"I look at the world like a simultaneity of past lives and personas. It started when we got back from Italy and were first living in Brooklyn. I was working at that paint shop Sirmos in Long Island City. You remember the Citicorp building, the lone blue green glass monolith that at that time was the only building of that height and stature in that area. I was walking to the G train after work. It was end of summer early fall and the sky had dramatic Turner/ Frederick Church type clouds and I was struck by this overwhelming feeling that I had lived this before. That I was some artisan in the service of some king or something, and that Citicorp building was some ziggurat. It was beyond overwhelming, like two lives superimposed over each other, identical."
I remember you spoke about this moment-- at the foot of the ziggurat, of blue glass. I’ve had similar experiences -- in many places. I feel attuned to this kind of resonance. Your message also got me thinking about why we get anchored into the past as archetype? Why do we want to forget the future? What if we look at time all wrongly? Rather than the Ziggurat as template for Citicorp, what if Citicorp was the previous life of the Ziggurat? Or are we always in the same situation or scenario and the names only change? Why don't we know the future name for this structure? If we knew the name could we not re-name it, change it? Is there no escape? Is there anything our creativity can to do to alter things or is it already written in some kind of fossil?
By implication, if I interpret a bit what you say, it seems to me we are always in the shadow of some pyramid, megalith, volcano, oppressive market system, government. Some source of shock and awe. But I seriously wondered about the thought process that keeps us snapped into our trapped dimensionality here.
Why can't they see the vision nor hear the music?
I have been having dreams I don't want to wake up from where everything is very good humored and always morphing. Seriously having a good time being Morpheus and the Mother of Morpheus. What keeps me from being able to communicate this sense to people? Why can't they see the vision nor hear the music? Thinking about your Citicorp and Ziggurat as two incarnations or configurations of archetype, I asked myself again the question about time and, if it is possible, to see around the corner of the megalith. What does it rest upon? There are suns far larger than our own. And Gaia has her own body-mind. Still, the human fixation is such that it can become nerve-wracking and frustrating.
I'm thinking about, hey, why don’t we get a future “glimpse” or sense of what’s coming out of this kind of moment, because it’s as if we could walk into the next manifestation of this identical or parallel scenario. Or bypass it. If we only knew how. What if we are already the future, that future we would rather be be and just don’t know it?
Why can't I go out dressed magically?
Buddhist and Vedic meditators melt time into ooze evaporating into transparency -- "all the time".
So what? Why can't I go out dressed as a magically mirror-faced four-legged walking wardrobe with constantly changing hair color cracking jokes in a language whose rules of grammar are being made up as each foot falls into the span of wing that sweeps away into some plasma naming itself via movement? Is that not what is happening? Why are we bound to this brain-span that is “getting a job and walking the walk?’
What is a Boltzmann Brain?
Anyway, even before this so-called morning, I went to sleep after reading an article that maybe your Citicorp/Ziggurat stardust put in my way via synchronicity. About the Boltzmann Brain. The thrust of the paper was multi-tiered, co-authored by three science geeks, so I cannot cram it into a few sentences. But one thing they wanted to show was that the classical Newtonian second law physics of entropy that results in this hypothesis that there is a Past moment (previous state), the Past Hypothesis, that is not any different from the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis, which states that a brain can exist, exactly like mine or yours, with all it's experiences and memories firmly in place while being created by entirely random combinations of elements and forces of the universe in millennia of evolution. This Boltzmann Brain would be your brain but without you. A pretty strange idea. The paper discusses how the role of circular reasoning in the Boltzmann Brain is in exactly the same circular reasoning used to justify the Past Hypothesis (where there is some historically or scientifically verifiable version of reality, with a starting point and an endpoint -- like the Big Bang. So basically the Boltzmann Brain Hypothesis called into question all theories about memory. Memory is a memory of a memory. How an event got stored as a memory of an actuality is subject to the law of entropy. The further away you go into time, the more it is just memory of memories. It became such a maddening thought that I hit google maps, plugged in the address of the house I lived in with my parents in 1970’s, where father’s parents lived upstairs (also with Babcia Florence) upstairs, a house that had belonged to the previous generation of the family, 416 Walden Ave, Buffalo, Neuvo Yawk. I did this search because I recall it was still standing years ago, unlike other Buffalo houses where I or other family had lived, razed after fires, cleared. I found 416 Walden Ave there on the street view. The surroundings had changed but the house itself looked structurally unchanged from the outside. I felt pretty sure I could still map the inside, sketch it out for anyone. I still can walk in this house of my memory. And yet, boom, there it was: I could not verify any of this. Probably never will be able to. If I could however, it would not allow me to change the past because it must always be that way. But will this house always be as it is? It seems highly improbable but it is a question of structure: 416 Walden has a large-basement and strong foundation. It stands because it has this solidity of stone. Monolith. I also noticed the house two doors away, which in the old days was the domicile of the family of the caretaker of the Concordia Cemetery, it too still stands. This house connected to the Stability of Death and its burial grounds rooted like it’s trees into the soil and culture. 416 Walden Avenue was said often to be a haunted house. They meant ghosts of the past and perhaps traumatic events. I wonder if the house was not actually haunted by it’s Future. Why does my mind return there so often? If the power of my thought is that strong to haunt, I should have more money in the bank. This of course is taking things a bit too far.
Regarding Boltzmann Brains:
