By Lawrence Au
In this post, I’ve described my attempts to understand social forces which cause the symptoms of the flyer’s mind. From the time I was in college, I believed that whatever had corrupted society was essentially infinite in character. At that time, I couldn’t see a substantive beginning or end to it.
I felt that only similarly infinite measures could possibly change the course of such a dilemma. Don Juan’s direct relationship with infinity and the mathematics of infinity introduced a sublime hope to me: a potential to live beyond our socially-created bounds, to reach out for freedom. Studying films, I sensed the potential to suggest alternative realities tangibly enough to shift society’s emotions and thoughts.
In studying mathematics, I saw structure derived directly from intent. Everything in math is created by intending it. As one of my math teachers said, math is built on twin foundations of motivation and language. In Don Juan’s world, the conscious application of intent is also fundamental. Don Juan said that we are heirs to intentions formulated long ago, including the intentions of ancient Greek mathematicians. We assemble a Euclidean world, even though that view is so limiting that it consistently interprets only a tiny fraction of our sensory input.
I hoped that the mathematics of infinity, which did not emerge until the Renaissance, could give us a boost beyond our miserable Euclidean-Aristotelian limits. Around the time of W.W.II, the logician Kurt Godel proved that the simultaneous, instantaneous mapping of infinite sets could be added to the traditional intentional structures of mathematics without logical contradiction. Such a mapping, whose technical term is the Axiom Of Choice, bypasses stepwise logic, relying instead upon parallel logic.
In 1963, Paul Cohen proved that the Axiom Of Choice is independent of the traditional intentional axioms of mathematics. In other words, infinite freedom is not derivative of anything finite. When mathematicians attempt to assert facts about infinite sets, the Axiom Of Choice tends to be implicit in those assertions, forcing mathematicians into a socially difficult situation where step-wise proofs do not apply. For this reason, most mathematicians look for ways to avoid the Axiom, as a way of protecting themselves. And yet, others were daring, drawn by the power of infinity. For me, the Axiom Of Choice resonates with the choice we have to change our current tonal, preparing us to meet the power of infinity.
The fact that Godel had proven that the infinite (nagual) is mathematically consistent the finite (tonal) filled me with hope. As Don Juan suggested, infinite power was at our fingertips, and mathematics had already begun to map that power.
I hoped that the recent mathematics of topology, also unknown to the Greeks, would be able to map the infinite set of lines which Don Juan described as the flow of awareness in the universe. I hoped that the language of topology, combined with infinities mapped using the Axiom of Choice, would deliver us a kind of “sheer understanding” of our dilemma, to somehow free us from inanity. I bet heavily on this hope, changing my major from film to mathematics at Columbia even though I was poorly prepared to be a mathematician. I did well studying fundamental concepts but I kept flunking courses like calculus and number theory which bored me because they seemed unrelated to my goal of mapping awareness.
I didn’t find any professors who shared my goal. My searches of the math literature were also disappointing. Topology described transformations of smooth shell-like structures but not the deeply woven structures of luminous eggs. The concept of the double I found only in matrix theory, and there only in solutions to linear equations, which I found to be almost useless. I didn’t find anything like assemblage points in math literature, but I did find it recurring constantly in computer programming literature, which I read in a part-time job I got in the university computer center.
Computers deal with millions of interconnected facts, by assembling them into clusters small enough to fit into its short-term high-speed register: roughly a dozen facts which are directly assembled by its processor. Most computers are programmed to do one thing at a time, using an architecture suggested by mathematician John von Neumann.
Even though all personal computers are still von Neumann architecture, the desire to do more than one thing at a time drove researchers to build things like the ‘non-von’ computer at Columbia in the early 1980s.
This was a feeble attempt to implement the Axiom Of Choice in hardware. It failed, not because of flaws in hardware design, but because general-purpose computer languages are stepwise in nature and handle trivial amounts of data in each step. Later attempts such as the BBN Butterfly and the Connection Machine also failed for the same reason.
In the late seventies I decided that if infinitely parallel computers were to succeed, a new kind of language had to emerge. Following later research by von Neumann, I sketched pictorial user interfaces where visual textures defined visual pattern matching operators.
But I couldn’t find the algorithms needed to support such a language. I made many sketches of non-verbal parallel computer languages, but organizational possibilities in language design are infinite. Sketching practical applications of proposed syntaxes, I found that syntax tends to obscure meaning. Parallel processing programs seemed especially hard to follow, especially when handling large varieties of data.
I wasn’t about to take no for an answer, but I was disheartened and exhausted by my attempts find a bridge to the Axiom of Choice. My advisors questioned why I chose math or even any kind of science as my major. Why didn’t I just go back to films where my grades were just fine? Or to a shrink to convince me to do that? Their suggestions injured my spirit. I couldn’t follow them because I knew they couldn’t lead me where I wanted to go.
My last two years in college, I had only two remaining hopes. One came from a statement made by Don Juan saying that the act of seeing was so powerful that a person who truly sees could naturally accomplish all other sorcery tasks. The other was his statement that some of the great accomplishments of sorcery can only be done through “sheer understanding.” I decided, without telling anybody, that I was going to see energy and come to a sheer understanding of the flow of energy in the universe even if it was the last and only accomplishment in my life.
Between the ages of 22 and 24, I devoted myself to this task, barely graduating from college, with no planned career, nothing to prove except to myself. Years of intending seeing from a mathematical perspective brought me to a kind of sensual knowledge, but it was very different in mood than Castaneda’s. For me, learning to see was a gradual, determined process of tuning into abstract patterns.
For me, the act of seeing was created by willing myself to see patterns other than fixed objects. I began by using my mind to block out anything that could be classified as a fixed object. Since I had a filmmaking background, I had already trained myself to see fluctuations in hue and intensity down to tiny details. Blocking out objects, I began to see patterns of fluctuations in hue and intensity all around me.
Repetitions of those patterns are visible in curvilinear forms. I began to realize that detection of those forms resembles the process detection radio stations. By setting up a vortex tuned to specific forms, we can detect the presence of those forms. Since most people tune into fixed objects, that’s what they detect. At first, by blocking out any fixed objects that I saw, I saw the motion of fixed objects. Then I blocked out that perception of motion too. Over a period of months, I began to see fluctuations across my whole field of vision which resembled archive movie footage variations in contrast and brightness. Eventually, those fluctuations appeared finer and finer in detail as I developed receptors for tuning in to them.
After two years of effort, the complexity of what I saw was far beyond anything I had read about in mathematics or even organic chemistry. I saw that the energy of awareness was beyond space-time infinite. Awareness had infinite dimension: it was an infinity of infinities.
Even the apparent closure of luminous spheres were opened by interactions I saw with energy at large. Vortices of emotions would appear from infinity and sweep through entire crowds of people, charging them with feelings.
Inorganic beings of many kinds mixed in with those crowds, interacting as semblances to familiar objects. When I saw flyers, they were only one of many forces which directly affected people. At that time, flyers seemed to me like inorganic garbage collectors, sucking the loose, disorganized energy from people’s luminous spheres. I wasn’t worried about the flyers. I was worried about the structures I saw inside people’s heads generating the garbage.
I tried to understand what I saw, looking for principles of energetic interactions. I saw two major kinds of interaction. In one, lines of energy directly charged each other though direct contact, like electricity travels through wires. Such interactions seemed to power most civilized, socially hierarchic behaviors. The hardwired hierarchies themselves are visible inside people’s heads, were held in place by tiny vortices where the fibers connect.
The other interactions involves fibers separated by a slight distance, resonating like the sympathetic vibration of strings. The movement of the fibers is visible, like a plucked guitar string seen close up. Harmonics are imparted from fiber to fiber, causing complex visual melodies. Such interactions seemed to power warm emotional feelings, our ability to sense awe and our connection to the universe. The visual melodies are held in place by vortices on the ends of the strings, as well as the mantras of our internal dialog. Hundreds of those mantras repeat constantly, like simultaneous channels of Muzak, to keep up a semblance of our selves.
As soon as I could see these interactions, I started to affect them directly with my will. I could alter the placement and vibration of any one fiber at a time. Of course, the zillions of fibers which make up a person are self-organizing, so these alterations are usually temporary unless they are consistent with the self-organizing principles. I then began to investigate those principles.
I also saw how fibers at large affect fibers inside the luminous spheres.
There are enormous fiber structures surrounding cities which affect the mood and capabilities of people who live in them. Domed structures like the one Don Juan went to definitely affect the overall intent of their inhabitants, bringing a sense of warmth and stability, as well as an undercurrent of longings and the sense of living on an island, out of touch with the universe beyond the safety of the dome.
I began to pick out places to live based upon the fiber architecture of locale.
I moved from Manhattan (a ring city, like Shanghai), to Warren, Ohio ( a small dome town, very ‘Mary Hartmann-Mary Hartmann’). I tried living in Montreal (the most gorgeous dome city I have ever seen). Although I found Montreal sentimentally most appealing and emotional uplifting, my creative energies become complacent there. I moved to Pittsburgh ( a tall bullet-shaped dome around a vertical column of infinite height ). There my creative energies rode that infinite column freely but left my human feelings stuck in the dome.
I live in the Washington, D.C., area now where massively parallel lines of energy intersect in competing cubical edifices. DC has giant cubes of energy which collide together at strange angles. It has some of the infinity of Pittsburgh but also socially bound sensations of sheet cities like Chicago and the chaotic feeling of jumbled cities like Cleveland.
There was, however, only so much I could explain by mapping large-scale energy structures. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that the assemblage point of people’s luminous spheres had to be mapped, in order to understand how large scale energy affects individual perceptions.
For the last five years I’ve been unraveling the structure of the assemblage point, using whatever tools I could find in cognitive psychology, computer science, the seeing of energy and the practice of energetic healing which I learned from Mietek Wirkus, a healer who also sees energy. Gazing at assemblage points gives me a feeling of going behind the facade that make us social beings. For adults, thousands of lines converge there to generate the illusion of sequential-time. For children, millions of lines converge there, but their sensation of time is less precisely sequential.
Yet the structure of the assemblage point does not yield easily to examination, because of its rapid fluctuations, and the massive complexity of it connection to the energy around it. My first attempts took place under the huge sky-light of the Postal Pavilion food court in downtown Washington. During my lunch hour, the tourists would gather there to enjoy the six-story atrium of this elegantly restored former post office. Riding a mutual wave of curiosity, I would connect with them energetically through their assemblage points.
Skimming their internal dialog, I’d sometimes be horrified, sometimes amused, and almost always confused by thoughts that another person was having. In recapitulation, my own thoughts didn’t seem much different, though.
I wanted to know how that jumble of thoughts is workable. Skimming the internal dialog is like listening to five radio stations at a time.
Using seeing while skimming, I began to see how memory works, by stashing copies of our assemblage points in various parts of our luminous sphere.
When we recognize something, we energize the portions of our luminous sphere which match the incoming energy meeting our assemblage point. We resurrect memories as isomorphisms to incoming energy, and we call that perception. Our perception assembles clusters of isomorphisms, which are then clustered together into larger isomorphisms, which we call situations. Situations are then clustered into reality.
Vortices in our energy constantly check to make sure these isomorphisms match. When they do, we feel our perceptions to be true. When they don’t match, a wavering, vacillating uncertainty enters these vortices, identifying a better match, or in cases of denial, a tightening of the badly matching vortex.
In cases where whole sets of vortices don’t match, the conscious emotions of discomfort emerge.
Vortices constructed from hardwired hierarchies prefer denial as a way of handling mismatches, because the energy required to undo their connection points is considerable. Speed is the main practical advantage of hardwired hierarchies, since the energy required to traverse their decision trees is minimal.
On the other hand, vortices constructed from harmonic structures easily adapt to new isomorphisms, because the energy required to undo them is far less. However, unless harmonic structures are carefully arranged, they bleed into each other, like radio stations too close together. When this bleeding occurs, isomorphic matches fail and people feel confusion.
When Castaneda and his cohorts began to talk about flyers, I immediately knew that the flyers mind and the rigid, hardwired mind of society are really the same. Struggling against this rigidity for years, I’ve found that society imparts a survival value to the fast reaction time of hardwired hierarchies, particularly at the forefront of conflict. However when conflicts grow to vast proportions, the adaptability of harmonic vortices is useful, if time and quiet can be allotted for them to sort things out. For instance, Tensegrity non-doings, particularly Awareness through Harmony, provide a means to quiet down and redistribute our harmonics, so that they function with greater clarity and efficiency.
As an alternative to the hard-wired flyer’s mind, I’ve sought to improve the efficiency of harmonic structures so that hard-wired hierarchies are no longer needed for speed. This would eliminate the survival advantages of the flyer’s mind, as well as liberating people from the habit of interfacing to each other through the flyer’s mind.
While studying computer models of cognitive psychology, I read a 1956 information theory classic by George Miller which tracked the relative efficiency of human memory over grouping sizes for assembling information. This paper is called “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” Extensive testing of human subjects showed that memories stored in grouping sizes other than 7 +/- 2 greatly reduce the overall efficiency of memory retrieval.
For instance, when presenting bulleted item in a slide presentation, there should be 7 +/- 2 items in each slide. Slides with less than five items seem to waste time, by not presenting enough information. Slides with more than nine items also waste time, presenting so much information as to be confusing or repetitious.
By mapping out exemplar hierarchies which follow this grouping guideline, I found that not only are the number of steps required to store and retrieve such information reduced, but also the number of steps needed to accommodate changes to the hierarchy.
The possibility of achieving such efficiencies are generally overlooked, partly because society places a premium on producing average learning abilities and mostly because society disdains to examine the efficiency its own definitions which form the bulk of what must be learned.
Another result of this research into optimal groupings is that the topological shape of such groupings, taking from a global perspective, is fuzzy.
The tiny little branches of consistent 7 +/- 2 groupings terminate in a fractal-like fuzz. When I read that Don Juan had said that the flyers come to eat the fuzz on the outside on our spheres, I realized that the flyers are going after the most efficient, sensitive and optimal part of our awareness.
So I was wrong about flyers being garbage collectors: they are after our best awareness.
Somehow they were separating the most efficient part of our awareness from us, leaving the least efficient part behind. Somehow the local volition of our efficient vortices forsakes us, choosing instead to reconnect to the inside of the flyers’ cavity. We are indeed built up from independent components. Don Juan referred to the nation of the heart, a nation for each organ. There is local volition down to our component atoms.
As people age, that local volition begins to rebel against the petty inconsistencies of the organism. Inefficiencies of our hierarchies, particularly our hardwired ones, create real anger at the local levels. They rebel, causing cancer. They go on strike, causing strokes. Unless we cohere the totality of our energy, by recapitulating and reorganizing our hierarchies, the constant burden of acquiring new awareness puts an ever greater strain on our local volition.
In the end, our local volitions decide to call the whole arrangement off, and we die. Along the way, flyers siphon off the fluid part of our energy, so that we never figure out that we are prey. They would probably siphon off our internal groupings too, except that these are more firmly attached. What we need to defend ourselves is our self-awareness. Our actual awareness is composed of living tree structures of memories. The little buds on the tree are easy to tear off if the branches turn into dead logs, because the local volition of those buds is necessary to keep them attached to us.
It shouldn’t be so hard to convince those buds not to forsake us for the inner belly of a flyer, but as our main hierarchic branches ossify, our buds eventually do just that. Our pettiness, our denial, our refusal to acknowledge their existence convinces them that flyers offer the better deal. Flyers do indeed offer longer lives since their structure is akin to mathematical objects.
Indeed, in our struggle with flyers, we are highly unlikely to ever kill one, even though they kill us regularly. The life-span of mathematical objects is nearly that of their spawning universe. Some probably even transcend that.
Only by increasing our cohesion, particular the cohesion of our dreams, can we avoid becoming food. To increase our cohesion, we really have to sort our intent, so that our dreams are unified by our intent. We have to reconcile our internal strife, which the flyers provoke in order to part us from our outer buds of awareness.
While recapitulating, I’ve been seeing my stored memories light up as my awareness sweeps across them. As each cluster of memories is touched, the local volition of that cluster enters my feelings, along with a sense of cohesion heightened by the careful attention I give that cluster.
In these recapitulations, I see that poorly connected clusters get a chance to improve their links to the main lines of intent which radiate from my heart; by identifying better alternatives to situations in which I’ve felt trapped, the clusters which remember these situations gain size by adding alternatives to the one or two undesirable alternatives in the cluster.
By sorting out alternatives for situations in which I’ve felt confused, I’ve reduced the size of overly complex clusters by dividing them into smaller classifications.
In both cases, clusters are relinked to achieve a median size of seven, which gives me a feeling of harmony and efficiency. At the same time, I can also slowly but steadily regenerate the fuzz on the outside of my luminous sphere, by re-establishing strong connections to alternatives on the periphery of my awareness. It’s like a process of regaining youthful cohesion and exuberance, through minute changes in energetic structure.
By sharing our experience of alternatives, we can help each other become more fluid. And by sharing our discernments, we can help each other divide our over-sized clusters.
Related Links:
