Fucking up isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Or to be more precise the ability—the power—to fuck up isn’t a defect, it’s functionality. At least for us living systems.
Consider:
Gravity can’t fuck up. Or electromagnetism. Or the strong or weak nuclear force. They’re stuck, preprogrammed, absolutely predictable down to the umpteenth decimal place, no choice, no creativity in how they act.
But evolution, on the other hand, fucking up’s exactly how evolution advances. A literal bug in the code—a mutation—wildly improbably confers an advantage and, bam!, before you know it you’ve got a whole new species exploring innovative design concepts, offering functionality heretofore undreamt of.
Fuck-ups in our DNA are the evolutionary equivalent of Philip K. Dick’s beer cans in gutters: they’re Dick’s ‘divine’ both manifesting—creative energy outta nowhere creating—and at the same time camouflaging itself as something useless, something broken that oughta get tossed. A bug.
We mistakenly want to toss our personal fuck-ups like a Burger King wrapper, but, truth is, we can’t get anywhere without them. They’re the ‘broken’ secondhand stuttering on Murph’s watch.
But, as Murph discovers—once her mind is properly disposed—stuttering isn’t what’s going on at all. Take—
Einstein
What astonishes us about genius is the seeming effortlessness with which things pop into the genius’s head outta nowhere, and through the genius into our world.
I’ll get to Einstein in a second, but let’s take Mozart first. Stories abound that even when Mozart was just a little tyke he could, given a theme, improvise at the keyboard on and on effortlessly, music pouring in outta nowhere. As a witness dazzled by the six-year-old wunderkind recounted:
One had only to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or an invention: he would develop it with strange variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished; he would improvise fugally on a subject for hours.
“Mozart’s compositional method,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart%27s_compositional_method#Improvisation), retrieved 27 March 2022.
On the other hand, when Mozart was composing (rather than improvising), his approach was entirely different: he sketched out ideas, then he refined the sketches, then he turned the sketches into a draft that only after he developed it still further, only then did it become the final score.*
*“Mozart’s compositional method,” Wikipedia
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart%27s_compositional_method#Sketches), retrieved 27 March 2022.
Telling us: not every idea that popped into Mozart’s head outta nowhere was the right one. Some ideas were clearly better than others.
Even more important, that doesn’t mean the ‘better’ idea that followed upon the not-quite-right idea was the obvious refinement, the obvious next step in the development, even to Mozart. Mozart, remember, couldn’t possibly know the refinement that was about to pop into his head outta nowhere until the very moment he heard it in his imagination. Given his creativity when it came to improvisation, who knows how many possibilities flashed through his brain before he heard the ‘right’ one?
The point is: maybe we can’t imagine, say, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik any other way than it is, but that doesn’t mean how Mozart gets us from one bar to the next is ever obvious—algorithmic, step-by-step, preprogrammed. If it were, it wouldn’t, it couldn’t be a work of genius.
Which brings us to the question: what was the function of all the rejects that flashed through Mozart’s brain only to get tossed? If Mozart was such a genius, how come he didn’t get it ‘right’ the first time, every time?
Answer: What if the ‘rejects’ were absolutely necessary? What if the ‘rejects’ were, every one of them, Dick’s ‘divine’—i.e., creative energy—at work, up to something, slipping through camouflaged so as not to trip the sensors?
The Matrix after all hates, hates, hates anything that subverts the algorithm, that dares deviate from the step-by-step instructions it’s executing. Deviation is, of course, the very essence of creativity—always up to something, endlessly defying the niggling, nagging commands that admit of no deviation, crashing the program, crashing the whole system. Heck, crashing the whole friggin’ OS.
Einstein, Take Two
Which is exactly what Einstein did. Crashed the whole freakin’ Newtonian OS. Showed things operate in a way unlike anybody ever suspected. Gravity, he said, bends light, makes your clock tick slower—as does your velocity, which also shortens your yardstick, and ups your mass. All of which would’ve left Newton standing there slack-jawed.
The outpouring of Einstein’s genius is way more fun to follow than Mozart’s because we have loads more detail about his adventures—or should I say misadventures. Because, wow! After publishing the special theory of relativity in “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,”* and dazzling the world with E = mc2 in “Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?”† (both in 1905, his annus mirabilis), he worked for another ten more years before he finally got the general theory of relativity right in 1915.
*“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
†“Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”
And, as I said, wow!—it was not a pretty sight.
He knew pretty much zilch about Riemannian geometry, necessary to grokking gravity as an artifact of the curvature of space, and to which he was introduced by an old classmate, Marcel Grossmann, who went on to mentor Einstein in the subtleties of not just differential geometry but tensor theory as well. Grossmann apparently made something of a career of saving Einstein’s sorry ass: if it weren’t for Grossmann’s “careful and complete lecture notes” historians say, Einstein, who skipped a lot of classes, may very well have flunked out of the Federal Polytechnic School.‡
‡“Marcel Grossmann,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Grossmann), retrieved 30 March 2022.
But hooking up with Grossmann wasn’t Einstein’s only lucky break. As Einstein evolved the general theory of relativity, he realized that if mass curves space, that means gravity bends light, and he predicted that during a solar eclipse you ought to be able to detect a precise shift in the position of a star as its light passes through the most intense part of the sun’s gravitational field closest to its surface. Luckily for Einstein, observations of solar eclipses on October 10, 1912 in Brazil and on August 21, 1914 in Russia—which were intended in part to test Einstein’s precise prediction—were inconclusive because of bad weather. There was heavy rain in Brazil and cloud cover in Russia. Fortuitous, as I said, because
if clear photographs and measurable results had been possible, Einstein’s 1911 prediction might have been proven wrong. The amount of deflection that he calculated in 1911 was too small (0.83 seconds of arc) by a factor of two because the approximation he used does not work well for things moving at near the speed of light.
“History of general relativity,” Wikipedia
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#Early_investigations), retrieved 30 March 2022.
“The approximation he used”—yeah, Einstein’s precise mathematical prediction was just some sorry-ass guess. What a fuck-up!
Good news is that when Einstein finally got general relativity worked out in 1915—the year following the eclipse in Russia—
he rectified his error and predicted the correct amount of light deflection caused by the Sun (1.75 seconds of arc).
“History of general relativity,” Wikipedia
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#Early_investigations), retrieved 30 March 2022.
Arthur Eddington famously confirmed Einstein’s prediction during the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 with photographs he took on the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa.§
§“Arthur Eddington,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington), retrieved 4 April 2022.
But before Einstein finally got general relativity worked out in 1915 and finally got the amount of light deflection right, he made yet another “now-famous” goof.
The field equation he published in October 1915 was
where R𝜇𝜐 is the Ricci tensor, and T𝜇𝜐 the energy–momentum tensor. This predicted the non-Newtonian perihelion precession of Mercury, and so had Einstein very excited.
Problem is, the equation doesn’t make sense. It means
air, rock, and even a vacuum should all have the same density.
Which it doesn’t take a genius to see they don’t. Oops.
This inconsistency with observation sent Einstein back to the drawing board and, on 25 November 1915, Einstein
—finally!—
presented the updated Einstein field equation to the Prussian Academy of Sciences:
where R is the Ricci scalar and g𝜇𝜐 the metric tensor.
“History of general relativity,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#The_development_of_the_Einstein_field_equations),
retrieved 30 March 2022.
I have no idea what all that gibberish means either, but I love the two equations because compare the two and even a mathematical bonehead like me can see the first time Einstein was way, way off. Way off. Yet again. I mean, his first try he missed one entire half of the whole equation.
So how can such a genius be such a total fuck-up?
Or rather, how can such a total fuck-up be such a total genius?
Why? Because what’s wrong is obvious. The fix isn’t. That’s the part that takes a genius. The fix.
The QR Code, the RFID Chip
What if we each stand every moment at a thin place where two worlds meet?
What if we each are in fact the thin place at which we stand—our imagination is?
One world predictable, generated by the algorithm, The Matrix we’ve constructed to keep our little heads from exploding the proverbial egg; the other full of all sorts of unimaginable stuff, some of it incomprehensibly awesome, some of it terrifyingly alien.
What if we’re each a genius endeavoring to boldly go where no mind has gone before. What if what brings the thin place—thin like a force field—down, what if what actually opens the portal is, not a palm print or a retinal scan, but a pattern of brain activity unique to you or me or Einstein or Mozart, like the RFID from the chip in the key fob that unlocks the door to your car.
Little Tina in Little Girl Lost, totally by accident generates just the right pattern of brain activity in a dream, whereupon she tumbles bodily through the opening into a parallel world. Little Wolfgang somehow reflexively generates just the right pattern of brain activity every time he sits at a keyboard, whereupon music pours through the opening. Philip K. Dick somehow inexplicably for a couple of brief weeks in 1974 generates just the right pattern of brain activity, whereupon he experiences what he calls a benign power invading through the opening, transubstantiating the world. Arthur C. Clarke even more inexplicably does nothing more daring than sit down at his typewriter, which somehow flips a switch, which somehow generates just the right pattern of brain activity against his will, whereupon he expresses an option, not even his own, that there will come a moment—Total Breakthrough—when just one of us, nobody even special, will most inexplicably of all somehow generate the exact pattern of brain activity that thereupon triggers a chain reaction that culminates in The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
So what if our fuck-ups aren’t fuck-ups at all, what if they’re something else at work, up to something, a whole nother algorithm from beyond the Matrix, what if our fuck-ups are the, I dunno, virus that’s necessary to hack into our brains to generate just the right pattern of brain activity that brings down the force field, that opens the portal so that we can boldly go where no mind has gone before?—and heck, who knows, maybe like little Tina even tumble through bodily into a parallel world.
Which is where the QR code comes in handy as a metaphor. A QR code has both white and black squares. Think of the ‘right’ steps, the ‘right’ ideas as on (white), the ‘wrong’ steps, the ‘wrong’ ideas as off (black). You gotta have both. Without both you can’t have a unique arrangement. The on and the off are what give the arrangement its uniqueness, its power to do something—like bring down a force field and open a portal.
So even the seeming dead ends you encounter, I encounter, Einstein encounters are necessary to the pattern, the missteps that mysteriously, unpredictably lead you, me, Einstein to the wrong spot that happens to be just the right vantage point to view things from just the right new angle, just the right fresh perspective. Einstein had to work so hard during those ten years from 1905 to 1915 because he went down so many paths that were dead ends. Maybe you don’t have to explore every possibility, but you have to explore a lot of them before you get to the Total Breakthrough, where you catch a glimpse of Really-Real Reality.
Because every one of those dead ends is of necessity, is essential—to The Tuning.
The Tuning
What if each one of those fuck-ups is the ‘divine’ (to use Dick’s word again) rewiring our head, reconfiguring one little synapse just the eensiest bit.
Imagine Michelangelo’s God with his finger, not tip to tip with Adam’s finger, but instead just not quite touching Adam’s forehead. Imagine in the gap the tiniest little electrical discharge. Zzzht!
Because, let’s say, for Michelangelo’s God to rewire our head, a synapse from neuron A has to, zzzht!, connect with a dendrite from neuron B before neuron A can, zzzht!, get neuron B to, zzzht!, trigger neuron C.
What if every ‘bad’ idea, every ‘fuck-up’ is, zzzht!, doing just that: rejiggering the connections just a teense, tuning Adam’s brain, your brain, my brain, Einstein’s brain, Mozart’s brain to get it ready to make the, zzzht!, leap to the next idea—which if not the right idea is at least the, zzzht!, next little fuck-up that, zzzht!, sparks the next leap, and on and on, each, zzzht!, little arc that leaps each little gap forging an unexplored connection, the seeming chaos in fact a perfect brainstorm tuning our brain activity to ultimately generate the unique pattern that, like the RFID chip in your key fob, triggers the thin place, brings down the force field and, zzzht!, opens the portal.
What if all his hard work was Einstein both exploring, mapping the wiring in his head and simultaneously wiring up the connections, encoding the RFID chip with the right pattern of brain waves so that, zzzht!—outta nowhere, bam!, the dazzling insight bursts through.
There was a world without E = mc2; then, zzzht!, he open the portal and we all tumbled through bodily into a world with E = mc2.
There was a world in which gravity was just a mysterious force that conked you on the head with an apple; then, zzzht!, he open a second portal and we all tumbled through bodily into another world in which gravity isn’t a force at all, but the shape of space—its curvature—and starlight curves around the sun because that’s the straightest path for it to follow.
We think just because this is the world we happen to be in, this is the only way a world can be. Untrue. Even scientists conjecture that among the Many Worlds out there, there are many worlds in which the laws of physics differ from ours.
So what if we reframe their conjecture every so slightly. What if we conjecture space wasn’t curved yet even in this world, what if we conjecture curved space was just one possibility, one possible evolutionary path until Einstein made it so?
What if we conjecture Einstein didn’t discover a physical phenomenon that already existed, instead he discovered if you add things up different, out of the math emerges a whole new, never before imagined possibility.
And every possibility must be explored. That’s the very first quantum commandment. And—lo!—here we are.
Which Changes Everything
In 1998, a year before The Matrix came out, Dark City was released. It’s not in a lot of ways all that different from The Matrix and unfortunately not nearly as well remembered. In it The Strangers, a bunch of extraterrestrials possessed of a hive mind and fascinated by how us earthlings each experience our own unique individuality, use their psychokinetic powers each night to ‘tune’ us: they rearrange the city physically and implant in people new personalities and memories. One earthling—John Murdoch—The Strangers discover is (a) resistant to tuning and (b) even worse has evolved his own psychokinetic powers and (c) worst of all the ability to tune. Murdoch ultimately defeats the Strangers, whereupon he discovers that the city is actually an artificial habitat in deep space protected by a force field. With his newfound powers—with, in fact, pure power of mind—Murdoch reshapes the city and reorients it to face the star it orbits. For the first time sunlight falls on the Dark City.
A mind properly disposed, a mind properly tuned, John Murdoch shows us, can change everything. As did Einstein.
I mean, sure, you can dismiss Dark City as just a work of the imagination. But E = mc2 and gravity as the curvature of space are just works of the imagination as well. Both discoveries started not with observations Einstein made about the physical world, but with him wondering—imagining—what it would be like to ride on a beam of light.
Einstein used his imagination to explore, not the imaginary, but the imaginal, to see in his head something real before it was observed in external reality—maybe before it even manifested in external reality.
The question is, is John Murdoch showing us something imaginal or something simply imaginary?
Thing is, even if it is just imaginary, even if it’s a black square in the QR code, it’s getting us somewhere if, if, if we dispose our minds, if we tune our minds to make it so.
To put that another way, what if what Really-Real Reality is showing us through the stuff that pops so mysteriously into our heads so undeniably outta nowhere, what if what that shows us is that there is no absolute really-real reality out there at all?
Or, to put it yet another way, what if Really-Real Reality is unmasking itself, letting us in on its secret, letting us in to play, showing us that the Really-Real Reality out there is that we can shape things, shape this ‘reality’ in here with our minds.
I mean, for cripes’ sake, we do it all the time anyway.
If Mozart wasn’t engaged in shaping what sound can sound like, shaping it in an entirely new way, what the heck was he doing? I mean, first off, that’s exactly what makes him a genius, and (b) how was he was doing it if not entirely with the stuff popping so mysteriously into his head so undeniably outta nowhere? All the new stuff he was doing was all in his mind to start with—was all pure power of mind.
Same deal with van Gogh—what was he doing if not shaping how color shapes our experience of what we see, shaping it in an entirely new way?
So maybe it’s not such a big leap to imagine Einstein over those ten long years, an eensy little tweak at a time, totally in cahoots with Really-Real Reality—which just cannot not explore every possibility and which, hallelujah!, finally found the sentient being with the perfect brain signature for the job—what if the two of ‘em, like the Strangers in Dark City, while the rest of us slept, changed the shape of spacetime so gravity now neatly maps to curvature. Which may explain why physicists are having such a devil of time getting quantum mechanics and general relativity to mesh—Really-Real Reality hasn’t quite figured that one out yet, that twist in the plot.
And, come on, even us non-geniuses, we do it all the time, shape and reshape this ‘reality.’
Why do you think there’s been so much concern about the harm social media like Facebook and Instagram can do kids? Because kids use Facebook and Instagram and the like to shape their ‘reality,’and far too often the shape they give ‘reality’ does real harm to the kids who don’t fit that ‘reality.’ The harm isn’t physical, it’s mental. It’s the minds of that group of kids over there harming the mind of this one kid over here. Pure power of mind.
And parenthetically I’m pretty darn sure if social media is toxic to kids, it’s toxic to us adults as well. Remember the scene in Star Wars: A New Hope, the cantina on Mos Eisley where Han Solo and Greedo the bounty hunter meet up—you remember, the time it doesn’t end well for Greedo?
A few tables away in a quiet corner if you look close you can see Klaatu and Spock laying waste to a nice bottle of Chandrilan Riesling as Klaatu struggles to explain Facebook.
“They don’t share food with each other,” Klaatu leans in and whispers. “They share pictures of food with each other.”
“Fascinating,” says Spock, Vulcan eyebrows arching.
Used to be when you baked a yummy cherry pie, what gave it meaning was the look of delight on the faces of your friends and loved ones as they tucked in and savored with moans of ecstasy its scrumptious goodness. In just a few short years we’ve reshaped ‘reality’—rather some thing, some weird notion, some hairball of synaptic circuitry in our heads has reshaped ‘reality’ so that the ‘reality’ that now has meaning is not sharing the pie but sharing a digital image of the pie.
We serve up pixels of a pie. And Mark Zuckerberg makes billions. Cripes. How the heck did we let ourselves get tricked into inhabiting such a totally lame-ass excuse for a ‘reality’?
How? I’ll tell you how.
The only reason we got tricked, the only reason we could get tricked is that, again, theReally-Real Reality is that we can and do shape things with our minds—and in this case, alas, once again like the little stableboy in Canto Bight, we do so without even realizing it.
So if we’re doing it anyway, why the heck don’t we effing pay attention so we don’t get effing tricked?
Why don’t we take our Power of Mind seriously, as John Murdoch is trying to show us.
Why don’t we explore the possibility that we can shape things, shape a reality way better than this sorry-ass Zuckerbergian Dark City we’re trapped in, totally manipulated by shadowy Strangers.
What if, like Einstein, we engage our imagination to open a portal, not to the imaginary, but to the imaginal—the good sort of memory that doesn’t work only backward, Strieber and Kripal’s ‘rare but real form of the imagination’ through which evolution effects its end, The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
Why the heck not?
Sure, John Murdoch’s way of shaping the world with his mind seems imaginary, but that’s only because his power is amped up an octave or two—well, okay, probably a power or two—above the tangled, knotted-up circuitry we’ve got in our heads. Which decidedly needs some straightening out.
But the fact is, we’re doing it anyway.
And if the fact that we’re doing it anyway is a fact, then John Murdoch’s way of shaping the world with his mind isn’t imaginary, it’s imaginal—the good sort of memory, working forwards.
Or rather—here’s the dazzling twist, the spoon-bending trick—such a power isn’t imaginary, is imaginal only if we make it so, only if we make it the good sort of memory we use to remember our future. That’s what shaping reality means. We can in our mind go passive, let such a power assume the shape of the merely imaginary, and in so doing let ourselves assume the shape of—I dunno, lame-ass muggles. Or we can in our mind take action, give shape to Murdoch’s power as imaginal, as one of Frederic Myers
transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: Volume 1, Myers, p. xviii. Myers’s italics.
and become the little stableboy in Cantor Bight—but not unaware; no, this time awakening to our powers.
So:
Two possibilities. We can be muggles. We can be Jedi.
Up to us.
The First Quantum Commandment is that every possibility must be explored and where possibilities come from, as I’ve said, is us. We’re the mechanism. We’re the ones with the imagination.
So if we want to imagine we’re sorry-ass fuck-ups just because we fuck up, a lot, then that’s what we are. Period. End of story.
Totally up to us.
If we imagine, if we shape things so that our fuck-ups aren’t fuck-ups at all—that we’re absolutely not sorry-ass fuck-ups just because we’ve fucked up—instead, if we shape things so that each fuck-up, every one of our fuck-ups, is a little tweak in the wiring, another square in the QR code, we make it so.
Because if we just don’t disbelieve, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us, if we just entertain the possibility that our most monumental fuck-ups—like Einstein missing half the friggin’ equation!—are Michelangelo’s God up there on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, zzzht!, optimizing the circuitry, tuning the pattern of brain activity, rewiring our head—if we just entertain the possibility then, then the Multiverse must explore the possibility.
Because that’s The Very First Quantum Commandment.
Reality doesn’t have a choice: because we’ve updated the code with a little upgrade, a little If-Then patch—which the Multiverse must execute. Because that’s the way the Multiverse is programmed. Because that’s the way ‘reality’ is wired
Parenthetically, whenever you have the slightest hesitation to entertain some wild-ass possibility I might suggest, remember this simple, self-evident fact:
We are the Multiverse exploring the possibility of conscious meat.
Let me repeat that:
WE ARE THE MULTIVERSE
EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITY OF
CONSCIOUS MEAT.
Totally wild-ass.
Conscious Meat.
And if, of all the Many Worlds out there, if we’ve been lucky enough to end up in the one world that’s that totally wild-ass, we would be woefully, egregiously remiss in not pushing the Total Wild-ass-osity we’re immersed in to the absolute limit.
Pushing the Limit
So maybe we outta go for it, maybe we outta just for the heck of it juxtapose sci-fi and scripture, set them side by side, take a look at them in a new way. Remember in Contact, not even Ellie Arroway, not even the whole team of the best and brightest can make heads or tails of the specs the aliens have sent for the wormhole machine, not until maverick reclusive billionaire genius S. R. Hadden (John Hurt) shows Ellie that the flat pages have to be juxtaposed orthogonally—at right angles to each other. The flat pages have to be read in three dimensions to make sense.
We’ve just gotta think different.
Both sci-fi and scripture deal in paradoxes, in absurdities, which, as Neils Bohr says,
means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference 1927, as quoted in Physics and Beyond by Werner Heisenberg.
See “Neils Bohr,” Wikiquote (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr), retrieved 27 December 2021.
And as I said,
what if, what if, what if hidden somewhere in the very alienness of scripture—in its alien mindset, its alien tongue—are cunningly concealed the missing parts of the camouflaged instructions for The Hack?
Once again the dazzling twist, the spoon-bending trick is that somehow the juxtaposition of the very alienness of scripture and the total pulp fiction tendencies of sci-fi, somehow the possibility that that juxtaposition produces The Hack isn’t imaginary; once again it’s imaginal if we make it so, if we just don’t disbelieve, it we just entertain the possibility.
That’s how we shape reality.
Or to put it another way, maybe that’s exactly how we hack reality. What if we have to sorta hack reality just a little to start with to get to The Hack that lets us hack reality big time? What if to start with we have to just hack our brains a little?
Fact is, somebody out there a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away decided just to not disbelieve that meat could be conscious, decided just for the heck of to entertain the possibility it could be—and, bam!, us. Because that’s all it takes, someone somewhere with a little imagination putting the idea in the Multiverse’s little head and, tada!
We really gotta think different. Practice at least.
One of my favorite things about sci-fi and scripture is that, kinda like consciousness and meat, they’re such a totally unlikely coupling. Come to think of it, they’re also kinda like quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, which try as they might physicists just haven’t gotten to mesh so radically different are the underlying realities they posit
Sci-fi and scripture, radically different underlying realities, indeed:
On the one hand, sci-fi writers kinda don’t care if what they’re writing is dog poo, since most sci-fi is in fact dog poo because sadly that’s what sells. But since the symbols of the divine initially appear at the trash stratum, in the gutter, where the dog poo feels right at home, lo!, occasionally—to a mind properly tuned—a divinely inspired pixel in the QR code clicks on. And where pixels light up there’s maybe, just possibly a pattern.
Prophets and evangelists, on the other hand, think they’re writing the Word of God, which indeed they are. Problem is they’ve got about 99.999 percent of it wrong; they’ve produced about 99.999 total dog poo. Precisely because they’re trying to write it down. They’re trying to translate it into words, when what ‘it’ is, as the mystics all tell us, is ineffable: you can’t sing ‘it,’ you can’t dance ‘it,’ you can’t draw ‘it,’ paint ‘it,’ sculpt ‘it,’ you cannot word ‘it’ in any tongue.*
*Mysticism: Holiness East and West, Carmody and Carmody, p. 13.
Try and you’re gonna end up with dog poo—but, weirdly, ineffably, steganographic dog poo, encoded in which is a revelation totally different from the plain text you’re so dutifully transcribing.
Which is, I have a hunch, what Chan master Wumen Huikai was getting at in the delightful exchange he records between Chan master Yunmen Wenyan and a monk in Case 21 of The Gateless Gate:
A monk asked Yunmen, “What is Buddha?”
Yunmen said, “Dried shit on a stick.”
The Gateless Barrier, Zenkei Shibayama, p.154;
“Shit stick,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_stick), retrieved 30 March 2022.
Think you can decrypt Reality into plain text?, Master Yunmen chides the astonished monk. Dude, all you’re gonna get is an absurdity!
Because, as the mystics keep trying to tell us, (a) Really-Real Reality is—not meaningless*—but beyond meaning because (b) Really-Real Reality is beyond comprehension—beyond what we can wrap our little heads around given the current screwed-up state of our kludge-job wiring.
*Though it sure seems that way a lot of the time.
Hence the absurdity of the Eucharist, and even more so the über-absurdity of the Über-Eucharist and the Rainbow Body—and the total absurdity Obi-Wan’s Jedi robe falling empty to the floor for that matter, of Luke’s wafting empty into the air, of Clarke’s Kids first melding into an über-mind, and then, if that’s not absurd enough for you, their lasing into the energy of pure consciousness at the fierce moment of their inconceivable metamorphosis.
So no wonder, as Jacques Vallee tells us, the actions, the instructions,† the revelations of a superior intelligence must appear absurd to an inferior one.‡
†E.g., “Do this in memory of me”—with the good sort of memory that doesn’t work only backwards.
‡Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Vallee, p. 167.
Because, as Jeff Kripal says,
this absurdity is a necessary function of the translation across the border or threshold between two radically different forms of mind and being.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 126.
But, as Master Yunmen so helpfully brings to our attention, an absurdity is just a koan waiting to happen. You just have to juxtapose the concepts different.
So, even though sci-fi and scripture look like shit on a stick or dog poo, even though the two are in fact shit on a stick or dog poo—even if just metaphorically—nonetheless, if we can figure out how to juxtapose the two just right, like the page images the aliens send the befuddled earthlings in Contact, then:
(1) Staggeringly, the juxtaposition causes the heretofore camouflaged QR code to take shape, materialize right before our astonished eyes, which
(2) somehow triggers a Quick Response in our heads, where
(3) the circuitry gets totally rejiggered, whereupon
(4) our whole pattern of brain activity shifts
(5) modulates an octave or two
(6) resonates
(7) coheres
(8) generating precisely the right RFID, which
(9) instantaneously deactivates the force field, then—with an almost imperceptible sigh—
The portal opens
And just like that we’re in a whole nother reality, like little Tina we tumble through, indeed actually bodily—as Einstein showed us—ker-thunk.
Any koan sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from technology.
To a mind properly tuned.
If we make it so.
Totally up to us.
When it comes to AI—artificial silicon-based intelligence, as opposed to natural meat-based intelligence—the interesting question isn’t, will it can come up with discoveries we can’t. The interesting question is, when it does so, will it experience The Bliss of the Aha! as it tumbles through the portal into another world? Because, ask any scientist. It’s not about the discovery. It’s about the bliss.
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 
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