Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The Neanderthal's World

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
- Albert Einstein


"But I mean why did I see what I saw?"

“What you saw was for your eyes only.

I hadn't seen Einstein for a week. In the interim I had been intending to 'go to the Neanderthals world' when seemingly out of nowhere I had two experiences that had nothing to do with my intending. I went to see Einstein and to tell him every detail of the experiences.

“Those are for your eyes only. Never tell anyone of what you witnessed. The experiences will have more power that way. Some experiences should be shared because they expand the horizon of common knowledge. Other experiences, like the two you've had are for your eyes only. Keep them. Once a person makes the decision to take responsibility for the fact that one day they are going to die it’s almost as if the supreme intelligence of the universe sets down beside that person and it begins to watch as if it were shy and then somehow ends up guiding that person to its presence. Once you make it into its arena it begins to challenge you. It will whisk you away at a moments notice and tune your awareness into becoming more adept at handling it. The experiences you had challenged everything you know about yourself and the world and our magnificent arrangement of perception. The spirit of the universe granted you two gifts of immense beauty and power the likes of which you'll likely never be able to forget.”

“But I mean I still don’t get it. I mean . . . I get what you’re saying but these experiences came out of nowhere straight out of the blue and had nothing to with anything about me. I mean I guess . . . but I never knew that . . . “ He watched me closely and shifted around in his seat.

“Let me say it to you this way. When you begin to attempt to cross the thresholds of awareness the supreme intelligence of the universe will whisk you away at a moments notice and show you things. And further, in accordance to the manner in which you are investigating the engineering of conscious experience you are also setting up the parameters of the experience. For instance, a woman investigating the engineering of conscious experience may intend to experience ‘infinite affection’ and thereby by burdened with the production of experiences that criss cross inconceivable levels of affection.”

“I still don’t get what you’re saying.”

“What I mean is that your method of investigation has the hidden assumption that intelligent species are separated from one another. Perhaps you believe the universe is one where intelligent species are cordoned away from interacting with each other. But to assert that implies that the driving force behind evolution is a highly intelligent one. Accordingly, it is feasible then that cognitive domains keep intelligent species apart until the species matures or is granted extinction because of the malevolence of their behavior. Your path for investigating this knowledge produces different results than say a woman’s investigation. Contained within your theory is the overall presumption that the intellect is an evolutionary advantage. To acknowledge that our intelligence is a grain of sand in a universe filled to the brim with intelligence is the best thing man can do now. You’re doing that by placing your awareness and your body out there under its infinite intelligence.

I was bewildered and shrugged my shoulders at him.

“Thus, the ‘for your eyes only’ experiences should happen naturally to us every night but they don’t. We should be able to prove our beliefs to ourselves. Every night we should be hurled out there into impossible experiences and we are, at least, for those of us who have enough power to remember our dreams. We see amazing things at night! But somehow still we run from its gaze. We never manage to be aware of ourselves in two places at once.

I still could not see what in the world any of what he was saying had to do with my 'for your eyes only' experiences.

"Just between you and me the thing is man believes he lives one life. If one life is all you have you collect a bunch of belongings, you amass large inventories of money, real estate, guns, books, memories whatever it is - collectibles, Calvin and Hobbes memorabilia." He laughed aloud.

"We are all collectors but we don't collect inventories of imaginary sensory information that give us the conviction we can live twice. When the dream of mankind becomes oppressive and people begin to die then a most grievous and heinous misunderstanding has taken place. Almost each and every person fundamentally believes that no other worlds are right there for the asking. Man lives out his life with a single certainty that this one life is all he has. The twiceness or doubleness you’ve experienced is never supposed or asserted as a possibility.”

A few moments of silence passed. I sat back in my chair and readied myself to tell Einstein that I felt his breathing and memory exercise had cleaned off something in me. I told him that I found myself sitting at stoplights in my car watching with rapt fascination the plethora of cars driving by, concrete, scratches in metal poles. All the while, introspectively I noticed that I was silent and filled with curiosity.

“Ahah! You are becoming minimally aware of abstract and imaginary sensory data. Lets say that with the breathing exercise you’ve polished a small portion of your awareness to be in tune with an infinite awareness that must exist out there somewhere.”

I told him that I felt rejuvenated at a level I had never previously witnessed. I told him that I noticed my attention actually focusing on sounds in my surrounding environment as if they were small bits of data pertinent to what I was intending. I was amazed. I would sit at stoplights watching with childlike curiosity catch every single detail of the cars going by. My rapt fascination would absorb every color, shape, bang, dent, shadow and what not. I seemed to tell Einstein again and again something I thought was an important detail. It was that I felt as if my whole body was rapt with attention and focused on hearing, seeing, tasting, and smelling more. And inwardly I kept repeating 'I intend to go to the Neanderthals' world' and managed to capture nearly all the sensory information I encountered under that rubric.

“Fantastic. You’re slowly becoming aware, in a gradual manner, of the practical implications of abstract and imaginary sensory data. Usually, the power of language encapsulates all the sensory information in the environment with words. Language is an efficient way of communicating but it forces us be ignorant of the sensory details of the world around us. With language we come to shape and make believe ourselves in a huge world filled with ideologies, religions and political followings. All this built upon the edifice of language! And we never really acknowledge the existence of - except in a moment to pass judgment upon- abstract art? They say it’s a meaningless cultural institution!

With that he smiled and turned and busied himself with his equations. I turned left to ponder upon just what in the heck was going on. I was confused I’ll admit but I kept doing my best to collect imaginary sensory data.

I continued along like this for a few days and noticed that the problems I was usually plagued with in my daily life seemed to disappear. I realized that I thought way to much about my daily problems and that this alone was the source of my feelings of insecurity, failures, and my bouts with depression. Repeating one thing and matching that to the sensory information in the environment freed me from worrying about myself and my problems to a degree that I'd never experienced before. It was odd because I'd always been taught to think about my problems and attempted to solve them by thinking about them. But I was slowly beginning to realize that it was my meddling and my attempts to get what I wanted that dragged me down and chained me to them time and time again.

About the third week into ‘intending to go the Neanderthals world which was about a week after the two ‘for your eyes’ only experiences I again found myself aware of being in two places at once. I was walking in pitch-blackness and could see on my right a very modern sheik looking apartment made of money. It had to be an apartment on the top floor of a New York building and it was filled with all the name brand amenities. I was surprised to see my brother, alone surrounded by darkness and self-pity. The view was very somber. I became very sad for him and could easily see that his life of collecting status and wealth had a price. He was very alone. He was deeply unfulfilled and yet at the same time surrounded by luxuries amenities of all types and kinds.

I felt I couldn’t watch such an appalling existence any longer and kept walking. The view of his apartment was replaced with pitch blackness and then off to my left I noticed that I was standing perhaps twenty feet away from a canvas. The canvas was huge. It must have been twenty feet tall and thirty feet wide. And it was suspended in the pitch blackness about twenty feet in front of me. It was magnificent. Huge rectangular and awesome. I was stunned - enmeshed in a huge golden frame was the most beautiful woman I had ever laid my eyes upon. It was my own personal DaVinci! The more I looked at the painting the more I became convinced that at any moment she would move, blink or lick her lips, or even faint a smile. The intensity of the colors brought a definitive sense of life to her eyes and nose and lips and ear. I was breathless fearing to startle the painting.

The more I studied her features the more I became convinced that at any moment she would wink, smile or move. I was filled with so much incredible love and would have stood there for unblinking for an eternity when suddenly, about ten feet in front of me, a woman flew down landing like a bird. She looked directly at the canvas for a good two and a half minutes and then she turned approaching me. I noticed that there was something palabply blue about her that was not quite visible to my eyes. She had blond hair, blue eyes, and she was very thin but not at all frail. She could obviously move like lightening. She looked me in the eyes. Her look was one of wanting to know who I was. Her eyes wanted to know what my purpose was. I couldn’t get over it. I didn’t know how she was blue. It was as if underneath her skin a blue light radiated. But I couldn't actually see the blue light and yet it beamed from her. Her skin was lilly white and it wasn't like I was seeing a blue halo or a blueness surrounding her. She radiated blue light but not light that my eyes could detect. Under no conceivable circumstance could I explain how it was that blue was the most obvious feature of her awareness. She took a couple steps toward me looking into my eyes and then in an instant she flitted away.

I turned to see her fly off up over my right shoulder and felt my whole body turn and I walked straight into sheer blackness and jumped into something. I found myself surrouned by darkness that faded into stones and knew I was surrounded by walls. I though perhaps I was within the walls of a medieval dungeon and then I found a path of light and moved myself through a tunnel and found I was deep in a cave.

I crawled until there was standing room. Light poured in through the mouth of the cave. Coming up on the horizon of the cave floor I managed to catch a glimpse of a a city far off on the horizon. I noticed the city was unbelievably beautiful but was in no way unusual looking. I stopped in tracks and my whole body seemed to shout " Oh my God! Jesus never lived here!" I stumbled clutching at rocks and when I noticed a very tall man standing to the right of the opening of the cave. As the cave got wider I stood to my feet and saw a man standing at the mouth of the cave. He was very tall, wiry thin with a long white beard and steel blue eyes. I wasn’t sure if I had made it to the Neanderthals world because even though he looked human he must have stood six feet tall. His facial features were thin devoid of anything that even remotely looked like a Neanderthal attributes.

Just as I was wondering if I could get close enough to talk to him I saw, out of the top of my line of vision, a huge red machine. Suddenly, my awe was invincible. A 15 to 16 foot tall war machine descended not less than seven feet away from me. It set down on the edge of the cliff in an oddly humanistic manner. I looked the thing up and down and was shocked into all sorts of disbelief. I simply could not believe what I was looking at. It's sheer power of the thing was extraordinary. It was obviously made to kill and protect. I didn’t dare look the thing in its eyes and yet my eyes trailed over its massive yet agile structure and I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off its feet. The circuitry, or rather the surface of its skin - the way this metal thing was put together - was not metal at all but was somehow alive. What ever I was looking at was a highly sophisticated robot but it was inconceivable in how it was robot. I couldn't believe it. It wasn’t a robot at all. It was a living machine and yet I couldn’t conceive of how the machine was alive. The toes and the whole skin of the machine were thinking and communicating a most visibly life-sustaining intelligent manner.

Without pause the machine hoisted something into the air with its right arm grasping what seemed to be a human by its neck. I looked and saw my brother fighting for his last breath. I panicked and suddenly in the oddest way imaginable I began to move my left arm in such a way that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was communicating to them what they wanted to know - who I was and what level of technology my world had. My jittery mechanical movements said VCR’s, Cell Phones, personal computers, Macintoshs' and boom! The next thing I knew the impossible feeling of being in two places at once disappeared and I awoke in my bed in a state of amazement.. I had been to the Neanderthals world. Suddenly, I was thrown into turmoil and panic. Without waiting an instant I dressed, and bolted out the door. I was in desperate straights. I knew I had to see Einstein

* * *

“But Einstein, why did I say, “Jesus never died here?” I mean what kind of reaction is that? I’ve been in no way concerned with Jesus since I was nine years old!” I distinctly remembered convincing my family to drop out of church because I was so disappointed and unable to accept their teachings.

“I don’t know. What was your relationship with Jesus?”

I told Einstein that my family and I attended the Catholic church and that I remembered the priest talking endlessly about how important it was for us as his flock to accept the death of Jesus in order to let Jesus be the savior of my sins. I remember becoming personally offended by the talk that I should accept that Jesus died on the cross for my sins.
I must have been nine years old or so and was highly aware of this idea as it was repeated ad nauseum in our church. The believers around me treated this as a central tenet of the Bible. It seemed to me that everyone in our church wanted Jesus to die on the cross as if that was his purpose.

I told Einstein that I had been raised as a black kid in mixed family and I was taught to be highly aware of my past and the atrocity of slavery. I despised slavery in any form. And I keenly felt in my deepest heart of hearts that under no circumstance would I let Jesus die for my sins. The more I held onto this view the more it seemed that the priests and all the followers of the Church wanted Jesus to die on the cross and keep him pinned there with their words like an ultimate slave whose body upon which their own sins could be wrought. Personally, for me, it was utterly wrong to make Jesus a slave to die for my sins.

Under no circumstance did I want Jesus to die the way he did. This idea was so repulsive to my nine-year-old mind that to this and to my very last day on this earth I will never accept it. I wanted God to see my decision and to forsake me in my absolute innocence to have no part in his sons death. And as a nine year old, I could plainly see in the world around me that Jesus hadn't been here for over two thousand years. And at that age I could easily ascertain that God didn't live here anymore. I concluded that Jesus didn't have the power to rise from hell and was still trapped there eternally dying for all the sins of mankind - because that was his job - that was what he was supposed to do and that is what the world wanted of him. As a nine year old I believed that if it were true that Jesus died for all the sins of mankind then under no circumstance, no matter how great or small, would I burden his ascension from hell with my sins. In my mind this was the least I could do for a man who chose to die for all of humanity's sins. If Jesus were going to come back to this world I would do my best to help him. I believed that in making this decision I was making way for Jesus to ascend into my own life as he did for his apostles.

“Well, it’s no wonder then! You have very strong feelings on the issue of Jesus. The engineering of conscious experiences are accomplished with everything we have and everything we are. It is no surprise then that your reaction was to intuit that perhaps the Neanderthals world is devoid of the teachings of Jesus.

I pondered that for a moment and was assuaulted with a terrible feeling. Panic and turmoil pounced upon me again. My mind went back and forth over the some of the details of the experience. I was supremely emotionally agitated and coming apart at the seams.

“What is it? Something else?”

Tears welled up in my eyes. I wanted to burst our crying but instead I nearly screamed. “I am not a friggin' marine!” And shot to my feet. “I panicked! That was my brother up there! Being strangled by that thing! I shit my pants. I wanted to save him. So I told them everything! "

Einstein was aghast.

"I feel like a traitor to my country. And I am scared out of my mind. Can the Neanderthals make here? Can they somehow travel through cognitive domains?”

“You say this thing you saw, this machine . . . how advanced was it?”

“Oh shit. You have no idea! The thing looked, well it was, uh . . . easily, very easily, . . . uh . . . well lets say that two thousand years ago . . . I mean that if you could go back two thousand years in the Neanderthals world you'd be at where we are at right now. It’s going to take us two thousand years to get to where they are at.” I was despondent. I told Einstein that I felt like peon telling them about our VCR’s, CD’s, Game Cubes, and High Definition TV set. “I mean . . . I mean . . . they could easily come and conquer us.”

Einstein stood realizing the ramifications of my words. He grimaced and all seemed lost. He broke into despair. “Why did you have to go over there like some kind of Vasco de Gamma? With the amount of precision allowed in the engineering of conscious experience you could have just as easily intended to go to the Neanderthals world as a street sweeper, a janitor or a homeless friggin' Neanderthal man! You know someone unnoticeable! But nooo, you’ve got take one big step for man and one giant leap for mankind and Whamo!! Look at this! Neanderthals and their artificially intelligent aircraft will be pouring out of the sky any minute now!” .

I wanted to puke. I wanted things to be different. I wanted to be stronger. My shoulders slumped and my mind played what had been replaying in it since the experience happened - the devastation of our world by a much more sophisticated and highly advanced civilization. And it would be entirely my fault! I despised myself because in a single moment I felt that I had sold the world.
Einstein peered at me. His behavior bordered upon that of a skillful actor. His eyes filled with concern. I quickly noticed that he was humoring me. He ran to the window peering out and searching the skies for a signs of invasion. He turned and looked at me. As soon as my eyes met his he erupted in laughter. I half cracked a smile unsure of whether or not we were laughing because we were resigning ourselves to our inevitable fate or because, suspiciously, I began to think, he was going to pin the entire thing on me. He kept laughing and I kept trying to laugh with him and noticed that my mood began to change.I burst into laughter. Suddenly, my heavy burden was lifted. I began to consider that maybe the Neanderthals weren’t going to launch some kind of retaliatory attack against us and that there was no way for them to bring an armada through the cognitive domains.


“Please do excuse me for punning along with you. Your internal dilemma looked like it was pretty serious. And it is always best to express everything. I played along with you and your fears in order to get all of those feelings out of you. Expressing everything, even if expressed to a brick or some other inanimate object, allows one to become fully aware of whatever is internally bothering them.” He laughed gently and he wiped tears from his eyes and continued. “The experience you had was and is unbelievable and to talk about them here as we are doing today dumbs these kinds of experiences down and makes it seem like they are something that can be understood, argued for and defended against. Or, in your case rationalized. The Neanderthals are coming! Oh no, watch out the Neanderthals are coming!” He chuckled aloud waving his hands about in the air adding much to my chagrin. I felt like a dolt for even thinking and feeling the way I did. “This is a grand error because even as you said yourself . . . a while ago when you recounted the experience . . .

“I . . . uh . . .”

“You said that when you were there a major part of the experience was unbelievable."

Einstein triggered my memory and I told him again that yes, I couldn’t believe in the experience because everything was impossible. I felt that inherently within the engineered conscious experience itself everything that I witnessed was impossible.”

“Yes,” Einstein said and began to pace the room. “Kant said that there are two apriori absolutes that condition all of human experience. These are space and time. Everything we perceive, comes to use prepackaged in time and space. When we hear a car drive by we hear it because the car is moving through time in space. And we sense it as moving in a specific direction."

Einstein paused stopping to look me in the eye and gather my full attention. “However, in an engineered conscious experience there are not only the two apriori absolutes of time and space but a third absolute apriori – the undeniable and absolute conviction that you are existing in two places at once. There is no way around it. There is no way to deny it. There is no way to get over it, to drop it, to do away with it. It is there and it conditions the entirety of the experience. Being in two places at once produces unflinching awe and the direct knowing that what is taking place is by far and away impossible – and yet it is happening!” He laughed aloud shrugging his shoulders.

“Therefore,” he said wagging his finger. “It makes no sense for me or someone on the street to say to you 'I believe in your experience' or 'I believe the Neanderthals world exists' because you yourself know that the experience is and was unbelievable! It is not a matter of belief! Belief is part of understanding. When we understand what a fish is we believe there are such things as fish. If 99.9% of an engineered experience is inherently unbelievable then don’t come back here and rationalize it into something commonplace. Then you are turning the ineffable into something manageable and as you know, since you've been there, the entirety of an engineered conscious experience defies any attempt at description and must be lived in order to be understood.

“Once that kind of understanding takes place - on the other side via experience - the idea of turning that experience into an argument for the existence of the Neanderthals should be seen as a great trivialization and a huge travesty. Taking something that inherently cannot be conceptualized and turning it into the mundane will rob you of your awe and then all of your power. You will lose yourself if you go that way. Your connection to the imagination will drift away and through the years as you attempt to argue for, or defend, or rationalize your experiences into the common everyday world your fight will become empty, your passion would disappear.

“The same will happen if you attempt to go preaching to people about the Neanderthal’s world and how you pissed them off and how you believe they are going to attack! Don’t do that either. The division between this world of experience with it’s two a priori absolutes and this other world of experience with its three a prior absolutes has to be kept intact at all costs. Utmost sobriety must be used going into these experiences and coming out of them. Otherwise we risk losing everything.

“We are simple beings with simple lives. We wake up. We go to work. We fall in love, have children, form communities, talk politics, talk sports and so on. We have to accept that we are human beings and that we live in whatever manner a man or a woman may live - as a potter, an artist, an architect, a barista, a musician, a tax accountant, a police officer. " He laughed and pointed at himself, " . . . a mathematician. Look around you. This is it. This is all we have. We exist here and we will live and die here. But to touch, as you’ve touched, upon another possibility of dying takes guts galore and a thousand pounds of sobriety! Stay sober and relax. There are no Neanderthals poised on the horizon to conquer us.



“ There is no completeness without sadness and longing, for without them there is no sobriety, no kindness. Wisdom without kindness and knowledge without sobriety are useless” – Carlos Castaneda

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