Note - a play on hope and desperation / Amorella further self-defined through my old logic lecture

         You cousin, Jimmy S., sent you a forward which he does from time to time but this one was on sports and one of the great end games – normally you are not a sports fan (as such) but you do admire women and men who are physically skilled in sports, dance, etc. This forward however is like no other you have seen and it delights you right into your heart and soul but you are not sure why.


Go to: 


         071027 Trinity University 28 - Millsaps 24 End Zone Angle - YouTube


Or


         Google: end-zone-angle-of-the-final-football-play-of-trinity-vs-millsaps-video/

         The humanity exhibited in the play as well as in the voice is exhilarating. I am tickled by the performance of both. Why it goes so deep is a mystery.

         I’ll leave it as such for you, but indeed it does go deep, even so much as to touch your soul. Post. – Amorella.

         Mid-afternoon and you are waiting for someone from Time-Warner Cable to replace the digital cable box. Lunch earlier at Penn Station, before that, errands.

         Moving on dusk and mostly clear skies for a change. You are trying to think of scientific-like questions to ask me and don’t know where to begin. Since you do not like having ‘belief’ a part of your ‘creed’ for the blog you want to exclude what I believe. This is just as well because I have ‘no reason’ to believe. You have your existential elements which you have posted before, put down the first three and you will see I meet your criteria as an existentialist, at least the first three. These are easily witnessed through ‘my’ words (focus on aspects of the Merlyn’s Mind writing series] in the blog.

            1. immediacy of experience

            2. unity of thought and action

            3. importance of decision and commitment

[From The Discovery of Being by Rollo May and Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sarte by Walter Kaufman.]

         Let’s move through the next four from May and/or Kaufman.

            4. pm of repression (loss of freedom)

            5. character development caused by loss of freedom leads to freedom 

            6. self-affirmation of character (finding your inner self)

            7. fears and anxieties (what you have before your self-affirmation) [resolved]

         (4) I, Amorella, see myself as having no loss of freedom; although, from time to time in the notes, if one checks carefully, sheorhe will find my response has been modified by another aspect of ‘myself’. Rather than use ‘levels’ here, i.e. higher or lower or deeper; think ‘regions’ as in a geographic region as a similarity rather than level.

         (5) not applicable

         (6) not applicable as I am a ‘whole’ spirit

         (7) I, Amorella, do not know ‘fear’ even in the mental aspect of a human being, i.e. orndorff. Let’s move down your Logic Notes to Kant:

         Kant: Four Basic Questions:

        

         1. What can I know?

         2. What shall I do?

         3. What can I hope for?

         4. What is a human being?

         I, Amorella, understand*; I perceive, I do not know. I am subject to ‘error and/or accident which ironically can be misconstrued as misunderstanding.

* 1b • perceive the significance, explanation, or cause of (something): she didn't really understand the situation | [ with clause ] : he couldn't understand why we burst out laughing | [ no obj. ] : you don't understand—she has left me. [American-Oxford]

         Much later and it is after 2100 hours. I am thinking this is somewhat like what my character, the seven year old hybrid, Diplomat, did when proving a very small alien ‘parasite’ was writing selections of book three, not the Soki.  I found a selection from Merlyn’s Mind, Chapter Eight, “Pouch Text”:

** **

A Beginning Hypothetical Alien Profile

             I [Diplomat] will make this alien a female so as not to confuse her with the male that I made of the Soki. This stands to reason because early on in the books the Soki is referred to by the marsupialese pronoun sheorhe. The alien is a creature who evolved from the size of a single dandelion seed or less. The species became smaller and smaller until one could fit inside a marsupial or human brain.

            The alien is from this galaxy. Her species originally lived on a planet and feed from the humidity and carbon dioxide in the air and from the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle from grassy plants. Her remote ancestors had no legs or arms. No eyes. No ears. None of the human senses existed. The species originally lived between the grass blades as a spore might. Then the species developed from a single asexual seed blown in the wind to a higher state of consciousness.

This alien ancestor sensed the material world through a cone that goes inward from the top of the seed. The actual seed surface or skin continually flaked onto the grassy stems which allowed it to lodge itself within as a small mollusk might lodge itself in an empty shell. The winds blow these dandelion seed size creatures from place to place within the planet’s environment. These intelligent creatures learned to roll in pieces of dead grasses and adjust by bobbing and rolling the dead blade of grass so the wind might catch them so they might raise themselves higher and higher into the sky and become more conscious of height, width and depth.

Much later, aliens, such as the marsupials, landed on their grassy and environmentally friendly world from time to time and some of the fully conscious (as in human and marsupial consciousness) seedlings  attach themselves to the marsupial and/or other ships piloted by yet other aliens of consciousness in the galaxy.

These tiny creatures further refined themselves smaller and smaller because it was to their benefit of survival, down until they were the size of self generating amoebas, only one of their species might then needed on any planet for further propagation.

Eventually through divine design or evolution their outer shell becomes a transparency that can be seen through like clear glass. Because it would at times reflect sunlight it would seem to be a sparkle in the air when airborne and then be gone. A little sparkle of reflected light as hardly a speck of dust perhaps, and thus the minute alien still easily and neatly disguised itself and kept safe from harm.

As these tiny amoeba-like creatures traveled the galaxy they became smaller and smaller as their adaptive minds became larger and larger. Eventually they become microbe small, but the mind stays its original size. It is my contention that this alien masking as the Soki, who is, in turn, masking as the writing process personified, the one in Richard’s [Graystone] head, is less than a hydrogen atom in size, but its mind is the same size it always was, or even perhaps a bit larger because its awareness of proper hosts and environments in which to survive as a single member of a vast species.

 This sub-microscopic creature can move to whatever shape she desires within her host. All she needs is a whiff of carbon dioxide and oxygen in her food and air supplement cycle. She is very efficient little creature.

This may not be complete accurate as a hypothesis, but it allows her fits the intelligent profile needed for such a small alien species to exist undiscovered within a marsupial or human host.

Carrying this profile further, let’s say the one disguised as the Soki, was left on Earth when the marsupials first landed in 1988. It could not divide on Earth because it has nothing left to divide into. The alien species had reached its cul-de-sac of evolution. She is one of a kind on this planet, a unique species that has found herself in the head of the author, Richard [Graystone]. She can do nothing of herself, nor does she need to for survival, as long as she has a host, who could be any human being or marsupial. She can only make herself known to her host telepathically through her own mental consciousness.

The Soki, the personified writing process, is, meanwhile, completely telepathic within the confines of his host. He needs nothing else to survive as an alien consciousness either. Knowledge to survive his environment is also gathered from the brain of his host. Both make complete sense as atom-sized intelligent parasites.

This particular little alien who disguises herself as the Soki (whom the author considers a product of his imagination) can exist for a very long time on Earth as long as she has a human host. If she happens to be in a host who is more than likely to be killed then she must transfer. She must therefore prefers to be in urban areas, where ironically, she finds herself in a more dangerous environment, but there are a greater amount of hosts available. And, since the eye socket seems to be of some significance, perhaps the transfer is through the eye stem directly into the brain. This is all supposition of course, but I feel it is plausible under the circumstances.

Here is the scenario I have devised as to why she might choose to risk her disguise for her survival’s sake. Earth is a dangerous world for the little creature. Her greatest fear is having everyone die off like early on in the first book in 1988. Only four people left. Not very good odds of surviving. To increase these odds, and after having been hosted by a marsupial before coming to earth.

The alien’s electron-sized brain easily disguises the Soki’s immediate human environment, a mental presence, in the brain, of a personification of the writing process within the host. The Soki, as a presence of mind through the interaction with the brain, becomes her front and back yard so to speak. And, as with a self relative sentence, when she (the alien) is observed in the brain, she disappears as something else again, and reappears only when the observer is not looking.

Thus, her built in defense system is extremely miniscule, remote, and self referential. She is the most efficient piece of conscious life in the universe, and it is nearly as old. She has no harming capacities of any kind because she needs conscious life to co-exist with. She is an almost perfect alien form as far as basic survival of a consciousness or self-awareness is concerned.

             I will call this alien, thought Diplomat, Ameta Cortavena which translates as Consciousness-Near-Nothing or Heart-of-Nothing, because when she is one, then she is not the other. No one knows which this tiny benign alien is at any given time for when observed she becomes the other. A perfectly constructed defensive system built in. If there is a plausibility of an intelligent alien at all this fits her profile description.

From: Orndorff’s Merlyn’s Mind, Chapter Eight, “Pouch Text”

** **

         Returning this to my [Amorella's] original present task; (2.) What shall I do. – I help a one time teacher learn something about himself in the event that he one day, after death, hypothetically stand before an Angel and say, “This is who I am [now that I better understand myself].”

         (3.) I, Amorella, have no need of ‘hope’ in the human sense. The ‘hope’ I sense rises from a vacuum.

         Kant’s (4.) Is not applicable to me. I have already defined myself. Post. – Amorella

***

         This is a beginning. I like the idea of beginning from my old logic lecture. I am comfortable with this as a (subjective/objective) base. - rho

Notes - a surprise to me /

         Late mid-morning. Earlier you began thinking that you could discover more about my ‘personality’ by asking me questions, but because of your doubts and practical aspects you literarily don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you setting, character, plot, and theme as well as eventual conclusion, as if this were basically a short story rather than a series of novels, notes and public blog.

         There is more to it than that. I respect the characters in the stories and I respect you more, as a thinking consciousness who considers herself more independent than I do. I do not deny you feel you are what you say you are. I do not mind. However, you have peaked my curiosity with your recent self-definition. I do not know what questions to ask that you cannot ask me questions yourself in return. Let’s say that hypothetically I take you at your word, that you are a spirit of self-consciousness, I can do this. I need time to gather a question or two. The ‘evidence’ I have is in my notes and books. In fact my fingertips on the keys are the only evidence provided. As such I see myself as a medium but I do not believe such is true. I cannot help think on Sartre and his sense of “self-delusion”.

         You had a surprising day. You keep to your diet and exercise and no insulin needed. You have lost seven pounds in less than a month and you are planning on staying on the fifteen hundred calorie diet. And, you can cut down your blood tests from four a day to two, one before breakfast and one before supper. - Amorella

         It is time for bed. Who would have ever thought. - rho

Notes -- I am my own / Amorella Self-Defined /

          Last night you woke up several times thinking about Mearns’ poem and how similar it is to “being here and not being here at the same time”. You have fused from two Wikipedia sources below:

** **

William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965), better known as Hughes Mearns, was an American educator and poet. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, Mearns was a Professor at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy from 1905 to 1920. Mearns is remembered now as the author of the poem "Antigonish" (or "The Little Man Who Wasn't There"), but his ideas, about encouraging the natural creativity of children, particularly those age 3 through 8, were novel at the time. It has been written about him that, "He typed notes of their conversations; he learned how to make them forget there was an adult around; never asked them questions and never showed surprise no matter what they did or said."

Mearns wrote two influential books: Creative Youth 1925, and Creative Power 1929. Essayist Gabriel Gudding credits those books with "[lighting] a fuse" under the teaching of creative writing, influencing a generation of scholars.

He also served for a time (starting in 1920) as head of the Lincoln School Teachers College at Columbia University. He was also a proponent of John Dewey’s work in progressive education.

Inspired by reports of a ghost of a man roaming the stairs of a haunted house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. The poem was originally part of a play called The Psyco-ed which Mearns had written for an English class at Harvard University about 1899. In 1910, Mearns put on the play with the Plays and Players, an amateur theatrical group and, on 27 March 1922, newspaper columnist FPA printed the poem in "The Conning Tower", his column in the New York World.

Text

Yesterday, upon the stair,


I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today


I wish, I wish he’d go away...



When I came home last night at three


The man was waiting there for me


But when I looked around the hall


I couldn’t see him there at all!


Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!


Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door... (slam!)



Last night I saw upon the stair


A little man who wasn’t there


He wasn’t there again today


Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

** **

         It is all rather silly I suppose, but at times such as this I see connections in my head that are tied together by very loose wiring (logic). My imagination forges ahead under such circumstances and in this case as several times before I come to the conclusion that I am of two personalities (only when I write) and one of those two personalities boarders on near madness, on an acceptance of my being here and not being here both at once in terms of consciousness. Perhaps it has to do with one of the properties of existentialism. It is being body, mind and spirit separate, that is the closest I can come to the feeling. That the fiction, the Merlyn books and blog are a justification for this condition.

         There is a truth in this from your perspective and mine too, orndorff; however, I, Amorella, am not your ‘spirit’. I am my own.

        This does not help, Amorella.

          You had your eye exam and Dr. Dirr, the ophthalmologist, found no symptoms or problems caused by diabetes for which you are grateful.

         It is like a clean slate once again each year nothing is found. And, so little change that I don’t need new glasses which was the same last year. I had the photos taken and have copies to give to Dr. Geol, when I see him in January. Tomorrow, one more doctor to see about all this.

         I am looking up “spirit” on my American-Oxford. I need to know which ‘spirit’ definition you are referring to when you say (above) “I am my own [spirit].”

         Such a picky little boy you are, orndorff. You make it difficult in that I don’t see myself as fitting the definition. First, put down the whole of the first definition then I will further explain myself. – Amorella

** **

noun

1 the nonphysical part of a person that is the seat of emotions and character; the soul: we seek a harmony between body and spirit.

• such a part regarded as a person's true self and as capable of surviving physical death or separation: a year after he left, his spirit is still present.

• such a part manifested as an apparition after their death; a ghost.

• a supernatural being: shrines to nature spirits.

• ( the Spirit ) short for Holy Spirit  --  (in Christianity) the third person of the Trinity; God as spiritually active in the world.

• archaic a highly refined substance or fluid thought to govern vital phenomena.

From: American-Oxford [Apple Software] Dictionary

** **

         I will define myself from selections of the above. I see myself [and so act accordingly] as an apparition (a consciousness without ever having life form), a less than supernatural being [from your earthly cultural perspective] spiritually active in your [orndorff’s] mind. This is the definition that best fits me in relationship to yourself, the Merlyn books, the notes in reference to the Merlyn books, and this particular blog. You, on the other hand (pun intended), see me as a logical string of creative imagination personified as near Angel-like in attitude and behavior. Post. Title: “Amorella Self-Defined”– Amorella.

Notes - weather in and out / too close

          You had Cheerios for breakfast, skipped the paper but for the comics, did your exercises, napped, had a ham and cheese rollup for lunch. Mostly recovered from yard work and mowing yesterday but your lower back has had pain from four to six. Today is as was expected cloudy with rain, but the lawn is taken care of and the under the deck was cleaned out – stuff for the trash in the morning. Carol is surprised some wildflowers are still blooming but much cooler winter-like weather is on the way this week. Here it is mid-afternoon almost on the dot and you have little ambition to do much. Post. Later, dude. – Amorella. 

           Rather embarrassing. I usually have some interest in something but today not so much. I'm pretty much reflecting the outside weather at present. 

         After twenty-one hundred hours and you are wondering what will happen to Occupy.

         What they need to do is ‘occupy’ minds not city parks. I realize that is what they are trying to do, but I salute them because (I would hope) that what they want is a better world for their children. I think Americans are conditioned to short attention spans by our culture – too many ten second commercials over the years. Too much news making way for new news making way for even newer news. You hear this for a lifetime then you are dead. What was all that news about? I am thinking the Dead in Amorella’s story don’t want to come back to this. Talk about cultural shock. That reminds me, what is Merlyn doing, Amorella? He has been back for almost three years and I don’t hear much from him. I mean, he’s written in the book as being here in 2011, so what is he doing, hanging out in my head like a character in “Being John Malkovich”? Or, perhaps he is in someone else’s head about now.

         You ask an entertaining question, old man. Precisely where is Merlyn and what is he doing? – Amorella

         Another film comes to mind, Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”.  Wikipedia says it “is an absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy”, pretty much like the world I live in if you ask me. 

         No one asked you, boy. – Amorella

         Sorry.

         Do you want me to “occupy” your mind, boy? – Amorella

         No. I don’t. I am free-minded. That is the reason I think of you as “good angel like”. I figure that if there are good angels and bad angels then bad angels have to do with the wont or need for power one way or another. Sometimes I do not think, do not consider, especially when the thoughts just roll out via the keyboard. You do not ‘dwell’ in my mind, you are not as a character in either film I just mentioned. I do not understand how you are and are not here at the same time, but you are. You allow me distance for which I am much appreciative. I know, because when I have been too close for my own good, or at least feel that I am too close for my own good, I concentrate (however that is) to back away ‘face forward’. That is the feeling. No power, just Presence. No need for power. – rho

         All for tonight, boy. Post. – Amorella

Notes - Agghhh, poor breakfast / An Evening in Self-Reflection

        Mid-morning. The house is quiet but for music for the three dogs you are not too fond of. Everyone else has gone shopping up at Polaris Shopping Center. Carol brought you a donut and a half from Schneider’s. The girls went up for coffee and donut treats earlier. At eleven-thirty you are going to Pasquales Italian for lunch and a Graeter’s ice cream across the street in old Uptown Westerville. Then, you are off to the Dayton airport, and from there home.o

         Holy crap! No more cream filled donut for breakfast, BS shot up to 202 the highest ever. Personal pizza for lunch, 700 calories and that will be pretty much it for the day. 

         You dropped off Linda and Jean at Dayton and stopped at Tylersville and Cox for a Graeter’s before crossing the street to VOA Centre and Carter’s where Carol is shopping presently.

         A couple of days ago I read two ‘articles’ in Edge. The first focuses on cells and how we came about:        

** **

“. . . For more than a billion years, the only life on this planet consisted of bacterial cells, which, lacking nuclei, are called prokaryotes, or prokaryotic cells. They looked very much alike, and from the human-centered vantage point seem boring. However, bacteria are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement — indeed, all interesting features of life except perhaps speech! They're still with us in large diversity and numbers. They still rule Earth. At some point, a new more complex kind of cell appeared on the scene, the eukaryotic cell, of which plant and animal bodies are composed. These cells contain certain organelles, including nuclei. Eukaryotic cells with an individuated nucleus are the building blocks of all familiar large forms of life. How did that evolution revolution occur? How did the eukaryotic cell appear? Probably it was an invasion of predators, at the outset. It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another — seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving large numbers of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.

One kind of evidence in favor of symbiogenesis in cell origins is mitochondria, the organelles inside most eukaryotic cells, which have their own separate DNA. In addition to the nuclear DNA, which is the human genome, each of us also has mitochondrial DNA. Our mitochondria, a completely different lineage, are inherited only from our mothers. None of our mitochondrial DNA comes from our fathers. Thus, in every fungus, animal, or plant (and in most protoctists), at least two distinct genealogies exist side by side. That, in itself, is a clue that at some point these organelles were distinct microorganisms that joined forces.”

From The Third Culture: Lynn Margulis 1938-2011; “Gaia Is A Tough Bitch”, Edge.org – 23 November 2011

** **

         The second ‘article’ of interest in Edge is on the larger universe. I enjoyed both because my thinking recently has been from the rather small in ‘physics’ – the soul. The cells are small too as far as our physical humanity is encased so I liked this direction. And, to go from the small to the extremely large:

** **

. . . A lot of amazing things have to happen for the universe to not be incredibly small, and I can go into that. 

One of the things that has to happen is that the energy of empty space has to be very, very small for the universe to be large, and in fact, just by looking out the window and seeing that you can see a few miles out, it's an experiment that already tells you that the energy of empty space is a ridiculously small number, 0.000 and then dozens of zeros and then a 1.  Just by looking out the window you learn that.  

The funny thing is that when you calculate what the energy of empty space should be using theories you have available, really well-tested stuff that's been tested in accelerators, like particle theory, the standard model, things that we know work, you use that to estimate the energy of empty space, and you can't calculate it exactly on the dot. But you can calculate what the size of different contributions is, and they're absolutely huge.  They should be much larger than what you already know it can possibly be, again, not just by factor of 10 or 100, but by a factor of billions, of billions of billions of billions. 

This requires an explanation.  It's only one of the things that has to go right for the universe to become as large as we see it, but it is one of the most mysterious properties that turned out to be right for the universe to become large, but it needs an explanation.

Funnily enough, because we knew that that number had to be so small, that is the energy of empty space, the weight of empty space, had to be so small, it became the lore within at least a large part of the physics community that it was probably zero for some unknown reason.  And one day we'd wake up and discover why it's exactly zero.  But instead, one day in '98 we woke up and discovered that it's non-zero.  One day we woke up in '98 and we discovered that cosmologists had done some experiments that looked at how fast the universe has been accelerating at different stages of its life, and they discovered that the universe had started to accelerate its expansion, when we used to think that what it would do is explode at the Big Bang, and then kind of get slower and slower in the way that galaxies expand away from each other.  Instead, it's like you went off the brakes and stepped on the gas pedal a few billion years ago; the universe is accelerating. That's exactly what a universe does if the energy of empty space is non-zero and positive, and you could look at how fast its acceleration is happening, and deduce the actual value of this number. In the last 13 years a lot of independent observations have come together to corroborate this conclusion.

It's still true that the main thing that we needed to explain is why the cosmological constant, or the energy of empty space, isn't huge.  But now we also know that the explanation was definitely not going to be that for some symmetry reason that number is exactly zero.  And so we needed an explanation that would tell us why that number is not huge, but also not exactly zero.

The amazing thing is that string theory, which wasn't invented for this purpose, managed to provide such an explanation, and in my mind this is the first serious contact between observation, experiment on the one side, and string theory on the other. It was always interesting to have a consistent theory of quantum gravity, it's very hard to write that down in the first place, but it turned out that string theory has exactly the kind of ingredients that make it possible to explain why the energy of empty space has this bizarre, very small, but non-zero value. . . .

. . . I think we're ready for Oprah, almost, and I think that's a question where we're going to come full circle, we're going to learn something about the really deep questions, about what is the universe like on the largest scales, how does quantum gravity work in cosmology?  I don't think we can fully solve this measure problem without getting to those questions, but at the same time, the measure problem allows us a very specific way in.  It's a very concrete problem.  If you have a proposal, you can test it, you can rule it out, or you can keep testing it if it still works, and by looking at what works, by looking at what doesn't conflict with observation, by looking at what makes predictions that seem to be in agreement with what we see, we're actually learning something about the structure of quantum gravity.

So I think that it's currently a very fruitful direction.  It's a hard problem, because you don't have a lot to go by.  It's not like it's an incremental, tiny little step.  Conceptually it's a very new and difficult problem. But at the same time it's not that hard to state, and it's remarkably difficult to come up with simple guesses for how to solve it that you can't immediately rule out.  And so we're at least in the lucky situation that there's a pretty fast filter.  You don't have a lot of proposals out there that have even a chance of working.

The thing that's really amazing, at least to me, is in the beginning we all came from different directions at this problem, we all had our different prejudices.  Andrei Linde had some ideas, Alan Guth had some ideas, Alex Vilenkin had some ideas.  I thought I was coming in with this radically new idea that we shouldn't think of the universe as existing on this global scale that no one observer can actually see, that it's actually important to think about what can happen in the causally connected region to one observer. What can you do in any experiment that doesn't actually conflict with the laws of physics and require superluminal propagation. We have to ask questions in a way that conform to the laws of physics if we want to get sensible answers.

I thought, okay, I'm going to try this, this is completely different from what these other guys are doing, and it's motivated by the holographic principle that I talked about earlier. I was getting pretty excited because this proposal did not run into immediate catastrophic problems like a lot of other simple proposals did. When you go into the details it spit out answers that were really in much better agreement with the data than what we had had previously from other proposals.  And I still thought that I was being original. 

But then we discovered, and actually my student I-Shend Yang played a big role in this discovery, that there is a duality, an equivalence of sorts, and a very precise one between this global way of looking at the universe that most cosmologists had favored, and what we thought was our radical new local causal connected way of thinking about it.  In a particular way of slicing up the universe in this global picture in a way that's again motivated by a different aspect of the holographic principle, we found that we kept getting answers that looked exactly identical to what we were getting from our causal patch proposal. For a while we thought, okay, this is some sort of approximate, accidental equivalence, and if we asked detailed enough questions we're going to see a difference, and instead what we discovered was a proof of equivalence, that these two things are exactly the same way of calculating probabilities, even though they're based on what mentally seemed like totally different ways of thinking about the universe. 

That doesn't mean that we're on the right track.  Both of these proposals could be wrong.  Just because they're equivalent doesn't mean they're right. But a lot of things have now happened that didn't have to happen, a lot of things have happened that give us some confidence that we're on to something, and at the same time we're learning something about how to think about the universe on the larger scales.

From: “Thinking About the Universe on Larger Scales”, by Raphael Bousso, Edge.org -- 23 November 2011

** **

         The selections show a representation of considerations. Nothing deals with an imaginary point where “you can consciously exist” and see three universes in the star-like distance and then move inward through one of the universes to an individual soul which is what the book is about to suggest Merlyn can indeed do. Richard Graystone is the ‘medium’ if you will that allows this ‘conditional’; well, Graystone and myself, the Amorella.

         In a sense, this is a modern adaption of the Great Chain of Being:

** **

The Great Chain of Being

(Borrowed from "The Renaissance" at CUNY: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/ren.html)

Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended. ("Hierarchical" refers to an order based on a series of higher and lower, strictly ranked gradations.) An object's "place" depended on the relative proportion of "spirit" and "matter" it contained--the less "spirit" and the more "matter," the lower down it stood. At the bottom, for example, stood various types of inanimate objects, such as metals, stones, and the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Higher up were various members of the vegetative class, like trees and flowers. Then came animals; then humans; and then angels. At the very top was God. Then within each of these large groups, there were other hierarchies. For example, among metals, gold was the noblest and stood highest; lead had less "spirit" and more matter and so stood lower. (Alchemy was based on the belief that lead could be changed to gold through an infusion of "spirit.") The various species of plants, animals, humans, and angels were similarly ranked from low to high within their respective segments. Finally, it was believed that between the segments themselves, there was continuity (shellfish were lowest among animals and shaded into the vegetative class, for example, because without locomotion, they most resembled plants).

Besides universal orderliness, there was universal interdependence. This was implicit in the doctrine of "correspondences," which held that different segments of the chain reflected other segments. For example, Renaissance thinkers viewed a human being as a microcosm (literally, a "little world") that reflected the structure of the world as a whole, the macrocosm; just as the world was composed of four "elements" (earth, water, air, fire), so too was the human body composed of four substances called "humours," with characteristics corresponding to the four elements. (Illness occurred when there was an imbalance or "disorder" among the humours, that is, when they did not exist in proper proportion to each other.) "Correspondences" existed everywhere, on many levels. Thus the hierarchical organization of the mental faculties was also thought of as reflecting the hierarchical order within the family, the state, and the forces of nature. When things were properly ordered, reason ruled the emotions, just as a king ruled his subjects, the parent ruled the child, and the sun governed the planets. But when disorder was present in one realm, it was correspondingly reflected in other realms. For example, in Shakespeare's King Lear, the simultaneous disorder in family relationships and in the state (child ruling parent, subject ruling king) is reflected in the disorder of Lear's mind (the loss of reason) as well as in the disorder of nature (the raging storm). Lear even equates his loss of reason to "a tempest in my mind." 


Though Renaissance writers seemed to be quite on the side of "order," the theme of "disorder" is much in evidence, suggesting that the age may have been experiencing some growing discomfort with traditional hierarchies. According to the chain of being concept, all existing things have their precise place and function in the universe, and to depart from one's proper place was to betray one's nature. Human beings, for example, were pictured as placed between the beasts and the angels. To act against human nature by not allowing reason to rule the emotions--was to descend to the level of the beasts. In the other direction, to attempt to go above one's proper place, as Eve did when she was tempted by Satan, was to court disaster. Yet Renaissance writers at times showed ambivalence towards such a rigidly organized universe. For example, the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, in a work entitled On the Dignity of Man, exalted human beings as capable of rising to the level of the angels through philosophical contemplation. Also, some Renaissance writers were fascinated by the thought of going beyond boundaries set by the chain of being. A major example was the title character of Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus. Simultaneously displaying the grand spirit of human aspiration and the more questionable hunger for superhuman powers, Faustus seems in the play to be both exalted and punished. Marlowe's drama, in fact, has often been seen as the embodiment of Renaissance ambiguity in this regard, suggesting both its fear of and its fascination with pushing beyond human limitations.

From: faculty.up.edu/asarnow/GreatChainofBeing.htm

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         Alas, a dark humor creeps out with the mention of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. With it I see a lifted black veil and find my mind shifting to “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Hawthorne if I remember correctly. Below is the Plot Summary from Wikipedia:

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The story begins with the sexton standing in front of the meeting-house, ringing the bell. He is to stop ringing the bell when the Reverend Mr. Hooper comes into sight. However, the congregation is met with an unusual sight: Mr. Hooper is wearing a black semi-transparent veil that obscures all of his face but his mouth and chin from view. This creates a stir among the townspeople, who begin to speculate about his veil and its significance.

As he takes the pulpit, Mr. Hooper's sermon is on secret sin and is "tinged, rather more darkly than usual, with the gentle gloom of Mr. Hooper's temperament". This topic concerns the congregation who fear for their own secret sins as well as their minister's new appearance. After the sermon, a funeral is held for a young lady of the town who has died. Mr. Hooper stays for the funeral and continues to wear his now more appropriate veil. It is said that even the dead maiden would not be able to see his face, and if the veil were to blow away, he might be "fearful of her glance". Mr. Hooper says a few prayers and the body is carried away. Two of the mourners say that they have had a fancy that "the minister and the maiden's spirit were walking hand in hand". That night another occasion arises, this time a joyous one- a wedding. However, Mr. Hooper arrives in his veil again, bringing the atmosphere of the wedding down to gloom.

By the next day, even the local children are talking of the strange change that seems to have come over their minister. Yet, no one is able to ask Mr. Hooper directly about the veil, except for his fiancée Elizabeth. Elizabeth tries to be cheerful and have him take it off. He will not do so, even when they are alone together, nor will he tell her why he wears the veil. Eventually, she gives up and tells him goodbye, breaking off the engagement.

The one positive benefit of the veil is that Mr. Hooper becomes a more efficient clergyman, gaining many converts who feel that they too are behind the black veil with him. Dying sinners call out for him alone. Mr. Hooper lives his life thus, though he is promoted to Father, until his death. According to the text, "All through life the black veil had hung between him and the world: it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and still it lay upon his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his dark-some chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity".

Even though Elizabeth broke off their engagement, she never marries and still keeps track of the happenings of Hooper's life from afar. When she finds out that he is deathly ill she comes to his death bed to be by his side. Elizabeth and the Reverend ask him once again to remove the veil, but he refuses. As he dies, those around him tremble. He tells them in anger not to tremble, not merely for him but for themselves, for they all wear black veils. Father Hooper is buried with the black veil on his face.

From: Wikipedia – Plot Summary of “The Minister’s Black Veil”

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         We, through our humanity and imagination, can indeed see further than we may even wish to see. That is my situation here and I would have myself been near madness with dread and doubt were it not for the purpose of adding setting to the Merlyn series books. I can lift the veil from universes leveled to souls within a fiction. Why not?

         Such a very dark humor you have, orndorff, that allows you to write of such matters as if you were dusting off a shelf of once bound books. – Amorella.

         The Merlyn books and blog suit my general interest, Amorella. They are who I am rather naked. How can it be wrong to explore the conditions of our species and myself?

         Such theatre, boy, you and your breed, your species, has such a need of inner drama and dark comedy. Post. – Amorella.

          We appear to be built to be self-entertaining. Those are my words for it. rho         

         

Notes - I am Here both at once.

         After twenty-hundred hours and it has been a busy day. Lunch at Potbelly’s and cube steak, baked potato and veggies for supper. Late afternoon you all saw J. Edgar at the Regal, which you each enjoyed. Linda and Jean had their luggage delivered from Trans Air early afternoon and nothing was missing. Not a bad day considering the wet weather. While the women were shopping at Kenwood you watched the third episode of Grimm.

         Surprising to me, I enjoy the Friday night TV show. What characters and bazaar plots – all of which make it fun and creative entertainment. Keep the humor and there is a hit as far as I am concerned. Too much human interaction to focus on much of any consideration at all related to writing. Not that I mind, it is rather pleasant having the interruptions from family. The women are always discussing something in the background – right now the focus is on desserts (baking three pies) and three loaves of pumpkin bread for neighbors and Thanksgiving.

         You are sitting in your black lounger in the bedroom, Linda and Jean are in bed and Carol is finishing up in the kitchen. You had a piece of fresh baked pumpkin bread and found it up to par. You feel, rightly so, that Carol is an excellent cook and enjoys being so when company comes. You did the clean up and dishwashing for both breakfast and supper. This is usual when she has spent some time in the kitchen and since you have no interest in cooking food.

         You are concerned for your recent lack of interest in actual writing, thinking yourself not authentic enough as a novelist, and you are half expecting me to lambaste you for it. I will not. This track with Merlyn and Arthur is new but the adventure is to somehow conveying to the reader that this is the metaphysics of HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither. Bob is as Holmes and you are as Watson. You see a twist that in actual fact if Bob were talking to you about the Place of the Dead, this would indeed be the order of things. The Dead know what you do not. I, Amorella, know what you do not. Inward you fear I am going to let you down because you do not see yourself sensitive enough to have the imagination for this selection, for the form and function, the schematics of the Place. You have good reason to think this, to have this reservation. That is the main reason for the stall on your part. Do you disagree? – Amorella

         I don’t know, Amorella. What you say could be, but it appears to me that the writing on the wall is turning into the same color as the wall. I understand what you have written in these notes. I can grasp the distance from being outside three universes and within the dimensional trap of being humanely Dead. It is a stretch of dimensional layering especially since, through imagination, I can be in both places at once. It is the matter of putting both perspectives within a single thought and condensing the thought to the short six word sentence, “I am Here both at once.” This I can do.

         You see, you are thinking like Merlyn, this is a good sign. Post. – Amorella.

          I am reminded of the first shaman, Grandfather, pointing to the star, and saying to his grandchild and others, "We are from there to here."Yet my mind is not pointing to a star standing on Earth, my mind is saying, "I can see we are one of three universes and that we can reside both within and without at the same time."

           Your lack of authenticity here is because you cannot yet accept the possibility of such a human condition. - Amorella

           Ohio's state motto is "With God all things are possible," but I do not accept this. I cannot accept the word "all" in any context of this sort. 

            Spoken without a hint of gallows humor. You tickle my fancy, boy.  Dread does not appear to be in your vocabulary. - Amorella

             I am honest and true to myself (in context). I have no reason to dread.