music: Barbra Streisand on Vinyl

colors: blue, yellow, orange

mood: getting by

thoughts: while finally unpacking books after the move, i found that book "the game of life" by timothy leary, so will now relate the part(from page 285) i was referring to quite some time back:

SINGULARITY

Come now, little aliens, cuddle closer to the central computer and you shall hear the final truth. It's about time for you to learn the tracks of life.

Singularities!

There are some human beings who have attained singularities. They know (and others uneasily suspect) that they are unique. They are somehow beyond the laws of passive human reaction, not dependent upon the rewards and supports of the local environment. They know that they create their environment. They inhabit their own worlds. You inhabit their worlds.

Now if you are not such a ONE; then you can't, you simply can't understand this message. All you can do is realize that there are persons whom you can't understand. You are like the reader of the Reader's Digest who reads an article by an astronomer describing powerful celestial objects who can be identified but whose nature cannot be comprehended.

It is a paradox of nuclear physics that we cannot "see" the particles we study. They move too fast for us. All we can detect is their vapor trails - their spin-prints in the sand of the cyclotron. So we cannot "see" a Human Singularity. We can only track them by the excited states they leave behind them.

Each gene-pool centers around a singularity. The function of each gene-pool is to produce a Singularity. The Singularity (at the slow level of DNA) is the special which makes the species.

Every hive member is fiercely ambivalent about the presence of a Singularity. The Special-One re-presents-creates a new species. SHe thus out-dates the old gene-pool-hive.

Here are some of the identifying characteristcs of a Singularity:

• Relaxed, laid-back self-love, total self-confidence
• Magnetic attractiveness; usually surrounded by orbiting satellites
• Aloof independence of hive limits; i.e. cheerfully irresponsible (you will never, repeat, never find a Singularity acting in a responsible, bureaucratic structure)
• Humorous, tender disdain for current hive pomposity
• Indestructible sense of uniqueness; of being a separate species
• A cheerful readiness for the future, a delight in being surprised, in being proved wrong
• An all-out openness and electron-hunger for fusion, for synergistic link-up
• An irresistible optimism based on the certainty that the universe does have meaning, that the evolutionary trip has direction, that the cosmic mysteries can be solved - by experiential science
• A common-sense, "Broadway" sophisticated wisdom that the trip from the protozoan unicellular state to the center of the galaxy is to be taken step-by-step - each moment offering the option of moving towards or away from the Violet Whole.
  

Much of the rest of the book goes on and on about all sorts of creative, yet all out zany, stuff he dreamed up (e.g. "the black whole - the mouth of the ulti-mate intelligence", "stage 18 reality fabricators," and "Webster's Galactic Dictionary, 23rd Edition," but the pictures, drawings, and notes in the margins are the crowning elements, 2nd only to the material on page 285).

Props to Z, from the Great Dane Pub and Brewery(my favorite: the Scotch Ale), for "lending" me that book eleven years ago.

chant/prayer/mantra:
gravitate.

pax hominibus,
joel