an important book which everyone on earth should know about

More and more, I wish everyone on earth knew about the basic findings in an extremely important book form a Harvard psychology professor:

http://www.amazon.com/Triumphs-Experience-Harvard-Grant-Study/dp/0674059824/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1424714561&sr=8-2-spell&keywords=Valliamnt

How important is this book? Lately, I often quote Thomas Jefferson, who said we could preserve government of the people only as long as everyone gets free public education which does full justice to three key books -- Locke, Principia by Newton, and something by Francis Bacon. I begin to think that Valliant's book, or some adaptation of it, is just as important for just as many people.

Some folks would immediately say: 'Hey, what about the Bible? That Jefferson rat.."
I am very disturbed by most of the recent unfair denigration of Jefferson, by fiolks who don't seem to understand the basic messages of free speech and dialogue, promoted not only by Locke but by John Stuart Mills, the Quakers and others. If we lose those messages, our democracy and our culture are very much at risk... and in fact, they ARE at risk at this moment. But in fact, Quakers and Jefferson were not dirty rats; they simply felt that governments should not be the curators of the Bible or the Torah or the Koran; government religion quickly becomes corrupt religion, and that is not good for the soul.  

But why add Valliant to the canon of four great classics?

Valliant shows how the success and failure of intelligent people depends, above all, on how they respond to shocks or disappointments.  (What would he say about people who never experienced shock or disappointment or frustration in their entire lives? I don't know.)

There are "good" defense mechanisms, which lead you to better things, and "bad" defense mechanisms, which can literally kill you. There is a whole lot of data (and stories) behind this.
The worst ones are denial and revenge, as best I remember; the best are making lemonade out of lemons, looking for a silver lining in the clouds... and waiting (not giving up) until you are ready to act.

That sounds simple... but I see so much neurotic denial all around us, driving all kinds of behavior and rigidity and lack of growth, to the point where it threatens our very survival as a species. The most obvious example lately is with climate change, where people seem to be true believers in the ancient idea that problems go away of you forcibly put your head in the sand and convince others to do likewise. Nature is not impressed by such mooning by humans. Life is not like a high school debate where winning arguments .. saves your life?  But there are many, many other situations now where people's respect for reality seems very weak, and people believe whatever sounds like what they wish were true. I often wondered: how could organisms exist for more than a few centuries like that in the wild?  I do know some answers to that puzzling question (published in the journal Neural Networks, for example) -- but part of it is that humans now have more power than before, and were not evolved to be able to use such power wisely. I have had to put more and more new technologies on hold over the past few years, as the human penchant for collective suicide becomes ever more visible.

Of course, trying to find reality is not a trivial exercise for us humans. There are some aspects I have only come to understand this past month... for example, in my previous blog post on "where is mind" and in a new paper in Press in Russian and English, now posted at www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf -- soon to be open access at that journal. There are also two new things coming on the physics side...

Best of luck,

    Paul

What IF the end times really might be coming?

I have put a lot of serious intellectual effort into two important questions: What is the probability that all of the human species will go extinct "soon" (within a few millennia anyway), and what can we do to reduce that probability? There is also an active discussion group on that subject, involving  very prominent thinkers, through the Lifeboat Foundation, and a new center at Oxford, on this subjevct.

"Believe it or not, nuclear bombs can still kill people. Death is not fashionable, but somehow fashion doesn't seem to stop those kinds of realities." On my short list of things that could "pull the final trigger" are misuse of nuclear technology, climate change (H2S, not warming as such), artificial intelligence, and "clone armies" resulting form misuse of deep brain stimulation. When I get deep into the realities of all four, and more, I find myself asking more and more: "WHAT IF we really can't juggle fast enough to stop all four of these threats and more?" Indeed, for many years now, I have had to remind myself of problems which seemed impossible which I was eventually able to solve, of the rational reasons for never giving up, and so on.

But what if we don't make it, in the end? What then? What matters?

If we as humans are just the obvious physical bodies and DNA we see every day (at least if we get our DNA tested), then the utility function in that scenario is a flat zero. Nothing really matters at that point.

But... if the concept of "soul" has any meaning at all .. we rightly ask.. how does that affect our rational choices?

Of course, there is a lot of empty bullshit being said about the soul, driven by people believing whatever makes them feel good, or gratifies their ego, or seems to offer them a vehicle for controlling other people (or at least avoid being ejected from a group). Myself, I start from a lifetime of trying to questoin and probe and extend what we really know; I have a new paper in press, in Russian and English, which will be open access... but for now I post it as www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf.
(It is forthcoming in the same Russian IFNA journal which appears in some of the citations.)

In essence... we on earth are all part of the same "noosphere. Our souls are all basically just parts of that entity. So if we loose the earth, it's not just bodies we lose, but souls too, for the most part.
(The Russian mystic Gurdjieff wrote a lot of strange things, to try to  shake people up, but he seemed to have some common sense awareness of limits which apply to souls, and not just bodies. )
So is it still just zero? If we don't find a way to stop the maniacs in process of trying to kill us all,
is that simply the total end of the game so far as we are concerned?

Maybe, maybe not.

I recently posted something about  "is your soul like a piece of paper"? My present, crude impression  is that the "harvest of souls" which would result in the event of extinction is pretty similar to what I was hinting at there. It's basically a matter of valuing different pieces of information, as one would do when moving to a new office... which is done at times anyway under normal turnover in an existing office.

Since Jesus also talks about "harvest of souls," and many people seem to be pushing us there.. I decided to watch "Jupiet Rising" the other day, because the trailer used the word "harvest" and
had a few other curious associations. I didn't go in search of a New Religion, but in search of a bit of mental stimulation.

Well, kit was provocative enough for me... but it also exposed pretty clearly how people's thinking on earth about such subjects tends to be screwed up. Yes, the earth -- including the entire noosphere -- is really tiny and immature even compared to just our own galaxy in our own time track, and yes it matters. But no, it is really pretty silly to imagine earth could be farm for carbon molecules or for vampire-like manna. That age old confusion between conserved physical energy and Freud-like "psychic energy" (either mundane or esoteric) screws people up again, in a serious way. Screwed up ideas can kill people, and kill their neighbors too. It would be more accurate to think in terms of INFORMATION value, or to think in terms of life... life as in family and kinship relations. On earth, we do not see people raising their children for purposes of food, and there is no reason to imagine that the galaxy is less evolved than species on the earth. It does not make apriori dynamical systems sense, and it does not make empirical sense either (for folks who have any data).

And so, if humans do engineer end times... yes, some spiritual existence may continue for some... but not for those who achieve nothingness (why???) and those who hide in caves both of body and of mind, but for those who continue to connect with humanity and the rest of the noosphere even through difficult times, trying to save physically but also to connect at other levels as well.

It is very sad that Koch's new committee now looks like a serious threat to a good harvest here, just as much as the Moslem Brotherhood (a particular growth, as Moslem as Cheney is Christian). In both cases, the problem is that they are pushing towards total totalitarian control, suppressing the natural real freedom for real humans which is a key prerequisite for spiritual growth (and salveagable information.). (Hint: as I digitize, I simply toss and do not digitize duplicate copies.) To get an illusion of control, Koch has built a coalition of those willing to exclude feedback..
and has apparently sold out to the :clone army" groups in his coalition, who slaver at the mouth about the big new money which could come from the new electronic versions of cocaine and heroin,
well suited to turning humans into controllable puppets on a string... they haven't exactly sold their souls to the devil, in hopes of getting their father's favor... but... it has the same effect.
There may still be hope, but it is not concrete and clear to me. And yes, they are more in charge now than Obama is.... but let me not get off course.

where is mind and where is the future

(First posted at Lifeboat Foundation.)

We have had a lot of offhand discussion about building minds and understanding the future here. But all of that rests on a foundation of assumptions about what the mind and the future actually are. This past month..., well, it is possible to surprise even an old guy with some startling new wrinkles -- if we don't get lost in the foggy world of empty DC-style pedigrees and hermeneutics. 

Long ago, folks like Aristotle told us that "mind" or consciousness as we know it is basically just a matter of "form," of patterns of organization defined over "substance" or hardware. Some of you associate that with Dan Dennett, who has pushed the idea that mind equals brain equals patterns of atoms in the brain. Dennett's choice of words was unfortunate at times, but the basic idea that mind is a matter of patterns defined over a physical substrate still makes sense. When real life experience tells us that our minds don't follow the mundane version of "what you see is what you get," some folks would choose to go nuts, while others would recognize that "substance" is not limited to atoms and that we can still try to understand natural law even when it gets weird.

OK, that's past. We take it for granted.

What I have begun to appreciate for the past few months is that this is not the true picture. And yes, this has something to do with my re-examining of quantum mechanics. Consciousness, in a quantum mechanical universe, does not really fit the Aristotelian picture. Perhaps Plato will have the last laugh here.

Many of you know about the "multiverse," a concept due to Everett and Wheeler, ably carried on by David Deutsch of Oxford (a bit less ably by Bohm and Hiley). In their version of quantum field theory, the cosmos is made up of an infinite continuum of the kinds of object we call "universes", all existing in parallel. In this view... when we ask what the future will be... we should remember that ALL possibilities will actually occur, in reality, with varying probability strength.

Everett tried to prove that this picture LEADS TO the usual Copenhagen picture of measurement, of "the collapse of the wave function," but he did not quite succeed in proving this -- because it isn't true! The work of David Deutsch is the real foundation of quantum computing as it is now known to science. Quantum computing is also necessary to building the most powerful type of mind, whether "natural" or 'artificial," possible in this cosmos.

But I never really believed in the Everett picture. It seems unnecessarily complicated, and it entails some really strange kludges, like assuming an infinite number of space dimensions but still only one time dimension. There are other ways to go.  As a proper follower of Occam's Razor, I have tried hard to get back to Einstein's prohgram, back to reality, back to understanding just how much we could predict and explain by assuming just three space dimensions and one time dimension, governed by nonlinear partial differential equations. I have sought a "theory of everything' which could be expressed in a single equation, a "Lagrangian,' and I even have a specific candidate Lagrangian in my notes.

But... well... those nonlinear PDE can do a lot more than even I used to imagine.

Even a universe governed by nonlinear PDE can do things which are very strange, in a way which changes the proper assumptions about mind and the future themselves.

I have two new papers coming out this month, one in the International Journal on Bifurcation and Chaos, and one in a Russian mathematics journal, giving different aspects of this, as well as a new experiment which really should be reporting out in a couple of weeks (delayed due to byproducts of the ongoing reorganization of the US government).

The IJBC paper discusses (among other things) three theories of physics -- Feynmann path (the most orthodox of orthodox in quantum theory today),

a new stochastic path formulation (which I call stochastic realism), and -- briefly -- the PDE possibility which is mathematically just a limiting case of stochastic path.

And yes, the latter two are abject heresy this week -- except that new experiments may say otherwise. 

I have studied what stochastic realism really predicts in detail for experiments involving two or three entangled photons... versus the usual old Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics... and this has led me to a deeper understanding 

of Feynmann path as well.

In essence, stochastic path and Feynmann path both appear to say that reality is just 3+1 dimensional, not at all like the multiverse theory. One future, and one future only. We would picture our minds as patterns over the fields in three-dimensional space.

But no, not so.

Both Feynmann path and stochastic realism are grounded in something I would call "scenarios" rather than "paths". (Feynmann used the term "path" \when he started out, thinking of a small number of point particles, but folks like Schwinger pushed towards thinking of functions of space-time.) You can think of a scenario X as a set of possible values for all of the fields of physics, over all points in space and time.  In a way, all of Feynmann physics can be summarized in the model

psi(X) = (1/Z) product {space x,time t} e**(iL(x,t,X)),

where psi is the probability amplitude of scenario X, where L is called "the Lagrangian function," and where Z is just a real number chosen to make the resulting probabilities add up to one.  In stochastic realism, I just assume:

pr(X)=(1/Z) product {x,t} e**(L(x,t,X)) -- just like ordinary Markov Random Fields,

used in AI for decades. (I think Laveen Kanal started that.) MRF are not new, but

what's new is the proof that we can explain all the known two-photon experiments this way, WITHOUT assuming any "collapse of the waver functoi\\ion" -- as in some papers I have at arxiv.org. With three photons, we can test for stochastic realism versus the old Copenhagen stuff.

What really hit me this path month... is the realization that

MIND IS ATTACHED TO SCENARIOS, NOT TO REALITY ITSELF.

What's more, even the "conservative" Einstein view, as the limiting case of stochastic realism, actually implies all the same weirdness as full stochastic realism and Feynmann! In all these systems, consciousness or mind is attached to "scenarios,' and "our" future is just a matter of other possible scenarios.

A bit like Pogo: I finally found reality, but it's not us. Mind as we know it 

is a matter of forms and organization of SCENARIOS... almost like those

science fiction novels where lots of simulations are going on in parallel.

And so... the complexity of an entire multiverse seems to be  compressed into

a single 3+1-D continuum, in all three types of model... so in a sense, David Deutsch gets the last laugh. I think of this as the "Jack in the box" universe,

mathematically "simple," but, due to the incredible power of Lagrangian variational mathematics...   an emergent effect just like a multiverse! Time tracks and all..

not for reality itself, but for shadows like us. (I suppose Zelazny might feel a bit vindicated.) EVEN for the Einstein-type universe! 

And yes, there are operational consequences of many kinds, including consequences for the design of more powerful computing systems...

but some of the consequences I am just now beginning to assimilate.

It's really amazing how rich the emergent behavior can be of one Lagrangian one could write out in half a page...

Best of luck,

  Paul

(As of now, no longer an employee of the US government.)

P.S. Could it be that NONE of these three theories -- Feynmann path, stochastic realism or PDE -- is true? Certainly. But the stochastic path and PDE theories are the simplest one could hope to devise, consistent with the two-photon and three-photon experiments. If the true 'law of everything" is different, that probably means that there are ADDITIONAL complications -- but all of THIS weirdness is pretty much unavoidable. I really wasn't planning to try to vindicate Plato this year... but.. some things need to be faced up to.

Is your soul like a piece of paper?

Is your soul like a piece of paper?

Many mystics of the old school say that your personal soul is like an individual cell in a larger body. It has its own existence and is real, but is not really meaningful except as part of that larger body. The larger body we humans are part of is recently called “the noosphere”, but was earlier called “nous” and other things; it is similar to what some people recently call “Gaia” (as in the Gaia hypothesis) or “the morphogenetic field.” There are other words. In addition to cells, the noosphere also has some matrix, as does a human body. The entire noosphere of earth is just a tiny dot in a much larger cosmos, but we make a grave mistake if we underestimate how big the noosphere is compared to each of us as individual people.

That’s a much better metaphor most times than the one I will give you today. Today I ask: How is your individual soul like a piece of paper?

For the past month, my top job here has been to sort pieces of paper. Because I am retiring from NSF, I need to dispose of all the paper in files in my office – and likewise files at home, to make more room for files from the office. Part of the problem is that Adobe Acrobat works right at NSF, where lots of people use complicated firewalls to keep the beast under control; at home, I bought it, but it never worked well enough to use hardly ever.

And so, for each piece of paper, I had to make a judgment:

1. Do I simply throw it away – which is like tossing it into the fire. (OK, I use a recycle bin, but

This is like what the Book of Esdras says happens to the souls of the unworthy. They are burned, not as torture,

But as a simple quick elimination of chaff. Imams say that humans should never burn humans, but who says that Allah cannot ever clean his house? Who says that human bodies and computer systems can get away without garbage collection systems? Actually, brain scientists know that when humans reach two years of age, there is a huge cleanup of brain cells by the developing brain.)

2. Do I digitize it and THEN throw it away? (This reminds me a lot of a thing called “the causal plane” by various schools of mystics who spend a lot of effort doing what people call “astral; travel” or “Out of body experience.” Those words are a bit misleading , but in my view the experience is quite real in its own way; I have gone to see for myself.  The metaphor is that “the causal plane” is like a garden of Greek statues, a place where initially there seems to be no life or activity but where you can “touch” a statue to animate it. I suppose there is also some analogy to what people call “the Akashic records,” where passive memories are available – but only for those who know how to activate them. So this week I get to assign many pieces of paper to the digital “Akashic records” on our computer systems.)

3. Do I put them in the most privileged position – where I digitize them AND put them into an active file, either at home or to be moved to home within the week now?

Of course, as I do this, and face a heavy deadline, I put some pieces of paper into drawers at home where I haven’t done that sorting in time. Also – because I have limited time and throughput, I try to handle pieces of paper in GROUPS as much as I can; I scan or toss entire documents, made of pieces of paper stapled together, or even bound. Books are a different category; because I don’t plan to scan any but a few of those, I will wait and either relocate, donate or toss.

Most religions of the world say that all personal souls are kept active and relocated – some to better places than others. But of course, human vanity easily explains why the power-seekers who put heavy spins on large organized religions say what people want to hear. And the normal human level of neurotic, not-yet-disciplined thinking explains why the egos of many religious leaders encourage them to assume what they want to assume. The opposite extreme, of saying we have no souls at all, is a natural reaction to such neuroses – but in my view is based on insufficient data and a lack of personal effort to go out and really see and feel what is there. Neither Faith nor Doubt are sufficient in themselves to take one to real truth; it requires effort to increase real understanding, and patience as we admit there are bigger things than us out there.

But in fact – there are garbage collectors out there, and those who get bound together in books like the Faith of the Mass Murderer may well be the first to get into the recycle bin.

OK – an interesting metaphor.

But I was thinking more about a different metaphor two weeks ago, more about my own personal situation. I am grateful in many ways for the job I am now leaving, and for the way that NSF was at its peak.

When I was in graduate school, my father worried that I was going to become a “perpetual student.” (I have digitized a lot of what he wrote this month, including things I never saw before, like a precise accounting of how much money I cost him through the years.) He was well to worry – since my job at NSF was in many ways like a perpetual graduate school, in which I learned exactly what you would from 8 to 10 PhD. My review panels were like seminars – only with 8 of the very best professors trying to teach just one lucky student, who got to ask all his important questions, but who had to follow up with the homework of reading compact well-organized 15 page essays by more than half the people doing advanced research in a whole variety of fields – especially fields connected with understanding intelligent systems (brains and computers and internets and so on), with understanding what humans really know about how the universe works (where electronics and photonics account for more than 90% of the real empirical data, data much more interesting than most people know), and with issues of energy and space technology and their eocnomic implicatoins (which connect to almost all the world economy).

For a week it seemed – now I will finally have my graduation ceremony. My father would be proud.  I will really leave school, and I will go out into the world a lot like one of his heroes, John Galt of the book Atlas Shrugged. (But maybe with less of the political posturing and lewd gestures Ayn would want him to make.)  I actually found a guy in the Detroit area, with former GM connections (hey, tis tracks the book really well), and found a way we could bring a new enine to the world that really could be a huge benefit to real people. And if the funding worked out, maybe we would move on to the more advanced technology I had up my sleeve, just like the book.

But... a problem here. The engine guy was very positive at first.. but became scared as it became real. He remembered the many people who really did mistreat him in the pastm in a way he was justified to remember forever, from crooked narcissistic VCs to legally corrupt higher-ups in some government agencies (fortunately not NSF at that time), and even university types who could not really see and feel his vision and its importance. So now...

Now... maybe, maybe not... but I have to remember the bleak possibility that this whole “earth office” may be relocated.  It’s not something I want to think about, but I feel as if I have been pulled kicking and screaming to face up to how real that possibility is, every year that goes by. Not just me personally, but the whole thing. I know about the earthy realities of nuclear proliferation and terrorism. (I ran the joint NSF-DNDO research program on that subject, probing the limits fo what we know on that subject, and had lots of prior experience at DOE. My files also have lots of open source stuff from CIA, NSA, DIA and others – mostly in the causal plane now.) I know about the earthy realities of climate change, a lot more than Al Gore ever did, which are very different but a lot scarier than what Gore talks about. And more.

And so, where am I? Is it just another stage, graduating from elementary school to middle school?

What emerges? Certainly a lot of new math, ala physics or emergent nonlinear systems dynamics. And... it occurs to me... that old stuff of grading papers, which I had to do for the professor back in graduate school a bit. I hated it, but so did he, and it did seem appropriate to assign some of that to a graduate student. In fact, isn’t that a major part of what I was trained to do at NSF for over 25 years? More sorting, more grading. Oh, dear. I hope not. I still really hope the “earth office” won’t be relocated. Not that kalpa stuff! I am not really planning for that. But today, I will keep sorting, keep reliving past history in so many sectors of life on earth, and – when it is done – I will certainly try to see Jupiter Rising, despite the bad reviews. (Hell, they did not like Bruce Almighty or even Avatar at first...

And those were worth seeing.) I hope the harvest of souls is not coming “soon”

(whatever “soon” means – the Biblical metaphorical week?) ... but it would be interesting to see their take on it. After all, their last big one, The Matrix, was interesting. Poor young Gaia...

========

As a footnote: I have also digitized a few technical papers on the role of metaphor in the human brain, a subject for which I have a more complete mathematical explanation than those modelers do. So much to digitize! And eventually a decision as to which to keep in digital form just in my home, and how much to secure cloud. And things to digitize on security too...   

Another footnote: I have two papers in press, one of which explains more about the noosphere and mental discipline

for mathematically competent people. After I wrote the first draft, I received long-distance calls from the orthodox church accusing me of heresy, and saying that the Noetic Institute is a front for The Devil and should be shut down -- but that there might be some hope for me.  Long story. I was discouraged... but I also got an email out of the blue for Kazan, asking for almost exactly the new paper, so now it's in press from there both in English and in Russian. Not exactly Nature magazine in either case, but I haven't had time to play the usual games required of academics. That paper goes for a new level of unification of science and spirit -- but a new part of the relevant science is also in press, actually following two or three channels. Who knows? There might be a little hope for us here, maybe -- just as maybe the engine might still happen. We will see, and try. I also sometimes think of the year I spent working in the Hart building of Congress, where we had a kind of quiet initiation in which an experenced guy said: "Above all remember-- you must play, you can't win." Not a grand synthesis, that, but the words do come to mind at times.

===========================
============================

Added later, Sunday morning:

All the words above the double line were written in the middle of the night. As I lay in bed, fully conscious, the words started gelling more and more, and I knew what I was supposed to do. I quietly murmured the word "muse" to Luda, put on a bathrobe and slippers, and went down to the study to type them in and post.  (I also sent a very brief email to
one of the folks mentioned, to be sure it's OK.) When I got back, Luda asked what the muse was this time.
Just a blog post????  I mentioned the title, and she asked: "What are you saying about people's souls? How some are 
clean, some are even shiny and glossy, while others are tattered and falling apart?"

My response: "Wow. You are reminding me of that video play, Cats, where almost everyone ends up in the recycle bin by default. The only one who gets digitized is that tattered old woman. Actually, for the past month, I have simply tossed a whole lot of new and glossy paper. I have put in a lot of effort to digitize some old and tattered pieces of paper, where I had to use the flatbed reader a sheet at a time.  Some are more valuable than others."

I  also thought immediately of the Buddhist monastery on Chicken Dragon Mountain in Korea, where I saw an old monk who made a very striking impression. The monk seemed to be a Zen monk, almost completely successful in her long goal of achieving total nothingness. Her soul was old and dry, and about to drift away the powder of disintegrating paper into space. Her face had a very strange rictus kind of smile on it... the smile of pride of success in achieving a goal pursued for so long, mixed in with a horror that something was wrong about what was happening... that strange rictus of an unhappy frightened smile reminded me of the "Crystalman smile" mentioned by Lindsay in his important book Voyage to Arcturus... but I now realize he had something different in mind. 

The Zen school does declare nothingness as its supreme objective, but the high TIbetan Buddhists would be more in tune with the idea that the whole world is a school, something we also hear form Rosicrucians like Joel Whitten (sp?),
author of Life Between Life.  The TIbetan Mahayana Buddhists even have an image of people being judged, after death, by folks a lot more like teaching assistants than like the Almighty Galactic Father Whom Christians often hope to see. 

But... back to more files to be sorted....

================================
==============================

Well... a few less important thoughts, for those amused by arcane things.

I never learned the full history of the play Cats. (It would be interesting enough to be worth digitizing if I did!)
I have the impression that it had something to do with T.S. Eliot, who had something to do with Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff folks used to say that they had three serious schools, and a lot of hokey imittaors. The three serious ones were basically ranked: (1) Ouspensky/France; (2) Bennett/UK; (3) New York. They also had three books, starting from the long one in poor English, followed by Meetings with Remarkable Men (closer to the empirical source), followed by a third series which was very secret. I do have a copy of the third series lying around in my house, and I was a bit surprised when I saw it. It was more like dirty linen people wanted to keep secret... or was it? It was mainly about how the people who try highest and get to highest ranks can easily just totally screw up anyway. My vague fuzzy memory was that New York had some pretty interesting folks after all, and maybe Eliot was of that tradition.

Years ago, in the house of the fanous art collector Stuart Carey Welch... I remember a young woman of the NY Gordjieff tradition dmeonstrating some of what she could do, in a low lit huge room with the Tibetan MASK OF THE DEAD AND MANY SUCH THINGS ALL AROUND.  (Caps courtesy of my touchpad.) Her enertgy was so impressive I was instantly overwhelmed by wanting to marry her... though of course I did not say so. All kinds of energies broke out amongst the four of us there... lights going on and off.. poltergeist.. the whole bit. I never returned, but always wondered a bit. But I have lots of other things to wonder about, and later my own trip to Tibet (at least to a place which the local Tibetans call Tibet).

Am temptyed to say more about what I have digitized, but must run..