SOME FUNDAMENTALS


As I said, we have no material existence, and there is no material world. We construct our universes for ourselves from information that is transmitted to us from the Que. In fact, we exist in a sea of information, some of which is relevant to us and some of which is relevant to the infinite number of other beings who have their own, entirely alien, universes.

The first task for my mind is to filter out only information that is relevant to my universe. That is easy, in fact, because the information from my Que to me is usable only by me, and no other mind. Likewise, information produced by other Ques for their partners is meaningless to my mind. This is the nature and purpose of the symbiosis the exists between Que/human partners.

But even after I have isolated the information that comes from my Que, there is a great deal more of it that I am currently aware, much less am currently able to use. All this excess information exists in a sort of subconscious dream world, into which I get only occasional glimpses. Some of the more startling, sometimes bizarre, glimpses we get of this world are ghosts, guardian angels, hallucinations, mystical experiences, visions, and all other forms of psychic, and psychotic experience. (I have emphasised psychotic because the problem with much of what we call 'mental illness' is not the symptoms, which, as the above suggests are quite natural and even useful, but the fear of the symptoms and of mental illness/insanity)

As an example of how this subconscious dream world works, it is useful to describe my own first experience of it.

As one of the approaches to treating my own mental illness, I attended a clinical psychologist to receive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The basis of this is learning to observe one's own thoughts and to examine them in a detatched way that allows one to alter any that may be causing negativity, anxiety, or whatever. Thus, it is very much an awareness-raising exercise; it causes one to turn one's vision inwards, as it were, looking into one's own head.

At first, it was very much thoughts, ideas, and feelings that I became aware of, but, later, I began to realise that there were visual images as well. The first time was when I was walking along the beach near my home one afternoon. I spotted a piece of flotsam which I thought would be suitable, if I was to trim it with a sharp knife, for a craft project I was working on. As I thought about how I would trim it, I had a flash of insight: I saw a dream image ghost fleetingly across my vision of myself cutting the object, and in the dream I cut the tip of my finger off.

Such a dream image normally goes unseen, but not unfelt. That particular image would have made me feel anxious about carrying out the task of trimming the piece of flotsam, and would even have influenced my actions and caused me to cut my finger. My fear of heights is likewise caused by subconscious visions of falling whenever I am close to the edge of a cliff.

That first insight was of the negative influences of insight. But, in a healthy individual, a really healthy individual, such images are helpful. So, if I was, in fact, rather clumsey with a sharp knife, the Que could provide a dreamlet of me successfully cutting an object, and that would have the effect of improving my performance.

TRIAL AND (MOSTLY) ERROR

Just as well I have more irons in the fire than playing with computers! ---had one of those bad-trips yesterday: I wrote this great, long blog, and pressed the publish button, and that was the last I saw of it. If anyone out there comes across a stray blog entitled: THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IS IN IT then please send it home!

So, having had my fingers burnt (yet again! ---how much of the industries tranquiliser-drug output is funded by computer users?), this is ging to be a short blog to test the system --- and this is your last chance, blogger. If it does not work this time, I'm never coming back again. No, I really mean it!

THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IS IN IT

INTRODUCTION

Currently there are very many beliefs about the nature and substance of existence. Christians believe one thing, buddists another, native americans something else, and scientists something else yet again. All these systems of belief tend to be incompatible with one another. Each has a different belief about what life is about. Is there a god or gods? Does life have a purpose? At one extreme, scientists believe we are an accident of nature, while at the other extreme, many religions believe that some god or gods created the world for humanity.

Scientist believe that the world is real and solid, and that there are no such things as souls or spitits, or anything 'supernatural'. Some ancient religions, on the other hand, do not believe that there is any such thing as a solid, material world: it is all just a dream, that human beings are all just 'dreaming minds', but the dreams we have in daylight, while we are awake, are just stronger, more real versions of the dreams we experience while asleep. In the language of our scientific age, they believe we experience a virtual reality (currently used to train pilots and doctors etc) rather than a solid, material reality.

In our western, scientific world, this idea has been explored by philosophers, found wanting, and dismissed. Essentially, they could not see how it could possibly be true, could not rationalise it, and so threw it out. Thus we in the west chose to believe in a material world. But let me stress, it is just a belief, not in any sense a verifiable fact. Science, just as much as any religion, is founded on belief.

The most famous attempt to tease out the issue of the nature of reality, was that of Rene Descarte. He tackled the idea that life is all a dream, but could not make it work because he did not have the concepts available that would allow him to make sense of the idea. In particular, we now have experience of virtual reality, and have made inroads in attempting to understand dreams.

This work revisits the idea that life is all a dream, and, using these modern concepts, shows that, not only can the idea now be made to work, but the change in perspective that results, causes all of human experience to fall into place and form one, comprehensible whole.

As a consequence, we can now find answers to such age-old questions as: is there a god? What is the nature of good and evil? ---- and any other question you can think up!

What is more, the theory moves beyond the confines of philosophical specualtion, and into the realms of the experimentally, or, more accurately, the experientially, verifiable. That is to say, it moves beyond the aegis of scientific experts, and becomes a matter for the individual. The reason for this is that we now have to view the world, as I shall show, as a living world.

The importance of this is that, unlike a dead, mechanical world, a living world responds to us. Ask it a question, and it will answer. So, the traditional difficulties associated with trying to find out and understand how the world works become trivial, and the new 'difficulty' becomes learning the language of communication with the world. However, this is no more than the difficulty we experience as children learning the language of our parents.


BASICS

All of us are minds; we have no material substance. A part of my mind is a virtual reality generator. All I experience is a virtual reality. My dreams are produced in the same way by the same part of my mind, the only difference being that they are in a weaker form.

The data that my mind uses to constuct this virtual reality comes from another, bigger, mind. I call this bigger mind the Que ( pronounced like the letter 'Q'). Each of us exists in symbiosis with a Que. Dreams, too, come from the Que. Our minds do produce dreams, but these are output to the Que.

When you consider the vastness and complexity of the universe of our experience, it is obvious that the 'software' needed to generate and maintain such a universe must be unimaginably complex. In fact, such complexity can only be achieved by starting with something relatively simple, and then building in change and development through evolution. So, all we have learned about the nature of the universe remains valid, but now we can understand how the virtual universe came into existence, and why it is the way it is.

Thus our minds, too, have had to evolve, and 'in tune' with our virtual universe. Through many lives we acquire and develop the ability to use our five senses, our cognitive skills and our emotional/intuitive skills. At every stage of this development, we move up to a higher level of consciousness. So, one can imagine some primitive past in which we may only have had consciousness of a world we could touch. Then we became conscious of sound, then, perhaps, of seeing. At each step, we became conscious of a whole new dimension to existence, and our existence became richer and more complex.So we can envisage our minds rather like onions: each layer of the onion is a level of consciousness, and our development is a matter of expanding our mind into new levels of consciousness.

Most recently, our emotional and cognitive ablities have developed. Of these, language and the ability to communicate with each other is the most important. The language we use is the language of symbols. The next level up is the language of metaphor. This is the language of the Que. the language of dreams. When we achieve the ability to communicate freely in the language of the Que, we are like children who have just learned to speak. Instead of having to learn by trial and (mostly) error, we can now ask questions.

In terms of consciousness, we now enter a dimension in which the universe is alive, ie, interactive, and is meaningful. By 'meaningful, I mean this: as I said, both the data for generating our dreams and the virtual world, come from the Que. So life is just a dream. That is, life, my experience, is interpretable in exactly the same way as dreams.


IN MORE DETAIL

The best metaphor to gain an understanding of this situation is that of a game such as Dungeons and Dragons.

This is an example of a game which started small, and can still be played in 'small' form, as a video game for one player, but which has evolved into a much more complex, multi-player game which has no end. It goes on increasing in scope and complexity, always offering more variety of gaming experience to more and more players. It is crucial to the development of such a game that it does not ever end. To achieve such complexity, you start with something small and simple, and then use evolution to progress towards something ever more complex.

The minimum requirement for any individual to participate in such a Dungeons and Dragons game, is for one player to form a relationship with one dungeon master.

The Dungeon Master is someone who knows the rules, and how the game works. He can change the rules or make new rules. It is the Dungeon Master's job to create scenarios for the players. The player is someone who experiences the scenarios created by the Dungeon Master.

A successful game is one in which the Dungeon Master is able to create scenarios that are sufficiently interesting that the player want to go on playing, and in which the player is able to give good feed-back to the Dungeon Master concerning his needs and preferences, and his assessment of the latest scenarios.

This raises the question of communication between the Ques and people.

The most straight forward and clear communication from the Ques to people is dreams. Dreams use metaphors drawn from the everyday world to create meaningful and purposeful communications. They are also a form of virtual reality. They are usually distinguishable from the waking world in that they are weaker, involving less sensory data, more like films than the full, virtual reality experience. Put it the other way round, and say: the real world is just a strong dream. The important point is this: that the real world is meaningful, and can be interpreted in exactly the same way as dreams.

This harks back to an earlier time when any unusual occurance was interpreted as meaningful. More recently, the psychologist, Carl Jung, attempted to make sense of the significance of metaphors as they appeared, not only in dreams, but in mythology, alchemy, and parapsychology. He was stopped from fully realising his ideas by two problems: firstly, he did not properly grasp the purpose of the communications, and, secondly--- and more importantly --- he did not see, much less solve, the problem of signal-to-noise. That is, if everything one sees and experiences is a possible metaphor for communication, how does one decide what is significant, and what is just noise?

I will return to this later, but, essentially, the problem has to be dealt with in the same way as a baby deals with the problem of learning to recognise and respond to human speech.

In the other direction, the Ques also need communications from people, and they receive communications in the form of dreams. The dreams we experience are from the Que; the dreams our own minds produce are sent to the Que.

These dreams contain our hopes and fears, our questions, our reactions to our everyday experiences --- all of our experience, in fact. This is where 'ask the world a question and you will get an answer' comes in. The Que will answer all questions, address all problems, fullfill all hopes etc etc.

I have spent most of today making up some terrariums in which to keep a collection of insects. This is something I have wanted to so since I was a child, but only now, half a century on, am I finally able to fill that particular dream --- and, now that I have worked out a few things I could not have known then, I can really have some fun with my new pets!

First, I would just like to make the point that there is a 'serious' reason for doing this: as I said previously, I am recovering from what has been diagnosed as schizophrenia. The BIG PROBLEM is ANXIETY. Post-traumatic-stress disorder, the professionals would probably label it today, shell-shock it would have been called about the time of the first world war, but whatever you call it, the experience is that you get scared shitless and dive for cover at the drop of a hat.
Even before I became psychotic, I was scared of heights, and spiders and things like that, but now --- unbelievable! So, in order to get free of the lingering effects of my experience, I need to get on top of panic-level fears, and I am calling on an old witches trick to do it: witches use what are known as familiars, and it is notable that these are often animals that people usually fear. Well, if you keep an animal as a pet, even if it is a spider, bat, or snake, then you will, eventually, come to like it, and then you cannot fear it any more. So, by making a pet of some of my old nightmare creatures, I am facing up to, and out-facing, some of my oldest fears, and the confidence I gain from that, will do for all the others.

But, to return to the things I can do now that I could not have done then. Current ethics adjure us to be kind to our feather/furred/many-legged brethern, where by kind is meant: cuddle, coddle and be nice. Your pets need TLC ! So, what I have discovered meanwhile allows me to say," bollocks to that."

This is not the place to explain the whole thing; I intend to publish a full account quite soon. However, in essence, I have discovered that the existence we experience is of the nature of a virtual reality. This works through a symbiotic relationship between people, us, who experience (live in) the virtual world, and other, bigger minds, I have called the Que (pronounced like the letter q), who design and create the virtual worlds. This is best understood by analogy with the game dungeons and dragons. The minimum requirement for a game of D&D is that there is one player and one dungeon master. The dungeon master is someone who knows the rules of the game, and whose job it is to create scenarios for the player. Likewise, in order for our existence to work, we need one Que to create the scenarios of our lives, and one person to live the life.
If you think about the implications of this arrangement, it contains all sorts of implications for how we live out lives. But, in particular, under circumstances, it would obviously be of huge advantage to be able to communicate with one's symbiotic partner. The establishment of the ability to do so, is indeed, the next evolutionary step for humanity; the reason it has not been done thus far, is because the method of communication, for reasons that I cannot go into here, is much more complex than the languages we use to communicate among ourselves. However, we are all, albiet unknowingly, in receipt of communications from our partners. The one that stands out is dreams. The dreams that we experience are not the products of our own minds, but of our symbiotic partners. We do produce dreams in our own minds, but these are for output to our partners, so we do not see them ourselves.

So, to return to the subject of my new pets. Among the things I have found out through communication with my own Que, is that animals are only biological machines! Thus they do not experience pain or distress of any sort. They merely mimic those feelings. Quite what all the reasons for this are I have not grasped yet, but one of them is this: we, humans, need to learn about feelings. We need to learn to experience them and how to deal with them. When you mimic a feeling, you experience that feeling, if only at a relatively low level. But that is where it starts, and that is how we begin to acquire feelings. So, by living in a world surrounded by creatures that behave as though they had feelings, we learn to mimic and experience them for ourselves.

So, having learned that these creatures are biological machines, obviously I am freed from the restictive ethics that have come to surround animals. That gives me a great deal of freedom, but not as much as a thoughtless conclusion might lead one to think. The fact is that if my pets are sickly looking, or torpid or viscious, then that does not make me happy. Animals make people happy, but only if they are healthy, lively and happy-looking. So, for my own sake, I still must treat them well.

schizophrenia is not an illness, it is the way forward

I filled in a questionaire today on my experience of schizophrenia. A well meaning body has undertaken to combat the stigma attatched to mental illness and wanted to know the opinions of interested parties. I had difficulty with some questions of the questionaire since my fifteen years experience of schizophrenia have lead me to some conclusions that are somewhat at odds with the prevailing views of the scientific community.

I read the memoirs of Carl Jung before I became schizophrenic, and then again afterwards. I would go so far as to say that I might well not have become schizophrenic if I had not read Jung! I was intrigued by his experiences 'exploring the subconscious', especially by his descriptions of the fantasies/visions/spirit encounters that he described. I was thus drawn down that same road. After I became schizophrenic I re-read Jung, and in the light of my own experiences of psychosis, it was obvious to me that what Jung was describing was exactly my experience of that 'illness'. If I am schizophrenic, then so, too, was Jung.

As far as I am aware, Jung never concieved of himself as experiencing psychosis. He never concieved of himself as being ill. I would concurr. Jung was not ill, and neithter am I. The illness is in blocking psychosis. What we call psychosis is a common experience of mystics, visionaries, and many peoples 'too primitive' to be frightened of hallucinations.

But these visions/hallucinations are perfectly natural. 'A picture speaks a thousand words' goes the old adage. This is absolutely true. This is the language of dreams. For dreams are a language, and a communication, and their language is the language of metaphor, and metaphor is much more complex than symbol. The ability to communcate using metaphor takes a much more advanced mind than the ability to communcate using symbols. That is why we have thus far been unable to handle the language of dreams and visions. But our minds are now at the stage where we should be capable of taking this next step.

Through my experience of psychosis, I have learned to understand the language of dreams, where dreams come from and why they come. That is for another blog. Suffice it to say that therein lies the answer to the question of 'life the universe and everything'.

so...

This is my nth attempt to make a go of blogging. This time I am definitely going to keep it up because I like to mull, but if I do not have somewhere to express the mulls I just get indigestion.

This is obviously a process that needs some practice --- I have been having some very interesting mulls today, but when I sit down here and start writing my mind goes blank. It is obviously not empty, so it must just be that it is not used to talking to a computer. All my previous conversations have been face to face with people, and if they are good to talk to they generally help you along with questions and comments, and so a flow is established and kept going. --- but now I think of it, I have always found phones difficult, and, again, because there is not the same level of interaction. Patience and practice, I surmise, will win through.

NEWS: I have joined the ranks of the pagan hordes that threaten to take over the world --- I wish!!! I might even say, I WILL. The pagan hordes will definitely take over the earth if I have anything to do with it.
This is a highly intellectual and minutely thought out position. I have examined paganism from every aspect, scrutinised its moral, intellectual and scientific basis, rooted out all logical inconsistancies, and all other undesirables, and have found I can give it my aproval. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said other religions, including SCIENCE--- it is a (conveniently?) forgotten fact that science, in common with all other systems of belief. usually refered to as RELIGIONS, is founded on a set of a priori beliefs, and is liberally sprinkled throughout its length and breadth with same. Of course, when you observe how science and religion so routinely lock horns with one another, you can conclude they are of the same species!!

Well, here endeth blog no. 1.