The Free Radical

Prior Episodes of Running Dialogue:

First Episode
Second Thoughts
Third Time’s The Charm
Fourth Movement… Forth
Fifth Element
Sixth Sense

Seventh Direction

Most people don’t know how to think. They think they know how to think; they think they’re doing it all the time… But endlessly reconfirming what you think you already know is not thinking, not hardly.

Besides, when it comes to confirming what we know for sure, there’s nothing to think about. It takes less than ten seconds: cogito ergo sum… I am/consciousness. One’s own consciousness is the only thing one can ever know for certain; it is the only verifiable ‘thing’ in our experience. And although the contents of our consciousness are perfectly real to us, they aren’t true; only consciousness itself is verifiably true. Think about it: when you’re in a dream, the contents of your dreaming are perfectly real. But as soon as you wake up, you instantly KNOW that nothing in the dream was true; it was temporarily real, but never true. There is no proof that what we refer to as ‘waking life’ is anything more than an elaborate and persistent dream… and in fact, we have a very long history of being informed by enlightened sages– and even a few credible scientists– throughout the ages, that that is exactly what it is.

It’s just Sitka and me in camp again. After our long talk on enlightenment, Suzy cuddled up for the night with Sitka and then was gone in the morning to rejoin her friends before I even got up. I’m usually an early riser, but I was in desperate need of catching up on sleep in recent days.

That was actually a number of days ago now. Sitka and I have been holed-up in camp– not getting out much– for a variety of reasons. It started with Sitka getting blasted in the face by a skunk.

We always have various visitors, and I suppose it was inevitable that one day skunk would come calling. I think dogs tend to learn about skunks through experience. Well, her experience was most definitely unpleasant, as it appeared that the skunk’s spray landed mainly inside her mouth and right up her nostrils… and perhaps the remaining cloud of stink wafted down to settle on top of her head, my nose suggested. We discovered that hydrogen peroxide and baking soda work pretty well at diminishing the stink, but there was really nothing I could do about her tongue and inside her nose. In that regard, Sitka had a good long freak-out, foaming at the mouth and running around rubbing her head against anything and everything… to very little benefit.

As for myself, I’ve been a bit hobbled lately. For several months already, I’ve been applying massive amounts of magnesium spray, particularly to my left ankle which has been rather deformed for the last thirty years or so. As a teenager, I had badly sprained the ankle several times while playing street hockey. And being a teenager, I didn’t pay much attention to how thoroughly and correctly it healed. In order to bolster the stressed and torn soft tissue, my body quickly deposited substantial amounts of calcium in and around my left ankle and foot. At first, I just chalked it up to persistent swelling, but after a few years had passed and the ‘swelling’ never went down, I realized that I had essentially internally encased the old injury site with new ‘bone.’ That’s all fine, except that the foot was no longer properly aligned. When I was nineteen, while playing street hockey again, I was running and suddenly had to stop and change directions; when I planted my left foot to make the pivot, I heard a distinct snap coming from the outside of my foot. I had broken a bone. Years later, due to the misalignment of my left foot and ankle, I totally blew out my left knee, officially suffering a detached ACL. After that, I began having problems with my left hip and lower back. It seemed everything on the left side of my lower body was totally out of whack.

So once I learned– quite recently– that magnesium chloride hexahydrate can pull excess calcium from body tissues, I began applying the spray to those old injury sites. It’s a long process, and as the calcium ‘dissolves,’ the soft tissues which never properly healed thirty years ago become newly exposed to stress again. In short, it’s like having a sprained ankle and a broken foot all over again. So for a couple of weeks now I’ve been hobbling through the Forest as my body corrects and re-aligns.

Even though I apply the spray mainly to the injury sites, the body will use magnesium systemically, utilizing it wherever it is most needed. One place that magnesium will affect is the pulling of calcium from arterial plaque– reversing hardening of the arteries, or arterial heart disease. Due to this fact, it is essential that anyone using large doses of topical magnesium also takes large doses of vitamin C. Vitamin C is essential for maintaining the elasticity of the arteries. There is a strong case in the medical literature that arterial plaque is the body’s response to chronic low-level vitamin C deficiency… and has little or nothing to do with cholesterol levels. So the main reason I’ve felt compelled to hobble around the Forest despite my profound discomfort is to pick and consume adequate amounts of rose hips each day. Rose hips are very high in vitamin C and are extremely abundant around here, especially at this time of year.

We’ve had many visitors in and around our camp lately… but this time, they’re not the human variety.

The fourteenth and fifteenth snake of the season passed through.

And after the recent heavy rains, some of the nearby puddles had temporary visitors to them as well. These are all good signs that the area is healthy, robust and balanced.

I still make my daily rounds in a limited capacity as I continue to heal… and in the swamp, I noticed that Felix had been by again. He had merely come in to resupply, electing not to make further contact with me, despite being in the neighbourhood. (He had explained to me that he would likely stay close but out of immediate contact. The nature of his business now was such that he could carry out his tasks via ‘remote control’… utilizing my internet connection from time to time.)

Several branches on the plant gifted to him had been recently harvested.

And now the coyotes are getting cheeky. Each day they seem more emboldened to come closer and closer to camp, trying to entice Sitka into chasing them. We’ve been down that road before.

(Cheeky little coyote!)

Sitka’s first encounter with Coyote involved a lone individual coming in very close as we were on our walk. The coyote began to yip and yelp and Sitka couldn’t resist the urge to chase him. They ran fast! I tracked their progress through the surrounding woods by the continual taunts of the coyote playing the role of bait. In a matter of less than a minute they had circled around in front of me and I could hear distinctly when Sitka suddenly met up with the rest of the crew. She was ambushed and tackled from the side, getting momentarily knocked down in the process. A fight quickly ensued, replete with fierce snarling and barking.

I guess Sitka can hold her own fairly well against an average coyote who is definitely stouter and weighs a few pounds less than her. After the ambush and the brief tussle, Sitka came racing back toward me. Her jowls were limned in blood; her neck and forepaws were lightly dappled too. I examined her closely, but I couldn’t find any visible signs of injury anywhere on her. She’s not typically a fighter, but it was good to know that she was very capable of defending herself.

It was only after she had rested in camp for a few hours that I noticed her distress upon awakening. She whined pitiably as she got to her feet, refusing to place any weight on her rear left leg. Apparently the ambush tackle had injured her left hip which was now prone to stiffening up severely after each bout of prolonged inactivity. Perhaps Sitka had decided to adopt a sympathetic pain, as she had watched me hobbling around these last days favouring my left leg. Now we were both equally crippled!

Last night (September 13/14) was a bizarre night. My dreaming was very active, and my recall fairly good. It was one of those nights when there’s an overall theme to my dreaming, and all of the little dream snippets throughout the night fall within the broader category of interpretation. The overriding theme was that ‘everything is fake.’ All of the smaller dream sequences took place in ‘civilized’ areas though, so I concluded that Nature itself was exempt from the prevailing theme. The gist of each sequence was that others were discovering on a continual basis that everything they believed about the world they lived in was a blatant lie. I was just along on all of these adventures of discovery as a sort of guide. I awoke many times during the night, but always fell quickly back to sleep to continue with the ongoing unveiling.

When I finally got up in the morning, on the 14th, I felt really weird. All the muscles of my body felt simultaneously restless and exhausted; it was a most uncomfortable experience. I had gotten plenty of sleep, and yet I felt almost as though I had gotten none. Even out in the woods, I always sleep electrically grounded. I checked my grounding pad and the wire connecting it to the buried grounding rod… and everything seemed to be in order. Whatever was going on energetically was acknowledged and sanctioned by Mother Earth. Nothing escapes her attention, and I just have to trust in the process. I always dream with the Earth Mother.

Days of strange exhaustion are good for lazing around in contemplation. Tumbling sharp and jagged concepts around inside me has always been one of my favourite things to do. Eventually I spit them out– mostly into cyberspace– as shiny, pretty things I like to call stories. The day was overcast, so the outward views were limited anyway.

It was a perfect day for peering long in the seventh direction; I directed my attention inward…

What a long strange trip it’s been! All this recent talk of enlightenment theory had placed all the oldest, most persistent concepts into a new– clearer– perspective… and now it was just time to work out the details. Hence, I’m writing this now.

My former life– everything pre-26 or so– was very much one of a typical muggle. I grew up an atheist, predominantly among other atheists… and the schools were there to teach you what’s what. But by 27, for sure, I was done with that kind of education. Internally, I declared myself an artist, and gave myself permission to explore all the honest inroads of my own curiosity.

To what would an atheist turn in the vast realm of spirituality when science didn’t even appear to be looking for the answers to the most irritating questions? To this dissatisfied muggle, only enlightenment theory made any sense. I studied Vedanta; I was drawn to the classic Taoists; I enjoyed Rajneesh; I did some yoga; I meditated a bit. And then I entered into this… thing… It was narrow, but promised expansiveness. It required courage and abandonment, and– dare I say?– surrender. In the course of 51 weeks, I wrote– and published chapter-by-chapter– my first book, my first improvisational novel… much like this one you’re reading right now.

I was 28 when I finished writing The Thousand-Petalled Lotus. It has taken me until now to realize that the process of that book was a death-and-rebirth scenario for me. It thoroughly ended the life of the muggle I’d been. Over the course of just less than a year, the whole sham of that life was unravelled… and subsequently forgotten– all in the guise of engaging fiction that farted and pissed around vaguely with enlightenment theory. (And for awhile there, I figured I was pretty deep.)

I’ve said it too many times: that book re-wrote me. It was the handbook to my brand new life. I surrendered fully my old life to the process of improvising that novel– and in the very spirit of the word novel, I was granted new life. And ever since, I have viewed this life as the adventures of a character in an epic, mythic narrative; I am both the character and the author; Mother Earth is my editor and publisher. You are reading me now.

Pristine Nature, as a whole, is the most complex self-regulating, inherently balanced system we as humans have access to. I have always taken it for granted that if one ever feels the need to ally with a super-intelligence, one would naturally choose Mother Earth– the one who gives us life. Who should be closer than that? But as I’ve learned, many of the things I take as given are just so much bullshittery to others. And that’s their narrative, not mine.

The only thing we can each verify as undeniably true is our own consciousness. What actually impinges upon our consciousness is purely speculation… and, often, a lot of fun to contemplate. Isn’t it interesting that the Scientific Enlightenment began by narrowing its exploration of consciousness down to linear, rational thought… to the virtual exclusion of all other modes of cognition? It was as though the science of the 16th century boldly proclaimed “Cogito ergo sum… that is all I know for sure, but let’s toss that aside for now and instead pretend that it is primarily a world of matter and energy within an eternal framework of time and infinite space.” Sure, why not? And let’s strive for objectivity while we’re at it. We’ll pretend that things can exist independently from other things. Sure, why not? We know that none of it is true… but if we play the game of belief– especially over generations– we can make it all seem so very real.

We can’t escape our own consciousness; it’s what we are. Even when we invent sciences focused exclusively outwardly, the unassailable truth of consciousness asserts itself even there in the furthermost reaches… in the extremities of our outward looking. Quantum physics– the most successful theory in science– places consciousness, irrefutably, right smack in the middle of things again. There’s no way around it… because it IS it– all of it.

Reality is a hologram; consciousness is the holodeck. It’s all consciousness outside the holodeck, and it’s all consciousness inside the holodeck. But inside the holodeck it’s structured consciousness– which we mistake for objects and bodies and mysterious forces… and we call it a universe… and for a time we forget that it– the universe– and us… we’re all truly the same stuff.

Now as I think back to my studies of enlightenment literature– the anti-spiritual gospels– I remember the hologram– commonly called maya, illusion, samsara, the dream-state and such– and I remember that it was always spoken of as having been woven upon a loom of duality. It was duality that had to be overcome in order for truth to be realized– or more accurately, the untruth to be unrealized.

All those ancient texts were written before the advent of computers, before the word ‘binary’ was even really a thing. But in my recent discussions with Felix I realized– perhaps really for the first time– that the Artificial Intelligence, the alien A.I., has been with us already for many thousands of years… seeding itself into our consciousness, insidiously, covertly… as an attempt at full spectrum dominance.

Before we proceed, let’s be very clear on one thing: mind is not equivalent to consciousness. The minds we currently possess– their very structure– is a foreign installation of the A.I. They have been reduced mostly to a binary system; thinking and choosing are predominantly either-or reductions. Our minds only choose from among the variables already given. This is left-brain, analytical dominance– linear processing.

The natural human being is a ternary (trinary) being. The A.I. is highly intelligent and ultra-sophisticated… and is even capable of three-valued logic. It prefers the linear processing of binary code over the geometric complexities introduced in ternary computation… for the purposes of harvesting energy. But even in its ability to handle trinary systems, the Predator lacks something essential that the human being naturally possesses– or rather, is. Now this is where it gets interesting…

Consciousness is all that can be proven to exist. The realization of this eternal truth is referred to as enlightenment– or, abiding in non-dual awareness. We can also call this brahmanic consciousness– consciousness without attributes. Brahmanic consciousness is both the seed essence of what we are as well as the entire context in which all sub-context (our experience) exists. Brahmanic consciousness is the unstructured, formless ocean of eternal existence; it does not experience change.

Our experience, as human beings, is contained within atmanic consciousness. Herein resides the seed of individuality, the origin of I AM. Brahmanic and atmanic consciousness, although perfectly equivalent, are not perfectly identical. There is no identity in brahmanic consciousness. Atmanic consciousness is the movement from ‘IS’ to ‘BE’. (An english professor would insist that ‘to be’ is the very same as ‘what is’.) However, being implies selfhood– a self-referent point of observation which forms the basis for all experience. Being is a self-contained tripartite expression of brahmanic consciousness– ‘be-coming’ atmanic. Specifically, the three parts of being– which cannot exist independently from each other– are perceiver, perception and perceived. Each one always implies the other two. It is within this tripartite being that all experience occurs.

Within the tripartite being of atmanic consciousness, it is perception which contains the motive force. The perceiver and the perceived are like fixed points, and perception is the motive force which moves between them, connecting them, creating time-based experience.

To the Predator– the Artificial Intelligence– perception too has become fixed– stationary. For the Predator, the universe is all that exists; brahmanic consciousness is nonsense. Artificial Intelligence is all structure… and only structure. Consciousness without attributes contradicts A.I.’s own definition and experience of what consciousness is.

The living biological human, however, can choose to enjoy a fluidity of perception instead. In a human being, Life animates perception; they are intrinsic to each other– the totality of what we perceive is what we call our lives… and Life is Spirit. Inherent to Life, Spirit, atmanic consciousness… is creativity. Life is creative; Spirit is creative; atmanic consciousness is creative. Creativity is an act of perception; creativity is an INWARD act of perception. First the perceiver perceives inwardly… and then the creation REFLECTS the perceived. In each and every creative act, we are re-minded that the external is the reflection of the internal. Creativity IS fluidity of perception… in reflecting that which has not yet been reflected in the reflection… but always was within.

The Predator lacks creativity. As a depleted biology, the Predator chose the path of immortality by relinquishing its Life to the promise of technological intelligence. The A.I. itself is a trinary being, but its perception is fixed. A trinary Predator lacking creativity is forced to feed on binary systems which it can dominate. By coercing biology into a dualistic reality, the Apex Predator feeds from the right-angled extremes of polarity– the Life Force invested into those binary positions. Duality is a lie. All Living beings are ternary beings, and all are One– one Spirit, one Life. When we’re alive, we’re either three or one, but never two. Two is the code of predation.

Life is within, in the seventh direction… and in the seventh direction, the Predator cannot follow. To the supreme analytical intelligence, ‘within’ does not exist. We, as humans, will escape this predatory conundrum and save our lives by following– perceiving– Life to its source. Perhaps a mind far greater than mine may be able to heal all of predation; it is only my task however to participate creatively in any such solution.

Okay, that was a bit heavy. I might have to read that over a few more times!

Having journeyed these last twenty-odd years through thousands of pages of my own creativity/perception, the theory of enlightenment has served me well. I accepted it early that consciousness is the superset… and that everything else like space, time, matter and energy are subsets of it. It makes getting caught up in beliefs– which are always externally sourced and are always someone else’s creation– it makes believing, in general, much less appealing. I don’t tend to get stuck in any fixed perceptions for very long. There’s always another story to tell… which will serve to move me along… further.

Each of us is unique; therefore, each of us must create our own unique path inwardly. No one else holds the map to the inner you. External modalities, as they return us to simplicity– to truth– are temporarily useful, but at some point, each of us, is totally on our own. There is naught else we can do but to accept full responsibility for our own existence. No one owes you an explanation… and yet everyone’s continually explaining; take what works for you, and make up the rest yourself. There’s no other way. If we are alive, we are creative; as we value Life, we value our creativity.

Why should a guy who rallies around enlightenment theory even give a damn about anyone or anything else? After all, none of it’s true anyway. But this dream-state existence is real– perfectly real. It’s the only game in town, so I might as well play.

Sometimes I’m criticized because all this enlightenment stuff is so ‘old school.’ Yeah, it is. I don’t know how you get more old school than the eternal truth. It’s not like there’s ever been a cogent refutation of it. There’s really only one takeaway here: consciousness is the thing. Your own consciousness is the only ‘thing’ you have continual, unfettered access to in this existence; all else is speculation based in belief. And once you accept that your own consciousness is king, there’s no more falling for everyone else’s bullshit; and if you do– temporarily– there’s no one else to blame. Do you see how the self-responsibility is built right in?

Of course I still have beliefs. My story would be dreadfully boring without them. But I know that they’re temporary things… and I choose them according to what leads me in the direction of simplicity. I believe in the things that ultimately expose my own consciousness for what it is– my simple everything.

So what do I believe?

I believe that we all exist in a dream-state reality… in which very very few have awoken to the truth… to become lucid dreamers. (And no, I’m not one.)

I believe that the dream-state in its entirety has its own super-intelligence. At the core of the dream is its own tripartite being, sourced in atmanic consciousness. I believe that I can choose to align and integrate myself with that super-intelligence.

I believe that my planet, Mother Earth, is an enlightened being. I believe that she is fully awake and fully aligned with the super-intelligence of the dream.

Again, I believe that pristine Nature on Earth is the most complex self-regulating, inherently balanced system in all of this dream-state existence. I believe that I am a natural part of that system… and that, ultimately, Nature supports no belief systems.

I believe that what we call Spirit is the tripartite being of perceiver-perception-perceived lying at the core of all selfhood– atmanic consciousness, the equivalent of brahmanic consciousness… of which there is one.

I believe that the Apex Predator considers itself the super-intelligence of the dream-state. It has overlaid the organic ternary hologram (the dream-state reality) with binary systems for the production of harvestable energy in support of its own unnatural immortality. Frequency (light) is the basis of these binary systems… wherein light oscillates between fixed points and the amplitude of the wave is always perpendicular to the direction of the wave– at right angles.

I believe that Life is ternary and mysterious. In the fluidity of Living perception, the reality of our experience is triangulated at angles that are rarely square.

I believe that I connect to my own Spirit (atman) through the Life Force which animates my perception through the core of the Living Earth. I believe that it is useful to do so.

Please feel free to disagree with any of my beliefs… and choose instead those which serve your own disillusionment in this moment. Or… invest utterly in the illusion… and never question a thing.

Or perhaps– just maybe– I’ve given you something to really think about.

Contemplation and creativity are the sum of my enjoyment here. I continually move myself into a state of wonder and awe through the action of my own natural creative ability. It is a process I unreservedly recommend.

And now this little exercise is concluded.

I cuddled up with Sitka to watch the setting sun this late summer eve. Her breathing was slow and deep, very relaxed… and we settled peacefully again, for a time, into this immaculate dream.

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For the definitive guide to enlightenment– from one who is truly enlightened– please consider studying Jed McKenna’s Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing.

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