What on earth are you babbling about when you say, “my infinite nature?!”

Before wrestling with the concept of an “infinite self,” it seems most appropriate first to say a few things about “infinity,” then to say a few things about “self,” and finally to put them together.

There is a famous story about a scientist giving a lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said:

“What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles turtles turtles, all the way down!”

For the purpose of our infinity, we can imagine the turtles going all the way up too. Why not? But we don’t need to imagine any gigantic space turtles for the sake of infinity when almost everyone as a little kid has learned to take delight in the crazy stuff that happens with two mirrors.

When I was a kid, my parents often took part in our little community theater. I remember hanging around the green room, that had mirrors on all the walls. I was amazed by the vast corridor of little Noahs stretching off into the distance on either side of the narrow room.

At the time it seemed plausible to me that somehow I could switch off and actually experience being one of my many mirror selves.

Of course in this picture there are only so many thumbs before they curve away into the mystical depths of the mirror world, but I’m sure your imagination can extend the concept indefinitely.

Not all mirrors give you an accurate reflection.

Some are distorted, so you can hardly even recognize yourself.

With that, I will segue into talking about the self.

Not all of the self is something we like owning up to. One of the most notable things about the human mind seems to be its ability to lie to itself.

There are straight people who just aren’t interested in hooking up with the same sex, but what of outspoken anti-gay crusaders?

Phenomena like GOP party member Larry Craig, a defender of anti-gay legislation getting busted for indecent conduct last month springs instantly to mind.

In research conducted by the American Psychological Association in 1995, penis engorgement was measured while homophobic men were exposed to gay porn and the data was compared to a non-homophobic control group.

The results were a perfect illustration of the mechanism by which people attribute the things they disown about themselves onto the world around them.

And what of the scientist in the 1950’s who exposed the secret sexual messages in the icecubes of this liquor add?

I guess I can kind of see it, if I squint just right, but I really wonder just how hard that man was searching for sex in the ice cubes.

Carl Jung called the disowned portion of the self, “the Shadow.”

People can commonly take the place of a mirror by responding to and returning our facial expressions, adopting our pet sayings, or merely by just naturally possessing qualities that we also possess, even if only acknowledged on a subconscious level.

When interacting with people, the more you are able to discern what is a reflection from what is truly external, the closer you are to being in touch with your true self.

The closer you are to scrubbing the grime off of your mirrors by allowing yourself to re-own the disenfranchised aspects of your personality; that is when you start to touch infinity.

Come together, over books.

I like to do a lot of reading. I’d like to give you an idea of some books that have recently served to stir around the soup inside my brain. I will do my best to share what it is about each book that has left an impact on me.

Hofstadter is a proponent of non-duality. This book endeavors to explore the nature of the thing that people call a “soul” or a “self” or simply “I.” To him, those words refer to the same thing, which is not made of a separate substance from the material world. Rather, it is something that emerges from the world of subatomic particles swirling about, bashing into one another without any clear cut boundaries. The interplay of symbols we know as “I” comes out of a process of making simplified representations of things that exist on the exterior of sufficiently complex nervous systems.

Hofstadter says that the “self” is an illusion, but although thinking of it as real involves a magical jump, it is an illusion that our exquisite gift of experiencing the world as an individual is dependent upon.

Integral theory is an operating platform for your brain. For those of you who haven’t read Wilbur, I dare you to give this work a try yourself. I found the IOS, or integral operating system, to be an amazing and deeply penetrating tool to sift through information overload.
Also a proponent of the awareness of our non-dual nature, Wilbur makes a case for the truths of the worlds “Perennial Philosophies.” Integral Spirituality, among other things, is one of the most poignant attempt to salvage what is good in them against the searing valid criticisms lumped against religion from modern and postmodern thinking.

I am currently in the process of reading the Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck. A deeply personal account of his process to make sense of a chaotic disintegrating world, he seems very confident that all signs are pointing to light on the horizon.

Drawing on just about everything from science and religion to ancient mythology and psychedelic experimentation, this book so far seems like quite a promising read.

Are you in the Manbox?

Are you in the man box?

I was at a Hot Mama’s pizza on capitol hill.

While I was inside enjoying my food, a guy who was hanging out with his rowdy group of friends handed me a bottle and told me, “You gotta put this shit on your pizza.”

It was some weird combination of olive oil and red pepper.  It sounded good, so I tried some.

“No no, dude.  Don’t be a pussy, just drench your pizza with it our else your not in the man box!”

I had to ask.  Apperantly this is a set of ways you must think and behave, or else you are not a man because you are not being “manbox.”

To get a sense, I started probing.

“If I wake up at 4 am completely hung over with a terrible headache and heartburn from drinking too much beer, and I go to my medicine cabinet to grab antacids, is that manbox?”

“Thats totally man box!”

“If I slap my girlfriend and say, ‘bitch, go in the kitchen and get me some pie,’ is that manbox?”

“Dude, only if you make her do it naked and wearing pumps.”

Appearantly being miserable is a requirement for the manbox as well.  I think I got the concept, so I asked him one last question.

“How about when I find myself naked in bed with four other men.  I go to jack off but I miss and end up getting the guy next to me.  Its okay though, because everybody reaches one over and we are all taken care of. Nobody looks one another in the eye, and nobody says ‘I love you.’  Is that still manbox?”

The guy got up out of his seat, with a vein buldging out of his forehead and screamed, “Thats fucking sick dude.  What the fuck are you doing in bed with four other guys!”

Screaming about how disgusting gayness is in a restaurant on capitol hill is not the best idea.  He and his friends were promply kicked off the premises.

Manbox has been a term that my friends now use to describe a certain dogmatic caricature of masculinity.

Outside of the cops and cowboys, soldiers and ninjas sort of ideal fantasy of what men are supposed to be, it seems to me that I am part of a generation of men that are struggling to find a concept of what real, honest to goodness men are supposed to be within the framework of an information hunter/gatherer society.

It is almost as if it is up to guys my age to start defining it and building it ourselves.

The John wayne Alpha male archetype doesn’t seem to be able to cut the mustard.  Look what happened the last time people decided that “manbox” is what we need:

New view

So here’s the story. Some of you may already know about fractals. To those who aren’t familiar, let me introduce you.

This here is a Romanesco broccoli. Its definitely the strangest thing I’ve seen in my life, as far as produce goes. Out of lack of a better word, I refer to each spiraling cone radiating from the broccoli as a node. If you were to cut off any node, and examine it, you would come to find that it contains the pattern of the entire broccoli. If you want to, you can take a Closer Look. The whole pattern being contained inside a small detail is what makes a fractal a fractal.

Heres another example, created by Joe Zazulak.

I hope you take a good moment to take in the detail. I find fractals to be mesmerising and beautiful. You can do a google image search and come across millions that are just as amazing if not more so.

If I were to use the broccoli as a metaphor for where I’m at right now, I feel like I’ve been focusing on a little node of my self, and that recently I’ve come to recognize it for what it is. Just a piece that’s contained in a much greater overarching whole. Now I am perceving the whole.

I thought I’d already made that switch before, but really what I mistook for the whole broccoli was actually just another slightly larger node. My perspective was so small that I didn’t quite notice that there was more to the whole I thought I was perceiving all of.

Of course, I thought I had done that before even that… but that time it was a really teeny tiny node I was starting from….

But enough with the irnoy.

When I considered myself to be a musician, it was how i intepreted my whole being. Now I realize it was something I contained within my being.

I used to think that happiness or sadness or sometimes anger defined me. Now I recognize that they are emotions that I possess, that I have them and I am not them.

I used to think that what I am is Noah, now I realize that what I am includes the identity of Noah. But it also trasncends that identity.

I plan on writing more blogs. Its been a while because I’ve gone through so many personal changes since I stepped outside of my country of origin and got to immerse myself in the international community while traveling.

Its taken me a while to incorporate all that I’ve learned, and now I feel ready to start sharing with the world.

I expect that my words should reflect the growth I’ve experienced. Stay tuned.

Something, or nothing?

Nothing? or Something?

Before I get going here, I would like to start off this post with a public service announcement:

Have you run the anti-virus scan on your living room?  Is there spam in your conversations?  Are there any unused items on your mental desktop?

Weed out the useless robotic patterns of “normality,” and actually start giving a shit about your real needs.

(lets hope i don’t get sued for using this image)

With that out of the way, there are a couple of concepts that I would like to tie together today.  I’d like to talk about physics, psychology, and most important of all, kids movies.

What kid in the western world didn’t grow up seeing the movie, The Never Ending Story?

In this movie, a ravenous force known as “the Nothing” rips the magical world of Fantasia apart at the seams.  The Nothing is fueled by one of the most abundant resources in the universe; a virulent silence of the imagination.  Where ever there used to be fantasies, the nothing rears its ugly lack of a head.

I wanted to find a visual aide to represent the Nothing, but if you look around you may discover that its a little difficult to symbolize and conceptualize such an elusive, ineffable thing as nothing.  I did an image search, but sadly it seems that all the pictures that came up were pictures of something, even if that something was only blackness.

If one has a hot cup of tea or coffee, and it is  left alone in a cold room, eventually the room will get a tiny bit warmer, but the drink will get much colder.  After the temperature of the room and the drink become the same, no more movement of heat is going to occur.  This state is known as entropy.

At one point, scientists thought that the big bang was like that cup of tea, and the cold blackness of the universe was like the cold room, and eventually all of existence would fizzle out into a state of maximal entropy or heat death.  In the end the Nothing would rear its ugly lack of a head.

The desperate search for objectivity in physics has traditionally involved stripping down things to their basic building blocks and forces in order to understand them and to remove all unnecessary superstition.   This stripping down, or reducing, is often called “reductionism.”

This view spread out from physics and eventually came to dominate in the realm of psychology.  If the brain is physical, lets destroy the concept of mind and break it down into the little itty bitty pieces, eh?

Here’s where the silliness comes in.  While people who spent their time thinking about the mind were taking this rigid, mechanical view of how we think and experience, something very confusing and surprising started to happen in the world of physics.

Thats where we start going down the rabit hole.

I’m  going to avoid talking about that strange and surprising twisty twirly confuseling thing and let you look it up yourself.  Maybe you could watch the movie, “What the Bleep Do We Know”  or perhaps you could read Wikipedia’s introduction to quantum physics and go from there, but there is way too much to cover.

But to summarize without going into details, the physicists have come to a point where it seems that the act of observing and perceiving the little pieces may cause them to take one configuration or another.  Like by peaking in and looking actively shapes the pieces.

Or another possible interpretation which is even stranger, is that wherever there is a variety of possibilities, they all exist as branches of parallel worlds that break off and separate from one another.

At this point a bunch of science guys start arguing about whether the nature of mind and perception actually alter and organize the tiny bits of things.

So back to entropy.  Entropy involves things being ordered and full of energy, and moving into a state of disarray, dispersed energy, etcetera.  In all closed, isolated systems, entropy tends to increase.  However, entropy can decrease in an open system, in which heat is being sucked in from a source outside of the system.

So it seems that life is negentropy.  It takes things and puts them into order, and creates heat.  As a matter of fact, the science guy from the quantum mechanics thing that pissed off a lot of the other science guys (including Einstein) with his interpretations wrote a book called, “what is life?”  He says that life is a system that sustains itsself by importing negative entropy.  His name is Erwin Schrodinger.

Schrodinger came up with this imaginary experiment about a cat. 

There is a 50/50 chance that some decaying radioactive isotopes will cause the hammer to burst the bottle of poisonous gas.  So when you measure the subatomic particles your observation is either killing or rescuing the cat.

This is at the center of our physical existance 

This is at the center of the milky way galaxy

The onslaught of the nothing is indeed endless, but it is nothing compared to our power to create with our imagination.

Do with it as thou wilt.