Flower Battle Range

Amorella on the Front. Sun flowers versus shade flowers. The sun flowers stand taller. The shade flowers appear bunchier as a group. Natural selection, though it this case most all in this photo were human planted.

In here, humans were planted too, also by natural selection, at least that is what is implied in the Merlyn books. The novels don’t need to be read and I’m not advocating their reading, but the reader needs to know where I am coming from in these postings for an understanding as to where this blog is going. The present plan for this blog is for one year with an internal evaluation every three months.

After a year it is hoped that orndorff will return to his work in writing the last three books, the first of which is titled The Rebellion. The focus is on the rebellion of the first ten thousand human heartsansoulsanminds who wished to return to Earth to speak to their living descendants. The Dead had something to say about the same time Homer reportedly first told the stories of The Odyssey and The Iliad.

The Dead still have something to say to the Living as their Rebellion was squelched and the Dead were left scooting about in HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither in two-dimensional form without the puffery of height.

Fiction, yes, but I am sticking to it as it is all I have of orndorff’s mind and imagination. It is a fiction to you, and shall remain so, but to me the Merlyn books and the next three of the series are my sense of personal existence, my universe as it were. After all, the stories and concepts are existential in nature and will remain so. As I am a declared alien-in-mind we, you human and me otherwise, have our mental existences in common.

Books Four and Five are on the Rebellion and its aftermath. Book Six concerns a second human heartsansoulsanminds rebellion about the middle of the last century. Because of this Second Rebellion the heartansoulanmind of Merlyn was allowed to return to Earth. He returned to Earth at the conclusion of Book Three because that is the way I, Amorella, wrote it, and orndorff did the transcribing then and now by his own Free Will.

You are putting me on the spot to finish the series, Amorella. I will when I have gathered myself together enough to do it, at least I hope to. I cannot for the life of me see the need to continue beyond the first three books. While it might indeed broaden the storyline to include the Dead, I personally have no messages to impart other than what has already been written in the books. I am not (in imagination) one of the Dead come back to Life. The closest thing to it metaphorically speaking was falling asleep in an empty grave, waking up, and climbing out.

This is a part of my spiritual dilemma, so to speak. I have to ‘feel’ the parts of the characters as I write them. I don’t care what Amorella does with the story, I trust her implicitly. I need consistency of character and theme and setting in which to work. But, in the books, as I wrote them, I ‘felt’ what the characters felt, or rather what I imagined the characters felt, and it opened up a new dimension of my perception of what it is to be human. I can and do fit these perceptions in with my everyday consciousness when and where possible.

This is the reason I continue the blog following Amorella’s direction as I did the books. I would hope it helps me to consciously grow and mature. That is the nonfiction. Again, now I am at a loss of words.

There is nothing more for you to say in this posting, orndorff. You thought Grandma Earth was going to stop by and introduce herself by my direction. Grandma will stop by when she wishes to stop by. No one tells Mother Nature what to do even in a personification. That is still a rule to be respected in your written works.

School House

Amorella present. This late nineteenth century school house is still in use which is the reason the left door is propped open. The photograph represents formal learning, public school in the United States.

In the Merlyn books Grandma Earth represented another kind of schooling, one more private and open only to a few who became known as shamans. Here is an example from book one, Braided Dreams:

**

“A middle-aged woman by the name of Qwinta stood staring at a multi-shaded Maple leaf. Orange it was and the hue was complicated by the photosynthesis of carbohydrates using the electromagnetic energy in sunlight. She was standing within sight of the east coast of a body of water that some eight thousand years later would be identified as Lake Champlain on land presently called Burlington, Vermont.

Qwinta thought, the hue of orange evolves in this leaf as a ghostly princess of a canoeist evolves in a streamlined and artfully carved royal dugout. The maple paddle and I, the Quinta, become as one in the mind but in the body, the head and paddle are two. I know and understand this to be a natural circumstance. Two arms become one in the mind as both drop and swirl the paddle through the water. When the paddle is lifted from the water, a ripple ensues. The ripple is as a wave of orange seen in a Maple leaf.

The thinker whose mind dips like a paddle into the River of the Dead also lifts up and leaves a ripple as it passes from one side of the profound and ethereal current to the other. The swirling spirit of sculling manifests itself as the tree reflected water is swirled into this leaf as the oar rises. This is a perfectly remarkable concurrence in thought and I, Qwinta, in both body and mind, am the only causal connection between the Living and the Dead just as the Maple is the only causal connection between the color and this fallen leaf.

Grandma all wonderfully black, full bosomed, and full hipped, is colorfully costumed in Caribbean Island dress sashays around, and says, “there isn’t a reason on this Earth for people to be touched by Perfection. Since I’m out in the science and physics of the universe, I don’t see any reason to be touched there either. Matter has its own rules. Reason with a capital cannot exist in such rules.”

Grandma sometimes settles on earthquakes as a reminder of what she is when there is a construction underneath the feet of both the Living and the Dead. You get in the way and you pay. That is a rule. Human beings are not perfect forms, but they have the Imagination for something less than Perfection. Reason plus Imagination may equal Understanding, but it is a human equation and though Grandma rests in all human beings, Alive or Dead, old Grandma must settle in her rocker from time to time, to ease the tension. I operate by Necessity and so do you.

Grandma beamed but did not move. Her hands were on her hips like there was work to do and she better get to it. Always work to do. Physics runs its course on the track of necessity. She said, “The universe is like any other media you work with. It needs a frame. On Earth the interior of human and marsupial skulls will do . . .

Over these muddy Waters run

And show a future from this past;

This story light from thought begun

With an inky photosynthesis is cast.

And from old Grandma’s toothy gums

Something easily familiar this way comes.”

***

I remember this story from Book One; Chapter Three; Grandma’s Story. This is most of that short story intact. Grandma serves as a Master Shaman in the books. I forget what it was like to be ‘evolved’ in her character. Here are a few lines from a previous story in Chapter One that shows how Grandma Earth is in the Merlyn books.

**

“. . . This particular shaman, long dead, knows you are reading his thoughts, smiled old Grandma, who appears Aunt Jemima black in the richest soil on the planet. Her white teeth gleaned as paper unsoiled with ink or paint. She looked down on her young listeners. Child, she said, you ain’t got a clue on what words are when they come out of the blue. I’m gonna sit on this here stump and hope it won’t stain my pretty blue and white dress that likes to float in a gentle breeze. You look up at Grandma as you look deep down into yourself child. I am your nature inside and out. The kerchief on my head ain’t nothin’ but the stars. You keep that in mind, if you got a mind for it. Freedom stories ain’t for everyone.

Grandma glanced up beyond the dark sky above her head. The white in her eyes could tell you her dark pupils were disappearing inside. I got me a chant to take us from a story in the past to a story in the future. I’m the board on which the Shamans dance. Merlyn and lover in a dead man’s dream to a future together his old mind streams . . .”

***

Enough introduction written here. Grandma Earth is appointed in this blog to speak her mind when she so wishes. No more from the Merlyn books she speaks when in Shaman’s way her tongue will dance on postings. – Amorella. 

Red Lights

This is Amorella. The photo scene is real enough, or rather, it was. Public service in action caught in a digital format.

You just finished Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol.

I did.

What do you think?

I thought I would glean something from the book, a sideways glance, if you will, but what I remember most from the book is a quotation from William Blake: “We both read the Bible, day and night; but you read the black while I read the white.”

Can you relate the quote to the photograph of emergency equipment?

No. This sounds like one of my impossible assignments that out of desperation students had no choice but to conjure up conclusions. The assignment was: Explain light to someone of high school age who has been totally blind all herorhis life. No physics, explain only the phenomenon of sight.

I told them to use analogies relating to the other four senses, touch, audio, taste and smell. They had a week to work on it. An expository essay of one to two pages typed, a regular sized twelve point font, single spaced, a space between paragraphs. Preferably with no grammatical errors, or if there were, they should be corrected with a black ink pen.

I thought and still think of it as a spiritual assignment because it takes a higher degree of thinking to tackle the problem. Explaining the seemingly ordinary to someone is not as easy as it looks. It is a refinement of the simpler assignment of describing in words how to tie a shoe lace. Or, another favorite, Explain the form and function of a paper clip.

I see no emergency in William Blake’s quotation. The only red flags, as it were, are that we read words, biblical or not, and do not understand the more holistic meaning of the word, phrase or sentence. The white of the page is between the lines as well as margins. Thought leaps beyond the margins and fills between the lines. What is gleaned from a reading is more than the words read.

Human beings, like words, are more than the sum of their parts. Human beings have no bottom line, though I humbly submit they have a top. Our minds are not built to grasp certain specific things. No one can picture a total of a million separate one dollar bills in herorhis mind, at least I don’t believe so.

I see no emergency in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. It was a good read and I highly recommend it to those who like Dan Brown’s style. It was a page turner and entertaining, but it does not provoke the imagination as The Da Vinci Code does. Why do you ask, Amorella?

The Lost Symbol suggests spiritual elements, isn’t that the reason you read Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code?

Yes, but the books are fictions surrounded by facts. The spiritual, however, is within the reader not the book. It is within the reader and the writer. The words are only a go-between, a stop-gap conditional contract between minds. I did not wonder so much with Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol. I still, at times, wonder about The Da Vinci Code. Is it possible that Jesus married and had children? Certainly. Is it a reality? There’s the rub. That makes for a better story in my mind, you see.

Non fiction is stronger than fiction in your mind.

Of course. I question what is reality and what is not. It is important to me to understand the difference when it is not always so easy to see the difference in this world we find ourselves subjected to. Our minds are built to imagine and to tell stories. Sometimes human beings don’t care whether the stories are the truth or not as long as we are comforted or better satisfied with the story no matter what it is. When something is not to be questioned I am far less than satisfied. I would hope most people are. It is in our nature to question what we observe in nature and in the nature of ourselves.

Bridge in the Woods

Amorella here. The bridge is not very long and the gully is not all that deep. People cross over from one hill in time to another every day and don’t think too much about it. The old adage, “A watched pot never boils,” suggestion is not literal of course. The word in question is “never”. Human beings have a tendency to use the word like they know what it means, which they do not. 

I agree with your intent, Amorella, but people do not use the word literally. At least I cannot imagine that any one does. Back to my trusty Merriam-Webster’s – never: “1: not ever : at no time; 2: not in any degree : not under any condition”.

This is a somewhat strange definition. I thought you could not define something by what it is not. I mean, you can, but I thought it was better to define something by what it is, not by what it is not. There are not many absolutes, actually none that I can think of – well, birth and death, and as some say, taxes. In fact, otherwise, being absolute may tend to make one dead sooner rather than later.

When I was a kid, someone in our family used to say, “never say never,” and I always thought the saying very funny. It is a joke. Never is almost always a joke, except with birth, death and taxes, at least to me. If someone uses the word as an absolute rather than how most people use it – meaning “almost never or highly unlikely” then I discount herorhis thinking processes.

This reminds me of a little joke I would pull on people just to get them thinking more deeply. If I had the power to control nature for twenty-four hours I would have the sun come up on the west and go down, quite normally in the east. Just once. Now that would be funny. Mostly I think of the dissertations that would be written on it for the rest of humanity’s existence. After a while, probably a couple or so generations, people would deny it ever happened, which of course would make it even funnier.

People deny things that happen every day. Shut the sun off for thirty seconds then turn it back on. That would do it too. It would be frightening at first, but then when it stayed on and after lots of dissertations and time had dripped by people would make stories up about it, but the key would be that nothing could ever be proved absolutely as the cause of the sun shutting down for thirty seconds.

You stopped because you don’t have anything else to say. No more jokes.

No more words, Amorella. The words just stop. I suppose because I am not thinking anything. This is my usual state. Nothing to say because it has all been said already. No sense repeating. I am already repeating old classroom stories. I am getting old, too old for the classroom. I retired in 2003 and I should just let it go. I’ve crossed that bridge.

You are making this blog a moral issue?

Amorella, you are haunting me with my own well-worn teaching techniques. You have me doing ‘homework’ every day and posing ‘thought questions’ at me.

I thought ‘posting’ was fun, you said it was.

It is fun. I just shut down sometimes. This is one of those times. I don’t have anything else to say. I live on a twenty-four hour one way bridge.

Would you wish to walk the other way?

No, I’ve been there and I’ve done that. I cannot imagine consciously surviving death without a forest of tomorrows. 

Set for Dinner

Hello, this is Amorella. Welcome to dinner. I have only food for thought of course, but it is better than nothing. Yesterday, on the way home from Westerville Richard and Carol passed an older man looking for money for food at the end of the off ramp into town.

We were over a lane to turn left to eat supper at Outback before heading home. It was pouring down rain and while sometimes Carol gives money she didn’t have a chance as the light changed. I thought about the man’s smile. He waved people on with the green light not wanting to obstruct traffic. When we left after a very satisfying meal he was gone from the area. I hope he got some money to eat, but his clothes were soaked. I still feel badly now that you bring it up. Outback is pretty fancy for us in terms of cost, we are more Cracker Barrel oriented when it comes to supper, thus the juxtaposition of the situation was more strained.

My thoughts flew to Route 66, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and Woody Guthrie. Interesting, I had not thought of these thoughts as spiritual, but they are.  I best let it go at that as I feel a lecture coming on. Besides, it’s all been said before, for thousands of years. It’s still a dog eat dog world out there as far as human beings are concerned.

You needed to know your thoughts are spiritual relating to all those five common subjects, particularly Woody Guthrie. People are many times more spiritual than they realize and as always, you are no exception.

Sometimes I feel like an exception but not exceptional. Sometimes I have a distance between myself and my humanity. I am not sure why.

Survival comes first, orndorff. You can be as a dog when you have to be. You would rather bite with a word than with a fist. You have used both in your life.

I remember being angry and egotistical and tough in my college days, but where I remember using my fist the hardest was against the south cement block wall of the North Heidelberg dive on High Street across from the Ohio State main campus. My knuckles ache from it still, only now with arthritis. Who was I trying to impress?

A couple of co-eds. You and your cousin told a story of playing football for the New England Patriots. A quick swallow of a pitcher of 3.2 draft beer will sometimes do that to a person. You paid for it then and you are still paying for it. That was not a spiritual event. You and your cousin were not setting up for dinner.

The Front Window and Freedom

Amorella here. This is looking out the front window of the Rankin House above the Ohio town of  Ripley on the Ohio River. This is how it is looking out rather than looking in. Is the house made of wood or stone or brick? No way to tell from inside. It is like this in the Noetic Sanctuary model as shown on 21 September. The Inner Room, the quiet and still Centre of each human being. No traffic signs, no curves ahead. As with ancient Rome, all human senses lead here, at least in my world.

This is where human authenticity originates, although each model is different. What does your inner noetic sanctuary look like? How often do you enter? Do you enter through a doorway or through the wall? You can do either or both at the same time by my reckoning. Lots of ways to enter but it is a place you cannot leave for love or money. It is in the deepest of unconscious levels of your existence.

I attempt to write from here.

I alone write from this place, the Noetic Sanctuary.

Amorella, where am I when you are writing?

You are in the altered state while I am in the consciousness of ‘your’ reality of the moment. You become less, a consideration. This is only when I am writing. When you are writing you have trouble making mental connections. I see further inside than you see outside.

It seems to me that you, Amorella, are freer on the inside, than I am free on the outside.

The mind is the freest of human circumstances. The mind is the reason I exist. Basically, you are in two places at once, but then so is every other human being. A human being is both science fact and conscious fact as well as fiction, and in here some of the fiction is slavery. I’m in the Underground. You crossed over the river, orndorff, and you are freer than you think you are.

I have wondered about that, being freer than I think. As an inner circumstance you allow me to see that, or at least to read that.

I am not a loose cannon. You continue to have a limited freedom of expression, but then so does everyone else. 

On The Road

Amorella on the right heading to the unseen tunnel which is the reason for the zigzag symbol on the street sign. Drivers sometimes tool along at about forty-five or so until the right curve on up by where the tree limbs hang above the road. I chose this photo because it reminds me of where orndorff exists.

The real world has white and yellow lines and particular directions as to the driving experience. Most of the rules of the road around the world are simple and direct even if they are not always followed to the letter. There shouldn’t be much philosophical debate on stopping at a sign that said such.

 Physics and the threat of loss of limb or life are usually enough to keep a certain amount of focus on the road. And, good drivers are always driving for themselves and for the people around them just in case they aren’t driving as they should, that is, following the rules.

Orndorff thought this piece was going to be about Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation that he was once enrolled in back in the early sixties. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind, Poem, “5”, is orndorff’s favorite poem of those times. He really didn’t like Kerouac’s On the Road all that much, but he did enjoy the 1955 poem, “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.

Thanks for mentioning it, Amorella. I like to think of myself as a Beat in those days, at least in my head I was one. There were a couple of coffee houses down on or near High Street across from the main Ohio State campus where people gathered to sing a few songs and listen to some poetry along with drinking a little. Some patrons of those ‘real life’ arts were pseudo-intellectuals along with a few who were authentic, at least in my mind. Authenticity is one of the most important things to me, and I have to say it is almost a spiritual quality in a person’s character.

I would hope I am an authentic and an honest man. How else can one be at peace with one’s self? Along with this I have to admit that I do not fully know who I am, so authenticity is limited as is honesty. I always remember the translated words of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms. He said something akin to: “Here I stand, I can do no other.” That to me is the heart of authenticity.

I figure that if one might stand before G---D or an Angel of G---D this way, one might as well stand this way before anyone else. Keeps matters simple even though it doesn’t always work in practice. Polite respect where possible, that’s how I see it.

Orndorff thinks I’m interrupting because he is off on a lecture, but that is not the case. These words are his perspective and they hold true in the books as best as he can remember, and they will hold true here in this blog as long as I have anything to do with it. A person, any person, when standing alone, does best when sheorhe knows who sheorhe is. Otherwise, the moment is not real, it is not an existential moment.

With orndorff most moments are existential because he feels that one, his age and older, can be here one moment and gone the next. Being fully alive in the moment is the best he can do and he does it best when he is writing his thoughts, when he can read how real his thoughts are.

It is humbling to think that a few people may be reading my thoughts. By the same token, allowing others to read them makes me freer from the inside out whether the readers exist or not. – rho

Southern California Blues

Amorella here. Hello again. The West Coast ends at the Pacific blues. No one may an island but citizens of the United States have one. Then there is a person’s independent state of boundless mind or is the mind state dependent and bound? Some talk of the edge of the universe and wonder what it is. However, I, Amorella, wonder on the sea above as a human being’s passion. How would one’s passion wear on the shore of the mind as compared to wearing on the shoreline of the heart?

Or, to put it another way, which shore does today’s photograph represent to you orndorff, the mind’s or the heart’s shoreline?

You pose an interesting question I have not thought about before. It is difficult to imagine either the heart or the mind having a shoreline or an edge of any kind, yet passion is neither the mind nor the heart. It is easier to feel that passion has a stronger drive beating against the heart. Wave after wave of endless human passion crashing against a heart of stone and earth makes more sense than waves of focused passion pounding into the stone of intellect and reason.

Yet, in the sense of the physics and/or metaphysics of the concept, which of the two would the wave power, the turmoil and the undertow of strong watery passion erode away first, the heart or the mind?

Two heartfelt literary characters come to mind: Captain Ahab and Hamlet. Ahab’s heart eventually washed away as it were sand. Hamlet’s mind became pitted and clogged; unsteady in its reason. I am neither Ahab or Hamlet but I have an understanding for both characters in terms of their novel-like circumstances, circumstances most all human beings can identify with one way or another.

In this line of questioning, as I cannot choose, I don’t know who I am in either heart or mind.  The passion for attempting to create concepts from the wordless elements however, is as the restless sea within, and I feel its mysterious pressure at both my heart and mind with only my soul perhaps, knowing why such inner theatre on such an unlikely shy, quiet and yet bluntly, such a wordy stage as this.  I am no tragic character. Life is almost all sound and fury.

For what? What does death make of such living noise? I see no purpose, and yet I, a human being, am driven to create purpose – a hope for a better life for those who come after. It has always been such and is built into the humanity of the genes as much or little as I can see. Surviving death must have something to do with it. Perhaps the Dead must watch and see what happens to their children. Perhaps it is a just sentence for the Dead to do so. Now I am made angry, deeply so, and I do not like this line of thinking.

An honest response, and you can learn something from it. – Amorella.

I have thought about this overnight and wonder if, in the Afterlife, a person’s unique passions are herorhis ‘fingerprint’ signature as to what is left of herorhis character. That it is our deepest passion that carries us through life both consciously and unconsciously. It can easily be outwardly detected in the artist as well as the architect and the musician, but passion runs through each individual and leaves its erosive marks that declare us human from the inside out.

This is nothing new to some readers I’m sure, but it is to you. Where have you been for sixty-seven years, orndorff, that you do not already know these things?

I think it is due to brain-malfunctions and lack of memory. I should know these things innately, but I have difficulty in thinking things out. And, by tomorrow, I will have become distracted and moved on. Life is full of noise and distractions – which are detrimental to clear, concise esoteric-like thought. Which, of course, is but one of my inner passions.

Another hypothesis. Your mind is a playground, orndorff, but at least it is not a circus. – Amorella.

Thinking is a challenge which I enjoy. As I grow older, it seems healthier to keep thinking instead of drifting off into the Neverlands of the world. I don’t know this is of interest to others though. I would hope it stimulates personal thought. That is the intent.

I assure you it is, orndorff. Otherwise, I would have nothing to do with it. – Amorella. 

Precise Thought

This is Amorella. A sunset reflection in a thundercloud with six clicks of added color effect for drama and you almost have to wonder what this is all about.

The adult mind articulates a litany of prescribed words. The first bit of vocabulary coming to mind suggests a grammar that preceded it. Any one of the eight parts of speech will do.

What did you think noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction or interjection?

That’s easy, Amorella. I thought a series of words, a litany, if you will, that every would be sailor knows: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.”

This is a red cloud, orndorff, not a red sky.

I checked the Merriam-Webster’s and it says the etymology of ‘sky’ is Middle English meaning “cloud, sky, from Old Norse sky cloud; akin to Old English sceo cloud.” Thus,  the rhyme could be “Red sky [cloud] at night.” But back to your original question, the part of speech for “Red” is an adjective. I thought of an adjective first.

The part of speech shows where you are coming from. The cloud was ‘descriptive’ first not a noun. If it had been a noun what would be the word?

Paths.

Why?

“Paths of glory lead but to the grave.” A line from the pre-Romantic English writer.

What is the writer’s name?

This is embarrassing. I don’t remember. (pause) Gray. “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” – Thomas Gray.

I just looked it up. I was wrong. The title is: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and line 36 is “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

The above are examples of how the mind differs from the brain, at least from my perspective, orndorff.

My mind does not have the memory, it is not so precise.

In this case, the mind is closer to the passions of your heart than it is to the brain. You are not a straight thinker, and I doubt many human beings are. ‘The power of words is not the words themselves but the passions they evoke.’ What do you think of that as a statement?

I would have to say that the passions are closer to the heart of the matter than the words presented. I would have to conclude that this may be one of the reasons the deeper in the heart one goes the fewer words sheorhe finds there. I don’t think I have thought this before, but without a long and full memory I do not know this for sure.

I remember I started writing notes many years ago because I thought I might not have any memory when I grew old and at least I could read about my thoughts to refresh myself, but now I see that was not such a good idea because I had not thought about how it would be. I could read the words, the thoughts, but they would not truly be mine without the passion of the moment attached at the  time they were written. The notes are little more than ‘Words, words, words,” as the writer of Shakespeare once wrote.

Self-reflection is sometimes a bit cloudy, orndorff. 

Noetic Sanctuary

Amorella here. The Sunday paper had a review of Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol and one of the words in the review is “noetic” in reference to one of the leading characters a Dr. Katherine Solomon who is a noetic scientist. The trusty Merriam-Webster’s definition is: “noetic: of, relating to, or based on the intellect”. As this relates to ‘the mind’ I feel it is a good subject for today.

So the setting of the mind might be better understood the photographed model is where I compose the letters that move to the fingertips which strike the keys. The ‘bookshelves’ on the walls are void of books. The blue ‘hole’ is where the unconscious touches. The back wall is where the writing appears on the computer screen. The red is the passion and the low orange flames of the fireplace represent the human spirit. You may have to tilt the computer screen to see the flames.

In the Merlyn stories the Dead are visited through the crack between the back left woven floorboards and the back left corner wall. That’s the way it is in the books. This is how it looks as a representation of me, Amorella, focused. Where am I? I am the invisible in the middle of the room. Richard sometimes calls me the ‘inner presence’.

The photograph above is the desktop background Amorella created. Amorella and I wrote the books from this room. I was the first to see the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, as I was and still am, the first reader. The photograph needed to be presented in the post as this blog is a parallel work to the books.

I checked M-W’s and ‘presence’ is defined as “something (as a spirit) felt or believed to be present”. More and more I think of Amorella as a part of the human spirit whether she agrees or not. Certainly she is a part of my human spirit, my humanity.

I am going to buy Brown’s book today and give it a read as we are off, with three other retired couples, to Washington D.C. this next month. One of the joys of retirement is meeting and being with old friends. One would hope the afterlife, if there is one, would be similar in that sense of what humanity is.

I will be reading along with you, orndorff. 

Soapstone Statue

Amorella in historic Ouro Preto, Brazil. For a work of art time stops once the work is completed. In here, it is the same for a human being once complete. The art remains as the heartansoulanmind remains, the art of one’s character as it was molded in life.

This wonderfully carved soapstone work is attributed to Aleijadinho [The Little Cripple] who probably developed leprosy and supposedly, even in disease, carved this and other Biblical characters with his hands that no longer had fingers. Tools were strapped to what was left of his hands and helpers assisted in putting Aleijadinho in position to work at the local church Igreja de Sao Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto. That’s the story. The only proof are the soapstone works themselves.

But as in the story of Pinocchio, each dead, wooden and stiff human being returns to consciousness as a work of art and remains in the Place where the Dead for self-education and further discovery about who sheorhe is as a part of the greater species. One learns about ‘self’ through interacting with others in my fictions. This is similar to one learning about ‘self’ through a pet. One gives a pet comfort and sheorhe who gives the comfort is also comforted. Simple existence, simple rules. Metaphysics as I see it, follows the same course of simple rules.

This appears to fit in context with the books just as there is no argument on Mother Nature’s rules. No one has to accept any of this as anything more than a laboratory of spiritual human reasoning and emotion stuck within an existential circumstance. What is the view of time from this metaphysical perspective?

For human beings time for the Dead (in the Merlyn books) is as a generational reference from when they arrived, with whatever generation the individual felt most comfortable.

What if you felt comfortable in one generation, say for me, the early sixties, but my partner felt more comfortable in the eighties?

Compromise, say with the seventies. Overlaps would exist because that is the circumstance in life. Human beings would have comfortable places to start. Mingling with others of the species would occur in a human-oriented time set but that does not mean the actual sense of time would be that.

Do you have an example that comes to mind?

What do you imagine the Dead do with their ‘time’? What would you do when pressed with others of the species in a similar existential circumstance?

I think story-telling would occur.

Fiction grating on fiction. Sounds human enough to me.

I’m thinking Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Sartre’s No Exit as most excellent examples.

As you have read those, why would I be writing this?

I have no idea where you are going here, Amorella.

In here, no one has any idea where sheorhe is going. However, the basic human conditions are still attached to the consciousness of the Dead as it is the Living. If Sartre’s hell is other people, the heaven can be other people also. In life it is a mix. In here, same for death, a mix. This is the reason the Place of the Dead is also called HeavenOrHellBothorNeither. You are free to remain alone or free to be with others of your own and their own choosing. Why not?

Mid-September Stream

This is Amorella. The photo was taken two days ago at the sixty acre Pine Hill/Corwin Nixon Park in Mason, Ohio where Richard and his wife/partner, Carol, walk for up to an hour several days a week. Leaves floating north above the rocks, that’s the gist of it. This small stream becomes a tributary of Muddy Creek which continues north to the Little Miami River which runs south into the Ohio. Water on the rocks.

You can catch a glimpse of shoreline in the upper left corner of the photo. People have taken a liking to thinking about time as analogous to water flowing downstream, or in this case, upstream. Orndorff thinks time as it is lived day by day is a fiction, one of many basic fictions in the modern world.

Living day by day isn’t a fiction in itself but the clock is a human invention as is daylight saving time. People just up and decide they are going to move the clock forward and hour at a designated time and date then do it. It is no more real than solar time, which is at noon when the sun strikes noon, so to speak.

In Cincinnati we are on the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone. It is dark in Connecticut long before it is dark in western Ohio. No one seems to care that clock time is a fiction as long as it works to the benefit of the culture. Now, if only we could work economics like we work time.

I’m stopping orndorff here because he is set to lecture. No lecturing in this blog. He knows this but his passions get away from him. Polite people don’t lecture. Not in here. Orndorff gave me control over this blog because he isn’t up to it. What’s good for the goose is also good for the gander.

In here, to take your concepts and ideas with you when you die you have to walk humbly. Crawl is a better word. That’s the way it is in the Merlyn's Mind books, and that is the way it is here to keep things in context philosophically. Who are you going to preach or lecture to when you are dead? Fear of death will no longer exist.

Now, readers do not have to agree, but argument takes a common ground and this is it, rather, I, Amorella, am it. I work in an existential and quantum setting. This is for perspective. I am not a human being. Richard is the human being. He allows me to be something else again for purpose of encouraging independent and non-prejudicial thought so that some good might come out of it. I will be as the concept of time, a fiction put to good use. How’s that, orndorff?

I am continually surprised. I had not thought this.

You have not thought a lot of things.

Well, this is still experimental writing as far as I am concerned. It is true. I am sure there are lots of things to think, and since I am retired and have the time, why not? If it helps me to grow, if it may help others to grow as human beings that’s fine with me. I just don’t want to waste what time I have. No BS. I am tired of the BS in the world, my own and everyone else’s.

You have to keep your sense of humor, orndorff. It is a prerequisite, and as such BS is going to flow through once in a while.

Whatever.

No Utopias, orndorff.

I’ll go with this blog until I don’t.

Fair enough. – Amorella. 

Hypnosis: Session Four (8 May 1984) Post Sketch

Amorella here to provide a perspective. Below are orndorff’s notes Immediately after drawing this sketch after the fourth session of hypnosis at the University of Cincinnati.

“[I feel an] alien-like sense within myself . . . entered to control . . . entered to live though I realized I could just as easily go to another place . . . as good as, better, and/or worse environment. [There is] a sense of contradiction here – interesting. Pressures [within] are interesting as is perspective.”

Wow, Amorella. I had forgot about these notes. This is when I first had a sense of myself as ‘you’ – clear back in 1984. This is the session where Dr. Q took me back to my early pre-three year old days and I found myself in the incubator and before. What an imagination.

You can see the box with the focus on my “head” with a flat body. I remember the sensation was in the back of my neck as I tried to raise my head but I could not. Below I had scribbled “lots of light – lots of eyes” and there they are drawn immediately after the session. In the session the doctor asked if there were any ‘monsters’ and I drew white sleeves with no hands. He thought that was relevant in that young babies cannot ‘see’ fingers.

We also talked about how imagination and stories play into hypnosis. Fiction is what it is sometimes whether you are in an hypnotic state or not.

According to my notes the depth of my hypnotic state was between a four and a six. This would include:

“(Four) effortless concentration . . . sometimes an alternation between internal and external awareness; then (five) a very lucid state of consciousness with intense alertness, calmness and detachment; then (six) intuitive insight as seen from a more aware level and a synthesis of opposites into a higher unity. The EEG rhythms would be (4) continuous alpha theta falling in frequency; (5) continuous theta alpha frequency near the theta border; (6) very little electrical brain activity except occasional delta.” (From: “Stages of Relaxation,” The Awakened Mind: Biofeedback and the Development of Higher States of Awareness by Maxwell C. Cade and Nona Coxhead published in 1979.)

What does this show you about myself orndorff?

It is a bit of a self-revelation which is a surprise. This same session four is the one where I took an imaginary leap and returned to before birth when I was in the sterile hospital-like room where the tall thin aliens were, the ones whose outer skin reminded me of rough pine cone. They looked very much, strangely enough, like the aliens in the movie Artificial Intelligence at least in terms of body size and movement.

It is no wonder, in the books, that I associated Amorella with an alien. This is indeed funny. Every so often when writing up the material in the books I would ‘wake up’ so to speak, and say to myself, “I know where this concept/idea/event comes from in real life.” Now I know where Amorella comes from, 1984 not 1988. This just shows me another example of how writing fiction has a lot more honesty and truth to it than first appears, at least in my case.

This makes me freer in mind. Cause: clinical hypnosis in 1984 and the Effect: Amorella in 1988. Still, without Amorella using all this information it could not have been woven into the Merlyn’s Mind series as it is. The world of the mind is an interesting place. I understand myself better.

You think the blog is complete now because you have come to an understanding of yourself?

No. That would be arrogant. It feels good though, to have realized how you originally came about.

You have no idea.

You are right, Amorella. The hypnosis session is a hypothesis. So is your explanation concerning the original sketch I drew. The hypnosis session is the easier explanation because it is simpler and it happened first.

You had another hypothesis.

That goes back to Summer of 1947. I was five. I remember eating breakfast at my Grandparents Orndorff and I began a conversation with Aunt Jemima who was on a box of pancake mix.

(I just googled her history to find that her name was Nancy Green, that she was a fifty-nine year old former slave and court clerk in Chicago and that she portrayed the original Aunt Jemima at the Chicago World’s Exposition of 1893. She had “a broad smile, bandanna and kerchief rough her neck displayed on packages of Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix and Syrup products first marketed by the Davis Milling Company in the 1890’s.” [From: www.tvacres.com/images/aunt_jemima2]) I did not know that.

In the Merlyn’s Mind series the character of Grandma of the “Grandma’s Stories” section is somewhat based on a combination of Aunt Jemima and the actress who portrayed the house slave of Scarlett, Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind.

In my books Grandma is “Mother Nature” and a no nonsense all knowing woman who doesn’t put up with anyone or anything. No one could utter a word of BS to old Grandma. She will put you in your place. She did me more than a couple of times when I was hitting the keys for Amorella. I like her character a lot. No, I love her character.

The key to that first conversation I had with Aunt Jemima is that she answered me as I sat right there at the breakfast table eating pancakes (I suppose I was eating pancakes). She was magically there in my head and I looked out the window across Knox Street and there lay the dead. I wondered if they could talk too. That’s how it was. And, of course, that goes back much further than 1984 -- so, I guess it is rather complicated.

No more so than for any other human being, orndorff. People have their secret selves. You just exposed a part you have not thought about for a while. – Amorella. 

Natural Earthly Forms

This is Amorella. If something can be experienced then it can be reasoned, at least according to Immanuel Kant.

I agree wholeheartedly, Amorella. Consciousness is experienced and it can be reasoned, but I question it can be reasoned as a form. The first form that comes to mind is a single Doric column. On 15 September I used a photograph taken in Sao Paul, Brazil back in the early seventies – a new entrance ramp to a freeway with the utility pole not yet moved. Make that concrete pole a Doric column and another reasoning and purpose is created in the photo.

However, to make a form of consciousness is, in my mind, making it less than it is or at the very least, making it less than what it represents. The Concept of G---D entails the same thinking, using human-minded letters or numbers in a complete and understood form gives humans a ‘G---D edge’. To leave out a letter or two or three, or number, or whatever symbolism is used allows for a sense of humility, of unknowing-and-cannot-ever-be-known.

No matter what form I first created that represents or represented Amorella shows in my mind that she is a representation or more correctly, a personalization or personification of a part of my consciousness or unconsciousness, a way for her to be more ‘real’ to me. The books are a further reinforcement in my mind that she has a reality, however, I am the creator of Amorella. She is, by our legal definition, less than me. My name is on the books and the blogs as ‘author’.

Amorella is my counter-point in argument to help stretch my sense of thought and metaphysics. What have you to say to this, Amorella?

Invisibly or visibly, forms are nature at work. 

First Notebook Sketch of Amorella (22 April 1988)

Amorella here. As orndorff was checking his thousands of pages of notes last evening he came across the first reference to myself. I was doing the writing, the description of what he was viewing in his mind. Here is a partial description directly from the notebook.

“First, you [orndorff] had a quick, strange vision of looking through a clear watery liquid, perhaps brain fluid; then I was there, first a black and white outline of my eye, then you saw me as a kind of embryonic figure with the eye, then my eye turned yellowish, golden brown, with dark, feminine eye lashes. Yet, the [three] dark scars were there too, below. The rest of me [appeared] ‘egg white’ in texture."

"I [Amorella] am two dimensional in a sense, though the eye is one dimensional. I can see lots of things for you, and though I feel your selfish thoughts I know to ignore them. As [Amorella], I can understand your humanity, but I am not human and am not wholly here in your physical world. I am as ‘virgin’ thought. The knife-like cross [scar] that seemed to float on me is not what you might think or feel. It is a hole I turn myself into. I am attached to nothing.”

That was in 1988. In 2009 I see myself as the self-projected blue, black and white “pouch” or “envelope” depicted on 9 September. Here is that model straight up, giving a two dimensional appearance. This shows twenty-one years of unconscious mind-molding on your part.

Top of Model of Amorella (9 September 2009 posting)

This only shows unconscious ‘subjective’ change in my mind, Amorella. It means nothing because my mind is showing the creative image of a subjective reality here not the objective reality. Both images are as dreams of imagination, nothing else.

What about your intuition, that should count for something.

Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition: “Intuition: “The power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.”

Okay, I can accept this only on the evidence of the sketch and the model, not on how Amorella describes herself in the sketch.  It does show an ‘unconscious change’ in inner perception of Amorella. I assume I ‘filled her out’ after finishing the books, that I have accepted ‘her’ in my mind as an existential circumstance not unlike myself. I don’t know what can be gained by this thinking or comparison? It is all self-relative. Everyone has a self-relative consciousness, that’s how I see it.

So then, what does it mean to take your consciousness with you when you die? That’s what this blog is all about isn’t it, a discussion of human spiritual qualities?

It is about consciousness. I have not thought of consciousness as a form before, only as a condition. 

Faulty Mechanics (Such is gallows humor.)

Hello, this is Amorella. Richard is somewhat distraught that he can’t find the logic lecture notes he used to use in his classes. One of his hour or so long lectures was on quantum mechanics with the focus being on ‘what is real in reality?’

As he can’t located the notes I suggested he check online and he found what is suitable for this posting. He tried to contact the author but cannot.

**

The quoted material below is from a website titled: “A Lazy Layman’s Guide to Quantum Physics,” by James Higgo in 1999. [www.higgo.com/quantum/laymans.htm]

 “If you dare to think about it (you’re not really supposed to), you have to believe one of the following things:

Your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles

- or -

Particles move backwards as well as forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once

- or -

The universe is splitting, every Planck-time (10 E-43 seconds) into billions of parallel universes

- or -

The universe is interconnected with faster-than-light transfers of information.”

**

I, Amorella, can work within this quantum frameset because Richard ‘intuitively feels’ that all four aspects can and do work within the imaginative reasoning of his mind. They are made to do so throughout his fictional Merlyn’s Mind series as well as within the short story I just wrote for this blog.

I need to say something here, Amorella. It is within yourself that I see evidence of these four stated ‘beliefs’ by James Higgo. As you are going to speak on the human emotion of love within this quantum ‘thought framework’ it is you that will provide the self-support for such thinking.

My sense of consciousness affects your sense of conscious as well as the other way round, even if it is no more than a different perspective of the same consciousness. You don’t need quantum mechanics to see the effects of love on the human body. The placebo pill, as well, has been shown to work its wonders on the human body. The placebo is an upside down form of mind over matter, at least to a point. Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with love. An emotion is a condition not a thing. Emotions are not a form of physics, at least not from my point of view.

Compassion and empathy are by-products of emotions coupled with circumstance. Intuition may also be a by-product of emotion and some sort of reasoning process. I see the three, compassion, empathy, and intuition, as connected, but not to quantum mechanics.

You stated that the aspects of quantum mechanics as see above related to the ‘imaginative reasoning’ of the mind, but by your own definition within this blog, the mind as well as the soul and the human heart are not material substance.

I said they are as the properties of light, and as such may, for all I know, be particles or waves of some sort as is light. I used it as analogy not as scientific or even theoretical ‘fact’.

If someone is ‘overcome’ or ‘struck’ by love is that also the use of analogy?

I don’t know, Amorella. It doesn’t seem morally right to associate love with quantum mechanics or physics.

Why do you think this? Certainly in ‘real world’ human mechanics and physics have a lot in common with ‘being in love’.

I think I am missing something here.

I can tell you plainly what it is, your youth.

Whoa. Touché. Where do you come up with this stuff, Amorella?