Archive for December, 2008

The Cosmos “Neither Declares Nor Conceals”

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

~ dedicated to the memory of Dev Hathaway

I can be a bit particular in my usage of certain terms. Recently my research has drawn me back to the subject of synchronicity, the mention of which often causes undue confusion. There are reasons why I use the words coincidence, serendipity, and synchronicity in very specific ways.

A bit of logic should silence all arguments: Yes, all synchronicities are coincidences, but not all coincidences are synchronicities.  Strictly speaking, any two things that happen concurrently form a coincidence, whether it carries any special meaning or not.   Serendipity is a step up – more like a lucky coincidence, but not out of the realm of everyday possibility.

By contrast, synchronicity is that rare coincidence that punctuates – with an exclamation point – a deeply meaningful coincidence, one that is so astonishingly rare as to be nearly unbelievable.  And, to satisfy its critics, the synchronicity’s extraordinary significance must be clearly and immediately undeniable.

Synchronicity has been acknowledged to happen more frequently during events or times in our lives that are accompanied by profound insight, change, or discovery – events such as falling in love or ending a relationship, experiencing cascading epiphanies, or, perhaps, inviting contact from “other intelligence.”

To explain, I’ll have to go back in time about fifteen years. One of my most esteemed English professors, the late Dev Hathaway, told me that my writing reminded him of Annie Dillard’s. Coincidentally, Dev was an acquaintance of Dillard’s sister. I remember the smile in his eyes as he mentioned I even looked a bit like her. He advised me to read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

That same afternoon I was browsing quantum mechanics or some such topic at the university library. Most of the books were relatively new – many in paperback, and all of them looking fairly standard for the subect matter. As I scanned the shelves, my eyes were drawn to one book that seemed somehow out of place: a dark, fabric-covered hardback with a faint, copper-hued title. I leaned in and, still unable to read the worn lettering in the dim light, pulled the book out: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

In a library housing hundreds of thousands of volumes, how is it that my eyes landed on the same book Dev mentioned just moments earlier – and why?

Later that week I chanced upon a paperback copy of said book, marked down to some unreasonably low price at a bookstore’s closeout sale, and I was able to add the book to my collection. Now, that I was at the bookstore at the same time as the book was a coincidence – and it was serendipitous that I happened to spot it while quickly rummaging through boatloads of others, especially since I had just learned about it.

Looking back on those days, when I was finishing college in my late 20s, everything in my life was at an intense high. I was experiencing some profound interactions with what might be called the subtle realm. Once I was sunbathing in the back yard – a lush, overgrown, and private area – observing nature. As I watched a dragonfly dart around the bushes and trees and Queen Anne’s Lace, I thought to it, “Come and sit nearby.” To my delight, the dragonfly immediately came over and landed very close, facing me with a steady gaze for several seconds while I perceived, with joyful gratitude, its gossamer wings and velvety eyes.

Back to the library, though, and to synchronicity.  At the top of my list of “all-time wildest synchronicities” has to be the following. I was in an “Intro to the Internet” class in the mid-1990s when a book was passed around containing the e-mail addresses of a hundred or so relatively well-known people. My assignment was to e-mail one of them and then report back on the result. I flipped through the book and found a name that was quite familiar, although I didn’t know much about him: Noam Chomsky.

Later that day I was, again, in the university library. This time I was deliberately looking in the bound periodicals section for a particular back issue of Esquire magazine, to read an interview with Dr. John Mack about the alien encounter phenomenon.

As I walked past the bookshelves, alphabetically approching Esquire, coincidentally I saw a section of bound volumes of a periodical called “Encounter.” I’d never heard of this publication, but I couldn’t resist stopping to take a quick look at one of the books. I chose one at random, with dates like Sept. 1971 – May 1973. I quickly flipped it open to a densely-packed page and immediately saw two words: “Noam Chomsky.”

So as I stood in a library of a million or so books with many more hundreds of millions of words mixed up in mostly-random order, I had chosen the right book, the only page in that book, and the exact place on that page to find the words that I had chosen earlier that day. Something was pulling me toward that book – or vice versa. Now that I would call a synchronicity.

Could a “conscious” factor in the book have sensed me walking by, and called me in?

Noam Chomsky – a linguist – ended up having a connection to an overwhelming interest of mine, crop circles, and specifically, to the meaning that they might convey. Nice conversation starter, eh? “Mr Chomsky, what do you think about the language of the crop circles in the fields of rural England?”

But to reframe: simple coincidences are not necessarily less valuable than astonishing synchronicities. Remember, Dev’s coincidental acquaintance with Annie Dillard was closely connected to the synchronicity of finding Pilgrim at Tinker Creek later that day. In fact, there was a similar chain of events in the Noam Chomsky synchronicity, only in a much tighter time frame: first, the coincidence of walking past a periodical named “Encounter,” which clearly grabbed my attention, and second, the synchronicity of my eyes landing on the words “Noam Chomsky” when I opened a volume at random.

I believe that the magnitude of a particular synchronicity’s meaning is inversely correlated to the odds of the coincidence. Doubtless, these events – especially the ones of least probability by chance – support the reality of a pervasive, yet obscure consciousness which I feel is omnipresent in the Cosmos – by whatever name it be called, whether quanta or God or something else entirely.

To paraphrase Heraclitus, who noted so long ago with riddling insight, the Cosmos “…neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign.”

STACE TUSSEL

Solar Low = Consciousness High?

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Perhaps you’ve seen the recent video of a dog in Santiago, Chile running out across a busy freeway to pull another dog, who’d just been hit and killed in traffic, out of the path of further damage. I can’t help but wonder what is going on in that dog’s consciousness as it dodges speeding cars and trucks, risking its own survival to spare the dignity of a comrade’s lost life. Are the dog’s actions indicative of intelligent reasoning, of empathy? Instinct hardly seems a viable explanation.

Nearly every day now we hear another news piece reporting on [non-human] animal intelligence: a parrot who warns that a toddler has choked and stopped breathing, a dolphin pod that protects a swimmer being targeted by circling sharks, another dolphin who successfully communicates with two beached whales to get them back out to sea after many failed attempts by humans, elephants and magpies who recognise their own mirror reflections…

Consciousness and intelligence, in general, seem to be developing at a rapid rate. Possibly the public’s increasing interest in the subject is prompting a discussion about what has long been known by certain factions and withheld from us. In any case, we’ve seen for a long while that animals evidence extraordinarily intelligent behaviours from time to time, but lately it seems we are witnessing among them an exponential increase of self awareness and newly-observed, undeniably-intelligent acts.

Is DNA being “fine-tuned” in conjunction with the extended, extreme solar minimum?

A similar increase in consciousness is apparent in many human beings. I think if we look back in history, we’ll find a correlation between extreme solar lows and the sparking of human intellect and consciousness development. For instance, the last half of the 17th century through the early 18th century, a period of intensely-low sunspot activity called the Maunder Minimum, corresponded with the well-known Scientific Revolution. And the Dalton Minimum during the early 1800s brought with it some remarkable advances, including namesake John Dalton’s atomic theory – which has, in turn, led to modern-day study of quantum physics.

While the earlier beginnings of atomic theory were significantly expanded by Democritus more than a millennium before Dalton’s lifetime, the subject had never been explicated to the same degree as it was in the early 19th century. This is not to say that atomic theory hadn’t been developed in the extreme distant past – on Earth or elsewhere. In fact, evidence exists (if mostly anecdotal) that advanced civilisations existed on Earth in far-prehistoric times. But formally assigning the beginning of any “new” discovery is fairly arbitrarily linked not to evidence but to proof, which is exceedingly difficult when it comes to prehistory. My point here, however, is that Dalton brought atomic theory to the fore within a timeframe of pronounced acceleration of scientific growth and discovery – and during a remarkably low solar minimum.

Bear in mind that “standard” solar minimums (in relationship to the correlating solar maximums) occur roughly every 11 years. Extremes, on the other hand, happen much more rarely – and by all accounts we’re in the midst of an extreme solar minimum now. Naturally, questions about the impact of solar activity with the development of consciousness are relevant at this time, especially when considered against the backdrop of our radical relationship with cosmic matter (“We are all made of stars,” as Moby wrote).  There seems to be a correlation between our awareness, whether named consciousness or intelligence or otherwise, and incoming interstellar radiation, which is likely infringing our solar system to some degree due to the Sun’s persistently-low sunspot activity and accompanying low solar wind, which has been linked to our shrinking heliosphere, particularly during our current solar cycle.

With the exponential advancement in science and technology and consciousness itself over the last several thousand years, should we not consider that a wave of interstellar particles may be bombarding Earth and contributing to the apparent increase in true mass consciousness by saturating not only the human race, but also other animals and perhaps on some level plants and even quantum particles as well? Could this wave be carrying us headlong into a future we can only begin to imagine, but which may have been predicted during far-previous solar low cycles? (Note: upcoming posts will deal with those clues and/or predictions possibly encoded in ancient megalithic sites.)

I propose no answers, but only questions, from this speculation. I can barely begin to comprehend the questions, let alone formulate the answers…..but like stones dropped in still water, these musings may eventually reach the outer banks of our awareness, leading us even deeper within the mystery – and, ironically, ever closer to the answers encrypted there.

STACE TUSSEL

Non-Coding DNA and the Non-Coding Cosmos

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

A supervast and unseen mix of dark matter and energy, which I call the Non-Coding Cosmos, fills most of the Universe. Observable reality – what we perceive – provides a dramatic contrast to the bigger picture. A radical relationship between non-coding DNA and the larger cosmic reality can be imagined in which the Non-Coding Cosmos activates DNA, thus bringing forth our existence.

Non-coding DNA is just as elusive as the Non-Coding Cosmos. Only about three percent* of DNA has a known purpose, providing each individual’s unique genetic code – yet vastly more DNA is stuffed into our cells. Why the extra baggage? Perhaps it has to do with the apparent syntax of DNA’s own “dark matter.” No one has been able to figure out the language that seems to be cleverly set in Non-Coding DNA, yet there is an undeniable underlying syntax to the “extra” DNA, which imparts a code…a language.

We may be wavering at the frontier of existence and reality – but the Dark Universe is difficult to study, rather like the mystery language in our DNA. If non-coding DNA indeed contains a language, however, what is it saying? And what if the Non-Coding Cosmos is the lens through which the message is seen?

Most DNA is like most of the Universe in being generally inaccessible.  A remarkable reverse correlation presents too, in the extreme difference in size – one tiny and the other unfathomably huge. Both contain immense amounts of information. Is the wizard a self-organised intelligence, or shall we anthropomorphise quanta and dark energy?

Perhaps the answers to such “unanswerable” questions exist – even by design – within the overlap of Non-Coding DNA and the Non-Coding Cosmos. The two do seem to share a natural affinity; perhaps they’re even designed to be interactive.

Considering recent developments in intelligence and consciousness research, if non-coding DNA and the Non-Coding Cosmos exist in symbiosis, then a critical paradigm shift regarding our cosmic origins and purpose could be imminent. Rapidly-developing technologies and recovered sacred consciousness tools may lead us to decipher cosmic secrets lying in wait, right before our eyes.

*estimates vary, but between 3 and 10 percent of our DNA is thought to be that portion that comprises our genetic code.

NOTES:

D.B. Cline, quoted in Scientific American:  “Determining the nature of this missing mass [i.e., what I speculate may be the Non-Coding Cosmos] is one of the most important problems in modern cosmology and particle physics. It has been noted that the names “dark matter” and “dark energy” serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance, much as the marking of early maps with “terra incognita.”

I first learned about Zipf’s Law, which has been used to show the linguistic patterns within so-called “junk” DNA, while reading Graham Hancock’s Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.

Rick Strassman, from his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule: “…in Channel Normal, our body is solid, has discrete boundaries, and responds to gravity. While we are perceiving Channel Dark Matter, we may be experiencing our body [without] visible light and gravity…..”

copyright STACE TUSSEL