Outlands Community USA

ROY:  In our last little talk Joan of Arc had just made a statement and SonShon was about to make one, but "events transpired" and this is the first chance we've had to get together to continue the discussion.  Thank you for joining us, love!

SonShon:  I've been looking forward to it, I think the little interim gave me time to think things out a little more clearly.  It's funny how, when I'm around you mortal folks, I notice time more.  We all do.

ROY:  Is it like an irritant?

SonShon:  More like a steady background noise which comes to our attention.  We should have a talk about that someday!

LLAM:  Here, here!  I was about to suggest that we bring in other Members in our chats here anyway.

ROY:  I'm down with that, it sometimes feels like I'm pontificating.

SonShon:  Guess that makes you the pontiff, huh?

ROY: [loudly] SonShon!  [laughter from Llam]

LLAM:  You caught him off-guard with that one!

SonShon:  Well.....I wanted to say something about Kali, and some of the other goddesses of my time.  I chose Kali because I invoked her last year when I saw how the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was going.  Whether or not there is a Kali, or Ishtar, or Ceridwenn is almost beside the point.  Kali I chose because she represents a pre-Aryan goddess, who is the image of a woman of that time, if you think about it.  For the last three hundred years male scholars have secretly either feared or adored her because of her power - but her power is strictly feminine, which is something most men do not understand.  I can put it briefly:  male power is little more than aggression; female power is control.  A man may plan to fight, to war, but a woman has already won it.  In invoking Kali I am sending a call to all women to waken their "Kali-self," if you would, because there are few women with that much awareness of their power today.  And yes, it is about power; power to nurture, power to love, power to be untrammeled by anything at all.  Think of the old icons of Kali dancing with an intoxicated expression on the corpse of her lover.  That is what ruled the world then.

ROY:  I'll ask you, sort of, what I asked Joan: do you believe in Goddess?

SonShon:  I don't know.  It sometimes felt in the old days as if I, or we, were touched by some feminine energy that seemed limitless.  At that time we would call it or her, Goddess, yes.  But today, having lived among you for a while, I've seen some incredible power coming from somewhere.  It strikes me in the same way.  But here is what I had time to think about, it's about power, yes, but "power" needs "resource" and some people in the OC seem to have unlimited resource.

LLAM:  What do you consider to be "resources?"

SonShon:  Imagination, courage, strength, renewability.  A city under siege had dwindling resources, but if Kali were a city, even should she be under siege, she would not have her resources slowly fade.  They would be constant.

LLAM:  Well put, SonShon.  But aren't you saying, in effect, that something is coming from nothing?

SonShon:  We're dealing with perceptions here, and in saying "if Kali were a city" it is of course a poeticism, or analogy....a concept.  You're asking me to be more concrete, aren't you?

LLAM:  Yes.

SonShon:  I'll try.  I'm assuming there is "male energy" and "female energy" in the universe.  Is there?  I don't know, I'm groping here.   So I would like to assume that there actually are two different kinds of energy in the universe and that we happen to signify them with genderized terms.  Female and male. [looks at Roy]  Or male and female! [both smile]  Why would there be two kinds of this genderized energy?  I can only fall back on a pseudoscientific analogy, that female energy is "direct current" and masculine energy is "alternating current."

ROY:  Hell, you put them together in one person born when I was and you've got someone who is AC/DC!  [laughter]

SonShon:  That's cute but I'm going to go with that for a minute.  As someone who's AC/DC, do you notice distinct perceptual differences.....are you aware of them being modes, or when they shift?

ROY:  I notice perceptual differences , yes.  It might not have occured to me to call them "modes," but it's a good word.  And my awareness of any "shift" comes after the fact, along the lines of  "Hmm, yesterday I was quite enamored of Roland and today it's Irlene."  I've never felt, never been aware of such a shift, probably because I'm not paying attention.

LLAM:  Alright, but where is this energy coming from?

ROY:  Where does any energy come from?  I think this is one of those unreducibles of the universe, a given, that energy just is.  That it goes back and forth between matter and energy is a kind of perception also.....does it?

LLAM:  And we are now square in the middle of quantum physics, how the observer affects the thing observed!

ROY:  I think that that idea which is basic to quantum is a statement about our experience of the world.  Is it necessarily, or absolutely true?  I don't know the answer to that but we can do things with that information, or product of this specific kind of perception.  But we are back where we were in the beginning, I don't think that spirituality and science mix at all.

SonShon:  If I've understood things, spirituality is a first-person, subjective experience, and science, physics, is third-person experience, describing "the subject" or "the procedure."  It's a matter of grammar.

LLAM:  In all that we've read about consciousness, Dan Dennet, Susan Blackmore, they seem to have overlooked Julian Jaynes.  Is that because he's basically doing philosophy about consciousness?  I suppose much the same could be said about that John Curtus Gowan fellow.

ROY:  I would think.  And Jaynes doesn't hesitate to trot in scientific research when it fits whatever he's postulating.  It's been thirty two years since his book (The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the Bicameral Mind).  He never got to publish the sequel.

SonShon:  He seemed to have wrestled with the science versus philosophy thing.  There is a website, www.JulianJaynes.org or some such.

ROY:  I'll make a note of that, see if I get anywhere when I contact them.  But his work is the only philosophic model that still makes sense within its bounds.  What he says in that book is that the nature of human consciousness has changed since Homer's day, that people at one time experienced consciousness, decision-making, ideas about things, as voices from deities, much as schizophrenics might.

LLAM:  He didn't limit himself to schizophrenics.

ROY:  I know dat!  [smiles]  But SonShon, you were alive then, so was Mike and Stro for that matter, do you recall anything like that?

SonShon:  I don't know that I could recall, umm, "thinking like that" simply because my perception of what my consciousness is, how it works, is in Jaynes' model, modern.  I remember doing things, I don't remember reflecting on them, or hearing voices telling me what I was doing.  I have memories.  These memories can evoke emotions, but my experience of these emotions is strictly "modern consciousness."  You know, we're doing a philosophic model of  consciousness in what we're discussing.  Right now we're having a philosophic conversation about consciousness, it's not scientific.

LLAM:  I think we should stick with that for now, if we accept the notion that science and spirituality do not mix - and by saying "spirituaity" we would be including philosophy - we are better off developing a philosophic model of consciousness that perhaps may relate to scientific work in some way.  But I agree we should not pretend that we are being scientific here.  I think that Evan Harris Walker's book [The Physics of Consciousness] was a brave attempt at synthesizing science of consciousness, such as it is, and a philosophy of consciousness.

ROY:  I didn't think that it was definitive or certain, but it is a step in the right direction, he at least is saying all along that it is all hypothesis, "if this, then possibly that."  I doubt he got taken seriously by people other than folks like us.  But alright, we should at least work on a philosophy of consciousness; but I'm already disposed to start with something that is along the lines of Julian Jaynes' work, that consciousness is strictly a verbal thing, but said in subjective, first-person descriptions.  It could work like this, that "the universe" arises because of consciousness.  The universe does not create consciousness, rather vice-versa.

LLAM:  What you would call a "chicken-and-egg" question! [smiles from all]

ROY:  I think that we'd be doing our job if we worked within our perspective.  I'm not a scientist.

LLAM:  But you're predisposed to be scientific.  You grew up doing all kinds of empirical experiments.

ROY:  I had a chemistry set and I dissected frogs and other animals, I was a real bug about microscopic things.  I was interested in astronomy and space travel but because real astronomy involved a lot of math I eventually faded from that.  I was more a "science fictionist" or "science imaginist" than a "little scientist."  I made explosives and rockets.  My "empiricism" was limited by my boredom threshold and resources, so the only alternative I had was imagination.

LLAM:  But you did that with your music as well.  You used real, hard-science devices to create your music.  Signal generators and the like. 

ROY:  I heard stuff in my head.  It took a number of years for technology to catch up with the sounds that I heard, or imagined.  But that is the limit of my being predisposed to being scientific.  I think it is merely good philosophy to say that spirituality and science do not mix, and that I, we, come down on the first-person subjective side of things.

SonShon:  Saying in effect, "Okay, scientists, here's the news from Outlands!"

ROY:  Right.  And of necessity we have to take note of what scientists are saying.  Many scientists say there is no god.  Well, my subjectiive experience, my having thought about my experiences, happens to agree with that.  Many scientists say that there is no life after death, that we can't possibly be having this converstaion.  Fine!  They might go on to say that I'm delusional, or faking, or that my imagination is doing Mach 2.

LLAM:  Beg pardon?  "Mach 2?"

ROY:  Scientific term, it means "twice the speed of sound."

SonShon:  Imagine that! [silence for a few momets]  Hee!

LLAM:  I would think that any further discussion would have to wait until we think about this some more, learn more.

ROY:  My idea is that we keep clearing out the nonsense.  Too much of "modern spirituality" is nonsense.  It may as well be how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. [looks at Llam; Llam smiles]

LLAM:  Ethereal beings like myself dancing upon a physical object!  Now there's a thought!  Shall we close?  [agreement]  Very well, then!

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