Stopping by fields on a snowy morning

If I could choose my favorite thing about living here at the ass end of nowhere it would be the silence. I grew up spitting distance from two major expressways and close enough to one of Ohare International's main approach paths that I could tell the difference between an L1011 and a 757 and could identify every major airline company on sight by the time I was 9, so needless to say, it was never truly quiet there. Even at 2AM, the soft susurrous of the Tri-state and the Kennedy was there. But out here in my little town of 5500 it is very different, especially in the winter. The rest of the year, various animal sounds are everywhere, whether it's crickets or birds or what have you, but in winter there is nothing but the wind and the rare truck crossing the IL-89 bridge.

Now, if my place is quiet, my brother's is bloody silent. I at least have neighbors. He, on the other hand, lives on the edge of a state park and his closest neighbor is 3/4 mile away. I got to experience this yesterday. My bro, bless him, wants to be a farmer, and he found a good deal on a 14' by 52' greenhouse from a local nursery. Guess who got recruited to help dismantle and move it. Nothing like a little outdoor work in January to get the ol' blood going, eh? Even better, he and his teenage son show up with the back of his F250 loaded up with a cord of firewood to drop off at his place beforehand, lucky me.

So after stacking the wood, he and his son go inside to get some tools together, leaving me outside. It was about as nice a day as you can ask for in Illinois in January, about 20, sunny, only a light breeze, and I was plenty warm from all the work unloading the truck, so I took a walk over to the cornfields that border his property on the south. It was a beautiful view, the land gently rolling away, the nooks and hollows of the fallow earth filled with a thin scrim of snow, the sky that perfect, crystalline blue you only get on cold, clear, winter days, and everything utterly silent except for the faint, sandpapery whisper of the wind.

I have had profound, mystical experiences before, some so powerful I thought the top of my head would come off, but the feeling looking out over those fields was different. I could feel the calm and the dreamless sleep of Nature in winter, I could feel the silence and solitude. It was a far calmer, a far more steady and accepting experience than I'd ever had. Instead of being swept along like a leaf on a river, I was floating in a mirrorlike pool.

I had a good 10 minutes of just absorbing this sensation, this feeling of suspension, before I was interrupted. Ah, I do love the silence out here, but I did after all have "promises to keep", so I had to bid those fields goodbye.

CS

The Field, Part 2

Oh boy, I found a good'un!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through "The Field" (tis a little thing, only about 225 pages), and I'm loving it. I haven't gotten to the "now I'll tie all these ideas together into one coherent whole" chapter yet, but I can see where McTaggert is going with it. Basically, the whole thing comes down to what is called the Zero Point Field (yes, same Zero Point mentioned by the character Syndrome in Pixar's "The Incredibles"), a background energy state in quantum physics calculations which classical physicists are aware of but simply ignore. A great many scientists, going all the way back to the 1960s, have postulated that the ZPF can be used to explain a whole host of phenomena that give classical science fits, everything from how memories are stored in the brain to why momentum and inertia exists to how bodies grow from a single cell to an entire complicated being.

The problem for classical scientists is that these postulations, if taken to their logical end, lead to ideas that smack of either science fiction or mysticism: juvenile plants giving off energy fields that mimic the size and shape of adults, homeopathic remedies that contain no medicine but only the "memory" of it, imprinted somehow upon the water, memories that do not exist in cells but instead reside in an energy field which runs throughout and around the body, energy transfers that happen at faster-than-light speeds and aren't affected by distance, and so on.

But the biggest problem of all for the empiricists is that the entire concept of the ZPF flies in the face of the Newtonian/Cartesian worldview. No longer is the world a mechanical device, separate parts clicking away in predictable patterns. Instead the entire physical universe is nothing more than a matrix of interconnected contractions within an all-pervasive energy field, one that, if disturbed at any one point, affects all of it, not like ripples in a pond but like sliding blocks in a giant puzzle, a single shift instantly affecting all others. Worst of all for them, it seems like thought and intention have replaced cause and effect as the prime movers in this ZPF universe. If these postulations are true, the physical universe does not exist as an entity in and of itself, but as a projection of Mind and of expectation.

The vast majority of the experiments and hypotheses in "The Field" are not new. Most go back a generation or more, and the book itself came out almost a decade ago, so it should be interesting to do some research and discover how things have progressed since 2001. These ideas give me a great deal of hope. I have observed first-hand that there is a slow but steady movement in religious thought away from entrenched ideas and toward experience. Now I see a similar movement in science. If these two groups can get together, I believe that holds far more hope for our future as a species and as an ecosystem than anything else.

More to follow once I finish the book.

jcs

The Field

Got a book recommendation from someone on my SF site (which is still defunct, much sadness). Little thing called "The Field" by Lynne McTaggart. Basically it's about the spiritual side of quantum physics, something I've been meaning to look into for years. Interesting factoid: one of the later Apollo mission astronauts did an experiment with psychic phenomena during the return trip. He tried to "project" images to people back on Earth (the whole star/circle/square/wavy lines thing from the opening scene of Ghostbusters, actually), and found out that the success rate was no different 250,000 miles away than it was if he was in the same building, about a 1:3000 possibility of being pure chance.

I'll post more later on how the book progresses.

My New Year's Resolutions

I have never really believed in New Year's resolutions, probably because I'm a lazy ass and don't like change, but this year I think I will make some, and I think this year I might just keep them.

1) Start using this blog more.

2) Start working on getting Snowflake published.

3) Work out. Boring, but I need it, I weigh 220 now.

4) Pay more attention to my kids and my wife.

Reasonable. Good for me and those I love. Let's see how I do.

So.... what to do?

I think the universe is trying to tell me something......

I have a pattern I follow every morning; get up, make coffee, get the boys off to school, go to the computer, and jump on SpiritualForums.com, my favorite site, to post and comment and debate while my little girl plays and my wife sleeps in, 'til it's time for work Unfortunately, this morning I go to log into SF and get a "this site doesn't exist" message from my browser. WTF? I'm not too bummed about the writing I've done there (I back the good stuff up onto a text file... and just did it yesterday too, hmmm....), but I love that site and have enjoyed the back-and-forth I've gotten into with some of the other regulars. I'm seriously bummed about this.

But then I get to thinking. All things in our lives are there for a reason, especially anything which evokes a strong emotional response. While I have enjoyed SF, I do waste a lot of time there, time I could be using for other things: play with the kids, edit my book, work on query letters, do chores. I used that site and used it well to hone my ideas and clarify my writing, and yes, it did connect me with others of a like mind, but has it served it's purpose? Do I find another outlet for my thoughts, my ideas, my spirituality?

Thus I am here, posting for the first time in almost half a year on this blog I had such high hopes for but then became so frustrated with. Here I am with, not a loss, but with an opportunity. An opportunity to use my time better, to accomplish what I really want and need to accomplish, rather than just doing what feels good. What was I really doing with my time on SF? Debating the fine points of Unity Theory with a half a dozen other almost-but-not-quite like-minded people, verbally fencing with Vegans, hashing over whether negative spiritual entities are self-created or drawn in by belief. Basically, spiritual masturbation; pleasant in it's own way but accomplishing nothing. I feel the desire, the need to share my ideas, not with just a few people who basically agree, but with a wide audience, some of whom will hate it, some who will love it, and some special few who will resonate with the ideas and use that resonance to improve their lives, alter their spiritual trajectory.

Why did SF go away? Don't know. Why is this experience now in my life? To get me off my lazy floppy ass.

Use this.

The self-destructive artist.

Hello,

Really been neglecting this blog lately. Between all the summertime hassles of home ownership, near constant trips on my days off, and a relapse into my addiction to videogames, my spiritual writing has gone to the back burner. No longer, though. Here is one of my newest insights into human nature. Enjoy.

A few years before he died, I had a very interesting conversation with my late brother. He'd gotten me in our annual Christmas grab-bag and bought me a live recording of Pink Floyd's "The Wall", and we were sitting around afterwards jawing about music and musicians and how tragic it was that so many incredibly gifted individuals died so young: Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, and so on. I asked him why he thought it happened, that so many artistics tend to self-destruct, and he said he thought it was because creatives tend to have "a little more of God in them", which makes them more sensitive to the evils of the world.

I thought this was bunk, but the idea caught in a crack in my brain and has stayed there for years. Why is it that those we admire so greatly, who bring such joy to our lives, are often so miserable themselves? I think the answer to this question lies in the nature and purpose of the arts. Any artistic endeavor, whether it be music, painting, or dance, is created or performed for the purpose of evoking emotion. It doesn't necessarily need to be a positive emotion: look at Stravinsky's "The Right of Spring" or Munch's "The Scream", for example. But in any example, art brings forth emotion, and the more powerful that evoking, the better the art.

So what does this have to do with musicians overdosing on heroine? In order for an artistic to create, they need to be able to grasp the emotion they intend to bring forth in their work. There has to be an intended response, a goal of joy or fear or sadness or rage or whatever that the wish their audience to experience, and so the creative needs to be able to feel the same emotion themselves. This is where things get dangerous, because too many creatives believe that they need to experience the emotion in order to truly represent it. They open themselves up to all sorts of emotional highs and lows, believing that they are necessary for their creativity to function.

Even if they survive this emotional rollercoaster, another trap lies ahead of them. While this society had done an excellent job of opening up avenues for creatives to learn the tools of their chosen trade, what is completely neglected in this "education" is their emotional learning. This society places a great deal of stock in teaching young people intelligence, but almost nothing in teaching wisdom. Intelligence is understanding of other, while wisdom is understanding of self. This is bad enough for the average person, whose greatest pitfalls are failed marriages and dependence on anti-depressants, but for artistics such lack of self-learning is deadly. They have no learning about how to deal with the very emotions they call forth from their creations, and are too often eaten alive by them.

Is it any wonder, between the two, that so many creatives turn to substance abuse to numb themselves? Too often, they are already addicts of a sort, hooked on their own creativity and the emotional heights it brings them, and the step from addiction to creation to addiction to a bottle or a pill or a powder is very, very small. To top it all off, we have the Cult of Celebrity our society has produced, which both glorifies and crucifies those "lucky" enough to have "made it" in the world as creatives. They are showered with riches, inundated with fame, and told that this is all they should need to be happy, that this is the Point Of It All. Then when they are not....

So what to do? How can this situation be stopped, for the health of those we admire so greatly and the good of our society as a whole? Perhaps the place to start is in the education of our young, teaching them wisdom as well as intelligence. Perhaps the place is in our popular culture, promoting healthier ideas about entertainment. Perhaps there is yet another place I don't personally see yet, I don't know. But something needs to be done. For all of our sakes.

CS

The rituals of the modern world

Went to go see fireworks with my brother, his son, my sister, her boyfriend, and my family yesterday. Was a typical rural-America fest: corndogs, funnel cakes, patriotic music, and a lip-synch contest won by 4 teenage boys doing "Bohemian Rhapsody".

Every culture needs it's group rituals, and their choices shed an interesting light upon said culture. From communal fire-pits stories to temple ceremonies to gladiator combat to weekly Mass to high school football games, what a culture chooses as it's communal gathering-point says a great deal about it.

The modern day has fewer and fewer of these. Yes we still have our sports teams and our fireworks displays and our parades, but too much of this has been replaced by the modern campfire pit: the television and the computer. We seem to find it harder and harder to come together with others and actually interact, make eye contact, mingle. Even those we have draw our attention away from each other and towards something else, whether that be a guy hitting a ball with a stick or an exploding skyrocket.

Perhaps this void is being filled to some extent by social video gaming. The popularity of get-your-friends-together games such as the Nintendo Wii or Guitar Hero or Rock Band shows there is a need for such a thing. Even online gaming, whether deathmatching on Call of Duty or joining a guild in World of Warcraft, can be a social interaction of sorts.

Still, interaction through electronic devices cannot replace sitting around a campfire and actually talking. We need to do more of this, methinks.

CS