Nautonnier Blog

As I wandered bleary-eyed through the airport this morning, I smiled wryly (not easy at 06:00 in Heathrow, you know) at the new Accenture advertisement. The tag line is "Play Quantum Leapfrog" and the picture shows a frog leaping over three other frogs in a single bound.

Clearly they wanted us to think that spending millions on Accenture consulting springs you ahead of the competition. Sadly for them the term "quantum leap" more accurately describes a tiny, instantaneous jump in a random direction.  Now for me that is far more in keeping with the Accenture experience, lacking only diamond plating on the frog to complete the picture. A rare bout of subconscious honesty escaping to the surface perhaps?

(P.S.  This ad replaced the previous Tiger Woods one.  Oops.)

“Are we human or are we Dancer?”, The Killers

In Michael Moorcock’s seminal series of books, “The Dancers at the End of Time”, the last inhabitants of Earth have gained the ability to completely manipulate their world. Matter is shaped in any way that catches their fancy, resulting in a constantly morphing landscape, instantly moulded and just as quickly destroyed according to individual whimsy and the latest fickle fashion.

Skip now to one of the obsessions of scientists throughout human history – to find the smallest building block of matter. In India, over 2,500 years ago, the concept of the atom was first recorded. However, at the start of the last century, as technological advances allowed scientists to observe activity at ever increasing levels of granularity, they discovered that below a certain scale there were no building blocks of matter, merely clouds of probability. Just think about that for a moment: everything we can see or touch, if we drill down far enough, is actually composed of nothing more than bundles of possibility. These nebulous clouds do ultimately “condense” into a particular state (although the mechanism by which they do so is still debated) and hence we have what we see as the material world.

Two well-known, but still highly pertinent, quotes from those making the discoveries are enlightening. First Niels Bohr: “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” And then Albert Einstein, unusually flying in the face of his own observations: “I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice.” But that is exactly the point, reality turns out to be a roulette wheel, the ball spinning in indeterminacy until it finally “collapses” into one of the numbered slots.

Clearly, though, the roulette wheel is biased. I drop a coin; it hits the ground. Every time, the ball comes to a stop in the slot marked “fall”.  It never seems to choose the “hover” option.

Or does it?

• A swiss visionary foresaw that if a chapel was built in a certain place in Ireland, beams of power would emanate. One of these beams would bring peace between the East and the West. The chapel was completed in 1988 and within 18 months the Berlin wall had fallen.

• What about Edgar Allen Poe’s first and only novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”? In this darkly imaginative work a ship capsizes and four sailors survive. One of them is called Richard Parker. Eventually, starving, the men turn to cannibalism and draw lots to see who amongst them will get eaten. Richard Parker draws the short straw and gets eaten. 46 years later in reality (and a matter of public record as it resulted in a criminal case) the yacht Mignotte sinks. Four people survive, drifting in a lifeboat. Finally one is selected, killed and eaten by the others so that they might survive. His name? Richard Parker. 

• When psychic questers Andrew Collins, Richard Ward and Sue Collins “imagined” a brass box, the box was exactly what they found. In Andrew’s own words: “But I think what’s even more of a mind-messer is that we actually made up the artefact to find – almost as a joke, initially because we hadn’t found the previous artefact that we were looking for… and [we] said ‘alright, let’s make up an artefact to find.’  And you [Richard Ward] said to Sue: ‘What’s it going to be?’ And she said: ‘a box’. And you said to me, ‘what’s it going to be made of?’…[I said:] ‘Gold. No Brass.’ Very quickly, just like that…And when we found it, it was exactly as we had imagined.”

• Are Edgar Cacye’s “wild” speculations about Atlantis somehow being brought into reality by the focussed efforts of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) and by Drs. Greg and Lora Little’s ongoing exploration of Cuba and the Bahamas in particular? And does this dovetail with Bernard […]’s vision (and subsequent paintings) of the Crystal Chambers beneath the pyramids (echoing other material revealed by Cayce during his readings) which is tantalisingly hinted at by Andrew Collins’ recent discoveries at the Giza plateau?

In all these cases it is as if, by some supreme feat of imagination, the ball has been nudged out of its usual slot and drops into another resulting in a little novelty leaking into our world. If this is possible, - no matter how infrequently, no matter how inconsistently – then we can become like the Dancers and forge around us a reality of our own making.

I leave the last words – ringing with the eloquence bestowed to him by the mushroom intelligence - to Terence McKenna, that intrepid psychonaut. He is describing the DMT machine elves but everything could equally apply to the Dancers:

What they’re doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you’re being shown is impossible. It’s not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it’s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what’s happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn’t sound, it’s vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they’re urging you to do this. They say "That’s it! That’s it! Keep doing it!".

 
Manifesto

•          There is no “just” about my imagination; I respect it as the faculty of wave collapse
•          I seek to introduce novelty and ambiguity
•          I hold the tension of opposites
•          I fight inertia by movement and action
•          I reach out
•          I give voice

 
 
 
Acknowledgements
 

In drawing up the manifesto the following ideas have been synthesised:

Paul Feyerabend’s anti-methodology of “Anything Goes”.

Terence McKenna’s Novelty theory and so much else.

Richard Kearney’s “Wake of the Imagination” – maybe we can resuscitate it yet!

C.J. Jung (in the general) – “Life is born only of the spark of opposites”; and

Wolfgang Pauli (in the specific) – [here paraphrased by Werner Heisenberg] “…Pauli once spoke of two limiting conceptions, both of which have been extraordinarily fruitful in the history of human thought, although no genuine reality corresponds to them. At one extreme is the idea of an objective world, pursuing its regular course in space and time, independently of any kind of observing subject; this has been the guiding image of modern science. At the other extreme is the idea of a subject, mystically experiencing the unity of the world and no longer confronted by an object or by any objective world; this has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism. Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle, between these two limiting conceptions; we should maintain the tension resulting from these two opposites.”

The Icon Chapel, the events and people that brought it into existence.

The mystics, artists and psychics; they create the treasure.

The questers, local historians and archaeologists; they find it.

I’m supposed to be doing some emergency coding this weekend - hence the unusually high level of blogging activity St Nectan’s Glen has been a popular subject on the psychicQuesting.com website over the years. It contains one of the most recent comments in the forums and the only set of photos in the photo gallery (click here to see the forum thread). I think a large part of this has to do with the impact of Yuri’s drawing.

On another track, I’ve been reading the Magdalene Line books by Kathleen McGowan (finished "The Expected One", half-way through "The Book of Love"). The books take as their starting point the very well-trodden, and perhaps now over-familiar, territory of "The Holy Blood/Holy Grail" & "Da Vinci Code" with Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus and mother of his children. However, she does take this is a new direction and the style is very different to anything else I’ve read. Interspersed with the novel "proper" are excerpts from Mary Magdalene’s own Gospel. In addition the relationships between the characters are carefully detailed so that by the end of the first book, the author has painted a vibrant and engaging picture of the earliest days of the Christian church and the people who drive it forward. Whether you believe this to be historically accurate (and, as mentioned, Kathleen* does introduce some very original twists into the familiar material) is an entirely different question but it doesn’t detract from the strength of the novel.

The structure of the novel is a standard split-time sequence. A modern investigator, using a combination of historical research and visionary experience, unravels the ancient threads while the information she learns about the time of the Christians is played as cut-scene sequences shot from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. The "ancient" sequences thus have something of the style of Geraldine Cummings’ books - only infinitely more readable! Where it gets very interesting for me is that at the end of the book, in the Afterword, Kathleen writes that the lead character who has been on this voyage of discovery is actually a novelistic version of herself. So suddenly we are to understand (and there are no clues that this admission is itself a fictional, post-modern flourish although I guess this is always a possibility) that Kathleen McGowan has, "in true life" (as my kids say when they want to make it clear that they are moving out of the world of make-believe), been on a quest to uncover the path of Mary Magdalene and the earliest proto-Christians - a quest on which she has experienced psychic flashes, full-on visions and uncovered genuine historical artefacts. All of which exactly describes Psychic Questing.

As I was reading the books, I kept experiencing a nagging sense of deja vu. Finally I realised that I was subconsciously comparing the books to Louise Langley’s book "The Sacred Quest". "The Sacred Quest" is also written in the third person although the protagonist is acknowledged to be Louise herself. It too features the theme of an unbroken bond of sacred love that transcends time. It highlights the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It details the upheaval in the life of its (female) protagonist and shows her moving out of what has been her normal day-to-day existence and into a more authentic, spiritual way of life. Both have strong connections to Ireland.

I’m not sure how pleased either author would be about their books being compared and I do it only to show that it feels like something more is at work here. If, as artists, they are tuned to the vibrations of coming events should we expect that such experiences will become much more prevalent? And what impact will this have on society? I am personally deeply suspicious of the whole 2012 thing (which seems to be a natural continuation of the older new-age "Age of Aquarius" meme). We all face our personal apocalypses and we tend to project our fears about this onto the outside world. On the other hand, there are some very weird things happening (and this investigation is obviously the meta-theme of my blog). Scientists have reached down to touch the bottom of reality, trying to get hold of the smallest "chunk" of solid matter. But like a cartoon character suspended in mid-air above a canyon, when they reach out around them, the solid base they thought was there has completely disappeared. Far from our world being built up from tiny bricks, the foundation appears to nothing more substantial than clouds of probability. If science can suggest that consciousness plays a part in creating the physical world around us then, it is important to pay attention to emerging global patterns of consciousness.

But I digress…I guess I’m wondering whether Louise and Kathleen form the vanguard of something that we will soon be commonly observing (and even experiencing for ourselves).

One last point. Joseph of Arimathea and his role as tin trader and his visits to Britain also play a part in Kathleen’s books. This legend, as popularised in the hymn version of William Blake’s poem "And Did Those Feet in Ancient times…" has just been picked up by Louise in a post on her blog. And the connection for her was made at…St Nectan’s Glen. It seems that there is some special energy there that may warrant further investigation…

[* As I go on to refer to Louise Langley as "Louise", it seemed to jar and be slightly hostile if I was referring side-by-side to Kathleen McGowan as "McGowan". I hope Ms McGowan will forgive me the over-familiar use of her first name.]

A scary thing happened to me last night. I was doing my usual “surf the music channels” routine when my attention was caught by a Transporter-esque scene in which a nubile young lady cavorted to a song which, to my critical ears, sounded very cool and pop-rocky. “Ah!”, I thought to myself, “I’ll watch this to the end to see who it is”. Soon I was muttering along with the popstress “Don’tcha wish you were a fly on the wall?” The horrific revelation, when the song credits popped up at the end, that the singer was none other than Miley Cyrus has catapulted me into an existential crisis from which I have yet to emerge.

This, remember, is Miley Cyrus as in Disney tweenie creation Hannah Montana. This is the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus (is any song more universally reviled than “Achey Breaky Heart”?) This is a girl so prefabricated that she makes The Monkees look like The Sex Pistols. Not since I found myself (briefly, OK?) fancying Sporty Spice have I been so horrified at my own behaviour (and taste). And besides Miley Cyrus is only 16.

This is not my first attempt to re-engage with the music of today. Previously, I stumbled across the Filthy Dukes in a similar Friday night surf and their debut album is brilliant and not, it has to be said in my defence, wildly out of kilter with other CDs in my collection. I can convince myself that I’m not like Tony Blair, simply draping himself in the flag of Cool Britannia and hoping that it would somehow make him cooler by association. The fact that I have the Lady GaGa album in my Amazon shopping basket is harder to justify but she has openly admitted that her two biggest influences are Bowie and Queen so again a genuine lineage back to my pre-crisis collection is provable. In addition, at 23, she doesn’t fall into the deeply unsettling “less than half my age” category.

And this, I think, is the major problem with Miley. Are my daughters going to grow up afraid of bringing their friends home because they know they won’t be able to mop up the drool from their pervy father’s mouth? Is this just the first symptom of an incipient mid-life crisis? I know the signs as I’ve watched those male friends around me buy sports cars, get kitted out in new leather jackets and, yes, pathetically chase younger girls. As a psychologist, I can understand the need to prove to yourself that you *are* still relevant, still cool. That your ever expanding gut could be slimmed down once more if only you put your mind to it and that you could still get yourself in the best shape of your life. That like Peter Pan we are, in fact, not growing old and still immortal.

I would like to hereby coin the phrase “a Miley crisis” to describe that first occurrence, the identifiable starting point, of the later descent into full-blown male mid-life angst. The pattern is clear. And the most terrifying thing of all? If it starts with Miley Cyrus then it ends with the bastard Triathlon.