4. The Mystery of Death
Death is a tree. It grows toward the light. And the light-within branches through the body like a tree.
In the dark long after, things happen as if they were not recalled.
Those two passages probably mean nothing to you. Each of these four sentences is an agent of intelligence who dwells among the resemblances. What are these resemblances who confront you as you first enter the Inner Lips of the Vagina? See, they look like trees.
They are, in fact, plumeria trees – the cemetery tree of the Hawaiians. And they grow here directly around the bend that leads to the crater. You can see the dirt path we followed from the end of the asphalt road. These gnarly trees guard the entry to the earthly imprint of the Goddess’ vagina. You can’t enter the interior without passing them.
Each year, the cemetery tree drops all its blossoms and leaves and appears to die. I’ll post another photograph of this grove later in the season when the trees are in full bloom. For now, though, the resemblances peek out from behind their disguise as plumeria. Look at them closely. They are earthly stand-ins for a cosmic reality that has become known to science only in recent times.
One’s first thought might be that their appearance is fractal (a description also known as self-similarity: fractals are fractions: a geometric pattern that repeats at endlessly smaller scales, fractals describe the structure of trees, river systems, bronchial tubes, arteries, brains, seacoasts, clouds, galaxies) – but the deeper understanding is that these trees are an appearance. Physics (in the famous double-slit experiment) demonstrates that the force of awareness affects the outcome of events. Seeing these trees entangles you with them.
With the next breath, the mystery of death begins.
You have seen the cemetery trees. Now, look closer.
Do you see how the branches resemble snakes? These are trees of snakes - lots and lots of snakes. The snake is our guide, the radiance of the snakewalk, darkness cleft by light’s amplitudes and curves, wavelengths of the photon. Remember, waves of light move through space without any medium, unlike the waves we know in the ordinary world (crests and troughs of water or air or violin strings). Over a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein developed a mathematical description of light that requires no medium. He never did clarify how a wave can exist without a medium. Even so, physics accepts this explanation, because the mathematics provides highly accurate predictions of the observable world.
So what are we seeing here in these cemetery trees? What is this presence that fills the very entry to the earthly imprint of the Goddess’ vagina? Each tree resembles a mating ball of snakes! Do you see it? See it. This moment of seeing, this pivot between perception (tree) and recognition (mating ball of snakes) is the most extraordinary moment.
What is the mind doing when we swivel from perception to recognition? This is not an ordinary exchange. Rational people, whose minds are nothing more than parking lots for memes, dismiss this exchange as ‘simply’ imaginary. There is nothing simple about imagination. It is dreaming us. Its secrets, its unspoken meanings, compass the very nature of darkness in which we, elected by chance, dressed in distance, and obscure to our own minds, exist as light. This light of human being we call consciousness.
Each snake is a wave of light in the void. Each of these trees is a mating ball of snakes, making every tree here a sun. And this cluster of suns, of tangled light, resembles a grove of plumeria trees. You begin to glimpse the many things. The spermatic power of these mating balls at the opening of the vagina is light entering darkness, penetrating the uterine presence of the Goddess, the motherworld of continuous creation, the Higgs Field that generates the physical world.
Once we see this, the first agent of intelligence comes forward and whispers: Death is a tree. It comes out of the ground of being and reaches into the void.
Somewhere in the future, you are already dead. The moment that we believe is the last moment is, actually, the first. This is so, because time does not exist as we think it does. Being-in-time seems an elusive and ineluctable flow of instants from past to future. This is an illusion. Our nervous systems (our perceptual apparatus: the sensorium) has evolved to interpret energy patterns causally. This way of perceiving reality is useful only in a strictly limited way, which facilitates the survival and reproduction of the organism.
Out of the grove of snakes, a new intelligence opens: time exists precisely like space. The future is already there. At the place where you die, you enter existence – and what you currently believe to be the past is a set of fake memories and counterfeit documents. This is not a conjecture. It is a consequence of physics. Look into retrocausation. Read about Ludwig Boltzmann. And Arthur Eddington’s concept of the thermodynamic arrow.
That arrow flies along the trajectory of the second law of thermodynamics, from lesser to greater entropy. It poses the biggest question in physics now: Why is entropy so low in the past? Entropy is the quantitative measure of energy spontaneously dispersing or spreading out and calculates how much energy has flowed from a constricted state to one more widely diffused. The most constricted state, the lowest entropy, is the big bang itself. Entropy near the big bang remains very low. And why that is the case presents to physics a stupendous cosmic mystery – with devastating consequences.
To appreciate that mystery, research the findings of WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe). 1,000,000 years after the big bang, the arrangement of matter remains astonishingly smooth. Such a regular distribution of matter is extremely unstable, given the attractive force of gravity, and generates a highly dynamic supply of potential energy. Why doesn’t that hot matter clump up? Why doesn’t it tangle tightly into black holes? Why instead does it create a colossal source of low entropy, on which the apparent direction of the Thermodynamic Arrow depends? (Roger Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind estimates the probability of such a smooth arrangement of matter at 10−10e123!)
The odds against such an even distribution of matter directly after the biggest explosion in the history of the universe is so inconceivably huge that many strange things are far more probable – including the very strange likelihood that ‘the future’ already exists and is deciding what will occur in ‘the past.’ Among those decisions is your undecomposition at the moment of death and subsequent emanation through spacetime toward the lowest entropy.
Three things to remember: light propagates without a medium - you are light (consciousness) that made specific observations at the moment prior to your undecomposition - and observations of final states determine different histories of the universe. Right now, in fact, your current observations are determining which history, among a vast number of possible histories, will happen as your ‘past.’ (Perhaps at this point you begin to grasp why the stonemovers warned you not to enter this place of sorcery!)
Why should we entertain the obviously absurd idea that ‘the future’ determines ‘the past?’ Recall from your studies of the thermodynamic arrow that, according to Boltzmann, probability increases exponentially with entropy. It follows that the objective direction of time does not exist, because the probability of producing the world we see around us is far less likely to have emerged out of the exponentially lower entropy of ‘the past’ and far more likely to come from the reverse of the normal temporal perspective.
Facing the truly colossal odds of the lowest entropy that WMAP reveals at the earliest history of the universe, other theorists have suggested scenarios as strange as what I’m proposing and - like snakewalking ‘backward’ in time - far more likely than the early state of our cosmos: all the particles that constitute the Sun and the planets could have spontaneously flown together in one instant to create our solar system exactly as we see it today and that event would be far more likely than the low entropy in proximity to the big bang. Also more likely than a big bang producing a super-smooth distribution of matter is the probability that your brain assembled spontaneously and you and you alone exist, experiencing everything as a virtual reality.
The Prince of Darkness, Dr. Realitätsprinzip, steps forward and refutes the snakewalk by asserting that the low entropy at the beginning of time simply (the good doctor much admires that word: ‘tis a gift to be simple) - simply indicates that there is something as yet not understood missing from our cosmological model.
Thank you, Doctor. The Prince of Darkness is right, of course. There is and always will be something missing from our rational understanding of the universe, because the universe exceeds our ability to grasp it rationally. (Check out Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Ludwig Wittgenstein.) But the snakewalk is not a rational walk in the park. The snakewalk is divine intercourse.
Part of our foreplay here in the grove of cemetery trees before we enter the Body of the Goddess is to set our sorrow down. Bereavement, the most immemorial leaching of our human spirit, disappears when we look closely at the physics of reality. Where are you when you are in ‘the future’ a moment ‘after’ you die? You are disembodied consciousness, light propagating without a medium in what Stephen Hawking calls imaginary time.
That means that when you are not in spacetime, physically embodied, you are moving in a direction of time perpendicular to the thermodynamic arrow. Examine the relationship of imaginary time to the wave-function of the universe (as described by Hawking and Hartle), and you’ll see that, unlike the thermodynamic arrow, imaginary time has no beginning or end, no apparent preferred direction.
The crest of the snakewalk occupies imaginary time and the trough exists in the physical world. The snakewalk oscillates from our far more probable ‘future’ to our far less probable ‘past’ until we arrive (after many oscillations, many incarnations) at the singularity of the big bang. In fact, the Hawking-Hartle quantum cosmology of imaginary time postulates that ‘the past,’ in particular the phase transition from imaginary time to the big bang and the start of the thermodynamic arrow of conventional time, is controlled from the far ‘future’ in a self-consistent loop.
So, we are snakewalking backward - until we reach our mother’s wombs and then launching again into imaginary time to another death that initiates another life…
Our ultimate destination is the big bang, itself a quantum event: its initial size, immeasurably smaller than an atom, exists in a probability state, a cosmic wave function, which the physicist Richard Feynman called the sum-over-histories.
The Tree of Death grows toward the light.
Every possible configuration of the particles that will condense out of the original energy of the big bang exists in the sum-over-histories, and each configuration is a worldline - sort of like the numerous branches we see here in the grove of snake trees reaching for the light of the sun. (BTW, the crest on the crater wall we see beyond the trees is Pu’u Mai - the clitoral hood of Kohelepelepe! I believe She’s excited to see us.)
The flash of death is not our departure from spacetime but our arrival. From there, we undecompose and radiate through the sum-over-histories toward the singularity at the big bang. There’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Along the way is an immense but less than infinite number of pathways, all the possible histories of any given life and of all possible lives. Light combs out through them.
The transmigration of consciousness drifts not into the ‘future’ but the ‘past.’ Past lives, then, are histories we presently choose by the observations and determinations (actions) we make. So, if you’ve always felt you’ve lived before as Cleopatra - maybe that’s where you’re headed. If there is a Cleopatra in ‘the past,’ you may be the one destined to create her. And among the sum-over-histories, there may be many of you who will exist as one of the extensive numbers of ‘Cleopatras’ extant in the manifold configurations of our universe.
The light-within branches through the body like a tree.
All the atoms of the human body take on mass (and inertia) from the Higgs Field - from emptiness. The body is the world. And the terrible darkness of the world trembles inside the body, pumping blood, darkness to darkness. At once impersonal and intimate, the world is a journey of forgetting.
When asked to remember, we dream. Dreaming is the light in the body, in the dread darkness of the world. Dreaming illuminates the impossible, which is the road of astonishments up and out of this world. At the crest of the snakewalk in imaginary time, we dream -and our dreams are our observations, which collapse the wave-function to the trough of the snakewalk: one worldline among the sum-over-histories.
When we are dreamers, when we are light snaking among the waves-without-medium of imaginary time, the force of awareness selects the worldlines we will live. Our dreaming shines from the moment of death all the way to our fetal enchantment in the undivided life of the womb, retracing the events we experience as we collapse through life into the singularity of the gamete - a trillion cells imploding to one, one molecule of DNA, splitting into egg and sperm and releasing our light and our life to imaginary time.
In the dark long after, things happen as if they were not recalled.
Our dreaming, our light in the darkness of the body, begins to unknow us from the moment we enter spacetime. Dreams branch through fractal dimensions, opening memory to the impossible, remembering another way of looking. Yet, among the blind powers of the world, events transpire in our waking life like creatures of their own imagination.
The doors of perception stay shut unless we push them open. Each life is a concentric awareness. At the center is our light, the force of whose consciousness decides everything in imaginary time. Surrounding our light is the world, a body of darkness where things happen as if they were not recalled.
That’s it. We’re out of here! One glance back at where we’ve been, the grove of cemetery trees and the mystery of death at the entrance to the earthly imprint of the Goddess’ vagina:
In the death of things, there are no empty gestures. Crossing through that grove, you faced four truths supported not by dogma or intuition but empirical facts. For over a hundred years, we have known that time is an illusion; yet, still, most people live and make critical decisions as if they are on an exodus to some promised future.
In the grove of cemetery trees, you went back in through your eyes to the engendering light within. You let go of the medieval mentality that time passes, and you gained the empowerment of being that was vouchsafed you the moment you died.
In any given moment, light coincides with dreaming. We are dreaming the world. The world is not dreaming us, no matter what anyone tells you about nurture and nature. The journey of forgetting stops in any given moment.
In is the direction. Into the body and the dark powers of the world. Into your dreams – and something deeper.
In the dark long after, things happen as if they were not recalled.
Those two passages probably mean nothing to you. Each of these four sentences is an agent of intelligence who dwells among the resemblances. What are these resemblances who confront you as you first enter the Inner Lips of the Vagina? See, they look like trees.
They are, in fact, plumeria trees – the cemetery tree of the Hawaiians. And they grow here directly around the bend that leads to the crater. You can see the dirt path we followed from the end of the asphalt road. These gnarly trees guard the entry to the earthly imprint of the Goddess’ vagina. You can’t enter the interior without passing them.Each year, the cemetery tree drops all its blossoms and leaves and appears to die. I’ll post another photograph of this grove later in the season when the trees are in full bloom. For now, though, the resemblances peek out from behind their disguise as plumeria. Look at them closely. They are earthly stand-ins for a cosmic reality that has become known to science only in recent times.
One’s first thought might be that their appearance is fractal (a description also known as self-similarity: fractals are fractions: a geometric pattern that repeats at endlessly smaller scales, fractals describe the structure of trees, river systems, bronchial tubes, arteries, brains, seacoasts, clouds, galaxies) – but the deeper understanding is that these trees are an appearance. Physics (in the famous double-slit experiment) demonstrates that the force of awareness affects the outcome of events. Seeing these trees entangles you with them.
With the next breath, the mystery of death begins.
You have seen the cemetery trees. Now, look closer.
Do you see how the branches resemble snakes? These are trees of snakes - lots and lots of snakes. The snake is our guide, the radiance of the snakewalk, darkness cleft by light’s amplitudes and curves, wavelengths of the photon. Remember, waves of light move through space without any medium, unlike the waves we know in the ordinary world (crests and troughs of water or air or violin strings). Over a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein developed a mathematical description of light that requires no medium. He never did clarify how a wave can exist without a medium. Even so, physics accepts this explanation, because the mathematics provides highly accurate predictions of the observable world.So what are we seeing here in these cemetery trees? What is this presence that fills the very entry to the earthly imprint of the Goddess’ vagina? Each tree resembles a mating ball of snakes! Do you see it? See it. This moment of seeing, this pivot between perception (tree) and recognition (mating ball of snakes) is the most extraordinary moment.
What is the mind doing when we swivel from perception to recognition? This is not an ordinary exchange. Rational people, whose minds are nothing more than parking lots for memes, dismiss this exchange as ‘simply’ imaginary. There is nothing simple about imagination. It is dreaming us. Its secrets, its unspoken meanings, compass the very nature of darkness in which we, elected by chance, dressed in distance, and obscure to our own minds, exist as light. This light of human being we call consciousness.
Each snake is a wave of light in the void. Each of these trees is a mating ball of snakes, making every tree here a sun. And this cluster of suns, of tangled light, resembles a grove of plumeria trees. You begin to glimpse the many things. The spermatic power of these mating balls at the opening of the vagina is light entering darkness, penetrating the uterine presence of the Goddess, the motherworld of continuous creation, the Higgs Field that generates the physical world.
Once we see this, the first agent of intelligence comes forward and whispers: Death is a tree. It comes out of the ground of being and reaches into the void.
Somewhere in the future, you are already dead. The moment that we believe is the last moment is, actually, the first. This is so, because time does not exist as we think it does. Being-in-time seems an elusive and ineluctable flow of instants from past to future. This is an illusion. Our nervous systems (our perceptual apparatus: the sensorium) has evolved to interpret energy patterns causally. This way of perceiving reality is useful only in a strictly limited way, which facilitates the survival and reproduction of the organism.
Out of the grove of snakes, a new intelligence opens: time exists precisely like space. The future is already there. At the place where you die, you enter existence – and what you currently believe to be the past is a set of fake memories and counterfeit documents. This is not a conjecture. It is a consequence of physics. Look into retrocausation. Read about Ludwig Boltzmann. And Arthur Eddington’s concept of the thermodynamic arrow.
That arrow flies along the trajectory of the second law of thermodynamics, from lesser to greater entropy. It poses the biggest question in physics now: Why is entropy so low in the past? Entropy is the quantitative measure of energy spontaneously dispersing or spreading out and calculates how much energy has flowed from a constricted state to one more widely diffused. The most constricted state, the lowest entropy, is the big bang itself. Entropy near the big bang remains very low. And why that is the case presents to physics a stupendous cosmic mystery – with devastating consequences.
To appreciate that mystery, research the findings of WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe). 1,000,000 years after the big bang, the arrangement of matter remains astonishingly smooth. Such a regular distribution of matter is extremely unstable, given the attractive force of gravity, and generates a highly dynamic supply of potential energy. Why doesn’t that hot matter clump up? Why doesn’t it tangle tightly into black holes? Why instead does it create a colossal source of low entropy, on which the apparent direction of the Thermodynamic Arrow depends? (Roger Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind estimates the probability of such a smooth arrangement of matter at 10−10e123!)
The odds against such an even distribution of matter directly after the biggest explosion in the history of the universe is so inconceivably huge that many strange things are far more probable – including the very strange likelihood that ‘the future’ already exists and is deciding what will occur in ‘the past.’ Among those decisions is your undecomposition at the moment of death and subsequent emanation through spacetime toward the lowest entropy.
Three things to remember: light propagates without a medium - you are light (consciousness) that made specific observations at the moment prior to your undecomposition - and observations of final states determine different histories of the universe. Right now, in fact, your current observations are determining which history, among a vast number of possible histories, will happen as your ‘past.’ (Perhaps at this point you begin to grasp why the stonemovers warned you not to enter this place of sorcery!)
Why should we entertain the obviously absurd idea that ‘the future’ determines ‘the past?’ Recall from your studies of the thermodynamic arrow that, according to Boltzmann, probability increases exponentially with entropy. It follows that the objective direction of time does not exist, because the probability of producing the world we see around us is far less likely to have emerged out of the exponentially lower entropy of ‘the past’ and far more likely to come from the reverse of the normal temporal perspective.
Facing the truly colossal odds of the lowest entropy that WMAP reveals at the earliest history of the universe, other theorists have suggested scenarios as strange as what I’m proposing and - like snakewalking ‘backward’ in time - far more likely than the early state of our cosmos: all the particles that constitute the Sun and the planets could have spontaneously flown together in one instant to create our solar system exactly as we see it today and that event would be far more likely than the low entropy in proximity to the big bang. Also more likely than a big bang producing a super-smooth distribution of matter is the probability that your brain assembled spontaneously and you and you alone exist, experiencing everything as a virtual reality.
The Prince of Darkness, Dr. Realitätsprinzip, steps forward and refutes the snakewalk by asserting that the low entropy at the beginning of time simply (the good doctor much admires that word: ‘tis a gift to be simple) - simply indicates that there is something as yet not understood missing from our cosmological model.
Thank you, Doctor. The Prince of Darkness is right, of course. There is and always will be something missing from our rational understanding of the universe, because the universe exceeds our ability to grasp it rationally. (Check out Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Ludwig Wittgenstein.) But the snakewalk is not a rational walk in the park. The snakewalk is divine intercourse.
Part of our foreplay here in the grove of cemetery trees before we enter the Body of the Goddess is to set our sorrow down. Bereavement, the most immemorial leaching of our human spirit, disappears when we look closely at the physics of reality. Where are you when you are in ‘the future’ a moment ‘after’ you die? You are disembodied consciousness, light propagating without a medium in what Stephen Hawking calls imaginary time.
That means that when you are not in spacetime, physically embodied, you are moving in a direction of time perpendicular to the thermodynamic arrow. Examine the relationship of imaginary time to the wave-function of the universe (as described by Hawking and Hartle), and you’ll see that, unlike the thermodynamic arrow, imaginary time has no beginning or end, no apparent preferred direction.
The crest of the snakewalk occupies imaginary time and the trough exists in the physical world. The snakewalk oscillates from our far more probable ‘future’ to our far less probable ‘past’ until we arrive (after many oscillations, many incarnations) at the singularity of the big bang. In fact, the Hawking-Hartle quantum cosmology of imaginary time postulates that ‘the past,’ in particular the phase transition from imaginary time to the big bang and the start of the thermodynamic arrow of conventional time, is controlled from the far ‘future’ in a self-consistent loop.
So, we are snakewalking backward - until we reach our mother’s wombs and then launching again into imaginary time to another death that initiates another life…
Our ultimate destination is the big bang, itself a quantum event: its initial size, immeasurably smaller than an atom, exists in a probability state, a cosmic wave function, which the physicist Richard Feynman called the sum-over-histories.
The Tree of Death grows toward the light.
Every possible configuration of the particles that will condense out of the original energy of the big bang exists in the sum-over-histories, and each configuration is a worldline - sort of like the numerous branches we see here in the grove of snake trees reaching for the light of the sun. (BTW, the crest on the crater wall we see beyond the trees is Pu’u Mai - the clitoral hood of Kohelepelepe! I believe She’s excited to see us.)The flash of death is not our departure from spacetime but our arrival. From there, we undecompose and radiate through the sum-over-histories toward the singularity at the big bang. There’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Along the way is an immense but less than infinite number of pathways, all the possible histories of any given life and of all possible lives. Light combs out through them.
The transmigration of consciousness drifts not into the ‘future’ but the ‘past.’ Past lives, then, are histories we presently choose by the observations and determinations (actions) we make. So, if you’ve always felt you’ve lived before as Cleopatra - maybe that’s where you’re headed. If there is a Cleopatra in ‘the past,’ you may be the one destined to create her. And among the sum-over-histories, there may be many of you who will exist as one of the extensive numbers of ‘Cleopatras’ extant in the manifold configurations of our universe.
The light-within branches through the body like a tree.
All the atoms of the human body take on mass (and inertia) from the Higgs Field - from emptiness. The body is the world. And the terrible darkness of the world trembles inside the body, pumping blood, darkness to darkness. At once impersonal and intimate, the world is a journey of forgetting.
When asked to remember, we dream. Dreaming is the light in the body, in the dread darkness of the world. Dreaming illuminates the impossible, which is the road of astonishments up and out of this world. At the crest of the snakewalk in imaginary time, we dream -and our dreams are our observations, which collapse the wave-function to the trough of the snakewalk: one worldline among the sum-over-histories.
When we are dreamers, when we are light snaking among the waves-without-medium of imaginary time, the force of awareness selects the worldlines we will live. Our dreaming shines from the moment of death all the way to our fetal enchantment in the undivided life of the womb, retracing the events we experience as we collapse through life into the singularity of the gamete - a trillion cells imploding to one, one molecule of DNA, splitting into egg and sperm and releasing our light and our life to imaginary time.
In the dark long after, things happen as if they were not recalled.
Our dreaming, our light in the darkness of the body, begins to unknow us from the moment we enter spacetime. Dreams branch through fractal dimensions, opening memory to the impossible, remembering another way of looking. Yet, among the blind powers of the world, events transpire in our waking life like creatures of their own imagination.
The doors of perception stay shut unless we push them open. Each life is a concentric awareness. At the center is our light, the force of whose consciousness decides everything in imaginary time. Surrounding our light is the world, a body of darkness where things happen as if they were not recalled.
That’s it. We’re out of here! One glance back at where we’ve been, the grove of cemetery trees and the mystery of death at the entrance to the earthly imprint of the Goddess’ vagina:
In the death of things, there are no empty gestures. Crossing through that grove, you faced four truths supported not by dogma or intuition but empirical facts. For over a hundred years, we have known that time is an illusion; yet, still, most people live and make critical decisions as if they are on an exodus to some promised future.In the grove of cemetery trees, you went back in through your eyes to the engendering light within. You let go of the medieval mentality that time passes, and you gained the empowerment of being that was vouchsafed you the moment you died.
In any given moment, light coincides with dreaming. We are dreaming the world. The world is not dreaming us, no matter what anyone tells you about nurture and nature. The journey of forgetting stops in any given moment.
In is the direction. Into the body and the dark powers of the world. Into your dreams – and something deeper.
posted by A. A. Attanasio at
18:43
26 Comments
