words and memes

I write like some people doodle. Words are like baubles I take pleasure in stringing together. I delight like a baby at the phantasms of thought that emerge from this mechanical process. The sun heats the earth, and weather spins out clouds. Similarly, language produces these "rows and floes of angel hair," and the wide eyed mind reads them like the I Ching, projecting imagery, and calling it thought.

There is something magical about language. Naming was the human power in the garden of Eden, that trumped the bringer of light. The word, the Logos, is considered by some the foundation of "reality." Terrence McKenna was of this opinion, and produced a very novel theory about the etiology of (what Laurie Anderson pronounced is "a virus") language, in Food of the Gods. A mushroom, perhaps an alien mushroom, taught it to us. If you haven't read this theory, do.

Whatever happened, something strange happened, that caused an abnormally fast evolutionary process to produce the neo-cortex. The Scientologists think it was an alien too. Zolton or something. Gurdjieff also has some sort of mysterious other inserting something into the evolving homo-sapiens brains, the kundabugger. Personally, I think Kurzweil's logic is the strangest of all, which leads to the likelihood that we are actually "alone" in the universe.

In Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller has a list of all the technological innovations that led to the 1969 moon landing, which he considered a pivotal technological milestone, that signified the first time humanity was technically capable of eliminating poverty. What was the first, foundational, invention of technology? The word. Of course, it's a technology we probably share in some way with the birds and bees, not to mention the dolphins and whales. And who's to say the word need be verbal, or written?

But we digress. Gabriel Garcia Marquez noted that a magical transformation took place after he'd written Hundred Years of Solitude. When he went back to his childhood haunts, to visit the places that had inspired the story, he found physical characteristics of the landscape that he had invented. They had not been there. He'd added them as a fictional overlay in his story. And then they were there, in "reality." (Nabokov said, "reality" is the only word that should never be written without quotes.)

Worse yet, I've written books, and stories, that I've never published, which have had this same effect. Fictions I invented became real. How? Henry Miller said the most powerful people in the world never wrote a word. They could appear as ordinary people, but with a thought, they could change reality. The secret was that they could produce a thought, and hold it for ten seconds. This is like the Olympics of mental focus. Most people only think they can think, let alone focus, but are actually buffeted on tides of thought.

Those who discuss the knack of getting enlightened in the moment after death explain that following death everyone enters enlightenment. The trick is to stay there. EJ Gold describes it as a ball that bounces into the enlightened sphere, but then falls back down. Most people only stay enlightened for a split second. With practice, this duration can be extended. If it's extended to several days, the enlightenment takes, and becomes permanent.

But back to thought, and words. How could they produce material reality, directly, rather than by, say, a business plan? Morphogenetic fields, perhaps. Rupert Sheldrake discussed these in New Science of Life, though, in order to maintain his reputation as a serious and stodgy scientist, only hinted at the implications for the action of thought on matter at a distance, and focused mainly on fields as a third choice to the nature/nurture equation.

We might also speculate that "reality" is like TV, which we tune by word and thought. There are literally many "channels" that cohabit the same space. Some whacky quantum physicists have suggested that physics allows for this possibility. In this case, the products marketed by memes, which are common notions cobbled together out of the rudiments of thought, are actually various, discreet worlds. Places you could physically go using the egg ships of Incunabula.

So "you" see, just baubles, ornaments, strings of cranberries and popcorn on a Dzogchen Christmas tree, trees falling in the woods with no one to hear, falling like yarrow sticks in legible patterns, informing phenomena through a voodoo of quantum entanglement, mathematical spells written on chaos, random neural firings, bibliographic spasms, pneumatic gusts of footnotes, pretty mental gewgaws of prayer and hope, jewelry of wish-fulfillment, lists of Old Saint Nick.

Oh, here's another nice one that looks good on this string. Leonard Shlain's book The Alphabet Vs The Goddess has some interesting theories about the odd behaviors caused when words are written with letters, vs not at all, or as cuneiform, or pictograms. He claimed that this shift caused the witch hunts after the Guttenberg press, and more recently, the strange insanity of Mao that washed over China for a while. The left and the right, vs the whole.