Off Topic

The Necessity of Symbols

And by extension metaphors, stories, pictures, and math. During my lunchbreak today, I read about Kurt Godel, a mathematician close friends with Einstein. The story was about Godel's discovery of a flaw in the US Constitution that would allow the government to shift to a dictatorship--this flaw he began to explain during an interview for US citizenship. This fun historical nugget led me to learn other things about Godel, the most intriguing of which was his mathematical "God proof." 

Before we go on, let me explain that my lunch break is often filled with a sort of random and fragmented search for entertainment and knowledge, and one never knows where one will end up. This takes just enough of the mundanity out of the day to make it bearable. This mathematical (ontological) proof was succeeded by a YouTube video explaining Graham's number, inexplicably larger than the inexplicably large googolplex.

Mind effectively blown, this was followed by a quote found via Wikipedia while attempting to understand the ontological proof better, a quote by mathematician Georg Cantor that in such a strange way tied the other two discoveries together. What follows below was a quickly typed up explanation to myself so as to make the connections.   It rambles a bit, and likely the logical leaps are perilous without being in my head or without the proper time to pound it out. It became for me a kind of validation of my path choices, of my obsession with words and symbols, and thus a validation of my choice to be a writer and storyteller. Explaining to yourself on paper is something I suppose writers do. 

The explanation to myself begins with the Cantor quote.  I make no guarantees as to the accurateness of the newly discovered information, nor as to the tightness of my logic. I'm not sure I even vouch for the sanity of it.

“The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.”  -- Georg Cantor, mathematician

Mathematicians struggle with infinity because math doesn’t work so well outside of finite (created) bounds. This led Blaise Pascal to say some crazy shizznit like: "Nature [God] is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” This fries his mathematical noodle and he is launched into the metaphysical abyss (see Borges's "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"); you just can’t do good, end-game math in a world like this.

For example, a googolplex is so large a number that there isn’t enough space in the observable universe to write it out one number per atom.

 Graham’s number is crazy bigger than that, rendered in certain ways, like below, though these aren’t the only ways because nobody can find the right symbol to represent it. Graham's number hold's the world's record for largest number used in real math.

The number's so big we only know the last 10 digits, and we know it ends in 7--the rest is a mystery, or as I render it: 

…2464195387

In Graham's language, it looks like this: 

 

 In another, similar language, like this: 

 

 

 

 

 

And yet another: 

 

Naturally, there are in infinity higher numbers, existing currently only in computer science and apparently represented as TREE(n). TREE, it appears is magnitudes larger than G (Graham’s number) and also larger than another computer number magnitudes larger than G: A^A(187196)1. Whatever that means.

You see the absurd symbolization difficulties we get into when we try to stretch our chimpanzee math out into infinity, then, right? Once we reach certain numbers—which certainly are real if incomprehensible—we reach equivalent god planes that must be rendered in other absurd symbols like G-O-D. Real but inconceivable. Expressible, but not. 

Now, this Godel character, Einstein’s pencil-neck buddy, wrote in weird math logic Greek symbols what translates as the following:

"God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist."

 Just happens to be a nearly exact match of the argument of an 11^th Century Catholic Saint named Anselm of Canterbury.

Anyway, you might say we can’t conceive of a bigger number except within contexts we have created, and even though the context is imaginary, the bigger number is real because we must be able to count into infinity. God exists in our minds, but we could conceive of a greater existence than just in thought, which is in reality, and God existing in reality would be the limit of how we might conceive him, the inconceivable and real number. Bang, thanks to the holy semantics of ontological word play and the laws of argumentation by definition, God exists within this weird paradox, one where imagining God to exist creates the existence in perpetuity represented by inadequate symbols, one where God is composed literallyof everything, and the standard scientific requirement that a demonstration of a posteriori negative proof is necessary to prove an existence—if indeed existence can be proved--is moot because a thing that is everything naturally encompasses its impossible opposite, which is nothing, because even the tiniest essence of nothingness is immediately a somethingness and God; circular as it is--with a finite circumference arrived at via infinite constant, i.e., pi), here we are again at the limit of that which we might conceive, which is where God and some absolute infinite lives.

In other words, see John 1:1, which says in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God; and note the Genesis is brought forth with (not literally) speaking the universe into existence, in essence telling a story, in essence slapping symbols (metaphors) on that which is beyond symbols, which is what writers, poets, storytellers, musicians, artists, and mathematicians do in pathetic and plastic imitation. John used a generic symbol, "word," to stand in for what cannot be expressed. Before and after him, thinkers, storytellers, and mathmaticians have done the same by substituting their own symbols.  

And that, my friends, is perhaps for me the incarnation of Borges's "Vindication," of which he wrote the probability of finding was zero. I write because stories and symbols are how we find God, who lives inexplicably within and without us.  

Filed Under # 5

Filed under Negative Buzz: It may be cell phone use is killing off the honeybees. This is only a problem if you like to eat things. In combination with pollution, climate change, and pesticides, nature’s best seed-spreader is in jeopardy. The solution sounds, erm, simple. To quote Ariel Schwartz, “unless we shut down all of our factories and power plants, nix international trade, stop using pesticides, and turn off our cell phones, we may need to find some other pollination solution.”

Filed under Get Your Fictional Weaponry Straight: New York Times prints correction about  baseball player’s bat misnomer. One can only imagine the breathless indignation that went into emailing the Times about the name of Thorin Oakenshield’s sword. Hint: It wasn’t Sting.

Filed under Things that You Should Be Really, Really Upset About: Potential miracle cancer drug isn’t being researched and developed because there’s no profit in curing things. 

Filed under Sticking It to the Man’s Homeowner Association: Don’t know if it’s true, but it sure is funny. HOA sues resident for painting house in a color not listed on the 7-approved-colors list. Resident responds by painting house ALL SEVEN colors listed. Nicely played, neighbor.

Filed under Why Isn’t This Bigger News? I know people have been a little busy with royal weddings and Dancing with the Stars, but when the governor of a major swing state seems as crooked as an Appalachian road, it probably should be talked about until he ends up on Celebrity Apprentice begging for forgiveness.  Newly elected (really, Florida?) governor Rick Scott wants to require all state assistance receivers to take drug tests at their own expense. He favors nationwide implementation of this. Though fuel for debate, that’s not as big a deal as the governor owning a chain of urgent treatment centers offering drug screening services and targeting uninsured clientele, meaning Scott stands to make a fair amount of money off the law if the ever-growing poverty stricken are forced to pony up. With 113,000 people receiving Florida welfare benefits, that’s $4 million if required to just do it once. Perhaps he needs some cash after running the hospital company slapped with the largest fines in US history for Medicare fraud. Really, Florida? This guy?

Filed under Told You Your Internet Girlfriend Was a Dude: Real people and their gaming avatars.

Filed under Big Brother Collects More Data than He Can Possibly Make Sense Of: The NSA collects more data in six hours than what’s in the entire Library of Congress.

Filed under If He’s Jesus then I’m the Queen of England: Former British government spook (00-crazy-8) says he’s Jesus and can control who wins soccer matches—so long as he’s not drunk.

Filed under Outrageous Fortune: Commissioner leaves FCC to work as Comcast lobbyist four months after approving the Comcast NBC deal. Imagined email between her and the biggest media company on the planet: Don’t worry. All that will happen is a few activists will get mad and write some really mean blog posts about you. After that, it’s easy street, baby, for us anyway.

 Filed under Far Worse Problems than Procrastination: A photo of a headline that reads, “Student sets out to write paper, ends up breaking world masturbation record.”

Filed under Wait, There’s a World Record for That? Sure is.

  Filed under New Zealand Has Weird Problems:As South Park previously illustrated, those ginger kids must be stopped.

Filed under There’s Funding for That? Screw the National Endowment for the Arts. The Air Force needs money to find out if you really can move “from location to location through mind powers.”

 

 

The Creative Spirit

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."--Stephen King

Over at Plumb, Rosemary Rhodes Royston estimates that writers are psychic. I don't think she's wrong, but I think the category should be extended to a more general “artists.” There's plenty of historical, theoretical, experimental, philosophical, and theological evidence for this. I'm not sure it's limited to writers and artists, but often the practitioners of the craft—who always have been led by the Creative Spirit—are adept at tapping into what some call the Universal Collective, or at least are tuned into what Plato called “the Real,” what many others have simply called Truth, even if what they are creating is fiction.

Theory: Artists live in the realms of the Subconscious, the biographical, experiential part of the psyche, and the Unconscious, the aspect of the psyche Jung theorized was biological, genetically and physically embedded with universal symbolism. In addition, as though philosophers in different tunics, artists dwell on humanity, what it is and what it means, noting its tendencies and mapping those tendencies along with their consequences on paper or canvas. When the chord is struck just right, it rings loudly, clearly, and devastatingly. When the chord is struck just right, it exists outside of time, seems to apply to all humans, and the product of the artist becomes immortal, far greater than the artist herself/himself. You can read, therefore, and find yourself in King Solomon's existential crisis in Ecclesiastes, in the tale of love and terror in the Gospels; you can laugh at yourself in Erasmus's Praise of Folly, suffer with the sinners and saints in the Divine Comedy, tremble with fear at the prescient similarities between the time you live in and the time laid out in Orwell's 1984. This isn't clairvoyance as much as it is getting in touch with the Self, as it is knowing thyself and being gutsy enough to shine a light on that.

Rosemary cites Carl Jung for support, and as a fellow Jungian, I think that's appropriate. Trying so hard to remain stoically scientific and rational, Jung soon found himself fighting his own romanticism on the divergent roads of the Psyche, where he discovered the Breath of God, and that breath was composed of symbolism—of metaphors—constant and universal within humans, seemingly implanted there in the womb. That may sound crazy, ye scientists who still proffer the recently outdated trope that science and spirituality are incompatible, but consider this: In a recent experiment with birds (forgive me, I'm not taking the time to find all my sources), scientists discovered what appeared to be “ancestral memory.” Male birds learn their mating songs from their fathers—Dad teaches his boys how to get the chicks!—and the researchers wanted to see what kind of songs offspring would sing if separated from their fathers before they could be taught the mating song. The songs were measured electronically, and the first generation of separated offspring produced some unmelodious and arrhythmic and pathetic verse. The second separated generation (the offspring of the offspring) did the same. But a few generations down the line, something incredible happened: The great-great-great grandsons found their special family rhythm again and produced mating songs identical to their original forefather.

Jung was right. All of us are connected by some strand of memory or symbolism, and a writer tapping into that effectively comes off as one stepping into your own head. The four archetypes, the universal metaphors, are present in all stories, all art stemming from the Unconscious realm. The Shadow: the dark but fascinating figure who thrusts the world into chaos, the one who must be defeated, the one very recognizable in others but frequently denied in oneself; Anima/Animas: the male and female aspects of the Soul; Syzygy: the divine couple, the (re)union of the aspects; the Self: also called the Real, the Truth, the Pneuma, or the vital, creative wind that carries us to God.

I'm surprised how many people I talk to who don't know much about Joseph Campbell, whose writings I think need to replace some of the Victorian twaddle still assigned in American schools. But they should know, especially if they're Star Wars fans; George Lucas gave express credit (and a private screening!) to Campbell for inspiring the iconic trilogy. Campbell considered himself a successor to Jung, and perhaps taking a cue from Jorge Borges, who said, “Perhaps universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors,” he dug around the myths pervasive throughout modern human history to see if he could identify those universal metaphors. And of course, he did. He found lots and lots of them, stretching across Middle Eastern messiahs, Chinese Cinderellas, and Native American Noachian floods.

Campbell discovered and wrote and said lots of interesting things before he died, and among them, the most interesting for me, was that as the modern world loses its rites of passage, as the modern Church fails to provide metaphors younger generations will be able to accept, as humanity strives for new metaphors with new (the same!) meanings, poets will become the shamans of mankind. And that's pretty retro, if you ask me, the idea we return to verse, but I suppose it makes sense because poets provide the metaphor, the deep layers of meaning within which we not only find ourselves, but the breath of God. Poets give us the symbols required for the Psyche to unlock the code. The writers of the Bible knew this. The Vedics did, too. Or how about this noodle-frying verse from John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And then Jesus commences to telling stories.

Here too, Campbell displays the divine couple: the poet and the storyteller. The poet reaches up into the realm of inexpressibility, overlays imprecise symbols that come only very close to interpretation, and brings the inexpressible down to expressible earth, which was, it is said, spoken into existence, and the storyteller lays out the routes upon which incarnated characters will live out their questions and live out their symbols. We rely on parables—on finding ourselves in the story—to reach God because the ultimate Truth is this: Every single thing we know about the Universe and Ourselves stems from a story someone told us and the odd and loose amalgamation of metaphors, both experiential and biological, we use for understanding.

Writers aren't anymore psychic than anyone else. We just have the gumption and curiosity to dwell in abstract and spooky gardens of truth, and we have hubris and courage enough to present those truths to sometimes hostile listeners. We don't pave roads, and we don't build cars. We only draw maps, and if we get lucky, the maps lead someplace real.

Filed Under #4

Filed under The Past Really Was in Color: Sources swear these aren't photoshopped and that high-quality color photography has been around for a century. The pics are surreal, like actually stepping into the past.

Filed under Exercise Can Kill You Faster: On average, barring interruption or intervention, mammals regardless of size are allotted 1.5 billion heartbeats. The fluttering mouse heart, therefore, is destined to run through that allotment a lot faster than the slow boom-ba-boom elephant heart will. Therefore, the non-sequitur I choose for selfish convenience is that jogging obviously will shorten your lifespan, and I shall not do it, oh no.

Filed under Yet Another Thing to Remind You Your Reality Is a New Human Condition: Answering the phone with the word “hello” —mind-bogglingly and circuitously related to “holla!” (old English for “stop”)—is a 20^th Century accident. Alexander Graham Bell proposed “Ahoy,” presciently anticipating the 21^st Century's “Talk Like a Pirate” day.

Filed under The Grossest Thing You'll Hear All May-Day: Spring tradition in Dongyang—yes, that could be the most ironic Anglicization ever—is to eat eggs boiled in prepubescent boy urine. Local residents suppose 23 cents isn't too much to pay for something that “tastes like spring.”

Filed under Stuff You Shouldn't Laugh At: Yeah, but it's funny anyway. There will be tears.

Filed under Everybody Loves Ramen: According to Wikipedia (source citation really needed), the Japanese voted instant ramen as the most significant invention of the 20^th Century, presumably above panty vending machines. But I defy you to name more important human discoveries than butter, sugar, and salt. Put that in your croissant and bake it, Madame Curie.

Filed under Are Those Sprouts, Long-Hair? The Sandwich, Mass., police department now the most likely to go on steak-outs for unauthorized dagwoods.

Filed under Chinese Factory Water Torture: The ultra-pure water they use to clean the semiconductors in your iPhone could kill you if you drank it, just suck all the vital minerals right out of your bloodstream.

Filed under They Took Our Jobs—Back to Asia: Between 1995 and 2005, over half of all Silicon Valley start-ups were launched by immigrants educated in the US. Due to tighter immigration regulations, immigrants are taking innovation back to China and India. Remember those great, American Dream romance stories about the contributions of the poor, tired, and huddled masses? These days, immigrants wave goodbye to Lady Liberty on their way home.

Filed under Beautiful Incomprehensibility: Pictures from the Hubble telescope.

Filed under Schroedinger's Cataract: For the first time, physicists have observed quantum entanglement with the naked eye. Crash course in quantum entanglement: What Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” was the apparent interconnectedness of disconnected photons; i.e., one light particle is tampered with over here, another one reacts on the other side of the universe. The weirdest part: These physicists had to make themselves part of the experiment, sitting in a dark room watching a pretty light show, which seems to my not-a-physicist understanding a conflict with what we learned from Shroedinger's Cat: Observers see what they expect to see. I'd keep going, but my brain hurts already.

Filed Under #3

Filed under Math = Awesome + Stupid: The awesome part of the term “yotta,” is that it allows one to introduce terms like “yottasecond” into the vocabulary, which is 32 septillion years. So you get to say pretentious sentences like “It only took a yottasecond for my husband to take out the trash.” The stupid part is—and probably I should have learned this in college at some point—is that my understanding of a number like 32 septillion (32, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) can not only be computed as zero, but that in French, that number is 32 quadrillion, because the French think in terms of million millions, not thousand millions. In other words, 10⁹ (English billion, French milliard) is 10¹² in French, but only if using a base 10, and if using a different (Logic) system, the number is rendered 1000²⁺¹ unless in French, where a billion is 1000³⁺¹ because I’m guessing the French won’t allow being one-upped by the British, who gave us yards instead of meters, which is why Asian countries are killing the US in math. Well that only took a yottasecond to explain, didn’t it?

 Filed under Stuff That Makes You Want to Holler: Congress first passed the Civil Rights Act in 1875, which was subsequently overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1883. That’s four-score and twenty-odd years of devistating lost progress. The ultimate irony: That law was passed by Lincolnesque Republicans, back when Republican meant Democrat.

 Filed under Awesomest Bet Ever: Dr. Suess’s editor bet him he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words. The result: Green Eggs and Ham.

Filed under What Engineers Do on Friday Nights When the Rest of the World Is Distracted by Romance: Build ridiculous working Lego factories. This video goes on for eight minutes. Don’t knock it. While still in grad school, the Google guys built Lego printers.

 

Filed under Somebody Has Missed the Point Entirely: All Free Speech area postings must be approved by the Office of Student Retention and College Life.

Filed under Skills One Can Master When the Cable Is Cut Off: Olympic Bread Tossing.

Filed under Positive Fashion Contributions from Iran: In 2010, Iran barred men from wearing mullets. In related news, the Hijab and Chastity Festival might sound like a hoot, but with no Kentucky Waterfalls allowed, it’s like a party with no Natty Light.

Filed under Stupidest Thing I Ever Heard: Back in 1999, a federal judge dismissed a discrimination lawsuit filed by a man whose employment application to the local police was rejected on the grounds he was too smart. According the judge, it wasn’t discrimination because everybody with a too-high IQ test score was rejected. Well, duh, stupid genius! The article doesn’t mention why such a hiring stipulation exists to begin with.

Filed under Is America That Racist?: Black dogs get adopted the least.

Filed under A Long, Long Way from Misunderestimated: President Garfield could write with both hands at the same time in two different dead languages.

Filed under Beginning of the End Again: eBooks now outselling paperbacks.

Filed under I Want to Say About a Million Things But I Can’t Express Myself Monosyllabically Enough for You to Understand Them All, and Besides Nobody Will Know How Pithily I Just Insulted You Anyway: Two old men in Mexico are the last two people on Earth who speak the language Ayapaneco. Naturally, they’re not speaking to each other. 

 

Filed Under #2

Filed under Claws or Affect?: Liberal brains are good for thinking about a problem; conservative brains are good for acting on a problem. A larger anterior cingulate cortex, found in people who identify themselves as liberals, understands complexity and is tolerant of conflict. A larger amygdala, found in people who identify themselves as conservatives, is a reptilian area good for seeking and destroying threats. Key point buried in the article: It’s unclear if these differences are the cause of political viewpoints or are the result of them. My hunch is it is the result of environmental factors: Growing up isolated (rural), poorish (survival-minded), and under consistent threat of eternal damnation (religious) creates a highly developed threat center; education (and if done right, religion) can help develop less of a sense of other-as-enemy, but threat assessment andunderstanding how to handle it is weakened. Thus we have our current Congressional situation: sissy weakling Democrats paralyzed by wanting to understand and compromise with a freshman class of GOP who’d rather just kill them and move on with other misdirected assinations, i.e., NPR instead of Defense, which of course the amygdala thinks needs $800 billion annually in case aliens or demons attack. If there’s anything the philosophical left brain can learn from the heat-seeking right brain, it’s how to visualize and attack rather than visualize and wonder how.

Filed under Lazy Ways to Create Energy: Sit in a rocking chair, take a shower, go to bed. 

Filed under Creepy Art: Banana sculptures hold no appeal for me, but are cool in a looks-like-its-face-is-melting kind of way. 

Filed under Maybe There’s Hope After All: By Vadim Lavrusik’s estimation, social media can help save quality journalism. His reason: even though people secretly search out the smut (celebrity gossip, political polemics) for themselves, they’re too embarrassed or polite to share the smut with others. Instead, they tend to share the good stuff, the informative investigative, hard news stuff.  David Wheeler points out that CBS News has the youngest network evening news audience, with an average age of 60, which means younger generations are going elsewhere, most likely the Internet, most likely to social networks.  The fear has been, as 20^th century journalism and media complete the last items on their bucket lists, that media would devolve into fragmented, underfunded, poorly researched, and low quality wars of ideology and culture. But maybe—oh, just maybe—always-on social networks will bring out the best in audiences and news sources. Get thee behind me, Cynic!

Filed under As If I Needed Another Reason to Lose Weight: Being fat affects your memory. What was I saying? Oh, it was that if I have to subsist on celery and water, I’d rather not remember lunch. It’s a vicious cycle,too, because other studies show too much thinking can make you fat—well, they show that brain-work and mind-intensive tasks rely on the brain’s glucose energy sources, thereby increasing carbohydrate cravings and chances of overeating. Sigh. My mom often wonders to herself (unjustifiably), “Don’t know if I’m fat because I’m lazy or lazy because I’m fat.” But my complaint is: Thinking makes you fat, and fat makes it so you can’t think anymore—you’d think not thinking would cause you to lose weight. Judging by the current obesity rates in the US and subsequent pandemic lack of thinking, that’s obviously untrue.

Filed under Royal Mind Bleep and Being Aware of the Time Warp Means You Can’t Do the Time Warp: In general, time moves only forward, but if light enters a state of zen and perfect unawareness, it might be able to move in time circles, but it won’t know that’s what it’s doing, and the moment it starts to perceive anything, it can only perceive moving forward in time. Hey man, this is science! Erm, maybe.

Filed under Eventually Misappropriated Military Technology: Though this fabric was developed for protection against noxious gases, how long you think before it’s sold to the general public as anti-fart technology?

 

Filed Under #1

My wife can attest to the fact that there are dozens of web browser tabs open on my PC at any given time. I read interesting things, mean to get back to them, email them, bookmark them, or post them to Facebook or whatever, but I always run out of time to finish all that before I have to get ready for work or spend time with my family or do some kind of chore. And just about always, the computer crashes, grinds to an infuriating near-stop, or does an update reboot before I can get back to them. Like I said earlier, I have an obsession with everything because I really hate not knowing stuff. That's probably not healthy, but at least I'm a good trivia partner. Blame Digg, Reddit, and Fark. So, I've decided to handle this problem in a new way. I'm going to file these Internet wonders here, in a series called "Filed Under." This is Filed Under #1.

Filed under You’re Not as Smart as You Think You Are: 12-year-old has a research job at Indiana U.

Filed under Immature Snickering: Obama buddy, arrested for soliciting a prostitute, is named “Titcomb.” 

Filed under Awesomest Reason to Be Expelled: Too young to have a badass mustache.

Filed under Completely Useless Information: 555 in Thai is “ha ha ha,” and now is code for the code LOL. They should add to this entry that in Japanese 555 is “go go go,” and is the name of a love hotel.

Filed under Places I Want to You to Take Me To: Funk Island

Filed under Well Waddya Know?: This is what the lady who says, “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and dial again…” looks like.

Filed under Super Rotten Things Governments Did 60 Years Ago: Britain shipped orphans to Australia because they wanted more white people there.

Filed under Profs I Wish I’d Taken: Philadelphia professor hires strippers for Platonic ethics class. Pretty sure that’s not the cave Plato was talking about.

Filed under Good Stories Don’t Need Excess Authorial Alliteration: Crook’s Constipated Caper Tapered by Poo-poo Po-Po, Penner Pulls One Out of His Pooper for Paper.

Filed under Apparently Dictators Are Just Frustrated Writers, and Words We Don’t Need Because They Are Impossible to Pronounce: Hussein wrote erotic novels, Qaddafi wrote twisted children’s books, Stalin and Khomeni were super terrible poets, and the word oeuvre is completely unnecessary unless you’re about to throw up.

Filed under Drunk Dialing Is About to Get Easier: “Brain-control interface” lets you dial phone numbers with your thoughts.

Filed under Somebody Get These People a Special Helmet Quick: Hotel staff blames chair for spate of pregnancies.

Filed under Congress Is Full of Baloney: What the House of Representatives would look like if it were truly representative.

 

 

Affirmation

My name is ____________. I say my full name to make the universe aware of it. I say my full name to make myself aware of it. Though I have good reason, like many before me, to think the world is some kind of illusion, I must assume for now the world is real and I am real. I must assume the people who depend on me are real, that we are separate-yet-one beings dependent upon one another within the space-time field of opposites, even if the space-time field of opposites is a logical and seemingly cruel absurdity in an infinite universe and cannot exist. I understand that because of this, I and my family, which includes all the human race, all animals, plants, rocks, particles and waves, are one, that the separation between us is an illusion composed of energy moving within a vacuum of nothingness. Though I cannot comprehend it, I understand that nothing and something are mirror images like photographs and negatives, made possible by the contrast of light and dark, colored only by scattering light, and one can’t exist without the other pulling against. I understand the universe is flat, the center is everywhere, that the circumference is inaccessible, and that it is held together by infinite contradictions pulling in equal and infinite directions until it is both flat and infinitely spherical; one is whole and round and endless, and at its imaginary border is its two-dimensional projection. I understand I cannot understand this but I am okay with it. My brain was not designed to understand it, and I choose to believe my existence is in accord with the will of the Universe. I assume the Universe has a will. I assume the Universe has a purpose, even if my concept is only metaphor, even if I should strive for an existence devoid of concepts. I assume, though it takes tremendous energy, somethingness defeats nothingness by insisting upon being and by gathering up the limitless energy available in what is named a vacuum. I understand the vacuum is an illusion, that something with energy within it is not really empty. The fact that anything even seems to exist at all is affirmation of life, of work, of positive forces. The fact there is an infinite amount of energy available to create and recreate somethingness in the face of eternal and unstoppable entropy is proof the Universe or some indescribable being within it values life and values my life, despite my being a single grain of sand and blinkishly temporary quantum particle in the fabric of eternity. Inconceivably, the Universal Being is aware of me and cares about me. It’s okay that I have my doubts. I would not be a rational observer of the Universe if I did not. I choose to believe I am here for a reason. I understand that I am a character in a play, and the play is divine. I understand that I am simultaneously AN author of the play and one very small atom of THE author of the play. I understand all beings are this way, and this unifies everything within a great incomprehensible continuity. I understand that all I sense is both real and not real. I believe, because I am an optimist—or yearn to be—the Universal Narrator (God) spoke the story of the universe into existence, and as a child of God I, too, am a creator, and I, too, can by speaking and believing create a tiny part of the world around me. I must remember to speak audibly to the Universal Being, affirm with my mouth that which I hope and dream to be. I understand that my attitude, positive or negative, causes ripples in the Fabric. I understand reality is partly my own creation.

I commit to remind myself everyday of the following:

                I am special because I am the unique product of the mathematics of Infinity.

                I am beautiful and highly unlikely.

                I am the product of pure energy.

                I am something rising out of nothing.

                I am called to participate in the Great Narrative, and to write part of it.

                I am smart. I see the world in a way no one else can.

                I am talented. I walk through, interact with, and find balance in the world in a way no one  else can.

                I wear just one of the infinite masks of God.

                In an infinite universe, all possibilities become eventualities.

                I am better than good enough. I’m great enough.

                God loves me. The Universe loves me.

                Love is the willingness to suffer with. Love is the most important thing a human can learn.

                God has a plan for me. I am free to follow. I am free because I follow.

                I am fated, and I understand fate is merely the knowledge of what will be. I made my decision long before I     was born. My part is known. Everything is known.

                I embrace the mystery. I am comfortable within it.

                I will try to be the best me I can be. It’s okay if I can’t be because it only matters to me anyway.

                I can change the world by being a drop in the countless waves that break the dam.

                I am the wave that breaks the dam, even if on the other side of the world.

                No matter my vocation, I am an artist. Rejection doesn’t matter.

                I am a creator. Approval doesn’t matter.

                I am a poet, even if I never wrote a word. Poets are the new shamans of the world.

                I am a storyteller, because the world needs stories.

                I matter, and I am matter, composed of the spirit of God.