Spinning Into Oblivion

Well, here we are in the last week of November 2016, and it seems like this year just started the other day.  Wasn't just yesterday that Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his campaign?  Wasn't it just hours ago that Iran captured and publicized 10 US sailors in their territorial waters? Has Turkey really been blaming ISIS for an entire year?  Didn't Denmark just pass a law to take all personal possessions from "refugees" to pay for their "resettlement?"

When you go back and scan headlines for the pat year, it's as if "news" outlets have been recycling the same stories over and over, hardly adding new details to keep them fresh.

For those of us tiring of the same ol' same ol', fear not, something BIG is coming and by this time next year, we may be fervently wishing for some o' dat ol' fashioned Same Ol'.

Here's a little fun you can have at home.  Go out and buy a couple of thousand Slinkys.  Not only will you soon have a greater understanding of Time, but you'll be doing your part to boost lagging Black Friday sales.  Take one of the Slinkys, collapse it to its smallest shape, and look at one end.  It's a complete circle, right?  Now look at it from the side and pull the ends apart.  Now its a Sine Wave, right?  Now look at it from an isometric angle (approx. 30 degrees oblique).  It's a coil, right?  You now know what Time looks like.

At this point, you'll want to connect the ends of a couple of dozen Slinkys, and then wrap them around a pipe or column so that one end overlaps the starting end.  You now know what a Year looks like.  Now take your Year loops and curve them around something so that your loops form a bigger loop.  Continue this until you run out of Slinkys.

What you have created is a Mandelbrot fractal pattern that ultimately continues in from the tiniest detail to the largest, ad infinitem.

Welcome to Time: a series of spirals forming loops, that in turn form spirals that create loops, etc.

What we have here is a constant set of changes that have similar circumstances producing slightly different outcomes until your brain is completely fried and struggling to climb out of your ears to head down to the local pub for a pint and a breather.  Speaking of which, we'll be back right after this break.

There...nothing a couple of (dozen) pints of Kilkenny at Molly Malone's couldn't cure.

Now, back to Time...

So, as you can see, Time keeps spiraling around so that from one point of view, it appears to repeat over and over again.  The Earth appears to rotate around the Sun in a circle, except that the Sun is moving too, so really the Earth is making a spiral if you look at it from a stationary point in Space, though it is impossible to be completely stationary in Space, so really...oh, damn, I need another run to Molly's.  Hang on.

Anyway, where were we?  Oh yes...so we are making all these sprials and history seems to repeat, but really that impression is only from one particular point view.  What is really happening is that events are overlapping with similar circumstances, but with completely different outcomes (e.g. looking at it from the side).  If we look at history from our oblique position, then what we see is that all these repeating events are themselves part of bigger patterns, which themselves are part of bigger...hello, Molly's?  I'll be right there.  Get those pints ready.

Once in a while, though, the spirals overlap each other and a major shift happens, as the path alters slightly to avoid hitting the previous round in the rear.  And sometimes, those slight alterations happen to synch up so that the shift happens on multiple scales.  THAT, dear reader, is where we are now.

Welcome to the Age of Shift.  We are looking at the overlap of economic, political, social, meteorological, astronomical, and cosmic cycles, with all of them taking ever so slight shifts, but the shifts are multiplied thousands of times by the "coincidental" timing of many different Slinkys all jumping slightly to avoid hitting the previous cycle in the...hoo boy...hello, Molly's?  Have you finished roping off and carving my name in that bar stool yet?  Go ahead and put a full keg on hold for me, would'ja?

All of this is not necessarily a problem, except that it is all the downward part of the cycles that are synching, and even more fun is that they, like the entire Universe, are all interconnected, so that one is part of the cause of the other...damn!  Maybe if I just took my rig down to Molly's...

OK, this is better.  With any luck, I won't slosh my precious barley water into the keyboard, at least until I finish this article.

As I was saying, we are seeing (once again) the collapse of a number of different cycles at a great many levels, and though the collapses have all happened before (the circle), they have never happened with our particular set of circumstances (the spiral).  Like alternating current from your wall socket, every +1v must be matched by a -1v in order to maintain balance and flow.  First Law of Thermal Dynamics.  Or was it Ralph's Only Law of Getting Drunk (what goes in must come out - one way or another)?

Us hardcore Time Lords have been waiting for this moment for a long time.  A lot of people have seen varying amounts of this moment for many decades.  Some predicted climate collapse, others economic collapse, and still others social collapse.  They were all right, but missed the key link that all things are dependent on all others things.

What is unfortunate for us, since we perceive the -1v part of the cycle as being painful, is that all these cycles are synching on the down-beat.  What is more unfortunate is that, I assume all the readers are alive, we happen to be living at the particular moment in history when this is happening.

Many people fail to consider that every choice we make is influenced by the sum total of all the other choices everyone else in making.  And all those choices are influenced by the natural cycles going on around us.  Thus, when a large number of people perceive negative events occurring, they react by making defensive choices that, in the conglomerate, exacerbate the negative parts of the cycles.

In other words, if an entire city of people perceive a typhoon coming their way, they all run out and clear the shelves at the local grocery store as they stock up on supplies.  This in turn causes the people who arrive late to panic because there is no food or water on the shelves, and their negative reactions cause further problems, and so on ad nauseum.  What most people fail to see is that the grocer has benefitted by selling out his stock and profitting from the increased sales.  Your negative is his positive.

Just as Molly's here has profitted mightily from my downing of the better part of a keg while I ponder these imponderables, and just like the Mandarin word for "chaos" contains the symbol for "opportunity," all cycles contain within them smaller cycles and are part of larger cycles.  Uh...bartender?  Could you just leave the tap open and give me that big piece of food-grade rubber tubing over there?

Regardless of what you think of Brexit, or Trump, or the results of coming elections in France and Germany, all of it is nothing more than the collective response of large numbers of people who perceive negative events coming from historic cycles.  These things can no more be stopped than you or I can stop Time by breaking our clocks.

The secret to a long and happy life, besides a keg or two at the local,is realizing that all things return to their origin, though not quite.  The prepared mind is the one who knows that in every black cloud is a beautiful ice crystal waiting to fall, melt and hit someone else on the head.

Learning to read the cycles requires a certain amount of resigning oneself to the process.  This, however, does not mean we are helpless.  Like the grocer, or the owner of Molly's, there is always a way to survive, and even flourish in the Natural Way of Things.  You just have to be on the right side of the equation.

Uh, bartender, what do you mean you're cutting me off?

The Rising Tide

Today's theme song is Billy Preston's Will It Go Round In Circles

From my earliest memories, I have had a profound and abiding interesting in astronomy and space exploration.  At various times, I have owned telescopes, traveled great distances to observe comets and eclipses, and have long worked on a personal project to develop a clock and calendar for Martians.

Some people may think these rather unusual hobbies, but they have taught me a very valuable lesson: the Universe operates on the fundamental principle of Cycles.  By extension, human beings, as part of the Universe, also function on Cycles, and in fact, even a cursory study of history and economics proves this fundamental proposition.

Much smarter people than me have shown repeatedly that Cycles are the basic building blocks of Life.  Nikolai Kondratiev and his contemporary Edward Dewey built careers on identifying natural and economic cycles.  These men were inspired by the earlier work of Fibonacci, who described in mathematical terms an underlying spiral nature to both numbers and Nature itself, which we see vividly in the shapes of galaxies and nautilus shells.

Until recently, our clocks were round, our calendars cycle through 12 months and then start again, and the sky is full of objects that swirl around in highly predictable ways.  Even our DNA is composed of a helix - two strands that wind around each other and store vast amounts of information.

We are, in short, composed of Cycles living inside of Cycles, like so many Matryoshka dolls trying to understand our own composition.

It is important to note at this point that the Cycles do not create perfect circles.  They are, in fact, spirals or helices that return to an approximate location relative to a past Cycle, but it is never the precise location from which it departed.

Within human history, we also detect Cycles.  There is an approximate Cycle the length of an average human lifespan.  There is a slightly longer Cycle of roughly 100 years.  There is another with a period of about 250 years, and yet another of about 500 years.  Humanity oscillates between extremes on roughly periodic scales, with the Big Picture being similar, but the minute details changing enough that without a high enough perspective, one cannot discern the pattern.

Thus, most humans plod along, constantly being shocked and amazed by global economic and political developments.  However, a few detect the patterns and see the trends, and can begin to predict coming events with a fair amount of accuracy, though no one can calculate all the variables to say precisely how events will unfold, or what effect they will have at the scale of an individual.

In terms of economic cycles, it is certain that boom will turn to bust, and back again on a fairly predicable basis, as the men mentioned above have shown with exhaustive research.  The so-called contrarian, one who recognizes the peak of one extreme, will begin to prepare for the pendulum to swing back again.  At first, he is viewed as - to put it politely - eccentric.  Over time, however, the majority come to realize the wisdom of this position.  Once the majority has crossed over to the other extreme, the student of cycles will begin preparing for the opposite, and so the pattern repeats forever.

In political terms, the same is true.  People will jump on a political movement until it has swung far to the extreme, and then reverse rather dramatically to the other extreme.  In each case, the extremes are the same, but the "flavor" is different, as the existential variables surrounding the cycles greatly affect how they look and feel.  The astute thinker, however, realizes that when a majority has adopted one extreme or another, it is time to prepare for the swing back to center, and ultimately to the opposite position.

Thus it was, that about 30 years ago, I instinctively recognized the impending peak of the Empire/Utopia phase of the political cycle.  I couldn't adequately express what I was feeling at the time, but I knew that I should begin preparing for the inevitable swing to the opposite pole of Tribalism/Isolationism.  I understood in not so many words that civilization had moods in every way alike to the individual.  Subsequent studies and research gave definition to my instinct.

Around the late 1990s, I began to test my intuition.  I began to predict certain events in the political and economic realm, and found to my delight that I could accurately predict movements, though of course not the exact details.

Famously, in 1999, I told my circle of family and friends to sell their stocks and other paper assets, and buy gold.  I didn't know exactly when, but I knew the time had come.  Naturally, I was laughed at and pooh-poohed by most, but within two years, the stock market had crashed post-9/11, and gold had started its meteoric rise from $265/oz., to a recent peak of $1,800.

In a similar instance, I advised folks to join the Ron Paul Revolution.  It was inevitable and I had watched the core sentiments of that movement growing for years.  Ron Paul failed because he was successfully marginalized by society, it did not stop the fundamental impulse that was driving it.  Last Tuesday, that impulse expressed itself "bigly" with the resounding repudiation of the Empire/Utopian extreme, in favor of the emerging Tribalist/Isolationist meme.

These things can no more be controlled or stopped than the shift from summer to winter.  It is built into the Universe itself, and we are - regardless of our efforts otherwise - captured in its relentless Cycles.  Our best efforts may delay or modify the process, but the outcome is as certain as Destiny.

Just as Herbert Hoover ushered in the Progressivist Era, Donald Trump will usher in the Isolationist Era.  These two extremes have battled it out throughout human history, from the Roman and Mongol Empires, to the modern Globalist States.  Like passengers on a boat, humans rush to one side, and just as the boat to enjoy the view, and just as the boat is about to capsize, they rush to the other for balance, only to repeat the process over and over ad infinitem.

Trump is only the beginning.  The process will take decades.  At some point during the lives of our grandchildren, the process will reverse.  We would not likely recognize the terms used or the world in which this process reverses, but it is inevitable that it will happen.  A good education and attention to elders can prepare them for this, but it cannot be stopped.

If you think you can stop the Moon in her path, or the Sun's orbit about the galaxy, then by all means fight trend.  You will ultimately be frustrated at every turn, or die trying.  The astute observer, however, knows that it is time to prepare for the coming waves, and reading history will do just that.

All the labels and ridicule, tears and stamping of feet, will not change the course of the Cycles.  With erudite effort, one might be able to adjust the course a bit, but the destination is as certain as death.

I recall with great fondness attending Spalding Gray's amazing one-man show, Swimming to Cambodia.  In it, he relates an experience in Thailand, where he and an acquaintance go swimming in Phuket.  At one point, the current grabs them and sweeps them far out to sea.  Spalding panics and begins swimming furiously, fighting the current.  He companion yells over to stop fighting and ride the current.  When he does, he quickly observes that the current in circular and is slowly returning him back to shore.  He states that it was a profound moment for him, and in the audience, I immediately understood the revelation he had experienced.

Once we stop fighting and learn to ride the Cycles, we find that we expend a lot less energy and enjoy the ride a whole lot more.  Furthermore, we have the time to track the Cycle itself and see a minuscule part of the Grand Design, and no experience is more profound than that.

P.S. - I highly recommend Spalding's other show, Monster in a Box, as well.