Running Dialogue: Tenth of One Percent (11/15)

by nielskunze on November 27, 2015

Prior Episodes of Running Dialogue:

First Episode
Second Thoughts
Third Time’s The Charm
Fourth Movement… Forth
Fifth Element
Sixth Sense
Seventh Direction
Eighth Wonder of the World
Ninth Life of Schrödinger’s Cat

I’ve been calling this an improvisational novel; that’s because I don’t work from outlines, and I never draft rough copies of anything. I do possess, however, several notebooks in which I periodically jot down key phrases and ideas during the percolation/contemplation phase of these offerings. We’re ten chapters in now… and I’m starting to look over my notes from the entire project. There are certain themes I keep coming back to… and there’s one very important person I really want to have the next conversation with: it’s you, Dear Reader.

(Winter Time by The Steve Miller Band from their Greatest Hits 1974-78 album on vinyl)

Over Yonder

Over Yonder

The General View

The General View

The River Lookout

The River Lookout

Glimpses

Glimpses

C'mon Dad! Hurry Up!

C’mon Dad! Hurry Up!

Snowed In

Snowed In

Tenth of One Percent

Winter, this year, has come to the Columbia Valley gradually. First, it lighted upon the mountain peaks, casting them into dazzling displays of flashing white teeth, winter’s smile, both menacing and alluring. And then it stalked and filled the valleys below with heaving breaths of crystalline condensation, bringing the first deposits in banks of heavy snow for all.

Three-Foot Drifts

Three-Foot Drifts

Back Foot

Back Foot

The bears seem to know every year exactly when to begin trekking west, into the pristine Purcell wilderness. I have discerned their tracks in frozen mud and freshly fallen snow many times. They climb the mountain passes to where winter has already gotten a grip which won’t release until spring’s uncoiling reawakening… to slumber in the hypothermic dark of cozy dens.

LARGE Back Foot!

LARGE Back Foot!

Front Foot with Short Claws (Black Bear)

Front Foot with Short Claws (Black Bear)

This one was clearly huge; these are some of the largest black bear prints I have ever encountered.

By The River

By The River

They seemed much too big to belong to this fellow– Sovereign Will– whom we met down at the river during the late spring runoff. It isn’t uncommon for several bears to share this rich territory during a single season.

Sovereign Will

Sovereign Will

Black Bear has long been one of my primary totems. We have had nearly 500 face-to-face encounters over the last twenty-or-more years. We get along fine; we both understand the meaning and value of self-determination– of being a self-responsible individual… at least as much as possible… in a consensual reality.

Our shared reality, what we commonly refer to as ‘the world,’ is an abstraction of our perceptual faculties. It has no intrinsic realness, independent from our perceptions. This ‘thing’ we call ‘the universe’ is primarily a product of our intents and our agreements. ‘Intents and agreements’… now those have realness; they’re inside of us; they’re part of us… and we easily recognize them as such– when we can clearly see them. And everything we perceive as external to ourselves is an abstraction– a reflection– of those intents and agreements.

(For a scientifically based presentation of why the objective universe absolutely does not exist, please refer to my essay Once (More) and for All (Time).)

How is it that less than one tenth of one percent of the world’s population gets to decide how the world presents itself to us all?

Isn’t that an interesting question? Is it even valid or true? See, that’s the trick of perception: if that’s the way you see it, then that’s the immediate truth of your reality. Somebody else– maybe God, or the Elite, or an Artificial Intelligence– is determining for you the primary shape and colour and texture of the world we share. If, on the other hand, you have come to fully realize that your own inner experience is what is FIRST subject to your own intents and agreements, that the external universe is the complete reflection of that inner totality… well, then, you have a very different experience of our ‘shared’ reality.

So for some, many, perhaps most, the question is perfectly valid. The world, as it presents itself to our senses in exquisite detail, is largely given to us by others. Everywhere we turn, it seems, there’s always someone trying to tell us how it really is. And somewhere along the way, we– everyone of us– made an agreement to primarily perceive the world as an objective and real thing, existing independently from our perceptions. That agreement IS the veil. And this apocalypse is about the lifting or piercing of that veil, allowing us to stop insisting on regarding external reality as being truly real… and for some, many, perhaps most, solely real… leaving us to live in the implication that our inner states are merely reflections, personal interpretations of and reactions to the external ‘objective’ reality.

Be-ing belongs to the Being. How can it be otherwise? You know what Being is; it’s inside you, infinite; you can feel it, fully sense it– its aliveness. Your Being is alive… and the universe reflects that aliveness. How dead is the world to you? How alive can you be? These can be choices… or givens; it’s up to you.

Eagle Again

Eagle Again

Quite often, as I’m walking through the Forest, contemplating… composing… this very calm-position, I get the nod from Eagle, who’s been visiting ever-so-briefly, with me, and with these terribly deep thoughts, on several occasions recently. As usual, Sitka spotted Eagle first, and by the time I looked up to see the source of her fascination, I only had time to snap a single pic before this flyover was done.

Most of the participants in Earth’s consensus reality rarely form clear intents about anything; they’re rather just coping. That’s why it doesn’t take a large percentage to influence the collective, to affect the consensus expression of reality. A handful of creative innovators can radically alter reality.

There’s always two sides to the coin. On the one side, there are those who work to bring about the conditions of consciousness that will keep us locked in fear… and on the other side, there are those who work to bring about the conditions of consciousness that will sidestep our fears and deliver us to safety. AND THEN there are those who work to bring about the conditions of consciousness that can see clearly that both of those are playing the exact same game: trying to control the consensus according to elitist perceptions. This third group rejects the coin altogether– taking the ‘I’ out of the co…n… and placing it internally, or nowhere.

Somewhere along the line (timeline), we all made an agreement to objectify everything; we have even objectified ourselves! This ‘objectification’ is the foundational habit of our perceptions. Yes, perceptions have ‘momentum’… or perhaps ‘inertia’ is better. Our habit is to continue perceiving in the very same manner as we always have before… or for as long as we can remember…

Perception is driven by motion. Motion is what we perceive. Internally, it is the movements of consciousness which we perceive as our feelings. Inside of us, consciousness moves and we feel it. Externally, we perceive the reflection of those internal movements as time. Time is motion. Everything in time moves, changes. Timespace– time and space come as a complete, integrated package deal– timespace is driven (created) by our inner perturbations of consciousness. E-motions are sourced in the reflection, in timespace. E-motions are our reactions to the reflection. Feelings are internally sourced; emotion is externally sourced… and both are tied up with each other in complex feedback loops.

Damn! That got pretty dense, didn’t it? Sorry about that.

It’s not just that the Newtonian view is slightly off– a matter of precision and tweaks– no, it’s that it’s completely wrong, providing an inverted view.

Let’s talk about our habits of perception. We can’t seem to help ourselves when it comes to perceiving our reality, our situation, in a decidedly Newtonian way… even though, if we’ve been paying any attention at all, we KNOW that it’s an utterly false view of reality. Perhaps there’s a failure in our mainstream education system when high school physics teaches us Newton’s equations for bodies in motion, and gives but the merest mention of relativity and quantum theory. We graduate with the implication that Newton was perfectly correct, and that his equations only begin to break down at the extremely small, the extremely large, and the extremely fast scales– but for objects in motion in everyday life, Newton is fine… and the unspoken implication being that the Newtonian view of the world is basically correct, unless we begin traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light… or if we suddenly get as fat as a planet.

When it comes to describing our situation, our basic relationship with reality… the Newtonian view is backwards, upside-down and inside-out… or in other words, not even close… and extremely misleading. The most immediate example of what I might mean by this is how the Newtonian view regards consciousness. In Newton’s objective world view, consciousness is some mysterious end product of a purely material evolution. The clear implication from relativity and quantum theory, however, is that nothing in the perceived universe can be shown to have any intrinsic, independent existence apart from consciousness. The ‘objective’ world is inextricably bound up with perception. And THAT makes perfect sense.

Cogito ergo sum.

The fact that you are conscious is the ONLY thing that you can verify as being absolutely true. Your own consciousness is the basis– the very foundation– of your experience. Your experience occurs in your own consciousness… and this is verifiably true in every moment. The very idea of suggesting that your personal experience exists somewhere outside of you, in an objective universe, is clearly absurd.

Consciousness is primary; it is our inner reality. What happens in that reality is our experience. Somewhere in our past experience, we agreed to create a reflection of that inner experience and project it outwardly… for our ‘objectified’ selves to inhabit. Part of the agreement was to identify with our objectified selves– our ego. And within that simple agreement we still remain lost.

Through the habits of these perceptions, compounded through eons, this ‘objective’ construction we call ‘the world’ appears incalculably complex, terribly convoluted, and ultimately inescapable… and it is… for as long as we persist in our incorrect view. We need to break the longstanding habits of our perception.

And how do we do that?

So glad you asked… but first, perhaps we should ask “What is consciousness?”

Consciousness IS existence– in all of its infinite potential; existence IS consciousness– in particular expression.

So what aspect of consciousness leads away from a particular expression and back towards infinite potential? C’mon… you got this…

That’s right! Creativity.

Whenever our response to the external reflection we perceive– and in which we are trapped– is creative, original, and personally appropriate, we deconstruct another layer of the matrix– the matrix of our agreements… or rather, our sub-agreements. The creation of the ‘objective’ universe– our creation– is the meta-agreement within which all our other agreements reside. Our creativity supersedes– or overrides– all of those sub-agreements… as long as we recognize that the place in which our creativity first expresses is internal. In consciousness, the firsthand experience of our own creativity is the primary reality– the thing with the potential to change everything. It’s not in the end products– our words, our poems, our songs or gesticulations, or in the secrets of the special sauce– that the catalyst is found. The catalyst for change in the external world is the changes wrought in our own inner realities through our creativity. True, original creativity always moves the inner consciousness; just ask any artist; it is for that inner movement– that undeniable feeling– that art is made. It’s the reason, the motivation… the inspiration.

Now, what do I mean by creativity?

Essentially, novelty. Just because someone writes books, or paints canvases, or acts consummately the part of a perfect jackass, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re being creative. True creativity demands newness. Creativity always breaks fresh ground. When we apply that creativity to our own inner patterns, choosing to treat our conditioned responses with novelty and fresh insight, we heal the perturbations in our consciousness… which are BOUND to reflect externally– either the healing, or the continuation of the perturbations.

There is room for creativity in everything we do… and that is the surest way to affect changes in all worlds.

I am continually moving myself into a state of wonderment and awe through the actions of my own creativity.

Wonderment and awe is the natural inner condition of human childhood. When we are encouraged to “be as little children,” it is this inner disposition wherein the world presents itself in infinite novelty which we seek. Whatever we come to believe the world to be, the ever-present truth is that its potential for becoming remains eternally infinite… for it is ever-sourced in infinite consciousness, in Spirit.

Infinite consciousness is just naturally creative… I mean, what else should it be?

‘Nuff said.

The reflection, by its nature, is non-creative.

I’ve chosen to call our external reality ‘the reflection.’ It’s a little more complex than a simple reflection in a mirror, so alternatively, we can liken it to a shared dream. The thing to remember about dreams is that the only thing which is truly real is the dreaming. The contents of the dream are real while you’re in it, but none of them are true– including the first-person representation of the supposed one who’s dreaming: you. Once you’ve awoken, your dream character is instantly seen as being just as ephemeral as the rest of the dream.

And here, perhaps, we should speak briefly of solipsism. For most, solipsism has a bad reputation. It is the philosophical position that the self is all that can be known to exist. It springs directly from Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. For some, for some reason, this poses problems in morality. The problems stem from the idea that if I am all that can be known to exist, there is no valid reason to treat others as though they are real too.

So let’s talk refutations for a moment. When Bishop Berkeley elucidated the solipsistic position in a sermon, Samuel Johnson famously refuted the argument outside the church by soundly kicking a rock and exclaiming “I refute it thusly.” All indications from history are that Samuel Johnson wasn’t really a complete idiot, but this famous ‘refutation’ is no refutation at all. If you kick a rock in a dream, you will experience the sensation of kicking a rock… and likely suffer a stubbed toe as a result. Kicking a rock in a dream and experiencing pain doesn’t suddenly make the dream true. And once you awaken from it, you immediately realize that neither the rock, your toe, or any other aspect of the dream was intrinsically real– but your experience of it was. Your inner experience of it is real– always… and that’s the point; do with it what you will.

And here’s how I solve the ‘morality problem’ with simple, selfish logic:

The core of my compassion is wholly selfish, stemming from the simple realization that I am the happiest, the most content and fulfilled only when everyone around me is in a comparable state of contentment-fulfillment too.

I might be able to justify being an egotistical prick for awhile, but in the end, eventually, I must come to realize that the above statement is actually true. The bottom line is that solipsism is true, whether you like it or not. It has never been refuted, and cannot be refuted. It can only be foolishly ignored… or logically embraced.

It makes sense to me to base our fundamental orientation in reality first and foremost on that which we know for sure. Don’t you think?

We are all participants in a leaderless collaboration called reality… We’re not looking for a leader to emerge, just the acknowledgement of the situation we are in.

From pure solipsism, we can make a choice. It is purely speculation, but in this dream, it is our prerogative to speculate. We are free to suppose that others have/are consciousness too, and that they actually exist in much the same manner we verifiably do. The problem arises in that we cannot share the consciousness– the Being– of another. But is this injunction absolute?

It would seem that the primary obstacle to experiencing a shared consciousness is our reliance upon language. The primary action of language is that it objectifies. Indeed, the very ‘space’ in which language is exchanged IS the supposed ‘objective’ universe. Perhaps it is language– including, perhaps especially including, our incessant internal dialogue– which holds our perception of objectified reality in place, second-by-second. If we could communicate through a means of shared consciousness rather than through a language standing in a timespace abstraction, perhaps then we would find no need for continuing this particular dreamspace illusion.

History repeats… in the absence of creativity.

When we think about time in the external realm we consider it to be steady and utterly consistent– the way scientists measure it. But that’s not at all how we experience it. Time, in the human experience, is highly variable… almost moody.

We are taught, and often reminded, that the past is the past. What’s done is done. But the fluid nature of time, internally, allows us in every moment the opportunity to revisit any past experience… and completely transform it. Any past experience that remains unsettled can be revisited and re-interpreted until it is re-solved. Any such resolution wrought internally is BOUND to reflect in the external realm. Heal yourself; heal the world.

(A personal experience from the most traumatic day of my own life is recounted on this blog in the short novella What Happened That Day. I have revisited that day countless times… and now I am fully at peace with it. It is the story of three friends going out on an ayahuasca trip one May afternoon, and the youngest of our group– my nineteen-year-old friend– Jake, died that day. It’s worth checking out for the healing process involved.)

No one can heal the world, but everyone can heal themselves.

The basic fabric of reality is experience. If we wish to discover the source of each and every wound in our timespace-avatar-selves, we will invariably find those sources in our own experience (past lives included). The resolution of our experiences of woundedness cannot ever be found in the abstraction we call the world. True resolutions demand a creative approach. (Almost by definition, resolution HAS to be novel/creative– obviously it’s never been done before… or it would’ve already been resolved, right?) Creativity can only come from within. When we use that creativity to redress our own experiences in brand new meanings and significance, we settle– once and for all– the perturbations in our consciousness… and remove one more thing the world is BOUND to reflect… and take another step out of the matrix.

And once we’ve taken all the steps…? Once we’ve settled all the perturbations… what then?

Well, then I reckon we’re free to create whatever the fuck we want– in full recognition that we will experience our own creations as both cause and effect, for which, both, we are responsible.

In the current paradigm we inhabit, we’re already food; a good first step toward extricating ourselves from the consumer paradigm is consciously choosing what we’d like to feed. We are the very basis for the entire food chain… such a choice would have enormous repercussions.

Self and environment is the basic dichotomy creating relativistic (relational) space.

You are what you eat. Am I the air that I breathe? Am I the environment? How am I NOT the environment?

Is not my inner life hopelessly dependent upon sustenance from the external environment? Debatable. We do certainly seem to inhabit a paradigm of ubiquitous consumerism.

Everything feeds.

That’s the basic nature of the game we’ve agreed to play (experience). And the only way to ever end that game is to creatively come up with a resolution for all of our insatiable hungers. What might such resolutions look like? I haven’t a clue… but I know that we’ll find them… through some crazy-ass collaboration or such.

All of reality is the romance between Spirit and the imagined self.

Everything we typically do can be done creatively. We’re already creating the experiences we’re having; why not throw our creative intent into the mix? When we intend, internally, to experience life from an aspect of Being– like lovingly or analytically, for example– Spirit asserts its inherent creativity to bring that state of Being about.

Fear is a form of tacit consent.

Now that’s a tricky little bitch, ain’t it?

You can only fear a thing if you believe that it might happen. If you don’t believe there’s any chance it might happen, you can’t be afraid of it. If you inwardly intend growth, then it is Spirit’s obligation to present you with your most persistent fears until you re-solve them. Creativity cannot spring from fear. But when fears are outmaneuvered and outgrown, only unfettered creativity remains. Fear can motivate, but it cannot truly inspire.

We can only fear a thing with which we have an acquaintance (experience). A specific fear is a persistent perturbation in our consciousness. The constant energy drain of fear fuels its need for further expression, the need to experience it again… until it is fully faced and truly overcome.

Fearlessness kicks ass! So I hear.

We won’t pierce the veil all at once. We’ll tear it down bit-by-bit, in tatters and shreds. No matter what wondrous pseudo-resolutions the reflection presents, we still have to be facing the right direction, addressing our own persistent perturbations in consciousness, inwardly.

I’ve shared with you here some of my more recent perturbations, albeit fairly creative ones. Perhaps it’s not all new, but in this very presentation you’re reading right now, I’ve become more grounded in a new understanding, dodging and weaving through these jumbled thoughts… in a new– for me– way. I haven’t given you here meticulous elaborations; rather, I’ve left these as big horkin’ chunks of food-for-thought that you can masticate, digest and assimilate (or reject) in your own unique way.

I seem to find it useful to say basically the same thing a thousand different ways. It’s tough, exhausting work to break these habits of perception!

Well, there. I’ve cleared my plate. Perhaps some things have been put to rest…

I closed the computer; that was enough for now. I would proof it in the morning and upload it to the blog tomorrow.

It was cold and getting dark rapidly. Sitka and I got to bed pretty early. I had been fast asleep when a muffled bark from Sitka woke me. There was someone in the tent hovering above me with a flashlight. Sitka was licking his face enthusiastically already as I pieced the situation together.

“Felix?” I asked squinting.

“Indeed,” he said rather grimly, and that’s when I noticed the gun beside the flashlight. The gun was pointed at me, at my head. He pressed the barrel to the side of my head.

“Felix, what the fuck!” I squeaked like a terribly distressed damsel.

“What?” he queried sarcastically, “you didn’t think Mossad were the good guys, did you?”

He lowered the flashlight from my eyes so that I could see the grim determination on his face in the shadows. Whatever Felix might have become, he was serious at the very least.

Because the muzzle was pressed right up against my skull, I could hear the movement of mechanisms as he pulled the trigger… and then the gun went off. It was loud. I mean, fuck!… it was loud!

And then my brains splashed all over Sitka and the inside of my tent… or so I imagined…

Dimmed Sun (Through a Cloud)

Dimmed Sun (Through a Cloud)

(The Whole World’s Going Crazy by April Wine, title track from their 1976 album on vinyl)
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For a related discussion held recently among myself and the Earth Soul Group admins, answering group member questions, please check out our YouTube posting HERE.
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