Making Magic

I read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett yesterday (published in 1911). I had polished off The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) a couple days earlier.  Both are commonly defined as “children’s literature” and never have we needed them more. With the occasional exception of Toad’s forays to recapture Toad Hall from the shoats and weasels, Wind in the Willows is remarkably free of any taint of violence - even those skirmishes produce only bumps and bruises, no one actually dies. The Secret Garden is a prototypical green novel, perhaps the archetypal example of the genre. For those of you who haven’t engaged in this joyful read in a decade or more, in The Secret Garden, a group of preteens employ the “Magic” of the renewal of spring growth in a long neglected garden to restore the physical and emotional health of two of their “secret group.” Their recovery is facilitated by a new, unexpected, powerful identification with, and appreciation of, the flora and fauna living in the garden.  The transformation is most obvious in the character Colin, who largely through what he identifies as the “Magic” of the garden, transitions from believing he will soon die, to the firm conviction that  “I am going to live forever!”

And what, you might ask, has turned my attention to these two “children’s books” from the previous century? Not really a difficult question. The motivation for this double dose of kiddy-lit Valium is the recent horrific dosage of the murder of school children here in America. Aside from the fact that the guns in the most recent bouts of carnage were purchased “legally,” the other common element appears to be that the murderers believed that they were acting from a position of moral certainty and that their victims represented a threat to a preferred society anchored in their own moral certainty.  I have also recently watched a couple of documentaries on Curiosity Stream about the rise of Hitler and fascism in the early decades of the 20th century. The parallels between the fascists of history and our current domestic crop are obvious.

I find it sadly curious that my two comfort children’s books were written as the world was sliding towards the “war to end all wars,” which turned out to be anything but.  Still there is, I do believe, an ethical component to existence. But I am much less sanguine regarding the notion that we have stumbled upon it.  Louis Pasteur said "Chance favors only the prepared mind."  While he was addressing the necessity of preparation in scientific investigations; I would assert that it would not distort the axiom too greatly to consider its application to ethical and moral considerations: Ethical and moral clarity favors only the open mind.  I view with significant skepticism those hucksters, religious zealots, and politicians on the right and left fringes who assert they have found the “truth” and conveniently close their minds to options and ideas they have yet to encounter or consider.

The comfort I draw from both Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden is that they both, perhaps naively, take place in a world where compassion and gentility are more valued than power and coercion. True, it is a world seemingly alien to the one in which I actually live, but then the great religious and philosophical texts of our civilizations also seem to depict realities still seemingly beyond our grasp. 

An interesting experiment. Contact your representatives in Congress and inquire about their feelings regarding the state of current gun legislation. If they assert that current legislation is sufficient, you will have learned two things about them; one a probability, the other a certainty. The probability is that their election campaigns are supported by meaningful contributions from the NRA (the National Rifle Association, for those of you lucky enough to reside beyond their nefarious influence.) The certainty is that they are wrong. If they wish to cling to their belief that there is nothing amiss with current gun control legislation you might suggest that they visit cemeteries near to these locations:

ROBB ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL

SANTA FE HIGH SCHOOL

MARYSVILLE-PILCHUCK HIGH SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

OIKOS UNIVERSITY

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

VIRGINIA TECH

WEST NICKEL MINES AMISH SCHOOL

RED LAKE HIGH SCHOOL

COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL

There they will find the graves of the 169 students, from elementary school to college, for whom, since Columbine, the current legislation did not suffice.

Enabling Hatred

Since we seem to be unable to implement the idea of “love one and other” perhaps it is finally time to stop enabling hatred. It should come as no surprise that here in our totally technology dependent nation that we need to focus on controlling the technology that enables our inexcusable, world leading, rate of death by firearms - guns. According to the New York Times, the US counts 45,000 annual gun related deaths. I don’t think this is a statistic that should have anyone chanting “We’re number one! We’re number one!”

 Yes, I have heard the old NRA inspired excuse, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” That is in some strange way true, but it ignores a vital lesson from history. The evolution of technology enables everything we do, everything we know. It was not so long ago - in the rather short history of humans on earth - that we believed we were the center of the universe. Uniquely blessed creatures on a uniquely favored piece of real estate comfortably located close to the one and only sun. And then Hans Lippershey invented the telescope back in 1608, and all bets were off. The constant evolution of optical and electronic telescopes since that point in time have brought us to the James Webb space telescope of today, peering back over light emitted 30 or 40 billion years ago, past countless stars and galaxies to help us understand the nature of our universe. Flip the telescope over and you have the microscope that revealed tiny creatures swimming around in blood, dirt, etc. A discovery that allowed us to shed the mysticism of shamans for the insights of science as we confront disease in the human body. 

Make no mistake about it, technology enables the capabilities of humanity - and we never voluntarily revert to last year’s model unless we discover that “the new way” carried unseen faults and danger. Albert Einstein - a world renowned pacifist - signed a letter, in August of 1939, to President Roosevelt encouraging the development of nuclear weapons to blunt Nazi efforts along those lines. After witnessing the previously unimaginable devastation caused by the bombing of Hiroshima, Einstein deeply regretted what he saw as his intellectual complicity in that desolation. But the atomic genie was out of the bottle, constrained only by intricate international agreements to stave off mutual self- destruction. Agreements whose fragility is being revealed by Putin’s raging. 

So technology is essentially culturally neutral, constrained only by legislation that defines its place in society. Now we have plastic guns that can be printed on 3D printers in the privacy of your own basement. We have legal kits to convert “legal” semi-automatic weapons into illegal fully automatic weapons. And, of course, we have the legal weapons used in the most recent atrocities at Robb Elementary School - deep in the heart of Texas, a state with some of the most lax gun control laws in the country. 

Now, again from the President to the coach of my Golden State Warriors, we are hearing cries of “Enough is enough!” It is time to reign in this deadly technology that is obviously out of control. I hope this latest round of indignation finally translates into meaningful legislation. But it is a hope I have hoped before. 

 In the meantime parents, teachers, pastors, rabbis, imams, big brothers and older sisters, teach the children well: Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.

The Secret Life of Trees

The Secret Life of Trees

Foster Harmony

 It is, perhaps, because this tenet is foundational to Distilled Harmony - my “path to appropriate living,” - that I find it so dismal when life unfolds in ways that are totally oppositional to it. The fact that the teenage murderer who killed 10 people and wounded 3 others in Buffalo, NY was a delusional racist white supremacist advocate of the “great replacement theory” allowed me to briefly hide behind the “He is insane. A kid blinded by the violent rhetoric of hate that seems almost everywhere in the world today. A crazy kid, an exception to the norm.” Then I learn about the 68-year old ethnic Chinese man in Southern California who murdered 1 and wounded 5 others during an attack on a church that was motivated by his hatred of people of Taiwanese descent. Well, there goes the crazy white teenager excuse.  Maybe everyone “out there in Southern California is crazy.” Then on the next link I get the latest from the war in Ukraine - which seems to have done the seemingly impossible by drawing republicans and democrats together, or mostly. This war is OK. 

Perhaps I am foolish to continue to believe - as Anne Frank, Dr. King, Mahatma Ghandi, Albert Einstein - and others far wiser than I, that deep down where it really matters, people are kind, caring, and compassionate. But it is getting harder. I am most frustrated by the incredible arrogance and false piety of contemporary religious leaders. I know of no faith that advocates something other than their version of “treat people the way you would like to be treated.” But somehow there are always implied exceptions. “Oh, you meant them too? I don’t know that I can go that far. They are, well, just different. Strange, you know?”

To clarify. Foster Harmony means foster harmony with everyone. And it starts at a personal level. You need to try to avoid personal disagreements - which is really hard especially here in the midst of the Covid pandemic. I am of the age and with a medical history that causes my oncologist to strongly suggest that I continue to wear a mask and practice social distancing in public and especially around children. I try my best.  Still I have folks point out to me that “you don’t need that anymore.”  My response? “I think I feel a cold coming on.” Much easier to lie than launch into a mask-muffled explanation. 

But here is a strange, admittedly bizarre, thought that is beginning to seem more plausible.  I was watching a documentary the other night - Netflix, I think the title was Unacknowledged. Anyhow, the basic assertion was that we - Earthlings, for lack of a better descriptor - have been in both direct and indirect communication with other far more advanced civilizations for several decades at least. These “unacknowledged” contacts have not been acknowledged - according to the documentary- for a variety of political reasons. But the one that struck me as most plausible was the assertion that “they” believed that we were, as a species, too violent and unreliable to be trusted to interact with these other far more advanced and - I assume - evolved civilizations.

They would, I muse, read one of my posts:

“Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm. Well, of course. And why don’t you do that?”

Dandelion

 It is a perfect day for dandelions, so I wandered out among them to look at a few.

While sitting on a bench I happened to look down and spied a tiny little gent - no more than an inch tall - striding amongst them. He was carrying an even smaller easel and a matching wooden case.

“My,” he murmured, with a slight Dutch accent, “look at all the sunflowers!” And opened his easel.

I slipped silently away so as not to disturb him, and made my way back to the asylum.

The Ultimate [Virtual] Video Game

Alright, let me assert right up front that none of us, even the youngest of the young, are not going to be around to play it, but I have a pretty good track record at predicting these future developments.   Back in 1998 I started an online children's publication company with a young novelist. We called it Chapter & Verse and had to build the whole site from scratch since no one else thought it was a good idea. Then Amazon and Barnes and Nobels swooped in, bye bye C&V.  Also, I was developing online courses years before the pandemic pushed education that way.  More recently, I was exploring marketing my images as Non-Fungible Tokens  - NFTs  - at least a couple of years before Dolly, and other less endowed pop and sports stars busted the field wide open. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

So why aren’t I as rich as Elon Musk? Well, that’s pretty simple. My strength is predicting. When it comes to taking the idea to market? The whole business side of things? Pretty clueless I’m afraid. But that isn’t a problem with this concept since, as I said, we won’t be around to play it. You know how prognosticators are always saying “So perhaps in 30 years, this that or the other thing, may become commonplace?” This is more like 300 years, if then. 

But let’s play with the idea.

First, we need to focus on the multiverse. Yup, here I go again. But I have been talking about the multiverse long before the silly movie about a multiverse of madness came out.  In truth, it may not be silly, I haven’t seen it. But the promos seem to be pushing PT Barnum's assertion that you could never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.  

But to clarify, and greatly simplify, there are three dominant flavors of ideas about the multiverse:

Flavor one asserts that our "here and now" universe is just one of a bunch of universes that all came into being simultaneously at the Big Bang and have been independently floating off around in spacetime ever since.

Flavor two has little baby universes growing out of those independent universes, initially sharing characteristics with their parents, but eventually popping off to go their own way.

Flavor three, and the one I like best, and upon which my ultimate video game depends, is the “many worlds” version.  You can visualize this version by looking at a pine tree.  The tree has a central trunk from which other branches grow. The cool thing in this flavor of the multiverse is that when we make significant choices in our lives we determine the primary direction of the central trunk of our “here and now” universe. But all those other choices that we did not make - the paths not taken, if you will - branch out and continue off in “another world” version of what our life would have been had we made that choice. Whew.

OK. So here is how the video game would work, and the challenges that cause me to posit that it will be a long, long time coming. First, we would have to determine the bottom of the tree, the “where it all began point” of our particular "many worlds." Logically this would be when we were born, and could begin to make independent choices.  Then the game would have to move on up the tree to get an understanding of each branch of the tree - each “choice point” that, in addition to the choice we made leading to the "here and now" around us right now, set some new worlds spinning off our central trunk - the paths we did not take. I talked about this a bit in the last post where in one world I became a forest ranger, and in another married my 6th grade sweetheart, remember? All of those "paths not taken" would be contained in the ultimate video game - the UVG.  Or maybe better,  UVVG for the "ultimate virtual video game" because, the UVVG would allow you to visit each of those many worlds, follow each of the paths not taken, while still returning to the “real here and now” in which we actually exist. 

Or not. And that “or not” is why I push my game out centuries in the future, because without that default to your “real here and now” the game does begin to take on shades of psychosis with an accompanying potential for addiction that makes fentanyl seem like MMs. I mean odds are that as we traipse around in those very real seeming "many worlds" we are going to find one or many alternative worlds that seem quite preferable to the one we currently inhabit. Perhaps a "perfect world!" So why not stay? Well, at the moment my thinking is we cannot stay because we aren’t really there. It’s a game, an artificial construction.  Maybe like Scrooge in the George C. Scott 1984 A Christmas Carol movie - my favorite version - you would "be there", but nobody in that world could see you or interact with you.  And at some point you have to take off the VR googles, or the batteries run out, or something, and the UVVG ceases to function. But you remember that perfect world, and there you are like a kid stuck with their nose against the window of the candy store - seeing, remembering, knowing, but never being able to go in.

I have these visions of the opium dens of the 1800s where people lay around in a stupor living, but not really, in their particular drug-induced fantasy world.  Pick your own version of these personal, ultimately destructive, fantasies. There are plenty of them out there in myths and fictions. And sadly in contemporary real life, with the addicts aided by today's descendants of opium.  And it is this easy digital path to psychosis and addiction, not to mention the incredible technological and the science/physics challenges to be overcome, that forces me to push the UVVG out there centuries in the future.

But if we could do it right, safely, harmlessly, wouldn't it be awesome?

 

PPP: Macro Mystery

 Hi All -

My better half suggested that I post this with no description and see if you can guess what it is and suggest titles. I will post what I call it in a couple days. 😜

Thoughts on Age, Insomnia, and Quantum Mechanics

With age, I am beginning to realize, comes an increased inclination for us to sleep like babies. We squirm around, we whine, we need to pee and poop, and no sooner than we wake up, we want to eat and finally nap.  Given this unfortunate reality we devise strategies to confront our golden age insomnia. My own ploy is fan, temperature, and iPad based. The fan circulates a breeze of no more than say, 65 degrees. The iPad is my answer to “white noise” that some friends and family address with an actual fan, or garden fountain. I have an app on my iPad called NatureSpace: Holographic Audio, which has dozens and dozens of audio tracks - crickets, cicadas, streams, waves, storms, rain, trains, etc., etc., etc. You name it and it is probably there. Now the cool thing about NatureSpace is that you can “blend it with other apps.” Like your favorite music app, like Pandora or whatever. So I confront my golden age insomnia with a variety of audio blends - classical violins and gentle rain, piano and distant trains, and other possibilities almost endless.

And what you may well ask, does my better half think of this?  Well, headphones seemed a good option for awhile, but failed to address the: “Hey! You are snoring!” “I don’t snore! You snore!” “No I don’t!” “Tape me!” "Tape You!"  debate. Which often leads to the age appropriate luxury of different bedrooms. Yes, it is true. When the kids finally move out you don’t only lose all that laundry, you also gain an additional bedroom or two. But I digress.

So, I asked myself, what soporific environment am I trying to create with my iPad/fan/temperature manipulation?  A number of childhood memories eventually came drifting back. In the summer we kids would occasionally sleep out on the screened-in porch. The best nights had breezes, rain, even an occasional storm. Similarly, most summers the family would vacation at “cabin number 12 in the pines” at Tower Hill Camp on the shores of Lake Michigan. There too, we kids would bunk in the screened-in porch. Breezes in the pines, occasional rain showers. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those sleep-inducing nights had followed me throughout my life; as a camper and then a counselor at scout camp in Ohio, as a counselor at a treatment ranch for “emotionally disturbed" 5 or 6 year-olds - my “itsy-bitsy-skitsies” - in Northern California, Scout camp in Austria. Nights with cool breezes, out in nature. Further, I came to realize that my current nighttime meditations would often send me drifting to those calming places and spaces. Sometimes inhabited, but just as often not. But I have recently come to understand that my “beat the insomnia” ritual is probably about much more than temperature and sound. It is about Harmony and the porous nature of existence.

Let me try to explain. Those perfect sleeping environments held no expectations for the future - those nights were somehow isolated in space and time. Perhaps the many worlds of spacetime? Floating? Harmonic? Protected? I’m not sure how to express it, They made the world go away? Or maybe made the world harmonic?

Which of course brought me back to Distilled Harmony. Back around 2000, in The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, I asserted that the unique “string” vibrations in our unique DNA determined the “chord” that defined us, and further determined whether we were in "harmony" or "discord" with the world in which we found ourselves at any particular point in time. People, places, sights, sounds, everything. We either hummed along harmonious in that moment of existence, or there were a lot of those “fingernails on the blackboard” moments - discord. Over the intervening years I have distilled those observations down to the four tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. It strikes me that my iPad and the fan moments are an obvious attempt to create at least some portion of those drowsy, soporific moments. But it further occurs to me that there may be more to it than that.

I remain intrigued with what seems to be the various special qualities of different types of sleep.  Why am I writing again here in tiny hours of the morning, knowing that even with my iPad and fan properly coordinated, were I to blank my screen and set the heating pad on low - did I mention the heating pad? - sleep would still be an hour or more away.  Yet, in mid-afternoon I can lay down my colored markers, and barely make it to my bed before sleep - often accompanied by technicolored dreams - overwhelms me.  No doubt a neurologist would offer an insightful medical explanation. Or a psychologist who would explain that I am still caught in a childhood mandate that I “should” sleep at night or Santa won’t come or whatever. While nap time is a time when I, as a retired adult with no lectures to prepare or research to pursue, can simply choose to sleep and hence do.  Could well be the case. But I am still more interested in what happens after I get to sleep, regardless of how I got there. Which is probably why I put so much effort in creating the ideal sleeping environment.

I am fascinated with the relationship between sleep and the “many worlds/quantum mechanics” issues I have mentioned here before. You see it seems quite reasonable to me that when we sleep - and the sleep scientists might provide some insight here as to when this might occur - we might well slip over the boundaries, perhaps through a personal "wormhole" between our many worlds and spend a little time in one of our alternative “worlds not chosen.” Neat idea, not?

So I am beginning to think of dreams, less as “dreams” and more as "quantum clusters" - sort of like cosmic candy bars, maybe mental mints.  They are, it seems reasonable to assume, unique otherworldly manifestations of Harmony, as reflected in the four tenets of Distilled Harmony.  Physicists tell us, although with less certainty it seems these days, that the laws of physics should manifest themselves consistently throughout the universe - as we know it.  It seems no less likely to assert that the tenets of Distilled Harmony are equally far-flung, with those very real seeming, hi-res, multicolored dreams being supportive data points.

Now, if I could only remember them better. 

Macro Silliness

Hi There -

Still getting used to the process, will try some more thoughtful constructions later with less stumbling around! 

Cheers!