Friday, September 22, 2006

THE FIRST INTERNET: GOD'S OWN WEB OF SOULS


An English professor wrote the words: "A woman without her man is
nothing" on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly.
All of the males in the class wrote: "A woman, without her man, is nothing."
All the females in the class wrote: A woman: "without her, man is nothing."

Punctuation is everything.


Author Unknown

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This is very cute but they are both true. I have been reflecting on the collective consciousness of families and this just fits my mood nicely. There is a very interesting shared consciousness in families that I don't think people ever really reflect on very much. (Some of this was prompted by my reading of an unbelievable science fiction book, entitled, Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton-sequel to Pandora's Star.) An alien described as the Prime Immotile produces soldier Motiles that are extensions of itself and yet not individuals and thus completely expendable. The Prime Immotile refers to the SI (Synthetic Intelligence) of the Commonwealth in an amusing exchange with the SI and one of the founders of human worm hole technology. “You humans created an artificial Immotile (referring to the SI) to make yourselves perfect.” Gotta read the book to really get it but it is just brilliant stuff.

Getting back to us…You get mind and grid-linked, so to speak and for lack of a better set of terms, to your spouse and children in a kid of hyper-dimensional consciousness that some might describe very loosely as "the body of Christ" but which on the natural level isn't just spiritual but more a kind of linked or collective consciousness...there the thought trail peters out. More on this when I get it but this is clearly (for me) building on some of the work that I did in How to Manage Your Destructive Impulses with Cyber-Kinetics—the infamous How to Manage Your DICK. An analogy towards what I am getting at is the Church’s teaching that we can be, in some instances, a means of actual grace to our fellows. The question is: what is the underlying metaphysical structure that makes that possible? I know roughly what it is based on Thomistic teaching but I suspect that there is a whole series of natural discoveries outside/parallel to the spiritual (possibly in physics and New Age thinking) to be made here. "Let us make them in our image." Does anyone ever think about what this line from Genesis really means outside of its usual pietistic form? The first internet is God’s own web of souls.

There was a hilarious line in one of the money magazines that I read at the dentist yesterday. The article was about pre-nuptial agreements. One couple's response: "We never really talked about it. He just gave me everything and said just give me some money once in awhile." Maybe the proper set of reflections would be based on humor as a form of collective consciousness. Consciousness dissolves and expands in humor and what comes in is more than we are individually. Maybe when we finally get to God we will encounter pure laughter as a concatenation of shared meaning fused with something so ontically generous and effortlessly self-perpetuating (the God who is His own existence) that it constantly finds itself in a fountain of joy and hilarity. This may be so far beyond our silly attempts to pin its triune and divine nature down into eschatological categories fueled by human concepts of justice and revenge that this too is vastly amusing to it.

“I am who am.” I hear the humor under the surface of the words. It is for this reason that I emotionally prefer the Hindu formulation of the Trinity as: Satchitananda—existence, consciousness and bliss. Perhaps the correct formulation should be existence, consciousness and mirth…

Sean O'Reilly

Editor-at-Large

Travelers' Tales Inc.

www.travelerstales.com

www.bestravelwriting.com

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