Life in the Cultlane

So radiate
I can’t see you
You’re just too far from me
– Carly Binding

I can’t be near you
The light just radiates
– Courtney Love

A thought experiment:

Imagine that underneath everything we know, underneath thought and physics and soul, there’s a… substrate, a field, a waveform, a signal, an energy source.

(Energy not as physicists would think of it, but more like the philosophers who predated physics, and who gave us the word energeia which we borrowed and restricted into its modern technical meaning. Energy as in power, creativity, intelligence, Life. Something much more fundamental and more interesting than mere heat and motion and all the other separated, chaotic energies that we know which contradict and destroy each other. This Energy has no analog and no opposite. A single millivolt of it can move suns. It is the Light which has no darkness in it.)

Imagine that people are like little antennas, or pumps, which can dig into this field and pour out that energy into the world. Radiate it out with every thought, every breath.

Imagine that perhaps that is what soul is: what existence is, and personality, and all the other things we think of that make an ‘is’. Little loops of antenna-stuff radiating energy.

Imagine that all the people you see every day walking down the street are glowing like this, lit up with the energy of God, all the time and don’t even know it.

Except some of them, perhaps, become dimly aware, of that energy radiating through them; that light and power, that love, that peace, that sense of connectedness with a single Personality that floods through the whole universe and from which it is formed (or radiated). And as they become aware, they start to act with more love, more kindness, more simplicity, more abandonment, a deeper sense of being exactly where they need to be and being supported and guided at every step.

And still not everyone knows or can see how that energy lights them up and lights others up. And the more they see, the more frustrating it becomes for them, the moments when they can’t see, and the people who they can’t feel that light flowing out. But they know it’s there all the same, in the same way that we’ve learned to know that electricity is there when we turn a switch even if we can’t see an arc zapping.

What would it mean, to live in a universe like that?

Is that the universe we live in?

How could we tell?

What would it mean, for how we live and work and play and relate with each other, to think for just a moment that everyone on the street is a filament in the electric chandelier of God?

Kid, I’ve travelled from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff. But I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful force controlling my destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
– Han Solo, Star Wars

1. Is God a person, or a natural force?

2. What possible significance can ideas about the self and cosmology which desert-dwelling tribes held in the Bronze Age have for us today in the 21st century, surrounded by marvels which our own mastery of science and knowledge has wrought?

3. When we can land a probe on Mars and watch it sift soil in near-real-time, and realise that possibly this is the first time in millions of years that an intelligently-operated entity has touched that piece of soil - what faith can we possibly have in any kind of ’sky god’ or ‘Father in Heaven’? Look out there, says science, look what WE have done. WE own Mars. We made this thing fly. We made it land. We send a signal, and soil is dug. We stop sending, and soil is not dug. If there’s any kind of being out there in space, guiding and controlling the life of planets, it’s us, and apart from us is blackness, emptiness, and vacuum.

4. And beyond the vacuum, in what unthinkable chaos of dimensions might exist in subspace or hyperspace or any other configuration of metaverses out of which our universe is born - why should we have any confidence that any order prevails in the universe which is at all unsympathetic to humans, to mind, or to life itself? Or is the ultimate reality random chance self-selecting through replication, evolving chaos being sculpted into ever-changing forms; evolution of species in response to blind immediate survival needs, somehow producing short-lived burns of bright intelligence and warlike culture, but undirected, unguided, ultimately alone even at the cellular level, and all destined for death?

5. What does the word ‘God’ have to do with any of this, with science, with space, with genetics, with the future? Why should we even tolerate in our language a word matching a concept which cannot exist in reality, except as a horror and a warning, a sort of ‘here be contradictions’ flag?

One of the reasons why intelligent people find it hard to stomach religion is the idea that believing in a personal God means believing in a ‘little old man in the sky’: that personality implies all the necessary flaws, limitations and contradictions that we see in each other as humans. The universe manifestly shows both order of a far greater regularity (and dullness) than human mind could hold without getting distracted, and inherent contradictions that seem to undermine the whole project of life and mind before it even starts; in both cases, it seems like the universe is more like some kind of shining but utterly alien artifact, its purpose examinable but ultimately inscrutable, creating and obeying its own rules, but probably not expressing anything at the large scale than a jumbled mess. A pretty, doomed, bit of cosmic junk. Possibly valuable in itself, as a sort of ethical rebellion against the night; possibly not. On the long scale, the choice itself may be meaningless.

And carbon-based life (at least as a platform for consciousness) seems remarkably poorly engineered. The whole death thing is a pretty horrible bug that should have been solved trillions of years ago. If consciousness boils down to the interplay of atoms in the brain, then that ought to boil down to the shuffling of bits in an algorithm, and there seem to be any number of much better ways of organising data than to encode it into proteins that denature at a low temperature, in a brain that can’t stand extremes of pressure or be without blood circulation for more than a couple of minutes, that has nothing remotely like a backup mechanism or removable storage. When Microsoft builds software this shoddy, we campaign against it, we build open-source software that is safer, patchable, proof from death, free of security exploits, we duplicate and triplicate our data stores; what kind of evil idiot, then, is the Designer of the human mind, that would package such an infinitely precious irreplacable thing as consciousness in the most fragile of eggshells?

None of this seems to be what we would expect if there were some kind of overall infinite Mind controlling the universe. Therefore, in accordance with Occam’s Razor, we should accept the most likely explanation, which is that ‘things just are what they are and there’s no explaining them’. Or at least, there are no simple folk explanations which can possibly be true, and the more ‘intuitive’ and emotionally appealing an explanation seems and the more all-embracing it is, the more likely it is to be wrong. ‘God’ and ‘gods’ are one of the oldest, simplest, most primitive explanations for stuff; therefore they’re the most wrong, and the people who promote them are either mindless parrots or cunning tricksters promoting known falsehoods to gain power and keep others ignorant.

And yet.

There are more words to be said on God’s behalf.

Reading channelled material, several concepts come through strongly from multiple sources:

1. There is a ’spiritual world’, which is actually more real than the ‘physical’ world of our senses.

2. The spiritual world appears to be composed of intention. Thoughts and dreams and will appear to be almost like actual substances. What we choose to think or believe, exists in some form and stays with us. Deeds remain with their doer, but it is the intention of the deed rather than the physical form of the act that has the reality. (All this is terrifying, given how randomly we dismiss intention and private thoughts as ‘nonphysical’ and therefore having no meaning or ethical claim upon our lives.)

In terms of physics, this is like our everyday room-temperature physics turned inside out, but in information theory and some views of quantum physics we start to approach similar (though not identical) ideas of connectedness without distance.

3. There is a single unifying guiding principle for everything, and it is Love. Everything that ‘actually Is’, exists to serve and create Love of one being for another and the gentle welfare of all beings. No beings can in fact exist without being an incarnation of Love; nothing that hates or destroys anything else for its survival has reality.

In terms of biology, psychology and sociology, this is almost the inverse of what we currently believe in the best of our sciences. Darwin saw species as constantly competing, Dawkins extended this to the meme; Marx saw the classes as locked in economic struggle, and Rand inverted this into the heroic egoism of individuals competing through the market, a worldview still influential long after ts use-by date; Freud saw the mind as hopelessly caught in a double-bind between self-expression and social conformity. (Jung took a different, more psychic-friendly route to psychotherapy, but I believe he still saw the mind as divided into archetypes with no single unifying theme.)

4. There is both a ground and a purpose to all that Is; it is the mind of the Father, the One Infinite Intelligence which both underlies the universe and waits for the emergence of mind in its likeness, and pervades all spaces between.

How then can we conceptualise something which is both mind-like and law-like? Something which is utterly free and yet self-organising? We have no decent human categories to describe a Mind which could hold the universe in a blink and not waver. The closest we can come at the moment is ‘machine’. Something made of steel, or diamond, or granite, or vacuum, or crystal; something cold; something big; that does not denature, does not bend; rigidity, permanence, endurance. And yet such a thing as sentient Mind is not a machine, not cold, not rigid; to describe the flashes of human warmth and intelligence in us, we think of metaphors like light, heat, wind, fire; things describing speed, change, attractiveness, environments that sustain physical life; smallness, ‘human-ness’, nearness. Breath, blood, touch.

Somehow, the concept of ‘God’ combines and transcends both of these. It is not a contradiction; but our language and even our physical experience betrays us. We call such a God ‘indescribable’ not because the concept is unthinkable (though we do not yet think it correctly) but because all the hints and glimmers that we see come down to our waking consciousness broken and incomplete. And yet there is a sense (and this is where intuition cuts in, or ‘faith’, where words break in our mouth and leave us frustrated) that there is really something there, a concept that could be grasped — a living concept, even, which reaches out to grasp us as we struggle towards it.

5. The universe is big. Bigger than we currently imagine. A whole lot bigger. The dead cold empty sea of space that we see… is not at all the whole picture. There is life teeming beyond the picture frame, but we are not currently able to understand how and in what fashion it exists. The best scientific images we have at present of ‘alien life’ are probably unhelpful, in that they project terrestrial life into space; but not only is life ‘out there’ not alien (since we are all linked by the one Father-Mind), it may not actually be in the ‘there’ where we’re looking for it.

We joke about ‘why would aliens cross light-years of space’ as if that clinches the fact that aliens are impossible, but even our concept of ‘light-year’ may be wrong. The spiritual universe described by psychics is one that fundamentally has no distance in it, either in space or time: or rather, distance is determined by mental affiliation (in a similar way to, I suppose, how a Google search page is constructed of ’similar ideas’ and we don’t make people ‘walk through the Web’ to find places like bad early 1990s science fiction thought we might). So if instantaneous travel is a way of life ‘out there’ or ‘up there’, in the higher reaches that we’re currently exiled (or self-exiled) from, something as easy as Googling a blog or texting - then why wouldn’t ‘aliens’ come visit whenever they wanted?

And in what form might they come? If the wider universe is primarily mental (like a well-ordered Internet), might they appear to us primarily as mental influences rather than physical? Might the best of them, in fact, not be tangible to us at all - just felt as a sort of quietness, a peace, a cessation of trouble? Or as unexplained surges of creative energy, or inspiration? Artists are familiar with the phenomenon of ‘the muse’, where connecting with one’s unconscious produces a surge of ideas that can often feel like a different personality. What is interesting is that many scientists in history who have produced key breakthroughs seem to have had their own muses as well: inspiration through dreams and other altered states.

Is it possible that the ‘muses’ are real entities, and that some of the strange ‘conspiracy theory’ ideas about ‘alien derived technology’ are in fact true statements about the process by which technological ideas are ‘given to’ us by the Father, but which we often fail to recognise?

And is it possible that bioforms can ‘download’ information from the spirit world (the ‘real world’ of which this physical world is but a shadow, as Plato tried to describe) in a similar way, and is this how DNA mutates? How God creates? How God heals?

The NASA Phoenix Mars lander, aiming for a polar landing with probably the best chance so far of detecting Martian life, is about to hit reentry in the next half hour. I’m watching live on NASA TV.

I love living in the future.

Edit: And it landed just fine.

The Secret History of Star Wars is a fan-written e-book that documents, in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail, the process by which the Star Wars film saga evolved over the last 30 years. At 533 pages, it’s a bit of a doorstop, but there’s a lot of material which is fascinating to someone like me (the frustrated artist/historian type) who loves listening to DVD commentaries, looking behind the stage sets and seeing how art is *really* made.

It turns out the answer is: with a great deal of hard work, a fair bit of brute-force copying, much misguided fannish enthusiasm, heaping helpings of pure luck, and above all it really helps if you have a circle of friends who can complement your weaknesses and add their own colour to the mix. Also, that there really aren’t that many in the way of rules for making art except perhaps ‘don’t let your vision get in the way of your friendships.’

The original Star Wars, it seems, is proof that the best art really can emerge from a committee, and the prequels are proof that sometimes ’seeing a story in your head’ can actually be a barrier to telling it.

Edit: Huh, I really didn’t realise it’s actually Star Wars Day today. Neat.

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The name fitted perfectly. It had the right hard, bright sound to it - and Trillions were hard and bright. It suggests millions upon millions - and the Trillions were everywhere, sprinkling roads and gardens and roofs and even the firesides of people’s homes with a glittery dusting of tiny jewels (but Trillions were not jewels).

And the name Trillions had a foreign sound to it - a suggestion of other worlds, star-studded skies, the cold emptiness of space. That was right, too. For wherever Trillions came from, it was not this world.

I finally read a book which haunted my childhood: Nicholas Fisk’s 1971 young adult novel Trillions.

Whatever age I was when I first glanced at it (ten? twelve?), it scared the willies out of me, so much that I never plucked up the courage to read the whole thing. Reading the book now, it both amuses and startles me that I picked up entirely the wrong idea from the snippets of text I saw then. The Trillions of my imagination were extremely nasty space-Triffids; the ones in the book are the opposite. The story reads like a rather tame Doctor Who episode with an antiwar and ecological message: masses of tiny alien nanobot-creatures fall from the sky, a suspicious military attempt to use nuclear weapons to destroy them, a group of children make psychic contact with the tiny critters, discover that they are ecological repair robots and eventually use their newfound control to save them from the army. Somehow I both reversed the sense of it and created my own monsters (which still make me shiver today). That’s kind of cool, actually.

The book does have several scary passages, but what I missed at that age is the context:

Scott suddenly saw a vision, like a photograph appearing in his mind, of the solitary figure in the space capsule. The figure was like a huge, elaborate, insect-like toy. It had a glinting, glassy, bulbous head. Its skin was of metallic silver material. Outside its body were veins - tubes and pipes and wires. But inside the glass-globe head there was a human face, in pain. And from one of the silvery arm-tubes there dangled a human hand with hairs on the back of it, nails on each finger tip and human warmth inside it. The hand moved uneasily and blood dripped from one finger.

The protagonist is talking to an astronaut about an Apollo-13 style space accident, and emphasising the loneliness and alienness of space; it is meant to be a little disturbing, but it’s largely a fake-scare. What I picked up from this at age ten-something instead was a vision of alien Trillions somehow infecting and transforming humans into alien creatures. Where I got that, I’m not sure. But it sure freaked me out, and I could probably write a really scary ur-Trillion horror story if I wanted to.

(My Trillions were tiny virus-like diamondoids, each with a little ’sting’, indestructible, with a hard cold alien intelligence which only wanted to consume, replicate, and possibly reconstruct the world into an alien ecosystem. They would eat the Terminator-1000 for breakfast, literally. It is difficult for me to convey the cold terror they conjured up in my brain - and I’m wondering now, where that came from.)

The Trillions are fascinating to me because they are an early nanobot story - long before Eric Drexler’s 1986 ‘Engines of Creation’, they have most of the pieces in place. They are little cogwork/lego type machines with a collective swarm intelligence, built like robots to serve long-departed ‘Masters’ and preserve their planet. Plausibly enough, they do not function as atomic assemblers but at a macro-scale: they can build mountains and large-scale structures, but not ‘real’ matter.

What I also missed was the flash of Christianity, in the dream-scene where Scott psychically contacts the ghosts of the aliens:

‘We must serve the Master’, said the Masters. ‘The Master of everything. The Master of all planets, all lives, all of us, each single Trillion.’
‘And the Trillions?’
‘Through us, they serve the Master too.’
The mesh hummed gently. The Trillions that made the walls of the cavern shifted, twinkling and changing colour. Now the walls glowed purple, tinged with gold. The mesh vibrated, pleased. A veil of colour rose from it like a mist to thank them.

The ironic thing to me is that for a story which centres on the power of love and understanding of the alien versus fear, and the triumph of childlike trust versus adult incomprehension, it was the child me who was afraid, and the adult me who understands.

And here’s another science-fiction image brought to life: Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog. Watching this thing move is like the Imperial Probot from Empire Strikes Back mixed with a bit of The Fly.

What I fail to understand is why 100% of the world’s residents *aren’t* science fiction fans, given that we live in a science fiction world. Or is it that we simply make an artificial distinction between ‘news’ and ‘fiction’, between ‘reporting’, ‘research’, ‘extrapolation’, and ’speculation’, between ‘absolutely impossible’ and ‘not yet observed’? But they’re all points on the same curve: we observe, we imagine, we predict, we experiment, we adjust our sense of reality. One blends into the other; if you try to artificially separate them, you lose sight of the terrifying intensity of the changes we’re living through right now.

And that’s just from a materialist perspective, before you even start to factor in the ‘impossible’ things which have been happening for millenia in the realms of the psychic, spiritual, or religious, and which our science for the most part has yet to digest.

(Both this and the Audeo via this article in the Boston Phoenix.)

As a science fiction fan, one of the reasons I get deeply frustrated with people asking ‘why do you care about that weird stuff?’ is that the line between fiction and reality gets thinner each day.

Take the Audeo, for instance. According to this New Scientist article, and video, it’s the first functioning piece of subliminal voice recognition hardware.

That is, if this tech isn’t just vaporware, a computer can now scan your nerves, detect a signal for words you want to say without actually saying them, translate it into sound, and speak it for you.

It’s not qualitatively a huge jump - we’ve had nerve-induction technology for decades, we’ve had voice recognition for almost as long, we’ve had voice-synthesis boxes for the disabled like Stephen Hawking’s device, and they’ve been slowly getting better - and who knows what experimental stuff the US military has had access to - but seeing this happening in real-time in what could be a high-end consumer device… that’s impressive, to me.

Of course, science fiction isn’t about answering the question ‘what will the future be like’, because the future is made by human choice and we’re too complicated to predict. What SF is good for is asking the question ‘what do we WANT the future to be like?’ Because often, until we can imagine that a technology like this MIGHT exist, and what its implications might suggest, we don’t even understand how to go about deciding whether or not we like it.

A local UFO flap, or just dots?

2005:
January 2

2008:
April 10
April 10
April 26

Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything interesting in the sky here.

Not shatterwrack. Not breaklight.
Just broken glass at sunset.

Those words end the first magazine-published science fiction short story I think I ever read: Terry Dowling’s haunting cyberpunkish Shatterwrack at Breaklight in Omni, 1985. The story (a sand-ship sailor encounters the holographic projection of a woman grieving a long-ago car accident in a future Australian city) got under my skin and left me dazzled and confused in a bewilderingly changed world, struggling to find my breath. It was a long time before I forgave Dowling for what he pulled on me.

(There are a few other SF writers who have had a similar effect: William Gibson’s Burning Chrome from the same era stamped cyberspace and the BAMA Sprawl on my brain, but much later; Greg Egan, another Australian, with his infinitely bleak Transition Dreams; Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. But Dowling for me was the first.)

What I didn’t realise at the time is that Shatterwrack was to be just the first of a long cycle of short stories all centering around Tom Tyson, the Blue Captain of the sandship Rynosseros, in Dowling’s far-future romanticised post-spiritual-apocalypse Australia where Aboriginal Tribes rule the planet with laser satellites, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and psionic powers, while white-skinned Nationals are exiled to the crumbling coastal cities. The stories - collected in three books in the early 1990s (Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, and Twilight Beach) - are a love song to the Australian outback and the Aboriginal Dreamtime, filtered through a cocktail of 1980s high-tech cyberpunk and a sort of space-opera-steampunk retro-escapism, dashed with tense and elliptical political intrigue. William Gibson meets Cordwainer Smith by way of Frank Herbert. And they remain probably my favourite science fiction works of all time.

But the stories never ended, they just stopped; they never resolved the mystery of just who Tom Tyson was, why he spent years in the Madhouse, what his three dream-signs (a ship, a star, a woman’s face) meant, why ID-5982-J, the old rogue Iseult-Darrian belltree AI, had given Colours to the Seven National Captains in defiance of the Haldanian Order themselves…

Well, that’s over now, because the fourth and final Tom Tyson volume, Rynemonn, is out. And it’s everything I had hoped for. Eleven short, mostly standalone, stories linked by a framing narrative, and resolving in a glorious, bittersweet, ambiguous battle royale that answers the basic questions of Tom’s existence but leaves so much - everything, really - open to the reader’s imagination.

If you’ve never read these stories (and the books are hard to come by, printed by a small press and possibly out of print, I had to get most of mine second-hand), but you love thoughtful, swashbuckling sci-fi (robots! aerostats! kite-powered sandships! mindwar! deathlamps! politics! genetic assassins! laser strikes from orbit for breaking tribal law!) - do your best to get hold of these.

Yes, there’s probably also a lot wrong with the Rynosseros universe too, starting with a sort of reverse Western orientalism that both glamourises and fears native people’s ‘inherent spirituality’, and a view of religion as little more than a form of mental warfare, so I’m not sure I could write these myself - but there’s also a poetry and warmth that is missing from a lot of fiction today, speculative or otherwise.

One day I’d like to write something as good as these. It’s just one of the unattainable goals I have that make me cry.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

– Clay Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Why the future belongs to those who can figure out how to radically decentralise, democratise, and empower the world to cooperate on projects they believe in, rather than try to centrally control it and enforce policy from above.

And that includes the Christian church.

The good news is that Christianity didn’t actually start out as a top-down central control trip, so stepping into this terrifying new world of massive democracy actually means getting *back* to orthodox belief, not destroying it.