Flying

Last night I dreamt I was flying again. This time there was a Japanese kid who was flying indoors where I was and my admiration of his technique caused me to climb up on something and dive off, landing inches from the floor and swimming about in the air, gradually gaining altitude.

Flying is something that you can’t really describe in words until you’ve done it. While very much like swimming, it takes a certain amount of mental focus to sustain. Just a little bit of arm movement can get you fairly high in the air, although with the proper concentration, almost no motion is needed. Probably the best part is the look on others' faces when they see how easy it is.

One of the best ways to learn to fly is pole vaulting, but flying on a swing is almost as good. The trick is to get the air and your momentum balanced to create weightlessness, which a pole vault does very well. Most people, once they are airborne, panic as their stomach rises, which is the main reason they fall back into the earth.

I remain convinced that the mind has plenty of energy to overcome the puny but persistence pull of gravity. That this focus happens in dreams isn’t surprising.

It’s interesting to note that levitation and flying are coming into the mainstream attention and fascination of adults.

It's happening

It's not so much that the line between reality and unreality is blurred. It's more like someone has stuck a stick in your brain and stirred the real and unreal sections together.

I could have a lisp. I could have a wine colored birthmark across my face. Then I would have reason to complain. But I only have emotional fracturing and inner thoughts that won't go away. And a world that is oblivious. I shouldn't complain. I'm not complaining. I'm just telling you what it's like.

What if?

What if it's all bogus? What if your brain really is the only one? What if all these allusions to parallel worlds are just hints or remnants or reverberations of what is really going on?

What if you really are living in a fragile bubble, and every discontinuity, every mis-apprehending, every deja vu, every scrap of paranoia is real? Would it matter? Would you do anything different? Would you just scrap morality and kindness and go for life as entertainment? Somehow, I don't think so.

The only thing that would be different, what would that be? You'd still feel lonely. You'd still feel singled out for all sorts of crazy treatment, from wonderful serendipities to a face bruised from closed doors and being ignored. You'd still feel frustrated by your faults. You might cry a little more. Or less.

This is what dissociation feels like: a disconnect between what people say and do and what is really happening. Forgetfulness. Mistakeness. Loss of hearing and buzzing in the ears. A sudden ability to lose 35 lbs of fat. A hidden ability to do the unthinkable task of caring for an aging parent. Double rainbows ending on the highway in front of you. Shadows getting longer in one day.

I guess if I knew that it was all bogus, I'd at least know something for sure. Right now, I don't know anything.

Even if it all comes down to chemicals

Sometimes I consider that all our emotional states come down to the chemicals running around inside our bodies. It's easy to make a case for this. So if that's true, why would life and all the things we do have any meaning?

I think the answer is that the chemicals are there as a result of processes: interactions, thoughts, the food we eat, and so on. In short, our daily lives and the choices we make are where the chemicals come from in the first place.  A case can easily be made for this too.

Yes, but why not use shortcuts? Why not just throw some of the right chemicals in and make everyone happy? Don't we all want happiness?

In other words, rather than trying to feed our hunger, we could just dope ourselves up until we don't care. Or we could take soporifics and immerse ourselves in a virtual reality that resembles heaven. Or any other variation on chemically induced happiness that you care to think up.

The fact is that this happens all the time. The most common daily example is drug use, especially those drugs that cause psychological dependence. They are showing us a better time than we could get in the non-drugged-up world. 

You could also say that a great portion of our online activity is another form of escape from reality, even though these examples beg the question of what reality is. If we play the game and define reality as 'natural human experiences, interactions, and the physical world' then I suppose we might be speaking of the Amish or other societies that minimize technology and stress physical presence and personal interaction.

In a more mainstream sense, we might say that reality consists of waking up and for most of us going to work and doing some sort of interaction with others to make our daily bread, having and raising children, getting old and dying. Even though none of us, hardly, do this without sometimes escaping reality, through daydreams, liquor, movies and other technological distractions, or drugs. 

If we jump through all these definitional hoops, we've pretty much defined any chemical shortcut to happiness as bogus. In effect we're saying that it doesn't all come down to chemicals, negating the title of this article.

So it comes down to reality and how you define it. Mathematicians have the same metaphysical problem when dealing with paradoxes that arise because of infinities. All in all, discussions of this nature are a great escape from reality, don't you think? Say, pass me that bottle.

The Ultimate Work of Art

Looking longingly again for some opus interactive online but accessible venue in which to place every single thing that is important to me and have organized access to it.

That's pretty extreme, lets try again: I would like to have ideally, a book, one that I could write in and access my philosophy, my thoughts, my being from, should the need arise. An interactive "who I am" combination diary and resource that I could use as a toy when I'm bored and as a legacy when I'm dead.

That was better. Now: I want this and its accessibility and its searchability without having to work very hard at it. Also,

I would like to have it suggest to me what to think- or rather, what to think next. I would also like to have it tell me what I need to review. What I really want is everything in my head, everything, but this would be the next best thing, all my thoughts about everything from Shogun to aesthetics to the hivemind to dreaming to everything, including what I've read, where I've been, etc etc. . All the disconnected connections that live in my head and in years of computer and written notes, searchable, as in totally searchable and sortable, from HG Wells Door in the Wall to Wolf Kahn on video to my thoughts about my curdled personality.

I would call this an idle obsession.

I mean, we have this wonderful technology and storage media. This would be a work, an artwork, a cyber power object. To what point? Schizophrenia?

Continuity isn't the only thing to be concerned about (Part 1)

It is starting to become noticeable. There are periods of time when I seem to be across a continuum. The linear self is beginning to take a backseat to the personhood that is in several places, if only mentally, at one time.

This is not a lot of fun, either. It becomes difficult to keep track of things. The only recourse is to focus in on one thing for as long as I can, at the expense of everything else, because there is just too much else. When I stop and look up, I can see it all around me, the different levels on which things work, the different responsibilities, the different personalities I am capable of wearing.

If all of this seems abstract and hard to visualize, that's because it is. An example: I find that posts I have never made are in my memory on some level as having been made. So I make them. It's sort of the reverse of Alzheimer's. It's as if my short term memory is not functioning on one, but a thousand things at once, and they all get compacted together. What I had for supper last night is lost behind where my keys are and the ten things on my incomplete to do list, and my need to journal my latest observations on continuity:

My latest observations on continuity: It is an illusion. Continuity is an idea that takes infinity and compresses it into every place you look. To assume that finite man could operate on a continuum is gross hubris. We, humans, are painfully discretized beings, only capable of a thin version of continuity. Indeed, we are so impressed with infinity, which is just continuity at the end of things.

We don't think about the mind-numbing case of infinity everywhere and all between. We blank it out. Discrete infinity is child's play next to this, but we get the two confused.

Consider: an infinite lifespan is to us just somewhere out there past our 100+- years, 101 is just as infinite as 1*10exp1000000 if we die at 99.

But continuity implies that every moment is infinite. Yes, it sounds like a trick, but what I'm talking about is the mathematical presence of divisibility completed, throughout one unit and the next. And physically, we are just not capable of that. Even though we work on the nanoscale now, for true continuity, we can just go on breaking things down forever. That is true continuity.It is an asymptote around every corner.

Is this the path that Georg Cantor traveled on his way to madness?