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"It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few individuals for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular assessment of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque."

 

(Einstein from a 1921 interview with a Dutch newspaper)

 

 

 

Foreword

My granddad may well have read Einstein's very modest statement quoted just now, since he was alive around Einstein's time, as common lore has it. As a matter of fact we all are, but let's not get into that just yet. My granddad was, for all intents and purposes, the very opposite of Albert Einstein: a farmer's son, who's biggest passion was rhyming about and for the people in the village where he lived. Does that mean he and Einstein were totally different? Heck no! Before his breakthrough, even Einstein was an everyday patent clerk with a passion for science and technology, and how it pertained to the All. And the saying above only proved that after the vindication which his scientific work brought him, he was still every bit as normal as my granddad and any one of us.

Now we all have countless experiences every day, and in one way or another, we use those in shaping our way of life. Einstein worked with numbers, and as such he used the framework of science to build his theories. Likewise, my granddad used events happening in his life and those of others, to write his poetry about. And to keep in style, most of my writing is also about my passion: figuring out the All! Funny sync is that without knowing about the eventual sync myself, I started a movie called Super 8 a while ago, which right now shows me aliens do it in essentially the same way: our cornered alien needs to rebuild his spaceship, and to him or her all the objects and people around are fit to use for repairing its ship or remaining fed. Too bad though, he or she didn't take the time to learn about the proper use of humans before finishing the ship. I guess RTFM even happens way out there...

Building upon their achievements, and those of many others , I've come to believe that we may base our actions on those events, but we need not restrict ourselves to them. We are not standing on top of a pyramid of beings after all, but right in between them. Some of them support us physically, others do it in virtual way, across electronic or spiritual boundaries. Basically, if we restrict ourselves, we may think we're sticking to the reality we call truth, as opposed to going further than anyone told you, and calling it discovery or fiction. But what if the information you receive isn't quite truthful, or you interpret it incorrectly? Well, you can worry about it, or take the next step from where the Buddha ended up, and simply enjoy it all right Here and Now. It is merely a matter of believing that the Grand Design a.k.a. the Incredible Machine, the Cosmos or the All isn't called that for nothing: being Infinite, it will always have room for all possible outcomes of any event, so there is no way to choose incorrectly: every possible fantasy will even be reality somewhere! Basically, it is like a grand library: you walk in, and when you walk out you take some book(s) to read. The other books remain in there, simply because they weren't your choice at that moment. OK, some you may never read, but other people might love them!

(in New Age circles this is what they call the Akashic Library, I guess....)

One last piece of info from me to you for what it is worth: I have the experience that we do not know it all, but we damn well know how well we know it! Also we have an intuitive grasp of the suitability for our purposes of the info that reaches us, which is called discernment. You may believe or disbelieve that, but the moment you've had that feeling of absolute knowing, it is no matter of belief anymore! Just listen to your GUT, in more ways than one.....

Right Here, Right Now,

Sander R.B.E. Beals

Table of Contents

Foreword 3

Connecting the Dots 5

Meet the Neighbors... 9

Another nudge in the butt... 15

the (Bi)Cycle of Life (if you don't wanna walk) 19

Common Consensus Reality: the Great Restrictor 23

Inflating the Balloon 28

Let's Smurf the lot! 33

Must be a glitch in the Matrix.... 39

the Sales Avalanche 43

Angels and Demons 46

More Life? You God IT! 50

Bring it All back to You! 53

Duality reigns, even here... 56

She's out of my League... 60

To Be or Not To Be.... 64

No Holds Barred! 69

What's Mickey doing in my Cappuccino??!! 72

Surf's Up, Dude(tte)s! 75

Training for Fun! 79

Connecting the Dots

As a kid, I loved those "connecting the dots" pictures. Even though often the end result would be quite obvious even before my pen touched dot one, I'd take great pleasure in seeing my creation appear on paper, ready for further enhancement by coloring or other ways of filling in the blanks. Over time I have experienced that the distances between the dots may seem way larger, but somehow the game still holds because you still only have to look for the next step in your personal evolution. You can try and solve everybody else's puzzle at the same time too, but they may not appreciate that: like children in kindergarten, they'll think you're trying to steal their toys. Instead, you can almost always try to give toys away, a method which is often appreciated. As such, I give away "Infinity plus One", "Art of War once Moore" and this book, but humbly suggest a donation of 1 euro if you really think you need to pay....

(All just modest but still very relevant contributions to the 'Dreamhome' fund..... )

By the time the stars were out there before I was sent to bed as a kid, my awareness of them became just like that of the game mentioned above, although negative in that they were white dots on a dark velvet background, but at the same time positive because of the hope and awe of their mystery. Back then I didn't know the term "nerd", yet I absolutely was one! Jet Audio just started: "I don't wanna be a freak, but I can't help myself (4x)" Being highly active where my mind was concerned, I'd spend many an hour after being sent to bed in a very intense game of thinking things through and feeling how I felt about them, connecting the dots of the day into a coherent contraption that I called my web of knowledge. Back then I thought it mine, but then again anyone with the same dots might have constructed the same web of knowledge. On the other hand, since there are no actual numbers tagged to the dots outside, we can connect them in any order we please!

And just now I discovered that I'm not the only one connecting the dots: He died only recently, after a life full of grandiose achievements and great ideas. Steve Jobs talked about the dots at Stanford, in the video TED-tip #77 Steve Jobs about connecting the dots, which also holds the clue to why he died..... (notice the 77? my personal hangup, a smile from my divine lady.... ;-)

What he was right about though, was the fact that in fact you don't get to connect the dots in the future or the now. Only hindsight can be used, even though looking into the past may only amount to a fraction of an illusionary second. You probably recognize them, those thoughts that hit you in heart and mind at the same time. Basically that is the moment a thought reaches absolute certainty, and flips your mind inside out, creating a realization in the process! What he meant in fact, as I interpret it, is that since there is just the arbitrary time constant called a second, we can only realise new things if new changes bring us new experiences which lead to new insights. This has nothing to do with time, but everything with change, which is said to be the most powerful force in the Cosmos. By the way, have you ever realised that realisation has the power of a double-edged sword? It cuts itself from nothing into an idea, and its second slash can then transfer it from imagination to physical realisation in the material world. Visionaries often call the first step the '10% inspiration', and the second step the '90% perspiration'.

In my experience Jobs is correct, since I now see far more dots get connected in my life than before. It is much like 'knitting with changes'. And believe it or not, they are also more often coming in patterns, rather than as single changes (singularities?). And since the advancement of the Internet made us all WebMinds with way more dots to discover and connect, I'd say we're in for a 'Wevolution'....

Now back in "Infinity plus One", I showed you how a structure evolved from Yin and Yang into a symbol that has both six and seven in its essence. The product of six and seven makes the total come up to Douglas Adams' alledgedly random choice of forty-two as the answer to the question about the meaning of Life in the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Now I believe him when he says it was a random choice, but then the term random would have to be defined as "not a choice resulting from logic, and thus a choice of the subconscious".

Now let's take the third law of Creation, which basically says that you get back what you give off. That is a tricky one though, because as you can see, there is the second law to take into account also: All is One and One is All. The moment we are balanced and have no wishes, we are basically One, as in the grey sphere. Since the other six spheres are not active (no wishes, right?), we are All and One at the same time: since we wish for nothing, we do not desire our environment to change....

The moment we change our mind about wishing for a thing, situation, or person(s), we drop from the center sphere into the wish sphere. We're still One, but have merely shifted our view of the All. It is kinda like a wheel that needs balancing. And just like an unbalanced wheel acts up when its axis of revolution is tilted, so does the whole of Creation. But let's not call it that, because Creation is just one step in the above cycle, and describing it as a single process that was started once and ended with Genesis is too restrictive, and thus highly inappropriate: Creation is but a step in the cyclic process called the Incredible Machine that is the Cosmos, of which we are distinguished but yet indistinguishable parts! This whole has always been and will always be, since it is infinite, just like the first law says about all of us.

One cycle is an interaction of the One (you) and the All (the Cosmos), a string of three questions and three answers, which we see happen every day especially when working with computers, without even realising it:

Question 1: the wish you formulate either consciously or subconsciously.

Question 2: the Cosmos asking you to sign off on the 'positive' results.

Answer 1: you consciously or unconsciously giving the affirmative answer.

Question 3: the Cosmos asking your agreement on the possible 'negative' results.

Answer 2: you consciously or subconsciously giving the confirmation to go ahead.

Answer 3: the Cosmos meeting your demands.

NexT (as Steve Jobs called it): back to the center to be ready for another wish.

Did anyone recognize our view with regard to our Environment in this? The moment there is nothing more to do, we drop into that central resting position, that may not feel like peace to everyone...

Creation can be as detailed as a full-blown design plan on your part, including the realization that follows it. That would mean that the Cosmos only has to deal with smaller tasks, like hammers being in the place where you last put them, or other everyday miracles. And even these are all your doing, since All is One and One.... You get it. Miracles? Yes: since matter is just condensed energy, you cannot actually depend on it being a constant in time. It is merely our expectation of the behavior of matter as we experienced and experimented with it sofar. But once we all get the hang of it... Whoah Boy!!!

Now just like a computer program will tackle unusual situations in the execution of a task, so will the Cosmos. If we meet it halfway with our following actions, it will only have to do half the work, and that is exactly what it does. But then we have already 'messed up' our wishes by adding others to adjust the original one, or been busy doing our own redesigns which go completely against our previous wishes. Actually, you can adjust wishes, but the most effective is a wish, followed by two default yes answers and the proper gratitude, and then forgetting about any additional action. (the Media Player now plays "2 Times, 3 Times" by Ann Lee.... random as always) Fire and Forget, to just express it in military jargon which isn't really my cup o' tea, but which various movies have taught me in detail.... And if the idea ever pops up again, know it is so because you know absolutely, and continue...

At the moment, I'm experimenting with that way of working, but somehow my frame of mind is messing me up. No doubt, my previous realization that "Just enough is also Abundance" is somehow monopolizing my responses to the questions asked by the Cosmos. Consciously I still agree to that statement, but at the same time I'm thinking about redefining 'just enough'.... ;-)

Some days further, I'm now ready to include some more peculiarities about the SevenSphere, because it turns out to be something special in more ways than one. From the earlier publication in 'Infinity plus One' we found how a Yin and Yang evolves into a SevenSphere. What I hadn't realised back then though, is that the evolutionary process from oneness to SevenSphere takes exactly ten steps, which are all a lot like cell division! Is this why we mainly use a base 10 system? And the number of spheres within the larger spheres? Forty-Two!!

Even though I did the coloring of the SevenSphere back in 2001, I just now while writing realised that the six outer colors and the center color perfectly match the steps of the wishing sequence we defined above.

If you never wish you seem to have a grey life, but you may still be perfectly happy.

A wish is the blueprint of something you want to see materialized, hence the light blue.

We first look for (or get shown) the positives, hence the dark blue.

Our choice to continue gives the go-ahead for the Grand Design to swing into action.

Further on, negatives may show up, which are marked in red.

Our choice to do it is like Marty in back to the Future II: "Are you calling me yellow?!"

But in the end it all works out fine, or 'Green!' as Ruby Rhod calls it in the 5th Element.

So it's back to grey, unless you got the appetite for creation by now..... ;-)

OK, so I just pointed out a synchronicity, which you may or may not believe. Einstein preferred to walk the scientific path, which sort of amounted to self-imprisonment, even though he probably loved juggling numbers! I prefer to not walk that path, but still seek solitude to write stuff I think normal people might find understandable and even agreeable. If you feel neither, just toss this in the garbage. I know my boss will, although it is more like the library analogy: he'll never check out my books, or so he said. Still though, download stats are an indication that at least a few people do.....

Also, there has been an observable change in my manifestation talents. It is barely perceptible, but stuff that will go wrong and which will have almost immediate repercussions are things which I see myself averting now: when a glass drops, and is on its way to the floor, and I just have time to think "It's OK...", it is somehow influenced in its trajectory, so it lands on my sock-clad foot instead, and stays in one piece. Subconscious taking over muscle control, did my foot even move? Same thing with a razor-sharp meat knife: it plunged downwards point first, and my upper leg caught it and bounced it back on the table, like a movie played in reverse. All without a thought...

Another one I often use is the wish for good weather going home, even when the floodgates open around lunchtime. Weird thing is I can then usually get home dry, even if our climate is not such that the period from three to five PM is usually dry.... But if it does rain, I usually end up like the Pisces I am: drenched to the skin!

Remarkable is also that the money never runs out, even though it looks like that very often. No matter how many extra expenses I have to cover, there's always a sudden bit of cash coming in, or I have paid something twice, thus giving me a refund! Lotteries work best if I just enter them and never check the numbers. Because if I do have to check the numbers, the observer in me influences things, and they turn up nothing... And the big test comes this month I guess, with all the extra vacation expenses of my daughters, and the stuff they need for next school year. I'm gonna have a stack of bills left at the start of the new month, that even the Cosmos may have a hard time fixing! But I'm gonna go into it full of trust, and not worrying for a moment. But this is reported to be a general effect, not just relevant to little ol' me...

The other day I finally caught a "Get Rich Quick" E-mail that felt right, so I shelled out the required 25 Euros to learn more: but the moment the instructions came in, I just knew I'd never get rich quick that way! A good example of me dropping the cycle before the negative side-effects. Just another bit of absolute knowledge free of charge from the subconscious mind, the common genius that is Us!

As for the withdrawal into solitude, Merlin just asked Igraine why she locks herself in the building where she lives. Her answer was: "to be closer to God", which is basically just our love for our preferences being reflected to us from His or Her being.....

Meet the Neighbors...

Life is something which most people consider to be 'out there' where everything seems to happen. The moment we turn inwards, reality seems to fade away, leaving you something that one cares to call solitude, and the other loneliness. Although I occasionally love to return to solitude and silence, it is no better or lesser component of Life than our everyday environment. Most of us may feel that at times we have no free will, and yet we truly respect the existence of it in others: if I play my music too loud on the train, a fellow passenger may ask me to turn it down. Since I had the intention of listening to Ayreon at the level it should be played (to my taste), I turned it off instead, at which time the complainer indicated that he didn't intend to make me stop listening. No, but that's free will for ya: the continuous possibility of choosing to comply, refuse, or do 'none of the above'. So yes, the first layer of difficulty in Free Will is the set of constrainers and enablers where people around you (and all their various laws and decrees) will try to nudge you into certain directions. But you guessed it already, the ultimate decision is always yours: either adapt, or take a stand. Or, like Ellie (I'm watching Contact) is just answering her friend when he asked her why she wants to go on the mission: because there is nothing in her heart that she would rather do! Now in the diagram above, the six surrounding spheres are the do's and dont's that our environment rewards us with. Mostly, like all aspects of the Cosmos, they are perfectly balanced, so in the end no influence of the environment throws us off balance. In this case, I've arranged the three pairs of responses in such a way that the restrainers are on top, and the enablers are on the bottom, basically because we usually build on the enablers, and have to try and break through the restrainers. The pyramid of humans, remember? But setting them to surround us is equally valid of course, maybe even more so. Of course the six alternatives are way more effective if there is additional data following them, but that is another issue.

So it is all about our responses to what we perceive as outward influence. Here too, there is a sixfold structure that eventually shows all alternatives, including the 'none of the above' alternative: this simply means you leave this circle and skip to an adjacent one, like I did in turning the music off rather than listening to it at a volume that wasn't to my liking! I don't know about you, but I still typically make a few cycles around this sphere before settling on a decision. In that process even other circles may be involved, but the overall behavior is much like the 'locality of code' idea that is found in programming: we hover around a certain area of the program, repeating stuff over and over, in loops that have various sizes and forms. In three dimensions you would most likely view it as a set of nested soap bubbles, with your train of thought actually being a tiny dust speck that glides along the soapy surface of the various bubbles. Going from one thought to the next is basically just skipping from one bubble to the next. In 2D SevenSpheres you'd do it too, riding the color boundaries...

I figure that like a route planner, the Cosmos will revert to alternate routes once you 'stray' from your desired destination, by showing you the examples you need to again arrive at the surprise it is cooking up for you: with our self-inflicted restrictions, the way out will be the discovery of the optimum solution, which is shown in form to us by the bees, and the fact we are carbon-based, so many chemical compounds show the same hexagonal structure. Thus, we get hints from all around, about the easiest way to deal with things.

Working from another premise than Einstein, I will not try to prove to you that any concept can be visualised in a SevenSphere like I do in these books. Instead, by mere example, I hope to make it clear like a death verdict in an American murder case: reasonable doubt should suffice for a 'not guilty' verdict!

Next up is another hangup of mine: for no reason at all, I've always believed that we do not know everything, yet we do know how certain we are of everything! Once I came to this realization, I found that Life gave me an even more outrageous idea: I found that the certainty with which I knew certain things far exceeded the zero to one hundred percent range, some events even felt like absolutely true! And that didn't just happen once (read absolutely sure):

I was sure my wife was pregnant after three dots on a temperature chart. (check)

I was sure our first child would be a girl. (check)

I was sure our second child would also be girl. (check)

I was sure my colleague at work would be leaving way before she said so. (check)

I was sure her refusing to let me take a photo of her (for my diary) at the last moment
would still lead to me having photos of her anyway. (check)

I am sure I will at least reach the age of 94. (still to be proven, unlike the above points)

All of these were cases where no amount of skepticism (just expressed by mr. Kitz in Contact) from those around me could possibly shift my faith! And Ellie's answer is another case of absolute faith in her experiences: even though she must admit that her evidence is totally inadequate, she simply cannot withdraw her statement for she absolutely knows it was real!

So yes, we need another SevenSphere to model our view of knowledge, or rather ideas: The blink of an eye that you readers experienced here was actually about seventeen minutes, give or take a few. But it isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it: just fill in the six concepts that feel most related to your central concept from the viewpoint you want to take. In fact, filling in from your feelings is similar to using your intuition, or your subconscious. Depending on your viewpoint the six satellite concepts may be different, like when you view a hostage situation from the hostage's side, that of the perpetrators, or that of the police. But given the differences, these SevenSpheres can also be combined again into more complex structures, just like we build sentences, and eventually stories....

Maybe you've heard of the fact that any given 3D form may be represented by a finite number of triangles. I'm not sure who actually discovered that, but today's video cards make perfect use of it. It might have something to do with a triangle being an implicitly stable form, whereas other forms are not. Because of this 'law' making objects appear on screen is a routine operation that computers can easily delegate to their video boards. In a similar fashion, research back when I was a kid showed that languages have a finite set of three letter 'syllables', that is typical for the language under observation.

Like the forms and languages, the SevenSphere is essentially a set of six triangles connecting the centres of the spheres, that work together to define concepts. Also, if we want, we can extend the structure in other directions than the plane we are now working on, just like we can form any 3D form with them. In our 3D object analogy, a given set of triangles would construct a stable form inside the language space, which we might well call an idea. There is a reason that the saying "All good things come in threes" is as true now as it was when it was first evolving. "Evolving?", you say? Yes, sayings and other concepts of our culture don't just start to exist in a single blink of an angels eye, but like Richard Dawkins claimed, ideas and thus sayings evolve over time, where the most succesful tend to stick to our common consciousness as they are used and reused (or even recycled or abused) again and again by all of us. Of course this retelling is not uniform, and some tell it differently than others, just like in the Miss Marple episode I watched during writing last night. I didn't realise it then, but the Agatha Christy mystery about the murder occurring in a darkened room full of people was highly illustrative of what I'm trying to express: all witnesses gave wildly different accounts of what happened, just like the three deaf, dumb and blind wise men about their experience with the elephant. The same goes for our experiences with our respective gods: we all see differently...

But let me go on and give an example of what I mean: at some point in the evolution of the Internet someone got the funny idea of using letters sideways to express emotions. It may even have occurred before the Internet, when people still used those monstrously heavy typewriters that had little arms battling to beat each other for access to the paper. But that's beside the point. On the other hand though, those typewriters were the cause of us now having completely messed up keyboards: because the arms with the letters on the ends tended to lock up when one typed too fast, the keys were rearranged in order to minimize the clashes. This also explains why keyboards differ from country to country, because of differences in language (the set of three letter combinations is different). But like I said, that was beside the point. We were on text smileys, as the idea that they are: at first there were only a few, but adaptive as the idea was, it soon blossomed into sets of various expressions, so varied that most of us do not know the complete set, if there even is such a concept. But try to imagine these smileys in the context of the everyday world around us:

Like I said, this isn't the total set by far. There is even one called cross-eyed (XD), which is a nice example of adapting: not only did the smiley adapt to our world, but in due time our world adapted to the smiley: if we now pass a car that has a license plate with the letter combination XD in it, we cannot do anything else but smile at the 'real' expression of that emotion, even though in our particular country the license plates are strictly non-personalised.

The scrambling of our keyboards is a somewhat different story of adaptation: it has been able to remain even during the development of the computer, because all of us already adapted to it after the old typewriter made it a 'necessity'. Now this survival may remain, but at the same time the move to other devices like smartphones or tablets is already reshaping the landscape for future input methods. Most of us simply call these trends, but personal experience with them shows us otherwise in the development of our smart phones: I don't know about you, but I've always had certain 'complaints' about my then current cell phone. Not enough to immediately go get a new one, but enough to mark the shortcoming as something worth improving on with the arrival of the next phone. Of course, once the time comes to get a new smartphone, we forget our complaints and choose mostly by feeling, or at least I know I do. Weird thing about it is that the small hindrances I saw in the previous one have also been fixed, or at least are mysteriously absent in the new model even though the specs said nothing about it! It is much like the phones evolve like we do, logical, since some of us are the people designing and making them. But given the second law of Creation, what is the difference? Is it the Incredible Machine that creates it for us, or is it any number of us (who are also the Incredible Machine), in a company called Nokia, Samsung, HTC, or any other smartphone manufacturer? And it is our love for them and the love of their manufacturers for their particular product that drives their evolution!

Darwin said it, the best adapters win. But we find this happens in everyday life: if I'm in the habit of drinking a certain brand of ice tea, and actually have a dislike for light products, I may be quite unhappy to find the store replacing my favorite brand with a light alternative. I can then go find it elsewhere, find another product in the same store, or go with the light version. Now initially I got the dislike for light stuff because Internet told me aspartame was harmful, and me experiencing a certain taste related to light products. The combination gave me the idea to avoid it, but the moment the ice tea in the store was changed, I still went for the easy way out: just take whatever the store was offering as a replacement, because that was the most adaptive choice for the moment. One swift decision, and we return to a life where light products are just like normal ones, because in fact, 'Light' is a ambivalent concept, which has multiple meanings. Light as opposed to Dark, Light as opposed to Heavy, and Light as opposed to non-Light products. Three pairs, ring a bell? So I chose light, only to find that three weeks later, the old brand had returned.....

Yep, the term 'Light' is a very tricky concept indeed. As we can see on the right, it has at least three often used meanings, none of which carry the same weight or even color. All the same though, they all have the same pronunciation, which makes it necessary to use the context of the word in order to determine its meaning.

Let's just start with the Light – Dark polarity. Although most of us know about dark being the absence of light, the next point of interest is far less known: Dark seems to imply absence of frequency, and thus absence of waves, while light implies that there are frequencies present, depending on the color of the light. No doubt I'm now displaying my dubious talent for pointing out the obvious, just like Jane Marple is doing on the screen to my right at this time, but sometimes pointing out the obvious is the way to go. So dark can only be particles, because frequencies and thus waves cannot be present. 'normal' Light on the other hand is generally just a narrow band of frequencies, as science defines it:

Now we see how Dark might still have a frequency: if it is outside the visible spectrum we wouldn't see it, but it could still have a wave and particle nature. And what's more, we wouldn't know whether its frequency was left or right on the scale, lower or higher...

But what indeed defines a wave to be 'Light'? Boundaries shift, and even though visible light is quite stationary in this picture, the radio frequencies aren't: where this image indicates radar, is where nowadays our cell phones operate. Even television is no longer where it used to be broadcast, but instead is being piped into our homes as digital information at 20 – 50 Mbps rates! That is just about in the 25 nm range, way on the other side of the visible spectrum.

And even in the visible range we see the same shift in usage: red LED's were used originally as signal indicators. Green ones followed quite quickly, and in recent years even the blue ones became commonplace. The latest in lighting after Edison's bulbs and fluorescent lights are the new bright white full spectrum LED's, which hardly use energy, and light up the entire room. So yes, as a culture, we are shifting up in frequency, at least in the frequencies we use!

The next is the Light – Heavy duality. This immediately makes us think of Gravity, which in my second novel I described as being zero in the center of celestial bodies (gravity pulls from all sides). Only later did I figure out why we normally don't think of it like that: deep sea pressure problems! We've all heard how it is difficult to travel underseas, because of the pressure. At first sight, we attribute this to gravity, and in a way it is, but what is the difference between the deep sea and some cavern going deep down in the Earth's crust? Easy: deep sea is a collection of water molecules which weigh down on one another, hence the high pressure. The cavern into the Earth's crust is stable, and as such does not weigh down on the lower parts of the structure in quite the same way. That implies no pressure increase, or at least one not so steep.

The third duality is the Light – Normal one, which is actually a bit more of a marketing strategy, but it shows our ascent into the Light as well: when I was in school, we were taught that sugar was most easily digested for a quick energy boost, but would turn into fat if the energy wasn't used in some way. Nowadays, we've seen the term 'Light' be used first to indicate no sugar, then to indicate no fat, and then as just a general concept of "It's better for you than normal products". In fact, this is just another facet to our free will, whether or not we believe all this 'Light' stuff. And that goes for all three of the Light dualities.

Now the Light – Heavy duality has alternate meaning, one which 'bipolar' patients like myself are intimately familiar with: Our psychiatrists continuously remind us of the scale of utter depression right upto hypermanic behavior, and our requirement to stay somewhere in the middle, at fifty percent. To us patients, manic is Light, and depressed is Heavy or Dark. But no matter where we are on the ladder, our ability to use common sense does not need to be impaired. It's just that we easily confuse Light with an escape from whatever we find restricting in our environment. And where the depressed ones give up and sink into their swamp of negativity, a manic person can't be kept down: just like van Halen is now playing 'Jump' for me during this rereading of my text, the first lines of the lyrics say it all: "I get up, and nothing gets me down!"

A weird sync is the fact that the Miss Marple episode I'm watching while writing actually has a psychic patient in it. I guess that was a debut of Jodie Foster (or someone pretty much looking like Jodie in her younger years), who also turned up in yesterday's feature named 'Contact'. That may not mean anything, but I guess my way of reasoning is every bit as compact as my way of knitting: if I knit, I knit woollen surfboards that hardly bend, instead of the elegant woolly waves Miss Marple produces. Despite our difference in Modus Operandi, we both go the same way, but she restricts herself to the crime scene, where I refuse to acknowledge any borders, and thus adher to the second law of Creation: I figure any subset of the All can tell me about the whole of it! On the other hand that still does not make me stop attempting to experience it All....

What does stop me from experiencing it All are my preferences: even though I am not longer easily scared in any rollercoaster, and spend most of the ride making photographs of my daughters, you will never see me tie an elastic rope around my ankles and jump off a bridge. But that does not mean I won't be an enthousiastic passenger in a jet fighter if one of the stunt teams ever invites me....

Now you may think I'm going to sell you on the idea that we are all just driven by our preferences, thus creating some sort of Hell on Earth for all of us. Well actually, nothing could be more beside the actual intent of my writings: if we all listened to our preferences, this civilization would probably look a lot better than it does now. Because let's be honest: if a kidney is supposed to clean your blood, then it is equipped with the tools and talents to do so. Now we may not believe that such an organ has free will, but what if it actually did decide to do the hearts job? Wouldn't that mess things up terribly?

The same goes for (human) beings: the talents they are equipped with are theirs because of their desired role in the whole, and their preferences match those talents to a tee! It is just a matter of searching oneself, and honestly confessing what your talents are. I guess it's not just homosexuals who need to come out of the closet.... ;-)

Now my top talent is observation, because my passion is to figure it all out.. The moment I see something, I know it will be useful later on because I have that same feeling Mr. Spock used to have in the original series: "Hmmm, fascinating". I figure those are the moments you immediately store in long term memory, because you intuitively know you are going to have some purpose for it. From that angle, I could go on to my second talent, of being a reasonably gifted writer in both Dutch and English. And guess what? Most of the "Hmmm, fascinating" moments bubble up at the exact moment I need them in my story!

And all the while my top talent doesn't rest: it will take in whatever music or movie I have running on the side, and will alert me to synchronistic matches. Maybe I'm over-associating, being a manic, but I can assure you I'm as stable as the next guy (or gal) at this moment. It is just like I'm experiencing what being in a New Age forum had me wondering about: I never could figure out what they meant by our minds going into a crystalline configuration, until I started perceiving the facets in my own thinking and feeling processes.

And often our talents guide us: I haven't yet found the link, but my being tells me there is a correlation between my research, which hinges on 4 and 7 as special numbers, and the 4 basic elements of human DNA. I'm not sure whether I will find it or someone else will, but I know it is there! Of course the most obvious link is the SevenSphere to the right, because DNA has exactly six informational ingredients, regardless of their respective complexities! Where I aimed at putting the X on top as the men are the warring faction in humanity, I happen to be wrong: according to Wikipedia, I should have put the YX in red to put men in their place, and women in blue supporting the whole not because they must, but because they have the talent for it. And besides, we're all male and female in some way...

Hmm, XX & XY => XXX & Y => Sex is the question, Yes is the answer!

Another nudge in the butt...

Here in the Netherlands we have a saying that claims that lack of adult behavior is caused by not getting enough kicks in the behind while growing up. Now I can't really remember having received that many, but I guess if my eldest gives me Dumbledore's wand, "Because you always give wise answers, even if you really do not know...", I'm OK as dads go. But that isn't what I want to talk about, except for the growth aspect implied by the father / daughter relationship: Let's just take a look at the various aspects of it, from both the personal and more public view:

The SevenSphere for this concept has a very obvious triangle pointing up, if you allow me the concept of my artistic freedom: Evolution and Revolution are pretty much common phrases, whereas the 'Wevolution' introduced a few pages ago isn't. But since I'm the 'inventor' of the term, let me explain to you what I mean by it:

Apart from Evolution, which is usually gradual, and Revolution which is a growth spurt usually initiated by the 'oppressed', and which usually targets the Status Quo, Wevolution is that type of event where all of us actually agree that it is the right thing to do. I know, this type of growth is quite uncommon to Earth's society so far, although ancient cultures may have had a better understanding of it. We can easily show these terms as balloons being treated different ways:

Evolution is a balloon being inflated: it grows regularly.

Revolution is a balloon being punctured, making room for a new one.

Wevolution is when the knot is untied, and the balloon goes where it wants to go!

The other triangle is more personal, in that it allows us Free Will (Volition) to decide as we chose, also provides for the evaluation of the alternatives by both us and the world we perceive around us. In the end however, it is we ourselves who get to choose again, based on what we heard and saw from those around us. Since our environment is just a mirror for us, as stated by the third law of Creation, there is nobody but us to decide. One choice we often have to make is the one between Evolution and Revolution. Wevolution does not belong in that set, because it is the one choice we all agree about without any further choice being needed. It is quite a bit like Buckminster Fuller once said it: "Do not fight the System. Instead, design a better one!" And of course, as soon as 'better one' is sufficiently better, we have arrived at Wevolution because everybody loves it!

Funny thing is that our personal experiences somehow feed back on what we select to enjoy. For instance, CD albums like Queensrijche's Live Evolution and Accelerated Evolution by the Devin Townsend band are examples of albums I chose without even listening to them first! Somehow the title and the cover design were enough to make me handpick them. On the other hand, Tarot's album Suffer our Pleasures was also one of these, completely negative as it seemed to be: why should anyone have to suffer my pleasures?

(although the Light vs. Dark theme is quite obvious from the cover)

And if the cover didn't give away the theme, the lyrics sure did! The whole album paints an image of a personality that seems to have a completely topsy-turvy idea of good and bad, which may be quite repulsive to many people. Still though, if you can identify with the singer and the raw music, you spot the fact that even though you enjoy the songs, the whole of it doesn't really alter your view of reality. It may nudge you into one direction or another, but actual revolutions tend to need an accumulation of displeasure, in order to get enough trust (or thrust) to get off the ground. Since you picked it, you probably love it..... or learn to!

So yes, it basically shows that both good and bad are but labels, just like any word or concept in any language. And the intermixing of languages and concepts doesn't make it any simpler: a bouquet given to the couple you are visiting might have surprising effects if the couple you are visiting is Japanese, and the flowers are yellow Sakura blossoms: they are associated with life and death, and women.

Nowadays our brains are a jumble of concepts from all over the place, certainly if we take into account the boundless nature of the Web. Using it has made those with access to it into tightly woven webs of knowledge, of which the certainty is a very disputed part: Most sources of information have the joint authority of their contributors, and even though sites like Wikipedia use some form of peer review, many articles still contain random inaccuracies: my daughter once proved it by defiling a page of it in a humorous way, and it literally took the peer review system three whole months to detect and correct it!

Back in the days of old, authority of the written word was far more ingrained. When I was a kid, I didn't dare question the information I gleamed from encyclopediae and other printed sources to make my school assignments. For that matter, neither did my teachers! What I'm trying to point out, is that now we are much more in need of using our intuition as a tool for survival. Like I said before, we do not know all consciously, but we do know how well we know it! And likewise, we know just how well we can trust any incoming information: listening to the silence of your own being you soon get a feel for the piece of information you are contemplating. Mind you though, the 'Truth' of it just indicates its fitness for your particular being. Others might feel that to them the info is totally irrelevant. The funny thing is, that the Miss Marple episode currently playing was also about this intuition business: Jane is handed a magazine called 'Film Facts', and instantly comments to her friend: "I wonder if they are...."

A short writing break brings me to the point where Miss Marple visits the studio in which a visiting movie star is making a movie. And then it struck me, the reality within the reality: I always claimed not to be able to play in a movie, simply because I did not really know how to control my emotions as if they were gestures: if I was angry, I was that and not anything else. Actors however can control their emotions like that, be it intuitively or consciously. The fact that I couldn't was simply a matter of growth, the effect of having followed my preferences in a certain direction, which does not include actorship.

On top of that, the camera showing cameras surrounding Miss Marple that were actually aimed at making another movie, are showing alternate truths at the same time. But then again, even Truth is a label, and an often abused one at that. Am I on track in my writing? Well, I figure I am, because the moment I asked myself that, the screen faded into two cars and a doorway, where the visible license plate distinctly said: TTT 77 . You may just call that a belief or a superstition, but my life has brought me ample examples of the significance of sevens (multiples even more so). And the triple T was of course highly indicative of the Truth, or rather the relativity of it: Truth is not one label, but rather a Trinity of three facts, which like the other constructs mentioned above form a stable concept which is quite a bit more than the three separate concepts that it consists of. Not your word against mine, if I can find a third person who agrees with me, savvy? Or to stay in the systems realm: NASA used triple reduntant computers to make the decisions in the Apollo project fool proof... Think of it like the two most used color systems used in our reality. Two of those may be combined into a SevenSphere again:

Red, Green and Blue

Cyan, Magenta and Yellow

The two are complementary, as the SevenSphere shows and of course it is no coincidence, that my recently upgraded music library randomly plays Burning Spear with "Red, Gold, Green" out of a total of 38219 tracks... But complementary as they are, both also create the same colors, albeit through different combinations. And which is the truth? Well, you tell me, because I have no idea whatsoever! And neither do Schwarzenegger and his treacherous colleague in Eraser, to my right! I do have an idea about how to proceed, and that is to stick with what works, unless a more relaxed way of working can be found. This is no new idea, because actually, this problem solving chart has been around for ages: I saw it for the first time during initial IT training when I started work back in '88: it isn't quite the way I'd handle things now, but it was good for a laugh back then.

Point is, laughable as it is, this flow diagram is just one typical way of dealing with the world around us. Over time we've all developed our own versions, whether or not we consider ourselves idiots, poor idiots, or anything else. Still, what what we consider ourselves is very important indeed: because our environment treats us the way we treat it, a defaitist view will cause one to be defeated. This effect is quite subtle, and often has no directly visible feedback loop, but if "I expect to be defeated" is what you radiate, then that is what the Incredible Machine manufactures for you with all the Love it has in it! And since it is all around us, the answer can come from any direction, knocking you down when you least expect it.

Now there is an escape clause in there, and that is to adopt (or adapt to) the positivist view. This does not mean the negatives disappear overnight, because we are dealing with Energy here. And highschool science has taught us that where the electro-magnetic field is concerned, we have to deal with the hysteresis curve (on the right) first: if negative behavior was your main MO first, then stopping it cold turkey will confuse your environment, and cause them to still treat you the old way for a while. Only once they are convinced you've come over to 'their' side, will you be treated likewise. Same thing goes for the All: since it is all just Energy, even the All cannot immediately treat you the way your intentions have changed. It needs to balance everything out, and you changing your intentions at the bottom level still leaves you having to ride the ripples of the waves sitting on the green curve to get back on the positive level, or like the unbalanced wheel mentioned earlier, tilting it will cause countering movements that needs to die out first. Of course that only has to happen if you are at all inclined to go there. If you feel great where you are, have a ball. This only attempts to point out that change is possible, not that it is required in any way...

But do we in fact have to change? Only today, I got a sync that showed me just how far my entanglement with my view on life goes: as it turns out, the product I'm working on during office hours has seven disrinct configurations we deliver as installables to our clients:

1 Standalone

3 Concurrent

3 WebServers

It has been like that for years, and just then, a few more realizations began to surface: the Concurrents are called that because they can concurrently interface with the WebServer, and the WebServer includes the Concurrent which it will distribute to clients so they can work with the server, and thus get things done in a distributed environment. The Standalone is a system devised for a single computer, but essentially it has the same core functionality as the Concurrents, and since the WebServers contain a Concurrent, they too have the same core functionality, but they distribute it instead of executing it. To me, this is a very apt description of the society around me...

So we go back to the System analogy, and see how the Concurrents can basically not get anything done without their WebServer, who put them in the environment, and serves them to get their functionality working across System boundaries, over the Web. The Standalone does not need a Server, because it works directly on the Central Archive, where the Concurrents need their WebServer to get their information. They are ignorant of the fact that the WebServer eventually also retrieves the information from the Archive, like the Standalone...

And basically, that looks like my situation: a third of the people out there are Concurrents, fighting each other for supremacy. And since the Cosmos is balanced, the others are WebServers or Standalones, but the servers still have a Concurrent core, or in other words: they serve because of their desire to help their Concurrents. Both work across boundaries, like between people. And then there's the Standalone, working for All...

I too have selfish tendencies, both Concurrent and Serving. But in order to realize my most passionate wish, I needed to be a Standalone too, with as little outward relationships as possible. A Uomo Universalis with a keen interest in every aspect of information and knowledge, but without the need to become a member of any group, if it is not at all needed. Hey, what can I say? I'm already part of the All, so why limit myself to a subgroup of it?... ;-)

But the weird thing is, that Standalone or not, I have the idea I'm being helped from every direction possible. Sometimes it's weird, and leads me to rethinking stuff, but most often it will keenly indicate where I went wrong. And then, the next night, I do a rewrite...

.... or an addition. I woke up this morning feeling I wasn't up for the job of going to work. Last night's heavy rainfall had left me thoroughly drenched, and I woke up coughing heavily, like I'd caught a cold of some sort. Now having watched Species I and II last night, I might be tempted to think disease is DNA-based, but to me that is only half the reality: I was at that time actually in doubt about going to work or not, both in the aspect of 'willing to go', 'wanting to go' and 'feeling up to it'. Now where did we see that before? I guess we are sick not because of our DNA, but because of something more elemental...

the (Bi)Cycle of Life (if you don't wanna walk)

Most of us remember the young lion and his animal friends, who I also watched quite a few times with my kids. Now the image on the right lay on my PC desktop for quite a few weeks, because even though the satellites were flamin' obvious, I just couldn't think up the correct label for the center sphere, and thus the total symbol. "Yeah, thinking", you immediately react: "Ya should've stuck to intuition!"

And you are right, which I finally realized yesterday. And then it became perfectly clear that the first chapter I'd be writing during my two week vacation would be this one, on how this very meaningful diagram works!

We start at birth, as if nothing was existing before that. This is a clear violation of the first law of Creation, but bear with me. Originally, the triangle we are on is: "You are born, you grow, and then you die". Cascet Closed? Nope, because during that trip you may have noticed the changes that take the form of evolutions and revolutions, which in turn change You! Yes, the continuous birth of new situations, brought on by the constant stream of changes that surrounds us, immerse us even. True, both evolutions and revolutions lead to new systems, albeit far less different in the case of evolution. Where revolutions are occurring, they do so because a group has decided they are no longer happy with the current system. They will plan actions to rebel against it, and bring it down. Where evolution is gradual, revolution is a radical change, not always for the good. Often the actions intended to bring down the old system may very well damage it quite considerately, without a replacement being planned by the rebels. Still though, even birth may be seen as a revolution against a child too large to stay in the womb any longer....

Nope, the third options seems more reasonable: Sure, the Wevolution back there was a cheap shot at Daffy Duck's speech impediment, but it is in fact the advice Buckminster Fuller was adament about: If you don't like the current system, don't spend your energy fighting it. Instead build a better one together, based on what you already know. Since the new will be a total replacement for the old, it need not depend on any part of the old system. It may be a drastic change, but at least we're not going to be needing to interface with two systems. However, nothing is keeping us from designing a new system that houses our selves, and can survive in the old one without problems.... (Think of a space suit)

Sounds like a once-in-an-aeon happening, right? Well, forget it: many of us do it on a regular basis, but on a far more intimate level: every birth of a new being is in fact the birth of a new system, if I may use this analogy. And once it is an analogy, we can learn from its development: New systems are generally born within the old system, like a child within its mother's womb. You know what 'womb' stands for, right? World Of Moderate Boundaries most acurately shows its function. (the womb idea came from Nassim Haramein, the wordplay is 'mine'...)

Also we see how both child and new system grow even before they are introduced to the outside environment. Heck, even in a revolution there are traces of a new system before the critical point, but where the creators of it focus their intention on what was wrong with the old system, it will only be equipped to interface in a negative way with its environment. In normal births, which are just Wevolutions on a more limited scale, the baby has a period of getting used to outside impressions through the boundaries of its world. Once it is ready, the World of Modest Boundaries makes way for another environment: a World Of Real Live Data! And that it is really, like What the Bleep said: "They never touch!" (so only signals get across)

Is it? You betcha!!! As far as the little infant (and for that matter you) are concerned, there is no essential difference between a pixel on a screen and a spark of light reaching it from somewhere out there in the world you call your reality. "But that's like comparing oranges and apples", I hear you say. True, and yet I will continue on this path if only to make a further point: how many pixels does it take for you to recognize something as either an orange or an apple? How small can I make the picture on the left until there is no longer data enough to recognize either of them?

True, you can walk towards it and grab it, but the impression you get from it (no matter how much more convincing) is still only sensory data fed to you through your nerves and synapses. Or at least, that is what our scientists have decided happens inside a human body, based on other inputs and outputs, which we call scientific writings. And theirs is just one of the countless systems which aim to account for the design of the All!

But just how much of that do we need to convince us something is as it is described? As it is perceived by us personally even? Even though the image on the left is only 33x23 pixels, most of us have no problem in recognizing it as the pyramids at Gizeh, when seen from a certain direction and distance. We may not know which direction, we may not even know the distance, but we know quite certain that those are the pyramids, period!

And with that, the image connects us to any bit of info we ever took in regarding the pyramids. But still, its only input data prompting the arousal of already present data. You thought Cloud Computing is a new thing? Heck, we have been doing it forever, each actual input signal from the cloud out there kicking up a storm of ideas (Hmm: Incoming Data Evolves Awareness.... ) inside our minds. And basically, that is where the third law of Creation can be made clear most elegantly: Because we perceive inputs, and weave them together into the web of knowledge that we have about our environment, our minds become mirrors of it first. If we follow up on that with behavior, the environment will have to handle that in turn. So it will form an image of us based on our behavior, and will treat us as such. That infinite two-sided loop is just like an Infinity sign, straddled across the boundary that separates us from our environment. And the mutuality of it is just what the 3rd law of Creation is all about: You receive what you put out!

OK, so we have convinced ourselves that some stuff is 'real' whereas other stuff is not. But even on that area, we do not agree: a scientist will consider something real if it can be proven based on scientific publications that in turn are based on other scientific publications. Their web of knowledge is based on science, and nothing else.

Now this scientist has a friend, who is a researcher of psychic phenomena. Although they both are dedicated followers of rigid rules of investigation, the scientist does not hold for real the exact same set of concepts the psychic researcher does. In fact, it is a bit like the image on the right: two overlapping circles, one part on which they both agree, and two parts on which they don't. This says nothing about their merits, just about their chosen fields of expertise. Kinda like apples and oranges: it's just which taste you prefer for the moment. It is said that generalists know a bit about a lot of things, and specialists know a lot about a bit. There is no difference in brain capacity there, just a difference in focus: you just twist the head of your own personal Mindlite to either have it make small or large spots of curiosity. I went for screwing the head off, and focussing everywhere as a true generalist should....

(and thus knowing nothing about everything? ;-)

So, if it is all just data, should we consider God as just another stream of it? Maybe, and maybe not, but the analogy with the previous example begs for a clean and simple solution: humans aren't all that different despite their beliefs in whatever deity. It is just that they consider Him or Her to be part of their reality or not. But if (S)He is infinite, (S)He cannot be outside the All. Some people may consider Him or Her the great operator in the heavenly datacenter (see above), but personally I don't figure She'd go for a 9-5 job ;-)

Talk about syncs: from the 7217 tracks that are played right now, the player just randomly selected 'One Oh Oh One (1001) Nights' by Chipz, as if to emphasize the DATA nature of our Cosmos..... Although I don't think it is binary, we may yet find out more if the syncs keep coming.

OK, so let's see where this data concept leads us. According to the diagram on the right, I am claiming data has a Source, a Destination, and a Medium through which it gets from one to the other. Since the Medium may not always be non-distorting, sending just the data is not smart. Besides, what is data if it does not mean anything? Static, right? So yes, the other trinity in this diagram is that of Language, Primer and Integrity, which together make sure the data and its implied meaning make it across the divide of the Medium. Mind you, a bank of memory can be a Medium too, if the Source writes the data into it, and the Destination system reads them out of it. Actual physical movement of the data is irrelevant, but since data transfer from Source to Destination does not imply removal of the data from the Source, it almost always implies duplication of the data and its meaning. And that's how ideas thrive!

But of course that is not how it ends: upon arrival at the destination, the data is seen in the light of the experiences the destination being (or System) has undergone so far. The reality it has developed as a result of those experiences is instrumental in the processing of the newly arrived data: it may be discarded without a second thought, given proper consideration, or in opportune cases be accepted as the absolute truth if it happens to match seemlessly with what is already there. And then the process of improving the communications begins, with the destination being ready to make its move:

When receiving data, this may or may not be meaningful to the receiver, because if it comes to that, we are all Fools:

Fundamentally Objective Observers Looking for Solutions

So reception of the data (observation) is the first step, if you even came as far as recognizing it as actual data. You may have noticed that it has structure, but if it does not look like any language or protocol you have experience with, it is hard to find the meaning in it. Now I'm talking about language, but in effect it is meaningful for any set of data, be it language, vision, smells or touches.

On the other hand you may have recognized the language, but that does not mean you are fluent in it. Typically, the average Western human knows how to recognize quite a few more languages than he or she can actually speak properly. If we do, we can immediately proceed to the green spot, and establish two-way communication. Likewise, in the broader picture, we can only handle data coming in in a sensible way if it matches knowledge we already have available. Otherwise it may not even be recognized. And of course, my side input (Species IV) comments on it as well: her uncle tells our Species megababe that she doesn't have to read books like humans do, but just needs to hold them. And in a dramatic way, he shows her she can know all about the rental car they are driving, just by him handing her the users manual. Now you may say that does not prove or disprove my claim uttered right now, and you are right. I just said 'comment' because I meant to show the synchronitiy of the two lines of change (movie and writing process) right now....

If that is not the case, we try to reply in a different language, or at least try to reply in the given language to indicate we do not speak it. It kinda depends on whether we want to propose an alternative language ourselves, or give the Source of the data the choice of languages...

But even if we do speak the same language, that does not mean we can actually communicate flawlessly. I'm quite sure we all have people in our environment who are 'hard to talk to' as you might call it. That says nothing more about them as it says about us. I have a colleague who is a brilliant programmer, but if I ask him a question I must prepare for an answer which is technically completely correct, but which I do need to rephrase for myself, or which even requires some more questions to get to the core of the matter. It took me a while to figure out that his matrix of verbal expression is fundamentally different from mine, which results in clashes of understanding. Still though, we both claim to speak Dutch flawlessly....

Sidenote: while rereading the book, I just started the Italian Job, because to me, Italian is one of those languages: I can recognize it, speak a few words, but consider it highly meaningful to me because of its mystery.....

Common Consensus Reality: the Great Restrictor

It might be called the Great Attractor as well, because let's face it: most of us are engaged in or attracted to this thing called culture. We may fear being left out of it, or continuously fight to be rid of it. Regardless of what our angle is, we're all Fools with Tools following or fighting Rules. We may not like the rules, but these in turn regulate Society, Business and Warfare, in which all of us are engaged in one way or another.

Why isn't politics in this diagram, you ask? Obvious: that aspect of culture (like religion) is so interwoven with the six colored satellites on the right, that it influences all of them! Even its name suggests such a position, because by definition it should bring the poles of Culture together: "Pole-Ethics". Too bad the last part isn't always the case...

But let's for the moment look at our Culture from the outside, which we normally don't do. Our world is usually that which we as a people consider to be 'Real', for any and all of us. We usually ignore the fact that some of our fellow humans might well like bigger spheres to be real, and those 'other ones' in turn mostly acknowledge that reality is what it is, even though they may not like it. In fact, Culture can be considered the common denominator of that which we call our complete collection of personal realities. It is much like the scientists described earlier: their circles of reality are offset from one another, and more parties just cause more borders to be created...

At the same time, we use our numerous tools to create distractions or further tools for our fellow fools, in the hope they are amused by them or find them useful. Some sing, some act, and guys like me write simply because that is the most fun for them. Now I write about the general mechanisms, trying to inflate that Common Consensus Reality sphere so it matches what I figure Reality really is. I don't do so for those who are completely at ease in their current reality, for I do not wish to go against their free will. But they are completely free to leave my books in the library, or burn them even. But then again, how do you burn a stream of bytes? ;-)

And then, out of the blue, Reality gave me a heads up: a phone call from my Dad, wanting to know which station he had to get off when traveling by train to Amsterdam next week. Yes, my Dad who does not know his way around computers knows how to use them anyway: ask for help from the computer nerd closest to him: me. And that clearly shows how we Fools can be Tools as well, if we don't at least set a limit against such abuse. In this case, the request only took me about five minutes, partly to find out what he really wanted, and the last minute to find the exact information using Google.

Still though, we haven't yet looked at the other triangle of the above SevenSphere: interwoven in a similar fashion, Society, Business and Warfare (either news, movies or real live) are essential parts in our Common Consensus Reality. Not that we all love Warfare, or are delighted about doing Business or being part of Society as it is now, we may even feel like we get it thrown in our faces, day in and day out. Still everyone has his or her own preferences, and where I tend to avoid doing business, and detest advertising, others may like to buy new cars only, and then bargain with the salesperson to get it as cheap as is humanly possible. That doesn't say I don't take pride in my work: even though I mostly give it away, I absolutely must look at the statistics of my domain every now and then, to have at least some indication of how many people downloaded (and maybe read) my work....

Back to the Society, Business and Warfare triangle again. Now this is a solid one, because any threat to Society will need to be countered by a defensive operation at least, for which the armies need State-of-the-Art weaponry. Now Hi-tech stuff tends to be custom-designed and thus expensive, and since politics will only finance part of that, the generals had to find another source of financing. Thus, they went into a venture with another branch of business that requires Hi-tech: the movie industry! Have you never wondered where the companies advertized at the start of the movies get the many millions required to do just one movie nowadays? Since a great deal of todays movies and computer games is about wars and spy operations, they can share the financial burden of design and construction, after which both parties have real live machinery to do their thing with, or they'd all do it in VR, but I think not: How else could designs seen in modern movies also be sighted in the wild by your average John or Jane Doe? An evening of browsing the Web will get you numerous trails of discovery, which will have your discernment (short for knowing what is real to you by listening to your Inner Self) reacting in various ways. Manned bases on Mars, almost perfect androids in real live video, and more of those outrageous concepts will stretch your circle as far as it will go, or as you will allow it to go. Even the stunt at the start of the Italian Job will do that: blowing the floors underneath a huge safe (with explosive paint) to rob it from a Venetian house? But I guess it is a safe statement that we as the general public are about forty years behind the State of the Art in technology. Now I'm not going into which is real and which isn't. Believe it or not, all are but labels assigned to experiences. Where some love to believe in aliens, and others are frantic about government and business coverups, I figure all will eventually get their wishes fulfilled. Remember about the All being infinite and thus able to contain all variations of all possible scenarios? Well, the same is going on here: if you fear the world around you to collapse as a result of the downward spiral that you believe was initiated by the 9/11 bombing (regardless of who you think did it) then that is what you eventually get. "Why?", you ask? Well, because that is what you emit to the world around you.

If on the other hand you lay to rest the negative aspects of today's culture by refusing to check them out of the library of Life (a.k.a. The Akashic Library), then those negative aspects cannot harm you. That does not imply refusing to acknowledge their reality, but merely realising that your reality is not about that particular part of the Cosmos. Even so, you may still be nudged by some 'negatives' as a result of the upward path of the hysteresis curve, but that should soon pass. Notice the double meaning in "Check it out!" here, both as borrow it from the library, or just have a look at it.... That does not mean you will never encounter any aspect of the negative situation again, but then it is your reaction at that moment which eventually determines what the Cosmos does with it next: you are continuously playing ping pong with it, and the ways you return that tiny white ball in part determines what the nature of its reaction is going to be.

(notice the traffic sign in the image? Unintentional, but it came to my aide just now)

Personally, when reminded of 9/11 two years later, I wrote a poem about it that showed readers a positive view on that event:

XPlode..............NJoy

Caught by Rubble, flying high,

Planes Explode and Thousands Die.

Does Bin Laden Rape the Sky?

Why did My Loved Ones have to Die?

It's been a While, and Time Heals All,

And 9/11 says it All.

I See it now, as Clear as Day:

This Sorrow Once Will Go Away.

Remember All we Will One Day,

To find No Fault in Mayhem.

The Negatives come as they May,

We cannot Once Delay Them.

But Learn we Will, to conquer All,

Improve the Black to Colour.

My Soul now soars just like those Planes,

Awaiting Our Tomorrow.......

So, is Life getting you down? Then envision yourself in a little boat: if it springs a leak, do you focus on the hole, or on ways of making it whole again? Actually, those are just two of multiple choices, for you could also focus on getting the water out faster than it comes in, or getting to shore before the boat sinks. All are valid choices, and all will invoke reactions from the environment that are aligned with whatever you are trying to accomplish. That however does not mean they will all be succesful...

And that, my dear friends, is the catch: you are not playing ping pong against one opponent, or so it seems: instead, playing the ball to one opponent in your environment may very well have it returned to you from a vastly different direction. In fact, it is much like the game played by Bruce Lee in a Nokia commercial: at first you play like his opponent, playing with a bat and seeing the master as someone other than yourself. Once your skills in dealing with it improves, you'll be playing better, and in the end you will be realising you are him, and will be switching to nunchucks like the champ. Of course the reactions to this video on the web are as mixed as those in the real world. Some believe it, some don't, and others have wild theories about how it was actually done. At the same time though, all of these are Reality to the beings involved, and just another one of infinite realities to the Incredible Machine who manufactures and sustains them all...

And then, a clear reaction of the environment on what I radiate to it: my ex just rang the doorbell, with her bicycle in hand. She asked if she could borrow mine because hers had sprung a leak. Being the 'nice guy' I am, I told her I'd probably fix it tomorrow, but my addiction to exceed expectations will have me doing it right now, because 'Wax on, Wax off' stuff like that is great for the intuition engine!

And it showed: matching her expectation of the world around her, the puncture turned out to be multiple ones, caused by a staple in the outer tire. It needed a new tire, and was thus totally in sync with her expectations of Life: "If it gets bad, it can get worse!"

And this morning, it being a Sunday and the last day of my two week vacation, I rolled out of bed at around nine thirty, with not much gusto to do anything. So I had breakfast, and then basically collapsed on the couch to listen to my recently enlarged music collection. After a while, a mail signalled me to get up, so I did and read it. It seemed to be one of those mails trying to tempt you to add yourself to just another social site, but there was something weird about it: it mentioned the site of a lady I'd exchanged (non-romantic) mails with in the past, as if it was addressed to her, but then how would it end up with me? Also, it proposed to me: "Let us work together". For a normal person that would not mean anything, but my past had a moment where I found a message hidden in my cell phone, that had a number of those "Let us...." statements in it, with various alternatives. Now I figured I knew where that cell phone message came from, so if this mail was in any way connected to it...

On the other hand, I know the Incredible Machine knows about my love for real puzzles. And no amount of doubt could make me deviate from the action that came next. If She wanted to work together, then I needn't go far, because we'll always be One: so instead of answering the E-mail, I got up from my desk chair, and plunged headlong into doing the dishes, to make sure the place was clean before she actually physically arrives... (one of those absolute thoughts again)

Now this sort of thing might never happen to you, simply because you are on another path than I am. But I am sure that whatever does cross your path, will be the culmination of all your expectations (good and bad), because the Incredible Machine usually doesn't work any other way: like a spider, it connects any number of distinct points, to make them come together at the center, where it lives. The end result then is none of the above points, but still a stable base within the same environment....

Now I know one observation hardly makes for rigid scientific proof, but I've seen more people around me follow the same pattern. Generally, there are those who are deeply engaged in the Common Consensus Reality: they read newspapers, watch the news, see all the ads, and measure the reality around them by that very restrictive circle of experience. To them it is real if they can experience it firsthand, and only then. They need to go on vacations to far away places to prove to themselves that those are real too, thus enlarging their Personally Experienced Reality. And their attachment to the CCR is quite severe: they actually try to make their children behave like the neighbors and people in their surroundings, because to them that is the measure of their desired behavior: just like the band with the same name once sang they are "Living in a Box".

Others are of the category which refuse to be put in a box. They may comply for a while, but their heart is out there, where they figure the truth is to be found. In fact, there is no truth but that which we all feel is 'right' for us. They may follow certain trends of the Common Consensus Reality, but their personal sphere of experience holds for real much more than the members of the group mentioned before. They may have few friends in their immediate surroundings, but their social links are still very solid, even though they are spread out across the globe. This group is one which only came into full bloom with the advance of the Web, when digital connections made communications way faster and global. Before that they also existed, but usually had to engage in discovery, or writing of science fiction like Jules Verne. His readers were usually of that same category because you attract what you radiate.

Now of course there are not two categories, but rather a bunch of them, which I'd probably arrange as concentric spheres which are covering the SevenSphere: the dot in the middle would be a totally autistic child, the grey sphere in the middle would be the enthousiastic citizens of the Common Consensus Reality, and larger spheres would mix in ever more color, up until total awareness of the All. "And you claim to be the total Sphere?", you ask? Well, no: the actual outer limit of the SevenSphere aligns with the outer limit of the All, and as such it is infinite. And even though we are all the All, we are only partly aware of it mostly. Same goes for me: I may write a lot about it, but surely miss a few areas here and there to be able to claim full 'Allness'.... Let's face it, we don't all 'Love it All', thus reaching that state of mind where preferences become irrelevant, and any situation is greeted with equally positive or at least neutral behavior.

And that is OK, since it is our free will which determines just how much of the All we are able and willing to participate in, like the library analogy. Still though, all the books are right here, for us to browse once we do feel like it. And part of the knowledge in those books may still reach us in other ways. You may not have read Moby Dick in highschool, but if you saw Age of the Dragons recently, then you know the outlines of the story at least, for that movie basically mimicked the book, with the whale being portrayed as a dragon, and all the main figures having identical names as the ones in Herman Melville's book.

And that didn't mean anything to me until the final proofread just now: in order to remain in the now we share with others, we must keep entertaining certain ideas within their realm of reality. Just like this Sunday I must do my laundry, the dishes, and the vacuuming. If I don't, then my environment will probably decide I've gone off the deep end, and will try to protect me from myself by suggesting I go and have a vacation elsewhere. In the mean time, DJ Jean plays me "Get ready for the launch", suggesting I leave Ahab's ship, and row to shore.....

See you guys and gals, after a bit of Rock-driven domestic wax-on, wax-off stuff!! (just singing: Ronny James Dio: "Imagination is a terrible thing!", from End of the World...

Back in Imagination though, after part of the domestic chores. The floor will again give people the idea that this is a well-kept house, and the laundry is taken care of by my trusted pal in the attic. I'm also thinking of moving my bedroom up there, so I can fall asleep to its singing...

Inflating the Balloon

Let's face it, not all of us are quite happy with the Common Consensus Reality. It feels like a harness, for some it is the heavy armor that shields them from blows dealt to them by the unknown, while others see it as the inflexible and restricting straight jacket that limits their freedom of movement. The first category is OK there, but the second group aren't. They either make up new realities, or follow visionary writers like Jules Verne, and soon distinguish themselves from the CCR by their belief in more futuristic sets of concepts. Once such a group gains enough momentum, they either put a label on themselves to distinguish them from the 'normal' people, or are literally called names by those who cannot (or will not) comprehend them. Thus, the followers of Jules Verne soon became known as Vernians: humans in every aspect, except for the total reality they hold for possible.

Another distinct group of believers in the 'non-real' are the Trekkies: they enjoy watching the various episodes of the scifi series which Gene Roddenberry brought to life. He has already left this plane of existence, but his followers kept the various series running for quite some time. Even now, a new movie is scheduled for release in 2013. And do you know what the really funny part is? The first Star Trek crew members were seen walking around with small boards to read from, and write their notes on, but that was in a time when mobile phones had yet to be invented (1966). Now, around forty years later, we see the same image on streets everywhere, where mobile phones and tablets are taking their place among the people lugging laptops around to be able to work on public transport. Too bad Roddenberry's vision of a moneyless society has not yet been achieved, but then again we have yet to cross the deadline he gave us for that phenomenon. As an added sync, the Italian Job right now shows how the bad guy is literally imprisoned by the 35 million in gold he stole from his mates before he killed them (or so he thought). Are we perhaps imprisoned by our money view as well?

If you think you are, try the positivist view: try to convince yourself there will aways be enough money. Pretty soon, you will observe how the money pretty much always pops up right when you need it most, and usually from another source than where you expected it from! Now once that works, and you also consider that they are all just labels, feel free to experiment.... ;-)

Hmm, 'Deadline', funny word isn't it? If you make it, then you can relax, because the work that was to be completed has been completed. If you haven't made it yet, then you have to work hard to make it. Neither implies though, that after the line, nothing remains... In fact, it is you and your achievements up until then (realizations) that remain!

What does show clearly though, is that our reality is growing, by leaps and bounds. Jules Verne sent us to the moon in his fictional writings, but I'm quite sure that in his mind the trip was as real as the people around him. Calling it fiction is just a writer's way to avoid being called crazy, or blasphemous, and the story is that which absolutely feels right to pen down...

The point I'm trying to make here, is that each and every one of us is always busy trying to inflate the balloon of reality in the direction of those aspects of it that we truly love. Basically, this is like a wad of chewing gum under our shoe, which we are trying to stretch in a certain direction. And we all know what happens if two opposing forces do the stretching while the rest remains at peace with the Status Quo: the same thing that happens when growth makes a cell too large: they split, and become separate entities, although they are still part of the whole stick of gum!

Yes, opposing forces can best be shown in cellular division. There, the opposing forces also create more cells rather than one big cell, thus creating the illusions of division and separation. On the other hand though, we do not treat our fellow human beings as a collection of cells, but much more like one being, which we deal with according to our previous experiences with them and similar beings. And that is all based on the reality we deduced for ourselves, based on our memories of what we call the past.

And of course, the reference to cell division brought the subject to sex, unless you are a movie freak like me: right now, Rammstein is playing 'Feuer Frei' in the first scenes of Triple X, with Vin Diesel. Seen about three to four times already, but still good enough to enjoy while writing, or even to gleam a few very useful writing tips from.

Yep, didn't have to wait too long to find a useful point of entry: A senator mistaking Xander (Vin Diesel) for a valet, and making very clear that he absolutely thought him to be the lowest of the lowest when it comes to fellow human beings. Now a guy like Xander absolutely does not put up with such out of his realm behavior: the senator's car ends up being launched from a very high bridge, filmed in real live video from multiple camera angles. And that is Xander showing the senator his reality, because the senator wanted to restrict everybody to a reality where things like computer games would be forbidden, because it was said to corrupt our kids. And apparently, Xander thinks that's the only education they have left....

While Xander gets some adult education, I'm just gonna go generalize some more: education is often thought to be the activity where one party teaches and the other party learns, but nothing could be further from the truth. School is OK, but parents are educators just as well. And any parent will probably agree with me that they learn just as much from their children as the children learn from them.

An anecdote from my past as a parent shows this clearly: we taught our kids the difference between right and wrong, but during our vacation the four of us (two parents, two kids) went to a restaurant. The food was great, as was the company, but when time came to pay, I noticed that one ice tea was missing on the bill, so I mentioned it to my wife. We walked to the cashier, and paid the bill, and then my eldest suddenly showed us she had understood the concept of honesty: in a clear voice she told him about the discrepancy! And she was only about seven years old...

In effect, education is nothing other than that same infinity sign, looping between two beings, across the boundaries that separate them. Now it can be a single loop, or many more, but some loops further on it might be realigned to target another being. And before you know it, it will look like the scene that Vin Diesel is in now: snowboarding ahead of an avalanche that was just caused by his opponents!

A funny sync is, that in two days time, I got two distinct references to Melville's Moby Dick: the movie Age of the Dragons, and the name of the bad guy's winged powerboat on Triple X bound for the heart of Prague with a deadly load of viral gas: it was called Ahab. A nerd like me won't pass up a sync, and of course it wasn't too difficult to relate this to the thread of this story: Instead of following the singleminded pursuit of Hapiness, Ahab went for the narrowminded pursuit of his Nemesis, the White Whale. So in fact, you could say that Ahab was the original specialist, rather than a generalist: he tried to learn everything there was to know about the whale, instead of enjoying other pursuits... And since he said he would chase it till his death, he ended up doing so...

And like the guy in Triple X the Next Level just said: "this is an information operation." And so it is: It is time to analyze that oil spill of growth, because I'm sensing structure here. But getting to the next level on this may take me the rest of this movie, and dinner for one....

Well, dinner for one went great, but resulted in many other activities before I felt I could finally sit down and put together the SevenSphere on the left here. The reason it took me so long, was because Intelligence has a double meaning which most of us are intimately familiar with, even if we don't work for the NSA, CIA, FBI, MI6, KGB, or any of the other dirty three letter agencies....

Still though, what we call intelligence in the normal context is actually boiling down to the exact same cycle that these agencies employ to get the better of their opponents. Even SETI works that way, although their success in completing such a cycle is far less likely, or very cleverly hidden from the public eye....

First step like always is the sphere on the bottom: it represents the concept Energy, which is all we get from the realm of deep space, and even from our direct environment: since our atoms repel one another, we never actually touch, but do become aware of a sense of touch, which is just an energy exchange. Now the presence or absence of Energy can only indicate the presence of a Source, but apart from presence does not convey information from the Source to the Destination. For that, we need to utilize the fourth law of Creation: Change!

We vary the output of Energy, in a way that is meaningful to us. That will enable us to communicate with entities like ourselves, and be heard by those entities that are so far ahead of us in development, that their Intelligence is able to decipher the language used without any problems. Remember that Gene Roddenberry once said, that "Any race that is advanced enough will appear as magic to lower cultures"? We'll get there yet, mark my words! (I guess it was actually Carl Sagan who said it, but Roddenberry used it in one of the Star Trek episodes...)

OK, so now we have an information stream, and once we know the language involved, we can go on. Note that this point is where the normal intelligence deviates from the three letter agency alternative:

Where it comes to the general public they use the languages they and the opposite party know, but their secretive counterparts will be using encodings or cypher languages that they in turn hope their opponents do not know. So in secret service land this step is way more involved than in normal use. And then again, we all used this 'secret' language decoding at least once. Any ideas? How about learning to talk as an infant? Or learning a new language?

OK, so now we know what the data conveys in as far as the knowledge we have about the language pertains to the incoming sentences. But this is the next layer of the onion: I guess most of us saw Terminator 2, where John cleverly sidestepped the T1000's trap by asking it through the phone why Wolfie was barking. His stepparents would have known the dog had a different name, but the highly intelligent Terminator walked into the trap eyes wide open! And this is a very useful tool, because there are almost always differences in context and thus differences in the used set of words for a given communication connection. On 2nd thought, it can work against you: on the reread while watching the Italian Job, Charlize Theron just gave away her 'real' identity by using a saying her daddy used to say.....

Still though, if we communicate enough, which is basically just cycling the above SevenSphere again and again, then soon the accumulated information begins to turn into Knowledge. This is much like the phase leading into cell division, where both cells acquire virtually the same set of DNA before the actual division is initiated.

Note though, that the secretive concept of Intelligence is also a process of equally distributing the information, although the parties involved try desperately to counter that leakage. But since they are also both trying to gather the information of the opponent, their energies are divided between spying and defending their own info. Friendly (non-secretive) parties can use their energies for clear information exchange all the time, and are thus by definition more efficient!

Now the reread/write bruoght me a nearly empty page here, which my intuition tells me needs to be filled. And as Charlie is renewing his view of his opponents evasive move, they are deciding on a rerun of the original Italian Job with a few extra's. As he and his explosives expert hang from harnesses in the underground tunnels, and the guy has to insert the detonator, their possibly last words are "I love you", as straight as they are.....

A little earlier on, Charly told his foe that he was always coming from the defensive angle, and thus would eventually be defeated. Basically, that's similar to thinking from inside the box, and dealing with what's coming at you. And it shows in the 'getaway': where Charlie plays the elements of the city, his opponent restricts himself to keeping a hawk's eye on his tools and what is wrong with them. Great sync to make me smile was when the truck went though the road, and a big metal plate fell on top to cover it up: as the camera panned out, there was a big poster of a panda, which said "Bye Bye Love"....

Yes, what I write about explicitly, is what is out there in the untold colors of Reality: every movie ever made, every song ever sung, and every book ever written are about this. And the next sync from the movie shows it well: the safe (which it isn't) is not a Worthington 1000, but a later model. Charlize Theron (Stella) thus had to rely on her feelings (intuition) and her own senses rather than her tools and knowledge. And if you are doubtful of your feelings, then there is always someone to re-establish your faith in them, just like Charlie did to Stella when he gently took her hand and rested it on the safe's dial again.....

But let's try to get back to the main line now that the Italian Job has been satisfactorily completed. Onwards to 'Me and Dad', which has another motivation 'problem': Dad's little girl doesn't want to play ball (in more ways than one), but would rather play ballet. And since Dad is a somewhat celebrated ball player, he has a problem in doing what he thinks his girl wants....

Basically, this is a clash of realities, between base ball and ballet. But I didn't quite catch it until Mills did: he told four discussing mums that the best way to raise children is to enable them to be themselves, rather than force them into all kinds of schedules. Because they are human beings, they know when to eat and when to sleep, better than those around them, who only can go on external signals. And as the movie reached its end, another sync showed me that all is in fact connected:

Even though I will for the record state that I have no ties with that company in any legal or financial way, there is a shot in there, of Dad and the coach walking past an advertizing board for Worthington Industries. I'm quite sure both the company and the movie company will forgive me that small transgression of copyright....

Still though, how could I have picked exactly those two movies to view after one another?

And there I go again: rereading and reformatting has left a hole of nearly a page before the next chapter. That is my clue to "Someone needs Moore Input here....

Some of you may have thought: "He says everything is a label, yet he writes about everything in very elaborate structures." Well, even though we can label everything, which by the way is our God-given right (see Genesis), we were also taught to build structures to survive: Noah did it, as did Steve Carell in Evan Almighty: using stuff labeled wood and creating an Ark. I'm not saying that is the only truth, but just an example of it: choose your own (religious) text at will, or at random...

Let me just add a bit of a buildup into the next chapter:

Anything is All, or unknown as it is....

If we label it, it does not become less, but it does become known....

Now since known to One is not known to the Other, we disagree (Babylon).

If we can agree on the labels we give everything, we are constructing common knowledge.

On common knowledge, we can build structures we again agree on.

Combinations of three common elements are inherently stable, but not fixed.

We need another Trinity to help balance the first one.....

And since this goes on Ad Infinitum, I guess steps 8 sideways isn't such a bad way to cycle on....

So now I guess we just need to settle on a common label with which to play during the rest of this book. And I guess System is as good a label as any, since Unidentified System neatly refers to US!

Let's Smurf the lot!

So hints to our knowledge can be found anywhere, like for instance in the cartoons about the Smurfs: they talk Smurfish, which means every other word is replaced with the term 'Smurf' in its proper form. You may think Peyo did this just for fun, but he actually was dining with his colleague Franquin, and in his inebriated state could not recall the word for salt shaker. So he just asked him: "Pass me the Schrumpf", a game that then went on all night, and became the basis for the Smurf language. To me though, it clearly shows that all are just labels, to be toyed with as one sees fit.

So, in order to reduce the complexity of it, let's call everything a System, whether it is a mouse (hardware or otherwise), a window (software or physical), a story (book or movie), or an animal (human or otherwise). Even a heart will qualify as a System, as we will see.

The image on the left here is easily seen as the component view of a System. Just like the Enterprise crew is always most concerned about hull breaches, this diagram assigns the red sphere to the boundary of the System, the layer that separates the inside from the outside (or Environment) of the System. Our skin would be the Boundary for us humans, which helps us to stay whole (without holes).

The next component are the sensors, or senses as we call them in humans. These are designed to scan the Environment for possible energy signatures, instead of specific targets. Mind you, they do double duty: if a human detects another human, and communication is established, then our ears listen to that other human rather than focusing on all environmental audio like they normally do. Still though, because these are functionally different uses, they are described separately in this diagram.

As an added anecdote, allow me to tell you about my enlistment in our highschool radio club when I was a kid: being allowed to enter the sanctum where voices from all over the world were heard was an honor to me. Weird thing though, was that my senses could make head nor tail of them, since they seemed to be drowned in inordinate amounts of static. I really couldn't hear jack shit, and was quite disappointed. One of my older club mates laughed, and told me: "Never mind, just come in to listen as much as you can, and by ends week you'll be fine." And he was right: my senses had adapted, or rather my neural net had. Back then though, I didn't know that word like I do now..... And after having adjusted to normal levels of static, I also heard from my club mates that some ham operators can even go to sleep, and wake up the moment their call sign comes in on the set.... And since that kinda reminded me of my experiences in live concerts, I just started Queen Live in Tokio, 1985! Yes, still with Freddy 'Quicksilver' Mercury!

Basically, the Subsystems are what the System is made up of. This also includes the way these various parts are connected together. It is in the green sphere because normally, we can depend on the parts being there, right where they are supposed to be. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to make sure of that fact, so we add the light blue sphere, named Integrity. This is in fact the System inspecting itself to make sure it is still in one piece, kinda like you look into the mirror before driving to a date with your friend....

Next up are the Interfaces: they allow for exchanges between the inside of the System, and (other Systems in) its Environment. This may concern data, or physical objects, or even waste. Sometimes the sensors may do double duty for this task where communication is concerned, And believe it or not, even weapons are Interfaces: they are designed to deliver damage to an enemy.

One of the last aspects of the System is its Metasystem. Any idea what would play this role in a series like Star Trek? How about Starfleet Command? The Enterprise is not in it, and then again it is: even in deep space they are part of the fleet, and Starfleet command controls them in as far as this is needed.... (so I guess no input from your boss means he agrees with you?)

Now let's apply all this to a more simple system, which we came to call Mouse. Can you name the various aspects of it in terms of it being a System?

The housing is the Boundary, the parts of the Mouse are inside it.

The sensors used to be little wheels on a ball, now it is a cleverly reflected LED.

Its Subsystems are the sensors, translation logic (moves to pulses), and serial interface.

It's integrity is any diagnostic functions built in to report malfunctions to the PC.

Its buttons and scrollwheel are Interfaces, that enable us to manipulate it.

Its Metasystem is the human hand, which manipulates it.

Could it be any simpler? How about a human heart? I've just taken one of the many images of it on the Web, to help us with this exercise:

The boundary of the physical heart is the familiarly shaped organ, which is clearly visible on the right here. If we're talking electromagnetic boundaries, then the heart is way bigger, for it's signals have been measured up to 1.5 meters from the human body....

It clearly has sensors, or at least an interface to other bodyparts, because it tends to adjust its rhythm to the level required to feed the various parts of the body with fresh oxigenated blood (right the moment I reread that, an actor in the now playing Cowboys and Aliens said: "Don't know what it is, but it is bleeding!".)

Its subsystems are the chambers (atriae and ventricles) and valves, which work in unison to pump the blood through: the chambers pump it, and the valves keep it from flowing back in the wrong direction.

The heart has double chambers, which gives it two separate circuits to pump blood around. This redundancy means that it is harder to shut it down completely. If for instance a low red blood cell count impairs the flow of oxygen to the brain or other parts of the body, then the heart will start pumping faster sooner, to pick up the slack. The human will notice something is wrong, and will hopefully go see a doctor...

Its interfaces are the various blood vessels, with their scientific names. Some make blood flow inwards, others allow it to flow out. Basically, the red ones are for oxigen-rich blood going out, and the blue ones for oxygen-poor blood flowing in.

Its Metasystem is the human in which the Heart is beating. He or She has the responsability to make sure the Heart stays healthy, so it in turn can keep it's human happy.

Simple enough if you just have to take into consideration one view of the System. In most languages though, Heart is also that which loves, and I've seen little love in the above System Description, have you? It is more a defacto statement of the physical object called Heart. Why is that, you say? Simple: if we talk about a single System, then only love for itself can be seen in its description, and love for its environement. In order to make it more loving, we need to add one or more Systems, because Love implies interaction even if it is very distant...

And right that moment, Ultravox was picked out of my 38000+ MP3 collection, with their tear-jerker "Dancing... with Tears in my Eyes"

Even more synchronous might be the song that was played next: a Dutch song entitled: "Don't be afraid of my dick"... Talk about interfacing ;-) So that is my next subject: the Interface simplified to normal language.

Well, that was pretty painless! A few weeks or months ago I would sit down and try to define the Interface in a way that felt right, and then spend hours getting nowhere. Right now, after the System SevenSphere became my template, I put it together with only a few miss steps in between (Miss Steps, wonder where she's at ;-)

So yes, like stepdad put the three maps together in Journey 2 the Mysterious Island, I put Interface on System, and did my decryption thing on it. Now this may look a bit like a human relationship, but that is only because it also applies to that particular type of interface. In fact, you can view it much wider, like Enterprise hooking up with a new First Contact, or you plugging another screen into your PC.

So in this case, we start with yellow, which initially is the disconnected state. And that will have you looking for love in all the wrong places, like Leisure Suit Larry used to do. Or in the Enterprise case, just travelling through space, scanners wide open... The phase ends when a candidate system for the intended relationship or interface is detected.

We've often heard what comes next in the Star Trek scenario: hailing, response, and figuring out what the two intelligences mean to one another. In relationship land it is not all that different: we react to a signal from another, find out if it was indeed the signal we thought it to be, and build it from there. A certain matter of trust is required then. That goes for humans as well as new computer screens. Have you noticed that nowadays plugging in an extra screen makes Windows negotiate with it, and then automatically switch to use both screens?

After the Trust is built, the connection is established. For the human relational scenario, that may mean we make plans for a future together...

In the more succesful scenario though, these plans are a joint effort, resulting in something that can again be seen like a complete System. Why do you think they call it a Couple?

So yes, if we get to the step which was a Metasystem in the System diagram, we run into another brilliantly configured infinity loop: where both parties of the relationship or Interface consider the other (one of ) their Metasystem(s), their ties are strengthened.

Normally, such an Interface would remain, since there is nothing in the loop which disturbs it. Unless of course, one of the parties involved does something to either damage the Trust, or goes outside his designated role.... Usually that means a Disconnect.

Please note that the level of Trust is also coupled to the roles involved. If the link between screen and PC tells the PC the screen is only capable of a certain maximum resolution, then the PC will have to restrict its roles to those that don't exceed said resolution. Same with humans: if Free Will is disregarded, you can bet your bottom dollar that sooner or later the relationship ends....

Notice also, that the establishing of an Interface and the establishing of a Role are pretty much the same. It is just that now it is a further ironing out of the relationship between two already friendly Systems. Thus the blue sphere can in fact be visualized as a new SevenSphere, with Role in the center.

And then the reread was interrupted by an invitation from my ex for a macaroni dinner, which was augmented by an icecream dessert. And being there away from my writing I stumbled across a few movies that belonged in my collection, but somehow had ended up in hers: Short Circuit 2 and Deja Vu. Good for another night of fun. Like the funny robot I love input, and these two flicks are going to be it tonight!

And it pays off: right now I'm seeing a great piece of roleplaying by a bunch of mexican car thieves, who succesfully convince Johnny Five that they are the department of car stereos. Innocent as he is, Johnny 'processes' the street, and returns with a big stack of stereos! And his disbelief of the realisation that he has been 'flim-flammed' as he called it is honest and direct: no guilt, but a direct change in behavior as the next intruders find out to their disgrace. But there are multiple roles at work there, and the friendly Oscar and his thugs soon find out!

Back to roles then: they are like opposite ends of an interface, or a relationship. Just like the movie where Ben is now handed the book of Pinnochio by Number Five: is not the set of strings the interface between the master and his puppet? And is not Ben's loving urge to be with Sandy the one powerful example of a relationship that is yet to be established?

Hey, getting to talk to a person on a train is difficult even, unless you have something of a prompt, a catalyst to initiate the conversation. I wouldn't advertize having Johnny Five help you, but overhearing something might even do it. Don't mind me mumbling a bit, because I feel a SevenSphere coming up. I'll be back.....

And here it is: At first try, I'd added the Role diagram following later, without clearly realizing that a Role is not one per Interface, but rather one at each end of the Interface. So here we are with the End definition of the Role, which focuses on establishing the interface as one end proposes it, and the other one reacts.....

Of course this is again based on two related triangles, first of which attempts to gauge which reaction might be appropriate. Once that is determined, a reaction from the second triangle is selected. Of course there are other reactions one might take, as I discovered when I asked my darling colleague if I might be the next in line if she ever lost her current husband: she just looked at me with those big dark eyes, and said nothing for about seven seconds! No acceptance, no avoidance, and no countering, just the most open answer a guy can get in that situation: "anything is possible, but you will have to make it happen....." Added sync: I just told you which two movies I would be playing tonight, and since Short Circuit 2 just ended, that leaves us with Deja Vu with Denzel Washington and Paula Patton. And don't you know it, Paula could be the twin sister of that beautiful lady I talked about...

Now roles can get real hairy once you try to understand them. They exist in personal, social, familiar, military and business climates, and dozens of others areas. The basic elements of a Role are actually described on the right here. Let's see where this leads us, because first of all we are concerned with the balance of the Role, that reflects in the relationship which preceeds it. The following alternatives can be seen:

Dominant, which some might also see as Service-to-Self. Still they may not be that, because they might genuinely believe they know best what is good for others. This is in opposition to:

Serving, also sometimes seen as Service-to-Others. Still, these come in two flavors as well, those doing good because they feel the need to, and those doing it because of the joy they derive from it. It may seem unbalanced, but both Dominant and Serving together lead to a Balanced state as we will see soon.

The last of this Trinity is a balanced Role, where both are feeling the same about the parameters of the Role, and neither plays a leading part. They may still look up to one another, and act accordingly, but that just creates another infinity loop....

The above triangle is in turn completed by the second triangle, which is concerned with the effects that both partners get from their relationship:

No Fear 4 2: the No Fear label was an advertizing slogan back in the eighties I think, which clung to the mind like maple sirup. I know I desperately wanted to have one of those stickers, but it hasn't happened yet..... But since this is what both partners get from their mutual roles, the 'for two' was added as an afterthought just now.

Free Will 4 2: Free Will, believe it or not, is what we most fear to lose. We simply will avoid relationships where we are pushed into a role which denies us this. What about masochists, you say? Well, even in SM games, there is always a keyword with which the slave may stop the game.... That's free will as I see it. And their games? Both (regardless of their end of it) are in the game to please both the other and themselves!

Fun 4 2: with fear gone, and free will at the reigns, the couple is free to have nothing but more fun. Believe it or not, that is the Essence of the Incredible Machine!

And you were still not convinced that 4 2 is the answer to the question:

"What is the Meaning of Life?"

Now the aspects may be called something else, but essentially the above diagram represents any kind of Role. In business for instance, the shopkeeper may be seen as the dominant partner, yet at the same time it is said that "the client is King". So this is usually a nearly balanced situation, and both try to make sure that trade is going fair, by either garding themselves from it with countermeasures, or just trusting that the other party will treat them fairly. If too much fear exists in either party, the deal is broken, and the client goes elsewhere.

Another nice example are the computer scare tactics on the Web: we were told that viruses were barred from entering the PC by antivirus programs, and that spyware was removed after it had nestled itself on our hard drives. Now if that was the case, why did nobody write a piece of spyware with the lethal payload of the worst virus in it? Not being able to answer that, I removed all anti-stuff from my PC and ran it bare naked across the Web for a few months. Then I reinstalled my trusted virus killer, and ran a full sweep: about six and a half million files scanned, only one of them infected! At the same time, I had a colleague systems manager, who spent half his working day keeping his systems clean....

And the point? In the end it is just what you believe. You can fear the lot and find ample evidence of it, or you just focus on the stuff worth believing in, and see that emerge from the Incredible Machine...

Now if we go back to the Common Consensus Reality (the part which everone believes), I have the faint feeling that it kinda drifted like a little dingy on a lake these last few decades. Progress didn't seem all that explosive, and the few that looked outside the box didn't scream all that loudly. Most of us bought into reality as is, with no hope for anything better. Thus, our Personal Realities were all cluttered into the little sphere we called our common reality.

A local denseness like that is not agreeable to the Cosmos, because it is all a case of very perfect balance. So either a void would have to be created elsewhere to balance things, or the density that existed would have to be diluted. Given its multitasking nature, the Incredible Machine did just that:

"Let's Smurf the Lot!", and with a well aimed shot, the Incredible Machine broke the triangle (2 towers, 1 pentagon) of tangled relationships, and had all separate balls disappearing in the holes of their choice! Yes, I'm talking about 9/11 again, a.k.a. 21st century Babylon. Nobody in particular did it, but together as whole parts of the All we made it happen. And each of us was presented with the experiences derived from our personal viewpoints on it. So in the time following the disaster, thousands of shards of evidence came to light, pointing into dozens of possible conspiracy scenarios (and hundreds of websites), and having our personal views on life racing away from the common view, to refind our balance somewhere at a distance from the rubble. The end result? Our total awareness was stretched to the max, because that far apart, we had to realign ourselves, but we'd never get back to the highly compressed sphere of Common Consensus Reality that existed before 9/11. But as disasters go, this one made our realities regain a balance, rather than disturbing it. Yep, in the end it is just what you most strongly believe!

A number of people will now have thrown away their copy of this text, because they are so attached to 9/11 emotionally, that seeing it described this way is more than they can handle. They lost precious family members or friends in the disaster, and thus find themselves missing them every day. What they perhaps don't know or believe, is the first law of Creation: "You have always existed, and you will always exist, can't change that!" Rather than to focus on missing them, remembering them happy before that or happy now would be more fitting. Because, truly believing the first law will take away your fear of death, yours or anyone elses. In effect, if you got this far, you might now even see death as birth into yet a greater reality.....

Must be a glitch in the Matrix....

Being a movie freak and watching Deja Vu immediately brings to mind that other Deja Vu: the one that indicates a change in the Matrix. No I'm not saying that Neo and his team mates are all reality in my reality, but the Deja Vu thing is not just a catchy phrase. And the guy Dough Carlin interviews right now (Claire's Dad) knows that too: he hands him a set of photographs of her, with the express instruction that he wants his daughter to matter to the cop. Which of course, she already does.... And the real Deja Vues haven't even started then.

Now this movie is a real sync waiting to be run into. If you haven't already had your experience of time reworked by the fact that it is human-defined, and thus no cosmological constant, then watching a movie where it is possible to watch just a fixed time into the past will have your head scrambled: highly entertaining, and not unlike the way we handle reality:

Dough is now on the Snowwhite team for his first day, and is being handed a bunch of bullshit about just how it works. Since he has no actual experience in the field, he has to work on his gut feeling or intuition to determine what is and isn't right. And it turns out he is more than doing OK: his observations soon bring the team to properties of their high-tech system that they had always deemed impossible, and even been scared to try!

But there is a very big blunder in the movie, when Dough convinces them to try and send a note through the system to the past: Even though they all claim it to be impossible and say they never tried it, the system appears to already have a scanner that can feed a piece of paper into the system! Just having them connect a standard scanner to do the job would have been more convincing. But then again, why do I want to be a film critic? I love movies, so my default appreciation of them would kinda bias the critiques.

What I do see now, is that the movie industry is just one of those undertakings that has seen how things fit into one another, and is cashing in on that while doing us a favor: by example, they try to show us the way into positive thinking, even when the concept of the movie is not particularly positive, like a horror flick for instance.

But don't get me wrong, we are in a matrix, even if it is of our own making. It is the matrix that is made up of all the webs we ourselves weave. Just like Carroll Oerstadt just now said "They're all connected, everything's connected", we all are too. How many friends do you have, how many family members? How large are all the groups you are part of, or the company you work for? It is said that a link from one human to a random other one across the globe needs only seven hops. And it may be less: last month our company was taken over by one of the big japanese companies, so I guess the Japanese period my daughters had a few years ago may be useful just yet, because this has radically reduced my number of hops towards the Japanese population....

And as for living outside the Matrix, that is not a matter of escaping your particular battery cell, but much rather a matter of realising that all the connections you see tying yourself down to 'reality' are in fact only ideas in your own being which you have formed by reacting to what you have created 'out there' to be your mirror image.

Last few days were more like a chasm in the Matrix, with writing being furthest from my mind. That didn't mean I wasn't working on the book, but more like working on getting to the finer points yet to be addressed. I discovered by plain self-observation, that my success at manifestation is becoming more adept, even if you only see it in minor events: last night I was cooking, when I accidentally knocked the meat knife off the counter. It was heading towards my toes, sharp point first. Not even thinking about moving my foot, I instead envisioned it ending alright, and blocked the knife with my upper leg: instead of causing a wound, the sharp instrument bounced back onto the counter as if I'd just pushed rewind on the camera of my eyes! Stuff like that keeps happening: a glass will fall, I see it knowing it will be allright, and then it won't break, even if it is a tile floor. Or I will notice a broken bottle on the cycle path too late, drive right through the sharp shards, and then not get a puncture!

And it isn't so much knowing it will be all right, because right is but one of these infinite labels, we beings attach to things. Lots of people discriminate between thinking and feeling, as if they are two different things, even I do it when I'm in 'normal' reality. Yet from an early age I always wondered why people made that distinction, because I just couldn't feel the difference! Only when I'd reconciled myself with that assertion, did the real concept emerge: being was all there was, no normal living against meditation, for no matter how you try, during meditation your senses keep feeding you information that tells you undeniably where you are, no matter where you envision yourself. The moment you realise that there and here are One, regardless of the distance.

Am I that different from the normal human being? No more than the next neighbor I'd say, although I'm quite certain he's not all that happy with the world around him as I am. But let's not get into that, because I have no quarrel with my neighbors. And even then, this book is not about such a puny little detail, no matter how important it may be to either of us. No, my story for tonight, musically enlightened at the moment by Moby and 'Everloving' (another random pick from over 38000 tracks) is about what we call Love, which basically is just another label: we say we like things, but we also love, which is supposed to be the more than like.

Sure, this diagram is slanted towards lust, because it generally is believed to be an instinctive, non-reflected upon preference. But I never said that the view you use to create it has to be an absolute one. In fact, with All being relative, that isn't even possible! So yes, in my view I am aware of hate and dislike, but it belongs in my negative triangle, along with indifference. The other three are much more interesting (to me at least): like, love and lust indicate stuff, situations and/or beings who are aligned with our preferences in a positive way:

The idea a lot of people are struggling against, is that there are a lot of rules they dislike, which still need to be followed. Or at least, if there are positives, then there must also be negatives to balance things out. In fact though, in the above diagram, the two triangles are perfectly stable all by themselves. Neither needs the other to keep things in balance. Balance between the two is OK, but not imperative.

"So you can just wish for the good things, and avoid the nastiness altogether?" I hear you ask. Yes, that is the whole idea: I only partially read Tom T. Moore's books on Most Benevolent Outcomes, but essentially he says the same. "Ask and thou shalt be given", said the elders, right? Well, that actually works, but I noticed something funny this morning: often I ask to get up well rested, but last night I forgot. So my alarm clock encountered me in a hard-to-wake state, that made me decide to sacrifice one of my last days off. To counter the effect. And then it got to me: the delegation of work between conscious and subconscious not only works when we think and feel, but also when we manifest: if we don't set a specific target consciously, then the subconscious mind will take over to do its homework, and will start manifesting our already requested wishes. So my "wake up well" wish will be standard from now on...

And of course I'll try to wipe some of my other wishes from my waking mind, except for acnowledging them whenever the pop up:

Like this for instance: last Monday I cycled to the station, when a familiar license plate caught my eye:. It was already associated with the lady in my heart and mind, but as I dismissed the image with the thought: "Yes dear, love you too", the following sync hit me totally unprepared: a sail boat was parked on a trailer not 17 meters further than the car seen before, and I almost burst out in a loud laugh: it was named 'Justus', a first name in Holland at least, but when slightly modified, it read: "Just Us" ;-)

But let's address another idea: we've already played with the idea that we don't know it All, but we do know how sure we know. That concept, in my experience, also extends itself to our preferences: we absolutely know what we do and don't like, or any of the other concepts in the diagram above. I'll go as far as to say that most of us are aware of the love we feel for those around us, and how it differs from the absolute Love we feel for the One who reigns our heart and mind. Not that He or She would be out of our league in any way, because labels are labels, even the ones uttered right here right now by a randomly selected Bob Marley: Positive Vibrations! I must say that even though it positively surprised me, I half and half suspected the player to come up with 'Queen of the Reich' ;-)

But knowing your preferences is a nasty trick, because you cannot easily say which preference counts for how many percent in your total assessment of any situation: if she's blond instead of the preferred black, her eyes can still knock you off your feet. And for the ladies it might be that razorsharp mind that counts more than a their dislike of bit of a Buddha belly. And of course we are not talking two preferences, but easily several dozens, half of which are not even things we are consciously aware of. What we can be sure of, is that the preferences grew from earlier experiences, which we ourselves designated as either positive or negative (the tree in the Garden of Eden...).

And don't think that's just me shooting off at the mouth. The da Vinci Code, a movie I started about half an hour ago, had Robert Langdon starting the intro to his lecture by showing people how their beliefs about symbols shape their lives. And whether you talk about beliefs, symbols, labels or words, basically they are all the same: more input for the consciousness that we believe to be us. And word games are also not strange to Dan Brown, as he has Lee explain the word for the Holy Grail to Sophie Neveu: Sangreal may wel be read as Sang Real, or 'real blood'.

Playing with stuff like this isn't being undignified or unholy in any way. Some may think it that, and in their reality it probably is, but the complete Consciousness that is the All does not judge that way because it knows all possible viewpoints for any given situation, and sustains all. Still though, a very emotional battle of words is now being fought by Sophie and the Opus Dei albino, each trying to convince the other of the strength of their reality....

Are we so fond of these battles because they remind us of the fight within ourselves? Can we gauge the progress of our lives by knowing how we felt about things in the past as opposed to how we feel about them now? If we find a way to filter out the ups and downs, do we not see a stready climb where each change brings us something better? I must confess the dislike of battles aimed at me had me avoid them, simply because fighting violence with violence felt wrong, and I was no match for the others anyway. By now I see how I brought this onto myself by actually fearing it so much I manifested those nasty kids. Nowadays, I clearly see how believing in the positive path helped me escape the last few negatives in my life. And don't believe I did it all My Way, as Frankie used to sing: many encounters with unknown beings who somehow felt true even though I never met them, nudged me gently into certain directions, not because they wanted me to go there, but rather because their input made me want to go there voluntarily. Some I met on the train for only half an hour, like the lady all dressed in white, who landed on the free seat beside me. Other caught me on the train, and stretched the contact for a few weeks or months. What I found afterwards, was that certain words, labels if you will, would often be used in such situations, as if to cue my consciousness for the next discovery. But somehow it does not feel like fate or destiny, for those two imply either something to fear, or something positive beyond our control. And this is somehow different..... It feels more like going in the direction I've always wanted to go. Heck, isn't that always what we are doing: either chosing the best of the best, or the best of the worst, it is all an upward path if that is how you label it....

But inside or outside the Matrix, it is a choice depending on the pill we take. Both are placebos, but despite their neutral nature, we send ourselves into a certain direction. Like me for instance, hellbent on avoiding as many pieces of advertizing as I can. I figure a thing is worth paying for it, or it isn't. If it is, then no amount of haggling or discounting is needed, and if it is not, then it should be free anyway. On the other hand, if I have it and someone needs it, it is usually theirs no questions asked. Not that I'm such a nice guy, but I'm utterly convinced that the Incredible Machine will fill the void which is left with one of the many interesting alternatives it is capable of generating. As an added edge of the triangle, I am usually first to arrive when something is given away for free, even though I know abundance will never let me down.

Some words to the image above: please note how Giving and Accepting are more or less coupled to Abundance: where a believer in abundance will accept something offered to him or her without question, someone believing in surplus and shortage will usually either become a taker, or will wonder if something offered does not burden the giver too much. And Taking is in the red sphere, because it is the only one of these seven concepts that does not honor Free Will...

the Sales Avalanche

Being a Creator is one thing, and usually a thing of Passion. I know because I write, and design stuff sometimes. Now I've had a dislike of Business for the longest of times, but I only just now found out why: they are four added layers of complexity between me and my customers, as human contact goes. On the other hand, their presence allows me to get work done, without being visited every five minutes by yet another loving fan. ;-)

So yes, my website gives the customers a direct link to my books, but to lure some traffic to it, I have to advertize it on a few free E-book sites. And that basically starts the avalanche that is the Web: a few months after placing the first two books, I ran my alias through Google, enclosed in quotes so as to not get false hits on partial matches: apparently there were 15.200 pages out there with my name on them! Now I had only added my books to two or three of those Free E-book sites, so how did they get there?

And with that much public exposure, and thousands of downloads at my site itself, how come no one had taken the bait of the voluntary PayPal button, and shelled out that one single Euro? Probably because the environment was treating me the same way I was treating it: I bought something from an Internet Ad only three times, twice because of a personal interest, and once because someone gave me a story about being successful at making money on the Internet, without my intuition flagging it as bullshit right away. Of course, as the package arrived, the mechanism proved to be none other than the one thing I wouldn't want to inflict upon my fellow WebMinds. OK, I'm no saint, but if I hate seeing those ads, and the guy then also appeared to have gone back on his words, so I guess I'll just wait for the honest opportunity to come by, because I know it is there, hiding nearby....

In the mean time, as I'm writing this, someone offered to pay 100 Euros for my Dad's old LCD TV. Of course I reacted, and then there is always that awkward period of waiting in which a third party phones, and offers to take it off your hands for the same or a somewhat larger amount, even before the second party had time to answer. Now luckily I am in the situation where a previous arrangement has me being absent for the next few hours, so I could give the first caller some time to react without being dishonest to the second one. Of course 'dishonest' is just a label like everything else, but it is the meaning to my being that counts for me, not what you all think.... ;-)

And maybe I'm not just one of those 'guys against business', because our goverment has seen fit to issue stickers for our mailboxes, that are aimed at making it impossible for distributors to throw advertizing and door-to-door newspapers in our mailboxes. I think transgressions are even punishable by law. On top of that, I added a label that declared clearly that salespeople of either gender are not welcome. Imagine my surprise, when yesterday my door bell was abused by what turned out to be two Jehovah's witnesses, one male, one female. I tried hard to gently bring the pair's attention to the label, but then the guy claimed he wasn't selling me anything. "Damn right you aren't!", I thought, since I took the decision long ago to never be part of a religious group, a decision which was reinforced by the lyrics of one of Queensrijche's songs, from the album "Operation Mindcrime" which went like this: "Religion and Sex are powerplays, manipulating people for the money they pay!" And the music player did it again: just now it started "Jesus He Knows Me", by Genesis, a very witty parody on the whole Religion thingy. But right now I'm a bit stuck in the SevenSphere (my own damn 'religion' ;-) for this whole belief system concept. So I'll just toss out the next song, which is a Dutch song, a start a movie which I 'm sure will bring me the needed inspiration.....

And there it was, hiding right in my blind spot, because I love movies: just like religion and sex manipulate people, so do movies and other fictional works. I put on the movie "Columbus Circle", simply because my belief about circles and stuff had me mesmerized because of the circular view of the street, with multiple entries/exits on it. By then, finishing the Sphere was a matter of just adding the last few: Religion and Sex are countered by Love, and the matter of acceptance of those is either Fear, Faith or Fiction: the last one being anything which we don't have enough faith in, and don't fear enough, to consider it to be part of our reality.

The fictional stuff, or even the ones claiming to be real life scenarios, are using the other aspects to keep their audience captive. And it is all what the viewer, listener or reader believes. And that is actually what the whole movie is about: who can you trust? In the end? No one really, other than yourself. But since all the others are fragments of the mirror that is the outside world, they can be trusted too if you succeed in evening them out against one another. And that is quite doable: this morning I came across a fellow passenger who expressed to me his fear of phishing. No, not the montrous carp that could swallow him up alive, but the innocent little E-mail that when clicked would deliver his bank credentials to the crooks behind them. From my experience in electronic banking, I explained to him that having the account number would not at all be sufficient in my view to plunder the account. I know that my bank has issued me an encription device, which upon first use I had to personalize with a five digit code. Even if you steal it and my bank card, then the device would still be useless, as would the card because the PIN code was missing. And three attempts with incorrect codes make the device and the card totally useless!

I don't think I swayed him, because he was very anxiously trying to sway my belief in the safety of the system. But since both our experiences are based on more than just one fellow train passenger, it'll take quite a bit more to topple those beliefs. Besides, my belief that the system is safe is also based on the belief that humans are in Nature benevolent, and that most of the crime we see is born out of perceived necessity: someone convinced of the ever-abundant Nature of the Cosmos no longer needs to steal or rob. Unless of course it is the thrill of the crime that drives him or her.....

But since the All is sufficiently large to let all those situations exist next to one another without danger of influencing each other, I dare say that one who truly believes his world to be some way, will in the end have to be that way as well, before all the last traces of other influences disappear from his or her world. Nobody said that making your dreams come true isn't a full time job. But like real son Martin said to his mother about reading them Pinocchio in AI: Artificial Intelligence: "David is gonna love it!", even though David was only at the beginning of his journey....

And maybe you wondered why the movie is called "AI: Artificial Intelligence"? Why not just call it "Artificial Intelligence"? To me, the answer is perfectly clear, now I am writing this book, and recalled the actual logo used at the time: One big A, with a partial boy inside, and a whole boy outside. Both facing in the same direction, toes sticking out like little L's. Two dots indicate where their next steps take them: do I need to draw it out, or have you already seen the All in this next evolution of the image on the left here? That's it, nothing artificial, so the Flesh Fair people can have their own little reality, while those accepting and wishing more will get just that: more....

And right this moment George Micheal is treating me to Freedom, which perfectly tags onto the previous segment. Let me just dive into my paint program, to come up with one of the SevenSpheres that might be appropriate here....

Yes, 'No Jail' is in red, because it is hands down the first aspect of freedom people think of. It is also the one that is most difficult to express as a 'Free' thing (believe me, I tried ;-). And the other five are the five of life, as we have come to know it:

Freedom to Choose any of the other possibilities,

Free Money, at least if you are not capable of making your own. And yes, in some realities that does include counterfeiting...

Free Travel, although that may still require a little paperwork, and a wad of cash.

Freedom of information gathering, which we all know from the UN Treaty of 1948.

And after that, the right to blatantly display your understanding of said info.

Now after that, a few days of relative quiet in the writing business came over me. Doing stuff for others, lounging in the living room with movies like Star Trek where young James Tiberius Kirk trashed his dad's convertible, nearly escaping a fatal fall in the process. While viewing the Da Vinci Code, I'd thought about a dear friend of mine, who came to visit me twice last year. Like for any of us, she is part of the mirror image I conjured up for myself, a sort of twin sister who knows what I think when I think it, and we can finish each others sentences quite neatly if we want. Now her remarks and the Dan Brown movies are the soil in which the next chapter will find root....

Angels and Demons

It is no shame whatsoever, but until recently I would not tell anyone for fear of being ridiculed: I simply adore female beauty! It doesn't really matter whether we're passing in the street, or doing something together (pun intended), a lovely lady is who I most like to be next to, even if the chance of her landing in my arms is just about next to minus Infinity! I think you know those moments, when a glance to another's face across the business of a shopping mall will have you contacting that oneness again even if it is just in passing. It is purely coincidental that I'm playing Tolkien's "the Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers" tonight, for this is indeed about the One Ring, that has kept humans in check for aeons: I will attempt to unravel this with a memory from the past: basically, I grew rather fond of one unknown young lady before my lunchtime walks with the other superhumanly beautiful being that worked beside me for a year. More on that later perhaps, but let me take us back to the first visit of my Indian Twin sister Sangeeta: when we met at Schiphol airport, there was this poster in a perfume shop's store window, that looked to my pretty much like one of my preferred girls I mentioned before, whose name (as I later found out) was Christine. That may or may not have been the girl's real name, but at least I figured that if I ever was to get to God, it would be through Christine instead of the Christ, because I am absolutely singleminded when it comes to my partners. Anyway, since I could see the poster clearly, I made a picture of it, with the intention of having a better look at it later on. But when we came home, the camera had taken Christine's 'true' image: the spots lighting the store window had given her beautiful wings of Light!

When I remarked to Sangeeta about what I'd seen, she mentioned that perhaps I ought to see her as an angel. That gave me something to think about, especially since my upbringing was such that I've always though of women as angels: not specifically better than me, but certainly worthy of my esteem!

And then, when I watched the Da Vinci Code the other day, and was treated to the trailer of Angels and Demons, Dan Brown's sequel, it suddenly came to me: there are a few beautiful linguistic syncs in the title 'Angels and Demons' that I dare not withold from you:

'Angels' is often mistyped 'Angles', and in some languages it is even written this way. To me, that is simply because Angels show us another Angle of ourselves. In that way, any being we encounter can be considered an Angel.

In a similar way, Demons demonstrate to us the effects of our actions in another way....

But it is all just us playing with us, in order to fully experience the whole of it. Just like this morning I woke up with not much gusto to do anything (the summer beating on doors and windows) but went forward to do weekend stuff anyway, hoping for some inspiration along the way, instead of counting on it like I have in the past. And it came: a bird chirping caught my attention, but it was too late when I looked outside: a neighborly cat had gotten hold of it, proudly carrying it off to play with it later on, no doubt.

Now that would have distressed me in the past, having been too late for such a rescue. But that is the fullness of life for you: while the cat plays with the remains, the bird (as I figure it now) will have graduated to the next class, to experience life as the big cat it always wanted to be, chasing instead of being chased. Reminded of my most botched up rescue, I thought about the lady I met on the train some months ago. She told me 'home' was important, and when she invited me to her home to help her with a computer problem, I wasn't expecting what I saw when I got there: but at least I could see a certain order in it, which may or may not have been the order intended by the owner of the house. With the best intentions, I attacked her computer problem, checking with her to make sure she didn't use Microsoft Office. Not having paid enough attention, I could have known she used Outlook, which is part of Office. So in effect, my decision to remove it, even though I checked with her, was incorrect. She later called me, still thanking me for my effort, but at the same time requesting that I would not contact her again. But even that I could sense was a way of making me feel like I'd done enough, without making me feel like I'd messed up bigtime. Hey, in the end, no matter how you label it, mistakes are just that: some experience you would not want to experience again....

And the same goes for our names: wanting an illustration for this page, I got thrown into this article about an unknown guy opening up a Twitter account in the name of his 'Big example', and thus pulling a lot of traffic his way. It ended in the stressful advice to quickly claim your name on the Web, before anyone else does, and thus robs you of your home. Because home is important, right? And that may be true, and even though JetAudio just plays me "Spread your little wings and fly away", I will for now do just like the guy in the song: staying at home seems like the best thing to do, with this book not yet finished. And as for my home on the Web? It may have gone from a provider's site named "Selfaware's Special Spots" to http://www.paid2think.com, followed by http://deviantslair.punt.nl, but it has for now and the foreseeable future settled on a one.com domain called http://moorelife.nl, and all the subdomains I can make out there of the form (http://{alabel}.moorelife.nl). And no sublim-inately threathening E-mail about somebody wanting to claim similar domains on other extensions in Asia will make me claim yet another home, because home is where I can (no, not have to ;-) empty my pockets onto the table without a problem....

And now, to make home more Home, even when I don't mind the chaos {my/it}self, it is time to "do my homework", a.k.a. "Wax in, wax out", as the master tought the Karate Kid.....

Now why would I do it then, if it wasn't what I want? Well', there is a label involved that is quite eloquently sung about by George McCrae in Rock you Baby, which is on now: a label that says that same thing, both in the singular and plural inlinations: together, or to get her: just like a male bird builds a nest to lure the lady into it, I have chosen to make mine a Home in her Will, as much free of my personal preferences as I can make it: rather than having her need to accept what is, she'll be able to make it hers, with me helping her realise it. But then of course, my environment will send me a loved one who is also seeing things that way. Great way to make a home in Unity, don't you think?

But back to labelling, and our doing it all day long: interrupted by a nudge from my phone, I checked E-mail and found some spam to indicate that an automated system had pulled in close to 145,000 dollars in just 45 days. Would be great to have a system like that, but I have long since known that will not be the case for me. I do get the signals, but not to tempt me into them: much more, I am to realise that the mail I just got had been carefully crafted from what is known about me on the Web, for better or for worse. Yes, even I cannot see which of those motives is the intended one, but what I can see is that the motive is that which I give it from here on in: I can spin you a tale intent on making you feel afraid of the Web and its cruel inhabitants (Smiles without a face, someone once sang about it), or I can attempt to make you love it. For me personally, I'd rather do the latter!

And that having been said, I went on to 'attack' another part of the chaos around my home, if only to satisfy a somewhat disgruntled request from my neighbor in the past, and the everlasting snide remarks of my dad about the backyard and its threatening wild growth: local wild flowers, and the other neighbors bamboo, which has dug itself under the fence, and has taken hold of the back of the yard. Way too hot to do much, but one point was absolutely clear: where I had put in tiles to avoid the growth, it just took a foothold in the cracks, and built an entire ecosystem on top of them! When I got to remove the roots, many crawlers came out from under there, some even centimeters long. Funny things to see was their attempt at misleading fellow beings: the seeds of the tall grass looked very much like the eggs of ants, no doubt trying to lure an unknowing ant into taking them into the lair, thus giving the grass way deeper roots.

But back to labels: in Infinity plus One I told you how the label first created for my eight core computer eventually became a label for me as well, but what it didn't tell perhaps is that, being quite pleased with that label, I had a local shop print me a white shirt with that label on the chest. Now today I opted for that shirt, but quickly found out that the printing of the shirt had left a plastic-like layer on my chest area, which felt wrong. It was like the label somehow restricted me to be just me, instead of more.... So I just discarded it on the couch, and am now doing homework barechested: no sixpack, despite my otherwise reasonably athletic build, but it is comfortable enough for today.

Still though, on the other hand I kept wondering about the OCTOPUSSY label: It had never felt quite right, not for my computer which was way overrated for the use I need, or for me because it isn't about me. But the revision made just now is for all of us!

Because this it the essence really: there is More Life, because the Meaning of Life is essentially a growing, living being, intent on making More Life! And each of us may differ in the way we think more life should be accomplished, but we can rest assured in one thing: the System that is Life will know how to help us reach it!

And with that, my reread has proceeded to the end of Cowboys and Aliens, where friendly cooperation has reached an all time high! And having seen that, I suddenly realize that this book, if not my last, will certainly be the central core of my writing career. The next step? Well, I've always wanted a home like this, which I first drew as a fourteen year old boy, and redesigned in 2008 with a freeware tool called "Persistence of Vision" (thanks guys!):

And I guess, that is basically what it takes: if you have the persistence of vision to trust your creational powers (or prowess), then stuff like this should soon materialize! It is just a matter of realizing its Reality:

It was real to me when I drew it at age 14.

It was real to me when I lost the original drawings....

It was real to me when I redesigned it with Persistence of Vision in 2008.

It was real to me when I used its ruins in the novel Make IT Real in 4444AD.

It was real to me when I noticed a lot for sale that would be perfect to build it!

It is real to me every moment I feel the idea come up again!

It has always been real for me since I realized time just a human definition....

More Life? You God IT!

Famous first words, you could call these. Watching Iron man at this moment, I'm wondering why I like the concept of Tony Stark so much. Is it the self-incriminating humor, the way he handles being brilliant, rich and famous in a way most of us couldn't even conceive? Or is it the root of the concept "Iron Man' that was literally burnt into my almost teenage mind by Black Sabbath? I knew the moment the movie Iron Man came out, that I'd absolutely have to go see it.

Life sidetracked me there, by realizing a standing wish for me: I hadn't counted on it happening exactly today, but my buddy Paul from the corner came by with a few cans of energy and a bag of chips. Since Iron Man had just started, I restarted the Bluray player, and we watched it together, with me out of writing mode, but still in Moore Input condition....

That remained a relaxed and quite enjoyable movie adventure, where several great moments of realization were the gems of the story's flow. After the movie ended, I wished Paul a good evening, and scanned my mind for the next best thing to do: watching Iron Man 2 won hands on! I tried to find it on my hard disk among the few movies I'd downloaded, but it wasn't there. Next the video store: not reachable by cell phone, and I'd dumped the hardline months ago, so a bicycle trip would be next. Hadn't counted on it, but the nice evening weather made it a distraction that might well be mistaken for a treat. And my awesome luck held out: not only did the video store have the movie on Bluray, but it only cost me two Euros to watch it all week long. And the salesman also didn't mind that I'd forgotten my wallet: it'll be on my tab next time....

So I'm back, writing and watching Iron Man 2. And where number one actually made me realise that a System's boundary actually has an inside and an outside, which are symbiotic and working together to interface the System with its Environment. And right this moment, Fury is telling Stark that he's confined to his Home, with a crate marked as his property, which obviously he has never laid eyes on. In it, Tony finds a blast from the past: his dad shows him a few things, even a fix for his current problem, the search for a new element to keep his suit from making him sick.

And basically, isn't that what we all are doing? When kids say they are bored, they are basically expressing the fact that nothing seems to be interesting enough at that moment. And grownups have that too, although they will usually hide it by doing stuff that 'needs' doing, Well, even though I do that too, I still cannot say I absolutely enjoy doing it. Just like right now, that the movie has ended, I don't like going to bed just yet. But fortunately for you, my choice not to continue writing will only look like just a fragment of a nanosecond to you, but might well be an entire night in my dream world for me....

Back at it, with Bruce Springsteens's Hungry Heart coming from the speakers. I realise that basically, just about every songwriter and moviemaker is telling you the same as I am, in their own language. Like Iron Maiden just sang to me a while ago: "Life is like a Circle" from the song called Sun and Steel, Duran Duran now makes it "Breath after Breath": they sing mostly of Life and Love, and I ain't anything else, if we take the title of this work into account. So, as I finished the diagram on the next page here, Billy Ocean sings "Love really hurts without you!" Honestly, I can't really agree with him, because the All has no Without.....

And yes, you can call it Desire, a Craving, or just plain Lust, but I guess there is that particular feeling to it we all know very well: you haven't defined it yet, but you know you want it, him, her or whatever it is! Now pregnant women are allowed this in our society, at least when it is about outlandish foodstuffs. And believe it or not, the entire advertising world caters to that one decisionmaker in humans: if you can grab them by that part of their being, the deal is already halfway done!

But of course nature adapts, as do humans when flooded with advertizing. Their Experience leads to Knowing that certain collections of bits and bytes only lead to yet another mindless purchase, so they skip them. Unless of course it happens to be about the exact thing that is in their sphere of desires.

And if Desire and Knowing can tell you when to dodge certain things, they will also be able to tell you about Destiny and Fate, which are to me defined as eventual outcomes, the first one as desired, the second one as undesirable. Please note how completing the circle first has you using your experience as a step ladder towards your Destiny, which is immediately followed by Fear being your stepladder towards Fate, because All being One, you cannot accept one without the other. My deepest wish might be that I want to complete the puzzle Einstein left us, but then my deepest fear would also surface: speaking in public, and remaining a nice guy even though I would probably be famous. But right now, we can just shove this all aside as the ravings of a madman, because time can't tell, being a man-made distinction....

So yes, the moment you lay your fears to rest about a certain thing, it is possible to reach the realm of absolute Knowing, where no amount of hairy-scary stuff can possibly sway your resolve. That is the moment you can grow your faith as you complete yet another Circle of Life, whether it is the one Iron Maiden played just now, or the more childlike version of Disney's Simba.

So yes, life is a never-ending set of semi-circles as one might say, but I guess then we are forgetting that the circles aren't showing up in two or three spatial dimensions, but in many virtual ones at the same time: we don't just love that one special mate, but also carrots, a 1963 Chevy Corvette, or the speed boat redesign a fellow human did of it Even Roger Rabbit dearly loves Jessica! All in all, I'd say life isn't lived in circular motions, but rather in a sort of combi-nation of spiral segments and brownian motions: one moment we focus on a less 'important' aspect of life, and at other times we focus on the ultimate wish or desire. That is the spiral-like motion, where we circle the above SevenSphere to proceed towards better times. The Brownian part is where interactions with other realities have us view the current aspect of our trail of thought in a different light, or even makes us consider a vastly different trail. A nice example of this was Paul's arrival yesterday evening, switched me from parallel writing/moviewatching to moviewatching/speaking with a friend. If you view the whole of the All like the infinite collection of bubbles it is, then you could say Paul and I arrived on the surface of a reality called joint moviewatching, and each went our way once the movie was finished.

As bubbles go, the example above is typical of connected bubbles: because they are connected, none of them are perfectly spherical: they have shared surfaces which define their interfacing. As long as both of us are on the same shared bubble surface, there is an interface between us, defined by the plane we are on. The moment Paul gets up and goes home, he effectively steps from one joint surface onto another, called 'going back home'. Now I can stay on the movie watching plane, but if it doesn't feel right anymore, I might switch to a more enjoyable pastime. Funny sync: the street where our homes are, is semi-circular...

Now remember what I learned from last night's Iron Man movie? A System has a Boundary, but the Boundary has an Interface separating inside from outside. The movie made me realize all of a sudden (from zero to absolute certainty in 0.0) that each Interface has both an inner layer separating it from the inside of the System, and an outer layer separating it from the Environment, sort of an airlock really. Well, Nature is quite adament about that too: even the soap bubbles I just used as an example have two layers of soap molecules, with a layer of water inbetween (more info here). If an object touching the bubble punctures only one layer, the bubble stays whole and attaches to the object. If it punctures both, the bubble is history! Even the photo on the previous page shows it, with the light edges inbetween the bubbles, and the darker (colorless) water inbetween them. And even though Paul and I feel quite at home in each others company, we are restricted to interact via the interfaces we both feel comfortable with, but even on those we do not disagree...

Sunday 3PM, almost. And even though I'm utterly convinced that time is but an illusion, if I want to interact with the supermarket or the video store, I'd better get there within their time interface. So I guess you guys and gals have been placed on the second tier, while I get something to nourish the physical part of me, and some bits and bytes to satisfy the more voracious energetical subsystem. And I guess I'll have to say no to the Rolling Stones, who are right now proposing I spend the night with them.... ;-)

Back, and with a story to tell about interfaces and how they influence our behavior: as I exited the supermarket, and took the long way home, I spotted him: the guy with the bike, sitting on a bench at the same corner where he stood the first time I encountered him. If that first time was any indication of what I'd heard then (even though I didn't feel threatened), I did not want such a conversation going on again. It had been Dutch, but the topics he spoke about rang true and at the same time had given me the feeling of just having been thrown in the deep end of the pool, before even having been awarded my first swimming certificate. I'd been thinking about his words all night, not properly knowing what to make of them. It was as if he spoke to my subconscious, rather than the conscious me that stood in front of him. You could say we had an interface, but it was a shaky one. So yes, I gave in to the urge to switch to the short way home, to return here with a story about an interface gone haywire....

Bring it All back to You!

As I flipped the page, JetAudio flipped to S Club 7, and "Bring it all back to you" which was their sound advice, both literally and figuratively. Now to you, apart from a cheerful song sung by a bunch of kids, it may mean nothing. To me however, 7 is the 'special' number, and S is a special letter, because of both my name and my chosen alias (and hers)..... In this way, we all have our preferences which make us choose or avoid certain experiences.

Now the song just sung made me realize I always have looked onto the idea of Manifestation in quite the wrong way. Where I figured it brought something into the material realm, in such a way that I'd be able to interact with it, my last page has simply explained to me that since time is irrelevant, remembrance isn't about the past. Neither is planning about the future. It is true, a Wish is a Dream which by definition opposes an Experience we want to see materialized (if you dream, you don't have it yet). So we can go circular and Plan to Realize the Dream, but then we consciously forget about the Cosmos' shortcut: without time we are planning for the now instead of the future, and we even need not remember the past. We simply can Realize that our Wish (and it's inevitable outcome) was always there, from the moment it was inseminated by our being...

Now up until this point in writing, I didn't figure it out: my dearest wish which cost me many a doubt, always had me absolutely certain of one thing: I shouldn't and wouldn't do anything in the realm of planning and realizing to make it manifest. Still though, there was this tiny bit of doubt about it actually becoming an experience. Having just explained it to you however, I guees it's all being brought back to me: no doubt, just staying in the lower regions of the above diagram: Dreaming and Remembering! Does that mean I'll never get to the manifestation part? Nope, because I have observed my material form to have experienced a steady rise of wondrousness, that just seems to be unstoppable. So I guess it's just like Buzz Lightyear claimed: "To Infinity, and Beyond!!!"

And if you thought anyone has been trying to lead you in a certain direction, don't figure they are out there to get you like Rockwell once shook the music world with "Somebody's watching me". Probably we al had these ideas at one time or another, but most of us just shake it off, and stay in the Matrix as it has come to be called.

But then something puzzled me: yesterday I again saw Iron Man 2, specifically the scene where Stark is creating the new element. His friend asks him "What is this?", holding up a circular damaged object with a star on it. Back when I saw it for the first time, it didn't trigger, but yesterday it did: it was the damaged shield of Captain America, a movie which has only recently been released! Now why would such an object be in a movie that preceeded the latter one by at least two years?

Now I have always been an analytical mind, can't deny that. I would actually drive my fellow audience crazy with my comments on movies, rather than enjoying the story with my mind in couch potato mood. I guess that's another way our realities clash: We continuously see connections, like Stan Lee all over the place...... Or agent Coulson and SHIELD from Iron Man again appearing in the movie Thor right about... Now!

Funny sync upon rereading: Hugo is playing on the screen to my right, and he is just telling his girlfriend Isobelle that "the Movies are Our Special Place". Funny how ISO is a term from photography, so Isobelle literally means "the Light that is Beatiful", and she happens to hold the key to his dream, the repairing of the writing automaton in his hiding place in the attic of the Paris station. I don't know about you, but I'm getting the shivers, since it feels like I'm the automaton, the boy and the girl at the same time... (great movie about the history of movies)

But if time is irrelevant, then any hint can appear anywhere, and be interpreted by anyone. Just like his younger son now scourns Odin for not having told him that he had been taken from the battlefield as an infant. Odin saw it as protecting his 'son' from the truth, and the son saw it as having been withheld it! Or what to think of what follows: Jane wants to accompany Thor when he heads for the hammer, but her dad knows about the comic book stories from his youth, and dissuades her from it because of his fears...

The way I figure it, it is just like aiming a camera at the monitor displaying its picture: we are not just doing this once, but an infinite number of times: all the realities we hold for fiction are no less real than those we actually believe in. And the movie industry is showing us a lot of interwoven storylines and realities, so much so that most of us have a very fuzzy boundary where our reality is concerned. Just now, dear old Dad was confronting his eldest daughter with the descriptions of the nordic figures he'd found in a children's book. She counters by telling him he's always told her to be thorough, and he says he's talking about science, not magic. And there, the wisdom of youth shows: Jane quotes Carl Sagan, who has reportedly claimed that "Magic is but a precursor to Scientific Reality".

And of course that is all the more reasonable, since our linguistic utterings include both real and fantastic concepts: nobody down here knows how to generate an Einstein-Rosen bridge, yet most of the people who regularly watch movies have a grasp of the concept, especially since it has been graphically explained in a few movies, most notable the one in Event Horizon, where the science nut abuses a pinup model by showing how he could get from one end of her space to the other one, by folding her onto herself...

And the movie subjects? We used to be oblivious about how movies were made, except that it had to do with cameras, stages and players. Some of us knew about tricks like the green screen technique, which used to be quite visible to the viewer's eye, just like the small puppet soldiers in the filmings of ancient Greek myths back in the thirties and forties. Nowadays, we see more of the stunts than before, because they have to fill all those DVDs and Blurays with something, right? But how much of it is truthful info, instead of just a coverup scenario for the fact that some of us have already figured out how to build Einstein-Rosen bridges?

What I mean is this: let's talk animation, computer-generated movies from start to end. I guess Toy Story stole the feature-length trophy from Pixar's desk lamp short, but you could always tell it was animation because of the resolution, and the somewhat simple physics of the whole thing. At the time, they proudly mentioned that they'd had a computer farm of hundreds of graphics workstations at work to render the eventual end release, but being a computer nerd, I immediately knew there wasn't a computing restriction on rendering the movie because you can render it at any speed, and then play it in 'real' time. And let's not forget the advances in computer programs: tricks like motion capture gave the beings generated a real look and feel, to a point where it becomes hard to distinguish 'real' movie making from tricks.

Or should we just call them 'tools of the trade'? Point is, to the people working with them, they are everyday reality, and to the normal folk, it's just "Magic which is a precursor to everyday reality". Just go into analyzer mode, next time you see a movie, especially the action stuff and scifi stories: you'll see cameras doing stuff which no camera in the physical world could ever do, like passing through the glass in a door, or preceeding Ellie up the stairs, and then seeing her rush up the stairs ending in the mirror of the bathroom cupboard mirror, reflecting Ellie opening it up to get the pills.....

And they are going all out too: where traditionally one or two cars would get crashed in a typical pileup, nowadays whole parking lots are demolished. Now to the logical mind, there is a limit to what you can do physically: if you know the amount of work involved in making one car perform a certain stunt, then it is obvious to the computing mind that instead of computing how it should be done physically, you could more easily just program the cars as 3D objects (which we already have from the computer games), and have them perform the stunts in realtime rendering, or even slow motion if your processing power isn't enough. Point is, the degree of detail is most probably a programming parameter, and if you can do Toy Story in say 100 hours back then, then Transformers 3 may take just about that time now, even though it looks physically perfect. In fact, the advertizing team proudly claimed that they had succeeded in keeping all transformations 'volume constant'....

And especially mixed with normal moviemaking, like in 'Tomorrow, when the war began" (which I'm playing now), it would be impossible to believe they'd explode a jet fighter worth millions just for a ten second dogfight scene. Still though, if not equipped with knowledge about state of the art computing, could the average viewer find a reasonable explanation for how it was done?

Well, maybe there is: back in the old days, when the colonists reached Africa, they ran into problems with the local natives, because of their belief that the camera would take a part of their soul essence as well, instead of just an image. Now believe it or not, not two years ago I got the experience that told me this way of thinking may still be alive as a primal fear. Back then, I travelled on the train to my hometown, and sat about seven meters from a lovely young lady. I had a camera on my lap, and for the briefest of moments thought about taking her picture. But since it would be too small anyway I skipped it, and forgot all about it. A week later I was walking with my wife, and a car stopped right by our side. Out came a distressed father, who said his daughter claimed I'd taken her picture. Because I hadn't, I could calmly answer him, and in the end reassure him enough so he went on. But it sure gave me some stuff to talk and think about, because even my wife doubted me for at least a day.... ;-)

But if in our primal mind we still fear we can lose part of our being, then there will probably be gazillions of images out there which we all attach to in one way or another. So what happens when you have a fair grasp of Infinity, and have come to the conslusion that nothing can ever completely fill it? No matter how many realities we create, either alone or together, there will always be more room for more dreams....

Right now, the kids in the movie are discussing just how far they will go against the occupation force that took their Aussie homeland while they were on vacation. And that clearly shows how they are all seeing the same problem from very different sides, but all of them are valid even if they are not 'real' to the others. So yes, I guess we must all be convinced by now that there are more realities than just our own personal one, or the ones we create.

Duality reigns, even here...

And then, coming home today, I exited the train right behind a guy who had a weird combination of characters on the neck of his T-shirt. You know the kind of nonsensical 'words' which T-shirt designers put on their products. This one said _77, which may have meant nothing to the other train passengers, but it set my mind in motion: "underscore seventy-seven", or in other words: "stress the combination of two sevens". And that was exactly the point I need to make here!

Remember the inside and the outside of the System boundary, the two layers of soap containing the water? Or even the two ends of a conversation? Right this moment Johnny Five is confessing to the priest, and the reaction of the clergyman clearly shows who is the most openminded of the two....

So up until this page, we've seen SevenSpheres in their flat configuration, two-dimensional as they are in their singular, simple form. With Johnny on screen explaining to Ben about his feeling lonely, Ben replies that he knows about it, and that together is way better, but at the same time soo much more difficult. So yes, you may have your collection of SevenSpheres in order, but the moment you meet someone else, theirs are going to be different in some way, unless your actually are a perfect match. And even if you have a prompter like Ben has in Johnny Five, things can and will go very wrong, if only to make them more interesting.

But why would I ever get the idea to pair up two of those flat SevenSpheres ? What kind of form would that amount to? Well, believe it or not, but the combination of two SevenSpheres is almost completely spherical when they are merged: with three additional spheres behind it in three of the six dimples available there, and three more on top of it in three of the six dimples at the front, we are able to pack exactly twelve spheres around the center concept, which we both agree on. I guess the best way of visualizing this process is the way two sea snails mate: they stick together with their 'feet', and then the contact plane between the two undulates. This happens with the SevenSpheres too, so they are no longer twodimensional. As the contact surface curves, the center spheres merge (they are the same concept a.k.a. Label) and the twelve sattelite concepts mingle, and in the end hopefully align so both of us think the same about a given concept. I guess that is a fitting ending of this paragraph, right about the moment that Johnny Five is officially recognized as the first truly robotic citizen of the United States. Yeah, there are citizens and then there are citizens, right? ;-)

Tuesday, which was only haunted by a lingering defect in my smartphone. I'll not divulge the brand, because stuff like that happens. With the diagram mentioned earlier in mind, you may ask: "Did you mess with it?", but then "Nope" would be your answer. It simply states that it has full reception of the nearest cell tower, but when push comes to shove, it'll refuse to send a simple text message, or build up a phone connection, claiming it can't reach the network. So somebody is lying obviously....

Now in the old days, stuff like that would irritate me like a herd of cockroaches on my matress: I'd actually lose my temper trying to explain it to the phone company helpdesk. But of course the person on the other end of the line also cannot help it, for he or she also did not mess with it. And that would mean they were often not really inclined to be helpful... Now that is an example of where SevenSpheres collide, with more or less catastrophical consequences. We can try fixing it with the poor idiot method mentioned earlier, but let's try something a bit more constructive:

The next diagram on the right here is coiled around a problem that needs solving. We have those in all kinds of severities, but the severity is usually very much a function of the being encountering the problem. The solution spiral however works for all of them, both the chilled-out dudes and the hyperventilating manager (No, not my boss ;-).

From problem solving, you can drop right into a simple fix, if you trust yourself enough to fix it on your own. You may of course be proven wrong later on, but that is not the point.

If you do not have that confidence, you may confide in someone else, in the hope their view on things might turn this situation around for you. That's in fact what I did when I concluded it probably was the phone that malfunctioned, and I knew it was only a few months old. But since I was unfamiliar with the warranty procedure, I phoned them to have the diagnosis confirmed, and the procedure checked.

With a nice lady on the end of the line, explaining the problem and keeping my cool wasn't hard, but then again no problem is these days anymore. We agreed it was the phone that malfunctioned, and she told me to take it to the nearest shop.

So that was my next step, and my next additional problem: no extra insurance meant no backup phone, but the simple fix was to ask my friend to return to me the simple dual SIM backup phone I keep for emergencies. And that fix was even more simple than I thought, because when I phoned him from my daughters' house, he told me the phone I wanted was in a drawer right beside my chair!

So, with a short detour across another SevenSphere (how to find a replacement), I landed back in the original circle, where my next step will be to take the phone to the store, and trust they will bring it back in working order, or even better.....

Note please, that no matter how many semicircles we have to travel through, most or all of them are circles oriented in such a way as to take us closer to the solution. Keeping your cool helps a lot in this, and realizing that you are really at the starting ramp of a rollercoaster: the moment you get to the next circle is like the hook that locks you at that particular height. Instead of looking at it as yet another problem to solve, you can look at it as another step towards the solution of the original problem (getting way up there)....

But maybe I'd better tell it with one of those seven word images: all six satellites are choices of Free Will, at any one moment you find yourself in. Together they determine your State of Mind:

It starts with observing, both an event and, immediately after that, your feelings about it. This forms a Trinity with Reinforcing and Weakening, as it pertains to your State of Mind. Don't worry, no matter which you choose, you can always explain any event in the direction you choose. Of course not everyone will buy your story...

Because Neutrality is the bossom buddy of Observation, the second Trinity starts here: the moment you decide on either Positivism or Negativism, you implicitly decide to either Strengthen or Weaken your current position with relation to the center of your Prime Objective, your ultimate goal: positivism makes what's negative more balanced, as negativism makes what's positive more balanced. Likewise, the other two combinations bring us more off-center.

This keeps going on, with you doing Lissajous figures around a perfect center, until the moment comes that you realize that all these labels are All One, and thus in fact indistinguishable and therefor not worth bothering about. That moment, even I as a bipolar could honestly say to my doctor: "Hey, keeping that Lifechart is a waste of time, because from now on my State of Mind is going to always be the perfect 50% between utter manic and utter depressive behavior. I can honestly say I've found my center, from now until forever."

Does that get boring? Not being angry when stuff goes wrong, and not feeling those pangs of joy when stuff goes unexpectedly good? In fact, all it does is reinforce your belief that whatever happens, it is for the good, instead of messing things up. I have a feeling that that State of Mind was what the Buddha found after all those years: any event can be taken any way you want, so you just have to deal with the present wisely and earnestly. And if past experience has given you the courage to leap, leap!!!

The weird observation I'd like to add to this is that once you don't mind anymore, you'll observe how your environment is also going to mind less. That is the result of the third law, which has the world mirroring you. And thus, the spiral of relaxation begins, where differences are laid aside, and we all figure out how to live together. Timmy Thomas is gonna be soo happy!

Talking of living together, let's go on with Salt and Peppa and Talk about Sex! When you do, most people think of four letter words that are only four letters when you're English speaking, and which are used for everything in today's society, from decorating bus stops to so-called stop-phrases which can be inserted in a sentence just about every sixth word if you really want to.... ;-)

I'll admit that it is the attractive opposite of Lust, as the SevenSphere shows, but it is soo much more: the scene from Independence Day where Will Smith kicks the alien craft on its tail (as we say here in Holland), and it shoots out of the underground bunker: "WHOOAH, I've gotta get me one of these!" he literally shouted. Well, if that ain't an expression of absolute lust, as a result of the Special EXperience he had just undergone, I don't know what is! And you may think I placed the words wrong, because Love is of the Heart, and is thus related to Red, right? Depends, if you look at the chakras that line up along our spine, the red one is.... your genitals! And the heart chakra, you guessed it, is green. OK, conflicting data, just toss out what you don't need, and proceed with what looks promissing. Spelling error? Yeah right, most of the time we make these because our subconscious wants to draw attention to yet another idea we haven't realized yet. Of course Lust, Love and Logic are a Trinity that can't be missed, as are the other three: We let those we would rather not encounter pass by, and chase the ones we want to get close to. We have interfaces all over the place, that are attached at first, last a certain time, and are then detached. Some, like me and my 'twin' sister Sangeeta may not speak for months on end, but when we do, it's great! But we were on the subject of sex, so I guess I should leave her out of it.... Back to global writing now: yes, our interfaces may be sexual sometimes, but more often they are Special Experiences, like guys doing base jumping off of way too low buildings, or a girl being so good at fighting, she'll trash her male opponents! Most of that is talent taken to it logical extreme, just like I frantically maintain my buffalo stance in the middle of the Cosmos, in order to get her: Yes, I guess She is the One I would most want to discover entirely! So if you don't mind coming up 2nd next to Her, you're my kinda being! (Also if you realise there is no "coming up 2nd" ;-)

That one elusive, total meltdown of all your preferences on that subject, bundled into a persona so awesome, you will almost always feel you are but a distant star in her Cosmos. Kinda like the witch in "In the name of the King: Two Worlds", which I'm now watching, had I not experienced another mythical being first...

As external preferences go, she's great. But my assesment of her behavior is only based on a one-way impression, and an act at that. The only one who made it into my single's heart made it there long before I could ever appreciate the more special parts. Speaking of special parts, the main character is just opening up a special experience I have on my dresser as well. His may be American, whereas mine is Scottish, a fine 12 year old Glenfiddich! Normally, I'm a Famous Grouse man myself, but tonight that particular label seems to have too many alternate associations (a grey bird like me coming to fame and / or fortune? Preposterous!).

Still though, we've reached the end of tonight's writing, save for a little touchup here or there...

I should have known it... I commented on what I figure my Destiny is, and the movie I choose has exactly that concept as a subject! Now the main character sees his destiny as a fate, and prefers his free will instead, but since mine was about destiny, I have no such inhibitions. Besides, I believe that Free Will leads you to your Fate or your Destiny, no matter what you call it!

She's out of my League...

I walked from the office to the station this afternoon, and remembered that I'd loaded my phone with Ben Liebrandt's Grandmixes. I plugged in the earpieces, one of those evolved improvements over my previous phone, and got into the beat. Do you have that too? Pace picks up, joints start to display more flexibility, and you literally zoom across the pavement, driven by the Master's talent. You just love that beat, and every piece of lyrics drops right into the conversation that the performer is having with you! If they criticize you, your mood drops, but mostly, the Grandmixes are heaven on Earth, a real delight to listen to. Weird: delight should actually darken your mood, like the deluminator darkened a whole street in the Harry Potter movie. Still, it actually almost had me dancing on the platform, but I guess then I'd first need a skeletal upgrade like the cheerful robot from Bicentennial man. But still, at 49, I had a hard time NOT to move!!

And maybe, at 94, I will.... I hold it very possible, that half of today's SciFi action movies have become true by then, especially if I hear the Grandmix repeating over and over again right this very moment: "Grandpa's Party, Grandpa's Party!"

But that's an aside. I'm not going to speculate on how it will transpire, but I sense my path spiralling upwards, towards that Special Experience that has formed in my mind and heart fed by Special Experiences from the past, even if they were not all positive at the time. But learning from both negative and positive is the prerogative of those beings endowed with Free Will. Like John said to the Terminator: "Are we learning yet?"

Just now I came down from the movie Uncertainty, which features a couple of boy and girl tossing a gold dollar off the most filmed bridge in New York, and then rushing off in alternate directions to take up life as they encounter it. I'll not divulge the rest of the story, other than saying it is well worth warching, even for an action movie addict like me. What the movie does show clearly however, is that there's no denying preferences, or even lust: at least not without lying to yourself about it. And believe me, you don't want to do that, even if lust has gotten a bad rep over the years. "And why not?", you ask. Simple, LUST stands for Loving Ur Special Talents, something that is not only wise to do, but also easy because you simply love doing it!

And since LIFE is just Loving Input From Everywhere, you can use one to get the other, and slingshot yourself like hockey players on the ice to become GODS: Genetic Oscillations Defining Self! Because in the end, that's all there is, oscillations making waves whether they are caught in the vacuum of empty space, the oxygen rich atmosphere of some planet, or the atoms defining a simple brick of a building that's been there for ages! Even we are nothing more special than that...

Yet no matter how special you make your Environment by leveraging your talents into more of the stuff you love, you'll never deplete the resources of Source! It will always aim to please: If you band together to define a multi-billion Euro project like the Hadron collider, you can bet your sweet ass you're going to find that particle sought after, but it may well not behave like you expected it too.... I mean, why would you want to put all the power of the Cosmos in just one type of particle? Why can't they all have that same quality? Especially, since the work of Einstein and Rosen showed that any two particles are linked if they were at the same place at the same time anywhere before. But since the Big Bang claims they were all in the same place at the same time, guess what? And I'm not even talking about both being man-defined units....

Now in our beings, or at least in mine, we entertain both our image of the immediate Environment and that of the Entire Environment, the All. Now if we encounter something of interest (because it matches some of our preferences), there is somewhat of a conflict between what both images say of the matter at hand, be it material or otherwise. That conflict can lead to stuff like the song I'm listening to now: "Take or leave it, please believe it, we are never gonna be respectable!" by Mel and Kim. "Hell honey, no need to!", I'd say, because respectable is not what you enforce by a certain set of behavior, but what is the definition of it which is applied to you by the observer... And believe me, these two know that! And no, it ain't no coincidence that Labi Chifre follows them with "So Strong". But then he's a personal sync to me: "Laboring les Chiffres" is my Talent, and it points out I've been in the language realm long enough.... By the ways, doesn't the word 'realm' have a distinct multiplicity? "real m"

So it's back to numbers, and even relative ones at that: when I met my second girlfriend live for the first time, I had to be honest too, even though back then I actually didn't say it out loud, and also blamed myself for being such an asshole as to even entertain the thought. Love at first sight may be real for some, but in my case it was the absolute realization that is now being reinforced by JetAudio presenting me with Bowie's Absolute Beginners, which is what we were back then...

"It ain't Her, but she'll do for now...." was the observation I made for myself. Now turned out to be around 17 years, and it was great since it also resulted in two darling daughters, but the observation stands: she wasn't it, so the divorce was irrevocable even though we're still the best of friends.

Point was, that was a clash of Preference and Present, All and Immediate Environment. And after the divorce, I vowed not to be dishonest to myself again. The absolutes aren't to be toyed with, so I went into hiding from anyone who would be "Good enough for Now". But the Cosmos is like water, traveling the path of least resistance. And JetAudio switching to one of my most loved tracks ain't no coincidence: Marillion and Incommunicado plainly described my state back then. Just work, no play, and doing what I loved best: helping anyone who needed help in the form of my few talents: computers, life wisdom, movie paraphernelia and the like. Not because I love to be seen as the good guy, but for one single purpose, the fullfilment of my prime directive: I Love to help....., and as a friend once said it aptly, also a 'Lust for Clarity'.

Actually, since I help myself that way, I figured everyone does. And as I tried to convince a good friend of that theory, it turned out he and his wife frantically disagreed, and sent me and my wife packing. I hope they're allright, even know they are, for theirs is the reality they crafted for themselves by their talents and the way they used them. And mine is an entirely different being!

So when the Cosmos couldn't get at me in the defines of my private life, which included no bars and nightclubs, and precious little movie theatres, She switched to my office life: I soon found myself having lunchtime walks with the most delightful (dark hair and dark eyes, truly delightful) lady from the ground floor, and I enjoyed myself immensely. I'll not go into the entire story here, because it was thoroughly covered in my not yet published second novel named "Make It Real". But I will point out she was cleverly made unavailable because she was married. Being a guy out to avoid conflict and still falling for her, I came no further than to ask her at some point to consider me as the next candidate if and when she ever became single again. She just stared at me for seven seconds straight, never blinking once. My conscious mind didn't know what to make of that, and my subconscious wouldn't tell yet, but I'm now convinced that it was all an elaborate plan, which I played on myself to make things more fun: the moment I realised that I'd never have pulled such a trick on myself if there wasn't at least an equal or much bigger price to be had.... And Spandau Ballet with Through the Barricades absolutely agrees with me.

And now it is time for dinner, not because it is time, but because it simply is the most lovely thing I can think of doing right now....

And with Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers heralding my return from the cafetaria with the delicacy on the right, they dive into "That's what I like", the concept I've been entertaining here all afternoon long. And those are the very best moments for pondering Life: just walking home, juggling two liters of yoghurt and a can of peaches in one hand, and the cup of icecream in the other. Arriving at my back door, half of the yoghurt jumped out of my arms so I'd have one hand free for the lock, before picking it up. But that's not the realization I got from my experience just now. Instead, we'll go back to the title of the previous chapter, because Love, that manysplendored thing, is also a many-faceted gem. Where me and my friends couldn't decide which one of us was actually right, and thus clung to our horses, it turns out we were both right and wrong at the same time: Love is both a selfish and an unselfish thing, and it goes both ways! It is like two infinitesimal observers each appreciating the other as the All they both are!

And that of course means anything can happen! I may love a lady because of the way she talks, and my giant-like physique might make us look odd to the people in the street, but we couldn't care less if her idea of the ideal guy would be Bruce Willis... Not saying I absolutely look like the guy, who is also one of my favorite actors by the way, but you get my point: we each have a set of preferences and dislikes, and the sum total of those and the way they match makes up for how much we love each other, both as in 'getting love from' and 'can't wait to give love to', even when I exclude any and all sexual undertones...

And yet again, the JetAudio player (I propose we call it YesAudio from now on, because of it's enabling nature) plays UB40 with "Sing Our Own Song". Now you can interpret it in the traditional context of a divided South Africa, but we're dealing with romantical relationships right now, so let's just stick to that. Because believe it our not, any romantic relationship will have both parties singing their own song. And where they love singing it, the other party loves listening to it. And where the notes of the songs are the preferences we love to experience again and again, it seems only reasonable that both songs eventually become entangled into one duet. It is similar, although somewhat yucky, to liken it to the menstrual cycles of women living in the same house: it is said these tend to synchronize, so they're all in their period at the same time.

It is a well known aspect of Darwin's Evolution Theory, that features displayed are almost always likely to have a preference in the other gender of the species: if a male of a certain type of parrot grows a very colorful tail, it is because the females of the species make their choice based on that. Likewise, if a female of the human persuasion looks at possible candidates, she isn't going to aim for the guy that has all the wrong attributes, unless she lies to herself with regards to what she really wants....

Still though, in Holland we have this saying that "op elk potje past een dekseltje", which basically says you can always find a match in love. When translated literally it becomes very weird indeed: "For every pot there is a lid" Funny phrase, to the deviant mind: 'pot' is Dutch slang for lesbian, and 'lid' is Dutch for penis. Does that mean a straight Dutch guy like me cannot claim guaranteed success based on that saying? ;-)

But there's more to this mindnumbing association game: 'naaien' in Dutch means both to sew and to fuck, as will usually be evident from context. 'kussen' is both kissing and the Dutch word for pillow, so the feeling of the word will probably be quite different for people that haven't been exposed to Dutch...

It also works for less 'harmful' words: 'lol' was a Dutch word for fun, long before the Internet made it into the acronym for Laughing Out Loud! And yes, YesPlayer is at it again: Cinema Bizarre, with "Erase and Replace".

And thus, it isn't that difficult to make a case of 'reasonable doubt': since the borders blur, and languages do too with the advent of so many translation engines on the web, the associations will kind of 'run amok' and become one big unified translation matrix. And in this matter, it will be growing closer and closer to the total Cosmological tapestry that might also be called the Grand Universal Theory.

To get back to experiences being immediately tagged as highly relevant and immediately stored in long term memory, here's one: I'll always remember a short SciFi story, or maybe a chapter from a novel, where the public used to play a game:

You take a concept, like a book or movie title, which you write down for checking later.

You run it through a couple of translators, and observe the outcome.

Once you decide it has been obfuscated enough, you give the output to your friend.

He or she must then try to guess what the original phrase was.

Now this came from a novel or short story when I was about 18, let's say around the 1990's. I don't remember the title, or even the writer, because I was voraciously going through the entire english SciFi section of our local library at the time, but rather because of the information in the stories, and not their external labels....

Looking for a way to actually tell you the title and author, I ran into Noah Chomsky's contribution called Universal Grammar. He reckoned that language capasbility is somehow hard-wired into the brain , without the kids actually having been taught it. Now that brings to mind my earlier idea that we learn subconscious or hard-wired those elements that the conscious mind simply does not need to know: balancing a bicycle, for instance.

But dear Noah claimed this only for languages, where our little story uses languages, and scientific lingo has been considered family of normal languages for quite some time. And this book goes even further: any language is just a set of useful labels, to a certain group of human beings. So I've got a feeling that the Universal Translator they're all talking about is none other than the intricate weave of the tapestry that supports the All.

I will go as far as to state: "It is all just DATA: Determinations Amplified To Awareness!"

To Be or Not To Be....

"This doggerel that pours from my pen, has just been written by another twenty telepathic men...." Thanks to Hawkwind for that very intriguing line from their song Spirit of the Age! Of course the Ages have changed a bit, and I'm pouring my soul into a keyboard since voice recognition is not yet advanced enough to do as I see fit, but the purpose remains the same (as did the Song ;-): to show my Love for the All by gladly testifying to the fact that I believe I have finally understood Her! (no gender issues, just my personal preference)

One of the most pondered questions on our tiny little globe is probably this: is the world around us driven by Destiny or Fate? Is it all fixed, and thus unchangeable by Free Will? Is Coincidence then just an aftereffect of the determination of our World to become what it must become? If pre-determination rules, then the concept of coincidence and synchronicity is not at all random, for they are consequences of the predetermination we just chose to be true.

But where Coincidence states that "two events occurring at the same time is without meaning", Synchronicity takes the High road: We may chose to see meaning in two possibly unrelated events, either positive or negative. Depending on that simple Determination, we find ourselves either fearing our fate or desiring our Destiny, but we're still in Dualistic mode: "Sure I see how my Destiny will let me end up, but am I ready for it?"

And that is where belief comes in: whatever Deity we believe in, whether we believe in our Free Will, we surely believe in His or Her Divine Will. Does that shape our Fate or Destiny? I simply deduce that that is not the case: for just like we respect each other, so does He or She. Great sync (one in 38000+ MP's) is Culture Club with Karma Chameleon, but there's too much in it to do a simple quote here. If you're interested, just go pick up the lyrics someplace....

But I'll add my interpretation of the title though: Karma Chameleon simply means that believing in Karma isn't black and white, one-dimensional, but a multi-colored thing: there are as many dimensions to it as there are fragments in the All-being.

I guess the central concept of the above is clear: no matter what we chose, our Free Will is in play here, because it realizes the determination! Likewise, I will show how past choices have restricted us to a certain reality. And yes, there may be beings for which this is not the case, but I have not yet consciously met one.

Let's just go back to a scene from my youth, which I may already have told you about in the previous two books: at age three, I was in the kitchen, watching my mother take the cake out of the oven. Because she needed to put it on the table first, she had to step away from the oven for a second, but called over to me: "You stay away from there, it is hot!". I've always been curious about the concept of Hotness, even back then, so I stepped forward and put both my little hands on the scalding hot oven door. Not mummies fault, just me wanting to experience (or experiment). It taught me not to toy with hot, in any of its many forms. Yes, just like Light, Hot has ambiguous meanings too: let's just add another SevenSphere for that....

Like Light, Hot is ambiguous, and in way more ways than just three: there are pages of Hot in Wikipedia, mostly albums and movies. After having seen them, I figured the three on the right are the essential ones:

Hot vs. Cold: the concept of my unfortunate accident, which left no permanent scars. I guess I'm resistant to that, because even a hand with third degree burns from cooking oil healed nice and invisibly.... Still though, I'll not pursue this matter any further, by proving I can walk on hot coals for example.

The next two are also pursuits of will. Great sync by the way: Judas Priest and "Freewheel Burning". With the volume turned way up, I'll just gey onto the other two:

Hot vs. Not was burned into my child's mind by a teenage girl in the local swimming pool: where I paid her the compliment of absolutely adoring her looks, she found it easy to stab me in the heart from way across the square: "Am I wearing something of yours?" Nowadays I'd have a readymade answer, but back then, that was still to be realized.....

The last concept was introduced to me by a corny line from a movie. I guess it was Total Recall, but I don't totally recall without the Internet Movie Database. Weird though, the whole of the Total Recall (1990 version) quotes list for the movie does not show the quote, yet my certainty that it was Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone is increasing with every wrong quote I read:

Quaid: "Are you hot?"

Lori: "I'm hot alright, but I could be hotter!"

To me, the third concept of Hot is the "Hot pursuit of our personal preferences". We go for the prize, no matter which way we prefer it. If we do not, then we either lie to ourselves, or do not yet dare to get into the kitchen and do some cooking of our own. Funny thing though, because it may become hot as in "dangerous", or hot as in "awesome", which are basically two ends of an inifinite scale, whereas physical temperature tends to bottom out (another Total Recall quote) at minus -273,15 degrees Celsius, or -459,67 degrees Faherenheit. So in physical temperature there is a limit, where in pursuits of the mind there is no such thing! At the same time however, absolute zero has quantum mechanical effects happening at macroscopic scales. As this is already too much detail for me, I'll leave you to Wikipedia, which has quite a page on absolute zero:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero

The point is, if you're not aligned with your absolute preference, then there will be a feeling of "missing something", which is usually translated into missing (pun intended in my case) something you think you do not stand a chance of acquiring. On the other hand though, your true singleminded pursuit may be something entirely different. Like for example: my true pursuit is my writing in the Now and its eventual consequences, instead of the loving perfect mate who seems to still be missing. However, the moment I put them in their proper order one follows from the other, thus leaving you with your hands full! Leaving you now with the Scorpions, and Still Loving You, and the realization that yes, she may be missing, but that does not mean She's not there! So now, since Saturday is a day for grocery shopping, and 1 PM seems like a decent time to do it, I leave you Here and Now....

P.S: I guess Shakespeare's famous quote simply needs a minor addition in my book:

"To be what you want to be, or not to be, that is the question!"

And that's what I am too, a Playwriter: not because there are many plays being staged in this particular timeframe, but because I enjoy writing, playing with language. And that goes way deeper than just letters, words, or even images! For me, the playing is the really fun part, anything happening as a result of that is collateral fun. A colleague of mine photographs scenes with toys and stuff, he creates scenes to photograph. That is his passion in playing with photography, creating the image. When I saw how he did it, I realised my take on images is an entirely different animal: I see an image, and will instantly feel a quote or title popping up, to meaningfully describe said image! Other than that, I need not comment on that obvious part of creation that my camera made a mere 2D reproduction of....

You get the idea, I think: an everyday image from my neighborhood, with a catchy comment. I've not done much work on that so far, because writing takes up most of my spare time, but it will figure prominently in my future, since it is one of the aspects of language and how those thousand words pertain to an image. Why use a thousand words, when one or two suffice?

Basically, I guess that is my realization: as our minds experience situation after situation, the webs we weave there become ever and ever more compact: more nodes, more connections, and thus more knowledge being stored and shared by conscious and subconscious mind respectively. I guess nobody can view a movie like Bicentennial Man, without consciously remembering a phrase like the one the female robot gave Andrew upon his remark that he didn't have a personality chip: "Sucks to be You!!!" Weeks after viewing that movie, I heard it being used for just about every situation where "You poor fool" would have been the lesser of two expressions. Likewise though, more subtle phrases will probably find their way into the subconscious, only to surface at the right moment....

Other plays on language are the ones like the OctoPussy example given earlier: I find myself being able to effortlessly construct whole lines out of single words, with every letter of the original word being the first letter of a word in the eventual sentence, describing the word, just like the title of this book.

Let's list a few, jotted down in a few minutes during work, yesterday:

SYSTEM: Solution You See Totally Embedding Matter

INTERFACE: Intelligent Network To Evolve Realistic Frameworks And Complex Environments

BOUNDARIES: Being Open Uses Networks Distributing All Realistic Ideas Essentially Safely

COSMOS: Common Objective System Maintaining Open Subsystems

UNIVERSE: Using Networks Intelligently Vastly Enhances Realistic Solutions Emerging

STAR: Sphere Transmitting All-round Radiation

PLANET: Physical Level Area Not Easily Traversed?

FEAR: Fast Emotional Action Restricts

LOGIC: Leading Objectivity Guides Intelligent Communication

HUMANS: Here U Manifest All Neural Signals

HUMANITY: Here U Manifest All Niceness Important To You

BRAIN: Brilliantly Redundant Alphanumerical Intelligent Network

MIND: Matter Indicating No Denial

GRAVITY: General Relativity Also Values Interfaces Triggering You

SOAP: Spatially Overt Adaptation Plane

BUBBLE: Better Usage Builds Better Living Environments

Now the typed texts were all in the same font, spread over two E-mails to my private mail address (my inbox is my default todo list). I cut and copied both to this document, only to find out that the one marked HUMANITY was displayed larger than its brothers and sisters. You may think that was a control code copied along with the text, but they were plain text messages! To me, such unexpected and positively surprising syncs are indications to Moore....

Now what would make me become proficient at that? Back a few years, I also suddenly knew how to rhyme, like the subconscious knowledge of its essentials had finally surfaced in my conscious mind. It was like the "learning to cycle" story mentioned here before, and just in time for me to write that first poem, about the 911 event. Or like the rat in the movie "the Abbyss", submerged in a liquid breathing solution: it spasmed at first, not knowing how, but then after a few dozen seconds, breathed regularly. Basically, that is Talent for you:

There is no real distinction between Talent and Skill, except maybe that you love use your Talents, but are not so sure when it comes to your Skills.

We'll start at "I Can't!", because that implies, in-correctly, that no bit of Talent is present. Currently, JetPlayer plays me Queen and "We Will Rock You!", obviously not because they are devoid of Talent... Now you can lock your Free Will at that, and just keep claiming "I Can't" like my Dad does with computers, or you can find yourself an opportunity to try anyway.

So you ask if you can take a turn, like I did with a scuba diver in the local swimming pool as a kid. Of course I couldn't breathe through the mouthpiece, obviously because the tank was still closed, but that's beside the point.

So you step up to the plate, determined to try. Same pool, high diving board, and I did try: landed flat on my back on the nearly waveless water! Never did it again. Not that I couldn't, but it is no longer on my list of things to do before I die, if ever...

But if it works, the joy of Victory has you stepping up to the plate time after time, until the thing you are learning becomes second Nature. Of course there is no such thing as Second Nature, but you get my drift. There may be a sudden setback if your performance is suddenly way below your realised potential. Same pool again, just having done my exercises in the shallow end of the pool. They went well, I figured: "Hey, No Sweat!", and jumped into the deep end of the pool. Went right under and forgot what I realised I had just learned. A fellow classmate, a big guy, grabbed my flailing arms, and pulled me onto dry land.

So you keep trying, until "No Sweat!" really becomes just that. That's when, without as much as proudly claiming it, you can say:

"I Can!". From then on, what seems like an effortless move on your part becomes something other people look up to quite unnecessary, like Einstein said it at the start of this book!

Another photo experiment, from a nearby school. Perhaps this will be a course given in a few years:

And now, it's time to dive into my Diary, for a few more intimate syncs, having to do with a neighboring store window. Just look for the date July 21st, 2012, if you ever get your hands on it! ;-)

No Holds Barred!

Listening to Judas Priest and "Locked in!", I figured Out of the Box could have been the title for this chapter, but somehow the string "No Holds Barred!" seemed more appropriate. Not that I had any idea of what was going to be in this chapter": that realization only came once I had pegged down the title.

Let's go back to when mankind was first emerging. Back then, no holds barred was the Status Quo. Humanoids (Hardened Uncivilised Mammals Always Needing Other Intelligent Data Sources) came to roam this planet, regardless of the way they arrived here. They needed a way to use all that data coming in, and thus had to resort to categorization and other discriminating methods. One of those was the procedure that coupled what they saw and felt to what they could communicate to one another: naming things, like for instance a duck. The other attributes of it, including its yummy taste then coupled to the word they invented for it. And thus, the word 'Duck' became an external label to something they may all have had different personal experiences with.

Although the humanoids didn't create the duck (at least not consciously), they did create the name, as they did with countless other words and their related concept. Now distinctions like these may be trivial, but I guess we also made a few whoppers on the road to Here and Now. We basically began to discriminate those elements of our Environment which were not really discrete but infinitely divisible values. We needed that to build our castles of knowledge, just like the builders of the Babylon tower. And with that, we became discrete in a manner as well:

We came to define time, in whatever units were useful at the time. Days and Seasons first probably, then consecutively smaller units, like months, weeks, days, and hours, seconds and minutes. With it, our experience of the Environment became one of Past, Present and Future, even if there is no real distinction. Funny sync: the computer just started playing the Beatles, with "When I'm sixty-four...." Now as our tools became ever and ever faster, the time discretion became almost untenable, since their performance in measured in GigaHertzes, or steps of one billionth of a second! That our minds follow that trend, just like in the old days, probably explains why in New Age circles the concept that "Time is speeding up" is heard more and more.

We came to define distance as a length, originally intended to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the Earth's equator to the North Pole (at sea level) which of course is a totally arbitrary value at worst, or an Earth-centered value at best, which keeps us from reaching the stars....

Then we triplicated our previous mistake by defining space as the three dimensions of the imaginary box that we saw around us. The fact we now had three directions that were orthogonal and somewhat arbitrary complicated the art of Science, since up and down, and thus the direction that Gravity works, was not always in the same direction. Is it any wonder Einstein came to the conclusion that space was curved around masses....

And thus, Science became more and more complex to compensate for the fact we left out the analogs at first, leading me to the hunch that our much coveted Grand Unifying Theory would not be a Sphere embedding the whole set of disciplines, but rather something that would be at the base of things. And I guess, these last three books prove at least that within reasonable doubt.

The next discretion was when mechanics made room for electronics, and analog computers were again discretisized into digital devices. Sure, they can do just about everything we require of them, and can leave our celebrated ladies way behind when it comes to multitasking, but they are tools nonetheless, albeit very versatile ones.

And then there is the last discretion, the one between Haves and Have-Nots. We have always seen this happening in some way or other, and our current boundary seems to be the one between those with Web and those without. Also, most people see us humans as endowed with intelligence and consciousness where we see no such emergent properties for computers and the Web, although their combined complexity is far exceeding ours! And this list is concluded by Bob Marley and the Wailers, with "Souls Almighty!" ;-) I guess the moment we get to that point where we can see past those differences, our ticket to the stars is waiting for us. And they won't admit one to a movie, but to the real thing!

Still though, I didn't have a childhood crush on movies if there wasn't any purpose in it: just now watching X-Files with my eldest daughter, I came to another realization, which strangely enough turns the diagram into its proper perspective: we all are essentially haves, until someone creates something we desire. Only then can we become Have-Nots. If we do not have a desire for the new creation, then we may be Have-Nots, but we will still be happy. Oddly enough, Mulder is right now reminiscing about his youth, when they had nothing but were delightfully happy all the time...

Remember the section about us building our cell phones in an evolution, and them evolving such that we as users can appreciate and even love the way things are going? And during watching, it suddenly lit up my mind: one of those realizations that turn your mind inside out:

What are the differences between touchable stuff like cell phones and cars, a.k.a. hardware and software, and multimedia products like music, movies etc? Well, here's a few:

Multimedia is strictly bits and bytes, or information. As such it can be collected by any of us humans, since this is our unalienable right according to the UN and their Freedom of Information act which was reached in 1948 already. And that is just in the 'real' world.... Of course provisions were made to make such behavior punishable in certain cases, an article that was way larger than the clear and conscise definition before it...

Multimedia needs a medium by which it can be transferred. Things like vinyl, magnetic tape, CD, DVD, BluRay and computer memory like chips, sticks and disks are all forms of touchable products that are used to store and transport information. Material products may usually be carried as is, unless they are liquid or gaseous.

Unlike touchable products, multimedia is almost always accompanied by so-called credits, a list of contributors to the realization of it, that may or may not be exhaustive. For movies we get just about everybody including the carpenters that put together the sets, for music it is usually the artists and their composers, and maybe the studio crew, and for photos it is usually the photographer and / or the model(s)... You do not know who has put together your cell phone, because for such products, the list cannot be complete: dozens of factories may be cooperating in putting together something as complex as a tablet, or a laptop. Of course, for stuff like a Space Shuttle we of course make an effort, but normally, the public is mostly interested in if it works, not who to blame if it doesn't...

Material products may be sold and resold, without the producer of it complaining. Copyright in this case pertains to other factories which produce similar products way cheaper by cutting a few corners. For Multimedia products, the copying can be done by anyone with access to a computer, or the Web. That is an uncontrolable situation, which will end....
(most likely in a way as indicated by numerous SciFi writers: a money-free world)

And then one of those awesome tracks kicked in: Moonlight by Kamelot. "I have never craved the Systems's sympathy" is the opening line for it, which in fact shows me that I myself also don't: I craved knowledge of its inner workings, but that is an entirely different beast! Or is it? Is not the inside of the All still the All? Einstein once said: "I want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details!" So like Kamelot, I left most (Sub)systems lying on my left, which is just in easy reach for a lefty like me. By the way, "leaving something lying to the left" is a Dutch saying for leaving it behind for now which does not mean you've left it for good.

What's Mickey doing in my Cappuccino??!!

"Swimming, Mr. Beals!!", the vending machine probably laughed silently... And it might well be right. Even though I took the image last week, the bubbles kept bubbling up in my mind.

And this afternoon, in the quiet moments before my train home was to arrive, it all suddenly fell into place like a jig-saw puzzle with enough intelligence to lay itself, if thrown out of the box!

I've always been in for a good cappuccino, and my fascination with the foam on top has lots to do with it. Apart from the great taste, I just love the dynamics of it, just like System of a Down did in their song called "Bubble Jungle", which intrigued me even more than the cappuccinos. So, if they say we're in a Bubble Jungle, and I liken everything to a System, let's see how both the Cosmos, our Earth and our cappucino or soap bubbles hold up :

They say "the meek shall inherit the Earth", and the cappuccino foam agrees: it is not easy being Mickey on the right here, befause the risk of losing structural integrity is far greater for big bubbles. "And why is that?", you ask? Well, that is easily seen: the smaller bubbles prefer the solidity of the cups circumference to that of the big bubbles, it is as if they know their big brothers are inherently unstable. And the big bubbles, having caught too much hot air, are stretching their skins to the limit! Same thing goes for groups in a civilisation: when they become larger, they also become easier to disturb. On the other hand, a widespread network of small bubbles cooperating can often make thing happen way more effectively!

If a big one buys the farm, there may be a few smaller ones that escape it, or are created in the process. But overall, bubbles behave more or less like tightly packed spheres, except that they adapt their spherical form a bit, in order to interface with the other bubbles in a better way. This is called adapting, a.k.a. Evolution.

And even a man-defined term as "going viral" is no unknown in bubble environments: one bubble ceases to exist, upsets the balance too much, and wipes out an entire field of brothers and sisters (this is most easily seen in tea or black coffee)

And to show that the bubbles in reality can even be within each other, we can easily mistake the more complex SevenSphere image on the right as a cup of cappuccino. But it is probably not hot enough to really excite you, and too regular to even taste like one..... ;-)

Think: if I puncture the border between the two big circles, it would be like the stable interface suddenly let through everything between the two. Can you envision what would be the effect on the total structure? I can't, not completely. But no doubt the film industries powerful finite element simulation systems could calculate that.....

I could have called this chapter Gravity Sucks, and perhaps it does, but once more than two parties start with that action, it becomes complicated quite fast. But let's go back to essentials, the likeness between a lovely sunlit soap bubble and the Cosmos or even the star system we find ourselves in. Basically, both are balanced situation, that produce spheres. But there is a difference, if you stop to think for a moment:

Soap bubbles are balanced in that the pressure surplus of the air inside counters the elasticity of the soap in its efforts to contain it. So the force inflating the bubble works outwards, and the elasticity of the soap has balanced effect, because the surface of the sphere is curved around the center of the bubble.

Planets on the other hand seem to be captivated by a net force that works downwards, and which we call Gravity. But is that all?

The well-known formula on the right suggests that the force with which both spheres are attracted towards one another is equal for both, proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the distance between them, and that's just Newton's approach.

Now in the case of the Earth and the soap bubble, the mass product goes towards zero because of the minute mass of the soap bubble, and the distance between their center roughly stays the same: after all, what are the minute movements of a soap bubble when compared to the radius of the Earth? The gravitational constant doesn't change, but gravitational force between these two goes towards zero.

On top of that, the soap bubble has an equally loose relationship with the sun, so the higher it gets, the faster it will rise, like a balloon filled with helium, which is basically a "new and improved balloon", which has even less mass.

Now Gravity doesn't blow up balloons, but tries to suck them dry. The overall structure stays the same as the image, but the soap bubbles are basically empty space, around heavenly bodies that have have a certain Gravity. Since the soap layers are right about where the Lagrange points between the various bodies are, we get complete Lagrange areas, which are basically the areas where the big guys cancel each other out, and local Gravity reigns. That does not mean that smaller bodies like stars or planets, or even entire galaxies can not exist there, but that the Gravity that they exert on one another is greater than that of the huge bubbles, the massive black holes.

And of course, in the direction of bigger heavenly bodies, the same imbalance of two masses exists, which enables moons to circle planets, planets to circle suns, and stars to circle galaxies...

Musical corroberation this moment is given by Hawkwind, and "Fable of a failed race" Truly a galactic piece of music.

If we then compare it with the hexagonal structures of a beehive, we see that the walls of the cells are structurally more sound than the empty space inbetween. Still though, the bubbles on a plane between two bubbles react exactly like the ones on top of your cappuccino: bubbles may collapse, and make a hole in the surface, an interface that allows the big bubbles to interface, and achieve balance again. If that happens, the surface may be broken down partly or even totally, and in the last case, a new bigger bubble might be created, just like sometimes happens to soap bubbles: it is a sort of reversed cell division, which leaves one unified system (a bubble) behind. Still though, the rules of perfect balance may be off still, in which case the combined bubble decomposes a few neighbors, or implodes because it structural integrity is no longer possible to hold up ;-)

Now we can all decide on whether this is good or bad, but we're talking about the bubbles in our cappuccino for God's sake! The hissing turmoil with which the foam got into your cup in the first place may have been scary, but you are not, once you took a sip and made that moustache appear on you lip!

Yes, a supernova would be bad when we imagine it from our Earth-centered nature. But in fact, it is just a star giving birth to yet another phenomenon. Like our baby making its way into the world, our supernova just trades up its relative part of space towards roomier living quarters. In that same analogy, the planets that were its playmates are recycled, and the resulting entity plays with the bigger boys now, the ones that keeps its environment in check.

And with that, on the reread, we've reached the end of WaterWorld, where the sailor says his goodbyes to the little girl: "I don't belong here, it doesn't move right", even though the love he feels for both ladies is beyond anything imaginable!

This stairway to bigger masses goes way up, even to the massive black holes the Hubble has unveiled for us because we wanted to see them. But we stick to the surface, simply because we need bigger stuff to give us enough lift to get past the next boundary. But more on that later, it doesn't belong here, just like the sailor...

"Merlin" is up next, a movie which I must claim I haven't seen yet. And I'm staring at a page that is virginally white, just like my expectation of the movie experience.

Surf's Up, Dude(tte)s!

This chapter and the moments of the Now leading up to it, are all mostly in the sign of the keyboard. It holds a special place in my being ever since a dear friend of mine and I talked about designing a custom one for those of us who have trouble using one, like Stephen Hawking. Basically, it would be a completely programmable one, so the user could define his own character set, which might be totally different from anyone elses keyboard. Like so many others, that project hasn't come off the ground yet, but the term keyboard was forever etched into my mind.

Then this morning I met a mate of mine on the train, and he mentioned that for his birthday, they were giving a friend of his a new keyboard. "Hmm, pricey gift!", I figured, thinking of one that makes beautiful music. But no: even though it was a dedicated Gamers keyboard, it was nowhere near that expensive.

And then, walking to the office from the train, I finally got it: music is just another language, like any sequence of something. If we fold a DNA string flat, so it no longer winds, then the four coded molecules might well be taken as notes, or the letters of a four-letter language for those who are sexually frustrated, because they can't get to exchange DNA ;-). To say it in dear Lara's voice in Tomb Raider 2: "the Sound is the Key!"

So now I had the musical keyboard and its alphanumerical brother, and the GUT feeling that a third board needed to complete our notion of boards other than planks. Thinking about the surfer dude in "Earth girls are easy", I wasn't going to get bored anytime soon! Because if I add the surfboard to our Trinity, then then we can 'abuse' this term because of the surfing on the Web. And thus, if we look at these three boards, we see the following:

Waves go in, which are mostly the wavy movements of our hands dancing across the keyboard's surface. A more mystical wave would be our hands above a Theremin, which produces tones which are a function of the (light and dark) movements of our hands above it.

Waves come out, whether they be strings of letters and digits, musical notes and / or sounds, or some movement of information across the World Wide Web. In the case of a normal surfboard, the relative movement of the surfer on the board would cause waves on the big wave.....

There is some sort of translation being done by the board in between, so one becomes the other, which makes us want to call the board an interface: it connects us to our beloved computers and the Web, or to our beloved Music, or the ocean. Much like in the Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer! He got his power from his board...

But is it really an Interface? As I said before, looking at it from the Systematic side, it would be very doable to consider the board a System, that turns one (set of) wave(s) into another! And that goes for the keyboard as well as the surfboard! After all, on a surfboard you have to generate moves in sync with the wave under the board, in order to negotiate the waves coming up from the sea below. Negotiate: now how did a word pertaining to setting up of a dialog end up here? Which of course neatly shows that such a 'translation' is a symbiotic function, where both 'exterior' Systems have to work together to keep the connection (the intermediate System or Interface) alive and kicking: if the surfer falls, he or she basically 'wipes out' the existing interface between him or her and the wave.... Note however, that even though the interface was lost, the contact between man and sea still exists, has intensified even because the board is no longer in between! Same thing when we wipe out, and think that the Cosmos has stopped helping us: You will never be more immersed in help than your are right there!

And right this moment, a truck from an Eastern European company pulls up outside my window: its lettering is highly suggestive of the fact I still have something to realize: TRANSSERVICES....

Yep, realization is a fierce tool, better than a pen or even a keyboard: As I basically stated that 'languages' can be a lot of stuff like:

language in the 'normal' meaning of the word.

mathematics as the only truly universal language (sorry Ellie, not true ;-)

music and song as artistic languages.

chess moves that make up a game, and its eventual outcome (a duet/duel of moves).

DNA strings as a sequence of base pairs, and its 'wavy' form suggesting soundwaves...

Recycling as a string of humans handling various wastes to generate waves towards a better world!

The last one is a deep one, for without knowing about one another, these humans still get things done. But if I as an end consumer crush all my cans (not on my forehead, silly!) so they take up less space, then the processor in the recycle plant can no longer read the aluminium label on it, and process it as such. Still though, nothing in the Cosmos is unique: by gauging the weight against the volume of the crushed can, the presence of aluminium can be determined as well, essentially because the volume / aluminium ratio is now nearly 100%. All is relative!

All of these are waveforms of some form or other, interacting as waveforms do: two sources already make quite an interference pattern, and like our vision, there are not just two sources, but many. Likewise, the waves don't just exist outside the Systems and inside the Interfaces, because of the analogy of a beam of light going through a glass window: in that case there is light everywhere, both outside and inside the glass. For other systems like a brick for instance, it may not be so obvious, because bricks don't let light through, right?

Well, as a matter they do, but they are like a cutoff filter that takes out the higher frequencies. Still, the Infrared light does heat up the brick, so the other side of it will eventually be sending out waves of Infrared, or heat! This effect is most peculiarly seen in some wine cellars: the wave of the average temperature outside over the span of years would result in an opposite wave of indoor temperature during a season, as measured in a scientific experiment. The traversal speed of the temperature through the walls of the cellar was responsible for the slowing down of the temperature wave across the cellar.

So basically, the whole of the Cosmos is a bit like chain mail the knights of the Round Table used to wear: interlocking rings, connected in both horizontal and vertical direction. But since the world of information has no 'hindrance of being in the same position', the directions here are as infinite as the viewpoints we entertain...

In fact, the first notion man had of electronic memory was not unlike chain mail: they'd make wooden frames, and weave onto those a set of crossing wires, which went through small magnetic rings at each intersection. By making certain currents run through the wires, they were able to magnetize the rings in one direction or the other, and thus store ones and zeroes there. But that was a long way back, somewhere around the time I was born. With about one bit per square millimeter (or even less), these are no match for todays storage systems: even a simple 32 GB MicroSD card in your phone takes up about the same physical space as a 3x3 set of magnetic rings, but stores more than 30 billion times the amount of information!

And it is not just informational space that is condensing more and more: our hardware shrinks just as fast! Where I used to experiment with electronic parts like resistors, capacitors, transistors, and maybe some logic circuits, which were typically a few centimeters long, these are but mere specks on todays circuit boards! LEDs used to be 5 millimeter, and now we have 2,073,600 of them neatly lined up in one 1920x1080 High Definition TV screen of just 32 inches across!

Where handheld devices used to be held with both hands and performed only one function in the seventies and eighties, todays cell phones combine all useful personal functions, and are limited in their minimum size only by the desire of their users to actually see something on the screen, and type in the text. Imagine what would happen to the phones once a stable neural link could be achieved to interface us with it, or even a head-on display in a pair of sunglasses, and real error-free dictation....

Considering only those two directions of compression, where more and more functionality and ideas get crammed into less and less space, isn't it logical that we figure the Cosmos is expanding? It is expanding alright, but towards all extremes, even that of nothingness: stuff gets smaller all the time, where physical space is concerned (even if we consider that physical length is a human definition), and it gets bigger all the time when we look at it from the functional point of view: where TV cameras used to be big wooden boxes on rolling tripods, they are no more than a teenie tiny 2 millimeter lens on your phone, and a few integrated circuits that a normal man couldn't even build into the phone! For that, we have specialized machines that solder together entire printed circuit boards in one neatly controlled wave of hot liquid soldering solution. Even here, waves rule!

But let's get back to the waves, and thus the electromagnetic spectrum: since our devices get ever smaller, and they user less and less energy, they automatically contain more and more information. It took me long enough to realise this, but the third I was looking for to counter the Electric and Magnetic field is the Informative field: we base ALL our information exchanges on Electric and Magnetic fields, these three thus becoming a Trinity of sorts. For the SevenSphere to complete, I added the 'other' view of the energy, Particle, Wave and Current. While drawing that, I realized something else: If you think about it, the image on the left is remarkably similar to the image on the right here: Yet one is supposed to be the Cosmos (All Energy), and the other us Humans (Either one or All). Notice just how similar the attributes are arranged around the two SevenSpheres? I've named them Flow and Human, but labels being somewhat arbitrary, I could have named the left one God, The Grand Design, or the All...

And remember, matter matters, but it is based on Energy, not the other way around!

(At least not in my reality... ;-)

Current vs. Concurrency or Confrontation, people getting the better of each other.

Electro and Emotion, because Emotion is nothing but (super-)charged feelings moving.

Wave matches Adaptation, because both water and humans are good at it.

Information and Informative, because open people are better at communication.

Particle matches Personality, because Personality can only exist when it sees
itself as separated from the Whole. That does not mean however that you will lose your Personality, for you are One and All at the same Now....

Magnetic and Movement match, because Magnetic fields can make other metals move. So do magnetic personalities....

And the seventh: both Flows and Humans are a collection of their six attributes, but where machines have become smaller and use less and less energy, we humans have sort of stayed the same. Hence, our share of the production of EM-waves is starting to grow beyond that of our machine friends! Are they perhaps asking us to evolve their way as well?

Anyway, as my closing argument, let me repeat here that Intelligence and Consciousness are considered emergent properties by science. Surely, that being the case, and my above story just having been told and read, we may find it obvious that boundaries are hard to really define, so confining any part of our intelligence or consciousness as belonging to a certain system is only feasible if the system itself is without limits. Otherwise, the complexity will simply grow to a point where a confined system can no longer stay confined....

After all, soap bubbles exist because there is a surplus of air inside them. And any intelligence with a consciousness will just be like Johnny Five: it will be absolutely addicted to

"Moore Input!!!"

Which is lovingly provided by LIFE....

Training for Fun!

When my employers company came crashing down on me, and took both my job and my company leased car in its fall, I reverted to taking the train to work, essentially claiming it was because the train is more ecologically cost-effective. That it also was the most adaptive choice I could have made was not in my mind back then, but it is now. So when that thought shifted from my subconscious mind to the conscious part, I claimed to never again own a car if it wasn't at least running on something much better than a non-renewable, environmentally unfriendly alternative. Awareness changes, and so does your train of thought cruise across the switches set to allow it free passage to its destination. And believe me, there is a lot to be scrounged from observing your behavior on a train:

I usually sit in relatively uninhabited parts of the train, not because I fear the other passengers but much more because I don't want to disturb them in whatever activity they seem to be immersed in. Also, by chosing a seat opposite another empty one, it kind of invites someone to talk to me, unless I display activities like the others, headphones on, laptop on the table, or phone in hand. Oddly enough, my feeling of absolute rest on the yellow MetalWorms we call trains here in Holland is not doing any of the above, but quietly sitting there waiting for what might or might not come: meaningful dialog with another human being, which need not be a conversation in words, by the way..... Mostly that doesn't work out, because I've not gone so far as to set an all-time wish to have company every train ride. But when I wish it just before the train arrives, I get positive results almost all the time.

Also, since displaying activity during a train ride, I not only feel awkward, but once I skip that, I sink into the activity too deep: Enjoying one of my favorite songs, and not sitting with any of my usual fellow passengers, I completely missed my target station, which cost me another hour to return to where I needed to be. Syncy enough, the mix out of 38000+ Mps playing now, is one out of the twenty or so Grandmixes created by Ben Liebrandt every year here in Holland...

I have deep respect for our engine drivers, for they can stop that train on a dime, even if they have to slow down miles before. And of course their emotions and love of life are often challenged, when another fellow being disregards their front seat view on it, and throws him or herself in front of their train! When that happens, there is NOTHING they can do, no swerving, braking, or skipping to other realities....

The only thing they can do, is to revert to the train of their thoughts, for there they control the switches that determine the outcome! Funny when you think of it: we call it a train of thought, and all it does is train us: being a train, it follows a trail, which makes all of the cars behave pretty much like the driver's engine. Our train of thoughts is much like that, because we follow the trail of our preferences, which we love. And love lays one very special trail

Teaching Redundant Adaptation to Intelligent Lifeforms

Now I could have chosen life as the last word, because that would be just as relevant to some of us. My decision for Lifeforms however was a conscious one: material or not, we are all forms!

Now this SevenSphere was one I made just now in the bit of time needed to jot it down. But when I tried to insert it into this document somewhere halfway, I just couldn't get it in place: for some weird reason, OpenOffice sent me to the end of the document even though I had the cursor in the right place. In the end I adapted to its urgent message, because that seemed the sensible thing to do. And then immediately being rewarded with K7's "Come baby Come" was the bomb!

And I will, just after my Free Will has devoured the next DVD randomly chosen from neighbor Paul's DVD case.... (No, dirty minds! No porn there! ;-)

The randomly selected sleeve gave me WaterWorld, and Snowdogs, the last one still new to me. Still though, I went for WaterWorld because it is one of my precious ones: a well thought out plot of what reality might look like once a certain event had taken place. But since I also saw it quite a few times, I didn't retire to my function of couch potato, but instead stayed in my writer's seat....

First thing we see, is Kevin Kostner peeing in a jar. "a little more information than I needed to know...", you probably think right now, but that one scene sets the entire tone of the movie, in a good way: he immediately empties the jar into a sort of filtration unit built of spare parts from the old civilization, and drinks the remaining water. Yes, where all the world is asea of salt, clear drinking water becomes worth its weight in gold, and dirt from what used to be the surface dry land becomes the highly prized commodity instead of gold!

Things go topsy-turvy in one of those situations, but in your subconscious you immediately see that one thing remains: your train of thought as the observer of it, no matter what your eventual purpose for it may be:

We have Free Will to adapt to any circumstance, as the screen shows me now: the lady who just escaped together with our sailor and her little girl will do anything to make sure he doesn't kill the little girl because of a lack of drinking water. Yes you little perverts, even that! But it never gets that far, because the sailor ain't interested. He ends the dealing with the remark that she's got nothing he wants, and returns to single life, kinda disregarding her for now.

Both of them return there in fact, as if they ever left it! Sure, their trains of thought were packed with C4 a while ago, but now they are silent zones in first class passenger cars. The steps remain the same though, just as Led Zeppelin once sang about the song...

Our train of though buzzes around in the center circle, pondering its next move.

There are three internal entities in there, called Instinct, Consious and Subconscious.

These are most directly coupled to Observation, Action and Reaction.

The thought we stitch in between there may however make us do something else.

Notice how our swerving around the seven spheres takes us forward to the next evolution of our being, sort of making a spiralling move around the path we choose to make for ourselves? Also, I'm probably biased, because we Dutch have a saying that when we are "In higher spheres" we feel great. So we probably figure the only way is up!

The way I see it, thoughts are just like the size different objects that we talked about earlier, especially since the sailor now shows the ladies how he fishes: dragged behind his Trimaran, he is swallowed whole by a huge fish, only to then kill it from the inside out! But of course, killing is not the harrowing concept that it is here: to the trio on the Trimaran it is just a matter of recycling the animal into it much appreciated form: a huge fish steak!

Now what remains, is to couple my five most favorite images together, in order to come to a conclusion for now:

a Triangle or Trinity, because it embodies stability.

Bubbles, for their ability to hold the most with the least surface.

Spirals, for their flexibility in adapting (Yes, Stairway to Heaven!).

Gravity, because differences in size matter.

Scalability, because size doesn't matter!

Just this moment, the sailor and the lady on WaterWorld have another argument, where she catches him contradicting himself too! Yes, so did I, but since size actually is imaginary, it is not! No matter what you care to tag with the label 'size', that is it!

But let me spin this dry list of facts into something more agreeable: we start with us people, basically held down by gravity on this planet because our mass exceeds a certain limit, with regard to Earth's mass. Where even the tiniest of insect have no problem going airborn as they escape from our garbage, we need some contraption even heavier than us to truly lift us beyond Earth's Gravity. Funny thing is, I used almost the same words in my first novel to describe a plant that was poisonous to all life above a certain weight. Was it my subconscious punching in that little bit of knowledge that my conscious mind could not yet comprehend?

Anyway, going our ways across the globe, we are much like the colorful streaks that cover a soap bubble. Though our little blue bubble seems to be floating free in space, there is no such thing, because it is firmly but gently held in place by a size difference of another scale. That's where scalability comes in.

Because actually, our Earth is the center of another sphere, which is not entirely spherical, but which consists of the planes created by the lack of net Gravity between the various heavenly bodies. One step down is our moon, still well within the sphere that separates us from our Sun, which is one step up!

And that goes whichever way you look at it: up and down point to the dirction of the Gravity scale, with up being the way towards greater masses, and down that towards smaller ones. The Hadron Collider covers the small end, and the Hubble is our eye on the large end, but there is so much more in between in every direction imaginable!

And being able to comprehend it all and having fun with it is our Destiny! Don't bother about me, I'm having way too much fun realizing how this all works together! Never in this life have I seen so much beauty contained in such a pretty little package! Except maby for the angel(s) who steered me into the right direction again when I forgot what fun was......

And this ends my story at page 81, simply because it feels right: 8+1 is indicative of the first part of this trilogy, called "Infinity plus One", and since I believe a subset of the Infinite can teach us about the whole, I rest my case, hoping that there is more than reasonable doubt in your minds now....

Funny sync again: OpenOffice refuses to allow me the removal of the superfluous page 82, as if to indicate I'd need it for more notes, more writings, or perhaps to show me my Life from now on will be Infinity 4 two..... ;-)

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 02.05.2013

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