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He sleeps for a couple hours, then sits up for a few minutes, eyes closed--gathering strength--then stretches on his way to the food bowl, then back again to the cushion beside the radiator. I'm not complaining, mind you, by no means; I enjoy his company. I don't expect him to get a job washing dishes or logging or anything. Maybe I just notice because he seems to be emulating me. Could I be a bad influence? Is it a mutual thing? He doesn't drink beer, I guess that'll be next.

A couple of bums hanging out in the woods watching TV. Winter in the Northwest.

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We were anchored behind the Pribilofs, weathering a storm. My fishing partner, Brian, had only one pair of reading glasses, which he needed. Those little X's on the charts stand for rocks, of which there are many in the Aleutians, so you want to be able to see them. While playing chess and drinking coffee, occasionally checking the anchor, we talked about how important his glasses were, not only to him personally, but also to the operation. In that atmosphere, as far as conversation goes, your mind tends to stay in the immediate locale; the rest of the world might as well not exist.

Here's the deal: We were a good fifteen hundred miles from civilization where you could get a new prescription as the crow flies. And we wouldn't be flying. To get to the closest place, we'd have to cut across the Bering, through the Pass, and then up 800 miles to Kodiak, where we might get another pair. So, their value was clearly in their irreplaceability, not in their monetary worth. That's why Brian handled them with such exaggerated care, as you should with anything irreplaceable.

Stewart Helfrich was another fishing partner of mine. We could put out miles of longline gear without having to say a word, once in a while we'd point, that was all. Smooth as glass, no hitches, problems fixed as they came up. I can't think of anyone else who I clicked with so well. Ward Kilham, building boats together, might be another. One of the tricks, I think, for it to work is that neither one presumes to be the boss. Two equals, equal skill and knowledge and smarts, working together. No pretensions. No one trying to out-will-power the other. Acceptance and assertion, at the same time.

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He was a math professor, taught at the nearby university, stayed home to work in his garden during the summers, never went to bars or restaurants, and only once in a blue moon could be found at a museum or gallery opening. Except for his students, with whom he felt most confident, being around others stressed him out, crowds caused severe anxiety and palpitations. Usually hovering somewhere between circumspect and paranoid, he feared displeasing by doing the wrong thing. He remained apart from his neighbors, never attending parties or get-togethers, not even at Thanksgiving or Christmas. He had no friends, only colleagues, preferring instead to spend time at home engrossed in some personal project, hanging out with his cat, Dominoe.

Maudlin was his middle name; chagrin his disposition. Although ordinarily attributing the nightmares to forebodings of doom, on more lucid days he saw them as either images of archetypes emerging from his unconscious, or memories long forgotten and unwilling to come forward, depending. Moreover, his preoccupation with practically every field under the sun seemed to evoke a nagging sense of abandonment, as though the two were somehow connected.

However, Jeremiah Zad was about to step beyond himself into a world he couldn't imagine; the source of his mysterious nightmares revealed.

CONTINUED...

Earth Only?
It's estimated, by professional estimators, that there are more stars with planets around them--solar systems--in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth combined. And yet, there is no shortage of people who actually believe that Earth is the only place where life exists. [Most of these people belong to the Republican Party.] Reactionary myopia verses progressive open-mindedness. Right wing narcissism verses left wing tolerance. I sit here trying to think of a witty comment, but, knowing a few people who believe not only that the Earth is the center of all life, but also that it's only 6,000 years old, I'm at a loss. What do you say to such people? Where lies the overlap of a mutual understanding of reality? What can you talk about, other than ordinary personal stuff?

According to their convictions, the Stone Age of ten thousand years ago never happened. And the dinosuars lived some time within the last 6,000 years. Apparently, they see 6,000 years as being a v e r y l o n g time indeed. So, forget paleontology, geology, archeology, cosmology, astronomy, physics (the half-life of what is 50,000 years?), just about any field you can think of. Forget the teachers and field workers, forget the fact that all these disparate areas of knowledge dovetail like a giant jigsaw puzzle of the mind, coalesce into one whole dynamic picture. Poof! Gone. No need to worry about it. It doesn't exist except in the minds of the ignorant, the countless hundreds of millions of ignorant, and throw away the hundreds of millions of books that talk about such nonsense to boot. A very simple reality, uncluttered by rational thought and common sense.

These are the people running the country, affecting our lives. Shades of the Holy Roman Empire, the Inquisition, the Dark Ages, the Nazi book burning craze, the Chinese so-called Cultural Revolution (irony of ironies), the Sovietization of indigenous cultures and suppression of intellectuals -- the list extends in every quarter. A struggle has been going on since the beginning, a fight that's won only in tiny pitched battles here and there.

Self-righteous ignorance and denial of reality. The cause of all evil befalling humanity. The source of hatred and cruelty and bigotry and selfishness and greed. A refusal to imagine a world of sense and genuine purpose. With all peoples working together towards a common goal -- survival. Not of the fittest or the best adapted, but of the human race itself. Each of us needs to choose a side.

"For what, in the final analysis, is morality but the command of conscience seasoned by a rational examination of consequences?"
-- from The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson

Click on image for larger version.

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Click on picture for larger version.

In the picture, the yellow dots respresent known satellites, the red indicate predicted faint satellites, and the blue, predicted dark satellites. The cone is the area surveyed by the Sloan telescope, our galaxy is just off to the left of its apex.

For animated versions of the diagram in this article, including a 3-D tour of the Milky Way, visit: scientificamerican.com/oct2011/blitz.

In the same edition there's an article on the Higgs boson. Here's a quote by Fermilab theoretical physicist, Bob Tschirhart, I thought was interesting: "There's a layer of existence out there we haven't discovered." Really. Physicists speculate on what is referred to as an "energy desert" existing between the realm they are able to probe now and the realm of new physics on the other side. As well, they speak of other levels of reality. If we include the current theorizing on the underlying nature of space and time, science seems to be on the verge of discovering worlds that have only been imagined in the contexts of science fiction and magic.

Within the fields of cosmology, astronomy, and particle physics, in particular, a major upheaval in the universe of thought concerning the nature of everything is in the offing. Accordingly, the ingredients we have assumed necessary for life to exist may not be all that necessary. The cosmic web coughs up its mysteries through application of our cognitive faculties. But on the other hand, our humanity limits us in our perception and cognition, how we filter and interpret reality. In so doing, we humanize all around us. In that respect, we are still geocentric, still trying to project and impose our understanding of how things work onto the rest of the universe. The Copernican revolution has not yet come to an end.

Live long and prosper.

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"Humanity coevolved with the rest of life on this particular planet; other worlds are not in our genes."

-- from The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson

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I went to ANCESTRY.COM and discovered that my great, great, great granduncle had been a bank robber in Texas. He was caught and given a 30-year prison sentence. While trying to escape, however, he killed two guards, and shortly afterwards -- it was Texas -- was hung by the neck until dead.

Who knew? My uncle, the bank robber. How romantic.

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The World of Charles R. Knight

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CONTINUED...

It just might be true that human beings are composites of all other living creatures, flora and fauna.

Forty years ago I started looking at things in opposite ways in an effort to see if blending those opposite perspectives would reveal an inner commonality, and their synthesis force a new, higher-ordered reality. Being mathematically inclined, I first considered the idea of a geometric point, a given in Euclidean geometry, as an empty--zero-dimension?--and less than helpful fabrication. Instead, what we call a point I redefined as an intersection of a finite and fundamental subset of lines--a basis--each one standing for a separate aspect or point-of-view. We thereby jump from a zero-dimensional point to an infinite set of intersecting one-D lines. And then there was string theory.

Hence, my assertion that we each need to contact our inner platypus and cease trying to find our heads. We may actually be everything else, and our pointy heads just a fabrication.

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Life is not a non-sequitor. Life is not something planted here. Life is not an intruder. It's indigenous, ingrained, innate, the inner psyche reverberating through all the Earth's living parts. If every creature on the face of the Earth--flora and fauna--were to suddenly and mysteriously vanish, the Earth would regenerate itself. It embodies life as a fundamental principle and characteristic of its restless and creative nature. The entire solar system operates as one grand nursery. The sun; the outer planets, protecting the Earth from falling debris; our place in the galaxy, everything works to bring about life growing through the Earth. And we are not separate from it even if we wanted to be. Our principle identity is that of something grown by the Earth, an earthling. We are not, therefore, a special creation. Humanity operates under the presumption that to plunder the Earth and devastate its other creatures, without knowing much about their roles or what benefit they may be medicinally, won't come back to bite us. There is no evidence to warrant that belief. We are disconnected from the Earth. We don't know our place, we don't know what we're supposed to be doing.

But one thing is for certain, the Earth presses towards symmetry, balance, and when things have gotten too far out of hand in the past, it's taken all the clay, rolled it up into a big ball, and started all over again; altering its expression, stripping away the old, setting the stage for a whole new order; same story, new characters; same symphony, different orchestra. The Earth has its own agenda. Asymmetry is the natural proclivity of evolution and the consequence of Earth's motility and dynamism. But symmetry is the aspiration, the energy siphoned from surroundings, channeled and organized, the counterpoint to entropy and asymmetry. Symmetries of wholes--individual organisms, ecosystems, hierarchies, natural orders--are continually being worked towards. And while such is sustained, we have the semblance of stability and equilibrium.

But Life exists on the edge of chaos, far from equilibrium. It resides in that irresistible asymmetric pulse; the balance achieved is in the realm of wholes. The asymmetric pulse breaks the symmetry, forging a new direction for the whole, a revised adaption to environmental pressures. Evolution, both of living things and the Earth-Solar system, is unstoppable and relentless; change inevitably occurs, a threshold crossed. Individual asymmetries within a system co-evolve. If this web of niches is healthy, the whole transforms in a mutually beneficial way, integrated functionality moving forward along interdependent trajectories in time and space.

Drastic change affecting all might come in the form of a one-time event, like an asteroid or volcanic eruption, or a sudden shift as the result of tiny alterations here and there gradually building-up over eons in a subtle, nonlinear, interdependent way, eventually reaching a critical state. And between wholes, a tectonic arrangement demarks the play of order and disorder at the fault lines, the boundaries. But when ill health, decay, or overwhelming environmental circumstances prevail, a system, regardless of scale, destabilizes, disintegrates, and implodes or locks-up and stagnates, resulting in terminal breakdown for each individual component composing it. This finality is an extinction event.

It's how the Earth carries on, given the principles of nature for which it stands, and it does it well. The Earth is both source and conduit of life-force. And despite humanity's stubborn arrogance, it functions independently of our wishes and desires.

The Earth grew us, that's where our primary allegiance lies. We are obligated by ties that run deep. Caring about the Earth is what we're supposed to be doing; elsewise, it might stop caring about us. It might see us as a dangerous infestation that needs to be eradicated, for the good of the whole, or beyond that, it might simply roll up the whole ball of clay and start all over again. That act of cleaning the slate may already be in the works, deceptively slow and randomly piecemeal, but we're too busy killing one another and trashing the planet to notice.

I was going to say the Earth corrects towards balance, but that's engineering terminology. It infers or connotes something mechanical going on. But the Earth doesn't react mechanically; its being lies in the act of continuous action. Hence, the energy--the mysterious life-force--needed as input, to be applied towards physical manifestation, as a sculptor would, from the tiniest molecules on up, to produce and maintain the vast complex of earthly biodiversity, the variety of dissipative systems we call living organisms.

A feedback loop inextricably links the biosphere with the rest of the Earth-Solar complex, negative feedback in counterpoint with positive amplification. Cyanobacteria generated enough oxygen to bed raw iron and thereafter allow for the emergence of animals. Were animal designs in the playbook from the very beginning? Preordained? Just because there was a higher percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere 600 million years ago, did that, combined with other conditions, mandate the rise of animals? Evolution is not blindly charging forward willy-nilly in all directions at once, hoping something will stick. Were beings capable of self-awareness purposefully grown by the Earth so it may know itself? Is that life's drive and direction? Conditions and circumstances set the stage, amplification homes in on its expression, a resonance in biospace traces a schematic, draws manifestation from available units, builds a hierarchy of regulation and modification--a chord is struck whose origin predates its supporting circumstances.

What came first, the gene or its expression?

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Luncheon of the Boating Party

Pierre-August Renoir

The Phillips Collection
[History and 'Who's Who' in the painting.]

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The Real number equals the parent group equals the wavefunction. On deeper levels, reality begins to run into itself; the boundaries, ficticious and provisional to begin with, lose their rigid certainty and, at first, become porous. Deeper still, the superficial differences melt away. Could that be a basic principle of life as well as of mathematics?

"The domain of species are invariant subsets and there are partitions of these sets that define genera, families, and so on, corresponding to hierarchically related invariant subsets."
From: How The Leopard Changed Its Spots, page 113, by Brian Goodwin.

The seed was an evolutionary breakthrough, supplanting the one-dimensional spore. The instructions for growth and survival are self-contained. The seed can be blown far from the mother plant or tree and survive for decades before taking root. This occurred at the end of the Devonian period, around 354 million years ago. Many plant groups and growth forms appeared rapidly at this time, referred to as the "Devonian Explosion." A major breakthrough. Flowering plants appeared around 125 million years ago and quickly spread across the planet. And let us not forget the incredible egg, when and how it came about perplexed Aristotle and every major thinker up to the present. The HOX genes, which regulate development by cascading instructions to other genes downstream, telling them not only what to do but, more importantly, when and how long to do it were a major breakthrough. And, of course, where would we be without the fortuitous leap from the prokaryotic to the eukaryotic cell? Sexuality itself arose as a means to an end about 1.1 billion years ago. Where would we be without that?

There have been many such breakthroughs--innovations--as evolution has turned, twisted and leapt its way along. Based on existing circumstances at the time, none could have been predicted. So, how did they come about? What was the generative force? Was an actual decision made? A new way of doing business ascertained, conceptualized, and put into play biochemically? First a design, then its reflection in material space. But why? The Earth could've gotten along just fine with only microbes and colonies of such. Why bother to expand on life? And where does the inspiration to jump to the next level of complexity come from? If it was not possible from the beginning, if life had gone down a deadend, development- and evolution-wise, would life had ground to a standtill? If evolution is not an innate characteristic of living systems, then what is the driving force behind complexity?

The Earth and life-forms dance together. Life-forms alter the Earth, including, significantly, the atmosphere, and in turn, the Earth creates opportunities for life that didn't previously exist. Taking the long view back in time, the breakthroughs played a critical role. They were not mere blips on a continuous string of cause-effect functionality. It's as though they were preset threshold events that simply had to happen.

Evolution, as a principle of nature, adapting to punctuations due to cataclysms, guides life along a chain of events, poised to take advantage of any empty biospace, spontaneously forming interconnections which, in themselves, expand on life geometrically. How does it know to do that? And by what method? What's the procedure? What does it do first?

I am not a creationist or intelligent designer. Nonetheless, I can't shake the feeling that evolution is intimately intertwined with an inner intelligence beyond our capacity to grasp. I don't know; it just seems to have to be that way.

"If we could change our psychic apparatus and should then discover that the world around us was changing, this would constitute for us the proof of the dependence of the properties of space upon the properties of consciousness."

"Why seek the miraculous and supernatural beyond life?"

From Tertium Organum by P. D. Ouspensky

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Cordova, Alaska
My home for six years when I was a fisherman.

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It was against the law for anyone to go without at least one good meal every day. Hunger was abolished. Pharmaceutical companies were ordered to research the worst diseases of humanity. They were no longer to waste time and money on lifestyle drugs, health became the priority. Big-city gang members, not only well-known by the police, but also not terribly secretive when it comes to advertising their gang affiliations, were rounded up worldwide, taken to their respective countryside, shot, then buried in mass, unmarked graves. This radical exercise worked to discourage future gang formation. The killing of animals for sport or profit, especially those on the brink of extinction, and the abuse of domestic animals was punishable by death; euthanasia, it was called. A moratorium was placed on all logging endeavors, no matter how small. Habitat loss was considered particularly heinous, its contributors were summarily executed. The ecosystem as a whole-unto-itself suffered from a bottom-up perspective. Procedures and protocols were put in place to correct the situation. Bureaucracy transformed almost overnight into a system impressed with fresh conduits of information transfer, social engrams that superseded previously ingrained manners of thinking and behaving.

Polluters of air and water were forced to breathe and drink the poisons they dumped into the environment; the worst corporate offenders were simply shut down; the days of the token fine were over. Recalcitrant leaders of industries deemed detrimental to the health and well-being of society were put to death on public television. This seemed to encourage others to clean up their act.

After it was discovered that poor nutrition--the result of toxically tainted food caused by irrigation with polluted water--was the main cause of cancer, heart and liver problems, brain tumors, and serious mental disorders--those that inevitably lead to violence--the quality of water became the highest of priorities. When the social ramifications of continued neglect of this life-sustaining resource--like war--were demonstratively realized, technologies to purify and protect it rapidly developed.

He instituted other controls as well, and everyone did as he requested; he was that charming and persuasive. It should be noted, however, that his people back on Xulcatur in the Andromeda Galaxy have the capacity to rearrange the interconnections of synapses in the brains and hence minds of lower-ordered sentients. During the Golden Age of exploration, his race had recourse to use this ability on many confused, ignorant, and volatile populations in order to gain cooperation, for their own good. On Earth, he applied this talent to its fullest potential, greatly enhancing his persuasiveness.

As well, his race had long since gone through its adolescent stage, past middle adulthood, and into the space of genuine understanding. Life, to them, was to be lived and enjoyed for its own sake, and this level of appreciation was to be spread around and the importance of the message instilled from birth. The inclination and predisposition for strickly self-centered action that denied the inherent value of others--sociopathy--had been neutralized over successive generations by natural selection. Like a tree across the road, advanced common sense prevented preying on, exploiting or bullying others in much the same way that a normal person would balk at deliberately dropping a heavy object on his foot. Only a moron would do something like that; consequently, morons were systematically eliminated from the gene pool.

It was his intention to do the same here, on Earth. Everybody with a brain in his head agreed.

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Believing in self isn't important; at least not as important as seeing reality. Not daring to do anything or even think outside the lines--restrictions that exist soley in one's head--yet trying to perpetuate and project the image of a free spirit can lead only to doubt, confusion, and chaos. You can go out to sea and be totally open and fearless, competent and confident, yet not be able to assert the meaning of your life, the intangibles; ready and willing to go to any degree to protect that which is irreplaceable.

The mind-set of holding on to what you got is a defensive posture that's doomed to collapse in failure and loss. Restraint due to fear of consequences of actions and words spoken when in defense of that which and whom we love can only come back to bite us on the ass. We know in our minds and hearts what we need to do, what's right and what's wrong; we gain nothing by holding back when it matters. I don't mean you should tell your landlord off and get thrown out on the street; the buoyant feeling of righteousness will only last so long, then the hard cold practical reality will kick in. No, nothing so stupid and irresponsible, and, I must say, petty and meaningless.

I'm referring to self-respect, valuing your life. The kind of self-respect that can only be realized and find fertile ground to grow when respecting others. Being a gentleman is a cultured discipline the instinct for which should come naturally. It has to do with maturity, consideration, and the appreciation for a certain quality and aesthetic of life. Being as smart as you're able in a clear, sober, unobtrusive way can open the door to fearlessness and freedom. To respect our highest intelligence is an affirmation of the best that's in us. And by so doing, the state of mutual respect--communion--becomes more important than our separate selves.

Caveat: Of course, if you're being treated with disrespect and contempt--or worse--by someone, you're under no obligation to strive for or honor said communion.

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I was sitting on the back deck of a boat, anchored somewhere in the northern part of Prince William Sound, Alaska. It was summer, July, the air was crisp, due mostly to the abundance of glaciers and small icebergs floating about, and incredibly clean. I was sitting on the hatch-cover looking out at the beaches, the glaciers, and the incredible Chugach Mountains all around. Because the northern part is all fiords, it can be sixty feet or more right up against the beach, the trees hanging over and growing up the slope. Jerry, my good friend, and I were smoking a joint and drinking coffee. It was quiet, an occasional seagull is all. We smoked and sipped and listened in silence as we slowly woke to the day, feeling the sun on our skin. God, how I miss that. The freedom, the beauty, the down-to-earth reality of it.

I could've lived my life behind a desk working for some corporation; I'd be much better off now, for certain. However, when the devil comes for me at the end of my days, I'd rather remember times like that with Jerry than anguish over all the coulda-shouldas in the world. That's the truth.

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Neuroplasticity--rearranging, reviving, and creating synaptic patterns--covers a range of processes, from applying ourselves to understanding difficult mathematical problems by holding several variables and parameters in our minds simultaneously, to seeing, while participating in, what's going on in front of us with as much detail as possible. These mental images are reflected biochemically in the form of an engrammic impression, a web of living nerve cells. Plasticity is the opposite of rigidity, habit-energy. So, even just accepting that a science called neuroplasticity exists and expressing an interest in seeking its help destabilizes the confinement of rigid thinking and causes us to refocus our energy and to see, with the intensity of present attention, how incredibly intellectually lazy we've become and what we can do about it.

It's obviously a cult starting in our midst. A cult that worships clarity as a way in to our psyche in order to manipulate, exploit, and impose social engineering and behavior modification. Once you've opened up to these mind-control fanatics, plasticity will become a by-word, an excuse to believe that whatever we think is just as good as anything else. It's all just neuroplasticity, we'll think, a fluidity, redefining the engram formed by a few neurons and their millions of connections, generating and emphasizing some while supressing and removing others. Then, who's to say. We end up remembering everything that happens in vivid detail, use faculties we forgot we had, process information like nobody's business, and yet not know why we're doing what we're doing.

On the serious side, however, isn't neuroplasticity what learning and the effects of propaganda, indoctrination, and socialization are all about? Isn't that what happens when we're confronted with a novel situation? When we feel a new feeling? When we think a new thought, experience an insight or a novel idea? Einstein's plasticity allowed him to question basic assumptions--accepted conventions--about the nature of time and space and gravity. To explain his novel ideas, he had to learn a new geometry. We are forever re-plasticising our brains by adapting to new circumstances and personally evolving and reappraising our selves. Our brains, through neuroplasticity, deletes old connections as frequently as it genrates new ones, either allowing synaptic pathways to fade away through lack of use or by increasing the density of patterns--preserving and strenghtening--through attention, learning, and memory. The bottomline is: we have to want to see and to remember; the effort has to be made. That's the science and the juju of it all.

Prolonged periods of depression, doubt, and self-flagellation tend to organize and emphasize pathways that cause us to forget the better side of ourselves. We may have spent years of our lives doing things that required unusual abilities, skills, and knowledge as our self grew in size, scope, and complexity that a continued state of depression works to eradicate from memory. Or we may be lost in a constant state of rage about being mistreated and abused, thereby drowning out any feelings and states of mind having to do with happiness or the simple joy of being alive. What we dwell on reshapes our brains accordingly.

A few years ago I experienced something I consider to be personally tragic, the loss of a loved one very close to me. Afterwards, I dwelled continuously on my role in that event. But, in spite of the ensuing depression and loss of self-respect, something strange happened. I began a process of remembering who I am, a person I had previously lost contact with through years of wishing I had made other choices in my life, regretting the abandonment of who and what I could've been. I no longer think about that. Somehow, that train of thought has been broken.

Those atrophied engrams that constitute the substrate of my previous personality are reemerging, are being awakened, so to speak. Every so often, unbidden, I'll remember an uplifting experience in my past that causes me to stop short. I think to myself: did I do that? Was I once capable of such confidence and strength of will, such openness to dangerous circumstances? It's like remembering someone else, another person entirely, another person I came to know and be, and with it the thought: had he been present all along, that tragic event would probably not have occurred. Thinking thus once generated anger towards myself, but not an anger that further served to undermine me. Quite the opposite, in fact. My mind/brain went to work remembering that former person, that man for whom I had respect. But only on a much deeper level. A coming to terms with faults and weaknesses of character, with ingrained psychological and emotional tendencies and shortcomings, to seeing them and accepting them while working to overcome them. And to deciding that from here on out, I intend to be that person, with all his imperfections, and to no longer try to sabotage him. I just don't have the time.

Neuroplasticity: Reviving and reshaping the positive and real while simultaneously abandoning and pruning the detrimental and delusional.

What the mind thinks, the brain maps. Or, as Thoreau once wrote: "What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or indicates, his fate."

Introduction to Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is a dirty word

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