Doctor Livingstone I Assume

Maybe you remember that old Star Trek episode called, I, Mudd?  It's the one where a businessman takes the crew hostage, to be guarded by a bunch of androids.  The crew starts dong a bunch of crazy things that cause the androids to shut down because the antics don't make sense, and the crew escapes once again.

This is what happens to my wife when she asks me something like, "Is sour cream still goot [sic] or no?"  I reply, "If the cream is already sour, exactly what criteria are we using to determine if it is good?  If you mean is it green yet, then I have to say it's still good."  I mean, the cream was sweet and fresh at one time, but it was allowed to go sour.  It smells sour and tastes sour, and by most standards that would not be good.

It's amazing how many assumptions we make in our daily lives that heavily influence our thinking.  What's more, our inner scale for judging the real world slides around, depending on what set of initial assumptions we make about a particular subject.

Take the anti-Ahok rally in Jakarta today.  Most people here could care less about Ahok, but this morning I can hear people running around the neighborhood yelling, "There's free food at the Ahok rally!  Let's go!"  If you have a hidden agenda to bring down the current administration and install your personal allies, this is good.  If you are a typical Indonesian who thinks anything free is better than nothing and you will go to any expense to get it, this is good.  If you are reasonably intelligent and like Ahok, this is bad.  It's all relative.

By the way, we really need heavy rains in central Jakarta today, so send some our way, because normally this would be a bad thing, but today it will break up a mass demonstration before it can get violent, and that's good.

Another good example of this phenomenon is the Trump Wave.  Most of the people who support Trump do so because they are sick and tired of corporate interests running the government against the interests of most everyday folks.  So, they get behind a man who is a walking brand name and quintessential CEO of a marketing empire.  Is this a kind of fire break?  To fight a forest fire, you start another fire?  Again, it's a case of assumptions, not to mention a lot of pretty words, coloring decisions.

Just because an apple is red and succulent-looking on the outside doesn't mean it is not shot through with worms.

We assume that vaccines work because...well, gosh, we've never had polio, right?  We assume a restaurant makes healthy food because they passed health inspection, right?  We assume the Sun will rise tomorrow because it has for the previous 20,158 days we've been alive, and by all accounts it has for a long time before we were here, though we assume that those records are really as old as we think they are.

When it comes right down to it, we actually know very little.  Basically, we know what we have experienced, but that is only valid for time already past.  The current status of what we know is just what we see, feel, smell, hear, and taste right this very moment.  All of that could change in the next minute, everything outside the range of our senses is unknown, and all past experience is based solely on our memories, which are provably dodgy sorts of things.

In fact, we are completely clueless.  What we know right now is not provable unless we have someone else to confirm it at the same time, but then we could both be under the same illusion of assumptions.

As Ram Dass exhorted us back in the day, "Be here now."  However, if you have ever really tried to live in the Eternal Now, you know it is virtually impossible to function in our collective cultures.  We actually need an entire truck-load of assumptions just to turn off the alarm in the morning, not the least of which that we can measure 'time' and that a morning will come for us to turn off the alarm.

Point of fact: assumptions are the foundation of our shared reality.  It cannot and does not exist without the basic assumptions that inform most of what we "know."

Perhaps you are one of us hippie-types who read Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land?  In the book, Heinlein posits a class of legal functionaries called "fair witnesses."  These people are trained to live in the Here-Now.  One of the main characters, Jubal Harshaw, demonstrates how it works when he asks his personal Fair Witness, "What color is that house?"  She responds, "It's white on this side."  In other words, she made no assumptions about the color of the house on the unseen sides, and reported only what she could directly experience.

What Heinlein failed to do, through his character, is point out that she assumed that what she experienced as the color 'white' is the same as everyone else who looked at it.

As I type this, I assume that there is a magic machine called a "computer" in front of me.  I can see the screen make squiggles that I assume mean something to objective observers.  I can feel the keys as I type.  I can smell the ozone coming from the heated components inside.  I assume that when I click "Publish," this machine will send a signal to some far off server that will render my experiences into something others can share.  I will only have some confirmation of these assumptions if the hit counter goes nuts and/or if someone sends a response, which I assume will be from a real human being somewhere else on what I assume is a planet that we co-inhabit.

As you can see, this line of deductive reasoning can get rather detailed and one can easily despair of trying to ascertain the Truth of any matter.  It is, however, a very good exercise in recognizing and coming to grips with the vast number of assumptions that we make moment by moment.

Many of the long-time readers here appreciate that I take a slightly different view of things, and I do that by first checking my assumptions, and those of other commentators, to see what - if anything - has been overlooked by our shared assumptions.  I attempt to point out that which has not been considered in the general discourse because we all made some common assumptions.

I do not claim to be special, or even a leader, in this effort.  I am simply trying to think clearly and to understand what assumptions I make about my daily experience.  With a bit of luck, I can share those observations with a wider audience who may - or may not - also appreciate these observations.

My wife just reported that most of the shops at the local bazaar that are owned by ethnic Chinese are closed.  This is because they have assumed that the Muslim-based mass demonstrations will erupt in violence, and that the violence will likely be directed towards ethnic Chinese.  These assumptions are based on either past experience in 1998 and other occasions, or on reports of those events.  Thus, they assume that it is better to stay home, unless their shop is close to where they live.  This last assumption is based on their perception of how fast they can get home in an emergency.

Yes, life is full of assumptions, and for the most part, we can't function without them.  It is important to analyze and understand what our assumptions are, so that we can avoid mistakes because of them.  We are much less likely to be caught off-guard when we are mindful of our foundational assumptions, and are much less prone to panic and more likely to think clearly.

In fact, I don't know for sure that I will be alive to finish this article.  I only assume, based on past experi...

A Word, If You Will

by Ji Lee (link at end of page)

When the Elohim became alarmed at the doings of Mankind, their response was to scramble His languages.  In other words, they attacked the words.

When a wizard or witch wants to manipulate the medium, they use magic incantations - words of creation or destruction.

Words are the very fabric of our reality.  We perceive what is real to us by which words we use to describe the "out there" to ourselves.  Scarier still, when we listen to others and ascribe to their words some sort of uber-importance, then we allow someone else to create our reality for us.  If you are listening to Flox Gnus right now, then you are allowing the various functionaries within that organization to create your reality for you.

We manipulate picture and symbols as a form of highly condensed words.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then think how much reality is created within you by simply looking at images.  It is a powerful thing to be the creator of images - to create within many souls the very fabric of their reality.  So what kind of reality must people see when they view vomit as art?

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell graphically illustrated the concept that people cannot conceive of realities for which they have no words.  By slowly reducing the dictionary of New Speak over generations, eventually people could not imagine whatever things the State wished them to avoid.  How like our current cultural situation is this?  Just look at what passes for language in the average text message.

Words are magical things.  All religions use them, whether it be Ohm, or nam myoho renge kyo, or the Lord's Prayer, or chanting Arabic phrases, those who follow such things are generally unaware that they have been socialized into creating a magical reality that someone else designed.  Why else would preachers preach, except to manipulate the medium of reality?

In most revolutions, the first to be slaughtered are the intelligencia and the artists.  The reason is simple - they people, wittingly or not, know how to use words and they cannot be tolerated in times when control of reality is of the utmost importance to those who seek to control it.


The Chinese culture knows the value of words.  They have a long tradition of meditating on characters and then transferring that essence to canvas in a process where the very language itself becomes art.  People like Wayne White do similar things with English words, while poets like e. e. cummings paint pictures with words (there is a difference).

One reason I have felt compelled to write since I was just a boy is that I have had an instinctive recognition of the power of words.  Like all writers, people who feel this truth seek to harness that power to some degree of success or another.  No one can deny that such men as the one known as Shakespeare mastered the technique.  Modern writers such as Tom Robbins are well aware of the power they wield.

As a child, I learned the old saw, "Stick and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."  What a sad little saying, since it inculcates a disrespect for the power of words that we all know is true, but which such sayings encourage us to deny.

Thing about it: the most powerful noun can be modified by a deceptively simple article like "a" or "the".  The largest and most active verbs can be completely turned around by nothing more than adding "to" or "for".  If these simple little articles and propositions can control the most powerful things and actions, then how much more power must other words have?  If we can invoke Satan with a word, then can't we do the same with God?

Words are reality.  We know no other reality but that which we can speak.  The more powerful a language, the larger its vocabulary, and the more it comes to dominate the thing we call reality.

In light of these thoughts, doesn't it behoove us to build our vocabulary and to take control of the language we use and that which we allow into our minds?  In fact, knowing these things makes it imperative that we turn off the corporate media and take control of our language and learn the power we have sitting right in front of us.  By taking control of our language, we control our reality, and conversely take away the power of others to create our reality for us.

Words are the core of majick.  They are neither good nor bad, but serve the intent of the speaker.  Take the word "cow".  To a Hindu follower, this is the word of a god.  To an overweight woman, this is the word of insult.  To a person urging action, it the word of blind obedience.  A simple word with so much power.

Consider your next word.  Use it carefully.  And the next after that.  Be aware of how you define your reality.  Control your inner dialogue.  Choose your terms to invoke the world you want.

We are all gods, and the power of that station is within our minds and at our fingers.  The smithing of words is more vital that we often imagine.

Most importantly, actively filter those words which you allow into your mind.  Consider the source that their intention in using the words.  Don't let others define your words, for in so doing, they are controlling your reality.

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The ArtWords of Ji Lee

Tricks Of Light And Shadow

You've probably received an email at some time in your life showing a guy doing chalk drawings on the street that, from a certain perspective, look amazingly 3D.  His name is Kurt Wenner and he is currently exhibiting several of his works, along with some Indonesian artists, here at the Ciputra Artpreneur Center.

Preserved on canvas, these pieces lie flat on the floor or form a 90-degree angle with the wall.  When viewed through a wide-angle lens, ghostly three-dimensional images pop out of the canvas, appearing to rise out of the background or apear in front of it.  It's really quite amazing and something photos just don't quite capture.  Makes you wonder how Kurt views the world.

What the art works highlight is the weird world of perception.  How we view the world and what reality is comes down to a matter of perspective.

In the midst of all the excitement, an email pops in from my Canadian bud and long-time ex-pat.  It contained a quote that he found "out there":

“Given the fact that it has been proven that our moon is a very suspiciously perfectly placed artificial satellite that is composed of non-naturally occurring material without which we could not have life on this planet combined with the fact that our Earth is very suspiciously the only place within our solar system and very likely our galaxy that can support life there is absolutely no question in my mind that, at the very least, the entire surface of our planet and all of its life forms are in fact nothing more than elements of a very large and complex software system that is being used to run what I am completely convinced are military experiments by some non-humanoid entity.”

I shot back:

"This is just a take on the ancient concept that we create the Universe through our collective consciousness.  The Hindus and Buddhists place this idea at the center of their beliefs.  The idea of a holographic reality or software simulation is just modern terminology wrapping the same concepts."

Seems this week's theme is 'perception', since everywhere I turn there are hints about reality not being all that real and our minds creating Creation.  It's strange how Life keeps throwing theme weeks at us.  It's like Bogart week on the Million Dollar Movie or something.  Just more proof that we create our reality, or it's created for us on a regular basis.

Related to that, do people really have premonitions, or does the intensity with which they think something create the situation?  My father used to think of people he hadn't talked to in years and out of the blue they would call or contact him within 24 hours.  This was before the internet and you could track most people down fairly easy.  But you have to ask, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

As Wenner's work shows, perception is all a matter of perspective.  One step in any direction and the world we see changes quite radically.  For those who see beyond the 'trick' of light and shadow, the paintings represent a profound look at reality.  Suppose we all exist on a canvas that appears three-dimensional and solid, until you shift to the side just a bit.

Perhaps if we all mentally stepped to the side and looked at the world from a slightly different perspective, we might see something completely unexpected and remarkable.  Of course, it begs the question what would we do if we found out the Universe was just a construct of imagination?

Happy Friday!

The Storm Front

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Some time back, I waxed poetic about Texas northers as a metaphor for world events.

Texas northers are like nothing I've experienced anywhere else.  You can see the storms approaching for hours.  The sky bifurcates, with a part being hot, humid and sunny, and the other part being black as night with a greenish cast and ominous lightning flashing in all directions.

You can tell they are coming in a hundred different ways.  Cows in the field will all line up with their hind ends pointing in the direction of the approaching storm.  The cow flies, normally heavy on a hot Texan summer afternoon, suddenly look like shimmering blankets on the backs of the cattle.

The air gets deathly still and heavy.  It's like trying to take a deep breath in a Turkish sauna.  It is so thick and hot and laden with steam that it fills your lungs before you can take a deep draught of it.  Walking through it is like pushing yourself through cream of mushroom soup with the heavy smell of mold and mildew laced into it, and the humidity is so high that you sweat profusely just sitting on the porch.

At some point, the storm line appears on the horizon, looking like Sauron's evil spreading over Middle Earth.  The rain is so heavy, it forms a solid curtain of silver gray that the eye can not pierce.  The line of clouds itself is so straight you could draw a surveyor's bead from it: in the leading edge are low, smooth clouds that curl down in the bow shock, and behind them are towering thunderheads that seem to stretch to Heaven itself.  Lightning leaps across the heads then stabs down at the Earth, momentarily casting a strange blue light over those things which have been engulfed by the advancing drapery of doom.

Far across the endless Texas horizon, you can see the fields of grain bow down to the relentless fury.  The line is so sharp that if you could stop the storm for a moment, it would be possible to stand half in and half out of it.

That line of subdued grain comes toward you in a way that seems both slow and plodding and blindingly fast.  Because of the vast views, you can watch the storm line come across miles of sorghum and corn. Now you catch a whiff of pungent wet Earth - the smell of hot, dry soil suddenly doused with unbelievable amounts of ice water.

Occasionally, at the leading edge, a cloud will curl back on itself, and within moments a tornado has formed. All around its tip, crops are flying up in a cloud of debris, whipping around the sky in a furious parade of destruction.  Just as suddenly, the tornado dissipates and the plants float, almost lazily, back down to the ground.

One minute, the storm seems miles away - hardly a threat.  The next, the line of doom is marching across your fields towards the house.  The cows seem to freeze in place, bracing for the impact.  The hot still air kicks up into a slight breeze, then turning to a furious cold wind.  The temperature drops ten degrees in seconds.

And the rain...

A moment ago, you thought you had time to refill your glass of lemonade.  Now your only thought is to find a wall against the driving rain.  The wind carries the drops sideways, first this way, then that.  Sometimes, you see gravity itself shut down as the drops fall upward for the briefest of moments.

The sky turns the most hideous shade of yellow-green as you dash for the tin barn to escape Nature's wrath.  Inside the barn, the noise is deafening, as hail pelts the tin.  Through the doorway, you watch as pearls fall from the sky and pile up like manna.  You shiver from the sudden cold and the good dousing you got running the few short feet to shelter.

Outside, it seems as if the world is ending.  At noon, the sky is blacker than midnight.  Through the various doors and windows of the barn, the rain seems to fall a different way in every direction - from the east over there, from the west over there, and on the north windows, torrents so heavy as to block the view past the panes.  By the south door, a fan of dampness spreads out on the cement floor as the mist swirls in the opening and settles down.

Inside your gut, the feeling is overwhelming.  You are hit with a sudden burst of fear and excitement, like a case of butterflies on steroids.  You have a powerful urge to run in circles and whoop and holler, though you have no clue why.  The air itself is charged - even the chickens out back are raising a furious racket, with roosters crowing and the hens clucking like Life itself depends on it.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the rain slows to a gentle drizzle.  The wind dies to a calm fall breeze.  The animals quiet down and that feeling of boiling emotion in the pit of your stomach ebbs away.  The pearls of hail have already started to melt and the clouds slowly loosen their choke-hold on the sunlight.  Green gives way to black, which parts to blue.

When you emerge from the barn, the world seems renewed, fresh, clean.  Even the dirt seems less dirty (though one step into the red Texas mud will ruin that illusion).  The sky appears scrubbed clean and the air itself has an effervescent quality, like the molecules themselves are sparkling.

In the fields, the plants are all bowed in the same direction, as if a giant foot had trampled them.  Look closely and you see a dozen fountains of dirt as the field creatures kick residue from their homes.  The grasshoppers, silent before the storm, are now clacking like crazy in all directions.  Across the fields, a tenuous cloud of insects forms just over the tops of the plants as they stretch to the Sun to dry their wings.

Here we are...

We see the storm approaching across the fields.  We've known for a long time it was coming.  The air is just starting to stir and all the signs are of impending cataclysm.  It's time to run to the barn.  The storm is here.  The fear and panic will start to rise shortly.  The animals, whose memories are dangerously short, will give in to the fear, but we have seen this before and can calm that simmering kettle of emotions in our bellies so that we are able to marvel at the power of Nature, rather than flee the temporary maelstrom around us.

The sky is turning, the wind picking up, the lightning leaping all around.  The storm is here.  It will pass, of course, but we must go through to enjoy what's behind it.

We've seen this coming from a long way off.  We saw the line of clouds, the angry tornadoes, the wall of rain.  We've made our preparations as best we can and taken shelter in the barn.  Nothing left to do but marvel at the dangerous beauty of what we call Life.  Many will be hurt, some will die.  There is no accounting for the seeming randomness of Universe.  Sometimes the rain falls up.

All is as it should be.

Is Reality Really Real?

Douglas Adams once posited that Earth and everything in it was assembled by an alien race to function as a supercomputer whose purpose was to find the Ultimate Question (the answer being already known to be 42).  Certainly, this hypothesis is about as valid as any other when it comes to understanding reality.

For at least the past couple of thousand years, humans have tried to define reality and about the best answer so far is something akin to the definition of pornography, we know it when we see it.  Some ancient philosophers concluded that reality was a demonic illusion designed to lead humanity into error.  In more recent times, films such as the Matrix series put forth the possibility that reality was a computer simulation designed to placate humans.  All equally plausible.

We used to think light came in seven colors, but now we realize that the very finite bandwidth we can see is just a tiny part of a vast progression of wavelengths spanning frequencies far beyond our ability to directly detect them.  Likewise, we used to think sound was only what we could hear, though now we are aware of far more.

We used to think reality was composed of three spacial dimensions, but cutting edge work is now opening the possibility of multiple dimensions of time and space.  We can even model them in our attempt to visualize things that our senses cannot detect.

In virtually every discipline, our boundaries of reality are constantly being destroyed and rebuilt somewhere further out, only to repeat the process again every few years or so.  Defining that thing we call reality is much like trying to nail water to the wall.  It is a futile exercise that we humans seems hell-bent on performing as if doomed, like Sisyphus, to an eternity of pointless labor.

It wasn't long ago that seeing people walking down the street talking to themselves was an indication that they had lost touch with our communal definition of reality.  Now we have incorporated this activity into our accepted boundaries by assuming those people are using cell phones with wireless headsets.  Thus, people who used to be insane are perfectly normal now simply by a small change in our collective definition of reality.

Conspiracy theories are generally thought to be outside the bounds of reality until they proven real.  Then suddenly, something that was once (violently) denounced becomes an undisputed given.  There was a time not too long ago when anyone who spoke of black helicopters was thought to be on the verge of insanity, yet few people dispute them now.  Same goes for chemtrails, weather manipulation and a dozen other topics.

It is getting increasingly difficult for me to deny what someone else considers real, despite the fact that their reality seems quite foreign to me.  For instance, Indonesians in general believe very strongly in the existence of ghosts and demons.  Though I find the idea intellectually repugnant, I cannot deny it when folks appear to look at these beings and react strongly to their presence though I detect nothing at all.  I also find most of the people having these experiences to be otherwise normal, intelligent and fully functional by my definition of reality.

Another example of this is the topic of evolution.  Millions of otherwise 'normal' people believe that this phenomenon is real despite a complete lack of evidence to back it up and all of the and logical roadblocks that make the theory virtually impossible to exist, much less believe.

The question of what is real still merits serious scientific study.  One group of scientists believe they have hit upon a way to prove or disprove that our entire Universe exists as a computer simulation in some greater reality.  They will attempt to create a new reality inside of a computer to test the rules by which we define reality, which leads to the intriguing possibility that their simulation would be just as real to the beings within it as ours is to us.

It also brings up a number of interesting thoughts regarding the various SimGames or the CGI program that was written to create the massive battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings series of films.  That program allowed the creation of digital creatures with a form of free will within the bounds of certain behavioral rules, not unlike human beings.

In general, we tend to believe that certain things we see on TeeVee are real, though the only objective reality connected with those images are the photons released by phosphors excited by streams of electrons.  The images appear to move even though they are nothing more than a rapid series of still images flashed before our eyes.

When it comes down to it, about the only solid definition of reality is the individual's belief that something is real.  We comfort ourselves by calling other people's experiences that we can't share 'hallucinations' or 'delusions'.  Yet to the person experiencing them, they are as real and tangible as the table I am sitting at to write this.  In some cases, we can even will ourselves to share an experience that was moments before 'not real'.

In a sense, then, both everything and nothing are real.  We cannot say that an experience we don't share with someone else is not real, it is just not part of the shared set of things we collectively consider reality.  In all cases, all reality is nothing more than belief.  The willingness of the perceiver to believe something is real makes it so, and if we all believe something, then we call it reality.

Once upon a time, the Earth stood at the core of a series of crystal spheres with lights attached to them all rotating around us.  That was quite real to the folks who believed it.  At one time, the Universe was comprised of only four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water.  Now we believe there are 117, with new ones beings discovered on a regular basis.  And at some point, we may redefine reality to make the whole periodic table obsolete and no longer part of our reality.

In the end, is there any such thing as objective reality?  Our entire concept of reality are constantly changing, both individually and collectively.  Where this really gets fun is trying to decide if we discover things because be believe they exist, or did they exist before we discovered them?  That may seem like a silly question, but who can honestly say that something existed before it was discovered?  Are we in fact creating our reality every minute of every day?

Just some fun ponders for a lazy Sunday afternoon.  Who knows...perhaps we can make unpleasant things go away by ceasing to believe in them.

Wouldn't that be fun?

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The Sunday Funnies

Here's an oldies but greaty from the musical philospher Tom Lehrer....