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Catch the Wave
© Copyright 2004, Jonathan Zap
December 29, 2004
I hope my first blog entry (which follows) (jonathanzap at xanga.com) didn’t sound heartlessly indifferent to the tsunami victims. No doubt I would feel quite different if I was there—–but it’s also that I have trouble seeing death as tragic. What I see as tragic, is the suffering and fear of people leading up to death and surrounding it, the suffering of abandonment, guilt, despair that the living survivors are experiencing. Getting washed away by a tsunami, swept out of the Babylon Matrix in one swift, incontrovertible, planetary action….I see no reason to think that’s “bad”—I’d have to know what was lying on the other side of that shockwave for the tsunami experiencers. Were they going straight to hell because they were too ignorant to know that God is an extreme fundamentalist? Did their consciousness vanish into the collective unconscious without a trace of its individual essence? I don’t think so, though some visionaries have said that for those who have led chaotic, fragmented, dissolute, depotentiating, spiraling downward lives, you know, the type of lives most people lead, then maybe the center does not hold, there’s no there there, the person may already be dead while they are still alive, a sort of zombie/autopilot in a psychic state of terminal fragmentation and depression. But other visionaries believe that these seemingly devolving creatures are not spiritually dead, but more like sleep-walking beginners, who will have as many incarnations as they need to wake up. The late Terrance McKenna said that “Nature conserves novelty.” Evolution seems to be propelled by a will toward complexification, individual differentiation, and consciousness. Our present understanding of physics demonstrates that information of any kind is never really extinguished. The past can no longer be considered an inaccessible realm that has vanished into permanent nonexistence. When eternity is your database (to continue the computer metaphor) not just that thin slice of now, flickering by (with apologies to Eckart Tolle), then nothing that ever existed disappears from the database. Anything that ever had, as Alfred North Whitehead phrased it, “the formality of actually existing” is safely stored, is still happening, at the very least in the past, so that it is never extinguished, it merely becomes invisible to an observer whose point of view is enslaved to linear time. If the elephant takes a step or two backward then a blind, deaf, dumb, linear time bound observer may conclude that it has ceased to exist. For an awareness unbound by linear time, past and future are merely dimensions of possible movement like left and right.
When we go to sleep we are like a worker who punches a time clock, and when he punches out, his card sits on the shelf arrested in time, he has stepped out of work time. When we got to sleep we punch the linear time clock and the dreamtime is free to use linear time as part of narrative structure or to twist it anyway it wants, we can be an adult living in a house that we left at sixteen, and we can also be shown glimpses of the future, like my friend Owl dreaming of tsunami twelve hours before they hit. Our dreaming mind is aware that past and future are alive and mixable right now and always, things are lost only when you are bound by linear time. For example, you can only lose your wallet if you are bound to linear time, if you weren’t than you could always travel back in time to when you last had it. If you are unbound by linear time than even if your wallet fell into a black hole it would not be lost. Recently Stephen Hawking had to pay up a twenty year bet and admits that information can survive a black hole. Your wallet, though maybe atomically worse for wear, might become available in another universe, or, alternatively you can just snag it out of the past before it fell into the black hole. That’s probably the way to do it, because who knows what the intense fields around a black hole would do to those magnetic bands on your credit cards.
If we want more information on approaching the event horizon we can consult near death experience research where we get testimony of other mortals who have actually stepped right up to and maybe a little beyond that event horizon we call death. Anyone that gives this field more than a cursory glance will discover a mountain of evidence that no neurological materialist will ever explain as the fantasies of oxygen starved brains. For example, Kenneth Ring has studied NDEs on the university level for more than twenty years. His most recent book is about people who were congenitally blind since birth who have highly visual NDEs. Past the age of three or four if a person hasn’t learned to see, than even if vision is anatomically restored, their brain doesn’t know what to do with it. But when these never sighted experiencers have NDEs they may have accurate, panoramic vision that is fully comprehended. If you think an oxygen starved brain can do that than remind me to forward you an email about a millionaire from Nairobi that needs your help.
Once I had a certain number of out of body experiences I found that my fear of death crumpled up like an empty pack of cigarettes. Fear of death was just way too flimsy a structure to survive direct energetic experience of energy and awareness apart from the gravity bound body. My fear of death, which had once been quite strong, became more of an excitement and enthusiasm for graduation day. I had already experienced how much more alive and aware I could be without a gravity bound, flesh and blood body. These were not fantasies but the most direct of energetic experiences so vivid that I came to register this corporeal interlude before death as a withheld orgasm. I also realized that I would be relinquishing the greatest of learning and service experiences if I hurried that release along.
Around the time of the tsunami I was twenty-four thousand feet in the air, streaking hundreds of miles an hour across a deadly cold sky, and the only thing holding me up there was a couple of mechanical, fossil fuel devouring jet engines, and every time I trust my life to one of these well made but uncertain devices, I feel about the possibility of crashing what you might feel on a sunny, optimistic day about those two Power Ball tickets in your pocket. A bit unlikely, but you never know when your luck might turn, and somebody has to win. The ad slogan for the New York Lottery used to be: “You got to be in it to win it.” That might be one of the reasons I love flying and aircraft, You got to be in it to win it. Think about it, a mechanical device that lives off the liquefied corpses of dinosaurs is the only thing you keeping you from a 25,000 foot tumble, so If you’re in it, you could win it. I find that pleasantly exciting, my only reservation is that I would strongly prefer that the fuselage not catch fire—–I sort of imagine the world’s longest and fastest downhill roller coaster ride with a painless fade to black at the end. Come to think of it a tsunami wouldn’t be a bad wave to ride out of the Babylon Matrix, perhaps a stressful few seconds of struggle and confusion, more like tumbling through a birth canal, and then you may wake up on the shore of a new world. Again, it is the tsunami survivors that I feel for. Depending on what you’ve been doing with your incarnation when the wave hits, a tsunami might be an aquatic version of the rapture for a given spirit that is working out a dysfunctional, codependent relationship with body in a world of environmental destruction, dominated by corporations and nation states.
The Babylon Matrix has a satanic sense of humor; it delights in mixing truth and falsity in strange and seductive ways. Most people hear “Catch the Wave” and subliminally scan their blood sugar to see if they are suffering from Coca-Cola Deficiency Syndrome. But maybe the Babylon Matrix has also disguised hidden reset buttons for us, and is sending us a cheerful winking acknowledgement that bad as things might get, there’s always a chance to Catch the Wave, so turn that frown upside down, that elusive Catch the Wave/Get Out of Jail Free Card might be waiting for you at your very next turn…..
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
| © Jonathan Zap, 2004
World Line: The first blog entry of this incarnation: December 26, 2004 Less than twenty-four hours ago, there was one of the four strongest earthquakes since 1900. Strong enough to disturb the earth’s rotation. The resulting tsunami has killed 40,000 people so far, a million are homeless. My friend Owl dreamt of tidal waves twelve hours before it happened, and while Owl was dreaming I was reading Russell Targ’s new book, Limitless Mind that talked about clairvoyant dreams extensively and provided much empirical evidence of precognition. Earth changes and personal changes seemed to correspond in this case, corresponded in timing, not necessarily in magnitude or tragic intensity. I know it can be a function of narcissism and ego centrism to see world events and inner events as paralleling, but they do parallel, not just for me, but as an essential organizing principle of reality. As the alchemists put it: “ As above, so bellow .” Given so much human testimony, and the support of quantum mechanics, it would take a deep commitment to the irrational to believe in a firewall between inner and outer. So it doesn’t seem fantastical, grandiose or coincidental that this evening, less than twenty-four hours after the earthquake and tsunami, I noticed that there was an inner shifting of my tectonic plates, a shift in my center of gravity. This wasn’t a thought or interpretation; it was a global shift that I couldn’t help but to recognize. It feels like a developmental shift, a deeper grounding, a calming of unworthy enthusiasms. This inner shift seemed to flow out of a very ordinary decision. I realized today that my 18’ RV was at the quit while you’re ahead point mechanically, still movable, but not for much longer if I kept using it. Shortly after this mundane (but significant to me) realization, my friend Sean pointed out that a mutual friend, Dave, was trying to get rid of an old Toyota truck with a camper top. Immediately a romance with this object began to play in my imagination—-how perfect it would be to take to gatherings, enough room to sleep in the back, etc. Interwoven with these roseate-hued fantasies of my future life wedded to this object, were anxieties about getting stuck with a high mileage vehicle that might be looking for a new sugar daddy to get it that new transmission, etc. Later in the evening, I was out canvassing for the Women’s Awareness Fund, talking to people about the horrible fate of women in fundamentalist Islamic regimes. In some future blog entry I’ll probably have a lot more to say about this cause, and canvassing itself, which for me has been one of the great developmental practices of this lifetime. Canvassing this evening was not all talking, it was more like islands of talking with long stretches out in the cold night air, three or four empty homes in a row ….and these were moments of general reflection and felt oddly healing. There was a change of pace here; this was my first day back in Boulder after eleven days in New York City, visiting with my family in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and catching up with friends and culture in Manhattan. And now, with the startling change of scene that jet travel makes possible, I was back in Boulder, skyscrapers and subways had dissolved and I was walking down a long street of houses, the Flatiron Mountains looming vaguely above me in a darkly clouded sky that smelled of snow. I had reached a nexus of odd and entangled occurrences. Owl had emailed me originally asking for dream interpretation. Why was he dreaming of tidal waves? Before I could answer, the planet provided a very literal interpretation. The clairvoyant dream sent to me was a thread of connection for me to the lead story in the news, but continuing the theme of odd entanglement I was to have a still more personal connection with the other lead story in the news. This story was the headline of the New York Times today and the top center photo on their front page as well. There was unexpected chaos with the air travel in this country, a computer melt down at a subsidiary of the airline I flew on, huge numbers of people camped out in airports, their Christmas flights canceled, ten thousand people separated from their luggage, and as it happened I am one of them, still separated from a huge back pack jammed with essential items including most of my cold weather clothing and that all season pillar of modern life: the cell phone charger. Funny how you never really appreciate cell phone chargers till they’re gone…. I do have more cold weather gear inaccessibly off in storage, but there is only so much you can put in an 18’ RV and you learn to have just one very good version of certain essential items like winter boots, gloves, coat—-so I had to walk home with just the lightest of pile jackets in freezing cold after midnight last night. And today I had to canvass without that stuff either. But it was fine, part of me felt refreshed by having to struggle with the elements a bit. I was one of ten thousand people with missing luggage rather than one of 40,000 drowned by tsunami—-what a shock wave that had to be for the people engulfed by it. Boulder, over a mile high, is a tsunami free zone, but any of us could be hit by an infinite variety of possible shock waves at any moment. The tsunami shock wave from the point of view of my ego was what the Chinese call, “ The fire on the other side of the river .” My missing cell phone charger was the fire on this side of the river. But even more significant than my cell phone charger is the fact that we live in interconnected waves of patterned energy, ripples of awareness. Clairvoyance is possible because of the nonlocality of awareness, because it is all one giant web of interconnections, interconnections that transcend linear time. And once my cell phone runs out of battery power, psychic interconnection will be the only form of nonlocal communication left to me. (Just a couple of hours after I wrote this there was another example of the precognitive. I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep and the anxious fantasy of getting a knock on the door from the police played in my mind. This fear was grounded in an actual occurrence of same a few weeks ago, before I had my present parking spot on private property. After years of getting away with sleeping in my RV illegally in various streets and parking lots, I got that dreaded knock on the door. About five minutes after I had the police door-knocking fantasy (this was at 2am) I heard a vehicle drive up and a car door slam, and then there was a loud knock on my door! As I headed toward the door I suddenly realized that this was not the police but my luggage getting back to me, and the person who brought it appeared to be something of a mutant, and we talked about earthquakes, tsunami and airline chaos for about two minutes.) While I was reading about nonlinear interconnections in Limitless Mind, threads of interconnection were forming to two collective shockwaves—–one tragically cataclysmic, one mundanely cataclysmic. The connecting thread to the tragically cataclysmic event was more removed—an email from a dreamer—-and the other connecting thread to the mundane cataclysm was far more immediate and directly influential to my bodily existence. Both shockwaves came at the same time as the shockwave of sudden scene change—–breakfast in the Bronx with my parents and by midnight in Boulder walking a mile and a half in the freezing cold without a coat and sleeping in my RV. As I was out canvassing this evening I recognized a shift of lifestyle was now called for. I would not get the truck or any vehicle. I would use my RV as a home, instead of a home/vehicle. It was better and healthier for me not to get another vehicle, to become a bike and bus person, workable in Boulder, not always comfortable in the Winter, but exercise and dealing with elements much better for me than sedentary comfort, all too easy in this culture to be seduced into coach potatohood, going from one chair to another, from living room couch, to bucket seat or sofa in the car, to swivel office chair, back to car seating, then reclining at home in front of television. All sorts of things in me seemed to shift with this seemingly ordinary life style decision, or actually, realization , I just felt an inner part of me recognize that, for me, (I am not generalizing this for others, or toward me in the future) having a vehicle was more trouble than it was worth, and that I would benefit from being another step removed from consumer life style, and that besides the beneficial subtractive aspect of this choice path, that I would additionally benefit from more interaction with the bicycle, outdoors, weather, feeling the effects of sun, wind, rain and snow far more than most car people. I may likely feel differently at any point in the future. I’m not trying to pull a Thoreau here, and you probably know that he didn’t walk his talk anyway. I am madly in love with my new laptop, it does more for me than a vehicle right now, I still love objects, I am simplifying my life to an 18’ stationary RV loaded with high tech gadgets, not a mud hut. I’m not saying that I’m doing this to lower greenhouse gases or for world peace…and somewhere in my subconscious mind I may have latent fantasies of a future with a shiny new hybrid with an eighteen speaker stereo. This wasn’t a transcendental realization, but this choice was part of a shift of inner tectonic plates, and seemed to come from a place of deeper maturity than the part of me that indulged anxious romantic fantasies with the Toyota Truck with camper top. The occurrences and inner changes were entangled threads, part of a musical tapestry of resonating threads playing itself out. And my personal thread is merely entangled with the larger tapestry—–how could it be otherwise? X Mass, another disturber of equilibria, was mixed into this; I chose the annual retail festival of 12-25 as the day for me to fly out of New York, figuring the airport would be a lot less crowded than the days that surround X Mass. The airline chaos did result in my getting switched to a first class seat where they brought me many free glasses of red wine. And now I realize another temporal milestone, this is also the time zone of my first blog entry of this incarnation. When I heard about the the severe shortage of websites a couple of years ago I took action and created Jonathan Zap’s Pavilion at alignment2012.com. And when I heard recently how earth changes are contributing to an acute shortage of blogs for people to read I knew I had to take action again. The least I can do for all the people who lost their lives in the tsunami, and for all the people in this country who were inconvenienced by airline chaos, and for all the unlucky people not living in Iraq who are still waiting for the Bush administration to bomb and invade them into freedom and democracy, the very least I can do is to create a self-referential blog to honor them, to show them there’s at least one red-blooded American willing to step up to the plate and knock out a blog entry for them at least once a week. You know what I mean man, like Blogs not Bombs , like a free blogs relief program to help all those starving and abused people. That’s just the very least I can do. And for all those Chinese government officials that are reading this: Free Tibet . That’s just a sample of the kind public benefit announcements you can expect from this blog. Now, more than ever, the world needs my blog entries, I can feel that. One blog-ring to rule them all, and in the darkness of cyberspace, bind them. And of course you are reading this in my future—- my first Blog entry, which I am writing in my RV, no actual blog even created yet, but this is a thread, or what in quantum mechanics they call a “ world line ” and it is having some effect on a future world line, you, the reader, reading this at this moment (which is in my future) and it is now recognized even by science that the future affects present and past, and that means that the thread of your world line is an influence on me as I write this. And when I asked the I Ching about creating a blog when the impulse arose this evening, I got #32 Duration turning into # 28 Preponderance of the Great, the changing line I got said, “It is not our responsibility to control or direct others. Allow them their own path, and keep to yours. If the paths meet, fine. If they do not, also fine.” So I create the first strand of zeros and ones forming the words of my initial blog entry, a world line that I am on at this moment and I know that this thread will probably resonate with some other world lines, the readers (if any), and their number or existence need not be my concern, the Creative, the Tao, the great tapestry, weaves the threads that are meant to resonate…. |
