Classifying My First Person Spiritual States

After age 70, it becomes especially important to better understand and organize the variety of states we experience, because we know that mortal death is on its way, to wipe out some states and allow others to continue. Even at younger ages, however, it helps to organize our understanding, in order to grow, in a realistic, grounded way. 

I. STAGE 1: STATES BEFORE 1979 or 1980

Up until Christmas of 1978 (when I began working for the US federal government, continuing until 2015), I had had a very focused and diverse exploration of PSI. That required a lot of time, especially when I went to bed, turned on elevating music on the stereo or radio, played with energy and ideas, and usually heard lots of poltergeist side effects and even dogs howling outside whenever I “turned on the switch.” But then it all ended quite abruptly, for several reasons. Partly, I needed to wake up early for the commute to my new job, but partly I felt some duty (dharma?) to focus on important challenges in the new job. And perhaps I was feeling some diminishing returns after many years of exploring the mind on many levels. I also did not like the idea of “wasting energy” on poltergeist and such. 

II. STAGE 2: STATES BEFORE RETIREMENT FROM US GOV: 

For many years, life seemed to settle into a three-way kind of routine.

(1) I had many “astral dreams,” like OOBE. By then, I understood that the dividing line between “astral dreams,” OOBE and lucid dreams is much less sharp than most people imagine. Really, there you are (not really in a specific places) and inputs or images come to you from your body, from other lo cations in this world, and from ”the astral plane” is a kind of mix. It is like the mix of what you feel in your legs versus our thorax versus what you see in your eyes; they are all present, and it is a choice where to focus.

 Ironically, LaBerge’s “just a dream” states represent MORE willfulness and consciousness than the proud but less conscious fantasy type states many people glorify. By 1980, I knew a lot about those states, and simply decided to integrate them into my ordinary daily life. It is interesting how SOME astral experiences seem bound by tight speed limits, while in others one is more free to move; that is an important clue. After 190, I did will myself to “go places” very much, but wherever I was I reflected whatever I was into at the time, sometimes like going to places and talking with other people. (Remember the novel “gravity’s Rainbow”?)

(2) I had many “assumption dreams”, living life from the viewpoint of someone else. Actually, I first noticed this kind of experience in my life before 1980, when I attempted the basic Rosicrucian OOBE experiment for the first time (long after I had worked with others) and suddenly found myself propelled into someone else’s body. 

That was one of the “once in a lifetime experiences” I will never forget, as I projected from the bedroom at 8411 48th avenue in College Park to a mature student sitting on the old red couch in the living room, the same couch I had lied on when I was 8 years old in Pennsylvania recovering from a hernia operation. The student and I were equally stunned, but there was also a time separation of about 12 hours. After this, I naturally read a lot, etc., etc. (I remember Bruner’s novel Players at the Game of People, and found others who had had the same fully conscious experience and could discuss it.) 

Now I view this as “gating” or “channeling”. It follows mathematical principles similar to the gating of visual images in the mammal brain, like what Olshausen discusses in a nice brief paper in one of Arbib’s anthologies on the brain, and like non-Euclidean symmetry circuits discussed in Werbos.com/Erdos.pdf (and various other papers in journals, like Kozma, Werbos, Ilin). 

The version in the noosphere is more powerful and general than what is in the mammal brain, because we “people” modules are more elaborate than visual images are, but the principles are the same. Lately, I understand the huge importance of “partial gating,” where it is not a MERGER of two entities, or even a complete matching of one to another, but a PARTIAL match, like what you do when you approximate and expensive detailed prediction model with a simpler and faster one not capable of hnading as many variables. ,br> 

 

(3) “Cosmic Consciousness”, a kind of full consciousness, 

where all my brain was fully awake and active but I connected to … well, let us say, to the noosphere. This became my routine for the time between when I fully woke up and when I got out of bed, in the early morning. It was a time of very intense mental activity, not restricted to the kinds of props people use in the various types and levels of astral experience.

(Footnote re (3): I thought of it this way because of passages I knew from Bucke’s book, long ago. Later a guru type informed me that Bucke was wedded to a theory I call “the phlogiston theory of consciousness”, which I view as utterly dead and zombieish and silly. I started to use the term “samadhi” for that state, until I learned it causes even more confusion, so I am back to CC. SOME use Samadhi for this, but others use samadhi to describe a kind of astral or mundane state of psychic masturbation, aka bliss, well described in a scene in Lindsay’s novel Voyage to Arcturus. Here I will not dwell on that, or on any others of the weird mental flora and fauna and illusions ALSO DESCRIBED IN Steiger’s book In My Soul I am Free.)

But more and more in recent years, especially as Luda leads me to interesting places all over the world, I have to add a fourth category: stunning periods of spiritual connection, which I have recounted in Facebook posts. Hugely diverse. I remember in Iceland, especially, trying to classify THEM, so as to do better. Quaker Meeting for Worship is another important venue for meditation and connection. 

III. STAGE 3: NEW PATTERNS IN MY INNER LIFE

Now, past 70, in a period of covid with the whole world on edge… yet also with some new knowledge.. the practical lines of classification shift yet again. 

There is still the scared time every day between full brain consciousness and getting out of bed. But some days it seems alive and energizing, and some days a foreboding which does the opposite (and has driven me to Irish Cream the following late evening on some days).

For about a year, I always maintain awareness of two books, among other things: (1) Jung’s Red Book; and (2) Trungpa’s Born in Tibet, plus his accompanying book on ”meditation” (the seven worlds and beyond). 

How can we classify and navigate those early morning states? EACH DAY included enough information content to fill several books, so how to organize it and move in a positive direction?

To keep it simple, this morning (in that state) I created an image of two important TYPES of state: (1) “the all-seeing eye” (EYE for short); and (2) “God as my psychiatrist” (DEEP for short). It is ever so important to be clear on the paradox, that the state which appears grander to itself is actually less real and inferior to the state which impels us to a bit more humility (i.e. realism).

III.1 EYE state

I experienced EYE first. It was yet another “great unique once in a lifetime experience” for me, probably before 1980, when I woke to a state where I felt such a great freedom in moving my mind “through the void.” (Imperfect words here, hard to translate. 

I had experienced something like that initial void state one night when I was twelve years old, in bed, in Flourtown PA, “the night of seven dreams<’ at tikes BETWEEN the dreams. A natural state; not great metaphysics, I thought.) In that state… I thought of H Spencer Lewis’s “cosmic keyboard,” but after I thought of various people I knew, it seemed like a great keyboard of PEOPLE. By typing gently on any key, I could open up a whole flood of information from and out that person. It was a labile two-way connection, easily and quickly adjusted. 

Like astral travel but with infinite speed. Like a switchboard. And I could move my awareness all over, like an all-seeing eye indeed. And yes, I saw a lot, figured out a lot, and learned a lot in that state, from political causes to higher science and math beyond what anyone else on earth knew at the time. That was handy when I later worked at NSF, trying to develop real understanding of ever so many fields of science. Math and mental mapping were crucial to keep it organized, but the flow itself was also crucial. But: given an all-seeing eye, where is the telos, the emotion, the affect, the sheer love? Until age 70 I could simply tell myself, “I” (the normal I of the day) had plenty of higher emotions and telos (utility functions) to appreciate the all-seeing eye. 

II.2 DEEP State

But what happens if and when that I die, and there is nothing left but an eye drifting through space? And so, this morning, I willfully brought up my memory of a discussion with Steve Morse ( “a Catholic Quaker”) and John Surr (“a Buddhist Quaker”) and maybe a few others, in the 9AM “morning drop in” discussion at Langley Hill Quaker meeting. (Cancelled a month or so after covid, and a few feeble attempts to do it by Zoom.) Steve was probably the person starting discussion of the book “Conversations with God”, and then “God is my copilot”. Those books fit well with a lot of modern Quaker thought, which works ever so hard to help us cultivate the skill of inner spiritual listening. As I tried to articulate my own remembered experience, I coined the phrase: “God is My psychiatrist.” 

That fit a lot of the best, most important stuff. Times when I would “rest in the void,” and phrase a question, which would iled an echo or suggestion, and then an entire dialogue. Often the initial steps would seem strangely unrelated to what I asked, but then led by an unexpected path to new insights I would not have imagined. Yes, as if I were in the company of a great psychiatrist. 

III.3 Life In and Beyond Those Two States

 So there are at least TWO different states in this CC cluster, EYE and DEEP. And after I saw this, this morning, I saw how Jung’s spirit of the times and spirit of the deep do resonate somewhat with this distinction, and help me be more conscious ness of what I am ding in these two and other states of the year. The usual EYE state wanders around the world (maybe beyond it a little at times in some ways), and DEEP really is grounded in a “void” state better described as “deep.” 

The “I”in the deep Is a curious state, a mix of power and humility, even more than the usual “Scylla and Charybdis” balance I long ago became used to. (Before retirement from NSF, I often warned myself not to succumb EITHER to delusions of grandeur OR delusions of helplessness, but this is a hundred times in that balance, yet steadier.) I rest in the void, get to ask questions, and can also ask questions which are not really limited in terms of possible answers.

 I can tune in not only to the higher mind of noosphere (to be there and listen) but even to the larger two levels I understand better this year, particular after my new draft paper on “approximation 2,” comparing the grand canonical Boltzmann distribution to the Bellman equation, approximation of which does constitute a different but higher level of intelligence. (Sorry folks, but this is important. I wouldn’t want to just delete all that exists, after all.) 

 I also saw a link to a Buddhist video Luda had me watch a few weeks ago, a video ever so important to my real like at this time, over age 70. It described a kind of sitting meditation exercise, and a kind of meditation in motion. (Please forgive; I forget the Japanese words, but we paid a LOT of attention when we prepared for our month in Japan October-November 2019, reflected only in small part in the photos I link to at Werbos.com/religions.htm.) My CC time in bed is like the sitting meditation, the part of ”me” which can live on after mortal death, 

III.4 Rhythm of Sky-I (EYE or DEEP or other) and Earth-I

But where is the qi, the telos, the flow of love and motivation, which I now derive most from daytime wandering in nature and connection with Luda, first, and other people? One key message: do work harder to cultivate that meditation in motion, connecting the spirot of the deep to as much of life as possible. But as a practical matter, of course, the “me” out of bed is a different state, and I would be ever so out of touch with reality if I did not distinguish it. I evolve towards a MIX of “sky-person” (or sky-I), in bed, using all the input and output channels I have available at that time, along with an “earth-person,” which needs to feel deeply why to cut back on the Irish cream, and to build connections to life and nature and develop specific options on earth (or connected to earth) to SUPPORT the sky-I actions, which in time will be all I have left. 

Of course, I am not disconnected from nature, life and love in the CC time in bed. Far from it. With an open window, overlooking vast nature, with cool breezes and bird song, and Luda nearby.. I am so grateful it is all there for now. I can try to connect all hat more to the deep, to preserve the connections. Talking with Luda and talking with “God” are not so completely different; each encourages skills which help with the other.

 The “deep” is also associated with an incredibly powerful and grand river of higher “qi”, probably like what Meng Tzu also felt and worked with. https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Chinese-Philosophy-History-Economics-ebook/dp/B00GHJH8JE/. It is so sad that so many Conficians in China have decayed from Meng to Zhu Xi, a bit like Shinto decaying from what we saw in the issa Peninsula to the Emperor’s instrument, eroding the very soul of the people who become too obedient, degraded, nepotistic and dangerous (exactly as Mao said when he complained at his school in Chang Sha, which we have visited). 

 And in conclusion, thank you for your patience if you have read this far into the writings of the “earth I”, trying to transcribe about five minutes of what the “sky-I” saw this morning. But even then… 

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This all was written as a response to a message from Nancy du Terte where she described some of HER experiences. My initial reply to her was:

First, I thank Nancy for discussing some of her real, personal first person experience, with the caveats and then humility that we all need to benefit form such discussion. I am influenced, of course, by knowing how much deep, extensive contact she had with heavily vetted psi research funded in the past by the US government. It is good that a few of us can discuss BOTH serious hard core science (like psi dot = i H psi) AND unvarnished first person experience under scrutiny, without social ideological repression of real experience.

I am also glad that the majority of the people on THIS particular list would be happy to discuss what the implications are if "animals have souls. More precisely, a majority of us believe there is more than a 50% probability that many other mammals possess PSI connections. For me, when I think how noospheres can come to be (see werbos.com/religions.htm), it would be hard to believe that many other higher mammals would NOT have a noosphere connection , just as we do. Whatever physical mechanisms allow the noosphere to perturb our brains (and vice versa in some degree of symbiosis), I will never forget how 99% of the human brain is homologous to the brains of other mammals, at the fundamental level we discussed so often with our collaborators Pribram and Freeman. If the noosphere could ONLY speak to mammals in English,this would not follow, but the idea that it only speaks in English is utterly ridiculous. Carl Jung's Red Book is one god window into how it really works, for those deluded people who imagine 

hat sort of reality. so OF COURSE, there are many fellow mammals with PSI, and there are valid questions beyond that about other animals.

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So... to tell it like it is... the experiences Nancy reports with her cats are 

really quite typical of what was documented very carefully in a workshop I attended in 2000 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perrott-Warrick_Fund, in Cambridge University, UK.

It is VERY sad that so many people today are so divorced from life and nature that they could really imagine that no other mammals possess psi.  That is why I bcc two friends, more involved in political kinds of issues, who are deeply worried about "how many people have been turned into zombies, de facto, by being locked up in impersonal big buildings where they do not even breathe the outside air and see the sun?"   The standard handbook of mental disorders used by psychiatrists lists low affect as one of the key symptoms, and many people tracking covid describe how lockups and low affect are causing horrible side effects. (Myself, I follow all the local covid rules, but still get get to go outside a lot.) 

INDIA and BRAZIL might well be the two nations on earth where humans retain the most real contact with other mammals, on a deep spiritually grounded way. (OK, Brazil may be more birds, but hey have enough mammals too.)  So maybe some of you might join me in saying to Nancy "Hey, there are a LOT of other connections which are part of OUR lives, which we 

will not hide in a closet." (No, not THAT closet!!! That's what Qanon tries to sell.)

My own life has been so full of so many "human" connections with other mammals (and a few different types with birds)... I will spare you all the details, because there are SO many.And no, Stan, I was not oing it to write a paper publishable in a scientific journal. With maybe one exception... the IDEA of EEG caps on cooperative horses, to do a Kelso type analysis.

But beyond that, there are SO many... 

Many psi believers talk about telepathy and OOBE, so maybe I should skip over that kind now. 

After people experience basic OOBE stuff, but before what I would call cosmic consciousness, there is a whole complex of skills or experiences which are variously interpreted as "channeling," attunement, or (in a more sophisticated version) "partial gating." Indigenous people in Brazil (one of whose leaders I bcc) are deeply familiar with exercises to attune with other creatures enough to see through the eyes of other creatures. Often birds.

I still remember being asked: "Hey, you connect to birds a WHOLE lot. So have you ever had that experience? Seen through the eyes of a bird?" I had to admit: "No, I have not experienced absolute assumption with a bird. Only once in my life with any animal. That was with a cat, and it happened because the CAT wanted it to happen;  it wanted me to see its point of view." (That was in the school year 1975-1976, in Laurel Maryland.) 

There are so many reflections of this in literature from all around the world! 

(I mentioned Walsh's NONdruggie book on shamanism, for example.) 

In my view, Jane Robrts had authentic experiences, even if she had troubles trying to really understand them. "Channeling" is an example, where there can be PARTIAL gating, where ... well, the more intelligent intelligent subsystem couples with the other one, with a well-defined restricted interface, not until the interface between a complex expensive model and a faster simple one, in a large integrated computer modeling system. Some of us actually know how to build intelligent systems, with machine intelligence, embodying the minds of capabilities which exploiting symmetry in this way allows. exploitation of siumpler symmetries and gating is fundamental even to understanding the simpler level of consciousness/intelligence to be found in mammal brains. 

Beyond this level, I see a link between what Jung calls the spirit of the deep and the variety of cosmic consciousness I try to work with, and with the state Nancy describes in the early morning. And with the higher qi described by Meng Tzu, as reported in 

https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Chinese-Philosophy-History-Economics-ebook/dp/B00GHJH8JE/. This and partial gating  also link to PARTS of the Upanishads, to the parts where they speak of"seeing though many eyes" at the same time (as in the netflix video Sense8, whihc has its weak points but has important real content).

A multiverse view of how the US election might come out

The choice of candidates in the US is certainly important, but toocomplex for this email and not the focus of this list in any case, Instead I ask: How can we connect what we SAY we believe with what we actually expect as individual people (and the groups we are part of)? Many people on earth believe the basic process is very simple. we are at a choice point, our CHOICES matter, but in the end, there is a certain probability that Smithe will win, and a certain probability that ones will win. (I started to type "most people believe," but humans are not so uniform as many believe. I started to say "A"and "B", but "Smith" and "jones" sound more like human.) This TYPE of expectation is wired to some degree into the human brain, We tend to expect that our environment is a LOcal Markov Process (LMP). Even those of us who do NOT believe our cosmosis a local Markov process, at any level of aggregation and approximation, need to know what an LMP is, to have any idea of what is really going on and what might happen to all of us. I am amazed how many people claim to be great experts in Bell's Theorem and Bohmian thinking, without knowing that he "Bell's Theorem" hwihc was first tested in the 1970's was actually the CHSH theorem, the theorem of Clauser, Holt, Shimon and Horne. (Bell's own book, The Speakavle and Unspeakable in Quantum mechanics, is VERY clear about the importance of the CHSH theorem.) Even such famous physicists as 'tHooft had troubles really understanding the meaning of that very clear, precise mathematical theorem. In particular: the theorem says that no mathematically well-defined theory of how our cosmos works can be consistent with cdrtain expeirmentalresults,IF THAT THEORY is a local Markov Process at the level of the variables we use in our model (fields and observations). CHSH used the word "causality"instead of LMP, because they thought it was easier for people to understand, Since few people seem to understand, even though it is such a clear and simple mathematical concept, I will go back to LMP. So what does this have to do with US elections? More than most of us can imagine. You all know some of the basics of the multiverse concepts by now. For those who pay attention to actual experiment, and not historiclegends about Adam and Eve, the flat earth and the great turtle, we know that the most conservagtive, cautious theory of how the cosmos works is psi dot = i H psi, which I have discussed many times. It is appropriate to discuss it many times, since it is today's best conservative mainstream model of what we really know in physics. In the old version of that theory, it is assumed that the US elections may put us into a MIXED state. Reality may split onto two streams. In one of them, trump is elected, and in the other Biden. (Along with a few splinter universes, maybe.) Both get to win, in their own universe. This is how High Everett III actually thought about it when he first came up with the modern mutliverse concept. (Again, if anyone does not believe me, just go to werbos.com/religions.htm, where I give links to papers with ever so many citations, citations which gtree back to original sources.) But Everett was unable to prove that this PICTURE of EMERGENT behavior can actually be deduced from psi dot equals i H psi. It was my paper https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf which explained why gthis was impossible, and how to fix the modeling of objects like polarizers in an expeirment go be consistent with psi dot = i H psi. Very simply: the theory that psi dot equals i H psi REQUIRES us to change our models of objects like polarizers, such that OUR level of experience requires something different from an LMP model. It calls for a more general family of mathematical models, which I call LMRF models, localMarkov Random Fields over space-time. The principles here are so important! B analogy, I remember when a mathematician at the RAND corporation said to me in 1968: "A function of a Markov process is not in general a Markov process." This is absolutely fundamental to reinforcement learning (RLADP), though few of the people who bullshit about AI and alpha Go have any idea of what it really is. But: a function of an LMP is NOT in general an LMP! What we observe is a FUNCTION of the state of our cosmos, not that state itself. Years ago, I believe that our cosmos is governed by an LMP (a slight generalization of Einstein's view), but large scale quantum optics experiments like CHSH require an LMRF model. And I have built and published and posted such models, which reconcile the CHSH experiments with Einstein's ideas. But Einstein did not envision macroscopic Schrodinger cats, or even parallel "universes" with different presidents in them. And so, I will never forget the dramatic day in 2014 when my whole understanding changed, even as it affects US politics and the current election, and the personal fate of the candidates. That day, I had already developed simple MRF input-output models of the polarizers used in Bell's Theorem experiments. such "lumped models" are very common in real empirical electronics and photonics, where people want to get the right prediction at minimum computational cost. But I worked to connect possible models to the actual condensed matter physics On this day, I worked out a model which I called CMRFp, a continuous-time model of what happens form moment to moment in one of the two common types of polarizers (dichroic, like sunglasses). In brief: It is possible that if the cosmos "does not like:" what Smith or Jones WILL do, it can actually rewrite history, not to erase them but to erase their very past, as if they never existed. I think it could happen. Remember: this is the most conservative model!!! Deepak Chopra knows crazier alternatives. ======================================= One of the folks on Yeshua’s list asked a question, and so I have explained a bit more about this: I did not say enough about what really could happen to candidates Smith and ones, according to different theories, and how it connects to Deepak's views. Or the details of what I learned in 2014. The equations of that continuous time MRF model are given in section 3 of Werbos PJ. Stochastic path model of polaroid polarizer for Bell's Theorem and triphoton experiments. International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. 2015 Mar;25(03):1550046. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.649.8389&rep=rep1&type=pdf . Again, this is the model CLOSEST to ordinary common sense consistent with the empirical results well established now in all the many mainstream "Bell's Theorem" experiments. Note that we know that all kinds of macroscopic systems exist in states of quantum superposition, "mixed states," and we know that entanglement does not break down at large distances except when factors other than distance are invoked, we have every reason to believe that we as humans are "macroscopic Schrodinger cats." This is the standard view of many worlds physics, going back to Everett and Wheeler, and then David Deutsch, and modern quantum computing. Forgive an explanation, if any one needs it. You probably all remember the Schrodinger at thought experiment, which Schrodinger wrote about in order to explain why he thought Heisenberg's theory of measurement is implausible. "Put a cat in a small room, with a gun pointed to its head, controlled by a Geiger counter controlled by a timer. set it up so that we expect a t50 percent probability the gun fires and the cat dies. According to Heisenberg, the cat is in a mixed state, half alive and half dead, until you open the door and look. By the act of observing the cat, YOU make it make up its mind, force it to be alive or dead." But isn’t the cat an observer? In the modern many worlds picture, when you open the door and look, YOU get split into two copies, one seeing a dead cats and the other a live cat. From the experiments on macroscopic Schrodinger cats, it would be a very great stretch to imagine that our world is not at least THAT strange. Of course, it can split into a world where Biden is elected, and another where Trump is. Deepak has once said "You all are all fictional characters, not really real." How real ARE we, if we are just Schrodinger cats for which other varieties exist, including universes where we do not exist at all? Our universe is certainly that weird, but also certainly weirder even that that. To fit the Bell experiments, we need to add that "retro ausal" feature, OR ELSE INJECT ASSUMPTOINS EVEN MUCH WEIRDER IN REALITY. The paper I just cited (in IJBC) shows a model, cMRFp, which adds that extra weirdness in the simplest way possible, adding nothing to the foundations of psi dot = iH psi. IN WORDS, it says that a photon passing through a certain standard type of polarizer "has a choice" at any moment of time dt. With a certain probability, it can jump to the polarization which the sunglasses "WANT" it to have, causing it to be disappeared and forever out of the experiment and out of the universe. With other probability, it can "become a total nonconformist," jumping to a polarization PERPENDICULAR to what the polarizer "wants," and forever untroubled by the polarizer as it passes right through. BOTH choices have very low probability at any small interval of time dt. But the requirements of empirical results and theory gave me no choice but to add a THIRD possibiliy for what the photon can do: it can "scrunch up its face like the comedian in an old British movie about seven sins", declare that it didn’t want to be IN this situation, in a way which changes the probability it would be in that situation, not just now but in the past and in the future. That is necessary, unavoidable. (And again, it is in the equations. This here is ust a translation into English, an explanation of what the equations tell us>) On the day I figured out, I thought: "Actually **I** am in a highly polarized and polarizing environment right now myself, in this office in the US government. if only I had third alternative, like this photon." And then suddenly realized: Hey, I do. as a Schrodinger cat, I too can say "meow." And it is not just me; sometimes it is a familiar pattern. What happens when a "handshake" of accommodation between past and future causes certain otherwise live possibilities to vanish into zero probability? This is a subtle matter, not a paradox in the mathematics but a strong paradox in the way people normally think. (And it has direct implications for the possible unintended consequences of building certain quantum optics systems even I know how to build). If we assume for the sake of argument that we beleive THE most conservative, tenable theory of physics, hard core Einsteinian realism, how could we explain macroscopic Schrodinger cats and explain what could happen here? In that case, our cosmos (which only has four dimensions) solves its Lagrange-Euler equations so as to maximize or minimize L over space time, finding the optimum in the ENTIRE SPACE of posisble configurations of space time (i.e. field values over space time). Some people "exist" only as part of the possible configurations which could have existed but are eliminated; they are "shadows of the mind." Thus even under hard core Einsteinian realism, Deepak could be right that one or both candidates for president, and we who watch them, are all "fictional characters," real only as possibilities. Is psi dot = i H psi really weirder than that? Under psi dot = i H psi, it is NOT assumed that all states are either THE final truth or zapped altogether. It is a matter of degree, how much probability strength they have. however, if either candidate will cause a future with VERY BIG difference in quality of results (judged by 0, we would still predict that the "handshake" process will cause a withering of probability down to "infinitesimal levels," as probable as a ball just suddenly flying up in our living room without any external force working on it. I previously mentioned how different things would be under the theory that the "universe" we see is actually just one of the astral planes. The implications are not really all the different. That's as far as I should go with this. Even the most mundane, old fashioned theories predict that the next month or two will be unusually tricky.

Quakers ask what to do about racism

Our uaker meeting today (by Zoom) began with a query from higher up, a rare case when a body higher in the uaker system asked us to meditate today on a questionto all meetings. Something like: "How can/should we right racism? What should we give up to do so?" We are urged not to speak unless we hear a messaage form the spirit, addressed to everyone, meeting highstandards, but for the very first time ever, I found the same message coming to my mind from the time when they asked the query until just after someone else spoke, who said almost verbatim a PART of what came to me. What I heard (as best I recall later): 'The racsm we need to struggle with most is the racism deep inside ourselves. We need to overcome the idea that our culture must bend down to take care of all those below us. In fact, what we need most is respect and love. We in our Europe- based culture have a great deal to beproud of and protect, but we need equal respect espec ially, at this time, to the equally deep values and intelligence of the most enlightened people of India and China, who wil become much bigger parts of our lives in the next five years. Yes, we see evil facsist actions by some peoplethere, but we see much of the same here as well. we need to work on our side, to make us worthy of not being viewed as fascists ourselves, and we must see past the fascists there to the deep and powerful cultures as spiritual as our own best. Our best values can be preserved but only if gthey are integrated and united more with their best values and understnading, which we need to sue with more and more, in the maximum spirit of love and respect. (Of course, I did not mentoin the posisbility that w eight actually ahvce a Presidnet of Indian descentbefore too long.)