ground (myself included), but they seldom have a voice comparable to the Richard Dawkins or Sean Hannitys of the never-ending debate. Deepak Chopra is the only name I can currently conjure up whose work is respected and moderately well-recognized.
I believe the problem with the whole debate - at least as it's presented in mainstream media and literature - is that it centers around a very archaic view of God: a separate supernatural entity who created us, then moved away to watch over and ultimately judge us. This is a very antiquated theistic notion, and one that is pointless for the religious to defend and for the atheists to attack.
Ironically enough, I believe George Carlin, during one of his famous (or infamous, depending on your take) rants on religion, hit the nail on the head: "I believe we're part of a greater wisdom than we'll ever understand, a big electron that doesn't punish, doesn't reward. It just is." Similarly, Chopra had this to say on God: "God is a field of consciousness that allows for maximum diversity ranging from the divine to the diabolical....[and is] the infinite organizing principle of Nature."
The subject of non-local communication between even the most infinitesimal components of the physical world has been observed and recorded by science, thanks to the age of quantum physics. Cells, photons, and all the other building blocks of us and the world we inhabit share a synchronized matrix of information and communication that sponsor the flourish of life. This is observable not just in labs but in your own backyard. Somehow, everything in our body is communicating - otherwise we'd all just collapse in a random unkempt heap.
Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion" (guess to which extreme he belongs), once said in a debate with Christian scientist Francis Collins something to the effect of, "Why would God sit around for another billion years before taking the next step of evolution?" Obviously, he was referring to the trial and error process of evolution as proof that Nature had no idea what it was doing.
Back up a second. The first problem with asking something like this is that it rashly assumes God is confined to living in the linear constraints of Time. In some ways I believe this to be true (for I believe the "force", if you will, is apparent in everyone and everything, from rabid dogs to Mother Teresa), but think back to the quantum mechanics notion that all things are inherently everything until they are observed, taken in by the subjective nature of a single consciousness. That means that duality doesn't exist except as pure potential, and "pure potential" is just a euphemism for "spiritual domain." Time and space do not exist outside of this dimension, so in essence, a billion years is meaningless: God created the Universe in the blink of an eye, over billions of years. It's both. It is not one or the other. Right and wrong, hot and cold, up, down, left and right all come from the same singularity, the same non-duality, and are thus One, as is everything else.
Another issue is assuming there was a plan for evolution. There was no plan except for the cosmos to experience itself evolving from the low to the high, inevitably returning to the singularity. The Universe isn't going to force itself on itself. Non-local intelligence generated life to be experienced through local consciousness, and non-local "design" responds to the actions taken by species of local consciousness. This means that if, let's say, octopuses had for whatever reason pursued a different evolutionary path that had taken them en route to intelligence, then we'd be sharing the planet with them, or, we'd still be swinging through trees while they drove SUVs and made closing statements to juries of other octopuses. The point is, God is one with Life, and Life is free to meander, wander, explore at will. If it wants to not develop for a billion years, then it won't. Time doesn't matter anyway, as I've stated. In the non-local realm, past, present and future exist simultaneously, as a single potential - just like the rest of all things pertaining to probability.
Our bodies all came from pure potential, as do our thoughts. Quickly, think of a giant green rabbit. Now where did that image come from? Sure, your neurons strung it together for you upon my command, but where did they get the information? Brain functions are physical, but the very impetus of these functions is not. The brain draws from the pure potential of the nothingness and the everythingness from which we came, and to which we will ultimately return.
Now, why is all this going on? What's the point? Quite simply, it'd be boring to be a timeless singularity, wouldn't you say? "This" got bored, so it created a "That" so it could have something to relate to. But it didn't stop there...it created many "this's" and "thats" so that it may develop and define itself over and over. God has to keep itself occupied somehow.
Regarding consciousness: I read a brilliant analogy recently comparing our bodies to a TV. When you turn the TV off, do the programs stop? No. All the information continues to transmit, just not through your particular instrument because it was shut off, or because it broke. Likewise, consciousness is the field of knowing that becomes localized in a body when we're born, and is released back to said field after our instruments are shut off.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Little Babblin'
Enlightenment is constant intercourse with the Universe.
For those that believe they are not "complete" without a "soulmate": you are already complete. All you need to do is realize it, and celebrate your utter completeness with every one and every thing. There is more to experience than the dick or the vagina.
This same message can be applied to people who can't have a good time without their significant other being present. Treat everyone as a significant other. If you don't believe they are, however, then they won't be. Just know it. Reliance on anyone else in this world for peace and happiness is never a good idea, in any case, from the young couple in a sextastic relationship to the golden oldies celebrating their 50th anniversary.
Ultimately, that comes from you. Unless it doesn't.
For those that believe they are not "complete" without a "soulmate": you are already complete. All you need to do is realize it, and celebrate your utter completeness with every one and every thing. There is more to experience than the dick or the vagina.
This same message can be applied to people who can't have a good time without their significant other being present. Treat everyone as a significant other. If you don't believe they are, however, then they won't be. Just know it. Reliance on anyone else in this world for peace and happiness is never a good idea, in any case, from the young couple in a sextastic relationship to the golden oldies celebrating their 50th anniversary.
Ultimately, that comes from you. Unless it doesn't.
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