The Void

The universe is derived from an ultimate principle of spiritual consciousness, the one and only existent from eternity.  Accepting this, you become an affirmer of The Void, which is to be understood as the Primordial Nothingness: that is, the raw stuff out of which all is created as well as the background against which every creation can be discerned. 

                                                                           Frank Herbert, Destination: Void.

This is from Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide, playing around with similar concepts.

                “What nobody’s been able to figure out is why a Big Bang would ever happen.  This way it makes a weird kind of sense.  If somebody was capable of holding the pattern of the entire universe in his head stepped Outside, then all the philotes there would sort themselves out into the largest place in the pattern that they could control.  Since there’s no time there, they could take a billion years or a microsecond, all the time they needed, and then when it was sorted out, bam, there they are, the whole universe, popping out into a new Inside space.  And since there’s no distance or position—no whereness—then the entire thing would begin the size of a geometric point—“

                “No size at all,” said Grego.

                “I remember my geometry,” said Valentine.

                “And immediately expand, creating space as it grew.  As it grew, time would seem to slow down—or do I mean speed up?”

                “It doesn’t matter,” said Grego.  “It all depends whether you’re Inside the new space or Outside or in some other Inspace.”

                “Anyway, the universe now seems to be constant in time while it’s expanding in space.  But if you wanted to, you could just as easily see it as constant in size but changing in time.  The speed of light is slowing down so that it takes longer to get from one place to another, only we can’t tell that it’s slowing down because everything else slows down exactly relative to the speed of light.  You see?  All a matter of perspective.  For that matter, as Grego said before, the universe we live in is still, in absolute terms, exactly the size of a geometric point—when you look at it from Outside.  Any growth that seems to take place on the Inside is just a matter of relative location and time.”

                “And what kills me,” said Grego, “is that this is the kind of thing that’s been going on inside Olhado’s head all these years.  This picture of the universe as a dimensionless point in Outside space is the way he’s been thinking all along.  Not that he’s the first to think of it.  Just that he’s the one who actually believed it and saw the connection between that and the non-place where Andrew says the hive queen goes to find aiuas.”

                “As long as we’re playing metaphysical games,” said Valentine, “then where did this whole thing begin?  If what we think of as reality is just a pattern that somebody brought Outside, and the universe just popped into being, then whoever it was is probably still wandering around giving off universes wherever she goes.  So where did she come from?  And what was there before she started doing it?  And how did Outside come to exist, for that matter?”

                “That’s Inspace thinking,” said Olhado.  “That’s the way you conceive of things when you still believe in space and time as absolutes.  You think of everything starting and stopping, of things having origins, because that’s the way it is in the observable universe.  The thing is, Outside there’re no rules like that at all.  Outside was always there and always will be there.  The number of philotes there is infinite, and all of them always existed.  No matter how many of them you pull out and put into organized universes, there’ll be just as many left as there always were.”

                “But somebody had to start making universes.”

                “Why?” asked Olhado. 

                “Because—because I—“

                “Nobody ever started.  It’s always been going on.  I mean, if it weren’t already going on, it couldn’t start.  Outside where there aren’t any patterns, it would be impossible to conceive of a pattern.  They can’t act, by definition, because they literally can’t even find themselves.”

                “But how could it always have been going on?”

                “Think of it as if this moment in time, the reality we live in at this moment, this condition of the entire universe—of all universes—“

                “You mean now.”

                “Right.  Think of it as if now were the surface of a sphere.  Time is moving forward through the chaos of Outside like the surface of an expanding sphere, a balloon inflating.  On the outside, chaos.  On the inside, reality.  Always growing—like you said, Valentine.  Popping up new universes all the time.”

                “But where did this balloon come from?”

                “OK, you’ve got the balloon.  The expanding sphere.  Only now think of it as a sphere with an infinite radius.”

                Valentine tried to think what that would mean.  “The surface would be completely flat.”

                “That’s right.”

                “And you could never go all the way around it.”

                “That’s right, too.  Infinitely large.  Impossible even to count all the universes that exist on the reality side.  And now, starting from the edge, you get on a starship and start heading inward toward the center.  The farther in you go, the older everything is.  All the old universes, back and back.  When do you get to the first one?”

                “You don’t,” said Valentine.  “Not if you’re traveling at a finite rate.”

                “You don’t reach the center of a sphere of infinite radius, if you’re starting at the surface, because no matter how far you go, no matter how quickly, the center, the beginning, is always infinitely far away.”

                “And that’s where the universe began.”

                “I believe it,” said Olhado.  “I think it’s true.”

                “So the universe works this way because it’s always worked this way,” said Valentine.

                “Reality works this way because that’s what reality is.  Anything that doesn’t work this way pops back into chaos.  Anything that does, comes across into reality.  The dividing line is always there.”

                “What I love,” said Grego, “is the idea that after we’ve started tootling around at instantaneous speeds in our reality, what’s to stop us from finding others?  Whole new universes?”

                “Or making others,” said Olhado.

                “Right,” said Grego.  “As if you or I could actually hold a pattern for a whole universe in our minds.”

                “But maybe Jane could,” said Olhado.  “Couldn’t she?”

                “What you’re saying,” said Valentine, “is that maybe Jane is God”

                “She’s probably listening right now,” said Grego.  “The computer’s on, even if the display is blocked.  I’ll bet she’s getting a kick out of this.”

                “Maybe every universe lasts long enough to produce something like Jane,” said Valentine.  “And then she goes out and creates more and—“

                “It goes on and on,” said Olhado.  “Why not?”

                “But she’s an accident,” said Valentine.

                “No,” said Grego.  “That’s one of the things Andrew found out today.  You’ve got to talk to him.  Jane was no accident.  For all we know there are no accidents.  For all we know, everything was all part of the pattern from the start.”

                “Everything except ourselves,” said Valentine.  “Our—what’s the word for the philote that controls us?”

                “Aiua,” said Grego.  He spelled it out for her.

                “Yes,” she said.  “Our will, anyway, which always existed, with whatever strengths and weaknesses it has.  And that’s why, as long as we’re part of the pattern of reality, we’re free.”

                “Sounds like the ethicist is getting into the act,” said Olhado.

                “This is probably complete bobagem,” said Grego.

                “Jane’s going to come back laughing at us.  But Nossa Senhora, it’s fun, isn’t it?”

                “Hey, for all we know, maybe that’s why the universe exists in the first place,” said Olhado.  “Because going around through chaos popping out realities is a lark.  Maybe God’s been having the best time.”

                “Or maybe he’s just waiting for Jane to get out there and keep him company,” said Valentine.

Time and Beyond

                I’m pretty sure eternal life doesn’t mean this width-less line of moments endlessly prolonged…but getting off that line onto its plane or even the solid.

                                                                               Lewis

                We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it.  “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty.  It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water.  And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.

                                                                               Lewis

I do like the Simultaneity/Sequency duality. But do you think that one is more foundational than the other? I think of the notion (as I understand it) that there was no "before" the Big Bang, and I hypothesize that death an immersion into that Simultaneity.   -  Nate Haken

I am quite aware that there are oodles of people out there much, much more qualified to speak to time and our speculation of its origins, but here’s my attempt at relating it to The Dispossessed and what might come after death. 

Imagine being knocked out only to wake up in a cell with only artificial light.  Suppose there is a clock in your cell, the old kind that is a circle with an hour, a minute, and a second hand.  Though you could see what time it was at any moment, it would be meaningless since you would have nothing to refer it to.  You would not know if it was am or pm, and you would only know how many days you spent in the cell if you imposed your own linearity by keeping track somehow how of revolutions.  Same would be true if you saw a time lapse of some nature scene, quickly zipping through the seasons.  The cyclical nature of time, says Le Guin, is its static quality that enables time to endure.  The linear aspect of time would be its dynamic quality.  Without being coupled with the static, dynamic linear quality would only be chaos.  Without some steady repetition, there is nothing to relate to.  Without an arrow to time, there can be no distinguishing between times. 

For physics, the most basic repetition is at the quantum level, with entangled subatomic particles.  Paired electrons rotating in opposite directions is an example of this.  Because you can separate those electrons to vast distances and have them affect each other instantaneously, without any passage of time, it is thought that this is the edge of existence where time can emerge.  At least I think that’s why in string theory, the strings are vibrating.  In other words, to measure an increase in time, there needs to be intervals, however minute they may be.  There also needs to be an original reference point to relate to.  Couple the original reference point with the second law of thermodynamics and you have the Big Bang.  Some have speculated that the Big Bang itself marks the beginning of a cycle among many where the universe expands and contracts.  This may have been the prevalent view in the 70’s when Le Guin was writing. 

Nate, I don’t speculate that Simultaneity is more fundamental; rather the opposite.  Simultaneity coincides with the static, with Truth; what holds the pattern and what structures the dynamic so it can last.  I don’t believe I would be alone in thinking that the Void that precedes time is chaotic; a crazy, wild, dynamic, creative force without form.  I’m obviously influenced by Frank Herbert, but he’s not the only one.  Now as to what we enter into after death is a whole other issue.  To reiterate what I said in some comments, time is usually considered the fourth dimension, and we have an inkling of its elasticity, its relativity.  So there definitely seems that there is a dimension or leap ‘above’ time.  We don’t discard the second dimension when leaping to the third, but rather build on it and it remains essential to maintaining the upper dimensions, even if it’s lost in the minute details of the gestalt.  Kind of like those 1’s and 0’s in the computer.  So to leap above time, we would maintain that connection to it and yet not be bound to it.  I’m hopeful that within such a state, we would be all the more capable of living on the edge of the dynamic reality, but I see this as something very different than existing in that something that was ‘before’ the beginning, precisely because we now participate in Simultaneity.  The problem lies with the word sequence, which places it within the realm of time, and so doesn’t directly seem to be more fundamental.  But in capitalizing it, I think it allows one to think of it as that force that drives the system, that pushes through the cycles of simultaneity; that force that is behind the movement of the arrow of time.  In other words, sequence only makes sense because it references itself to the cycles, the static.  This cyclical reference will remain within the fourth dimension, but the force that pushes through will also push out and above.  It may very well be true that as we leap into higher and higher gestalts, we both get farther from the Source and at the same time more capable of accessing the Source without losing ourselves.  It’s a nice thought, anyway.

One other morsel to chew on…The combining of a circle and an arrow seems, at least geometrically, to be a spiral.  You get a feel of the spiral in some of the philosophers, particularly Hegel and his view on history.  Perhaps, time itself, also works out in some sort of spiral.  My hunch is that it could even be the logarithmic spiral that we find all through nature.  That ubiquitous, fractal, ever expanding spiral that we find in shells, ferns, bathtub water, brassicas, cornea nerves, storms, galaxies, and Mandelbrot equations.  Smells right, at least.

Integrity

What is integrity? Is it simply what you do and who you are when you think no one is watching?  - Madame Muse

The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage.  But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage…The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.   -  Chesterton

The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.  -  Lewis

Well, here would be my quick answers.  Integrity is:  Honesty.  Opposite of false.  Even when no one is watching.  Even when it comes at a cost. 

I think there’s more, though, and it relates to gestalt.  Someone once told me that integrity comes from the same root as integer, which is a whole number.  This is why we can speak of machines as having integrity, which in this case, would mean the system was unimpaired, complete, whole.  So in terms of the enjoyment of things, whether art or people or simply a jigsaw puzzle, integrity is the opposite of mercenary.  The reward and enjoyment from the activity needs to fit in the whole precisely because that is the consummation of the activity.  There is a humility and a commitment when one is dedicated to integrity, because you fully immerse yourself to the activity’s agenda and not your own.  In this sense, integrity is the opposite of affectation.  And people are usually pretty good at telling, even if subconsciously, if you’re just pretending to like the latest piece of art, whether music, or painting, or poem, or fashion, or whatever, just to be cool.  Especially good at telling if they themselves honestly like the art.  Most people can tell if you are simply trying to be their friend so you can share the four spiritual laws with them and usher them into the kingdom.  Most people recognize political double speak of their opponents.  For whatever reason, the human race has kept its bullshit detector quite intact—as long as it’s about somebody else.  Hypocrisy, is essentially an affront on our sense of aesthetics.  I find this hopeful, as I’ve written before that our faculty of aesthetics helps us chose between truths. 

Unfortunately, our western culture is on this side of the industrial revolution, and our society is saturated with the compartmentalization of everything.  While this analytical separation of things has enabled us to push technology to some pretty impressive feats, we have paid for it in the aesthetic realm.  It may very well be a dependable axiom that the greater the scientific feats of a civilization, the more they will experience meaninglessness.  We may have amenities a plenty, but we know longer feel connected.  We have ripped the universe into separate parts so that we can rebuild them into whatever the hell we want, but our souls feel the loss of the pattern, the gestalt, the integrity of the system.  A lot of well-meaning people attempt to address our problems, but they have no sense of the pattern, no integrity, and consequently usually cause more damage.  I’m thinking of things like Kony 2012.  This was a classic case of Chesterton’s wandering virtue isolated from the pattern.  The whole white man’s burden is offensive because it lacks integrity.  I confess a part of me was smugly pleased when I heard that some Uganda villagers rioted after watching that ridiculous YouTube.  It was just wrong on so many levels it’s easy to pick on.  But enough people have pointed out that the whole ‘save-Africa-through-awareness’ strategy is fundamentally hypocritical.  We simply can’t continue with the American life as is, and act at the same time as if we are going to help alleviate poverty and fight corruption in Africa.  The two are part of the same whole.  Feeding invisible children and rallying people and governments to kill Kony is at best a relief valve for the guilt a Westerner (probably subconsciously) feels for participating in a global system that sanctions the rape of the world and the systematic poverty that happens as a by-product.  At worst, it’s a monkey wrench in any real movement for change based on reality.  And it is not just our luxuries that perpetuate the system.  Simply functioning and communicating and making enough money to feed our own families requires us to participate in the system, whether it’s simply consuming oil by driving our car to work or buying a cell phone to communicate.  And we certainly don’t have to look overseas to see the effects of our dehumanizing system.  Here as well, the richer are getting richer and the poor poorer.  My wife showed me a statistic that said if you took all the wealth of the poorest half of our world, however many billion that is, it would be less than the wealth of the top 85 richest people on earth.  It’s no wonder the Africans are telling us “Get the effing log out of your own eye before you work on our speck!”

A side note:

I thought of a good way to explain why the jumbled words belong in the gestalt collage.  Remember this?

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a  toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

It’s a perfect example of the periphery focus thingy.  Pay attention to what your eyes do when you read.  Read it aloud, and if the sentence is flowing, your eyes are peripherally taking in each word as a whole.  It reads slower for me, because even though the gestalts are happening, I feel off kilter.  Focus in on the details of the letters, and it’s gibberish.  A good metaphor for life, I think.  So many of the patterns around us are broken, but with the right type of focus, we can see things how they ought to be. 

Idol Making

Esther Muse wrote:

I am intrigued by the image of 'exercising a mental state of periphery.' You give the example of working a jigsaw puzzle (and I've seen you there), as well as your 'zone' in soccer. Is this simply a physiologic phenomenon, or does the state of periphery also play out in your human relationships?
Reminds me a bit of the scene in Patch Adams whereby the crazy old math professor holds up four fingers and says "how many?" The right answer requires looking beyond the obvious....

I’ve been stewing over this all day yesterday, and while doing chores outside in a foot and a half of snow this morning.  Lots of thoughts, but I know that none of them will be very satisfactory.  It’s not that I don’t have a very good answer that’s got me worked up, but because it raises red flags.  I think these red flags are personal, and very well may be applicable to me only, so my inclination was to try and not dwell on them and come up with something decent to say.  I tried toying around with different understandings of humor and how to reinterpret it through a periphery mentality.  I thought of viewing relationships as an art and applying the peripheral state as such.  I thought of sex and the unfocused state you get in when lost in your lover and pleasure.  I thought of ‘holy nites’ with the guys, drinking and smoking and pontificating without any real structure—sort of a feeble attempt at communal lateral thinking.  I thought of times when I’ve been angry at my kids.  Somehow, anger (coupled with self-control obviously) for me sharpens my mental abilities, and I find myself, at times, using my reprimand to explicitly and verbally make connections for my kids.  The connection between discipline and self-discipline.  The connection between hurting others and the insecurity within ourselves.  Between giving and receiving.  Between junk food and the quick, temporary high of hurting others.  Between real nourishment of both body and soul, where the pleasure is long lasting and builds on itself.  Probably the kids just avoid getting me angry just because they don’t want to have to hear some strange pontification concerning things they really have no clue about or couldn’t care less about.  But I can always hope something gets through.  Anyways, I thought of a lot of things, but none of them really had a spark.  I think I’ll have to let someone else answer for me.  But what did have a spark were my red flags, and I think that’s what I should write about.  I think I can draw more universal principles out of my own experience so that it is not just like reading a diary, so bear with me.  Couched in what I have to say will also be how I would approach answering the periphery question in relationships. 

Fractal:  an infinitely complex pattern that is self-similar across different scales.

We are so devastatingly good at making idols.  Analysis is quite prone to naming and defining things to the point we can box them up, give them a “body” and soon after worship it.  I am good at the analytical idol making, and I think I’ve come dangerously close to it in these blogs.  I have a history of idol making and C.S. Lewis was the one to help me recognize this fact.  In college--when my mind was exploding in great expanding leaps, when I was falling madly in love, when I could maintain hours of intense physical activity, intense emotional activity, and tried to maintain intense spiritual activity--I had an inkling of what I now label riding the edge.  I wanted every interaction with others to be intense, deep and if possible, to further my intellectual expansion.  I couched it in religious terms as ‘living in the Spirit’.   Only in my late teens and early twenties did I have enough testosterone and energy to even entertain the idea of remaining on such a high.  (I might not have done meth or cocaine or whatever, but I was a junkie on some very powerful stuff.)  This is not unnatural.  When the seed first dies and germinates, there is an explosion of growth.  Mentally, I had died to old ways of thinking and was exploding in new thought patterns.  It’s not too surprising, that the seedling might think its life will constantly consist in such rate of growth, but eventually, it has to slow down and grow at a more sustainable pace to become the great oak that lasts for hundreds of years.  As a side note, it might be worth remembering, that the growth is only rapid as a percentage of itself.  A full grown oak does a lot more growing than a little seedling, but in relation to its own size, the growth is relatively small.  Anyways, I made an idol of that growth, of that high, of that intensity.  When you boiled it down, I was a simple thrill seeker, even if my thrills were more meaningful than bungee jumping or a meth high.  In the end, I think I was saved by integrity.  I demand the honesty of integrity of those around me, and even more so in myself.  Let me revert to quotes again to make my point.  There is a great deal I no longer agree with C.S. Lewis about, but his keen mind was able to spell out certain things for me that still hold true.

In an essay called Lilies That Fester, Lewis writes:

                We all know those who shudder at the word refinement as a term of social approval…He who shudders feels that the quality of mind and behavior which we call refined is nowhere less likely to occur than among those who aim at, and talk much about, refinement.  Those who have this quality are not obeying any idea of refinement when they abstain from swaggering, spitting, snatching, triumphing, calling names, boasting or contradicting…Refinement, in fact, is a name given to certain behaviour from without.  From within, it does not appear as refinement; indeed, it does not appear, does not become an object of consciousness, at all.  Where it is most named it is most absent…

                …there are others who sincerely and (I believe) rightly think that such talk is not merely a symptom of, but a cause active in producing, that disease.  The talk is inimical to the thing talked of, likely to spoil it where it exists and to prevent its birth where it is unborn. 

[this is a little harsh, but if we keep reading, Lewis qualifies his assertions.]

                I do not mean that we are never to talk of things from the outside.  But when the things are of high value and very easily destroyed, we must talk with great care, and perhaps the less we talk the better.  To be constantly engaged with the idea of culture, and (above all) of culture as something enviable, or meritorious, or something that confers prestige, seems to me to endanger those very “enjoyments” for whose sake we chiefly value it.  If we encourage others, or ourselves, to hear, see, or read great art on the ground that it is a cultured thing to do, we call into play precisely those elements in us which must be in abeyance before we can enjoy art at all.  We are calling up the desire for self-improvement, the desire for distinction, the desire to revolt (from one group) and to agree (with another), and a dozen busy passions which, whether good or bad in themselves, are, in relation to the arts, simply a blinding and paralysing distraction…Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry.  For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.  [my emphasis]  The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience.  The desirable habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as a by-product, unsought.

[you’ll have to excuse his diss on fantasy and Sci-Fi.  It comes as a surprise since he wrote that kind of stuff himself.  Maybe he was just criticizing that specific book in particular.  In any case, this next one was a key passage for me.]

                …In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside.  For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested.  I should have hopes of that boy.  Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books.  The organs of appreciation exist in them.  They are not impotent.  And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

                                The child whose love is here, at least doth reap

                                One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

[Okay, so I realize this may be very ordinary stuff for most people, but I needed to hear it back then, and to be reminded of it now.  Here’s a section of Lewis talking carefully about his ‘edge’.]

               " In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness.   I am almost committing an indecency.  I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.  We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.  We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.  Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.  Wordworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past.  But all this is a cheat.  If Wordworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.  The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.  These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.  For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

So here’s the rub.  We may want to live a life that contacts the dynamic that resides in the edges, but this truly only comes when we pursue other things for their own sake, not even for the grand purpose of that dynamic edge.  My problem has never been making the music or soccer or even the person the idol.  I never mistook them for the dynamic reality.  My mistake was to shift my attention from them to the dynamic reality coming through them.  In other words, to have deep intimate conversation because you want to ride the edge betrays the process.  It’s a slight, but devastating difference.  To do so would be to make that person an object to be used, (I suspect this is another form of idolatry) and they will slowly cease to be a vehicle by which you have access to an edge.  We cannot look at the source straight on.  We must look at it with the periphery of our pursuits, so to speak.  Remember it comes through our pursuits.  Elsewhere, Lewis does a fantastic job of showing that joy is the true mode of the process.  If you do not enjoy the person, enjoy the music, enjoy the sport, enjoy the book, enjoy the whatever, for its own sake, you’ll never have a sense of where the edge would be.  You would have eyes that do not see.  And ears that do not hear.  That would be like deciding “oh, this guy achieves a peripheral state of mind by puzzling.  I can’t stand puzzles, but I’m gonna train my brain to think laterally.”  Good luck, I’m afraid you would first have to learn to like puzzling, then you might have a chance.  But way back in one of my first posts I insisted that the sacred and the ordinary should not be separated.  This is because you can lose yourself in any normal endeavor, if you fully enjoy it.  This is what saved me back in college.  I truly did enjoy my friends, soccer, intellectual pursuit, even philosophy.  And when I started feeling them slip, feeling the life shift away from the center, in the end I was not willing to sacrifice them, even for the sake of pursuing ‘the edge’.  And in so losing the edge, allowing that direct pursuit to die, I eventually returned to the unadulterated process that in the end is the only way to access that dynamic reality.  Personally, I think this is religion's Achilles’ heel.  Almost by definition, is it mercenary.  But the reverse is also true.  Anything, pursued for its own sake can give us a chance of leading us to ‘god’. 

So when Esther asked about a state of periphery in our relationships, all my answers struck me as trying to describe the process directly—I was trying to make too much of a one-to-one correlation.  When I get in an equation mode to understand or direct an analogy, I know I’ve slipped behind the wave.  In fact, I felt dirty.  I trust Esther to know this, but I’ll say this just to have it out there; this had nothing to do with the question, but rather to do with my history and old patterns of analytical idolatry.  So here’s my lateral approach to a question on periphery:  Life is fractal.  The puzzle and soccer illustrations are examples of the periphery packed tightly into an action.  The compaction creates an intensity we cannot expect to maintain.  Even in puzzling and playing soccer, I go in and out of the mental mode—I haven’t, after all, reached some sort of enlightenment.  So, when I expand these illustrations fractally to relationships, I would say that a peripheral approach to life, to relationships, is pursuing things for their own sakes.  This can run the whole spectrum of intensity.  The crucial part is to pursue relationships because you enjoy that particular joy that comes with that particular person.  This is not mercenary, because as Lewis writes, “The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.”  In other words, if you compose or play or simply listen to a piece of music, the music does not exist on its own.  It is only fully consummated by your enjoyment.  We complete each other by delighting in each other.  That’s really all we need to know, because only when we are lost in the enjoyment of another person, will we find that we are indeed riding an edge.  Don’t think about it too long, acknowledge it, be thankful for it, then forget about it and go right back to enjoying each other.

P.S. I saw Patch Adams so long ago, I don’t remember the finger scene.

P.P.S. I’m planning on returning to the concepts of time.