An Awareness of The Atoms in The Body

I was furious. My physics professor had just given a talk on atoms and went on about how atoms constitute the very basis of everything around us. I quickly made my way across campus heading to Einstein's office. Upon arrival I found his door unusually locked. Immediately I began frantically knocking. He came and unlocked it. I burst into the room and spewed forth a tirade.“Why can’t we be aware of the atoms in our bodies? Four hundred years of white philosophers who are too stupid to suggest the question! Oh my God! There is a huge piece of the puzzle is missing”

“Oh, now you’re going to blame ‘white’ philosophers?”

“You’re damn right! Their negligence is a crime against the human race! Why didn’t they ever think or posit that we human beings could be aware of the atoms in our bodies? Atoms are everywhere!" I looked at Einstein demanding an answer. "Why aren’t I aware of the atoms in my own body?"

“Where?” Einstien said turning, his hands offering a perusal of all the books lining the many shelfs in his office. “Where is it written that you cannot be aware of the atoms in your body?”

I paced the floor. I was irascible and seething with rage. I told Einstein that with what I had done so far with engineering conscious experiences I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was possible to be aware of the atoms in my body. And, I told him, knowing this made me feel robbed of a part of my body. "There is no way in hell that I will not stop to fight for what it rightfully mine! You want to talk about minority rights, women's rights – you know about slave rights! This tragedy is nothing in comparison. Those white philosophers sold the whole human race into chains of ignorance"

Einstein swiveled in his wooden chair, picked up a pencil and jotted something down on notepad. "How did all this come about?"

I told him that during the physics professor’s lecture I began to wonder why I was aware of my body physically, as flesh and blood, but not aware of the atoms in my body – which – according to our modern scientific understanding – are also a part of the flesh and blood of my body. It seemed to make no sense that I could move my arm, pick up my pencil and not – at that same time – be manipulating the atoms of my body at some unconscious level. Einstein leaned back listening intently.

“According to modern chemistry cells of the human body are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms. So I agree with your analysis. Yes you are moving millions if not billions, if not nearly a quadrillion, of atoms in your arm when you pick up a pencil.”

“But, if I am manipulating those atoms then why in the world aren’t I aware of the atoms in my own body?” I could not tolerate the inanity of inherited knowledge passed down from the philosophers of the ages.

"You like biting off more than you can chew, don't you?"

I was immediately irriated by his comment. According to what I'd learned I knew I could do it. And yet, I was flammebasted by his comment. I automatically assumed he didn't believe I could do it.

“I’m a big chewer.” I spat back. As soon as my mouth closed I regretted saying something so dumb as I’m a big chewer. I felt like I was three years old. I’m a big chewer?

“You see, it's not that your passion is not in the right place or aimed in the right direction. And it's not that your curiosity isn’t enough. Your inquiry is certainly well suited to engineering a conscious experience. It comes down to a basic fundamental cognitive requirement that you have yet to fulfill.

"Which is?" I looked at him glaringly openly challenging his non-belief in my skill.

Einstein swiveled around to his desk again, scribbled something down and swiveled back. "You simply don't have enough abstract sense data within your cognitive processes to engineer a conscious experience of the atoms in your body. And your handling of abstract sense data is inefficient. In short," he said standing. "You don’t have the necessary experience to engineer a conscious experience of your body as atoms."

"That's crap! I'll do it."

He laughed aloud and looked out the window. "Why not go back to the Neanderthals world.”

“What?”

“You still haven’t proven to yourself that you were ‘in’ the Neanderthal’s world.”

My jaw hung open. “I was there.”

“Perhaps you were, perhaps you weren’t. But you didn’t actually SEE any Neanderthals." He gave sharp glance at me. "If we are conducting a scientific investigation of first-person experience, and we are, then you need to validate your claims. And you haven't seen a Neanderthal.”

It was as if his words pierced something in me. I began to fight the feeling of being deflated. My rage began to slowly seep from me and my intellect began to take over. He was right. I hadn't seen a Neanderthal.

Einstein gave me a serious look and made walking motions with his index and forefinger. “You have to take a little detour before attempting to become aware of the atoms in your body.”

“That’s no problem. How do I become more inefficient at handling abstract sense data?"

“No, going back to the Neanderthals world is a big problem. It's a huge problem. It's a ten foot tall wall that you are smacking right into and you've got to learn to jump over the wall. You think that all this rage is going to do it for you as if engineering a conscious experience were up to you and you alone. Of which it is and which it isn't." He grimaced wondering if he should say something. He stood and paced the length of his lab scratching his chin and biting his lower lip. He turned to me and put his hands in his coat pockets.

"You're problem is simple. It's just that you have yet to take responsibility for the fact that you will one day die."

I was taken aback "What do you mean? Of course I know that one day I will die. I don't drive into oncoming traffic! I eat well. I keep myself in shape!"

"But you see, you only know it only intellectually. Your body doesn't know that it's going to die."

I was perplexed.

"Intellectually, sure anyone and everyone knows, in whatever way they are aware, that of course, yes – one day they will die. Nevertheless, for most of us this is just an intellectual proposition. Usually, we have the attitude that - 'I will die when I'm old.' More often than not we tend to think - 'I will cross that hill when I get to it.' But we fail to realize that ‘dying,’ implies a break in the continuity of time."

I wanted to say duh or no duh. But respectfully offered a “Hmm?"

“You see the experiences you've had so far are pretty much in line with everyday life. You go to sleep. You go somewhere. And you wake up. If you are going to intend to be aware of the atoms of your body you will have to break your notion that time is a continious straight line. Most of us live our lives watching time as it retreats from us." He grabbed a piece of chalk and drew a long arrow on the left hand side of the chalk board.

"We are always looking back at our lives, reflecting on what happened when we were five, when we were ten, and so on. This traps us into looking back at – to use your slang – what we shoulda, woulda or coulda done to change our present situation. People in these shoes obsessively fill themselves with regret. In watching the retreat of time we strap the past– literally and figuratively – onto our backs and almost always blame someone else and even ourselves for our present day malady."

"Another aberration of the human condition is continually being wrapped up in some vain but glorious rendition of future selves. ‘How great I will be! How powerful!’” Einstein looked at me peircingly. "I saw that in you when you came in ranting an raging. 'Oh how great YOU will be after you experience the atoms in your body! That's trash. Check it at the door before you come in next time."

I felt like I was being scolded by my parents and seemed to revert to a non-judgemental state of mind.

“Here in ruminating feelings of worthiness or worthlessness," he scribbled a big circle at the tip of the arrow." We look back at our past blaming most of our maladies on others - 'my parents didn't raise me right', 'my girlfriend is not good enough', 'no one understands me,' no one knows how I feel.' Or ‘white philosophers screwed it all up for us!' " He laughed aloud.

"Increasing your worth in the future is based on your past inadequacies and personal shortcomings. In that way, even think we are future oriented, we carry the past with us and time seems continuous. Right? Think about it. If time were to stop being continuous – if your imagined future self can't be phenomenally rich, or famous – then there is a part of you clinging to the continuity of time. But if you're intending to become aware of the atoms in your body you're going to need to let go of all that. You're going to have to begin a serious study of the philosophy of a being who is going to die.

"The philosophy of the being who is going to die." I sat down in an empty chair and flipped to a blank page in my notebook writing it down. "Uh, OK. What is the basic premise of this philosophy?"

"Allow me to establish that by putting forth the following scenario."

"Okay."

"Lets say this is your last moment on earth and you're being attacked by a lion. What do you do?"

"I would fight! I would find someway not to be eaten!"

"Of course! You'd do more than your best to perceive a way out of the situation. You'd run, jump, climb a tree – or go toe-to-toe with the tooth, jaw and claw of the beast. In such a battle your awareness would be attuned to every movement between you and your death without a shred of remorse or sadness and no morbidity whatsoever. Your struggle to survive would involve your total body, your total awareness. It is in these moments that time comes at you directly. There is no past. And the only future is your next action. Within a life or death moment yesterday is gone and tommorrow doesn't exist. There is only the immediate here and now. In life or death situations your past doesn't hinder you and your next action, no matter how mundane, is truly a fight for your existence and therefore requires more than the best of yourself.

"In order to become aware of the atoms in your body you have to turn away from the past. And this isn't an intellectual excercise. It's a pragamtic one. Make a list of everyone you've ever had sex with and go down the list one by one. Breathe in the scene, capture every detail – the light, the sounds, the person, their hair, the pillows, the color of the room, and so on. And blow it out with an opposite turn of the head. To close the scene move the head to center but do the breath with the intention to let go of the three-dimensional world and ”

It took me a moment to realize that my jaw was unconsciously hitting the floor. I felt uncomfortable for a minute wondering just what in the world did sex have to do with anything?

Einstein gave me a serious look. "During sex we take in very large quantities of abstract sense data because our whole bodies are perceiving almost as much as being at a Tool concert. In recapitulating these events, one can recapture tremendous quantities of abstract sense data. Certainly, you’ve done a preliminary examination of your life but to be aware of the atoms of your body you have to disarm the continuity of time.

“In spite of your previous success, you are pretty, much still here . . ." he turned and gestured with his hand “ . . . lodged in the daily world. You have yet to empty your body of its past accumulation of abstract sense data. Your cognitive processes don’t yet see the mystery of existence in this world as it is.

I kept scribbling notes down on my pad of paper.

“And nothing does the job better than gathering abstract sensory data from sexual experiences. The breaking of time must be a very gentle process. By this I mean that you shouldn’t use the abstract sense data to intend to be aware of the atoms in your body. You're not there yet. You don't have enough power for that yet. When you recapitulate your sexual experiences use abstract sense data to become aware of the philosophy of the being who is going to die.”

“ . . . and the basic premise to this philosophy is?"

“The basic premise of the philosophy is that we are perceivers who don't accurately perceive the undeniable fact that one day we will die."

I scribbled it down in my notebook.

"I'm meeting another professor at the student union cafe at 11. Would you care to join me?" He turned around did a double take of the room and grabbed his sport jacket. “Lets go to the café.” I paused for a moment gathered my things and we bounded out of his office and found ourselves waking down across the university plaza.

The cafe was busy. It didn’t look like we’d find a table but at the last moment a space opened up. And we sat there sipping our warm drinks.

“You see abstract sense data is the most ubiquitious substance in the universe. It exists everywhere and can be found in everything we do. But if one is not aware of abstract sense data then there is no chance of being able to handle it, much less collect it and use it engineer a conscious experience. I nabbed a pen and my notebook from my back back and began to take notes again. “For instance, in this moment what do you hear? I told him there was an cacophony of sounds and that I could hardly distinguish any sound from any other sound.

"At least apply an ounce of concentration."

Immediately I felt indignant. But in spite of my feelings. I closed my eyes and detected a noisy background filled with the murmor of people talking, kitchen noises complete with the clattering of dishes and a cash register. I told him all this.

"Keep investigating the philsophy of the being who is going to die even within this moment."

"How so? What do you mean?"

“By adhering to the tenets of reason."

"What are the tenets of reason?"

"The tenets of reason is the principle belief that the continued uses of the ability to reason leads one to be more and more reasonable. Or put another way, the tenets of reasoning allow one to examine a proposition, or a statement from all sides allowing one to comprehend the whole from a sum of its parts.

“Okay." I said still lost. "How is that applicable in this situation?”

He looked at me smirkishly. "If we were beings who were going to die then what?"

“If I were a being who was going to die I’d fight it. I’d fight that moment."

“Of course you would. But this is a philosophical study not an ad campaign filled with slogans. If this is your last moment on earth then what premise reasonably falls from that proposition?

"Uh . . . there is no past and no future?"

"Yes, if we were beings who were going to die then we’d treat every moment as equal to the next. And . . ." he said waving his finger and taking a sip. ". . . since every moment could very well be our last moment it is ridiculously unfounded to expect anything in return."

I scribbled down and said aloud, " – a being who is going to die has no expectations."

"One could surmise that a being who is going to die doesn’t cloud his view of the mystery of the existence with confabulated stories of his failures or his successes. And neither does he press his successes and failures on those around him. He takes responsibility for his past and future because, in accordance to the philosophy, both are equal.

He looked at me and asked. "What can we imagine about a being who behaves in such manner?

"Uhh, he certainly can't take himself to seriously cuz he doesn't have a moment to cling to the past and he has no aspirations for the future."

“Of course. And a being who behaves in such a manner delivers to every moment an equal amount of attention because without a past to dictate his present actions and therefore no undertaking is laborious and no moment can be so boring as to be blotted out of his attention. However, I partially disagree with your proposition that a person in a life or death struggle has no aspirations. Yes, he has no ambition to be - the best competitor, the richest, the most handsome, the smartest, and so on. A being who is going to die knows his next action is all he has and he doesn't waste those actions by toiling around with some futuristic notion of himself. And yet, in making each act count he aspires to become aware of, or perceive, or rather come to the realization that he honestly does not know what it really means to die, to let go of everything one's ever known.

I was taking notes like crazy.

“This leads us to the next, in a multitide of questions that arise. For instance, what is so important in this moment that is without a past or a future? Firstly, a being who is going to die has to pay attention to every sight, sound, taste, touch and smell of the world no matter how small and insignificant they are. Because he is fighting for his life and can take nothing for granted. And he must give more than the best of himself to perceiving the perceptual stimuli around him because this is it! This is the moment where one will die. Look around. Take it all in. Memorize every detail. Look away and look back. Notice the smallest most insignificant changes. There is no gaurantee that we will live beyond this moment."

"Uh, uh a meteor could be plummeting out of the sky right now aimed right for us!"

"Indeed! In moments like these who wants to die in crappy mood, or involved in some petty act that takes one's eyes of the marvel of the perceptual world. The sounds, the sights and textures of the world! How incredible! The study of being who is going to die also is a study of the human condition when we don't know we are going to die one day.

"When we don't pay attention to the world around us if it were not our last moment we end up delusional not-so-sober-minded creatures. We end up drunk on indulgence, drunk on our sense of rightousness, our sense of revenge, on those who have trespassed against us. Drunk on the idea of ourselves and on how we've been wronged or how right or great we are. When you treat every moment as equal to every other moment – a moment will come to you when you realize you can give more than you receive – without expectation for anything in return. We have to be reasonable. Death is final. There is no reward in dying. If one is aware of this then in every act such a person undertakes there is an equal amount of happiness, pleasure, and/or whatever emotions the person is made of."

He looked up and waved at his friend who was making his way toward our table. He looked at me. "Keep going. Keep studying this philosophy. Perhaps then your spirit will become more balanced and perhaps then you will be able to intend an awareness of the atoms of your body. But I urge you to first, intend to go back to the Neanderthal's world. There is no sense biting off more than you can chew. Start humbly and work forevermore to be humble but equal to everything that surrounds you.

* * *

Somehow being with Einstein allowed my attention to be filled to the brim with interesting and curious thoughts and ideas. But when I got back to my apartment I began to think about the atoms of my body and why I wasn't aware of them. I hated being denied what I wanted to do and decided then and there that I was going to prove to him that I could become aware of the atoms in my body. It took all of my spare time over three days to make of list of all my ex-lovers and past romances. As soon as I was done I began use the visualization breath exercise to recover the accumulated abstract sense data. After each recapitulation session, I rubbed my hands over and over on the bed, every night before bed and intended to be aware of the atoms in my body.

One night I dreamt of being up in a cloud like city or air ship. I was a commander on the bridge of a crew that relied upon me to direct the mission. It was a rather slow day and I decided to take the day off. I moved toward the steps leading down from the bridge. When I took the first step the scene dissolved and I found myself stepping down and taking another step down into zillions and zillions of luminescent lines. Each line glow with an yellow golden glow and all were perfectly straight and look to be solid but were solid in anyway I had ever seen. With each step I would step down feet, then eight feet and then twelve feet. I kept moving down with bigger and bigger steps. The lines were everywhere. I endlessy fell or kept or stepping down through lines and lines of luminesence plodding and plodding away for what seemed, upon awakening, to be eight hours.

I felt groggy. Out of it. I remembered everthing down to the details of the bridge, the metal, the other workers, and the huge windows filled with a horizon of clouds. But I was bugged by something undefinable. I couldn’t concentrate. My attention was preoccupied with something I couldn’t put my finger on. I felt nervous, impatient and internally pulled into a detailed examination of something unknown to me. I felt listless. I noticed my hand were breaking out into a cold sweat. Nervous chills ran up and down the muscles of my body. My forehead started to sweat. I felt I had a definitive need to keep actively engaged in doing something, even though I didn’t know what that something was.

Did I have to go to class? Did I forget a homework assingment that might be due today. But it wasn't something about school, or my friends or myself. I noticed I was extremely suspicious about the world. I became more nervous and felt that i didn't trust something about the world. This insight into my condition only compounded my nervousness. The palms of my hands were sweaty. The next moment I felt as if I were in emotional and intellectual anguish over something that I had indefinably lost. Something was not right.

I more or less aimlessly wandered around fixing breakfast, thinking some food would help. A shower later and still no change in my condition. My attention seemed listliss. I was afraid of getting lost in something indefinable. I realized then that I had to swallow my pride and go see Einstein.

***

"You moron! That is the stupidest things Ive ever heard! You can’t collect abstract sense data by indulging."

“I wasn’t indulging. I was intending!” He laughed aloud.

"You know the difference and you should be smarter than that! You saw the lines of the universe." He grabbed me by the arm and hustled me into the sunlight. "Physicists will posit their string theory till kingdom come but they can’t be bothered with the methods involved with seeing the lines of the universe directly using their own bodies as the instrument of perception. They'd say the human body doesn't qualify as a scientific instrument" He grabbed me by the jaw and swiveled my head back and forth using the sunlight to look into my eyes.

"You saw the lines of universe and what you’ve done is very dangerous because if you see them too long Poofa! You die. But somehow, probably because you are stubborn and sometimes just plain dumb, you managed to survive. You're feel trapped don't you, by something indefinable?"

I nodded.

"That's because part of your body still sees the lines of the universe but your mind refuses to acknowledge it. You’re right to be worried. Any more pressure and you will spontaneously combust. Just kidding. But we’ve to seal the division between the two. The boundary between this world and the next must must be sealed completely."

He grabbed his sport coat and dragged me by the forearm out the door and onto the campus. We rapidly walked about seven or eight laps around the campus mall before going to the financial aid building. Einsetin seemed to be throughly well known by all the staff particularly the ladies. He dragged me down a flight of stairs to a basement and we traveled through a long concrete corridor. We seemed to walk fast paced for nearly a half a mile in the underground corridor before coming to and ascending some steps. The next thing we knew were in the art museum. The museum must’ve opened at 8am because there were students milling about. He led me past painting after painting. And then we stopped in front of a Cubist work.

"This Cubist painting is as accurate a representation of what the senses perceive without interpretation from the mind . . .” Einstein shuffled me to the painting beside the Cubist work. “ . . . as this Vermeer is a representation of what the senses perceive with interpretation from the mind.”

"Now, mind you, I said the Cubist work is what the senses perceive. When you saw the lines of the universe you saw them with your entire body. Since the senses perceive an abstraction that is much like this Cubist work, it means here is a huge difference between what the senses perceive and what the mind synthesizes. The senses perceive an abstraction and the mind cogitates it into a three-dimensional world."

He motioned for me to sit down on a bench where we could view both paintings.

"It has been debated since time immemorial the the senses are only capable of perceiving sensation. And historically, it's been concluded, more often than not, that sensation is meaningless stimuli. The mind lends meaning to sensation. The mind's synthesis assembles sensation from each sense, that in and of themselves do not even perceive the same things. The eye perceives light while the ears perceive sound. The sense of touch perceives neither light nor sound, but detects textures, liquids and what not. What is the glue that synthesizes the sound of running water with feel of liquid running through one's fingers?"

"The imagination."

"Yes of course, the first and foremost power of consciousness - the imagination. At night when we dream the imagination lets go of its day to day synthesis and one perceives other arrangements of perception. When you see the lines of the universe your imagination failed to glue together a three-dimensional world. As such you saw the fundamental basis of reality – the lines of the universe with your full body – not just your senses. During regular dreams the mind synthesizes sensations collected in the body over the course of the day. A disciplined collection of sensations or the more technical term abstract sense data leads to the production of a disciplined state of awareness one that is completely separate from the daily world.

"Look at that Picasso. He has accurately depicted a abstract sense data as it appears to the senses. More accurately that Picasso depicts abstract sense data as it appears to two senses – sight and touch. That's why I'm showing it to you so your senses and your mind can gently realign itself with the conglomerate whole we call the world.

"So next time this happens all I have to do is look at a Picasso and I'll be better?"

"Hereafter, I think I am going to call you by a new name. Ned Block."

"Ned Block?"

"No, you can't just look at a Picasso to save yourself! You are as dense as a rock sometimes!"

I laughed aloud at his new name suggestion.

"Physical exercise is what focused your mind and body on this world and allowed your body to let go of the lines of the universe. You see you have to be aware that the senses perceive an abstraction 24/7. The mind refuses to acknowledge this just as it refuses to acknowledge seeing the lines of the universe. Piaget's study of infant perception demonstrates the adaptive power of consciousness that turns that abstraction, which, for many justifiably reasons, is as jumbled as that Cubist work. For instance, like the Cubist work the infant has no depth perception to allow a perceptual distinction between the foreground and the background. Look at that – the background is the foreground. The more one looks at a Cubist work the more the background and foreground oscillate. Assuming Piaget had some insight into the manner in which infant's perceive, same things occurs for them – background and foreground are indistinguishable.

"And further, look how transparent the planes and surfaces are in Picasso's work. The infant does not see objects but sees a world of lights and darks. The infant's power to synthesize the images on his or her retina with the tactile sensations begin the minds' production of objects. Only when the infant learns the images his eyes register have tactile presence does foreground and background, and hence depth, take their proper place and Shazam! Piaget deduced that by the time we are a year and half old we perceive the world, for the most part, as Vermeer depicts it.

"But Einstein, objects are real. The mind doesn't produce them from nothing but, according to your theory, it produces them from abstract sense data. But abstract sense data is still derived from the object."

"Any reasonable person would think that is the case. However, abstract sense data has a different sense of time. As you’ve perhaps encountered in your art classes, there are a set of techniques historically passed down since time immemorial that allow artists to engage and be aware of abstract sense data. As part of your academic training as an artist you have probably been introduced to many different techqniques that allow you to engage and become aware of abstract senses data."

I readily agreed and told Einstein that we were taught to squint our eyes when looking at a model or a still life in order to really see the arrangement of lights and darks without focusing on the objects. In fact my art teachers never once told me to focus on drawing or painting the objects.

“Unlike Vermeer sitting here looking at his model who is not to move, the Cubists actually invented a new method of painting that allowed them to capture the world as it appears to the senses without interpretation from the mind. Vermeer’s canvas and his model were motionless, unmoving. The Cubists . . ." he said chuckling, “ . . . on the other hand moved both the canvas and the object. They moved around whatever they were painting or drawing – taking their canvas with them. Or they moved the still life. They were interested in capturing all side of the object. In practicing this new method the Cubists actually deconstructed the visual object and arrived at an accurate rendering of abstract sense data as it appears to the human senses from the very moment of our birth to our last moment on this Earth.

"What can you say about your sense of time when you look at this Picasso?"

"Time seems fragment and yet there is a sense of eternity."

"There are scientific studies that have tested the eyes and have found that our eyes and don’t see the world as three-dimeinsional but rather as sensory information devoid of meaning. The wonder of the senses is that they transmit this information to the brain where, as best our scientific knowledge can tell us, is where consciousness may very well be. Science shows us that the eyes can only register the light of the world as abstract shapes, without depth, meaning or significance.

He stood and walked up the Picasso.

"As such the Cubists painted a representation of the perceptual environment – the world – pre-synthesis – as the senses perceive it – that is just as accurate as Vermeer’s depiction of the perceptual environment post-synthesis – after the cognitive production of three-dimensional objects. Vermeer’s painting is astounding in its verisimilitude, which for all accounts and purposes, is an exacting depiction of our consensual agreement to perceive a three-dimensional world. Once we learn how to put the world together its off to the money-making mills and vacations in Aruba. What we don't know is that the function of consciousness is to create a 1:1 rapport between abstract and imaginary sense data. Artists, are seemingly the only ones, who looking back, and saying – what about perceiving? Wasn't I supposed to learn something about perceiving? The parents are dragging them away from their crayons and chalk." His hand imitated a child being dragged away screaming.

"That's the definitive moment for the artists. The child that says, "No I want to learn about perceiving. Is an artist from that moment on they are curious and asking can I draw? Take pictures? Dance? Play the saxaphone? The rest of 'em run off and become bankers and financiers' who are completely unconcerned with the sheer fact that we perceive anything at all. This is the mystery of all mystery. Why do we perceive at? It's only when you perceive the other side of the coin that you know. As you've already demonstrated to yourself.

We walked out the museum and parted ways. He, I assume, went back to his lab. And I went off to class.

******

After each recapitulation session I used the abstract sense data I had collected to intend to ‘go to the Neanderthals world.’ After a few days my intention to 'go to the Neanderthals' world moved down from my head to my abdomen. It was no longer merely a thought and the working of a couple concepts. I felt unified in body and mind and it became much easier to see more opportunities to collect imaginary sensory data. I knew in my gut that I was afraid to die but in spite of my fear of dying I was exhilarated by the idea of dying for nothing, dying for an idea for a moment for a jump into the Neanderthal’s world.

After a few more days of intending it happened.

I found myself fully aware of the dichotomy between our world and this new place. I was aware of myself in two places at once and I was walking through what I thought was the house I grew up in and yet at the same time I knew I was home in bed sleeping.

I turned a corner into the kitchen and my body froze to the spot. I was in awe. I saw a young Neanderthal boy of perhaps 15 or 16 years of age doing dishes in the sink. He had short stocky arms that reminded me of the dinosaurs whose arms were much too small for his overall body. They were short arms in the sense that the muscle from the shoulder to the bicep was way too short. The area of the bicep muscle was strong, formidable but again way too short. His forearms were again too short to be human. His entire body and musculature structure was odd in a way that I couldn't really recognize. His head was a block set low on his shoulders with almost no neck. Thick bone surrounded his eyes and cheekbones and his mouth and lower jaw protruded far enough out not be mistaken for a monkey but in no way was he human either.
And then I watched his eyes.

He was in no way aware of me. The Neanderthal boys' eyes glistened and watched his moves as he washed dishes and put them into a drainer for drying. Suddenly my entire mood of awe reversed course. I was totally repulsed by what I saw. It was horrific. I detested the sight of this 'man' who was short, stocky and his arms were in a configuration that made me experience sheer revulsion. The revulsion I felt was bodily. Every ounce of my body disagreed with what it perceived in that moment. The two opposing and contradictory views in me were so overwhelming that the engineered conscious experience ended. I awoke in my bed.

I recounted the entire experience. I found that for the first time in my life, I understood the sense of sheer revulsion of the Conquistadors who conquered the Indians in Mexico or the Europeans who enslaved the blacks in Africa. I was the Conquistadors and the Neanderthal boy Indian. I felt terrible. I was a man who sincerely believed I loved my fellow man. For God's Sake I was a minority! I had grown up with racism thrown in my face and vowed to fight against such stupidity. But now the tables were turned. I felt somehow that my entire cultural heritage, not just as a man of snowy white color, but also as a human being, was invalidated upon coming face to face with the Neanderthal boy. I jumped out of bed, readied myself and hurried over to Einstein’s building.

As I told him every detail of my experience I found myself asking him why I experienced so much revulsion. I announced with authority, “I am a minority for God’ Sake! I should be the last person on the planet to be offended by another living being!

“Are you kidding me? Don’t you see how much of prick you are?!

“What?”

“There is nothing more offensive than coming into contact with something more intelligent than ourselves!”

He seemed to read my mood and said, “And besides look at you! Have you ever taken a look at yourself? You’re intellectually arrogant! You’re not even out of college and you think you are the world’s greatest painter! Your middleclass background forces you to believe that the world owes you something and that you’re destined for great things! Individually you believe that all you’ve got to do is get into the gears of the social machine and work a bit harder than the rest and – Bingo – success is yours! And on the unexamined other hand, if these treasures are not offered to you then there will be hell to pay! Your greatest fear is that you won’t be a success and that you’ll be nobody. And for the social beings that we are there is nothing worse than being a nobody. You can’t carry all of your arrogant self into an engineered conscious experience. In order to engineer a conscious experience you have to reduce yourself to nothing. You have to disappear quietly with no announcements, with no one noticing and come back in the same manner –without searching for the accolades, the trophies, the recognition of success from a social standpoint. Titles represent finite games with definitive beginings and endings. The infinite game is equal to all others because there are no beginings and endings.

“When you witnessed the Neanderthal, all of that, your entire upbringing was threatened by witnessing the existence of something more intelligent than yourself! Remember? It was only when you saw into his eyes that you became offended.”

“I, . . . But, . . . I mean, . . . how can I be offended by my own imagination!?”

He laughed aloud obviously enjoying the debate and said waving his hand, “Lets just say, at least for now, that the supreme intelligence that must exist out there somewhere challenges us to be more than what we believe we are. The realm of the imagination is the ground for meeting those challenges. If you can’t even get in there then your are deeply occupied by the same thing everybody else is yourself! "

He stood from his chair and announced, “Affection is the highest form of intelligence in the universe!” Einstein declared standing up from his chair. “That is why it is so rare on our world! Without affection we would be slaves to love. Love is usually a mutual agreement to give affection only to each other. But we rarely give affection freely. We demand payment for its expression and share it only with those we trust and yet affection has to be the most intelligent thing there is. Think of it. How better to introduce yourself to another intelligent being than with the utmost affection?

“Hmmph.” I grimaced.

“I urge you to take a good hard look at yourself. Perhaps this is the only way you’ll be able to acquire enough abstract sense data to produce an awareness of the atoms in your body. I would recommend that you say good-bye to everyone you’ve every truly cared for or loved. Make a list of the people you’ve truly felt affection or love for and go back through each encounter with that single person. For instance, your mother, every night before you go to bed sit up straight and say goodbye to her in a good loud voice. Say it like you’ll never see her again. Then using your list, go back through every single encounter you’ve had with her. Start from the preseant and go back to your most important teenage moments. The ones you remember most! Breathe in the scene while moving your head to the left or to the right. Visualize all the details of the scene – where the chair is, where the windows are, the color of the light, the time of day. Get every perceptual detail and then exhale every perceptual detail. But do this as if it were you’re last act on this earth only that way will those perceptual details be imbued with enough power to be turned back again into what they were originally; abstract sensory information. Then focus on the emotions in the scene blow out the emotions you don’t want to keep. Breathe in and hold dear the affection, the love, the amount of time and attention your mother gave you. Keep those and whatever else you find as your own. Do this with each person on your list.

“I cannot tell you or warn you enough that there is no weaker a moment for the person who intends to engineer a conscious experience than the moment after one has collected abstract sensory information with this breath. Because in one moment, you have retrieved, veritably, and pardon my french but – shit loads of abstract sensory data, depending upon how closely you remember what the five senses perceived in those past moments. You have to choose then and there how you want to use that immense amount of abstract sensory data. And then you have to intentionally act in a practical manner to turn that abstract data into imaginary sensory data. By that I mean that after you’ve reviewed the scenes, toss pennies into a jar, do a disciplined action with which you can focus your intention to ‘be aware of the atoms in your body.’ Or better yet, let me show you moves that strengthen the flexibility of the body and strengthen it. The unification of your body and mind can be enhanced by doing simple disciplined movements."

He pulled out some yoga mats from a cupboard and layed them on the floor. And then he showed me 12 movements. Before we started he told me to pause between each movement for roughly the same amount of time that I practiced the movement.

https://www.theengineeringofconsciousexperience.com/MO/TheRunningMan.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/20090831005153/http://geocities.com/magicalpass/runningman.html

******

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

* * *

I went back to Einstein to talk about the nature of engineered conscious experiences and the idea of collecting sense data in bulk. Einstein said that to understand why bulk processing engenders a dramatic shift in consciousness a cognitive model is needed. Einstein said that this cognitive model is found in Kant’s Transcendental Theory of the Imagination. He added that Kant’s great claim to fame was his quiet, unyielding and eternally patient, well studied and astutely observable accounting of they way in which the Transcendental Imagination worked. Einstein stood and began a lecture.

"Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of western civilization and his intellectual reach influences every single field of academic discipline from philosophy to psychology and from science to art. In his book, The Critique of Pure Reason, he finds that, and I quote –‘we must assume a pure transcendental synthesis of imagination as conditioning the very possibility of all experience’ (Kant 133). And further, that our sensory experience of the world of objects and the understanding needed to differentiate them, as Murray Code acknowledges, ‘ . . . requires a synthesis of sensibility (which provides the mind with its object for thought) and understanding (which forges conceptual coherence out of the objects for thought)’ (Code 93). Sensibility and understanding require a transcendental synthesis, a synthesis that occurs before sensation and understanding are formed and available to the conscious mind. This synthesis as Richard Kearney, professor of philosophy at Boston College says, is attributed to the power of the imagination and ‘points to a primordial unity of sensation and understanding brought about by the imagination prior to the functioning of either faculty’ (Kearney 191).

“The imagination’s synthesizing power is recognized theoretically. In the realm of cognitive science, Gregory Kampis claims that, 'The result of information processing is an artificial reality, as many have suspected since Rudjer Boskovich and Immanuel Kant’ (Kampis 142). And, in relation to Kant’s theory, Richard Tarnas notes that, 'Experience is a construction of the mind imposed on sensation' (Tarnas 344). Kant asserts that the power of the imagination to synthesize raw sensation into something meaningful is dependent upon the concepts of pure understanding. Without the concepts of pure understanding, the imagination’s power to synthesize sensation is nearly useless to make sense of experience. Thus, as Roger Scruton notes, raw sensation synthesized by the imagination, and I quote - “contains no concept” and “is without intellectual structure”-end quote- until the concepts of pure understanding give form and meaning to sensory data and create ‘appearances’ (Scruton 67). Howard Gardner notes that appearances are the phenomena, the sensations caused by particular objects (Gardner 58). But these appearances are synthesized into a unity by the transcendental imagination and therefore are a distinct production of our cognitive processes and not a real appearance of them, as they exist. As Kant explains on page 147 of his Critique of Pure Reason, “ . . . the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had we ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there" (Kant 147). The appearances of objects relate in very distinct ways to the concepts of pure understanding, which are present both in the mind and in reality. As Gardner notes, without the concepts of pure understanding embedded in the understanding scientific experiments would not have measurable results (Gardner 60). Therefore, the mind is actively structuring the world of perception around it according to its process of cognition. According to Tarnas, this means that, "the nature of the human mind is such that it does not passively receive sense data. Rather, it actively digests and structures them, and man therefore knows objective reality precisely to the extent that that reality conforms to the fundamental structures of the mind” (Tarnas 343).

Einstein paused, looking at me poignantly, "The question to ask here is: If an individual’s perceptual experience is put together by the primordial function of the imagination and if the mind is actively constructing the overall perceptual unity of this world i.e. via correlating imaginary sense data with abstract sense data, then why can’t the imagination engineer its own conscious experience? First, it is known that the understanding is capable of incorporating all kinds of experiences into its organization. Secondly, the imagination does not possess the concepts of pure understanding! Our question dichotomizes and now we must ask,’ How can the concepts of pure understanding be dislodged from the understanding?

“Right?” he said looking at me. “And is it possible to instantiate the concepts of pure understanding in the imagination?” When you engineered your experience of the ultraviolet spectrum, you instantiated the concepts of pure understanding within the bulk inventory of abstract sense data. How did you do it?” I told him I associated every sensation or every sense data I was aware of with my intention to go to the ultraviolet spectrum. I also told him that I chose a single habit in order to dislodge the concepts of pure understanding from the understanding.

“What was your single habit?” I told him I had chosen to continuously tap my foot with the intention to go to the ultraviolet spectrum. And I kept up this habit practicing it continually.

“The ability to engineer conscious experience takes advantage of two key principles in human cognitive processing. The first principle is that objects and events in the daily world are instantly synthesized and categorized with a reaction to a minimal amount of stimuli. Per the example, when I hear the sound of a car driving by I actually believe it is a car. In accordance with the strictest rules of reasoning, all I’ve heard is a sound. Why? Because the factual elements that constitute the veracity of ‘a car driving by’ do not exist to my senses. Secondly, our cognitive processes also respond to registering and collecting sensory data in bulk. Giuliana Mazzoni’s research on the origin of dreams suggests that “our brain is busy consolidating important memories that have accumulated during the day and combining neuronal signals with existing knowledge and memories to produce some sort of coherent interpretation” (Mazzoni 442). What you've done with going to the ultraviolet spectrum is just that. You've collected what you once regarded as meaningless data into the intentional construct - 'I intend to go the ultraviolet spectrum.' Then with your sustained efforts you managed to complete a bulk inventory of abstract sense data and your single minded habit managed to dislodge the concepts of pure understanding from the understanding itself. Once the concepts of pure understanding fell into the bulk inventory of imaginary sense data it was digested or rather instantiated. Instantian created imaginary sense data i.e - the conscious experience of the ultraviolet spectrum. In a similar vein, lucid dreaming happens because the participant is trained to frequently acknowledge throughout their day that perhaps they are dreaming. Imagination Engineering consolidates these two views and advances that basic premise that gathering raw sensory data in bulk produces vast and extraordinary changes in consciousness – not that we know what consciousness is mind you. Rather, imagination engineering is a way to experience what consciousness does.

"The raw bulk data that is registered and collected intentionally and will affect the understanding. This is obvious when one encounters nearly any kind of abstract artwork. There is nothing there because the understanding is initially overwhelmed with large amounts of raw sensation. Interacting with large amounts of raw sensation produces an aesthetic experience. Inside of this aesthetic expreience is what Kant called the ‘free play of imagination’ (Kant 244). The ‘free play of imagination,’ for Kant, meant that the imagination was free and “accountable to no authority beyond itself – neither to understanding nor to empirical reality” (Kearney 174). In an aesthetic experience the words disappear and the understanding turns the raw sensation over to the imagination. This occurs just as philosopher Paul Guyer explains, “Kant’s view seems to be that in the experience of art the mind plays freely yet harmoniously with a wealth of both images and ideas – intuitions and concepts – manifested and suggested by the work at hand” (415). The ‘wealth of images and ideas’ he talks about can only come from raw sensory data stimulating more areas of the brain. With more stimuli reaching the brain the understanding is supplanted by the aesthetic experience thereby allowing the imagination to play with more concepts and imaginings.

"But this is not enough to produce an engineered conscious experience. A categorical intention must be used to transform raw or abstract sensory data into imaginary sensory data. It’s been said that categorical intentions function to “determine the type of interpretation that is appropriate to the work” (Rollins 178). If the type of interpretation is to be ‘aware of the ultraviolet spectrum’ one could intend to collect raw sensory data into a categorical construct that overrides the understanding and engineers a conscious experience in which one is aware of the ultraviolet spectrum. A point will be reached where the imaginary sensory data, the categorical construct, and the understanding - which again, contain the much needed concepts of pure understanding- acquiesce to the sheer persistence of the individual’s will and to the overwhelming amount of data collected. In one moment an engineered conscious experience occurs.

"But it only occurs because the concepts of pure understanding have fallen into a huge collection of abstract sensory data. The concepts of pure understanding act to digest the imaginary sensory data into sensorimotor responses. It has to be clearly understood that the inventory of imaginary data is a simple fantasy without the instantiating power of the pure concepts of understanding. Imaginary data will never be turned into lived experience without slowly allowing the understanding to let go of the concepts of pure understanding. The pure concepts are freed from the understanding via a new routine, an intentionally upheld habit. Or in your particular case - the process of creation found in art.

“The only way to free the concepts of pure understanding from the understanding is to come up with a new habit. For instance, if you copy someone else's way of walking with the intention to 'go to the ultraviolet spectrum' or if you intentionally move a foot 24 hours a day 7 days a week within the same intention your body and mind will automatically collect the data and simultaneously the new habit will pry loose the concepts of pure understanding.

“However, even this is not enough to engineer a conscious experience. The third and final element of using a conscious intention must be utilized. Everyday we reach for things, cups, steering wheels, fruits, breads and so on. The imagination engineer must make every act count and he does this by deciding before he moves that his conscious intention for acting is to ‘intend to go to the ultraviolet spectrum.’ That decision and conscious intention must be renewed every time one acts. This conscious intention must be upheld simultaneously not only with the single habit that is loosening the Kantian understanding but also with attempts to register and collect imaginary sensory data. A moment of instantiation will be reached creating an experience that accords to the nature of the imaginary data a person has collected.

He denoted the end of his lecture and sat down. A question that had been bugging me all throughout his lecture came to my mind. "But Einstein there were no Neandertals in the ultraviolet spectrum. How come the experience didn't accord to the nature of the data I collected?"

“You collected data necessary to jump to the ‘ultraviolet spectrum’ where you were going to look for Neandertals!” He burst into laughter and looked at me seriously. "Why don't you try going directly to the Neandertals world?"

I felt like an idiot. Duh! Why didn't I just intend to go to the Neandertals world? I told him that my experience of the ultraviolet spectrum reminded me of money and how money in our world is just as controlling as the unknown materials were in their world. I wanted to say so much and tell him so many things. But I rambled on about nothing for a good five minutes when finally a question I was dying to ask erupted from me. "But, Einstein, is the ultraviolet spectrum a real world out there or is it just in my imagination?"

He laughed uproariously and the light in his eyes seems to ask the question –Does it matter? He kept laughing and leaned perilously back in his chair. "Truth is always established by consensus. Certainly there may be someone else on this planet who is interested enough to engineer a conscious experience of the ultraviolet spectrum. And that person could go there and see the marvelous materials you spoke of and most certainly he or she could report back to us exacting descriptions of what was there. But I fear the day of such consensus is a million miles away. What matters is that you've taken responsibility for the fact that one-day you will die. Right here smack dab in the middle of it all you'll die and the respect you've shown your death by leaping to the ultraviolet spectrum in search of something larger than yourself goes much, much further than attempting to establish a truth or a consensus on whether or not the ultraviolet spectrum is a real world. On your very last day here in this world your death will stop in awe of you and what you've witnessed and stop for a moment to see what you've done with your life. Imagine that! One of the most powerful forces in the universe stopping to see what you saw, to breathe through your breath. Your death will pause for a moment allowing you to have a gesture with all that your life has been. Such a pause from such an eternal force can only be respect.

“Until a consensus is formed you can only consider your journeys into the imagination as just that journeys into the imagination. For now you will just have to consign these experiences over to your imagination. Perhaps 300 years from now, when the blarthy swarms have fettered away, and the rubbles been cleared and the smoke disappears and then, perhaps then, we will clearly see and understand the meaning of consensus, perhaps then, the world will be a better place. Perhaps then.”
He turned slightly to his keyboard and struck a slow key on his old antique Remington, striking a single letter to a crisp white sheet. Neatly and quietly I gathered up my things and snuck out of the room.
END OF CHAPTER SIX

The Ultraviolet Spectrum

I set my mind to it and began to register and collect all the sounds and sights around me as if they were tiny bits of sensory information that would culminate in my body and mind leading to the creation of an engineered conscious experience. It took me six days of doing this every chance I got and then it happened.

I awoke kicking the lid off a coffin distinctly aware that I was in two places at one time. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was home in bed sleeping but I was also here acting and aware. I launched myself up out of the coffin knocking the lid to the ground off causing lots of noise. I did not startle in the least an old woman who stood waiting by the door with a most solemn look of longing. Next to her was a large slab of cement. Right next to and a bit below the slab of cement was a long shelf filled with jars of all different sizes. The jars were filled with opaque substances. It was dark and the only light coming into the tiny room came from the window where the woman was standing. I scrambled out of the sarcophagus and approached the old lady. She seemed oblivious to my presence. I thought she’d lost her mind. As I got closer to the old woman, I noticed she was a lot younger than I had previously thought. She couldn’t be a day over forty. Before I had a chance to sum up the situation the front door of the little hut or dark cave burst open and a man, woman and small girl came rushing in. The man was carrying a corpse, which he quickly laid on a stone slab that took up most of the space in the room. Suddenly the old lady moved with the gait of a twenty-nine year old.

I was shocked by her steadfastness and concentration. Initially she seemed old, run down and perhaps sixty years old. As I watched her move, I could plainly see that she was young, strong and vital but she was also emaciated. Her skin was dark from tragedy and her eyes were filled with dread. The look in her bulging eyes said that these were her last days. Her hair was grey and covered with some kind ragged cloth.

With expert skill, she pulled what seemed to be ointments, herbs, and different things from the jars surrounding the table and engaged herself in what I could easily perceive to be an ancient ritual for bringing the corpse back to life. The body didn’t even seem to be human. It was more of a kind of vegetable man or somebody in a rubber suit. I wasn’t sure if the ointments were going to open the rubber suit or if the creature was still alive. Its skin was black and dried like a prune. Nothing else about the figure seemed apparent to me. Before I had time to question what was happening I found myself out on the street. It was deserted and it was nighttime. Shops lined the street up and down. Nothing was unusual except for an incredible glow coming from the streetlight. As I got closer to the incredible glow, I noticed that the glow wasn't a light it was some kind of object, some kind of metallic gold orbish glob. I looked down the street and every seven to eight feet a light pole shone with one of these golden amorphous orbs. The most apparent thing about the orb was that it radiated everything that was good. I knew instantly that the people whose house I woke up in fought to keep their city or town the way it was. They loved it here. They fought for everything that was good. The goodness that radiated from the streetlamp was astounding. I'd never seen any kind of substance in my life that provoked such an intense feelings for God and all that was good. It was odd because the glow of the orb really had a strong influence on me but I knew intellectually that it was coming from the substance the object was made of and not so much the object itself. I looked at the orb again and was filled with the knowledge that it was everything that was good and Godly. I was filled with mirth at its appearance and sight and I found myself walking along the street amused at how these powerful objects just hung out in the open for anyone to steal or take or borrow and yet no one disturbed them. They were engrained unnoticed features of their everyday life.

I kept walking down the street. Slowly the buildings on my right began to look darker and they took on a more malevolent shape and quite surprisingly hanging from their streetlights was a color or hue that I have never witnessed before in my life. The hue could only be described as Ultraviolet. And whatever it was made of was nothing like anything I've ever seen. But there was one damn thing that I knew for sure when I looked at it. That substance radiated pure evil. It wasn't God Evil or Satan Evil it was as if the substance itself emitted some kind of radiation that affected the viewer's emotional state. The object's color was the most peculiar thing I'd ever seen. The material of the object wasn’t plastic, it wasn’t paper, and it wasn’t even remotely close to the golden orbish Godly substance I’d just found. I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the kind of substance the object was made of. But I knew the object itself made me feel the way I did. It dawned on me that whatever material the objects were made of didn't exist in our periodic table. They weren't made of plastic, metal, or any kind of organic material but were obviously fashioned by hand or machine. Peculiarly, I paused and thought for moment realizing that this situation had never happened to me before. I tried to place the substance; it’s color and hue into something I could identify. But for the life of me, I couldn't place the material into any kind of category that is known.

A huge sadness washed over me as I realized by the wear and tear on the buildings, the age of the street and the fact that such precious materials hung out in the open for anyone to take down, hide or throwaway that this world, this culture, had been locked in a war that had easily lasted a thousand years. Both sides had collected a precious material that they must have fiercely believed was a deeply factual representation of who they were. But now as the war had consumed both sides and engaged them into bizarre culture rituals that had survived by being passed down for generations they seemed to have lost track of the fact that the need to possess these objects started their wars.

My mood suddenly changed and I began to find it deeply humorous that each side had forgotten the source and the influence of the powerful substances that were now merely decorations that hung on street poles. Then I was furious and wanted to begin to end the war.

I demanded an investigation. I decided to stroll through the "evil" streets to find the "evil" castle and see if there were huge amounts of this material horded by some fellowship of "evil." But before I could take two steps in that direction, I was caught unaware. I found myself jumping out of the back of a jeep like vehicle still laughing from the absurd notion of two cultures allowing their entire world view to be controlled by two very opposite substances.

The young man and his, I assume, wife and their child were looking at me with panic and fear in their eyes. I was immediately concerned with myself and suddenly heard a barking sound to my right. I turned and in horror saw a shiny hollow metallic dog radiating the ultraviolet hue from his mouth and violently charging me. I immediately adopted a defensive pose for facing an opponent but it was too late. Fear overwhelmed me and I noticed an inability to remember the form correctly. In the quickest second imaginable, I managed to adopt a stauncher fighting pose and I jumped to strike the dog with one of the lamest leg kicks in the world. My fear was too great. The very next moment I found myself awake in my bed with the full realization that I'd just engineered a conscious experience.

* * *

Next Chapter: Making the Jump

I was pissed. I had just returned from my anthropology class. I frantically knocked on Einstein’s door. He unlocked it and let me in. I immediately launched myself into a tirade of thoughts and ideas - “Under no circumstances, at least not in my fricking world, is it acceptable to believe or to posit or to assert that early man was a genocidal maniac! Anthropologists’ assertion that homo sapiens wiped out homo Neanderthal over 40,000 years ago is completely unfounded, biased and utterly stupid especially in the light of the sheer contradiction of facts.”

“What are the facts?”

My tirade went on. I paced back and forth reiterating to Einstein that I had always had a deep problem with anthropologists’ assertion that we were much more intelligent than Neanderthals. I told him that I had always been interested in the origins of intelligence and was fascinated by the story of how humans evolved from apes. But I found the explanation of evolution to be riddled with flaws and believed that anthropologists were off the mark on more than a few of their theories.

“Oh yeah? How so?”

“Well, for instance the idea that the Neanderthals were wiped out by the then up-and- coming Homo-sapiens is preposterous! “

“Why is that?”

“Because the theory is riddled with egocentrism! In all actuality we have no clue as to what happened to the Neanderthal species! All we have are a bunch of bones! Yes, some of those bones may indicate death by violence but to conclude that early humans killed off ALL the Neanderthals is a retarded fabrication because - #1) it contradicts the fact that Neanderthals brains were 200 cubic centimeters larger than our own! Neanderthals had bigger brains than we do but anthropologists say that this ‘extra’ brain matter doesn’t count because of the ‘extra’ muscle mass the Neanderthals carried on their skeletons! This is sheer blasphemy! In every anthropological account I’ve ever read they always trump up the idea that increases in brain size lead to more intelligent species! But when they find out that the Neanderthals had bigger brains they reverse their stance, call them dumb! Unable to make tools! Unable to speak and unable to form culture!”

“Physiologically, yes, most theories today assert that the Neanderthals were unable to speak. Evidence indicates that their larynx was underdeveloped and they were unable to create speech.”

“But what is speech but a form of communication? If the Neanderthals had extra brain matter located in the occipital area of the brain, the area where our visual world is recorded then perhaps they had a different form of communication. Perhaps they communicated with light and their eyes in the same way we produce sound that in turn correlates to our sense of hearing producing language. Perhaps the Neanderthals were able to produce light in a way that correlated to their sense of sight to produce a vastly different system of communication.”

“How in the hell do you think they saw their world?”

I was surprised to see Einstein going along with the absurdity of my speculative thought. My father was a staunch realist and would have resorted to pure defiant ridicule to set me in my place for even thinking such a thing. “Well maybe the Neanderthals were able to see in infrared or perhaps they saw into the ultraviolet spectrum and through the use of shiny objects they were able to communicate. If Neanderthals did see into the ultraviolet spectrum the tools they made, the culture they sustained would be inconceivable and therefore unavailable to be perceived by the human mind. Somewhere along the line of evolution a cognitive barrier grew between the Neanderthals and us making them entirely disappear!”

“Your assertation that Neanderthals extra brain mass in the occipital region allowed them to see and somehow interact with the ultraviolet spectrum is interesting. They lived in, what - glaciers and snow and ice? They certainly could’ve shined up a rock and used it as a reflective device to send signals long distances. And thus, establish a basis for their form of communication.” Einstein walked around the room rubbing his chin.

“I like your idea,’ Einstein said. “We consider them apes, yes. But we consider them dumber apes than us. Your assertion is -what if we considered them to be exquisite in every way comparable to what we are?”

I sat down still furious. “When is a genocide a valid conclusion to anything? This is the best intellectual conclusion that the world's greatest anthropologists have to offer as to the disappearance of the Neanderthals? Our innate nature is not homicidal egomaniacal mania!” This is a blatant case of egocentric racism! And this conclusion gives modern day people the permission to believe that we are inherently genocidal egomaniacal killers. This kind of thinking allows monstrosities like Hitler to exist! Genocide in Africa! Never will I accept ‘this’ as any thing remotely close to the truth in my heart of hearts.”

“Well I can see that you are quite passionate about your argument. “What do you plan to do?”

“I am going to go into the ultraviolet spectrum and find them.”

Einstein smirked and in a devilish manner mentioned that, “How can anyone 'go' into the ultraviolet spectrum? According to the way we understand the world the ultraviolet spectrum is a wavelength of light. There is no way to go into a wavelength of light!” He tossed a handful of peanuts into his mouth and began to chuckle. “How can a person go to the ultraviolet spectrum, in the first place and in the second, and above all to look for Neanderthals?!”

He bent over in his chair his whole body was shaking. He nearly fell out of his chair laughing. I was afraid he was choking on the peanuts. "Its impossible!” He roared throwing his head back. “There is no way to achieve your quest! Your quest entirely contradicts everything we know about the world and thus is perfect for engineering a conscious experience!” He winked at me and smiled tossing back a couple more peanuts.

“To engineer a conscious experience of this magnitude takes a person of certain constitution. By that I mean one needs a righteous passion worth dying for, a genuine desire to know, and of course - honesty, hard work and on top of it all - an extraordinary sense of discipline!

“In order to engineer a conscious experience of the ultraviolet spectrum you have to be willing to make this your last act on this Earth. You see, I am not like those other professors out there; I am not going to lie to you. I will not pull the wool over your eyes. I will not spin myths and fairy tales to cloud your mind. The truth is that you are a being who will one day die. This can neither be a curse nor a blessing. It simply is a fact of the human condition.

“The imagination engineer, however, uses this fact to his advantage by choosing something and then going the distance and fighting for the possibility to actually chose how you want die. Most of us live our lives selling our deaths to the highest bidder. We sell it to the Marlboro Man, to Budweiser, to cake and frosting and other delights. You know, whatever indulgence it is that catches our eye. We don’t really know how to die or rather I should say that we don’t know what is involved in the actualities of dying and so we auction it off. We simply sell our death. We buy our plot and resign ourselves to it with a signature. We either don’t care how we die or we’re not interested. Traditionally, we’re told to accept it.

“However, the imagination engineer does not accept the fact that he will one day die. Instead he rallies against it and battles the chance to have a chance at escaping its clutches. He does this by selectively choosing his battles and finding, as you’ve done, something worth dying for. All you need now is to understand the mechanics involved in engineering a conscious experience.”

He paused and walked around the room for a moment. His eyes glistened and seemed to be focused beyond the four walls of his lab.

As if reading from a non-existant horizon he said, “You see traditional academia relies upon quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as textual and visual methods to study the world and our place in it. As such, the imagination is not considered by academia to be a feasible tool with which to investigate meaning, the production of knowledge and the nature of consciousness. Colin McGinn and Eva T. Brann both involved in contemporary debates of the imagination largely define imagination as the ability to produce an image of a person, place, thing or idea that is not present to the senses (McGinn 7; Brann 24). Due to its ephemeral quality the imagination has rarely been thought of as a tool on par or equal to that of reason and logic. Philosophical investigations of the imagination have been conducted in terms of how the imagination can create an image in the conscious mind not in terms of how to bring the conscious mind to the imagination. That is what you are flat up against! You are going to engineering a conscious experience in the imagination.”

Einstein began to root through the journals in, on, and stacked around his desk. I didn’t think there was anyway in hell he could find what he was looking for in an area of such disarray. But after a few minutes of digging, pausing and digging again he pulled an article out of the debris.

“Aha! He announced. “Thomas Nagel!” He read aloud a statement like a reverent Irish man. “There is every reason to think that the imagination contains genuine and important insights, and that it addresses real socio-cultural, or even spiritual, needs. For science to dismiss the issues it raises would amount to the acceptance of a major limitation on the scope of the scientific approach to reality. In order to address these issues rationally and effectively we need a scientific theory of imagination.”

With that he nimbly scaled a stool and stood atop it and announced with graceful distinguishment,“Human beings process information in two completely different ways.” He then crawled down the stool without ever looking at the floor in a slow, calmly mannered way that reminded me of an unsure child - something of complete benevolence. He then pulled the stool up to the cold black slate of his lab table. I watched as he meticulously swept off the seat of the stool. He brushed it and polished it with his sleeve. I closely watched his antics because I believed he was attempting to show me something of great importance. He looked out the window and measured the angle of the light coming streaming through the window and he turned carefully and bent down slowly picking invisible dust mites or hairs or whatever it was he saw, off the stool. When he was satisfied he bowed like a true gentleman and offered me a seat. I sat down on the rather high stool and my feet came off the floor.

He picked up a book from his desk and read aloud, “ ‘Gerald C. Cupchik, a professor of life sciences at Scarborough College, states that there are primary differences in the conscious experience produced from everyday cognitive processing and conscious experience produced from aesthetic cognitive processing (Cupchik, 72).’ He goes on to say that the primary distinction between everyday and aesthetic processing is that in the former a person is semantically oriented to the world and unaware that he or she is perceiving. In the latter Cupchik says there is a ‘reinvestment of attention in physical-sensory information” and one is aware of “the process of perception itself (Cupchik 80).’ Taking these two distinct differences in cognitive processing into consideration we find that aesthetic processing can be pushed further to the point that the synthesis between sensation and understanding which produce the world we know, doesn’t necessarily have to create the world we know.”

He looked at me with a wide eye seeing if I understood his point. He sat slowly searched amongst his papers. Upon finding something he turned to me and said, “ The imagination is commonly understood as and I qoute – ‘a power mediating between the senses and the reason by virtue of representing perceptual objects without their presence.’ (Brann 24). By virtue of representing perceptual objects without their presence . . .”

Einstein slowly stood and began to pace back and forth. “If one were sitting in a room reading this paper one would have to take into account the limitations of the fives senses and what they immediately perceive. According to the definition anything outside of the immediacy of the senses should then, quite rightly, be considered to exist in the imagination.. And certainly persons, places and things exist outside of the immediacy of the senses. They do exist, certainly of course they do exist. There is no argument there. But this means the imagination is engaged when anything outside of the immediacy of the senses are referenced or talked about.

“According to the stricktest rules of reasoning what exists outside of the five senses can only be found by following a specific sequence of events that we’ve come to regard as actual ‘proof’ that there is an outside world that we visit on a daily basis. Since talk of what exists outside the senses takes up so much time there is no time left to pay attention to what exists directly to the senses. We always end up traversing the sequence of events as we go to-and-fro and fro-and-to. What I aim to emphasize is that this basic philosophical reduction ‘from the world at large’ to the ‘world of the immediate senses’ creates a dichotomy between a perceived and unperceived world. The unperceived world is that which exists right outside of our senses.

“For instance, an adult and perhaps an infant or a very young child hear a train. The adult knows the sound of the train is a train. As such all of the adults five senses are convinced the train is real. Lets say the infant/child is hearing this peculiar sound for the first time. As such the infant/child has no idea what the sound is but still hears the sound. Both the adult and the infant/child in hearing the train only detect the train with their sense of hearing. However, the adults other five senses are stimulated by imaginary sense data. The adult truly believes an entire train exists just outside the full range of his senses. The adult believes this because his senses are stimulated from an internal subjective source - imaginary sense data. And, of course, the infant/child's senses are also stimulated by imaginary sense data. But the child does not conjure up, or think or is even convinced there a train. So what does the child experience?

“Uh . . . something inexplicable probably.”

“Of course! Unfortunately, our imaginations respond to the sound by forming the concept ‘train.’ But according to the senses there is no train! There is only a sound detected by the ears. A vibration in the fabric of time and space touches our ears and the infinite power of the imagination to a single response – train!” He laughed aloud and continued chuckling to himself while shaking his head.

“For everyday cognitive processing the abstract sense datum doesn’t exist. The synthesis of train occurs with a minimal amount of stimulii. The most important thing about this mental construction or synthesis is that it occurs with a minimal amount of stimuli. What Cupchik is describing, Cupchik’s everday processing, is minimal processing. A simple glance at an object and instantly we know what the object is. A half-second of hearing the sound of a car and lookey here we know what it is. Only a minimal amount of sensory information is detected by a sense organ and Shazam! We are convinced of the entirety of the object!.”

He continued to go on with whatever he was saying and I began to find it difficult to hear him. I knew internally that I had heard enough of whatever such and such a theory it was he was spelling out for me and felt my familiar habit of boredom come over me. I also noticed that my habit of ignoring what people were saying begin to take over. I barely noticed that he began to dig into a cupboard. The more he kept drolling on and on about objects and sense datum’s the more I became more involved with my own thoughts and feelings. I kept him occupied by offering an occasional ‘uh huh’ and ‘hmmmm.’ I barely heard him rummage through one and then another and then yet another cupboard. I knew he was mindlessly spouting off Kantian gibberish and I quickly became lost in a sense of timelessness and thought.

Out of nowhere Einstein slammed something of huge mass onto the cold black table in front of me. My body shrieked in surprise. I sat bolt upright in my chair. He announced in a loud inquisitive booming voice, “Do you remember learning?” In front of me was a massive chunk of soft urban brown palpable clay. My eyes fell in love and immediately began shaping the clay with my hands.

‘What Cupchik doesn’t know is that human beings are also capable of processing information in bulk. That is to say, human beings have an undiscovered ability to process sensory information in bulk. The engineering of conscious experience takes advantage of the fact that human cognitive processes can process sensory information in bulk form. Do you remember first grade?”

I nodded as I busily worked the cold clay into a warmer form. He looked me in the eye stopping me for a moment. “No, I mean really make an effort to remember first grade.” I paused and thought back.

“Okay.”

“Well close your eyes!” he said chuckling. “Then breath in the scene. What do you see? Where are the windows? What is the teacher wearing? Is the teacher male or female? How does your body fit to the chair? What is the surface of the desk like? What sounds do you hear? What is the teacher teaching? Once you’ve summed up all these questions breathe in all the sensory information in the scene while turning your head from one side to the other. And then breathe out all the sensory information in the scene. This simple act converts the sensory information into abstract sensory information. What appears to memory as windows, desks, light, shadow, sounds is unlocked from language and raw or abstract sense data is capitulated to the body. Do another sweeping breath of the head with your feelings. Keep the feelings, the emotions, the sights and sounds you want and then blow out the feelings and/or reactions that you don’t want moving your head back to other side.”

I sat there for a couple of minutes really getting involved with the memory I was experiencing. Then I moved my head breathing in all I wanted to keep and then, moving my head the opposite way, I breathed out all that I didn’t want.

“When your done acknowledge that you’ve breathed in scene and that you’ve released it by moving your head from one shoulder to the other in a slow movement stopping in the center” I finished the scene and he asked, “What did you remember?”

I told him I remembered sitting in a room facing east. The morning sun glistened all throughout the room. My memory was one of kindergarten not first grade. I told him as many details as I could remember – the thickness of the pencil, the funky recycled paper, the blue lines, the girls sitting next to me, the location of the bathroom, and my feelings about the lesson. I couldn’t quite remember the lesson we were learning and the memory wasn’t specific to any day. It was more or less a generic memory. We were writing that is for sure. And I remembered wanting to be the first to play with the red Tonka fire truck when our fifteen minute break came along.

“Curious isn’t it? All those lessons learning about giraffes, elephants, leopards, lions are all buried somewhere in our minds each undistinguishable from the next. Where are they? How do we learn things? Lets take apart the scene – what happens if you take away the sensation of the chair you're are sitting on? Take away the windows, the walls, the floors, the ceilings, take away the sounds and the sensation of the big pencil in your hand? Blow out all these sensations and what do you have left?” He looked at me inquisitively.

“Nothing?”

Einstein laughed aloud. “The lesson! What is left is the lesson –the teacher standing there and everyone in the class looking at a picture of an alligator and learning about the alligator.We learn in the hopes that one day in the future sometime somewhtere we will be able to go to the zoo and recognize – ‘Hey there is an alligator!’ And yet what we most often remember is not the lesson but like you said, the fire truck, the location of the bathroom, the windows, or perhaps even the people sitting next to you. If you practice this breath it becomes apparent that every single sensation in the room contributed to our learning of ‘alligator.’ Everything! Birds flying by, Billy flushing the toilet, sneakers in the hallway . . . all of it every ounce of sense information contributes to learning.

“By being able to detect all those sensations in the room and being able to match those sensations to the concept and picture of the alligator and to the repetitious writing of the word ‘alligator’ we successfully learned the meaning of ‘alligator'. Engineering a conscious experience is similar in that all the sensastions one is aware are associated with the concept one is intending to learn more about. Raw sensation surrounds us twenty five hours a day eight days a week! Accessing it and being aware of it are the heart of engineering conscious experiences.

I looked at him puzzled. He had lost me somewhere.

“For instance, imagine that ‘alligator’ was at one time a foreign concept, just as foreign as ‘going to the ultraviolet spectrum.’ Well, instead of alligator, lets use llama, as it is the most foreign animal I can think of right now. When we were given the concept of llama it wasn’t a word yet, it was a new kind of animal and as children we were filled with awe and excitement on learning what kind of animal a llama was. We collected all the sensations to fill the ‘concept’ llama through rewriting the word and associating all the sensory information available to the senses with llama. Once the concept is engrained in our minds and bodies we have learned what a llama is and can recognize one on the spot and recite various facts about its existence. And thus the end product of learning is knowledge.

"What is interesting when you really look at this way of learning is how it’s accomplished. The gathering of abstract sensory information into a concept we will call ‘taking an inventory.’ Everyday we wake up and go about our day gathering sensory information from work, school or where ever it is we go during the day and at night we come home and eventually fall asleep only to wake up again and take pretty much the same inventory of sensory experience and so on till the next day and the next day and the next and again and again. Our future is born of boredom, monotony and routine. The imagination engineer deeply desires to escape monotony, routine and boredom. And the imagination engineer knows and is aware of the fact that, whether we like it or not, the body and mind continously takes an inventory of sensory experience. Go back to ‘alligator’. Repeat the word aloud in various intonations. With enough repetition the meaning of the word will fall away. The word becomes incomprehnsible. When this happens the sounds of ‘alligator’ has become abstract sensory data.

“In order to make the jump to the ultraviolet spectrum you will have to associate abstract sensory data with an action oriented concept – ‘ I intend to go to the ultraviolet spectrum.’ This association, if persistently taken for a duration of time will form a bulk inventory of abstract sense data. This inventory must completely contradicts the order of 'the kantian understanding.' And you must take it to its full length. For instance, as you work with that clay intend to create the association.

He paused for a moment and watched me as I kneaded and knodded the clay in and out of forms and shapes and figures. He said nothing and then moved about the room. "The ability to engineer conscious experience is dependent upon registering, collecting all the sensory information you come in contact with under one single unbending category – ‘Intend to go to the ultraviolet spectrum.’ As you fill the concept with abstract sensory data your mind, your Kantian understanding, will feel threatened because it is reasonable and will refuse to process the abstact sensory data. The Kantian understanding inherently knows it is impossible ‘to go to the ultraviolet spectrum.’ And we are reasonable creatures. As such we have to admit that there isn’t a chance in hell that you will ever see the ultraviolet spectrum. But then proceed as if this fact doesn’t matter one iota. It’s important to erase any expectations that you will succeed in your task and yet you must move forward and do more than you best to accomplish your goal. This way more of the raw abstract sensory data will go into your inventory and not into entertaining ideas of ‘how great it will be when’ or ‘i can’t wait for such and such to happen’. The bulk inventory must be whole and complete.”

I looked at the clock on the wall. I was time for me to go.

“Remember, human beings are capable of learning in two vastly different ways. Minimal processing produces the world of everyday life and all it’s toils and spoils and wins and losses. Bulk processing registers abstract sense data in an inventory and upon cognitive digestion produces imaginary sense data in a reasonable state of awareness wherein the struggle for life depends upon abandoning the daily mode of cognition in order to survive. Thus, the state of awareness engendered in an engineered conscious experience has all the hallmarks of daily awareness. And by that I mean that in the engineered state of consciousness, one is fully aware of who they were, where they were and why they were doing it."

The Three Cornerstones of the Imagination

Einstein’s Dream
The Engineering of Conscious Experience

Chapter Six



""Learning is experience. Everything else is just information."
– Albert Einstein




Chapter Six – Three Cornerstones

“All sciences, philosophies, religions and political beliefs, ideas, whatever you want to call them, have three cornerstones. Each is concerned with what is percieved in the world around them with a code of behaviour and with who or what made all of this. For example, the science of cosmology is concerned with what is seen in the night’s sky, with behaviour of suns and galaxies, and with how these structures got to be the way they are. The big words academics use to describe these three corner stones are phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology. Phenomenology concerns itself with ‘phenomena.’ ‘Ology’ means ‘study of.’ Therefore, phenomenology is the study of phenomena. The phenomena under scrutiny can vary from what the five sense detect to moral and ehtical behaviour including all its rational social implications and ramifications, to the motion of atoms, to galaxies and the orbits of planets. Ontology, the study of being, can be summed up in the question, why do we exist? Everything living thing has sense an ontology. A cup, for instance does not. And yet we are talking about art and the ontology thereof. Of, course art as an object has a sense of being. Something of great importance transpires when witnessing a work of art. It is the theorist’s endaevor to find out about the ontology, and the phenomenology of art works. What makes a work of art avantgarde and what makes a painting, a sculpture or musical piece not a work of art? Scientists on the other hand make the same inquiry on the material world and call it epistemology 'epist' referring to the the methodological ways of knowledge building.

On the whole, epistmology, the last but not least, concerns itself with the study of knowledge and asks the fundamental question, how do we know what we know? Why do we see what we see? Why do we know things at all? How is this possible if we are just matrial things? Why do we exist?

Most sciences, religions and philsophies, art movements, sports events, or what have you are concerned with dominating and ruling these three corner stones in order to dominate and rule another persons or group of peoples three cornerstones. All are manipulating or handling these three cornerstones with abject will. Imagination engineers differ widely in that they are concerned with replicating these three cornerstones within the realm of the imagination. Which of course, becuases you’ve already done it, is no easy task. It takes a hell of lot of hard work to achieve the recreation of the three cornerstones in the imagination. And as you can attest to yourself – this is no easy task.”


*** “Everyone knows they personally exist in a world or universe that offers phenomena, offers a means of existence –ontology, and has some specific kind of epistemology. . exists. Everyone has some sense of being and are in someway concerned with why they exist. Everyone is also confronted with a phenomenology – a certain and specific conviction that they are surrouned by something that is percievable with the five senses. Thus, there are only three overall fundamentally evident features of involved in the construction of experience at any given time. Ontology, phenemology and epistemolgy exist in every single experience. For instance, imagine yoruself in your kitchen at home, You do have a kitchen don’t you?”
I nodded.

“Well then close your eyes!”

“You are in your kitchen looking about and around. Anything is yours for examination. And a most obvious feature of every object is that is was made by some kind of knowledge. Every objects has an epistemology. Even objects of nature. This is why scientists investigate objects in nature in order to know more things about how they were made. But we are scientists of perception. We are deeply and truly interested in percieving and looking and seeing.”

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and it addresses the concern as to whether or not what is known is real. Ontology is study of the nature of being. How do things come into being? Phenomenology concerns itself with the nature of perceiving. What are we perceiving and how is this made? Since they all end with ‘ology’ each one crisscrosses over the other and form the three cornerstones of nearly any conceivable philosophy, religions or political system. Take for instance, Buddhism. Buddhism is concerned with the nature of being alive; Ontology. They are concerned with what is perceived in the world around them – Phenomenology. Epistemologically they know things about the world and about their practices but their practices lead them not towards a scientific and thus, falsely believed, not a practical orientatoin towards knowledge but leads them inward toward an esoteric and more spiritual understanding of the world.” He looked at me for any kind of disagreement.

“Basically, these three big words Ontology, Phenomenology and Epistemology break down into being, percieving and knowing.”

“Do you follow me?”

I nodded.

“That’s it. Those are the three cornerstones that all philosophies, religions and political beliefs, ideas, whatever you want to call them have. They are Epistemological, Ontological, and Phenomenological in nature. That is rule number one for role for anyone traveling into the imaginatoin. But of course no one is really concerned with the being, doing and knowing of the imagination. It has largely been considered impossible to get into the imagination and experience it as an Ontological, Phenomenological, and Epistemological propositions that is just as real as this one. Do you follow me?

I nodded.

“Good!” He said smiling. “Our question then becomes; How does one behave and then act to get the conviction that they have journeyed into the imagination? Since the real world is the real world and our bodies are made of physical substances there is no magical doorway that can lead us into another world of experience.”

He stood and began to slowly pace the room. “Sure there are different cultures each with different physical and environments –different buildings, different ways of accomplishing love, marriage, birth and death, but there is no way to journey into a realm of pure imagination. The Ontological, Phenomenological and Epistemological premises for such a philosophy do not exist.
“In America, we teach our philosophy students basic premises from a historical view. We introduce them to age-old problems that have haunted Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes and Kant for centuries but we don’t teach them how to use their imaginations. A pity and a downfall for this great country. The biggest problem hauting mankind today is that we don’t know how to handle sensory information. We were robbed of the chance in our infancy. Today, We are boring creatures stuck in routine ways of thinking and acting out of tradition. For instance there is no way for a student of philosophy in any major North American University to romance his imagination with wayward utterly foreign ideas that explore one’s own personal and passionate interest’s in Ontological and Phenomenological and Epistemological terms.

“Wait a second,” I interjected. “I am just getting used to these terms your throwing around here and I do understand them but only because you’ve made them simple enough for me to comprehend. I doubt that that is the full picture because I know volumes have been written about Epistemology.”

“That is exactly what I mean. You are infused with Descartes’ Error. For Descartes to suggest in his famous phrase “I think. Therefore I am” demarcates the very downfall of humankind because it places to much emphasis on two things doubt and the self.

“Don’t get me wrong, epistemologies thrive on doubt. Doubt is the driving force behind teaching. But it is as if we are teaching students first and foremost to doubt themselves and then to do a complete turnaround and believe that their thoughts have real substance!!” He laughed aloud rolling around in his chair.

“Where did the premise go that - thoughts are real if they accompny the conviction of a percpetion. Thoughts that are not acted upon do not materilize into material world. It takes a lot of hard work to bring a thought into the world. Therefore what is the use of building an way of knowledge on doubt? You’d end up with a flimsy structure. Thinking thoughts that cannot be acted upon? I am not dismissing the contemplative mind that leands back and for hours examines decisions, pathways, choices and avenues of possiblity. That is fantastic. I applaude Decarte for his ingenuious insight in have the audacity to romance the infinite nature of thought. But what are thoughts but tiny, insignificant flashes of electrical activity in the brain? And to these we resort our greatest powers? “I think therefore I exist? There for I am? I think there for I know? Where is the premise - I think therefore I percieve?

“If Descartes had any balls on him he would have plainly noticed that an infinitly more powerful epistemology can be built on the idea that one day we are going to die. As on epistemological premise it unshakeable because you can’t doubt that one day your’ge going to die. If you take that gamble you’ll be wrong. I much better gamble is to bet that one day you will die. But don’t take this premise as a morbid thought. Think of it like as the abstract proposition that it is. Think of it as a future moment that no matter what is going to happen. There is nothing else in our lives so solidly guaranteed as that moment. What if you knew what the winning lottery numbers were going to be on a specific date and time? Would you play? What if you knew without a shadow of doubt that a certain stock was going to go through the roof one day? Would you invest? In life, we may never achieve our dreams, we may never get married, never have kids, never see costa rica, never travel to France, but for sure and without a doubt we will all one day die.”

I could see the solidity in his argument.

“The nature of Descartes method to doubt everything around him until he negates the phenomenal world and undermines the epistemological significance of the objects around him ‘till his only certainty is an ontological one - the certainty that his thought are real and that he - the thinker of his thoughts - are the only real things that exist?! Thanks to that pinprick we’ve spent two or three hundred years toiling around with mechanical nature of the world bringing us to the verge of destroying ourselves with attempts to dominate the three corner stones of others via world wars, nuclear war heads, cigarettes, and so on. Now we are on the verge of losing humankind’s subjective access to the imagination? How appalling.” He turned in disgust. A true sadness enveloped him. Then his eye’s sparked.

“If Descartes would have kept his Ontological, Phenomenological and Epistemological wits about him he would have realized that the phenomena that surrounds us on a daily basis, the phenomena of light, sound, taste, touch and smell are as REAL as can be.

“Without the phenomena of raw sensation Descartes could not convince himself that the only certainty, the only real thing he could count on was his own thoughts. Although his thoughts were, in a very real sense, tautological, circling in on themselves because the times he lived were in great peril. Everything that young man knew about the world was being overturned. He arose to be regarded as a great thinker because everyone in his time was unsure of their ontological, phenomenological, and epistemological place in the world. A new land was just being discovered and a new horizon of the unknown burgenged up upon their way of being in the world. If Descartes would have held is ground, taken responsibility for the perceptual world around him perhaps he would have been able to realize that the certainty of his thoughts derived from the physicality of the real phenomena, real raw sensation and that only perceputal phenomena is capable of offering conviction to the senses and thus to the mind and thus to thoughts. His thoughts should have been considered inadequate to the conviction of his senses.
“Imagination engineering is an edifice of knowledge that combines the ontological nature of being with the phenomenological nature of perception and perceiving with the epistemological search for new knowledge. If we were to introduce it to the cannon of wetern history and its methods of teaching we could call it - Imaginology.

“Imaginology?”

Einstein burst out laughing. “It sounds terrible doesn’t it? It sounds faint and dumb like waiter wearing a handkerchief on his wrist.”

I laughed aloud at the analogy.

“What’s worse is the word form – Imaginological.” He keeled over laughing slapping his knee repeatedly. I was giggling at how he could change from being so serious to being utterly non-serious.

“I’ve settled for the term Imagination Engineering. The engineering part denotes the integrity and awareness needed to unify the ontological, epistemological and phenomenological in that place you called. . . what was it?

“Somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else!”

Thus, the engineering part also stands for intenttionally using imaginary and abstrtact sensory data in novel ways to create a cognitive doorway into the imagination.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was in a million places at once. I wanted to jump up and kiss him and run around the room like a fool celebrating a life long wish that had finally come true. But I simple sat their internally experiencing these emotions and then feelings of when I was younger came over me. I felt a particular sadness about the time when I was seven years old. I felt that at that time I would have lived and died a hundred times to find a way to go into the imagination. But those feelings died in me by the time I was eleven years old. I distinctly remembered talking to everyone I knew about the imagination expressing how disappointed I was because I wanted to go see the dinosaurs. I was repeatedly told that there was no actual way to journey into the imagination even if my only purpose was to see the long excint dinosaurs. Over the years, the feelings I had had for the imagination slowly drifted away and became a faint distant memory like a fog.

“I can tell that its not that you don’t believe me. It’s that you’ve lost your spirit of true adventure.”I was amazed at how completely absorbed I became in my own thoughts. I must have looked like a man who lost his best friend when suddenly Einstein spoke to me. “I would advise that you go back over your decision to give up on the imagination as realm of veritable experience by journeying there first as realm of visualization. Visualize the scene when you decided that the imagination was all guff. Try to recall every detail. The color of the room, how many windows there were, what your emotional outlook was. Then once you’ve established these rudimentary ontological, phenomenological and epistemological constructs look at the reason that forced you to show your hand. Breathe in everything you saw, heard or touched. Then do the same with the feelings that are holding you back. Keep what you want and exhale everything. Single the end of the scene with a movement of the head from left to right and to the center pausing breifly with the head in the center. This breath reduces all phenomenological, ontological and epistemological relationships to pure raw sensation or abstract sensory data. Breathe in the raw sensation and use it to make a new decision that a cognitive doorway to the imagination exists.

“And, further, if you can’t remember when or where it was that you denoted the need to escape to mere childhood fears you will have to make list of everyone you’ve ever met from the present all the way to past. Go all the way to your birth if you want to be professional about it. Go through the list and ontolgoically, phenomenologically and epistemologically, reassemble every interaction. Place yourself in the scene from a new vantage point and then and then deconstruct the scene, the light, the placement of chairs, the floor, the woolen blankets, whatever it is. Then go to the words used, the emotions you felt, the things you saw and heard. Breath it all out. Reduce all of it to raw sensory conviction but also scoop up and decide to keep anything you want.”

“But I don’t want to erase all my memories!”

He nearly died laughing. He had to scramble to his feet to keep himself from falling out of his chair. “ Trust me they don’t go away. If anything they become clearer more powerful. Instead of your memories being logdged in you unconscoiusly now you will be aware of the best of your memories and more importantly you will be able to hold them in theh plams of yoru hand and rotate them with your fingers. Your life would become expansive and powerfull because the breath itseslf creates the necessary cognitive spce for these experiences to happen.”

“Mother nature has not evolved us into being who can naturally get rid of cognintive waste. All thos memories bricked up, and bricked in by the three-dimensional cognitive arrangements of time and space hold us down. They pin us to the wall. For instance, thinkg about the person who believes assuredly that he’s been hurt beyond repair by his mother’s yelling at him. He holds it as a true injustice for the rest of this life and dies not only beliving but knowing his pain is real. There is no 360 degree rotation of the memory. He never ‘sees’ for instance how she struggled and was beat down at work and came hoime only to find her only son committing atrocities and yells at the person in question out of a need to protect the only thing left that she has affection for. The memory holds him there. Unable or unwililng to breath the three-dimensional solidty of the memory of himself he is pinned down and thuroughly believes his tragic state of affaris. If he were to get back to how the senses regheter the world – as pure phenomena, he could plainly gather up all the abstract sensory information in the scene or repeated scence wherein he felt he was treatly so badly and the essence of whatever lesson had to be learned becomes moveable and can become a position of power and great learning which may of may not eventually lead to a source of wisdom. We hall have things to learn. And we will all learn whether we like it or not right up until the day we die. But learning can be a joyous, highly romantic affair when you can see those past moments as ontological, phenomenologocal and epistemological constructs – free from the victimization of the self. Then the tears of the universe will be in your eyes and maybe for the first time in your life the pin is removed and the weight is shouldered the pain is no longer a hinderance to learning and maturing to a righteously curious person.

“We are perceivers. And if we are not daring enough to percieve our own past memories then we will never acquire the training to make into the imagination as a place of experience. We are built to perceive but we live our lives like washing machines that never do the washing. We live like dryers who are too afraid to dry! We don’t believe ourselves to be perceivers when I know for a fact that we are. The five senses we have and share with others in our world are not the only means by which we can perceive. Anything imaginable or unimaginable can be perceived but only if we put our minds to it. Put the mind to it and the body will follow.