Tag: quantum theory

Thunder, Perfect Mind.

How big is the Universe?

very big..

with mobius strip blueprints.

People who think about such stuff, other than those trying to perfect techniques of delayed ejaculation and have already mastered their times tables, generally fall into one of three groups..

each one of which has its own Quantum Demon to wrestle with.

The first bunch, the Old School, like their Universe all squared away, limited in space and time. The second lot, Hawking’s Hotspurs, are a bit more mystical and have their Universe expanding. The third, mostly consisting of undergraduates in possession of their first ever quarter of skunk,

say its infinite and goes on forever, dude.

The Quantum Demons that preside over each mob have the rational mind by the hip. The First confonts the Old School with what might lie beyond their sign in the verge..

‘No Parking, Universe non-existent beyond this point”.

The second, the Big Bang Demon, feasts on the arguement that the Universe expands at such tearing speed we cannot creep up on it fast enough with a tape measure. Even the speed of light has a number and the fact that you can’t sharpen your pencil quickly enough, or live long enough to chase after all the zeros involved, doesn’t mean that the number, though unimaaaaginably big, isn’t out there and therefor the question, ‘What is supposed to lie beyond?”, still remains. Put more simply, ‘What are we supposed to be expanding into?’

The third Demon takes a large toke himself and asks, ‘If the Universe is three dimensional, twiddly warps in time and space not withstanding, how can it contain that which is infinite?

Err..

The Universe cannot go on forever and yet it must. You can appreciate why the story of a minor god, Ialdabaoth also known as Yahweh, creating it All out of pique at his Mum, who’d sent him to his luminous cloud for bad behaviour..

should become so popular.

It by-passed the paradox.

God made it.

Problem solved.

I like the idea of Autogenesis, that which makes itself. Somehow, something that comes into existence because It Wants To dwarfs the question of it’s inside leg measurement, however mighty.

At the micro cosmic end of the scale you find a similar paradox. It also has to do with time and space doing what they shouldn’t.

Matter is and is not.

Fortunately, these things are supposed to be a mystery.

‘I am the utterance of my name.” Thunder, Perfect Mind.

Hoping for redemption at some point in the future on the basis of being sorry for something you did in the past is not only designed to rip you out of the present. It gives you the idea that everything can be understood. And that’s why there is no real wonder anymore.

because you have to be able to acknowledge that you haven’t actually got a fucking clue, not even if you are awake or asleep, to find wonder in any one moment.

I knew a Professor of Comparative Religion from Oregon who approached his work in a very rational and academic way. Eventually the mysteries of all these religions began to plague him and he got really obsessed by that-which-could-not be-spoken. In particular he was tormented by the Buddhist concept of Desirelessness.

He heard there was a great Buddhist master visiting in the next state and drove all night to meet him. When question time arose he jumped up and said,

‘but how can you desire desirelessness?’

The master shrugged and said, ‘It just doesn’t bother me.’

At some point contradiction collapses into paradox and rather than confuse and agitate it soothes and nourishes.

‘We are all alone, together.’ Buddhist proverb.

Its supposed to be a mystery.

Time, Eternity and Bathtime.

The recent stink created in scientific circles by Stephen Hawking’s angry letter to Big Bounce theorists, Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb, is as interesting to Psychology as it is to Physics.

Firstly the letter claims that there can be ‘no disputing’ the current model championed by Hawking and his friends, of an ever expanding Universe. This is curiously authoritarian for ‘objective’ scientists.

He was angry, you say… How interesting.

Then the letter cited just how many scientific documents exist to support the dominant model.

Our dick is way bigger than yours.

most scientific..

But even stranger, they then went on to say that Ijjas et al were disrespecting the scientific community by their research and rubbishing the research of the signatries, which is a glorious piece of paranoia….

By holding your opinion you are attacking me and destroying everything I stand for..

So, what makes otherwise level headed chaps suddenly become Unquestionable Authority believing that Vengeful Dissenters are out to get them?

when paradigm shifts turn your world upside down.

Something unknown is doing I don’t know what.

Ijjas et al have some compelling evidence gleaned from the European Space people, a mapping of the most ancient light, Cosmic Microwave Background, by the space probe, Plank. What they found was a puzzle and didn’t fit with what you might expect if you subscribed to the accepted veiw.

And so they said as much.

The frenzy with which this was then received is typical treatment of all mould breakers. They get pilloried and called into line like apostates. The leading lights of their day become the old guard, defending against innovation, unable to bear that their story might be but one among many.

Quantum theory itself asserts that what we see out there mostly has to do with us, so these riled physicists have had a raw nerve gouged somewhere..

what might it be?

The problem is that Science finds it very difficult to deal with some of its own conclusions….

especially when they are decidedly mystical.

And you don’t have to be a physics major to see it. The current model says that the Universe came into being 13 billion years ago. How can it make sense to say that Time came into being at a point in time? It’s a tautological argument whatever ‘age’ you put on the Universe. The reason it’s a tautological is because you have to refer to a moment in time in which you aver Time was created..

which is a tad circular.

Moreover, it is in the nature of Time to tick, and so the mains of a time when Time began, can be additionally garnished with the question of what was going on at elevenses the previous day…

The Big Bang theory is more than a scientific theory. It is a creation myth. Those that tend it, the true believers, do so with curiously sacred and tetchy devotion. Questioning into what does the Universe expand is a bit like asking an Australian Aboriginal to explain how bandicoots came from Ka-ro-ra’s armpit.

Ijjas et al propose a ‘Big Bounce’, contraction and expansion, which suggests recurring life-cycles and sentience…

within which the Universe is perhaps more of a three dimensional Mobius Strip. If you went as fast as your legs could carry you, armed with enough biscuits, you’d soon approach Earth…

The veiw that our telescopes continually approach the boundary of Creation leads to a strange condundrum. Since matter cannot approach the speed of light without becoming infinitely dense, the light of the Big Bang must precede it’s material manifestation, which means that the light of the Origin exists outside the conceivable Universe let alone the measurable Universe…

and all of a sudden Orthodoxy is plunged into sacred fire.

Not disssimilar to the goal of Consciousness as suggested by the Gnostic gospel of Thomas….

“I will give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, and what has not arisen in mind.” Thomas logia 17

that which is both ‘the light’ and no-thing.

Thomas Kuhn observes that folk on the cusp of paradigm change tend to behave in the same way no matter which era you find them in. They carry pitchforks and torches. He defines science as….

“a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions”. T. Kuhn

Which is why we can live with the paradox that recognises being hugely overweight is problematic whilst owning more stuff than you need is aspired to as the very symbol of success.

Can you imagine how bright the torches would burn, how pointy the garden gear, if a significant body of folk suddenly got it into their heads that having more than you need is a form of obesity and something to be troubled about?

…and that the ubiquitous collective value we’re sold, to be rich and famous, is the same as wanting to be fat? If a person’s body weight reflected average wealth then the richest of our species would put blue whales to shame.

On the side of obscene, slavering wealth, is the conditioning of centuries that associates money with salvation and the right to rule. We regard material gain as deserved and even ordained which means the stuff you stole also has the numinous power to confer legitimacy on the theft and transform it into something noble.

One of the greatest symbols of this in the West is the Spear of Longinus, now housed in the Vatican treasury, the spear that supposedly pierced the side of Christ. When Hitler invaded Austria the first and only thing he did that day was to take possesion of the Spear of Longinus from where it was kept at the time in Vienna.

The gilded Spear magically confers legitimacy on the owner, no matter how it has been obtained and therefor represents a symbolic equation between wealth/possession and the favour of the gods.

Since piety replaced good works as the index of salvation as early as the Council of Nicea in the fourth century, it became difficult to tell saint from sinner. Charity no longer counted for much, and so piety had to be inferred by the extent to which god’s blessings might rain down upon you. Wealth and virtue become synonymous, resolving once and for all the puzzle of spiritual poverty being dolled from a golden chalice.

Scientific theories are just like the spear of Longinus, we imbue them with the Magic of Authority and get very peeved when someone claims their relic to be more holy. Creeds of any kind are dangerous. They let us live with horrendous contradiction and stamp all over originality.

Personally I like the Big Bubble theory over the Big Bang and the Big Bounce. This theory says that somewhere God is creating the Universe with bubble bath.  Our galaxies are all in the the skin of the bubbles which sometimes burst but get re-made with just a little splashing. Not quite in Eternity, yet neither in time, life emerges in the unimaginable vastness of the Monad’s wash tub.

 

 

 

 

The Crocodile’s Jaws.

As part of Empire’s ‘special forces’ in Africa I was once caught up in a covert operation to murder a group of dissident fighters who’d defected to our side. They’d been given a clean uniform, a shiny semi-automatic G3 and a square meal… without really thinking any of it through… They must have wondered at their sudden good fortune, all freshly laundered and all.

Most were taking the opportunity to exact tribal revenges or personal vendettas. The problem was that they also had a check list of grievances which had become diplomatically, ahem, ’embarrassing’.

We were eight gunners in the belly of a Crocodile, 16 tons of armored personnel carrier, roaring to its rendezvous with death. En route, the mission is unveiled. Gooks. Lure them out. Kill them.

During the rest of the journey I sat in shock, trying to think through what I had just been ordered to do, and as more of an invitation to a party than a command..

…you are in the grip of Evil….

They are defectors, untrustworthy, here today and gone tomorrow, taking pot shots at you along the way with your own weapons..

…you are in the grip of Evil….

They’ll turn against you one day. You can’t trust them! Strike now while they are unprepared and easily beguiled by treachery….

I mean strategy…

…you are in the grip of Evil….

The innocents were teased from the bush with bully beef and cigarettes. When the trap was sprung I remained bolted to my seat, immobilized from within. A woodlouse in the debris at the bottom of the vehicle was trying to negotiate my bootlace. Would it go over or under? Which way forward? What would he do?

When the firing  stopped, the officer glared at me furiously. Refusing an order could have fetched me an eon in the Dog Box but he said nothing.

And so I started to chew. If I can refuse an order and get away with it something other than the ordinary rules of war are at play. Moreover, if allies can be killed today for the inconvenience they might pose tomorrow then what about one another? What about the guy sitting next to you?

And what might motivate such hideous cupidity? The answer was in the momentary anguished screams of the dying, which is what the Crocodile ultimately fed upon, the beseeching howl of betrayal confirming them as sacrifices to the Dark Face of God.

What any of us were fighting for had nothing to do with freedom or any political ideals. The scenario I had just witnessed was the real covert endgame. It seems like gratuitous carnage or ‘collateral damage’, until you consider the awful possibility that when strategy assumes the shape of rite and sacrifice we weren’t just soldiers anymore, we were priests at the devouring altar of Mammon, disavowed dark face of Yahweh. His PR makeover into New Testament Shepherd could be swung at a pinch but He has to be fed with offerings of Humanity to do it, culminating in the current  famines in Yemen and Somalia which are engineered not just by economic policies of greed or the propping up of corrupt regimes for gain…

..but to feed the maw of gods we will not name.

War proliferation and economic infrastructure dependent upon perpetual conflict is the tip of the iceberg. It’s about way more than money and greed. Its about the quasi-religious experience of being sunk into the Collective,

of being Quanteam,

and acting out the denied underbelly of Yahweh.

”The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” CG Jung

With the prospect of nuclear war greater than it has been for decades we would do well to remind ourselves, not just of the dangers of escalation but of nuclear weapons specific purpose, civilian deaths,  game changing technology for gloves off diplomacy. Its the innocent people we’re ultimately after. You don’t nuke a city because you don’t like the mayor. Nor even because you are pissed at its citizens. We are through the looking glass of collateral damage. The dark god requires sacrifices. Its His thing, with a History way older than the Allied carpet bombing of Dresden, the Holocaust, or the Armenian genocide.

Acre in Judea. 1052 AD. Richard the Lionheart bravely kills every civilian in the entire city. 20,000 people. Oh and Charlegmane, he was full of convert or die. Some of the ones who were converted still had to die… only quicker. By the sword instead of the garrot. I wonder if they were grateful for that mercy?

and lets not forget Edward Longshanks beaching the Jewish citizens of London in Morecambe Bay, 1275, to be swallowed by the tide as surely as Andromeda was offered up to Poseidon….

Soon after the Crocodile’s feast, all the blokes involved got taken out by one of the only two Sam7’s fired in the Rhodesian war. I would have been aboard the Bell chopper myself that day had I not hurt my back and called in sick…

The fittest did a rather poor job of surviving. My troop had been cut down from thirty men to a mere four. We remaining Sons of Empire were treated as pariahs by the others in the Commando. They wouldn’t  eat with us. Men refused transfers to our unit or pulled strings to avoid it. We were bad luck.

Strangely, when the troop was disbanded and we were individually assigned to other units we then became talismen of survival, canny warriors imbuing each host troop with new life and hope..

despite the obvious reality that we were being cut to pieces.

and despite all the ardent blood sacrifices to the Dark One..

This flick from one state to its opposite is what the ancient Greeks called Enantiodromia. It’s the kind of thing that seems terribly unlikely, yet actually describes both matter and consciousness rather well,…

”This phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counter position is built up, which first inhibits conscious performance and subsequently breaks through….” C G Jung.

Enantiodromias occur at a sub-atomic level as well. In fact, life as we know it seems to depend on the unlikelihood of matter being one moment a wave and the next a particle while blinking in and out of ‘reality’. Its as unlikely as going for tacos at an icecream stall and still getting lucky, or an entirely indoctrinated man refusing an order…

and getting away with it,

followed by surviving something that kills everyone else.

Enantiodromias presuppose a ‘quantum superposition’, or Self, a non-material state wherein these opposites are tolerated as paradox.

Within the quantum ‘superposition’, matter is in an unquantifiable state, you could even say it both does and does not exist. It ‘pre-exists’ in contiguity with everything else. Consciousness is like-wise an unquantifiable soup until something observes, witnesses, mirrors, even a woodlouse will do, compelling realization from the Belly of the Crocodile. That which pre-exists, knowing right from wrong, takes form as a definite state.

Being here now, the unrehearsed messiness of emerging from the wave function and becoming what you are not, is then further complicated for both consciousness and matter when time and distance come into play.

It seems there isn’t any.

Old Man Physics says that if you lie in wait for a Quantum Creature on a jungle path after you’ve seen it leave its lair, it will in fact arrive at its destination by a different route. The act of lying in wait changes the past. If quantum creatures are separated and housed in different laboratories what you do to the one affects the other. Distance is a construct.

”If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t.” Feynman.

Participation mystique, a term coined by Levy-Bruhl to describe the  soup of collective identification with one another, a state of shared psychic reality like the quantum superposition, containing the components of individual identity without suffering their trials, just outside real time and space, removed from any circumstantial trouble and gloriously protected from all moral consideration.. allowing men to play dice with the Universe in a way the Gods would never dare….

similarly defies conception.

Just before my decimated troop was disbanded, I passed out one day on the parade ground. I was carried to the medic’s tent who looked me up and down and asked, ‘have you got a girlfriend?

er, yes. Jane.

Is she pregnant?

er, I don’t think so, why?

Because you have the worst case of morning sickness I have ever seen…

Many years later and out of the Blue, Jane’s younger sister called on me and told me that she had in fact been pregnant at the time and had an abortion without letting me know.

how does that happen?

You hear about fathers-to-be having sympathetic experiences with their partners, but without being told and thousands of miles away?

Distance doesn’t matter.

Like the enmeshed sub-atomic particle, individual consciousness is undivided from its superposition in a way that bypasses the constraints of time and distance like phones or first class post. This enmeshment of the wave function is what Rupert Sheldrake calls Morphic Resonance.

This most excellent Quantum Biologist refloats the Gnostic idea that matter and life pre-exist as morphic fields of possibility which are both non-material and have memory.

It turns out that even dense materials have a morphic field which ‘informs’ the process of crystalization, something which can be observed by the way in which synthetic crystals grown in laboratories become easier and quicker to create over time. Laboratories starting up on the other side of the world synthesize the crystals at the new faster rate despite using all the same old equipment. Something akin to a neural pathway, but outside three dimensional space and time, enables the crystallization process to ‘remember’ how it is done.

The simplest of creatures have morphic fields that help them ‘know’ who they are, cuttings grow roots, the lizard his tail, the segmented lugworm a whole new body, and what is learned  by one member of a species becomes part of the storehouse of knowledge of all its other members wherever they are. Sheldrake taught a sample of rats to achieve complex tasks. A separate second control group then took only a fraction of the time to learn the tasks once the first group had them well mastered.

Morphic fields do more than share memories. They share information. The introduction of milk bottles in the 20’s led to the surprise discovery that once one Blue-tit had worked out how to get the top off the milk bottle, the news then traveled faster than Blue-tits can fly, let alone breed. So, no new genetic markers or mutations in the mix.  When delivery was interrupted by WW11 and several generations of Blue-tits had come and gone, the new generation knew straight away what to do.

What does it mean?

When I bought myself out of the military for the princely sum of $125 I went walkabout in Central Africa for a few months to try and get my head straight. I had just left Kasama, south of the Burundi/Zambian border where I spent the night. I walked for miles along an empty road into the sprawling endless forest. All of a sudden I became panic stricken as it occurred to me, I cannot say how, not in words or images but as a visceral impression, that I was about to be arrested before the hour was up.

I rushed into the forest with my heart pounding, emptied my bag and sorted through all my stuff to see what there might be to incriminate me in any way, anything that might give anyone the slightest reason to get offended..

So, I buried everything that associated me with my past, an old bush hat, a set of para wings sewn onto a shirt. Letters with personal stuff in them.With about twenty minutes to go I got back on the road to meet my fate. Nothing and nobody. Still, strange shit will happen so I squared my shoulders and walked around the bend in the road.

Nobody, just jungle.

I began to relax and walked on. Perhaps I’m just a bit paranoid? After another ten minutes I got to the lip of a shallow escarpment that looked out over a broad valley. I could see for miles and waaay down the road.

Nobody. Not even locals, let alone horrible policemen. Just the cicadas.

Four minute warning. I began to laugh..

At that moment a young couple from Malawi drove up behind me, the first vehicle all day, perhaps taking pity on my clearly hysterical state. They kindly gave me a lift as far as the road block three miles away, where I was arrested exactly on time.

Kibbles for Schrodinger’s Cat.

Scientist Steven Weinberg says that the corrosion of religious belief by science is a good thing because of what an awful God it is that’s shared by Christians and Muslims alike…

…but while his character analysis may be spot on it does tend to make a neurosis of anything other than ego based psychologies and ignores discoveries in quantum physics that seem to demonstrate that there is something truly mysterious, mystical, about the relationship between Consciousness and Matter, between Time and Eternity.

‘The Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that.’ ― Erwin Schrödinger.

just as the person who is fifty experiences themselves as the same person as they were at forty no matter what has happened in the interim.

Quantum theory uses an intertesting term, the ‘quantum superposition’ in which an atom can pre-exist in a combination of multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes. Curiously, this is also true of Consciousness.

”The unborn work in the psyche is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself,” CG Jung

Shrodinger’s cat experiment, in which a cat in a box would be killed if a random particle was detected by a gieger counter and could therefor be considered both alive and dead until you’d checked up on it, was meant as a mockery of the prevailing ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ which supports the idea of quantum superposition and can demonstrate the truth of it with experiments during which light behaves as a wave or as a particle depending on whether the experiment is being observed at the time…. Even if it is being merely monitored by detection equipment…

matter playing peek-a-boo…

Consciousness, too, exists in multiple, contradictory and sequential forms that seem to have very little to do with one another not unlike a recent scientific discovery which has determined that some species of dragonfly shares no DNA with its nymph. At some point in the metamorphosis the organic state of the nymph not only dies to itself, it is reduced to its most basic atomic constituents…..

from which will emerge a three gram jump jet.

For those who have a Newtonian point of veiw, life is like being a dot on a page. It cannot imagine a line any more than a line could imagine a page, or a page a book. Yet what seems particular to all life is this  incomprehensible transition from one kind of life to another.

Something I console myself with when I’ve lost perspective in all the chaos, is that whether science or religion is right in their eternal wrangle about the origin of life, it is an indisputable fact that at some moment, from a ball of millenial flame now cooled sufficiently for rain to fall and support life…

Life did just that, and at 2.34pm one Tuesday..

Life blinked on.

Consciousness too, blinks on from multiple potential states beyond our comprehension and navigates a passage through the world chiefly by virtue of the attitude held towards that quantum superposition from which it emerged..

and whether or not it allows itself to be altered by involvement.

An example of quantum theory at work in fairy tales can be found in the comparable stories of, ”The Devil’s Golden Hairs,” and ‘Brother Lustig,’ both of which involve an encounter with the quantum wave function of Hell.

In the first story a boy is born with a lucky caul and a prophecy that he would marry the daughter of the king who just happened to be around. The king took Lucky Hans and threw him in a river to die but he was saved by a Miller who then raised him as his own.

Years later the king passed by the Mill. By chance he learns of the boy’s identity and sends him to the Queen with a letter saying, ‘kill the bearer of this note.’ But the boy gets lost and wanders into a thieves’ den where he falls asleep. The thieves  read the letter, feel pity for him and secretly change it for one saying, ‘marry this lad to the princess’.

And so it was.

When the king finds out he has been tricked he’s enraged and sends his new son-in-law to fetch three golden hairs from the Devil’s head, thinking he could not possibly return.

On the way the prince encounters three gate keepers. The first asks, ‘why does the spring here not gush with wine as it once did?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but I’ll try to find out.”

The next one asks, ‘why does the tree of golden apples no longer give fruit?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but I’ll try to find out.’

The next is the ferryman to Hell. ‘Why must I be the eternal ferryman ?’

‘I don’t know’, he says, ‘but I’ll find out’.

When he gets to Hell the Devil is out, but his Grandmother is home. She’s friendly when she finds out that he’s there to save his marriage, when he’s transparent and straight with her. She turns our hero into an ant which she hides in the folds of her skirts having promised to help him get the hairs and the answers to his questions..

Prince as Ant has acheived what the Tao calls action through non-action. He acknowledges the primacy of the quantum superposition to take care of the situation.

The Devil arrives tired and grumpy. He falls asleep on Grandmother’s knee and when he’s snoring she tweaks out a hair. He wakes startled. ‘So sorry,’ she says. ‘I was dreaming of a spring that no longer gushes with wine.’

‘Nor will it,’ replies the Devil, ‘for as long as the toad sits upon the source.”

He drifts off and she tweaks a second hair. ‘So sorry,’ she says as he starts up, ”I was dreaming of a once beautiful tree of  golden apples that now has even lost its leaves…’

”and it will die entirely if the mouse continues to gnaw at the root…’

A third hair and the Devil leaps furiously to his feet. ”Sorry, so sorry, I was dreaming of a ferryman who was imprisoned to his task…

‘so will he always be till he hands the oar to another,’ grumbled the Devil and wandered off to a spot less infested with grandmothers.

And so our hero returns victorious with the three hairs and the secrets of the various afflictions… and bags of gold from the grateful gatekeepers.

‘Can I have some? asks the wicked king.

Sure, says the prince, ‘go ask the ferryman for his oar.’

The kind of consciousness a person has, influences their material fate.

This is not a crude, ‘everything happens for a reason’, nor even that we might make meaning of tragedy. Its more that Fortune favours the brave. Fortune was a Goddess before the church got hold of her and made her an attribute of knights. In our story, the youth who experiences himself as fortunate catches Her attention. In her guise as Grandmother, the quantum superposition, or archetype, enables him to realise a useful outcome because he’s motivated by his heart and by the Principle of Relatedness, which is her thing too.

So all goes well.

Not so for ‘Brother Lustig’, who, like Schrodinger, had a hard time with the Copenhagen Interpretation, that potential states can exist simultaneously on the threshold of the phenomenal world and that what happens next is down to how they are perceived.

Er, so, reality as well as beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

You can see why someone lurking with philosophical intent might have a problem with that.

Brother Lustig can’t co-operate with Saint Peter, his travelling companion, his wave function, who goes to great lengths to make sure Brother Lustig does okay in life but is thwarted by our hero’s own ineptitude and bad grace. The Self, the  combined multiple states of a quantum system, has healing and energising properties. St Peter brings a man back to life with just the right salve and mysterious ability, but Brother Lustig, the self involved ego, is more interested in the reward of a lamb dinner than the miracle he’s witnessed.

Brother Lustig eats the only part of the lamb that Peter wants, the heart, and then lies about what he has done despite ample opportunity and considerable pressure to come clean. To make things worse he then tries to resurrect the Princess of the land who’d just died, by the same means as Saint Peter the day before.

Of course he is just inflated. He hasn’t got the knack for it and fails. Saint Peter has to step in at the last moment and pull him out of trouble. He even gives him a magic knapsack which could contain anything he wished to make sure he should never be hungry before he departs but Brother Lustig is unimpressed.

”I am very glad you have taken yourself off, you strange fellow, I shall certainly not follow you.’ Grimm.

Eventually Brother Lustig dies and comes once more face to face with St Peter at the Pearly Gates who is reluctant to let him in.

‘At least let me return the knapsack,’ he says and passes it through the gate. No sooner has St Peter taken it than Brother Lustig, thinking himself clever, wishes himself into it. St Peter tutts quietly and places the bag in a corner.

‘Tis strange how some want their Eternity. The power was only to wish things into the bag. Now you will have to stay in there.’

”What happens to a man has something to do with him.” CG Jung.

We create our reality.

and do so by refraining from trying to be the author of it all the time.

”One must not wish to leap over everything and penetrate directly.” Lu Yen

Lucky Hans has a way of rolling with life by accepting his dependence on it. He lets himself be lost and need help. He willingly takes a backseat in Grandmother’s folds while she does the work. He has faith in the Universe because he knows it will offer him the face that he shows it.

”The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.’ CG Jung.

I was once on a train which was bound to my destination but via a different route to the inbound journey. The conductor points out that its the wrong ticket and that I could be liable to a fine and the cost of another ticket.

The situation was entirely absurd and of course I could have protested the unfairness of it all since I was clearly just making a return trip. The route was irrelevant.

But the guy had a job to do.

So I handed him the ticket and crawled into the folds of Grandmother’s skirts.

He looked at me, looked at the ticket, clipped it, and handed it back.

A quantum system, British Rail conductor, remained in his Quantum Super-position until interacted with or observed by the external world, BR passenger, at which time his wave function collapsed into a definite state,

”causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement.” from the Copenhagen Interpretation

The situation emerged as a result of how it is measured. I knew he would do the right thing, and he did.

”Consciousness is fundamental. I regard matter as derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Plank.

So we have to stop it already with all the what-is-the-meaning-of-life? What life might mean presupposes that we know what it is…

The followers said to the Master, ‘Tell us in what way our end will be. The Master replied, ‘Have you therefor discerned the beginning in order that you seek after the end? For in the Place where the beginning is, there will be the end. Happy is he who stands boldly at the beginning. He shall know the end, and shall not taste death.  Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. logia 18.

My teacher George Brown used to say, ‘don’t get caught in the (client’s) story’. Its even easier to get caught in our own story and, like Brother Lustig, to get mesmerised by the drama.

Roberto Assagioli, founder of Psychosynthesis, likened the psyche to an orchestra where there was the various facets of personality represented by different instruments, the conductor, the organising ‘I’, and then the Self, the composer.

What he left out was the audience, the all important observers of the experiment, since music is meant to be enjoyed after all. They, by their appreciation, draw the utmost from the performers who in turn forge admiration from envy and abundance from gratitude.